by Mary Volmer
“Miss Rose’s nephews look like they’re ready to eat up the cutlery with their breakfast,” I said.
Mrs. French turned the page. I tapped my foot, watching subtle shifts of thought cross her face. Pretty soon I wandered over.
“Do you need something to do, Madelyn?” I was standing in her light.
“What are you reading?”
She leaned back, cleaned her oculars, her mourning dress little departure from her usual attire.
“Probate law.”
“Oh,” I said, but didn’t pretend to know what this meant; Mrs. French had a nose for false conf idence.
“In case they do try to eat the cutlery with their breakfast,” she said.
At ten, guests f inally began to arrive: Mrs. Drabney from the Wayward Home, Judge and Mrs. Bennett, and towheaded Mr. Sims, a young lawyer from Springf ield who boarded with them. Mrs. Smith followed with the cobbler, Emil Le Duc, often in her presence of late. Then came Mama and Mr. Dryfus and Hanley, too. No William, yet. They gave their jackets to Roberts and their condolences to Miss Rose, who though frighteningly gaunt, wore a reassuringly extravagant dress, a f itted sheath of blue-black lace and silk, flaring into a bustle of layered crepe. A black mesh veil obscured her face.
Was it sadness I read there? A headache? I hoped sadness, because I hadn’t managed more than a distracted and self ish remorse for Old Man. I found myself watching her closely; everyone was watching her, even as they shook hands with the nephews standing like blocks of wood to Miss Rose’s right. One by one, guests blinked into the candlelit entryway, their voices spiriting away in the cavernous space. Only then did I recognize the larger effect Miss Rose had created with all those shrouds and candles and darkness, even with the flowers and Old Man’s stink. The manor a stage! A funeral scene in one of Miss Rose’s plays.
Except it wasn’t a play.
“Well, you look very nice, Madelyn,” said Mrs. Smith. Mama, every bit the lady, wore gray with black lace. Half the ladies in attendance were wearing her lace. “Very put together,” said Mrs. Smith. “Doesn’t she look nice, Hanley?”
Someone, Mrs. Smith from the way she was smiling, had put Hanley together; his shirt and trousers pressed, his eyepatch clean, his hair oiled. Embarrassed, neither of us mustered a response. Emil Le Duc and Mr. Dryfus joined us. Then a hush.
Melborn Stockwell emerged from the porch glare, and even breeze-blown shrouds seemed to still.
I knew enough to expect Stockwell. Donovan and Doolittle, too, were expected, especially, Mrs. French told me, because the election results were still in doubt and each would be eager to claim Old Man’s memory for his own use. The whole town was expected, if not at the viewing, then later at the cemetery. Shops and factories closed; pubs opened early, and all day church bells would ring the half hour. They were ringing now.
Still, the shock remained, because, well, I’d never actually seen Mr. Stockwell and Miss Rose in the same room; from the watchful expressions around the room, no one else had, either. Behind him came a little convoy: his wife, the invalid Abigail, and Georgiana, who kept her eyes trained away from Miss Rose and on the hem of her mother’s skirt, then Reverend Reynolds, who seemed to balance his dignity on the tip of his chin, and then the Morrisons and the Walshes. Outside, a horse jangled its tack. An oriole called, but for an awkward moment both of them—Miss Rose and Mr. Stockwell—stood before each other entirely at a loss. They reminded me (forgive me, Miss Rose) of a bulldog and a poodle, who after months of barking insults from opposite yards, discover the gate between them open.
Miss Rose squared her shoulders. A caustic smile lifted Stockwell’s thin lips. If her veil unsettled him, he didn’t show it.
“My condolences, Miss Rose,” he said too loudly. “For your loss.”
Behind the veil, Miss Rose’s eyes shone, her nose angled like a dagger.
“Thank you, Mr. Stockwell.”
“He was a remarkable man, your father. We all owe him a debt of gratitude—a great deal of respect.” He rocked forward into the word, thumbs in vest pockets, chest thrust out as if he thought even birds outside should stop their chatter to listen. Most people did.
“Yes,” Miss Rose replied.
