Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  11

  Mr. Dryfus was not wrong, exactly. After the disastrous dinner party, Mr. Stockwell and the Sin Society did not take their business to the Democrat. Instead, they bought the other paper in town, the Sentinel, and hired their own editor. So when Mrs. Smith offered to pay Mama on commission for her fancy work and to teach her dressmaking besides, Mr. Dryfus had little choice but to agree.

  “As long,” he said, “as your labors do not threaten your condition,” which was becoming rapidly, a little too rapidly, apparent—a fact that if Dryfus noticed, he ignored.

  Only Clara’s response, on the night Mama told Mr. Dryfus about the baby, had been suspect. The incessant shake of her head stilled; she placed her hand f irmly on Mama’s belly and from the look on her face, must have known. Still she said nothing, because Mr. Dryfus, he had been stricken at the news with a helpless, hope-f illed smile, which ever after seemed to come upon him like a yawn or sneezing f it, tipping his mustache to reveal a set of crooked teeth, white as I’d ever seen.

  I couldn’t help it, I liked him better for it.

  For the baby’s benef it, Mr. Dryfus imposed upon Mama mandates and prohibitions against anything that might over-excite the child’s animal organs. “A mother alone—” said Mr. Dryfus, who had been reading a great deal on the subject, “her thoughts, her diet, her habits and experiences—endows or burdens the unborn child with each of its def ining characteristics.”

  Once, he reported, a pregnant woman had unwisely visited a menagerie, where a monkey leaped upon her shoulders. As a result, the child had been born with a small prehensile tail and a predilection for climbing. Another woman, craving the last cherries of the season, reached in vain for fruit beyond her grasp, and the unfulf illed longing caused cherry blotches to appear above her child’s elbow.

  “Can you recall?” Mr. Dryfus asked Mama. “Did your mother subject herself to any shocks or immoderate longings before your sister’s birth? Did she desire tomatoes, apples, radishes?”

  “Mama hates radishes,” I chimed.

  “Hated.” Mama kicked me under the table. “She hated radishes. So do I.”

  Undermining Mr. Dryfus’s efforts was a cohort of German women from Clara’s church, who provided Mama a daily ration of foods guaranteed to excite the animal organs: sausages, meat pies, sweetbreads, which I happily sampled. This offering also entitled them, it seemed, to lay their hands on Mama’s belly and subject her to their own onslaught of judgment and advice. Each night, while Mama busied herself with fancy work, Mr. Dryfus read Goethe, Kant, and Spinoza aloud in German, asking no more than Mama’s presence, and by her presence, his child’s. If he posed philosophical questions, he posed them generally, demanding no response from either of us, as if anticipating conversations he would one day have with his child.

  He wasn’t talking to Mama any more than the German ladies were feeding her. He was talking to his baby, and though I could tell he was trying to remain scientif ic and serious about the whole development, some nights when the window frosted white and the lamp burned low, I could see in his eyes fearsome emotions clear as the telegraph man’s dots and dashes, if you knew what to look for.

  He never managed to show Mama anything more than a growing regard. But I suppose he felt it safe to love the baby inside her; he thought he was loving part of himself.

  What Mama thought about all these attentions, I can’t say. She had more practice guarding herself than Mr. Dryfus. I have more pity now, but no more understanding than I did at thirteen, watching her bent over her tatting, hiding all she thought and felt behind that shield of industry. As her belly grew, her silence took on a new authority, which frightened and pulled me closer. I found myself touching her shoulders, her skirt, her forearm, whenever I could. Never her belly, though that was what enthralled me. The belly, the baby between us. I’d never felt so drawn to her or so trapped and lonely in my life.

  That is, until the baby came.

  Karl Johan Dryfus, born on the twenty-fourth of May, by most accounts two months early, was big, unblemished, orange as a pumpkin. “You’re a lucky woman,” Mrs. Smith told Mama after it was over. “The f irst one is usually much harder.” From the noises coming out of Mama, it sounded hard enough to me. Banished to the kitchen, I kept the water boiling, the rags fresh, and worked up a good frothing hate for Mr. Dryfus, who sat at the table, pale as a cabbage; wasn’t even his doing, after all. I called the baby Little John, out of spite, I guess, but the name stuck. Only Mama called him Karl. He would look nothing like her. Any resemblance to Mr. Dryfus was declared only with great imagination, but no one, least of all Clara, seemed inclined to point this out. Within a month, Mr. Dryfus changed the sign on his shop door to read Lyman Dryfus and Son. That fearful joy on his face? That was, I knew, what love looked like.

