Benedict Hall

by Cate Campbell

  This was not accomplished easily, but in the end the mother came, her bound feet pattering across the floor. She stood beside the examining table, hooded dark eyes flickering around the little room, the glass-fronted cabinets with their syringes and needles, glass jars with instruments soaking in alcohol, folded bandages and brown glass bottles. Margot followed her glance. If this family was not used to doctors’ offices, it all must seem alien and alarming. She tried to look reassuring and confident.

  “Will you explain to your mother what I said, please?” she asked Mrs. Li. The girl spoke to her mother with tears spilling down her face. Soon the mother, too, was weeping into her handkerchief, leaning against her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Mrs. Li,” Margot said. “Listen to me, and translate for your mother. Just last week I read an article by a man named Whipple, showing that eating liver—beef liver, specifically—can help this sort of anemia.”

  The girl sniffed, and choked out a few words. The mother turned tear-glistened eyes to Margot. A rush of Chinese spilled from her, while she clutched her daughter with one arm.

  “Tell her,” Margot went on, “that it must be a lot. Half a pound daily.”

  At this the girl’s eyes widened. “A half pound?”

  “Yes. Eight ounces, every day. Can you do that?”

  “It will be very expensive. I don’t think we can—”

  Margot put up her hand. “I know a butcher who might help. I’ll write you a note.”

  The girl spoke to her mother again. They looked at each other, tears drying on their faces. “You need rest, too, Mrs. Li,” Margot added.

  The girl’s head drooped. “I have to work,” she said. “We have a flower shop in the Market, but it doesn’t bring in much money. My husband is away on a ship, and . . .”

  “Have you fainted at work?”

  The girl bit her lip, and looked away. Her mother asked something, and she muttered a short answer. Margot, suppressing a sigh, said, “Well, Mrs. Li. The liver at least. I’m going to write to my friend the butcher. And I want you to come to me again next week.”

  The girl didn’t speak again until Margot ushered her back into the waiting room. There all three of the Chinese women bowed, and Mrs. Li thanked her formally, the note to the butcher clutched in one hand.

  Margot went back to the office, leaving Thea to deal with the bill. She didn’t expect anything to come of that. This visit would cost money, not bring it in. The note she had written directed the butcher to send his bill to Benedict Hall.

  She closed the door, and leaned against it, wishing there were more she could do.

  The economic boom of the war years had evaporated with terrifying swiftness, leaving even those who had worked steadily all their lives worrying about the future. Families like Mrs. Li’s had nothing but their labors to save them. Margot argued endlessly—and pointlessly—with her father about social welfare, often losing her temper from sheer frustration. Nevertheless, despite his bluster, she knew him to be a kind man. He would pay the butcher’s bill, because she would put a name and a story to it.

  Thea knocked on the door. Margot turned to open it, and Thea stretched out a hand. She held a fold of fabric on her palm. “Your payment, Dr. Benedict,” she said in a wry tone.

  Margot took the folded silk. She shook it out, and gazed down at a cloud of embroidered butterflies, vivid yellow and glowing scarlet, fluttering above a branch of creamy cherry blossoms. It was a scarf, or perhaps a light shawl. The butterflies and the flowers were exquisitely sewn, and so smooth she could barely distinguish the tiny, delicate stitches. “Oh, Thea! Look at this! It’s lovely.”

  “It’s not money,” Thea pointed out.

  “No,” Margot said. She smoothed the silk with her hand. Someone—the great-grandmother, perhaps—had labored long and hard over this, doing what she could, offering up what she had to help her family. “No. It’s not money.” She draped the silk over her outstretched arm, and it fell in shimmering folds nearly to the floor. “This is much better than money.”

  The spring sun sank slowly behind the gray-green waters of Elliott Bay. Margot had sent Thea home an hour before. There was no point in keeping her in the office when there was no work to be done. She turned off all the lamps and pulled the curtains, then went out into the street, turning back to lock up. She rested her hand on the door for just a moment, reluctant to leave, wishing she could think of some way to encourage more patients to come to her. She knew there were those who needed her. And she needed them.

