Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  The womb veils probably wouldn’t have mattered either, if the subject had been allowed to die quietly. You can be sure no one from the Benevolent Society, not even the snitch, whoever she was, would have stepped forward to conf irm she’d ever procured, much less used such a device. But when Stockwell published his accusation against Miss Rose, she simply could not let the matter lie. She published this response:

  If Mr. Stockwell believes such private matters to be of public note, then perhaps he should agree, also, that precautions against conception should enjoy public support, especially if such precautions protect the health of our daughters, wives, and mothers. The law, such as it is, considers a married woman’s body the property of her husband. Would not a good husband take care of his property, promote her good health and longevity in any way he could?

  And further down the page:

  . . . I cannot help but reflect upon the tragic death, over a year ago, of Aileen O’Heaney, once in Stockwell’s own employ. I have good reason to believe the poor girl was compromised and with child when she was found murdered in the river. We were all happy to assume her fate to be the work of a traveling rogue. Yet if the father of this tragedy lived and worked among us each day, how would we know? Her unfortunate death would mean he could easily conceal his conquest, and expect no repercussions at all . . . Perhaps the innocent maidens Mr. Stockwell so desperately wishes to protect would be better served if they possessed the means to guard against disgrace conferred upon them. I ask you, if conception alone is to be punished, then why not prevent conception?

  “Tell me,” demanded Mrs. French, walking late one night into dinner, holding the newspaper rolled into a club, “what you were hoping to accomplish with this?”

  Miss Rose did not dignify the question with a response.

  I felt a passing guilt for failing to tell her about Aileen’s early departure from Oak Hollow, especially later, when Mrs. Smith came to speak to Miss Rose herself—until it was clear Miss Rose’s opinion of Stockwell’s guilt remained undamaged by Mrs. Smith’s facts. She weathered the swift and damning responses her letter prompted with a kind of martyred pride, unshaken for a week, until Stockwell managed to raise another petition against her theater. On the night Violet debuted as Juliet, only a dozen people attended, most of them dockworkers, all of them drunk. And after the performance, as the hansom clattered to a stop before the manor, Violet’s “Rose tone” f inally cracked.

  “It’s all your fault,” she whispered. I thought she was talking to me, until she said it again, louder.

  “It’s all your fault no one came to see me.”

  “Oh shut up, Violet.” Miss Rose, head back against the cushion, closed her eyes.

  “You didn’t want anyone to see me. You want to be the star. It’s all your fault and I hate you!”

  Violet took a great gulp of air, her face pinched, all of her posturing affection replaced by a deep and vulnerable resentment, suppressed who knows how long. Miss Rose drew herself up as if to strike, but the force of the betrayal proved too much. She took to her bed. Violet locked herself in her room and would not come out the next day or the next.

  “Will you go to her?” Mrs. French asked me. “Go to Violet.”

  “If she won’t listen to you, she won’t listen to me.” But I knocked on her door anyway.

  “Go away.”

  “Mrs. French thinks you should eat.” The door was locked. “Violet.” In spite of myself I felt pity rising. “Listen. It wasn’t you. You were good.” I thought her very good, in fact, but the admission was hard enough without such a qualif ication.

  “I said go away!”

  “She can stay in there and starve for all I care,” I told Mrs. French.

  “She’s scared, Madelyn. You don’t mean that.”

  I thought maybe I did. I thought maybe Mrs. French was as wrong about me as I had been about William. I wasn’t like her, wasn’t intelligent or kind, didn’t have any promise. Ordinary, except ugly. Extraordinarily ugly. She just couldn’t see it. This was my fear: that she’d made up someone better than I’d ever be, and when she learned the truth, I’d lose her, too.

  It was then late April, late afternoon, a Saturday. Usually we walked down the garden path to the river at this time, but Mrs. French turned the ankle she’d busted months ago and sat, captive in her bedroom, where I wasn’t often welcome but always felt comfortable. Sparely furnished, with a long writing table beneath the window, plain drapes, a rag rug, an armchair, a canopy bed stripped of its canopy. Botanical paintings graced the wall, orchids mostly. No pictures or photographs or any other sign of the family she’d lost, which seemed so sad. A collection of Asa Gray’s essays lay open next to the lamp on her bedside table. The window faced west.

