The Bride’s House

by Sandra Dallas

  “I am quite well now, thank you,” the young woman replied.

  The next day, Pearl went into Charlie’s study and resumed her duties as his secretary. There was much that had been left undone during her time in bed, and she set about writing the letters and filing the papers, making entries in the ledger, and over the next days, father and daughter fell into their old pattern of working together, although they said nothing to each other that did not concern business. And they no longer had tea together in the afternoons.

  * * *

  Charlie’s desk was cluttered with ore samples that he had collected, and one afternoon when he was out, Pearl labeled them in her neat handwriting and set them in the cabinet on the far side of Charlie’s desk. As she closed the glass door, she glanced down and saw that the wallpaper beside the cabinet had been cut away and something inserted in the wall, something she might not have seen if she had not been on her father’s side of the desk. She knelt and examined the wall, discovering that the lath had been cut away to accommodate a strongbox. There were hidden drawers in the cabinet, Pearl knew. Charlie kept stock certificates and negotiable securities and sometimes large amounts of cash in them, because they were so cleverly concealed that nobody but Charlie and Pearl knew they were there. Why, then, would Charlie need a hidden strongbox? And why had he gone to the trouble to take it out just then? The wall would have to be repapered with one of the rolls left in the storeroom.

  So Pearl was more than curious, and she lifted the heavy container out of its hiding place and placed it on her father’s desk. The box was not locked, and she lifted the lid. Inside were a letter, certificates, what appeared to be a deed, rolled up and tied with a ribbon, and odds and ends of paper. It was a paper on top that caught her attention, a receipt. She picked it up, turning it around to read it, but then her hands shook so that she dropped it and slumped down in her father’s chair, her head in her hands.

  She calmed herself a little, thinking it could not be so, that her eyes had betrayed her, and when her hands were still, she picked up the paper again, smoothing it with her hand, and slowly focused on it. The paper was a receipt, written in her father’s hand, a receipt dated the day she had broken her engagement. The amount was $50,000, and it was signed “Frank Curry.” Pearl slowly placed it back into the box, too stunned to wonder about the papers under it, and swiveled around in Charlie’s chair to stare out at the mountains. They had always given her solace, just like the Bride’s House, but no longer. Nothing in that brooding house could comfort her. If there had been a tiny bit of hope that she and Frank would be together one day, it was gone.

  The house was as quiet as death. Her father and Mrs. Travers were not at home. Outside the air was as chill as Pearl’s heart, and she listened as the wind rattled the windows, blowing so hard that the front door slammed open. At first, Pearl thought her father had returned, and she didn’t care. He could come in and discover her there with the strongbox, know she had looked into it, that she now understood Frank had been a fortune seeker and that her father had saved her by buying him off. Then she wondered if her father had left the strongbox displayed on purpose, thinking she would find it and read the receipt, discovering for herself Frank’s perfidy. But she could not bear to admit to Charlie that he had been right. After a time, she returned the box to its hiding place and picked up the bits of plaster that had fallen onto the floor when she’d removed it.

  She went to her room then and later told Mrs. Travers that she was unwell and would not be down for supper. The bedroom that had once been her refuge seemed now like a cell. The next day, when she went into the office, she found the wall had been patched so cleverly that no one would ever suspect that something was hidden behind the paper.

  * * *

  The knowledge of Frank’s faithlessness gnawed at Pearl, but as much as she blamed him, she blamed her father even more. She loved Frank, and she believed that he cared for her a little. Would it have been so wrong if Charlie had given the couple the money, underwritten the marriage? Frank would have made her happy. Did her father care at all about her happiness? Perhaps Frank was only a little weak and would have married her anyway, and that was why Charlie had given him the money, to buy him off. The questions ate at her until Pearl could not stand it, and one day when she and her father were in the office, she remarked, “You are not what you seem.”

  Charlie looked up from the report he was reading and frowned. “What’s that, Pearl?”

  “I believe you are a different man than I had supposed.” She kept her hands in her lap so that her father would not see that they were shaking.

  “And why do you say that?”

