Decorum

by Kaaren Christopherson

  “In view of the company, I’ll take the blue silk, thanks,” he said, setting the glass precariously in the soap tray and taking a puff of the cigar.

  Another moment passed. He heard her cross the room and pictured her calfskin-slippered feet upon the carpet as she retrieved the silk robe that lay across the bed. Through the cheval mirror he watched, amused. She pushed the door open and stood in the doorframe, peering in as if ready to avert her gaze. His movement as he took a sip of whiskey drew her eyes toward the curtained tub and her expression turned from caution to relief. Her hand was upon the doorknob and the blue robe over her arm, an ermine stole in her other hand. The evening frock of ice-blue-and-silver moiré hugged her figure, a watery-blue silk swag encircling her hips. The wide neckline left her shoulders bare, her long gloves nearly meeting the cap sleeves. Even in the mirror he could see the deep décolleté and the little well between her breasts—or did he conjure it, knowing it was there? He adjusted the glass in the soap tray and drew on the cigar.

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand.”

  At this she saw his movement in the mirror and an amused smile graced her lovely face.

  “What a picture you are,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I thought only ladies indulged in this kind of decadence. Reading, drink, cigars. My, my. Is this your usual state when bathing?”

  She extended the arm that held the robe.

  “I’ll just toss it in your direction and leave you to it, shall I?”

  “And have it end up in the bath? I’d rather not if you don’t mind,” he said. “You’ll have to bring it in.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “I am rather,” he said. “By the way, how do you come to be in this predicament?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” said Francesca. “I thought I might catch you before we all met for dinner.”

  “I see. You have my full attention, I assure you.”

  “This is hardly the interview I expected.”

  “No doubt.”

  “It’ll keep until later. I’ll leave the robe on the rug just here.”

  “I’d rather that you didn’t strew my belongings all over the floor. You can put it on the stool there,” he said, indicating with the cigar. “Besides, I thought you were one of these modern, unflappable women.”

  His smile was returned with a challenging look in the mirror as she walked past the tub without looking at him and draped the robe across the stool. She turned and fastened him in a look of defiance.

  Maintaining his air of nonchalance as best he could, he let the newspaper drop onto the floor, reached for a large sponge at the end of the tub, and floated it over his middle, at the same time drawing on the cigar in his other hand and blowing out the smoke toward her.

  She burst forth in peals of laughter he never had thought possible in her. A gloved hand to her mouth, she threw back her head and rocked with pure mirth. Her eyes, at first wide in amazement, drank in the scene and closed tightly, as if all her attention were concentrated in merriment.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “Aren’t you treatin’ the gravity of this occasion a bit casual?”

  In fact, the gravity was all on his side. Whether she laughed from embarrassment or his ridiculous posture, he was awestruck by her abandon. Not a feminine titter nor a childish giggle, but a ringing out from the center of her being, as if the form, cinched and restrained into womanly outlines, had finally taken leave to pop like champagne and froth over.

  The day she told him about Tracey he thought the possibility of her ever laughing again had vanished—that some misplaced sense of decorum would prevent her from abandoning herself to joy. Moreover, he had feared that Tracey’s handsome ghost would follow them through a lifetime of grief and self-reproach. At times he had wondered whether he could bear it, even for Francesca. To see her nearly helpless with mirth awakened the hope that he might someday make her happy. Whatever it might take to give her that laugh again and again over a lifetime, he vowed to himself, he would do it.

  Her hair grew fuzzy in the steam and the flush in her cheeks made her face glow and her eyes dance. Connor thought he’d never seen her look so beautiful. He reached forward, grabbed her skirt, and drew her by silken handfuls closer and closer to him.

  “Oh!” she cried. “Oh! Oh, no!” and tugged away from him—not very hard, he thought, or was it his imagination? With one last pull that nearly raised him to his feet he reached for the swag round her hips, threw her balance forward, and upended her feet. She landed across his body in a deluge of soapy water.

  As the silk and linen layers submerged and covered him, she laughed like a drunken thing. He turned her and held her with one arm while he lifted her face to his and stopped her laughter with his mouth. Francesca’s dripping skirts cascaded water over the side of the bathtub as she moved herself to cross him breast to breast. She propped herself against his chest and looked him in the face, then dropped her head as laughter overtook her again. He drank in the scent of her perfumed hair and reveled in the soggy, silken chrysalis that enfolded him. When she looked up he embraced her with his arms and with his lips.

  The suite door again opened and shut. A knock came at the bathroom door.

  “Mr. O’Casey, sir?” said Jamie’s sheepish voice, as the manservant stood frozen in the doorway, staring into the mirror.

  “It’s about time you got back here,” said Connor over Francesca’s head. “Would you please go to Miss Lund’s maid and ask her, with my compliments, if she would please come and bring her mistress a new set of evening clothes?”

  “Miss Martin,” said Jamie to May, as the latter sat with Rosemary in their room, working at some mending. “If you please, there’s been a slight mishap and Miss Lund requires a whole new set of evening dress.”

  “She hasn’t called,” said May, curiosity written on her face. “What have you to do with the matter, Mr. Lynch?”

