FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Once I returned to the table, I tried to don my kid gloves again, but they were annoyingly tighter than usual and Quentin put them in his pocket. I did pick up my parasol and we ambled into the bright afternoon, he drawing my arm through his, which was quite proper because people were doing it all over the beach.

  The beach. Oh, my. I couldn’t help seeing a good deal of men’s bare arms and lower limbs and women’s too! Their bathing costumes were tight woolen affairs much resembling underclothing, and I managed to mostly look away.

  Besides, Quentin was guiding me inland, to . . . the elephant hotel!

  “There is horse racing at the island’s other end,” he told me, “but the people are rougher there, I thought you’d enjoy the sights here.”

  “Of course. And the elephant is an eastern creature, isn’t it? Perhaps you could become an elephant trainer.”

  “Sometimes I feel like one,” he remarked wryly. “The government moves as ponderously as an elephant and its ears seldom hear where the feet are trampling.”

  We ambled around the front of the building. It was shaped like a huge standing elephant with a skin of tin, the howdah on its back as high as the spire on the cupola of the sprawling hotel to its left.

  “It must be twelve stories,” I estimated.

  In its massive front feet sat shops, a cigar emporium on one side, a diorama in the other.

  “Do you care for a cigar?” I asked Quentin, feeling he was entitled to some souvenir of the day, no matter how disgusting.

  “Do you care for a cigar?”

  “No! Irene would.”

  “Shall we buy her one?”

  “No! Yes! She will be so shocked.”

  Of course Quentin bought it and tucked it inside his breast pocket. Poor man, he was becoming a human elephant, my gloves in his pocket, Irene’s cigar in his jacket. I giggled at the sheer absurdity of it.

  The elephant’s other leg hosted a diorama of the island. I gasped with delight when I saw it, and we immediately paid a dime each to go inside. Even though the leg’s circumference was sixty feet, as the brochure boasted, the diorama was sadly lacking the artistry of the Paris panorama buildings, which I told Quentin as soon as we left.

  “America is new at these things,” he answered. “Give them time.”

  Then we climbed the spiral staircase in the elephant’s rear leg to regard the few hotel rooms the edifice offered and a gift shop, where he bought me a chiffon scarf with a drawing of the elephant on it. Then it was onward and upward, until we stood looking out of the elephant’s eyes on the panorama below.

  “I never dreamed I’d ever be inside an elephant,” I declared.

  “Neither did I. Come, there’s more to do.”

  “More?”

  Quentin next escorted me to a railroad station!

  “We’re leaving, then,” I said, surprised by the unintended disappointment in my tone. “You said there was more to do.”

  “This train doesn’t go anywhere,” he said, smiling mysteriously as he bought the tickets at ten cents apiece.

  I suddenly realized that I felt like a child again, who needn’t worry about what things cost, or who would take care of her or . . . anything at all. Although, as a child, I had never been to such a place as Coney Island. Was this having fun? Perhaps.

  But this was a very strange railroad. The cars were open, on wooden tracks like mine trams, and we sat two abreast. As soon as we were seated I saw that we were poised at the top of long grade downward. The sign read “Switchback Railroad.”

  “Quentin—”

  “It’s an amusement ride.”

  “That grade doesn’t look amusing in the slightest.”

  I remembered the deep alpine valleys I had traversed alone by train to reach Irene in Prague once. How my fingernails had cut welts into my palms with the tension! I had never told anyone.

  I remembered, also, how Quentin and I had returned from Prague more recently by train, and as well as we got along during that enforced sequestering then, we were on entirely different footing now, with more wariness between us, and deeper feelings as well. Perhaps the first was because of the second.

  He grinned at my serious face. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

  “Many things that are supposed to be fun are simply dangerous,” I began to answer in my governess guise, but the odd “train” pulled away from the boarding area right then and we shot down at a fearsome pace, down, down, until the tracks rose up like a mountain and we raced up the grade until momentum stopped us. There we were handed out to wait while the attendants pushed the cars to a higher point on a second track.

