Coming Up Roses

by Duncan, Alice

  Hadn’t he? The good Lord knew, he’d worked hard enough at it.

  “Hmmm.” Cocking his head and staring without seeing at the crowd of fair-goers walking past him, H.L. contemplated the nature of self-image and the importance thereof. Crumbs, if he’d done as good a job at creating himself as he thought he had, perhaps marriage wouldn’t blow it all to hell.

  The word marriage had always brought to his mind images of men shackled and cuffed, tied to their wives and children out of duty alone. It hadn’t occurred to him until Rose Gilhooley galloped into his life that perhaps those men, who had seemed akin to unwilling prisoners to him, had actually chosen their bonds.

  “Don’t be an ass, H.L.,” he grumbled. Of course, they’d chosen their bonds. It’s only that they hadn’t seemed like bonds at first. The true imprisonment of marriage crept up on a fellow; it swooped down on him as he contemplated other things, and had him by the throat before he knew what had happened to him.

  “Look, Papa. That poor man’s talking to himself.”

  H.L. peered up and bared his teeth at the sweet little girl who had uttered the comment. The girl squealed and darted off. The little girl’s papa cast a fulminating glance at H.L. and went off to tackle his daughter. H.L. said, “Hunh!”

  A second later he sat up and swiveled his head to see where the father and daughter had gone off. He saw the man pick up his little girl, hug her close, and give her a smiling explanation of H.L.’s bad behavior. The little girl, after looking frightened for a second or two, let go of a startled laugh and hugged her father, as if he’d said the one thing that could transform her worry into something jolly and happy. As he stared, H.L. came to the reluctant conclusion that the girl’s father didn’t have the haggard, beleaguered appearance of a man who’d been trapped into a hateful life sentence. He looked mighty pleased with himself, as a matter of fact.

  Turning and narrowing his gaze, H.L. pondered this phenomenon. After he’d done that for a minute or two, he mentally substituted himself for the father in the recently enacted scenario. Naturally, his and Rose’s daughter would be much prettier than that admittedly pretty little girl, and she’d be much too intelligent to be frightened by somebody making a face at her, but still . . .

  H.L. experienced the strange sensation of his heart getting soft and gooey as he considered comforting a child of his loins. A darling little girl, perhaps. Or a sturdy lad. A lad with a decent name. H.L. would never burden a child with a name as awful as his own.

  His image slapped him in his mind’s eye again, and he frowned. Hell. No matter how pleasant certain aspects of the marriage state might appear in contemplation, there was still his image as a care-for-nobody to consider.

  All of his colleagues would laugh at him if he told them he was getting married. H.L. considered the comments he’d surely receive.

  “So,” he imagined Wiggins saying, with a sly wink, “somebody trapped you at last, eh?”

  “H.L. May as a married man?” he imagined his editor saying with a loud guffaw. “You should have kept your drawers buttoned, H.L.”

  H.L. winced. Damn them. They didn’t know Rose, or they wouldn’t say such things. Rose was special. Any man would be lucky if she agreed to marry him.

  He sat up straighter on the bench as the truth of his last thought sank in.

  By God. Any man would be lucky—indeed, he’d be honored and privileged—if Rose Ellen Gilhooley agreed to marry him.

  For the first time, H.L. wondered if he was approaching this marriage concept from the wrong direction. Maybe he ought to think of it in terms of his meeting with Rose as a serendipitous occurrence; an occurrence not given any other man in the world but only to him. How fortuitous had that been?

  Hell, he might have lived his whole life without their paths having crossed. The thought of never having met Rose made his chest ache. He pressed a palm against the sore spot and thought some more.

  By the time he’d thought himself to a near-collapse, H.L. had decided what he had to do. He only hoped Rose would cooperate.

  # # #

  H.L. had stopped haunting the Wild West. He hadn’t been by her tent or Annie’s for three days. Rose knew it for a fact, because she’d abandoned Annie’s tent for her own two days ago.