  And I could see, clear as anything, Mama loved the baby too.

  It was the way she held him as he suckled, aware of nothing else in the room, the way she watched him sleeping. And God help me, I imagined terrible things: Little John falling on his head. Little John, blue faced, floating in the river. Other times, holding him soft against me, I wished . . . Well, I wished Mr. Dryfus was Little John’s daddy. Or that Mama had not told me any different. Then I could believe there was such a thing as a family. Could imagine my father, Landis Wilcox, in a gray peacoat, carrying me around in the crook of his arm, loving me unreasonably. What if Mr. Dryfus had been my father? Clara my grandmother? William my beloved? This is what I did each night in the attic, imagine for myself some other past. Wasn’t this what Mama had done, after all? Tie the loose scraps of her life into an acceptable reality?

  It didn’t help that we’d had no word from William. This fact weighed heaviest on Clara, I think, but I missed him too, and especially the refuge of the photo shop. Each night in my scrapbook, I composed him letters. “Dearest W—, How long and harshly my days pass in your absence!” Inane, flowery nonsense, and imagined his Dear Miss Branch letters to be his response. Sometimes, as William used to, I’d pick interesting faces passing on the street and hold them in my mind as long as I could before the picture blurred away. And if ever the memory of the dead girl, or of William standing above her on the river bank, snuck into my mind, I’d think instead about his lips on my stained hand. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  •

  June and July passed, a busy, humid blur. August f inally raised its sweaty haunches off the town and lumbered away around the river bend; the floodwaters settled; there was a bite to the air again. Hanley and I sat as we had all summer, in the composition room with the window wide, sorting type from the week’s printing into cabinets.

  That is, I sorted type. Hanley, long legs propped on the Washington Press, was reading aloud week-old news about Indian wars and going on about colonel this and general that, when the shop bell jangled. A handsome young gentleman—a real dandy from the look of him: fob watch, a fancy gray vest, and matching top hat—peered through the doorway. He blinked in the window glare. I could smell the Macassar oil that slicked his hair, sure as I could see his wedge nose jutting over his wide, clean-shaven jaw.

  “You get any bigger, Hanley,” he said, “the calvary have to put a saddle on you. What, Maddy?” He took his hat in hand. “Have I changed so much?”

  “Wilhelm?” Clara’s voice, crackling down the hallway, saved me from a response, but not from the shock at the sight of him. At the sight of him so transformed. Clara charged in, shuffled him into a hug, thrust him away again, ran a palsied hand down his cheek. “Mein Gott, Wilhelm!” Then she pulled him with her into the kitchen.

  “Maddy,” said Hanley. “Maddy, come on,” and bounded after them. Little John’s cries announced Mama’s return from the dress shop, and when f inally my legs moved me to the kitchen, I saw that Mrs. Smith, the dressmaker, had accompanied her.

  “Why, Mr. Stark,” she said. Hanley fetched beer from the larder. Clara checked her st
ew. “Wait until the young ladies get a look at you.”

  The prospect did not please me.

  Mrs. Smith, fashionable but oddly proportioned, had a wide bottom and short legs that in any other woman would have looked out of agreement with such a slender neck and arms; instead they seemed to anchor her and give weight to her observations and opinions, of which she had a great many. There was no longer a Mr. Smith, but that didn’t mean she was a war widow, as I f irst thought. Two months after the war ended, her husband, a lieutenant in the Missouri regulars, got himself shot dead in a duel on Smallpox Island, over another man’s wife. So she sold his tailoring business in Saint Louis, cashed in his investments, and bought the dress shop in Reliance. Hanley told me this, but it was no secret, having been in all the papers, much to the dismay of her cousin, Mrs. Stockwell. She would have had to go much farther than Reliance if she wanted to be shed of the gossip, and really I’m not sure she did, for it lent her a kind of immunity from the usual standards and judgments. Mama, I knew, in her own guarded way, appreciated her frank outspoken generosity. Most of the time, I did, too.

