"Clementine, you are gawking," her mother said. "Ladies do not gawk."
Clementine leaned back against the leather squabs and sighed. Her soul felt chaffed raw with a restless longing. Something was missing from her life, missing, missing, missing... She thought she would almost rather feel dead inside, wooden and dry like winter branches that would never grow leaves, than have this constant, changeless longing for things unknown, unnamed. The missing things.
Stanley Addison's Photographic Gallery was in the top flat of a brownstone on Milk Street. Mr. Addison was not a genteel man. He wore a striped waistcoat of a garish lime color and a paper collar. He sported a mustache so thin it looked inked onto the flesh beneath his nose. But Clementine barely noticed the man. She was mesmerized by the samples of his art, photographs and tintypes, that hung on the dull maroon gallery walls.
She circled the room, studying each portrait. Men of serious demeanor and pompous poses, actresses and opera singers in fanciful costumes, families of mother and father and stepping blocks of children... She stopped, a little hum of delight escaping through her lips.
Here was a cowboy. But a real one, not a made-up man on a souvenir card. He was decked out in silver-studded chaparejos and a fringed vest, with a scarf knotted flamboyantly around his neck. He sat on a hay bale, his booted legs rigid and braced apart as if he was more used to straddling a horse. A coiled lariat hung over one knee and a shotgun rode across his lap. He must have had a taste for violence, for a pair of pearl-handled six-shooters was strapped around his waist as well. His mustache grew thick and long, falling over the corners of his mouth and hiding the shape of it, just as the low-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes. He looked wild and young and fierce and noble, as untamed as the land he roamed.
Clementine swung around to the hovering Mr. Addison. She sent a barrage of questions at the man. She wanted to know how a photograph was made. She wanted to make one herself. She ignored her father's scowls, nor did she notice how Mr. Addison flushed and stammered as he led them to what he called his camera room, where he proposed to take their portrait.
To Clementine this place was even more fascinating than the gallery. An enormous window had been cut into the roof so that the room was washed in light. Painted screens lined the walls depicting trellised gardens and colonnaded porches; there was even one of the Egyptian pyramids. Among the screens stood several mirrors of various sizes and an enormous sheet of foiled tin on rollers.
The camera, a large wooden box with an accordion-like bellows, sat on a wheeled dolly. Clementine circled the thing, trying to puzzle out how it worked. She gave Mr. Addison a shy, tentative smile and asked him if she might view the world through the big unblinking eye of his camera.
He blushed and nearly tripped over his own feet as he showed her where to look. Clementine pressed her eye to a hole in the top of the box and saw the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt and his wife.
A canvas backdrop, painted to resemble a cozy sitting room, was stretched on a screen behind them. Her father sat on a fringed red velvet chair; Julia stood behind him. Her hand rested on his shoulder and he held it in place with his own hand, as if he feared she would bolt from the room if he didn't restrain her. A potted palm balanced the grouping, its fronds sheltering their heads like a big green umbrella.
Seeing them through the camera lens was to Clementine like looking at them from a great distance, as if they were not of this world. Or, no—as if they were still of the world but she had gone to a place beyond. Her father shifted his feet, uncomfortable in his ruffled dignity. The palm fronds cast small bars of shadow across her mother's face.
Clementine knew she looked like her mother. They had the same ash-fair hair and shadow-green eyes, the same air of porcelain fragility. A woman growing, a woman grown. She tried to see in the face of her mother the woman she was becoming. There were so many questions she wanted to ask of that woman. Why did you laugh when the doctor said you could have no more children? Have you ever wanted to stand at the window and lift your face to a man's to be kissed? Are there empty places inside you, yearnings you cannot name? She wanted to make photographs of her mother's face and study them for the answers.
"Miss Kennicutt, I believe your father grows impatient."
She left the camera to join her parents next to the potted palm. Aware now of the camera's eye, she kept herself apart from them. Even when Mr. Addison asked her to move in closer, she took care that no part of her person, not even her sleeve or the hem of her skirt, touched the man and woman who had given her life.