  The knowledge that H.L.’s interest in her hadn’t lasted a full month caused a heaviness to pervade Rose’s whole being. She aimed to perform tonight and, while her bruise had healed, she wasn’t sure she could summon the lightness of spirit it took to do all those tricks she had to do. She’d been practicing. All yesterday afternoon and all this morning, she and Fairy had practiced. So far, she hadn’t fallen off the horse and cracked her skull, but the day was early yet.

  “Stop it, Rose Gilhooley,” she muttered as she slipped into her costume. As miserable as she felt about having been made a fool of by H.L. May, she still didn’t really want to take a tumble from Fairy’s back and kill herself. Not only might it be painful, but it would certainly be humiliating, and Rose had suffered enough humiliation lately to court any more of it.

  Therefore, she had to concentrate. She’d been concentrating a lot these past few days. So eager had she been not to think about H.L. that she’d studied the lessons Annie had given her with special concentration.

  Even Rose had to admit that she was a good reader by this time. She could read everything and, if she didn’t know all the words in the English language, she knew how to use the dictionary, and she did. She was every bit as smart as H.L. May, she told herself with a sniff of longed-for superiority, even if she wasn’t as well-educated.

  Bitterly she wondered where her self-respect had been hiding out when she’d first met the newspaperman. Self-respect might have done her some good then. It seemed merely superfluous now. A cynical chuckle escaped her as she considered how the word superfluous had simply popped into her brain as if it was as familiar to her as the word horse.

  It wasn’t, of course. Rose had learned that big word, as she’d learned how to read and write: The hard way. She’d worked diligently to achieve her present mastery of the English language, and, while she used to feel stupid, she now was proud of herself. It had been difficult, but she’d done it. Unlike H.L. May, whose education had been handed to him on a silver platter, Rose Gilhooley had been required to seek it out. And she had, blast him.

  Stupid man. Going around flaunting his superior education and so forth. An education didn’t mean a single thing except that one had been fortunate enough in one’s circumstances that one had been able to attend school. Rose had been doing useful things with her talents when Mr. H.L. May had been sitting in school, learning how to use words.

  Rose commanded herself to stop brooding about H.L. May. Her mother and sisters would be arriving on the noon train tomorrow, and the colonel had promised Rose that they’d be honored guests at the Wild West for as long as they remained in Chicago. What Rose prayed for was that her mother would agree to stay in Chicago from now on.

  Although she hadn’t spoken a word to anyone else, not even Annie or the colonel, Rose was considering retirement from the Wild West. She was tired of traveling constantly, of never having a home to call her own. In spite of H.L. May and bittersweet memories of lost love, Rose liked Chicago. It was not only a civilized place, but it was an exciting one. Rose didn’t think she’d get bored very soon with all the amenities and interests Chicago had to keep one entertained.

  Besides all that, she’d been offered a job. A good job. A job that would provide her with an ample salary and that would be plenty enough to support herself and her mother. She imagined her sisters would return to Deadwood because they’d made lives for themselves there. Anyhow, Charlotte was set to marry the youngest Palmer boy, so she was sure to head back to Kansas. Lizzy could attend a finishing school here and learn a profession if she didn’t want to marry.

  H.L. May wasn’t the only one in the world who could exist without marriage. It was women who had to do all the hard work when they married, anyway. Men re
aped all the benefits of the married state and had none of the responsibilities to go along with it. Well, except for money, but if one prepared oneself properly, one didn’t need a man for that.

  Rose lifted her chin, proud that she didn’t need a man in order to survive in this troublesome world. She’d make sure Lizzy wouldn’t need one, too. A woman could survive on her own. A woman could have a good life—a fine life—as a spinster. A better life, actually, because she wouldn’t have to put up with a man.

  A sob escaped her unbidden, and Rose stamped her foot. She’d be so glad when she stopped mooning over H.L. May and her abandoned hopes. What good were hopes? They’d only brought Rose grief, and she was sick of them.

  Rose knew, because she’d grown up the hard way, that nothing in this life lasted. Therefore, even though she was going through a rough patch right now, she knew it wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, her heart would heal. Broken hearts didn’t kill one. As Annie and her mother had both said more than once, any experience that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  By the time Rose was through mourning the loss of H.L. May, she’d be strong as an ox.