  Mrs. Smith looked back at me, a question on her face, and motioned to an open chair as they all sat down. I stayed put against the wall, staring a hole in the back of William’s combed head as he flattered Clara, admired Mama and Little John, teased Hanley. I’m not sure if, for all my romantic imaginings, I ever really expected him to come back. Now here he was: no beard, no scars on his face. No blemishes of any kind. His clothing and manner all wrong, too tidy; perfectly trimmed to please. He’d been to Saint Louis and New Orleans and back again and went on about the photos he’d taken, the flip books he’d made, and the galleries he’d seen, while I pressed the hand he’d kissed against the charm hidden beneath my blouse and burrowed like a little blind beetle into my despondency.

  The shop bell rang; I hardly heard it, and was surprised to look up and f ind him looking at me. “What do you think about that, Maddy?” William asked.

  But by the time his acknowledgment registered, William’s smile dried up. His eyes skirted mine. They fell on Mr. Dryfus, who had emerged stiffly from the darkened hallway. Mrs. Smith, sitting up, looked with intrigued confusion between the two men.

  “You’re not staying,” said Mr. Dryfus.

  “Hello, Lyman,” said William.

  “You do not write or send word of yourself. Have you any idea how worried Mutti has been?”

  “Lyman,” Clara pleaded, stepping forward.

  “No,” said William. He stood, but when he did, his manner cracked; stained black f ingers raked his face, and in that brief action, I saw him again. My William, broken and struggling with himself. What a self ish relief I felt!

  “I mean yes,” he said, recovering. “You’re right. You’re right, Lyman. I was . . . I had to . . .” Then, giving up on an explanation, “I’m sorry.”

  This was not the response any of us, least of all Mr. Dryfus, expected. His mouth opened, closed.

  “I’m sorry, Mutti.” William took Clara’s hands in his own. “I won’t be staying here, but I will be returning to Reliance, to my shop, for a while at least. I have taken a room at Madrigel’s on Fifth Street and established a kind of, well, an agreement with Miss Rose that may in time prove”—here, oddly, he looked at Mrs. Smith—“fertile?”

  Mrs. Smith did not respond. Little John, lurching in Mama’s arms toward Mr. Dryfus, gave a frustrated squall.

  “Agreement?” asked Mr. Dryfus.

  “A patronage, of sorts,” William said vaguely. “After she comes into her inheritance. Fitting, don’t you think?” Then, to the question on Mrs. Smith’s face. “Old Man Werner was a great patron of my mother’s work,” he said.

  “You think he plans to leave her something?” asked Mr. Dryfus.

  “I don’t know,” William, shrugged. “But it won’t hurt to be of use.”

  “Whose money is she spending now?” asked Mrs. Smith.

  Hanley grinned. “Probably the dead husbands’.”

  “Is that what they’re saying?” asked William.

  “What aren’t they saying?” said Hanley. “If it isn’t the weather, it’s Miss Rose.”

  “Ever since she tried to vote,” said Mrs. Smith.

  “Well, that was her purpose, was it not?” said Mr. Dryfus.

  “And why can’t the vote have been her purpose?” Mrs. Smith demanded. “Anyway, I think she encourages rumors. The more people believe about her, the less they will know.”

  “What do you know about her, William?” asked Hanley.

  “Not much. As much as she wants. But one of us might know more soon.” William, then all of them, looked at me.

  “Maddy?” Hanley laughed. William was not joking.

  “Miss Rose is looking for a girl. I recommended Maddy.”

  “Me?”

  Mama, watching, listening to all this, stood up. “A girl for what?” She handed Little John to Mr. Dryfus. “A girl for what?” she repeated.

  William pulled his eyes from the spectacle of Mr. Dryfus and the baby. “Well, I don’t know exactly.” He turned, considered me, a muted conspiratorial smile on his lips. “She will have to go and see.”

  I followed him to the shop front, the gravity of this last development not nearly so affecting as the knowledge that he had been thinking of me. Even far away in the city. Even with his gentleman’s manners and costume, he’d been thinking of me. I didn’t care if anything came out of meeting Miss Rose, suspected nothing would. William had been thinking of me.