Mr. Addison fixed iron clamps behind their heads to assist them in holding still. He disappeared into a small closet, and a sharp, stinging smell like rubbing alcohol permeated the room. He emerged moments later, his movements rushed and jerky like a rabbit's. He carried a rectangular wooden box, which he slid into a slot in the camera. "Raise your chin, please, Mrs. Kennicutt. Er, Reverend, if you could give your vest a tug. Now, each of you draw in a deep breath and hold it, hold it, hold it... Miss Kennicutt, if I could coax from you a smile."
Clementine didn't smile. She wanted to memorize all that he was doing, to understand. Her deep, wide-spaced gaze went from the wondrous wooden box to the papier-mache props and painted screens. A growing excitement filled her until she felt that she was humming and crackling inside, like the new telephones that graced the lobby of the Tremont House hotel.
She was beginning to grasp, to know, what of life she wanted. And so it was that on that day over a year later when a cowboy from Montana knocked her down with his big-wheeled bicycle, Clementine Kennicutt was ready for him.
It would never have happened at all if a wheel hadn't come loose on her father's black brougham. It began to wobble when they turned onto Tremont Street, and soon the whole carriage was shuddering. Her father pulled over to let Clementine out. As they were only two blocks from the Tremont House, where she was to meet her mother and Aunt Etta for tea, Clementine was allowed to go on without him.
She walked slowly, savoring the glorious day. Shop awnings shielded the street from an unusually strong February sun, but the warmth of it was in the breeze and felt like milk against her skin. The strains of a waltz tinkled through the open doors of a pianoforte salesroom. She had to stiffen her back against a wild urge to go dancing down the sidewalk.
She paused before a milliner's window to stare with longing at a spring bonnet of white rice straw. A thick crimson plume flowed over the crown and was fastened onto one side with a plate buckle. A lady, Clementine knew, would have labeled the hat vulgar, but she loved it. It was like a peacock, flashy and gaudy, and it shouted to the world: "Look at me. I am beautiful!"
A delicious smell of chocolate and marshmallow wafted from the shop next door. She drifted down the street, following the smell, until she came face to face with a pyramid of candy. Sighing, she pressed her nose to the window glass. She was never given any money to spend on herself; otherwise she would have entered the shop and bought a dozen of the treats. She would have eaten each one slowly, licking the chocolate coating off first before biting into the gooey white center.
The frantic clatter of a trolley bell jangled through the air, followed by a scream and angry bellows. A silver flash caught her eye—the spokes of an enormous wheel weaving through the jam of traffic in the street.
She had seen a drawing once of such a machine in the newspaper. It was an ordinary, or a bicycle, as they were coming to be called. The advertisement had claimed it could distance the best horse in a day's run, although seeing one now, Clementine wondered how a person even managed to stay astraddle of it.
The monstrous front wheel of this ordinary was nose-high to a man. Connected to it by a curved pipelike rod was a small trailer wheel the size of a plate. The wheelman perched on a tiny leather saddle atop the big wheel, his feet pedaling madly. His mustached mouth was open in a scream of terror or laughter, Clementine couldn't tell which over the noise he was leaving in his wake. Vehicles and pedestrians all scattered before him lik
e frightened quail.
He bounced across the tracks directly in the path of a trolley. The horses reared in their traces, and the driver's arm pumped hard as he rang the warning bell. The bicycle narrowly avoided slamming into an elegant lady in an osier wood phaeton and struck a street-cleaning wagon instead, sending the wagon up onto the sidewalk with its sprinkler spinning in a wild arc and raining water onto the shoppers in front of Harrison's Dry Goods.
Miraculously the bicycle was still upright, although wobbling now like a drunken sailor. It hit an awry cobblestone and leaped the curb onto the sidewalk, narrowly missed a whip peddler's stand, clipped the back end of a chestnut cart, and headed for Clementine Kennicutt.
She told her legs to move, but they wouldn't obey. It never occurred to her to scream, for she had been taught to retain her dignity regardless of the provocation. Instead she simply stood there and watched the giant wheel come straight at her as if someone had aimed and shot it.