  “I have learned a great deal about you.” Pearl stood and went into the parlor, where she picked up a marble egg and held it in both hands to calm herself. Perhaps she should have kept quiet. But she couldn’t. The thing hurt her so.

  Charlie said, “Come back. Have you something to say?”

  “I believe it is you who should say something, Papa. To me.” Pearl went as far as the doors separating the two rooms.

  “I keep nothing from you, Pearl, except what is for your own good.”

  “And was it for my own good that you gave Mr. Curry a great sum of money?”

  Charlie raised his hands dismissively. “Not so much.”

  “It was fifty thousand dollars, was it not? That was the amount on the receipt. I consider that a very great deal of money.” She did not wait for him to respond but went on. “Did you leave off a zero? I should feel ever so much better if you bought me for five hundred thousand. Or perhaps you added an extra zero by mistake, and my price is only five thousand dollars. Surely that is cheap.”

  “Pearl, you should not have looked in there. Did you read the other—”

  Pearl cut him off. “I suppose I ought to enter the amount in the ledger, but do I put it under ‘household expenses’ or ‘bad debts’? Perhaps I should start a column for poor investments.”

  “Don’t,” Charlie said, his voice sad. He picked up a chunk of ore that he used as a paperweight and turned it over and over.

  “You bought him off for fifty thousand dollars?” Pearl could not look at her father. Instead she gazed through the lace curtain at the snow that was falling again, falling sideways, because the wind was strong. She heard the wintry blasts and tightened the shawl that was over her shoulders.

  “I invested in his molybdenum company.”

  “Then I would call that a very poor investment. You yourself have told me the metal is worthless.” She took a deep breath. “Forgive me, Papa, but I don’t believe you. I think you paid Frank Curry the money to break off the engagement.”

  “And what if I did? It’s a small amount to show you he was only after your money, a bargain to me. But as I told you, the money went for stock in the company. If you like, I’ll tear up the stock certificate.”

  “No, you mustn’t do that. I would like you to sign it over to me.” The young woman felt the chill as the wind came through a crack beside the window. “After all, you don’t pay me wages for my work. You have made it plain to Mr. Curry if not to me that all the money in this house belongs to you, so I should like to get a little something for my labor. The worthless stock will do.”

  Charlie stared at his daughter, who slowly lifted her face and stared back at him. “I don’t pay you, because you know I will give you anything you want. But if you care to have the stock, I’ll sign it over to you.” He studied a vein of color in the ore sample and did not look up as he asked, “Are you very sure?”

  “I am sure. Thank you, Papa,” Pearl said in a businesslike manner. And then her voice broke, and she cried, “Would it have been so wrong to let us marry? Did it matter so much if he loved my money more than me?” She broke off and fled, flinging over her shoulder, “Oh, Papa, you should not keep secrets.” She did not see how Charlie blanched at her words.

  CHAPTER 12

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THAT, as Pearl, Charlie, and Mrs. Travers sat at
the supper table, Pearl announced, “I am going to take a trip.”

  Charlie seemed pleased, probably because of the coldness that had developed between them over the Frank Curry affair. “Go anywhere you like—Chicago, New York. California is nice this time of year.”

  “I am thinking of going to Europe, on what is called the grand tour.”

  “I couldn’t accompany you just yet, not until the summer,” Charlie told her.

  “I am thinking of going by myself.”

  “Alone?” Charlie asked. “Surely you wouldn’t go abroad by yourself.”

  “Of course not alone. I’ll take Mrs. Travers.”

  The old woman looked pleased, although not surprised, and if Charlie had not been so taken aback at the announcement, he might have wondered if the two women had already discussed the idea. But the look on his face told that he was not thinking about them. In fact, he appeared hurt. “You have never wanted to travel before, certainly not alone.”

  “I am a different woman now.”

  “Very well.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Pearl said quickly. “You mustn’t think we don’t want you. But we’ll be attending plays and visiting art galleries, taking in the opera and the museums, and I know that would bore you. You would hate it.” She seemed almost frantic that Charlie stay home.