  We boarded again—there was no other way to get back! Quentin took my hand in his, and squeezed.

  Away we went, down again in a great swoop and up until the speed of that plunge again petered out.

  We finally stood on our own two feet again, watching the line of eager riders shuffle forward to the sacrifice!

  “That beats a gallop on an Arab stallion,” Quentin pronounced.

  I wouldn’t know about that, but I did know that he, at least, was having fun.

  “Are you game for the Ferris wheel?” he asked next.

  I looked at where he gazed: a vast version of the steamship’s side wheel looming against the sky, swinging cars resembling charms on some giant’s bracelets, and poor benighted people sitting in them.

  “Ferris wheel? That?”

  “It’s the biggest I’ve seen.”

  I was not reassured, but I hadn’t the heart to tell him so.

  Nellie Bly in a madhouse? Nell Huxleigh on a maddening Catherine wheel in the sky? Didn’t they torture dead Roman Catholic saints, usually women, virgins and martyrs, on just such appliances?

  “If you have any reservations, Nell—” he was saying.

  And that settled it. For one day I would be a woman without any reservations, as Irene had been at Delmonico’s when she had bullied her way in and we had found Pink and Quentin together.

  Somehow I must be as brave as Irene, as Pink.

  I gazed at the great circle in the sky. Once on, I could not get off until let off. I would have no control over anything. I would be a prisoner, only this time of my own choosing.

  I nodded, and Quentin bought the tickets.

  From that moment regrets nagged me like demons. Why had I agreed to this? Look. Other people, other couples were waiting their turns to ride, laughing. It was nothing. Or it was fun. But I couldn’t get off! The seats were open to the air. It was like a locked box! Quentin would be with me. I would still be alone!

  And then we were handed into one of the swinging boxes with a kind of bar across our laps. I pushed my reticule strings up to the crook of my elbow and braced my parasol between the bottom of the car and my hip.

  Our car jerked upward, then stopped, then repeated the process until all the cars were full. We had paused, swinging pleasantly at the top of the wheel. The whole island lay visible beneath us again and I actually was coming to relish this bird’s-eye view, this sense of distance and knowledge of the true proportion of things, of the world and the people in it.

  Then, like the train, the wheel plunged over the edge of the world and I truly feared I would fly off it, forever, either to smash against the earth below or vanish into the sky above.

  I screamed, only stopping when I saw the apparatus on the ground level loom into focus . . . and vanish behind us . . . then we were again pointed at pure sky . . . and tumbling over the edge of the air again, as off an invisible cliff, my stomach still a half-turn behind me, my hat lifting from my head.

  I clapped a hand to my hat, but thereby lost my grip on the bar and slid on the seat, almost slid out of the seat.

  Quentin’s arm on my shoulders clamped me back down in the seat. I caught my breath and screamed. My hat flapped like a giant blue bat before my eyes, falling . . .

  He caught it and thrust it into the bottom of the car, one foot stamping the brim edge to the floor.

  Ag
ain the ground rushed up at us, and again we flew away. I screamed.

  Quentin clasped me tighter than I believed possible.

  Over the top yet again, and no stop in sight!

  I screamed.

  And Quentin held me tighter.

  I screamed again and turned my face into the dark of his shoulder.

  The world turned, and us with it. I whirled, around and around. I stopped screaming. Somewhere, sometime, I began laughing. And screaming.

  Because nothing horrible happened. I didn’t leave my seat or the earth. The ride had a rhythm, and every time I came over the terrifying top and plunged down, I knew I was safe and I had to laugh even as I had to scream.

  And finally, the pace slowed, and stopped, and we hung there swinging, then jerked down again, and swung some more.

  I opened my eyes. It was still daylight, but the sun was riding low in the west. As we neared the ground I saw the shadow of our car thrown long and thin.

  I had no screams left.