  “William. William, I’ve never said anything about . . . I’ll never—”

  “I know, my apparition.” He reached over my head for his jacket on the rack. “I was right about you, what I told Miss Rose. You are . . .”

  “What?”

  Hanley lumbered down the hallway toward the composition room, watching us. William leaned close, his bare face full of sharp and unfamiliar angles. “Discreet,” he whispered.

  12

  Two days later, face scrubbed, hands clean, Mama’s best dress sagging in all the wrong places, I set out to meet Miss Rose at the Werner Manor. William would not, as I had hoped, accompany me, the only advantage I could see in this venture, for I was sure the interview would end with a quick and f inal dismissal.

  Even so, it was a welcome novelty to leave the shop at that hour and step out into the new-washed morning. The glassworks whistle blew at ten minutes to the hour; shop boys scooted to their posts. Men in top hats met in twos and threes like a gathering choir on the courthouse steps. Still, everything was hushed; the fog over the river held even bird calls close as secrets until the church bells clanged nine, and all at once men and birds seemed to fully rouse themselves to the day.

  Only after the pavement ended and houses thinned beyond Millionaire’s Row did I become appropriately nervous about where I was going. By the time Tenth Street branched east to Godfrey and I stood on the cusp of a plunging drive attended by a trim regiment of cypress, mice were doing flips in my stomach.

  Miss Rose had come to Reliance from New York City, a place so far away and foreign to my experience, it might as well have been another country. That she had been an actress and then a theater manager no one disputed—if rumors were true, she was planning a theater in town by the docks, in her father’s abandoned warehouse—but no one seemed to agree just what this implied about her character or her proper regard. I’d seen her about town plenty that year. That is, I’d seen her plumed hats and gaudy dresses from a distance, her prof ile behind the crepe curtains of her hansom. Her presence lingered like a scent; her name lingered, certainly. Shop owners happily cataloged whatever she bought. On the strength of one such report, Mrs. Smith sold her entire stock of dyed hat plumes. She was a radical, a nuisance, a countess, a blessing, a madam, a suffragette. All of these things, and none of them. Hanley told me she’d been married three ti
mes. “Rich men all,” he said.

  “Then why is she still Miss Rose?”

  Hanley shrugged. “Just what she calls herself. The last man was as old as her father, kicked the bucket a month after the wedding. Another is in with the loonies on Blackwell’s Island.”

  “And the other one?”

  Hanley didn’t know, but whatever evil pleasure he took in frightening me soon fell away. “Oh, Maddy. It’s all talk, you know. I’m sure you’ll probably be f ine.”

  But this reassurance and every other thought swept from my head when the cypress drive opened to a tangle of roses and browning topiary. On the ridge below sat an eight-sided manor, three stories tall, ringed with porches and topped with what looked like a little glass house. From up there, it reminded me of a jewelry box I’d seen once on the shelf of Dixon White’s Dry Goods back in Susanville. Gave myself shivers imagining Dixon White’s grubby hands reaching over the sycamore grove, and lifting its roof straight from its walls.

  As I approached, I heard voices, laughter, someone chopping wood. In the courtyard, the most extravagant turkey I’d ever seen thrust its cobalt chest around the porch, and with a bob of its tonsure dismissed the universe with the same impressive indifference with which the butler greeted me at the door.

  “Never mind, Robert.”

  The butler stepped aside and a f inely dressed young lady, about my age, framed herself in the doorway. Curls and thick, dark braids wound about her head, but it was her contemptuous expression, not to mention her perfect complexion, that rendered me inferior.

  Without a word, she led me through a marble foyer that opened to a vaulted gallery cored like an apple by a spiral staircase and drenched in light spilling from the glassed cupola. Servants bustled about, sweeping floors and dusting statues—little ones on ledges and big ones so lifelike and numerous, I mistook them at f irst for a still and silent crowd.

  “That’s a samurai helmet,” the young lady said, for I had stopped, to regain my bearings, before a curious black hat with winglike flaps, displayed at the base of the staircase. “Ah. Don’t touch!”