  “Perhaps you could join us at the end of the trip, Mr. Dumas,” Mrs. Travers said.

  Charlie nodded, and his face softened a little. “Yes. That would do. I don’t care much for looking at pictures. Perhaps we could visit some of the European mines. I could make arrangements.”

  “Of course,” Pearl said, but only because she knew that would please her father. She did not care much about seeing mines. She only wanted to get away.

  * * *

  The two women left in late winter so that they could spend the spring and summer in Europe. “I don’t fancy looking at snow over there,” Mrs. Travers said. “If I’m going to see snow, I might as well stay at home.” And if the trip were more spontaneous, with less planning than normally might be given for two ladies embarking on a grand tour, Pearl and Mrs. Travers enjoyed it all the more. When they tired of one place, they simply packed up and headed for another. “We’re gypsies,” Pearl wrote her father, not realizing that in the past, that was the last thing anyone would have called her. Pearl admitted to being a little bewildered, but she was enchanted, nonetheless, for she had never realized that the world was filled with so much richness. She might have thanked Frank Curry for opening her eyes to the wonders beyond the Bride’s House. But Pearl did not want to think about Frank, not any more than she had to.

  She wrote to her father each week, describing what they had seen and done, remarking about the beauty of old Europe, the elegance of the stores, the collections of ancient artifacts displayed in the museums. She told him about the books she had purchased, the antiques for the Bride’s House, and a cameo for herself, to replace the one she had worn as a girl. “Mrs. Travers says to tell you her feet have been in every museum in five countries,” she wrote.

  Charlie wrote, too, telling them he had engaged a Mr. Randal, a bookkeeper from one of his mines, as a secretary, and he would keep track of business affairs so that Charlie could join them later. “He is not so engaging as you, Pearl, but I have complete trust in him.”

  The women went to France, where, Pearl wrote, she had contracted the influenza and been ordered to bed. “You must not worry. I shall be perfectly fine and think the doctor overstates the case when he says I am fragile and must rest for several weeks. Aunt Lidie agrees with him, however. So I humor them by staying abed in the mornings like the laziest of creatures. Still, I do want to be fit when you join us, so I do not protest too much.”

  Charlie met them in Paris at the end of the summer, and the three retraced the journey the two women had taken a few months earlier, detouring on occasion so that they could visit mines. In Florence, Pearl admired a diamond bracelet in a shop window, and the next day, Charlie presented it to her. Only a year or two earlier, Pearl would have been uncomfortable wearing such an expensive bauble, but she had become a different woman. The events of the past year along with the worldliness that she acquired on the tour had made her both more sophisticated and more fashionable.

  Back at home in Georgetown, Pearl settled into the Bride’s House, although she no longer thought of it as the refuge it had been for so many years. She roamed the rooms that had once delighted her—and her mother—and found them dreary, oppressive. So she threw out the heavy velvet drapes and reupholstered the horsehair furniture with damask—red damask, for Charlie insisted the room be kept the shade that Nealie had chosen for it. She got rid of the old plants in the solarium and added exotic ones, including orchids. She added to Nealie’s knickknacks with antiques that she acquired in Europe. If Charlie noticed, he didn’t comment, perhaps feeling he owed something to his daughter.

  Influenced by the fashionable shops in Europe, Pearl changed her own style, as well. She put aside the matronly dresses she had worn all of her life for simpler, more youthful fashions that could be worn without confining foundations. She never again wore pink, but she experimented with colors that complemented her pale complexion and red hair. One day in Denver, Pearl went into a salon and had her hair cut off—not short by any means, but shoulder length. Like Pearl’s body, her hair seemed uncorseted now. It flared and curled around her face, giving her a girlish look. When she returned to Georgetown after the haircut, dressed in a green frock that had caught her eye, and walked into the Bride’s House, Charlie stared at her as if he’d seen a ghost. “You look like Nealie,” he said, his voice choking. And Mrs. Travers put her hands over her face and cried.