  As she turned away from the office, she realized Frank Parrish had not returned her call.

  Blake was waiting for her in the street. The whites of his eyes shone through the dusk, and his familiar silhouette lifted her spirits. He lifted his driving cap, and said, “Dr. Margot.”

  She gave him a weary smile. “Good evening, Blake. Thank you for coming to fetch me.”

  “I don’t like you on the streets alone at night,” he said. His deep voice still retained lingering hints of the South, though he had been with her family since before she was born. She wondered how he had sounded when he first arrived in Seattle—more like Hattie, perhaps. He gestured to indicate where he had parked the Essex, and she pulled on her gloves as she followed him. The streetlights were just coming on, casting spheres of light into the blue dusk. Smaller lights glimmered from the ships in the harbor, like golden fireflies hovering over the dark water.

  Blake held the door of the Essex as she climbed into its capacious rear compartment. He got into the driver’s seat, and adjusted his mirror. “I trust you had a good day, Dr. Margot?”

  “Well,” she said. “I had a day, Blake. I think that’s the most we can say.” She had abandoned her efforts to persuade him not to call her Doctor. She suspected Blake took more pleasure in her accomplishment than her parents did. But then, he was almost a third parent.

  This thought made her smile. Her mother would fall over in a dead faint if she ever heard Margot refer to Blake as one of her parents. Her father would roar with laughter.

  Blake painstakingly backed the Essex and turned it. When he turned left onto Madison, having to bump over the streetcar tracks and maneuver the big car onto the proper side of the street, he sounded the horn to warn the innocent of this precarious operation.

  Margot leaned against the back of the seat, and wondered if she had shocked Major Parrish by inviting him to dinner. That would be too bad. He looked as if he could use a friend.

  She could, too, come to that.

  Blake pulled up in front of the house, and got out to open her door. She climbed out, and leaned to retrieve her medical bag from the seat. Before she started up the walk she glanced up at him. “You know, Blake, this is very old-fashioned.”

  He gave her a gentle smile. “I’m an old-fashioned man, Dr. Margot. It helps in life to know the proper way to do things.”

  She stared up at the welcoming glow of the windows of Benedict Hall. “The thing is,” she said thoughtfully, “it only works if everyone knows what’s proper. If everyone agrees.”

  He closed the car door, but he stood beside her, gazing at the handsome house with its graceful porch, the old camellia rising almost to the third floor. “You’re thinking of Loena.”

  Margot cast him a glance. “You know about her, then.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “She hasn’t said who it is, has she?”

  Blake didn’t speak for a long moment. Margot watched him, knowing that slight pinching of his lips, the downward sweep of his eyelids. She knew him better, perhaps, than she knew anyone else in the family. She prompted, “Blake?”

  He shook his head, such a subtle motion she would have missed it had she not been watching him closely.

  “Ah,” Margot said. He would never say it aloud, of course. It was part of his role as the loyal retainer. “I don’t want you to worry about it. You can leave it to me.”

  In the light spilling from the porch, she could see the furrow in his brow. �
�You be careful, Dr. Margot.”

  “Thank you, Blake, but I’m not a child anymore,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

  He touched his cap, and Margot walked toward the house. Despite her declaration of confidence, she felt a shiver of unease. As she opened the front door, she told herself she was being silly. Everything was different since the war. He was different, and they were all grown up, all three of them. They had put childish conflicts behind them.

  Loena would lose her job, though. Edith would never tolerate such indiscretion in her household staff. And she would never, under any circumstances, believe that her son could be responsible. Especially not her youngest son.