  “Well, you see,” said Jamie, stepping inside and closing the door, “she’s in Mr. O’Casey’s suite.”

  Rosemary snorted a suppressed laugh and bent over her mending.

  “I don’t understand,” said May, feigning ignorance and doing a poor job of it.

  “If you please, May, there’s no time to waste. Miss Lund requires a full set of evening dress—from the skin out, so to speak, and shoes and all. Perhaps it’d be best if you bring Miss Corcoran with you.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Rosemary, wrapping her mending and laying it on the bedside table.

  “The devil of it is, begging your pardon,” said Jamie, “we’ve got to get it all up to Mr. O’Casey’s room without drawin’ any attention, if you take my meanin’.”

  Rosemary hooted and instantly composed herself.

  “This is serious,” pleaded Jamie. “We’ve got to go quickly. They’ll be late enough for dinner as it is.”

  “We can wrap the dress in an overcoat and put the underlinen in a satchel,” offered Rosemary.

  “Best make it two satchels,” said Jamie, “We’ll need an extra allotment of towels.”

  The servants arrived to find Connor in the sitting room, nearly dressed, his tie hanging at loose ends and his cuffs without links, the mother-of-pearl cufflinks on a side table and his tailcoat lying across the back of the settee. He nodded to the maids as they bobbed slight curtseys, passed without looking at him, and followed Jamie through the bedchamber, where he motioned them toward the closed bathroom door. Permission granted to admit the maids, Jamie hastened back to Connor, closing the door that joined the sitting room to the bedchamber. Mixed expressions of horror and glee emanated from the bathroom.

  “Oh, my God, miss,” said May’s voice to a fountain of giggles from Rosemary.

  “Shhhh,” Francesca admonished. “We’ve got quite enough to attend to.”

  The two men bent to the serious business of administering the cufflinks, not daring to look each other in the face, but each with an ear cocked toward th
e bathroom.

  Rosemary appeared at the bedroom door.

  “If you please, sir,” she said, looking at Connor, then to Jamie, “Mr. Lynch, we’d be obliged if you could find us a bedsheet for wrapping the wet things. And if you’d be so kind as to deliver them, or see that they’re delivered, discreetly, to our room while everyone’s at dinner, we’d be most grateful.”

  “I’ll see to it,” said Jamie. As Rosemary returned to the matter at hand, May’s voice again rang out from the bathroom.

  “Oh, my God,” exclaimed May again. “What are you going to do, miss? You’ll have to marry him now.”

  “Shhh. That’s enough.”

  At which, the two men looked at each other. Connor smiled and Jamie decorously dropped his eyes and helped Connor on with his tailcoat.

  Connor tugged at his shirtsleeves, smoothed his lapels, gave himself one last look in the glass over the fireplace, and went to rap upon the bathroom door.

  “Yes,” said Francesca’s voice in some surprise.

  “I’m going out now. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Jamie’s leaving, too, so you ladies’ll have the place to yourselves.”

  CHAPTER 51

  The Universal Passion

  Love is the universal passion. We are all, at one time or another, conjugating the verb amo.

  —Decorum, page 179

  Francesca wrapped her stole around her shoulders and looked out over the landscape. The Bow Valley was filling with the last of the summer light like a great trough of gold that gilded tree and mountain as no Baroque artist could have bedecked a cathedral. In moments the gold would fade into twilight. A waning crescent moon had risen like a bowl filled with faint stars. An enormous calm settled upon her, a sense of well-being she could not remember feeling for many years. As she stood on the terrace, silent and still, watching the valley’s colors change, birds headed homeward and insects tuned up for an evening rhapsody more tranquil than any music that echoed deep within the hotel.

  Dinner was over. The large party of accumulated friends old and new had tested the hotel’s culinary artistry. Francesca, transformed in a deep orchid silk gown of sweeping lines and void of ornament, floated above the conviviality with a light spirit. No matter where she went or with whom she might converse, she felt a pleasant connection to Connor, who always met her eye with a knowing smile that warmed her cheeks from an intimacy shared.

  “What can this hotel be about?” complained Connor’s elderly billiard partner to Francesca. “Here I am, dressing for dinner as per usual, when all of a sudden water starts leaking through the ceiling. Burst pipe or some damn thing.”

  “Problem, sir?” inquired Connor, who had caught the last few words.

  “Just telling Miss Lund here that my man barely saved my wardrobe from ruin. Water all over. I can’t think what the hotel can be doing. Had to move me to a different room till they could find the trouble.” Connor was all sympathy and shot Francesca an amused look over the gentleman’s head.

  In the weeks since coming to Banff, New York had nipped at her heels like a mad dog. The telegram and Jerry’s subsequent letter, even Vinnie’s revelation about the Lawrences and her escape from the Jeromes, had upset the equilibrium she had hoped to regain in coming here. Then her interview with Ida brought her up short. She began to realize that although she might run away from a point on the map, she could not hide from herself. Ida and Vinnie and Blanche each had held up a mirror from which she could avert her gaze only at her peril. Each mirror showed her an ignorant, biased part of herself that mortified her. She wondered what possessed Connor to want someone as blind and willful as she and had stewed about it since Blanche’s departure. A confession was nearly on her lips when she went to Connor’s room, only to have her pious resolve evaporate into laughter. In spite of the restorative nature of confession, laughter had been the better tonic. She knew now what it felt like not to fret, that at least one person in the world existed to whom she had neither to explain nor prove. All that was left was to know whether he still wanted her.