  Pearl had not intended to cause them distress, especially not Mrs. Travers. The two had grown even closer after Frank broke the engagement. Sometimes when they worked together in the kitchen, Mrs. Travers, her eyes wet with tears, would put her arm around Pearl’s waist and hold her, wordlessly. Pearl herself was distracted and listless at times, melancholy, often retiring to her room in the middle of the day. Charlie blamed lingering effects of the influenza, but Mrs. Travers frowned at him as if to say that Pearl still mourned Frank Curry.

  No one other than her father and Mrs. Travers knew about her brief engagement, so people attributed the changes in Pearl to her exposure to the outside world, and to the fact she was no longer her father’s secretary. They thought that Mr. Randal’s replacing Pearl was a healthy thing. It was not natural that Pearl was cooped up in the foul-smelling study with her father all day. That particular change was not Pearl’s doing, however. She had intended to resume her duties at Charlie’s side once they returned from Europe, but Mr. Randal, a small, unctuous man with a great sense of his own importance, made it clear she was a usurper, remarking more than once that as a woman, she did not understand mining matters.

  When her father failed to contradict the man, Pearl withdrew, believing Mr. Randal’s ill temper came from a fear of losing his job, and she did not want to be responsible for putting a man out of work. She still kept up on mining, reading reports and prospectuses, but when father and daughter talked about investments now, Pearl did not voice an opinion. Once, the young woman had been full of questions about the mines whose shares her father bought, and her observations influenced Charlie’s decisions. He had valued her insights. But now when Charlie spoke of investments, Pearl listened politely and did not comment. Charlie, for his part, appeared to approve his daughter’s changing position at the Bride’s House. She was less secretary and more hostess.

  To outsiders, it seemed that Pearl, who was in her early thirties, had blossomed. She joined a literary society that met monthly and whose members gave papers on a variety of subjects—flower arrangements, table settings, glove etiquette. When Pearl’s turn came to make a presentation, she read papers she had written on ore extraction methods and on increased mechanization underground. She even gave a talk on labor issues in Colorado’s mining towns. If the othe
r women were surprised at her choice of topics, they did not show it. In fact, they were impressed, because despite the fact that mining had waned, Georgetown still considered itself a mining town.

  Pearl was one of the founders of a hiking club and was much admired for her tireless climbing and sure-footedness in the mountains. In winter, she determined to improve her skating and did, and although she was never proficient at it, she at least was good enough to stay on her feet. She learned to play tennis, too, and one summer, she asked Charlie if he would permit the side yard to be turned into a court. Charlie said he was happy to oblige and even suggested that he hire a man to string electric lights so that she and her friends—single men and women as well as married couples of her age, many from the Presbyterian church—could play at night.

  For the first time since Pearl was born, her life no longer centered on her father. She had become a person in her own right. Charlie did not remark on any of the changes in his daughter, and perhaps he was not much aware of them. Pearl was, however, and knew they had to do with Frank Curry. She wasn’t sure just how. Maybe Frank had given her a sense of herself. More likely, she wanted to show him that her life was complete without him, but if that were the reason, it was of no consequence, because she never saw Frank. Or perhaps it was that in some part of herself, she expected that one day Frank would admit his mistake, would come back for her, and he would love her more than ever.

  There was another change, one of which no one but Pearl seemed to be aware. A friend had given her a journal for her European trip, in which Pearl had recorded the sights she had seen. Now, back home in the Bride’s House, she continued to write, sitting at the dressing table in her room, recording her thoughts in pen and ink in notebooks. At first, she made grand and, it must be said, trite observations—“everything in London is so old,” for instance—but as time went on, she developed a keen eye and a wry assessment of the people around her. She wrote about her friends and the ordinary people she met, the grocer, the stable boy, the miners, about their foibles and their virtues, drawing trenchant and often witty conclusions from simple events. Sometimes, she wrote about emotions close to her—loss, unrequited love, betrayal. On occasion, she recorded her thoughts about the Bride’s House, wondering if houses, like people, grew old and died. In her writing, the house was no longer a place of warmth and comfort but a house of secrets, a boarded-up building where life stood still.