  CHAPTER 7

  Preston stared at Margot across the little piecrust table in the small parlor, loathing her mannish features and the blunt cut of her hair. She could never have been called pretty, of course. When she was a girl Mother had done her best with hairstyles and dresses and trips to the beauty parlor. He should have told her then to give it up as a bad job. Margot had the Benedict jaw, the long legs, her father’s strong hands. She refused to pluck her eyebrows, and she had made everything worse with her haircut. Bobs were swell on girls with rosebud lips and pointed chins—girls like Ramona. Margot should wear her hair pinned up, away from her face. When he had suggested it, she laughed, and said it was too much trouble. He wouldn’t put it past her to start wearing trousers. Really, she was an embarrassment to the whole family.

  He set his drink down, hiding his fury behind a woebegone smile. “You seem awfully confident that Loena’s—delicate condition—is my fault.”

  She put up a hand to rub her eyes. Her hand was spotless, with short, perfectly clean nails, but the thought of where those hands had been, what they had touched, made Preston’s stomach turn. Sores, infections, blood. Meat. It didn’t matter how clean her hand was. It was revolting.

  “Preston,” she said tiredly. She had turned down his offer of a drink. She kicked off her shoes to stretch out her legs, and gave the little sigh of disdain he had been forced to tolerate since he was four years old. “I saw Loena coming out of your room a few months ago. The right number of months.”

  “You surprise me. I didn’t think you were able to tell Loena and Leona apart.”

  “I can now,” she said. “She’s four months along. She’s stopped throwing up every morning, but she’s starting to show. Hattie and Blake already know. Mother will soon.”

  Preston had to drop his eyes to hide the rage that must blaze in them. He put his hand to his chest, pressing his palm over the stone hanging beneath his shirt.

  “Are you all right?” Margot’s tone changed all at once to one of concern or, at least, of interest. She sat up straighter, eyeing him. “You have a habit of touching your chest like that. You don’t have pain there, do you? Burning?”

  He lifted his head. “You’re so sweet, Margot.” He liked his voice like this, boyish, vulnerable. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine. I just—” He put up his hand to riffle through his hair. “I feel terrible about this. I’ve been trying to believe it wasn’t me. I see now what a stupid mistake I’ve made.”

  Her eyebrow lifted, and doubt flickered in her eyes. “Do you?”

  “Oh, Margot. It was a silly thing. She surprised me, and I—well, you know how they act around me, both of them. When she slipped into my room, I just didn’t—” He gave his most diffident gesture, a little lift of one hand, a rueful drop of the eyelids. “I didn’t show any discipline at all. Any self-control. I should have ordered her out, but I didn’t, and now . . .”

  “Mother will be furious,” Margot said uncertainly.

  Preston’s anger turned to amusement. His sister had girded her unfeminine loins, no doubt, to do battle with her naughty little brother. She hadn’t expected him to concede without an argument. He picked up his glass again, sipped at it to hide his smile. “I know,” he said. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” Which, in a way, was true. It was a bloody nuisance, the girl catching like that. Just one moment of weakness, and now he would have to arrange something. Maybe Carter could make himself useful at last.

  That was something else he wished hadn’t happened. It had never occurred to him that Carter would arrive in Seattle uninvited. When Blake gave him the message that his former “military colleague”—Blake’s words—had shown up at Benedict Hall, Blake hadn’t even tried to conceal his distaste.

  Not that Preston disagreed about Carter’s unsavory character, but Blake was a bloody Goddamned servant, and a black one at that. Who was he to look down his nose? At least Preston had been able to stow Carter in one of the flophouses down on Fourth Avenue. He had told him not to show his face at Benedict Hall again, but he knew Carter. He was like a bad penny, always turning up where he wasn’t wanted. He wouldn’t lie low forever.

  Margot interrupted his reverie. “Preston, we’ll have to find a place for her. I can help with that.”

  He made his eyes round and innocent. “Someplace that will take good care of her?”

  Margot sighed, and rubbed her eyes again. She was going to get wrinkles if she kept that up, but he wouldn’t tell her. Who cared? She was bound to be an old maid anyway.