At last the man noticed her in his path and tried to swerve by yanking the wheel crosswise. The ordinary balked at this rough treatment. The tire shrieked as it skidded on the granite sidewalk, and Clementine got a whiff of hot rubber before the wheelman sailed over the handlebars and slammed into her hard, knocking her flat on her back and driving the air from her lungs.
Her chest strained as she wheezed, and her eyes opened wide onto the candy shop's awning. The green-and-white-striped canvas billowed and blurred.
"Well, hell." A man's face hovered above her, blocking out the light and the awning. It was a nice face with strong bones and a wide mouth framed by a mustache that was thick and long and the golden brown of maple syrup.
"Well, hell," he said again. He pushed a big soft gray hat off his forehead, uncovering a hank of sun-tipped light brown hair. He wore a strange, bemused look, like a little boy who's suddenly awakened from a nap and doesn't know where he is. Clementine had the strangest impulse to pat him on the cheek as if she would comfort him. Yet he was the one at fault, sailing cat-in-the-pan over the big front wheel of his ordinary and into her.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, and he grabbed her arm. "Take it slow and easy, now," he said. In the next instant he lifted her to her feet with one hand and a hard strength that she felt all the way to the bone.
"Thank you for assisting me, sir." Her plain black straw hat was tilted askew over one eye, and he helped her to straighten it. She started to thank him for that as well and then lost her thought as she stared into eyes the color of a summer sky and filled with laughter.
"I'm sorry I stampeded over you like that," he said.
"What? Oh, no, please... No harm was done."
His mouth broke into a smile that blazed across his face like the explosion of light from a photographer's flash. "Not to you, maybe. And not to me. But just look at my poor bicycle."
The big wheel's spokes were bent, and the red India rubber tire lay in the gutter. But she barely gave the ordinary a glance. I must be dreaming this, she thought. Surely she must be dreaming; otherwise how would a cowboy have found his way into Boston, Massachusetts?
His pants of rough and riveted canvas were tucked into tooled leather boots with elevated heels. His blue flannel shirt gaped open at the collar and a loosely knotted red handkerchief sagged from a throat that was strong and sun-browned. He needed silver spurs on his boots and a pair of pearl-handled six-shooters, and he could have stepped straight off one of Sho-na's souvenir cards.
He kicked at the loose tire with the pointed toe of one of those boots and shook his head, although the bright laughter never left his face. "These things have got more pitch to them than a Montana cayuse."
"Montana..." The wonder of him stole her breath. His talk was all drawl and it resounded through her blood like the pipe organ in her father's church. "What is a Montana cayuse?"
"A cow pony that can run all day and turn on a nickel, and is all wild."
He had a way of smiling, she thought, that was just with his eyes. She stared into his smiling eyes as his long brown fingers tugged loose the knot in the kerchief around his neck. He pulled it off, then leaned toward her. He took one corner of the soft cotton and rubbed it along the side of her mouth. He did it gently, like the brush of a feather across silk. "Grease," he said.
"Oh." She swallowed so hard her throat made a funny clicking noise. "Are you real?"
"Last time I pinched myself I yelped, so I guess I must be real."
"I meant are you a real cowboy?" she said, and she smiled.
Clementine had no idea what her mouth did when she smiled. The man stared at her, not moving, not breathing, looking as if he'd been hit between the eyes with his own ordinary. "I, uh... I'm... well, hell."
"And if you are a cowboy, then where are your silver spurs and your chaparejos and your fringed vest and your pearl-handled six-shooters? And why are you riding an ordinary instead of a cayuse?" she said, and then she smiled again so that he would know she was teasing.
His head fell back and he laughed, a wild, joyous sound. "I made a bet with my cousin that an old bronco-busting cow-puncher like me could break in a Boston bicycle and look the part while he's doing it. But if I'd've put on all those duds you mentioned, I'd be looking like a greenhorn on his first roundup."
"You make me smile, the way you talk," she said, only she wasn't smiling this time. She was looking at him, lost in looking at him.
