But thoughts of Tara were never far away.
Reece was like a blind man who, through a sudden bolt of lightning, had his sight restored. When Tara came into his life, the emptiness—the unsatisfying narrowness of his existence—was laid bare to him. Images of what could be flooded his mind.
He could not give in to his dreams of her. Nothing else had changed. His mother, Emory Millinder, Miriam…they were all cords in the net that held him captive. The net was of his own making, though, not theirs. His original crime was made far more wretched by the intrigues and deceits that he’d allowed to follow it.
That night in Hap and Delores’ apartment, when he and Tara had found each other in the darkness… The sensation of her lips haunted him. He remembered the shame as well. Delores was right about him, wasn’t she? Tara had everything to lose, but she was courageous enough to make her feelings known to him. If he was the man he wanted to be, the moment he’d kissed Tara he’d have gone immediately to Millinder and told him to go to the devil.
Instead, Reece followed Tara’s life from a distance. Her success in vaudeville surprised him not at all. How could anyone who knew her not see how special she was? He refrained from going to see her perform, fearing his own weakness. Performing was the vital center of her life, a burning core of energy that would pull him even closer to a woman he couldn’t have.
Not until the automobile accident, when Miriam sensed something passing between Tara and Reece, did he acquiesce to attending one of her performances. Miriam, although not an especially intuitive girl, knew that Tara was somehow a rival and wanted to learn more about her. If Miriam only knew the truth, Reece thought tiredly.
Then, backstage, in Tara’s dressing room, having to mask his true feelings… When Miriam invited Tara to the wedding, he alone saw the look of hurt in Tara’s eyes. It was obvious to him that Muldoon meant nothing to Tara, in spite of the man’s attempts to convey the impression that he did. Still, Reece had to quell a violent anger when he saw the two of them together like that.
Maybe if he could explain things to Tara…
Desperate to see her once more before the wedding, Reece visited the boarding house a few days later. He found Hap in bed, still recovering from his injuries, and learned the whole appalling story.
“She and her cousin Sheila left before dawn the next day, without a word. I sure am worried about her, Reece. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this Muldoon character.”
“Did she leave anything behind?” A letter for him? he wanted to ask. “A clue to her whereabouts?”
“Just some boxes in the basement. Clothing, mostly. Her vaudeville costumes. Guess she figured she wouldn’t be needing them until this whole business got cleared up, seeing as how she’s blacklisted and all. Left a note asking me and Delores to keep ’em for her and of course we will. Said she’d be back to get ’em when she could.”
“Any idea where this Muldoon can be found?”
Hap glowered and shook his head, then winced. “I’d like to find him myself. I don’t care about what happened to me. I’ll be up and around in a few days. But a man who would go to those lengths to get at Tara…”
Delores came into the room with soup for Hap and cheerfully managed to turn the talk toward Reece’s upcoming wedding.
Reece noted dimly that Delores seemed to have forgiven him for his earlier indiscretions, but it gave him little comfort. He was consumed by worry for Tara. She was in trouble. A ruthless criminal was stalking her. Her career was in ruins, and she had a young cousin to care for. Where would she go? What would she do for money? He’d been a fool and had nearly lost her, but it wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be too late for them. He wouldn’t let it be.
“There won’t be any wedding, Delores,” Reece said abruptly, his tone troubled, like a man rousing himself from a nightmare. “Not with Miriam Sedgewell, anyway.”
Delores and Hap looked dumbfounded, but there was no time to explain it to them. Delores, predictably, recovered her powers of speech first.
“What in the world are you talking about, Reece? Have you lost your mind?”
He was headed for the door.
“And where are you going?”
He turned back just long enough to smile at them reassuringly. He felt peaceful, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he could finally stand tall again. “To do something I should have done a long time ago.”
• • •
Bewilderment. Tears and recriminations. Pleas, threats and finally, acceptance. Miriam gave vent to an impressive range of overwrought and dramatically expressed emotions before finally, bitterly releasing Reece from his betrothal promise. He’d earned her undying hatred, and accepted it as his due. Miriam was not to blame in this. She cared for him in her own way, he supposed, and she would suffer for it. Society tongues would wag for some time to come over how she was thrown over by her fiancée less than two weeks before her wedding. She would be thoroughly humiliated.
He was deeply sorry but it had to be done.
Where Miriam’s anger was teary, Millinder’s was explosive. “How dare you do this! We had an agreement!”
“I cannot go through with it.”
“You have no choice. Did you forget? You gave me your word. That apparently means very little to you, but I am not in the habit of allowing my associates to renege on agreements. You will go to Miriam at once and tell her you made a dreadful mistake in breaking off the engagement. Tell her it was bridegroom’s jitters. Cold feet. That sort of thing. Tell her whatever she needs to hear for her to take you back. Beg her, if you have to.”