“For his faith,” Stockwell continued. “Yes,” someone echoed behind him. “His founding vision. His moral fortitude.”
“I am glad you think so, Mr. Stockwell,” said Miss Rose.
“Melborn,” his wife entreated, glancing at faces in the room.
“But you see, we all think so, Miss Rose,” he said, including the room with a broad gesture. A good many heads nodded agreement—with what, I wasn’t sure. The exaltation of Old Man? The criticisms of Miss Rose embedded in those exaltations? Both? I felt a strong urge to walk right over there and . . . what? Accuse him? Defend her? How? No direct attack had been made. He hadn’t even mentioned the election. I knew there must be a good reason Miss Rose withheld her own accusations but I couldn’t think of what it might be. Mrs. French, by the parlor door, cast me a warning, her hands palms down as if to say, “Easy, Maddy.”
“Melborn, dear.” Stockwell’s wife tried again. “There are people waiting to . . . We should really . . .”
Stockwell, cheeks red with triumph, led his disciples toward the refreshments.
“Oh! What a beast he is,” Mrs. Smith whispered as they passed. I wondered how much Mrs. Smith knew about it. Wondered again where William was. “I think she handled herself very well.”
“A beast, maybe,” said Mr. Dryfus. “But no fool.”
“Mr. Dryfus, don’t tell me you side with that man!” demanded Mrs. Smith.
“I did not say that. But we must acknowledge the strength in his design. Even those who did not support Stockwell, who might even have applauded Miss Rose’s election scheme, might now feel reasonably obliged to be offended on Old Mr. Werner’s behalf.”
“Reasonably?”
“And with what happened last night . . .”
The party followed the flow of traff ic to the dining room. Hanley stayed put.
“Bunch of glassworks boys fought the Paddies by the docks last night,” he said. “Rumor’s going around if there’s a strike like they say, the Paddies will step in with Donovan’s blessing. I guess they’re getting a head start f ighting. Nobody died yet, though.”
“That’s good, I guess.” I said.
Together, we picked our way past gossiping, well-fed mourners, teeth and faces jaundiced in the lamplight. Mr. Donovan arrived, right after Mr. Doolittle and Mr. Baynard, the outgoing mayor, a gout-ridden man with a spinster niece who fluttered about him like a colorless moth. “Yoo-hoo, Mr. Sims!” Big Nora, arm in arm with Angela, breezed by, chasing the lawyer. “Oh, don’t you just love a good funeral? For an old man especially. Then it’s not such a shame, is it? Then it’s rather a party. Oh look, Nora!”
All those pushy people! In the gardens, the gallery, the music room, the dining room. I was in no f ine mood by the time Hanley and I edged our way into the parlor. There Old Man lay helpless against all those gawking eyes. It’s true I didn’t know Old Man much better than I had eight months before, but I’d felt his presence, and now his absence, as they had not. Made me mad, the way everyone seemed to hold him on their plates with their tarts, taking bites as they talked of other things—the whiskey trials, the election, the potato blight.
Hanley spotted William on one side of the casket, speaking quietly with Georgiana Stockwell. She looked at him, leaned in to say something, and when he smiled, my heart twisted.
“I’ll be back, Hanley. I’ve got to . . .” and leaving him midsentence, I picked my way through the throng to William, tapped him on the shoulder and when he leaned down, whispered in his ear.
“I know she was pregnant.” He blinked down at me. “Aileen.”
This had rather more effect than I expected.
“Come wi
th me,” he said, and leaving Georgiana to gape, seized my arm and pulled me with him out the door. F inding the porch occupied, he continued to the garden. Behind the garden shed, he turned me to face him, all frivolity in his manner gone.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Miss Rose,” I said.
“Where did she?”
“Stockwell did it.”
“Stop playing games, Madelyn!”
“Miss Rose said Mr. Stockwell did it! She said Georgiana told her.”
William, breathless, paused. “Georgiana?”
“As much as told her.” I yanked free, close to tears, wishing I hadn’t said anything. William leaned against the garden shed, hands to his face, tugging that phantom beard and staring west across the river.