  A trickle of people began to populate the terrace. A familiar voice spoke in her ear.

  “I came out to see if you might like a nightcap,” said Connor, drawing up next to her and looking out over the Bow Valley.

  “I don’t believe so, thank you.”

  “You said you wanted to see me.”

  “Did I?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already,” he said, clearing his throat. “I didn’t startle you into forgetting, did I?”

  “Oh, that,” she said, smiling. “No, it was rather memorable.” She reflected a moment and then added, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  “I came to apologize for my appalling lack of tact in coming to see you when I got Jerry’s telegram. No, that doesn’t sound right. Not tact. I was so thoughtless. . . .”

  “It’s not like you to be thoughtless,” he answered. His voice comforted her.

  “I hope not,” said Francesca. “I don’t mean to be.”

  “I know that, Frankie.”

  “That’s just it,” she said in earnest. “You do know. I think I was counting on that from you.”

  “I did think it was a bit brazen of you to come to me and wondered what it meant—”

  “But I didn’t mean anything . . .” said Francesca, trying not to plead, for she knew she didn’t need to.

  “I know, I know. When you talked it out and I knew there wasn’t anything behind it—anything—”

  “To hurt you, you mean?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, then I was glad that you felt you could come to me—like a barrier between us might have come down somehow. Was I right to think that, Frankie?”

  The name soothed her as it came off his lips, rolling over her in his mellow baritone.

  “Yes,” said Francesca. “I believe so.”

  They stood together in silence. Conversation now could hardly be private with so many there enjoying the evening, but Francesca knew not how to introduce the subject of more privacy. He seemed to read her thoughts.

  “It’s gettin’ a bit crowded,” Connor said. “Shall we take a little stroll?”

  “You’ll want a coat. It’s getting chilly.”

  “Not for just a short turn round the hotel.”

  He offered her his arm. The living being who clasped her arm under his, the smell of pomatum and soap, the crunch of gravel under their earthbound feet comforted her.

  “While we’re apologizing,” he said, “will you forgive me for anything hurtful or insulting I may have said to you? You’re right that I bully people when it suits me, but I should know better than to bully someone I care for—” He stopped abruptly, as if catching himself before he made an exhibition of his feelings. “It’s a stupid thing to do,” he said in some confusion.

  “To ask for forgiveness?”

  “No, to treat people I care about as anything other than precious, that’s all,” he said. “I’m a fool that way. I am sorry, Frankie.”

  They had moved well away from other guests before he spoke again.

  “Frankie, ought I to ask your forgiveness for Blanche?”

  The question had never occurred to her before he uttered it. The fact of its total absence from her mental list of reservations about Connor O’Casey—the realization that she had never held anything against either of them—bestowed a sudden liberty upon Francesca that jolted her like a thunderclap.

  “Heavens no,” she said, dismissing the notion. “What right have I to forgive you for something begun before we ever knew each other? When I think of where we all were a year ago—even six months ago—how could any of us have foreseen anything that has happened? We’d have to be conjurors or prophets, and we’re nothing like that, thank God. Being human is difficult enough without the burden of perfection that none of us can achieve anyway.”

  Ida West’s words again rang in her ears. Francesca was not ready to grasp them th
en, but she believed them now.

  “If you really feel that way, Frankie, that’s more than I ever expec—”

  “Of course, you realize I’ll have to marry you now,” Francesca broke in. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to say. She did not need to see his face to feel him register surprise. They were both quiet as she waited for his thoughts to catch up with hers.

  “You’ll have to marry me?”

  She turned her head toward him and looked into his face.

  “Yes. I’ve seen you in your bath,” she declared. “How else am I to preserve your honor unless I make an honest man of you?”

  In the waning light, she could sense the amused look on his face. He fastened his dark eyes on hers and held her there.

  “I must admit, I hadn’t quite thought of it in that way.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions,” she said, a little embarrassed. “You do still want to marry me, don’t you? Because if you don’t I’ve just made a foolish—”

  “Yes, Frankie, I do want to marry you—and strangely enough for the very reason you just said. I do want you to make me an honest man—at least a better man than I am.”

  “You know I can’t do that for you. I can’t be God for you.”

  What a thing for him to want of her. For a fragment of a second she thought of Edmund—a man who wanted everything around him to change for the better so that he could remain the same. Perhaps he had wanted to regain a man he had lost and mistook that journey for a treasure hunt. How different was he from Connor—a man who realized somewhere in his depths that if anything is to truly change for the better, it must first be he himself. Francesca hoped that this was so, that she was not deluding herself again. Yet was she not the one who asked him for honesty? If this request meant anything at all, was he not handing her his best intention as a basis for their life together?