The laughter left his face and he stared back at her for the space of three slow, thunderous heartbeats. She was surprised he couldn't hear it, the beating of her heart.
He reached up and rubbed the place alongside her mouth where the grease had been. "This cousin of mine, he's got a whole factory full of these bicycles. He's putting on a demonstration race tomorrow, and somehow I've let myself get talked into riding in it. Why don't you come along with me and watch me make a fool of myself some more?"
She had never seen a race of any kind, but she thought they must be wonderful things. Of course her father would never allow her to attend such a vulgar event, let alone in the company of a man who was a stranger to the Kennicutt family. "We haven't been properly introduced."
"Gus McQueen, ma'am." He swept off his big western hat with a flourish and performed a sweeping bow that was self-mocking and yet oddly graceful for such a large man. "I own a ranch in the middle of the RainDance country, where I run a few hundred head of scraggly cows. I also got me twenty percent interest in a silver mine, which so far as I know has produced nothing but muck and gumbo. So I guess you could say my prospects are of the promising sort, and my antecedents are... well, if not strictly respectable, at least there's none in jail that I know of."
His gaze dropped to the hat he held in his hands. He pulled the soft brim around and around through his fingers. "As for myself, the man—I don't lay claim to being a saint, but I don't lie or cheat at cards or drink whiskey or chase after loose women. I've never put my brand on another man's calf, and when I give my word, I keep it. And I..." His fingers tightened on his hat, as if he struggled for the words to impress upon her that there was more to him than the cowboy she saw. He couldn't know that what she saw she thought was wonderful.
But when he looked back up at her, his eyes were laughing. "And I'm not usually one of those mannerless rascals that cusses in front of a lady, even if you did manage to pull three hells out of my mouth in the space of as many minutes."
She tried to act indignant, but inside she wanted to clap her hands and spin around on her toes and laugh over the delight of him. "You are unfair, sir, to lay the blame for your sins at my feet."
"Oh, but it is all your fault, ma'am, every bit of it. For I've never in all of my life come across a girl prettier than you. And when you smile... when you smile, my, but you are truly something wonderful to see."
He was the wonder. The way he talked and the brightness of his laughter that was like a glow on his face. And the way he simply was: built tall and broad-shouldered and strong, as a cowboy was meant to be.
<
br /> "Now that I've given you my name," he said, "why don't we make it a fair swap?"
"What? Oh, it's Clementine... Clementine Kennicutt."
"And will you come with me and watch me race tomorrow, Miss Clementine Kennicutt?"
"Oh, no, no... I could never."
"Of course you can."
A strange, tingly excitement bubbled inside her. She didn't smile at him again; she only wanted to.
"What time do you race, Mr. McQueen?" she heard herself ask.
"Straight up noon."
"Do you know where the Park Street Church is, just down the block from here?" The daring of what she was doing left her lightheaded, making all of her feel lighter than air, making her fly. "I'll meet you beneath the elms in front of the Park Street Church tomorrow at eleven."
He put his hat back on and he looked at her from beneath the shadowed brim of it, so that she couldn't see the expression in his eyes. "Well, I don't know if I feel right about that," he said. "Not meeting your father and getting his permission to court you proper."
"He would never give his permission, Mr. McQueen." She punctuated the words with sharp shakes of her head, while her throat grew so tight with wrenching disappointment that she could barely breathe. "Never. Never."
He looked down at her, stroking his mustache with the pad of one thumb. She waited, staring back up at him with her still, wide-open gaze. She wanted to see that race, and she wanted other things, too, things having to do with him that made her stomach clench with excitement. She wanted to see him again, to talk with him and make him laugh.
"I suppose," he finally said, "that we'll have to do it your way."
He held out his hand, and she placed hers within it. His hand was large and rough, and it swallowed hers. He rubbed his thumb over her palm, as if he knew of the scars hidden by her glove and was trying to erase them. "Just one more thing... Will you marry me, Miss Clementine Kennicutt?"
Heart of the West Page 3