by Tom Miller
We regarded each other for a long moment. I wondered if it might not be safer to press forward than retreat.
“Could I ask you—how’d your parents meet?”
Somehow, that was a good question, a right question.
“Well, that’s complicated,” Dardanelles answered. “My dad comes from old New England stock—the Puritans threw one of his forebears out of Plymouth for heresy. After Dad finished divinity school, he went on a grand tour of Europe and got it into his head he wanted to see the site where the city of Carthage used to be. So, he visited Tunis and fell in love with the place. He met my mother and fell in love with her, too.”
She took a sip from her water glass.
“Mom’s from a venerable Arab family on her mother’s side—not that they’ve had any real power in two hundred years—and a French count on her father’s. Mom was his illegitimate daughter. That was a whole different scandal.”
I was duly impressed.
“So, Mom and Dad got married and lived in Tunisia for five years,” Danielle continued. “That’s where I was born. Then Dad inherited a lot of property back in Providence and the three of us moved to the States. Even in a church as progressive as Dad’s, there was no end to the innuendos. The society ladies whispering behind their gloves when they didn’t think I could hear. They had lots of names for me. You’re going to sit there and tell me I’m not colored, then what would you call me?”
“Sophisticated as hell,” I said.
That surprised her just enough to win a faint smile.
“French counts and inheritances and ancient cities,” I went on. “I never knew my pa—he died when I was two. I never really lived anywhere but Montana. Probably on account of my head being so far up my ass.”
That got me a real smile.
“Well, I didn’t mean anything by that, either, then,” Danielle said.
Our waiter came. Danielle ordered cheese toasts, eight watercress sandwiches, a chicken salad, an ice cream sundae, and a glass of porter. The waiter was unperturbed—either they got a lot of transporters or he was well trained.
“And you, sir?” he asked me.
“I’ll have the same,” I said.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Danielle said.
“What?” I said. “My sister told me if I’m ever in a restaurant and I’m not sure what to order, especially if the menu is in a foreign language, just say ‘I’ll have the same.’ ”
“You couldn’t ask for a plainer menu! Or don’t you have chicken salad in Montana?”
“Touché,” I said.
“Hah! You can play the rube, but your French is better than mine!”
Was it possible I hadn’t ruined the night after all?
“My real concern,” I explained, “is that they might have a smokecarver in the kitchen. No telling what you’ll get—ice cream that tastes like a snake egg omelet.”
“There isn’t a smokecarver in the kitchen here, I promise,” she said. “We’ll be lucky if there’s so much as a cook.”
The glasses of porter arrived and we both took a long drink. I had a little experience with whiskey, but almost none with beer. The stuff was bitter and thick enough to stand a spoon up in.
“Tell me you’ve never really eaten a snake egg omelet,” Danielle said. She wiped foam from her lip with the back of her hand.
“Not me,” I said. “It was Blind Doyle who always said he’d rather collect rattlesnake eggs enough for dinner than face up to his second wife when he came home drunk at two in the afternoon.”
“It was who that said what?”
This necessitated a digression a quarter hour in length, explaining the character and wisdom of Blind Doyle, the oracle of Billings, who sat in his rocking chair in front of Billings’ hardware store, sorting bags of mixed nails by touch and dispensing sage remarks.
The cheese toasts came and went and the watercress sandwiches were delivered. In following Angela’s advice, I’d ordered the single item on the menu unfamiliar to me: shreds of bitter lettuce on white bread spread with soft sour cheese. I ate one to be polite, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose such a thing. Danielle, though, tucked into hers with relish. She finished them more quickly than was decent, even for someone who’d covered four hundred miles that morning. I saw her eyeing mine.
“If I were to offer to trade you seven watercress sandwiches for—”
“No,” she said. “But you could give them to me.”
I did.
Chicken salad, bland but edible, followed, and then ice cream sundaes, which were the best part of the meal. Though the porter steadily improved in taste through second and third glasses.
We were both feeling expansive. I told her the life story of my best friend, Willard Gunch; she countered with the sad tale of her tall aunt Sandy. She recalled the time she had transported into the back row of church just in time for her father’s sermon; I told her about stealing nephrite jade out of my mother’s laboratory. It was her awful koru tutor versus grizzled old Mrs. Rutt, my primary school teacher; Feargus, her family’s elderly sheepdog, in counterpoint to Skinner, our champion mouser; her first round of golf against my early handling of a shotgun.
“I’d like to learn,” she said. “The Corps pays sharpshooters an extra three dollars a month.”
“Then you don’t want a shotgun. You need a rifle.”
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell either from a brass cannon. They installed a shooting range in the basement of the Gray Box when the war broke out. They’ll let you check out a gun for target practice.”
“So, let’s go sometime,” I suggested.
“Really?” she said. “I already almost killed you once.”
“We can stop the lessons when you get good enough to hit me. Otherwise folks will say, ‘Poor old Boober, shot down in his prime by the deadeye Dardan—’ I mean, Danielle. I mean, what do you like to go by?”
She scraped with her spoon at the layer of fudge on the bottom of her glass dish. “Call me Bill or call me Sue, just don’t call me late for supper.”