  I wonder now if the law was, in fact, Mrs. French’s natural element. Such an active body and mind might have been better suited to physical explorations with books as aides but not the sole means of discovery. Where did her vigorous curiosity come from? What might she have become, given the opportunity?

  None of these thoughts burdened me then, however.

  Miss Rose called. I looked despairingly toward the door. For the time being, I replaced Violet at Miss Rose’s beck and call, but didn’t feel triumphant as I’d thought I might, didn’t want to go, and didn’t care if Mrs. French ignored me for the next four hours so long as she let me sit, quiet in the corner of that room, grounded in her presence.

  “Ma-de-lyn!”

  “I better go,” I said, but hesitated.

  “Mrs. French? You’re not leaving, are you? You’re not going to abandon Miss Rose?” Abandon me, I thought. “She is not well. She is getting worse, I think.”

  “I am not leaving, yet.”

  “Yet?”

  She looked up, tapped her pen on her knee, put book and pen aside.

  “I’m not sure either of us will have a choice, Maddy. There is no sense deceiving ourselves, however much”—her eyes gleamed; she pursed her lips—“however much we may wish things were different. One can only deny what one knows in one’s heart for so long before the burden of self-deception becomes greater than the unpleasant truth. The lucky, perhaps, do not recognize the deception. But for the rest of us, Maddy, for you and for me, that needy denial, that deliberate blindness is a kind of poison. A self-imposed sickness. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

  “That you’re leaving,” I replied, knowing this wasn’t the only truth she was telling me. She, too, stayed in the manor with Miss Rose’s blessing. Friend or not, with the paltry income from her writing, she was as dependent on Miss Rose as I.

  “I may have no choice. We may not have a choice, Madelyn.”

  36

  But just like that, it was the middle of May. A warm, damp wind from the south brought the scent of blooming orchards, and you could hardly see the river for the full gowns of new growth dressing the bluff. Summer was upon us. Violet, having given up sulking a week after she began, emerged withered and penitent to lay her head on Miss Rose’s knee and weep her contrition. Miss Rose’s mood and color improved. Her headaches eased. The snappish silence between her and Mrs. French relaxed, and they resumed their playfully competitive disagreements. William remained stranded in Reliance, penniless, until the lawyer untangled what was left of Old Man’s f inances. No servants had been let go, yet, and even Mrs. Nettle had fallen victim to a cautious optimism, brought on as much by the sunshine and sweet Virginia creeper climbing over the kitchen window as the light work.

  It was only a lull, of course. Miss Rose knew the life we had been living was over. We would all have to leave the manor. There would be no choice. Her only choice, as she saw it, was how to make her exit—with a theatrical production of another kind.

  “A masked ball!” she said one night at dinner, as if the extravaganza hadn’t been ripening in her mind for the last month. “To be held on my birthda
y, June tenth.”

  Mrs. French, glancing up from her f ish, was the only one alarmed. “Your birthday’s in August, Rose.” She paused. “And you have no money.”

  Neither fact made any difference to Miss Rose. In the coming weeks, her vitality returned, and with it a depth of voice and gesture. Not even the arrival of the appraiser, an exacting, mouse-faced man with a clipboard, seemed to concern her. Nor did the drawn look on Mrs. French’s face each time a creditor came to the door or the mail arrived with a new batch of letters calling in debts. Nor did the closure of the River Theater after the third bust in a row. When men came with a train of wagons for the statues, leaving the gallery bereft of all but Daphne, she said, “Well, we must make room for dancing!”

  By the last week in May, though no formal announcement had been made and no invitations sent, the ball had become public knowledge, the election (which had been ceded to Donovan) and Old Man’s death all but forgotten in a wave of new speculations. There would be an ice sculpture, I overheard from one of the post-off ice gossips. A trio of Asian belly dancers, said a lady in the dress shop. Hanley heard there would be a live elephant in the garden, a layer cake as tall as a man, f ireworks at midnight . . .