“It’s true, then? William?”
Beneath shouts of boys playing tag in the topiary, I heard the insect hum of human voices from the manor beyond. First, only William’s eyes met mine. Then, after a moment’s consideration, his attitude changed. He turned.
“She came to me,” he said. “For help, Maddy. Look at me.” I looked at his chest, at his lapel. “I gave her the address of a place to go in the city and my mother’s charm to pay for it. I did what I could for her. I told you that.”
“You didn’t tell me she was pregnant,” I said. “If Stockwell did it, if you knew, why didn’t you—”
“This is not some romantic fancy, Maddy! Who would believe such an accusation? Only her memory would suffer.” He held me by my shoulders at arm’s length, and still I could not meet his eyes. “Do you understand that? Her memory would suffer, Maddy. I would suffer. Do you want that?”
“No, William.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened. It doesn’t matter now. Say it.” His breath hot in my face.
“Maddy?” Hanley called, then appeared with Mama down the path. “You okay?”
“Say it, Maddy,” said William.
I looked at him then, right in the eye, and found there an anguish that made me all the more uncertain. “Doesn’t matter,” I said with no conviction, and pushed past Hanley and Mama, toward the manor.
34
“Madelyn, darling girl! Tell me what they are saying about me.”
We had laid Old Man to rest in the Twelfth Street Cemetery, four acres of Union dead, on a west-sloping hill overlooking the river bend. Now, the morning after, Miss Rose had stripped black crepe from her off ice mirrors and windows, and a tense April sun peeked in. She’d discarded her deep mourning, too, for a royal blue tea dress of linen and lace; and while at f irst it was a relief to f ind her brimming with energy and vanity, I could sense the sharp edge beneath and see from Mrs. French’s posture that I’d interrupted something. I didn’t want to rub them wrong.
The fact was, I’d paid little mind to what anyone was saying about Miss Rose. I’d spent the funeral ruminating on what William had not said. He had not, as I expected, or rather as I wanted, conf irmed Miss Rose’s accusation against Stockwell. Not in so many words.
“Well?” she said. “They cannot say I neglected my duty. You heard how they spoke of him, I suppose? More god than man, I should think. Now don’t think me insensitive, Madelyn, I cried my share of tears for my father. Yes, Mrs. Hardrow?”
Mrs. Hardrow, pushing through the door handed Miss Rose a note. Mrs. French spoke up: “If that is another request for charity, Rose, I say again it would be wise to wait until we have—”
“Oh, as you wish, Lorena! Nothing was being said about me, Madelyn? Mrs. Hardrow, before you go . . .”
The lawyer, Mr. Schneider, a gaunt, unassuming man, well dressed but badly groomed, popped through the door as if sprung from a clock. And to my surprise, to everyone’s surprise, William followed him. William, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, barely looked at me.
“Mr. Stark?” said Miss Rose. “Can I help you?”
“I have asked Mr. Stark to join us today, Miss Rose,” said the lawyer. From Mrs. French’s expression, she had no prior notion of the invitation, nor did the nephews who charged through the door as Mrs. Hardrow shooed me out.
I ventured no farther than the balcony, sliding down cross-legged, my head pressed to the balusters, hearing little beyond the laughter of two hired girls collecting mountains of crepe in the gallery, for what purpose I couldn’t guess and didn’t care. A shadow draped itself over me. Violet glared down. She carried a script under one arm as though she’d been working with great industry.
“Don’t you have anything to do?” she asked, as the off ice door bashed open. We jumped. The taller nephew, face red as a plum, stood in the doorway, one f inger raised as if he’d burned it.
“We warned you. If something like this happened, we would not, we will not stand for—”
Miss Rose’s voice was a hammer striking an anvil. “Out!”
Downstairs, the hired girls hushed. Violet and I edged close enough to see Miss Rose, head raised, eyes flashing, crumble into the settee. Violet ran to her side. Mrs. Hardrow called for salts. For a moment I stayed where I was, watching William, rigid and pale, holding himself upright on the back of an armchair. Mrs. French, squinting at a document in her hand as if it might catch f ire, now f ixed her eyes on the lawyer.