“Okay, Bill,” I said. “I just thought you must hate the nicknames.”
“I do. But I hated them more when I was trying to get people to stop. Dar I don’t mind. It was a pet name when I was a girl.”
She’d caught me by the eyes and I couldn’t look away. Neither of us could. “Dar,” I said, trying the name on for size.
Like an incantation, the word melted the lining of my chest and it all dripped down into my belly. Nothing philosophical about it, just good old-fashioned magic.
“Do you like it better?” I whispered.
“Better than what?” she asked.
She leaned in close. I waited a long moment, afraid to speak. Afraid of what another word might do.
“Danielle,” I said.
She cocked her head a fraction of an inch to the right. “First one again?” I could feel her breath, warm on my face.
“Dar.”
Our lips touched. Once, twice. Hungry, curious, open.
We leaned back and for a minute there was no need to say anything.
“Robert,” she said finally. But whatever cantrip had been in the air was gone; names no longer held erotic power. Or perhaps it was just my name. She laughed. “You were never anything but plain old Robert?”
“Weekes,” I said.
“That’s even worse! What did you call yourself before? When you were gunned down in your prime?”
“Robert,” I lied.
• • •
At a quarter past two we paid our checks. I walked her to the door of her building.
“That was really nice,” she said. “Even if it was just the Wag.”
“Yup,” I said.
She clasped my hands between hers. “Good night.”
I said, “Good night, Dar.”
And it happened again! The enchanted name working its spell. A slow, lingering kiss, our lips tentative and conversant:
Really?
Really.
Me, too.
We separated, giddy, my hands still enveloped in hers. “Good night, Robert,” she said, hiccupping as she pronounced it.
“Please,” I said. “Give me a new name. Anything.”
She brushed her fingers down my throat and took hold of my lapel, keeping me near for a moment longer. “Plain old Robert sounds just right.”
19
Imagine what it was like, back in ’61: Cadwallader assembling her Corps, scouring the whole Union for its finest philosophers. And every day for three months, Comfort Tyndale went to Cadwallader’s laboratory for an interview. Each day Cadwallader’s secretary threw her out with the same words: “We are not enlisting Coloreds.” Eighty-eight times. The eighty-ninth time, the secretary was eating lunch and Mrs. Tyndale slipped into Cadwallader’s office. No one knows what Tyndale demonstrated for her, but both women came out with singed hair, covered in soot. Mrs. Cadwallader announced: “Any Negro woman who can do the work—take her.”
The causes were bound together from the first days: civil rights, women’s rights, and philosophical rights.
Rep. Danielle Noor Hardin, Speech on the Second Zoning Act at Spelman College, March 1, 1926
I FLOATED THROUGH THE rest of the weekend. Then, bright and early Monday morning, the world came to an end.
I was sitting in Empirical Chemistry, reducing walnut ink over a flame and adding iron filings, when all around me the young women went quiet. Then the voice of my instructor, invoking the same warning about explosive demagnetization that I’d heard a thousand times in childhood, stopped, too.
Rachael Rodgers was standing at the door.
“That one,” she snarled, pointing at me. “Now!”
Tillie and I had discussed the possibility that Radcliffe’s higher-ups might be just a tad upset over our impromptu evacuation of the wounded marchers, though we’d convinced ourselves no real trouble would come from it.
A tear-streaked Essie was waiting in the hall.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Professor Brock,” Rachael answered. “This is the end. For all of you.”
Rachael led us out of the building, toward the Gray Box and its sub-basements.
“You just don’t learn,” Rachael said. “Right back at it, you and Miss Priss and that lesbian squaw.”
I opened my mouth, but Essie elbowed me.
“Well, you showed us just what kind of incompetent, ungrateful bastard—”
“Stop it!” Essie said. Her voice was small, but had steel behind it. “Fire us if you’re going to, but don’t speak to him that way.”
Rachael went silent, though it didn’t stop her from smirking the whole way to the library. We entered and descended five flights of stairs, each one narrower and lower ceilinged than the last. Rachael led us along the poorly lit corridor to Professor Brock’s office. Tillie was standing inside, silent. Brock was sitting behind her desk. She looked drained.
“Thank you for collecting them, Miss Rodgers,” Brock said. “Why don’t you reduplicate those lesson plans and we’ll review them in an hour.”
“I wanted to stay and see that these—” Rachael began.
“This doesn’t concern you. I’ll see you in an hour.”
We could all but hear the shriek of frustration as Rachael clamped her mouth shut and stormed out.
Brock, thick-necked and coarse-featured, dressed in a heavy, no-nonsense fisherman’s sweater, watched the three of us for a long moment. A pump in the bowels of the building kicked on and chugged away. I could feel the vibrations through my feet.
“In the last thirty-six hours,” Brock said, “I’ve had no less than the president of the college, the chief medical officer at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the New England liaison for the Department of the Interior try to tell me how to run my aerodrome: who should be fired, expelled, and charged with attempted murder. That’s to say nothing of the dozens of faculty and donors and alumnae—and even the janitor—who’ve felt compelled to tell me what size sticks I should use to knock some sense into you.”