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  “Which part?” I didn’t discount cake or belly dancers or f ireworks (though I had no idea where the money would come from). But I knew there would be masks—hundreds of masks. I knew because I was to help make them from water, flour, and the piles of newspaper I’d been sent to the print shop to collect.

  For the next two weeks, in fact, every free hand in the manor was drafted to make masks. Even Miss Rose took off her gloves and put on an apron to ply strips of gluey newsprint over cardboard molds while remembering aloud stories of costumes thrown together, stages erected with no budget, sets built from scratch on the day of a performance, the smell of wet paint still sharp when the house opened. When a batch of masks set, we painted them black. Each one covered the eyes and part of the nose and could be decorated as desired, then held like a lorgnette or attached by a strap behind the head. Four days in a row preceding the ball, Miss Rose sent Hanley and the bookshop owner’s sons to tie masks with ribbons on doorknobs of households on Miss Rose’s list. Two masks per household. Each mask an invitation.

  I’d wager even those humbugs who swore they’d never attend checked their doors every morning. At any rate, Mrs. Smith told me, there weren’t enough bonnets or bassinets to justify the amount of lace, wavy looking moiré, and ribbon she’d been selling. By the day of the ball, decorations in place, food arranged, anything in the world seemed possible.

  Wind gusted through the conservatory doors. Lavender streamers, draped from the second-floor balcony, bucked and thrashed. Laurel wreaths tacked along the front porch rail jerked free and rolled across the deck as clouds thundered into place. And then lightning, a glimmer in the gray, the acrid stink, and then rain, rising timpani, one minute, ten, and after twenty softened, stopped. Tree branches dripped. Leaves papered the newly swept drive, and when the clouds opened, the whole household breathed relief.

  We should have known the storm wouldn’t last; for all we knew, the storm, too, had been part of Miss Rose’s script for the night’s events. Certainly her demands had fallen as harshly and more persistently these last four days than that thundershower.

  Every detail, every decoration, bouquet, and pastry had to pass her inspection. My dress, and Violet’s, the servants’ costumes and masks, the musicians’ arrangement, the length of the lamp wicks—nothing escaped her authority. Why should the weather, which, after all, had doused the heat resting on the shoulders of the town for three days, and renewed the roses.

  What concerned me more than the storm was that no one but Mrs. Hardrow, not even Mrs. French, whose concern f irst whetted mine, had seen Miss Rose since the storm passed.

  “You think she’s okay?” I asked Mrs. Nettle, sweating over her last batch of pies. “You think it’s a headache? I think she’s been working too hard.”

  “She has, huh?”

  Raisin-fat flies writhed and buzzed over cheesecloths covering pies, tarts, and pastries lining cupboards and countertops. Already the tongue and the ham and the poultry were sliced and chilling in the ice house with the salads and jellies. There would be no elephant or belly dancers; the cake was not quite as tall as a man. But Rose had ordered marzipan fruits from the German baker; Nettle made ices, flan, and trifle. I stuck my head out the door to say hello to Alby and the hired girls. They sat three across beneath the kitchen awning, hair and dresses sodden with sweat, hands swollen from their labors. In silence we watched the thunderstorm sail away over the Missouri flats and threads of steam rise from the flowerbeds.

  I felt like crying. Felt like crying all day, to be honest, and couldn’t say why. Clocks, one after another, struck f ive. I went to the guest room to bathe and change.

  “Look at you, Maddy,” Susan said, holding the mirror so I could see the gathered twist of curls she’d arranged down my back. “You’ve got your dance card?”

  The dress Miss Rose had ordered and Mama and Mrs. Smith had made was a dusty salmon pink with a long skirt and a bustle, which gave a swinging weight to my walk. A high, ribbed collar covered my mark but opened to reveal a padded bodice, generously enhanced. I wore cream-colored boots, kid gloves to match, and a little gold bracelet on loan from Miss Rose.

  But it would be the mask that made me.

  This, too, was Miss Rose’s design. Pearl buttons formed a shimmering scale over the surface. Dyed red ostrich feathers, six of them, had been f ixed to resemble a sideways S, one plumed extremity angling over my right temple, the other curling over my mark.