  Quentin’s grip on me eased, and my breath sighed out instead of being gulped in.

  I stood up, both Quentin and the ride operator extending hands to help me out. The man handed my parasol out after me.

  I stood on the gritty ground and blinked. I had screamed and screamed, as I had never done so many times during my terrifying odyssey of last spring when I could have. Then, to scream would have been to surrender. Here, it had rinsed me free of all the stored fear of that awful time. I was . . . empty. Free. Free to begin again.

  Quentin kept an arm around my shoulders as he guided me away from the Ferris wheel.

  “Are you all right? Was the ride too much for you?” He sounded very worried.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s supposed to be fun.”

  “Was it for you?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “Even though I screamed like a banshee?”

  “You’re supposed to scream like a banshee.”

  “Well, if I must scream, I’d rather it be like something terrifying.”

  He eyed me carefully. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Remarkably all right.”

  “Then you’re able to stay for the band and the fireworks?”

  “Band?”

  “Sousa.”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “And I suppose you’ve heard of fireworks too?” he teased me.

  “Yes.”

  In the tepid, fading sunlight, we walked among the crowds. Quentin had forgotten to let go of me, but there were so many other . . . couples like us I hardly noticed.

  We stopped once or twice at a shop. He bought a large canvas bag for “New Jersey Shore Salt Water Taffy,” and a box of candy to go in it. “For Irene,” I said. As the sun went down, he put my parasol in the bag, and then he stopped and pulled the last pin from my hat and that went in the bag too.

  We found a table in the twilight and sat just as John Philip Sousa’s baton struck up the band. As a chill came with the dark, I felt something warm close around me and turned my head. Quentin’s coat. I reached in the pockets for my abandoned gloves and donned them, then held the lapels closed and craned to see the stage.

  Goodness! We couldn’t see the band from where we were, though we certainly heard it. That stirring music woke up the crowd, yet I remained in a lazy dreamland, sitting here on another continent, amid strangers and stranger sights, feeling all the evil memories of the old World slipping away.

  After the concert, we joined the crowd again. Their chatter and laughter and the children’s happy screeches blended with the fading calls of the gulls vanishing into the night.

  We managed one last walk, to the fireworks display. By then night had fallen and electric lights had turned the flat landscape into a fallen constellation of bright colors and lights.

  Henry Pain’s fireworks display was centered at another elaborately lit building, but it spewed far more decorative constellations into the dark sky over Brooklyn. We saw famous battles reenacted in the sky above us, rockets bursting in air, Catherine wheels spinning into the heavens as I had been so afraid that I would earlier that day. Each new explosion of red, blue, green, yellow, and bright, blinding white seemed to split the dark open and spill out shattered pieces of the rainbow. Oddly enough, a rainbow image ended the display, slowly blinking away into a few sparks in the darkness.

  In silence Quentin took my arm and led me back to the Iron Pier, where our steamship and its Catherine wheel of water was ablaze with light for the journey back to Manhattan.

  We stood at the rail watching the tiny lights of stars and ships both moving across the dark sea and sky. I was half asleep on my feet, but Quentin held me up. It was as if the hard cold dark box of my almost-coffin had been replaced by a warm, living box of flesh that spoke to me softly sometimes, and stroked my hair.

  There was a flutter of cold air and motion as we disembarked and exchanged shipboard for a horse-drawn cab. I remember hearing the horse snort, and feeling Quentin lift me into the cab’s dark interior.

  In the hansom cab, Quentin leaned near to pull his coat closer around me.

  “It’s not half as warm as you need,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. Though he was only clad in shirt sleeves I felt a band of warmth encircle me.

  “Why is ‘fun’ so tiring?” I asked, only half serious.

  “Because it’s so hard to be ourselves most of the time.”

  I liked hearing the sound of his voice, distant yet close, as I was still half asleep from the sea air, so I said, “Why?”

  “Because everything in society is designed to make something of us we don’t really want to be.”