  Not only that, but she was going to have a good job. That alone was enough to dim the edges of her grief every time she thought about it. Mrs. Lucius MacDonald Hereford, a wealthy Chicago widow and patron of the arts, had offered Rose a position as curator of a museum of popular culture which the lady was establishing all on her own, using money she’d inherited from her late husband, a railroad magnate. Or, as Mrs. Hereford herself had put it, “a railroad robber.”

  Rose had liked Mrs. Hereford the moment she met her, because the woman was down to earth and enthusiastic and didn’t put on airs, as so many wealthy women did. She and Rose had hit it right off, in fact. Rose had even found herself confessing a little bit about her current heartache, although she’d kept the salacious details to herself.

  “You’re better off, Rose,” Mrs. Hereford had told her in her downright, no-nonsense manner. “Most men are asses at best and criminals at worst. Just look at my late unlamented husband, if you doubt it.”

  Rose had laughed, although she’d also entertained the unspoken thought that at least the late Mr. Hereford had left his wife a good deal of money. Anything, from heartache to dinner, was easier to live with if one had a lot of money. Rose wasn’t so naive that she’d failed to learn that lesson in her twenty-two years.

  With a heartfelt sigh and another little lecture to buck up, she slipped her moccasins on and headed out to the stable to fetch Fairy. Tonight would be the first time she’d performed since her injury. She wondered if H.L. would be in the audience, then mentally slapped herself for it. She thought glumly that hers was going to be a long recovery.

  # # #

  Her performance went flawlessly, however. Rose was pleased since she hadn’t had so much time off from trick riding since she’d joined the Wild West. She didn’t see H.L. in the audience, even though she scanned the first few rows as she took her bow. Her heart hurt as she rode out of the arena to thunderous applause. No matter how often she reminded herself that she was better off without a faithless newspaper reporter in her life, she still felt horrid.

  She continued to feel horrid until the following day, when she met her mother and her sisters at the Chicago train station. Their reunion was joyous. Rose was happy to see that her mother didn’t look nearly as haggard as she had the last time Rose had seen her. It was perfectly astonishing how a sufficient amount of cold, hard cash, even in so rustic a place as Deadwood, Kansas, could improve the quality of a person’s life.

  Lizzy and Charlotte were all grown up now. Both of her sisters were taller than Rose, and it amused Rose that when they saw each other for the first time in years, both of them treated her with a degree of awed respect. Or maybe it wasn’t amusing. Rose was now a star in a wild west show, but when she’d lived with them, she’d fed them. It seemed to her that if people had their priorities straight, her sisters should have been in awe of her then instead of now.

  Fame was a funny thing, she decided. After lots of hugs and kisses, and after Rose had seen them to a fancy hotel which had both sisters and her mother goggle-eyed with wonder, she took them on a brief tour of the Columbian Exposition, including popcorn, hamburgers, carbonated soda, and the Ferris Wheel.

  She couldn’t stay with them all night, however. “I have to get ready for my show. I want to introduce you to the colonel afterwards.”

  “I remember the man,” Mrs. Gilhooley said. This time, she seemed worshipful. Rose didn’t begrudge her that. Rose fairly worshiped the colonel herself.

  The show went well. Rose pulled out all the stops in order to give her family a brilliant performance. As she took her last bow to the cheers and applause of her audience, she waved to them. Then she could have smacked herself when she scanned the crowd for H.L. May.

  Fudge.

  # # #

  It took H.L. forever to talk Annie Oakley around to his point of view. He’d almost given up when she began to weaken. Taking heart, he renewed his pleas with new vigor, finally wearing her down, as she put it, to a nub.

  H.L. was sorry he’d harassed her so badly, but his life lay in the balance, and he guessed his life was worth a little harassment. He wasn’t sure Annie agreed, but she said she’d help him, so he didn’t much care.