  “We can try the Good Shepherd Home. They do good work with girls in trouble.” She let her hands fall to her lap. “It’s been my week for unwed pregnant girls.”

  “Has it?” Preston said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes, the same dark brown as Father’s and Dick’s, bored into his. What did she think, that she could read his mind if she stared at him long enough? Finally, she said, in a dry way, “Are you really, Preston?”

  He quelled the fresh surge of anger that burned his throat. He didn’t touch the sapphire, but he took a breath so that it moved against his skin, cooling his temper, steadying him. It was as if she were steadying him, Roxelana, who had faced so much, and triumphed over it all. “I was a spoiled boy, Margot,” he said, with what he felt sure was a convincing little catch in his voice. “I know that. But I’ve been to war. I’m a man now. If you think I need to tell Mother—” He made a helpless gesture. “I will, but it will upset her.”

  Margot shook her head. “I’ll have a word with Blake. Perhaps we won’t have to trouble Mother. If Loena will go without a fuss . . .” She gave him another of her penetrating glances. “You’ll have to pay her expenses.”

  “Of course. Oh, of course.”

  She raised both eyebrows this time. “Well. I’m glad you understand. Shall I talk to her, or do you want to do it?”

  Preston paused for a long, long moment. He stared into the cold fireplace as if searching for the answer between the polished brass andirons, then picked up his drink and leaned back, exhaling heavily to show his sorrow. “I’ll do it, Margot. I should do it. It’s my problem.”

  They got up to go in to dinner. Preston held the door for Margot. He would take care to seem abashed, to seem suitably chastised. He would maintain a restrained demeanor throughout the meal. That might convince her. He could go in search of Carter afterward.

  Carter’d been living down there with the rest of the human trash for three months. He should know how to find anything, procure anything. Damned good thing he hadn’t killed the bugger when he first showed up! The thought had crossed his mind.

  Preston smiled absently at Hattie as she pressed an extra serving of dried-out halibut on him. Maybe he should just have Carter do Loena, put the wretched slut out of her misery. It would be a simple thing, catch her on the street or even in the backyard, haul her down behind the train station or to one of the cribs and put an end to the whole episode.

  He felt Margot’s quizzical glance on him, and he gave her a slight, sad shake of the head. No, he would have to be more subtle. Margot was paying attention to this. He would make a good show of speaking to Loena, then go out and set Carter to finding what they would need.

  And if everything went well, maybe Margot would stop looking at him as if he were some sort of germ t
o be Pasteurized.

  Frank couldn’t bring himself to call Margot Benedict from the Red Barn. He told himself the noise from the workroom was too loud. And if he picked up the telephone on the manager’s desk, to ask the operator to connect him, every head in the drafting room would turn to listen. The whole building would know before lunch who he had called and what he had said.

  Mrs. Volger was proud of the brass and cherrywood Sultan telephone recently installed on her hall table. She told Frank he was welcome to use it, as long as he left a dime in the little silver dish beside it. Frank picked up the receiver once, but the moment he heard “Number, please?” he put it down again. Every other house on the street knew when someone made a call, because the telephone clicked and buzzed. Curious housewives would pick up their telephones. More than once, a neighbor came across the yard to ask Mrs. Volger about someone she had been speaking to. There was no chance of making a call with no one listening in.

  For two days he tried to put Margot’s invitation out of his mind, but he found as he bent over blueprints or sat in meetings that his mind kept straying to that slip of paper, now buried in his desk drawer. Why, he asked himself, did he hesitate? He liked her, at least what he knew of her. Her father had been more than kind to him. Preston was only an irritation, with his affectations and odd manner. And it was, after all, only dinner.

  But when he tried to see himself escorting Margot Benedict—or any woman, for that matter—he saw again the horrified expression on Elizabeth’s face as she stared at what was left of his arm. No, not horrified—worse. Disgusted. Repelled.