“Please remember.” The lawyer folded his hands neatly before him. “That I am merely the messenger.” He looked across the room at Miss Rose, then William. “If all parties are amenable, I would suggest coming to reasonable terms outside of probate.”
I stepped back to let him pass. William followed as far as the stairwell. “There’s been no mistake, Mr. Schneider?”
“No mistake, Mr. Stark.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, carefully. “William?”
Staring up, dazed, in the direction of Old Man’s room, he glanced blindly at me, then followed Schneider down the stairs and out the door. Bees knocked dumbly against the window glass; the glare from the cupola suddenly blinding. Susan came running with salts. Violet fanned Miss Rose with her manuscript. Mrs. French, document still in hand, the only steady soul in that raging sea, stepped beside me.
“Mrs. French?” I took a breath. “What happened?”
“You knew, didn’t you? You knew Old Man was William’s father.”
Having run all the way from the manor, I barged breathless into Mr. Dryfus’s off ice. Mama from the kitchen and Hanley from the composition room, poked their heads into the hall. Mr. Dryfus, shocked from his labors, stood up, and then, grasping his pipe, sat purposefully down again.
“Come in, Madelyn. Close the door.” I did. Pages he’d been marking flurried across the desk and, I swear, those portraits of important men on the wall leaned closer. “How do you know about that?” Dryfus’s eyes met mine. “Does William?”
“He does now.”
I told him about the will, how Old Man left William everything in something called a trust: the manor, the brewery titles, the railroad bonds—everything but a strip of swampland in New Orleans that had belonged to Miss Rose’s mother. This would go to Miss Rose. The nephews would get nothing.
“And you knew all along, didn’t you?”
Dryfus tapped ash into a pile on his desk, pointed to a chair, but I remained standing.
“Not about the will,” he said f inally. “But about William’s parentage. I knew, yes. Mutti found Mr. Werner’s letters to Willa Stark in her studio after she died. Creditors were pressing,” he explained. “We didn’t know how to reach William, or if he was still alive. Mutti had been William’s nurse, the closest thing to family Willa had, so we took what we could.”
Hanley had been right. Cholera had killed Willa Stark, though William later blamed himself for running away to war against her wishes. He had been only f ifteen at the time. Willa and Clara begged Mr. Dryfus, then a typesetter at the Westliche Post, to follow William to Camp Jackson and talk sense into him. “You are to
o young,” Dryfus told him. It was just after the siege. Riots had left behind burn-scarred walls and hot tempers. Volunteers in homemade uniforms shouted abuse at Dryfus through the gates. “Think of your mother,” he persisted. “Think of Clara.”
William wouldn’t listen. “Only women and cripples are staying home,” he had said, and Dryfus left him to his fate.
While the war lasted, they had no word from William. Willa Stark refused to speak of him. She worked constantly, slept in the studio, rising to paint with f irst light, moving from one canvas to the next throughout the day as the light changed. Then the war ended. A month passed. Two, and still no word of William. She stopped painting. She would not eat or sleep. She began making little lacerations on her thighs—Clara found the rust red stains on the bed sheets. She was already half mad when the scourge came.
“Her physiognomy alone should have warned a wise man away from her, much less her profession,” said Mr. Dryfus. “Yet every man I knew loved her. She was . . .”
“Alluring,” I said in spite of myself.
“And unattainable. Yes, and talented. Saint Louis was full of artists capable of a likeness. Willa Stark was different. She had a remarkable smile, which she never used in flattery, and hands.” He looked at his own with a trace of embarrassment. “Hands that spoke when she spoke, and a bearing so composed, so utterly indifferent. Until she painted you.”
“And then?”
Mr. Dryfus came as close to blush as I’d ever see.
“Then she looked,” he said. “She f illed you up with looking. I don’t think people came so much for their likenesses. They came to be seen by Willa Stark, to see themselves as she saw them, to take a piece of her away with them.”
The very romance of this idea, coming from a man I’d thought incapable of such perceptions, was enough to enchant me. “Did she paint you?”