  Next he tackled Rose’s mother and sisters. They weren’t nearly so hard to convince as Annie had been. Mrs. Gilhooley, in fact, was moved to tears by H.L.’s plight. Never one to eschew the use of emotional blackmail when it served his purposes, H.L. played up his heartache to the hilt. Rose’s sisters were inclined to be romantic, so they were eager to assist him.

  Mrs. Hereford, whom H.L. had met before, thought he was a sly dog and told him so, but she, too, agreed to help.

  Little Elk had proved the most difficult of all, primarily because he considered that his loyalty lay with Rose. It took H.L. hours to convince him that by helping H.L., Little Elk would be proving his loyalty to Rose. By the time the Sioux finally consented to help him, H.L. was exhausted. He wasn’t through, however.

  He tackled Buffalo Bill Cody last of all, sensing that the colonel’s assistance would be invaluable. Although H.L. had always found Cody affable and friendly, he approached the great man with trepidation. If Buffalo Bill let him down, H.L. despaired of ever achieving his mission.

  Oddly enough, Cody proved the least recalcitrant of the bunch. He laughed heartily, clapped H.L. on the back, and said he thought it was a splendid idea and he’d be more than happy to help H.L. perpetrate his scheme. He even helped H.L. plot out the most strategic plan so as to prevent injury to Rose, should she be so shocked, she lost her concentration.

  Therefore, H.L. carefully coached his collaborators to spring the trap during Rose’s very last race around the arena, when she was holding tight to Fairy’s mane—or whatever she clung to during that headlong dash.

  If this didn’t work, he guessed he’d just have to go out to the pier, jump off, and drown himself.

  # # #

  Rose was pleased that her family so enjoyed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West that they wanted to see it again. She was puzzled, however, when she saw them rising from their grandstand seats right before she turned a somersault and landed on Fairy’s back. Perhaps one of the girls felt ill. Rose hoped not. If she was, she hoped it was nothing more than indigestion caused by devouring so many of the treats available at the Exposition.

  She knew better than to think about her sisters during her act, though. If she lost her train of thought, she was done for. Therefore, she cleared her mind of extraneous worries and carried on.

  It was while she was standing on her hands on Fairy’s back and trotting around the arena that she first suspected something was going on. Upside down though she was, she realized that several people had walked into the arena and were now standing on the sidelines holding signs. Even on her head, Rose could discern her name on one of them.

  What was going on here?


  Lowering herself to Fairy’s back, she nudged the little mare into her last, thrilling gallop around the arena. As was her custom, Rose leaned way over so that she created as little wind resistance as possible, and with her feathers streaming out behind her, she took off like the wind.

  She blinked when she saw a huge sign painted on white board in bright red letters that had been sprinkled with glitter: ROSE GILHOOLEY.

  Whatever did this mean?

  A second later, she read another sign. I LOVE YOU.

  Good heavens.

  I’M SORRY popped up next in her line of sight.

  FOR BEING SUCH AN ASS.

  H.L. This had to be H.L.’s doing. No one else she knew would use such inelegant language in a public arena.

  MARRY ME, ROSE.

  Good God. Rose felt lightheaded for only a second. She steadied herself before she could tumble off her horse.

  PLEASE SAY YES.

  Rose was totally rattled by the time she drew Fairy up in the center of the ring. Because she didn’t know what else to do, she made her usual bows. The crowd, she noticed, was practically hysterical with joy and laughter. Small wonder, she thought sourly. They probably didn’t get to witness such outlandish marriage proposals on a regular basis.

  Neither did Rose, and she didn’t know what to make of it. It was no use trying to pretend everything was proceeding normally, because the crowd had started chanting.

  “Marry him! Marry him!”

  Fiddlesticks. Rose wasn’t used to improvisation. She didn’t know how to react. When a thunderous cheer went up, she breathed more easily, knowing that meant the advent of the colonel. Her relief when she turned on her horse’s bare back to witness his arrival turned into pure shock when she beheld, not Colonel Cody, but H.L. May trotting out into the arena. His form on horseback, she couldn’t help but notice, was abysmal.

  He was also holding up a last sign: PLEASE MARRY ME, ROSE. I LOVE YOU. H.L.