I glanced at Tillie: she didn’t even wink. We were in real trouble.
“You violated three different no-fly zones. You made a stringer flight over inhabited territory, to say nothing of a landing that almost killed a man who was sitting at his kitchen table eating breakfast. No message ahead to warn the doctors they had ten critical cases incoming. And you had an eighteen-year-old boy putting broad-spectrum stasis sigils on unconscious women in the middle of a field. Every bit of that is insanity! Except for the intervention of Ms. Addams, all three of you would be sitting in a prison cell instead of in my office.”
Essie was weeping quietly.
“All of you are fired,” Brock continued. “The rest of the Threes are fired. The whole aerodrome is grounded, one week, effective immediately.”
Brock leaned forward in her chair, shouting. “Grounded! Without exception. Spread the word—if Mrs. Woodrow Wilson stops by to borrow a regulator, she’s grounded. If the ghost of Lucretia Cadwallader requests a tour of the city by air, she’s grounded. If Jesus Christ himself puts down wearing his Holy Shroud of the Skysuit and begs for a cupful of powder in return for eternal salvation, he’s grounded, too!”
She wiped the sweat off her forehead.
“Now get out—except for Weekes.”
Tillie and Essie filed out. Brock looked even grimmer than they did.
“Do you have any idea,” Brock said after we were alone, “how much easier it would be to just expel you?”
I was not going to sit idly by and be thrown out for doing the right thing.
“For what?” I said, trying not to raise my voice. “What did I do that they didn’t?”
“How can you ask that?” Brock said. “The constant insubordination toward Miss Rodgers.”
“I’m not the worst! You’re not threatening Jake or Francine or—”
“The physical altercation.”
“Which she started by laying hands on me.”
“Nancy Durstman in the river.”
“Which could have happened to anyone.”
“But it happened to you. And then Saturday morning. Running a mass-casualty evacuation? Robert, one of those women died yesterday!”
“What was I supposed to do?” I shouted. “Wait for a professional to show up?”
“Yes! The hospital has a team. They can hover out and do it themselves.”
“How long would that have taken? Ten minutes? Some of those women were dying in front of me! You want to tell me that one died, then how many did we save?”
Brock shut her eyes and took several deep breaths. “The Board of Overseers met last night to discuss expelling you,” she said. “Dean Murchison threatened to resign if they did. That’s the only reason you’re still here.”
I was mighty short on friends if I had only a madman to protect me.
“This isn’t fair,” I said. “This is because I’m a man.”
“No it’s not!” Brock yelled. “This didn’t happen with Radcliffe’s Contingency man last year. It doesn’t happen with Mr. Unger or Mr. Mayweather. If you want to play at being an R&E corpswoman, then this is what happens!”
“I don’t want to play at it, I want to do it!”
Brock put her hands to her temples and looked at me in despair.
“Lord help me, but I know you do,” she said. “And you’re good enough.”
“What?” I said.
“Maybe you need to hear it,” she said, her tone softening. “I know what it’s like to be different from the other girls, how reckless it can make you to prove yourself. So, I’ll say it again: you’re good enough. I know it, Addams knows it, and Murchison knows it. The dean says he doesn’t care how many laws you break—you’ll be useful to us, so we ought to train you for R&E. When the aerodrome reopens, we will. But your behavior has to be beyond reproach. You cannot give the Overseers further cause to expel you. No flying while grounded
. Don’t antagonize Rachael. And for the love of God, don’t save anyone else’s life!”
• • •
That kicked off a dismal week, top to bottom.
Dar, after keeping up a flirtatious string of messages on Sunday, flitted off to Washington for a series of meetings. She wouldn’t reply to my notes with anything more extensive than Made me smile, pls keep writing. Well, if I’d made her smile, she couldn’t take one minute to do the same for me?
On Tuesday, the synthesis of mercury fulminate went horribly awry at the lab bench next to me in Empirical Chemistry, releasing a noxious cloud that forced us to flee the building and left me hacking up yellow phlegm. Unger sprained his ankle playing tennis on Wednesday and was pouting about being on crutches. On Thursday, I messaged Mother, who mentioned that Julie Yzerman was working out so well as an apprentice that the State Office had granted her full credentials. Reject me for a probationary license, but give an unrestricted one to a sixteen-year-old girl! I tried messaging Angela for sympathy, but she replied Boo hoo hoo, save your tears to water the salt garden.
Coming back from class on Friday, I had a good mope and a cup of lukewarm coffee in the dining hall. I couldn’t move myself to eat a proper lunch, not even a scoop of apple crumble. As I shuffled out the door, intending to go to bed for the entire weekend, a group of women nearly knocked me over. They were walking arm in arm, laughing and singing a triumphant tune:
We’ll march up to Heaven
We’ll march into Hell
We’ll march to Aunt Laurie’s down in the dell.
We’ll march through the morning
We’ll march through the gloam
But nothing compares
To marching back home!
They wore gray dresses and capes and shook out their umbrellas in time to the song.
I raised my collar, lowered my head, and skirted around them.
“Weekes!” one of them cried.
It took me a moment to recognize her—Dar. I’d never seen her so happy. She ran over and flung her arms around me.