  That woke me up. “You?”

  “Yes. Duty and family. I honor both, but in my own way.”

  “You are lucky to have found your own way.”

  “I paid dearly for every step of it, Nell. None of us is merely lucky.”

  “You? Struggled?”

  “Do you think I was meant for the life I have?”

  “Do you dislike it?”

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  “A woman can’t—”

  “She can.”

  “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too late.”

  “I don’t know. You know how you look just now?”

  “An utter disgrace,” I realized suddenly, thinking about seeing Irene, struggling to sit up, putting my bare—again!—hands to my disordered hair, neither of which were at all respectable.

  He pulled my hands down. “You look exactly as you did when I saw you, in my niece’s schoolroom with her friends, playing Blind Man’s Buff.”

  “Quentin! I was a girl then. That was years ago. Besides, how can you see me at all inside this dark coach?”

  “Yes, you were a girl then. That’s what I saw, although you were trying so hard to play at being a governess, being only a handful of years older than your charges. And certain emotions never age. And the streetlights play like fireworks over your features every now and then. And don’t you see me by flashes of light as well?”

  “No. Yes. It depends.”

  “You never saw me then, that day I stopped by the schoolroom to greet Allegra. You were blindfolded, reaching out for some schoolgirl to identify with the tips of your fingers. You were all laughing, all you beautiful, carefree girls. You can’t imagine what a sight that was for a man back from a bloody, vicious war. For a few moments, I didn’t even realize you were the governess. You were one of them.”

  “Never! I was never a girl like that. I was not of their class, I was not carefree. I was not beautiful.”

  “You were to me, that day, all three.”

  I swallowed a tiny sob, for I would have loved to believe that fairy tale, and never knew how much until this impossible moment.

  “Nell.” His hands found my face, pushed the hair back. “You found me that day, with your blind fingers. You touched and trac
ed my face, and you didn’t stop, not even when your fingers found the moustache.”

  “I . . . don’t really like mustaches. It was a game. I had to play it. And . . . I knew who you were.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course I had seen you at the house before. From a distance.”

  “Had you?”

  “It was the game! I had to make sure.”

  “And did you?”

  “I did.”

  “Perhaps I have to make sure too.”

  I was too exhausted to be puzzled, but I almost was when I heard him delve in the bag with my parasol and hat. Surely they were not needed now in the dark and out of the wind!

  He withdrew something. The souvenir scarf of the elephant hotel.

  “Turnabout’s fair play,” he said softly.

  “Quentin,” I objected, half understanding, half not.

  He drew the silken scarf over my eyes, behind my head.

  “Quentin!” I was back in the Paris panorama building and felt the cloth with the sickly sweet smell of chloroform cover my face, saw the endless darkness of captivity. I put my hands up to my face.

  “Shhh. Trust me, Nell. It’s eighteen-eighty and we’re in the attic schoolroom on Berkley Square. Only all the girls are gone now, and it’s my turn.”

  His hands pulled mine onto the rough sides of his face; his replaced mine on my overheated cheeks. The scarf pulled as it knotted behind my head, and then his fingertips were on my brow, light as butterfly wings, though I had never felt butterfly wings. I had never felt anything so soft.

  “This is wrong,” I said.

  His fingers froze.

  “You should be blindfolded! It’s not a true turnabout.” He laughed soft relief at my nitpicking objection. “I know, but I have to make sure,” he said.

  I was too confused to say anything further, and suddenly understood how he had felt, drawn into a game he was not a part of, too polite to object and then . . . captured by the mystery, the featherweight touch of alien fingers, down his brow, over his nose, cheeks, chin, lips.

  I felt what he had felt that day and all fear fled. It seemed as if the sun shone on me again, and the peace of the seashore pulled at me like a tide. The terrors of my captivity completely slid away, into the future past. I was a girl again, caught in a game I didn’t understand, which was so very pleasant nevertheless.