  Susan slipped it into place, tied the straps, and hid them among my curls. It rested awkwardly on my nose, narrowing my vision but sharpening the sound of voices and carriage wheels on gravel, the smell of singed hair and gas lamps. Downstairs, the quartet, tuning for the past half hour, dipped into a slow gathering melody. My courage returned. I was not me. If not transformed, then anonymous, I made my careful way down the spiral staircase and saw I wasn’t the only one to feel this way.

  The f irst guests arrived in pairs, the men drab, carefully indifferent, the women like so many brightly colored birds beneath their masks. Roberts, the butler, took coats and hats. Mrs. Hardrow showed ladies to the dressing room. I hardly recognized Mrs. Bennett in yellow moiré. There was Mrs. Liederman with her husband, the tobacconist, a good-natured stub of a man ten years her junior, and Mrs. Smith with Emil Le Duc, arm in arm and equally mismatched.

  Mama and Mr. Dryfus arrived moments later. Mama, lovely in a lilac-colored gown and a pink-sequined mask, didn’t know me until I slipped my arm through hers and said her name: “Hello, Rebecca.”

  Still no Miss Rose. Her absence becoming a presence. Her name on everyone’s lips. No William, either, though I didn’t know if he was coming and wasn’t sure I wanted him to. People gathered in small faceless islands. Music played. No one danced. I joined Mrs. French, but she, too, kept looking to the balcony where Miss Rose was to appear.

  “She must make her entrance,” I suggested.

  Mrs. French didn’t answer.

  “Is she okay?”

  “I think I’ll go see.”

  A quadrille broke the dancers’ reticence. Two, then four, then eight couples took the floor, relaxing behind their masks, giving in to the illusion of anonymity, their conf idence contagious. People milled around the parlor and music room; a couple kissed in the conservatory; others strolled the garden. The day’s last sunlight shrank behind the clouds. Lizzette lit the lamps and flung open the doors and windows, and the quartet reined their tempo to a slow waltz. Still no Miss Rose.

  “And who have we here?” said a voice behind me in the conservatory where I stood watching the dancers. I paid it no mind. “Excuse me, Miss . . . ?” He was speaking to me? A young man, blond
hair oiled and gleaming. It was his ears, large as flags on either side of his mask, that marked him as Mr. Sims, the young lawyer rooming with the Bennetts. And he was talking to me. “Do I know you?”

  My cheeks flamed, but the mask hid all except my short dismissive shake of the head. He must have read my embarrassment as indifference, for as I looked past him to the dancers, he stepped into my line of vision, undeterred, perhaps even encouraged by my dismissal. Hanley ducked back through the door with lemon ices for both of us.

  “A travesty,” said Mr. Sims. “I was sure I had met every pretty young thing in this town.”

  He held out his hand, and I, still flabbergasted, looked at it.

  “Your dance card is full, perhaps?” Mr. Sims said.

  “Maddy?” said Hanley.

  “Miss Maddy, is it?” said Sims. “You have not danced all night. I know. I have been watching. You are waiting for someone in particular to ask, perhaps?” He looked at Hanley. “Surely, he wouldn’t grudge me one dance.”

  And so I entered that heated kaleidoscope of spinning skirts and danced as Miss Rose had taught me: one two-three, slow two-three. Mr. Sims’s, hand upon my shoulder, talked and talked, about what I hardly knew, his breath tart, his teeth purple from red wine. When the music ended, another man marked my card, and then Elroy, a skinny, laughing fellow who clerked at the bank and sang in the German Choir. I danced, anonymous, alluring, almost forgot Miss Rose and William, until there he was at my side, linking his elbow with mine.

  “Is that you, my apparition?” He raised my gloved hand, he kissed it, and slipped a letter into my palm. The eyes behind his mask asked nothing of me.

  Had I a head for such perceptions at the time, I might have wondered about the story of the cave Mrs. French and I had read together. I’d imagined men with guns or knives had forced the prisoner from the comfort of his illusions. But what if it was not guns or knives at all that compelled him? What if what drove him was his own merciless curiosity?