“No.”
“And what of my partnership with Arthur Sedgewell? He may very well take this affront to his family personally. This could endanger an extremely lucrative business venture which I’ve spent a great deal of time putting together. Have you given any thought to that? To how your rash decision might affect me?”
Reece did not answer. Nothing Millinder could say would change his mind.
“And the most despicable thing of all is what this will do to your mother. Do you care nothing for her? The poor woman is just recovering from a bout of pneumonia. The thought of attending your wedding was giving her a reason to regain her strength. She was looking forward to it more than you can know. How selfish of you, to snatch away the happiness your nuptials afforded her. In fact, she has an appointment with a seamstress tomorrow for the final alterations on her dress.” Millinder shook his head in disgust. “She deserves better than you, in a son.”
Reece stared at the wall, his mouth set in a thin line.
Emory glowered at him for a long time then opened the door leading out of the study.
“Very well, then. Leave. Go off and do whatever it is you wish. But remember the terms of our agreement, Reece. I intend to tell your mother the whole story, and you’ll have only yourself to blame for the consequences.”
Reece started to turn down the hallway, in the direction of the central staircase. “I’ll tell her myself.”
“She’s sleeping.”
“I’ll wake her. It’s unfortunate, but necessary. I think she should hear this from me.”
Emory exploded. “She’s sleeping because she’s ill! Would you disturb her, just so you can confess and ask for forgiveness like some child? Are you really that selfish? Be a man and consider her welfare for a change. Haven’t you done enough to this family already?”
Beaten, Reece left.
Emory went to Adrienne’s room and sat at her bedside, watching her sleep. Her recent illness left her breath coming in short, tortured gasps, her thin, blue-veined skin as white as parchment paper. She awakened and looked up, smiling in surprise to find him there.
“Adrienne,” he said softly. “I’m afraid I must tell you some things about Reece…”
• • •
Three days after his confrontation with Millinder, Reece found, in his mail, a note in his mother’s shaky handwriting.
Reece;<
br />
Emory has told me everything. I have tried in my heart to understand, but what you did is unforgivable. My son is a murderer. Even now, after having time to absorb it, I can scarcely credit what I’ve heard. Emory has shown me the police report, so I know it is all true. That the details of the crime never became public knowledge makes what you did no less reprehensible. And how am I to understand your duplicitous behavior since the incident?
I am actually relieved that your father is not alive to see what you’ve become. He would be so disappointed.
I have no wish to see you again, ever. Do not try to gain admittance to my home. The servants have orders to keep you out. You will no longer be receiving any monies from this family.
-Adrienne
• • •
The twenty-two square miles of Manhattan would come to seem like twenty-two million to Reece in the frustrating months that followed. He went first to the vaudeville theaters, sure that he would find someone who knew where Tara had gone. The mention of her name elicited fearful, edgy glances among her friends and fellow performers, but little information. Everyone was afraid.
He went back to the boarding house and questioned Kathleen. Through her, he sought out Lotte and her family. No, Tara had not been in contact with any of them. She did not leave her forwarding address. She did not return to the factory for work. Kathleen was particularly distressed over Tara’s plight. Reece gathered that she and Tara had had some sort of falling out, and she didn’t want to leave things that way.
With vaudeville’s doors shut to her, what sort of work would Tara seek out? The garment district that sprawled along Seventh Avenue was a likely place, but his search of the factories there yielded no results.
He tried to put himself in her position. Where would she live? What would be affordable, clean and safe from Muldoon? He searched the enclaves where Irish immigrants tended to settle, and met with more suspicion than answers. No one he talked to knew of her. She was not among the Italians on Mulberry and Bleeker Streets. Neither was she to be found with the Germans in the East 80s section of Yorkville.
He widened his search knowing that he should, instead, be worrying about his own situation. His funds were dwindling rapidly. He ignored this and continued his pursuit. The city’s wonders were lost on him as he haunted the streets, hoping to catch sight of Tara on some crowded boulevard. The tallest edifice in the world—the 60-story Woolworth building, completed only a few years earlier—was just a monolithic, Gothic-edged shadow to him. He took no notice of the autumnal feast of colors in Central Park, or of the tidy corridor of limestone mansions along Park Avenue. The towers crowned with finials and steely webwork of the still new Queensboro Bridge did not capture his attention. He likewise gave little thought to the stony cliffs of New Jersey, looming like a gray, gathering storm just beyond the Hudson River.
He toured Chinatown, in south Manhattan, where papier mache dragons danced through the densely populated streets on New Year’s Day and the air was laden with the heady scent of opium smoke. The pier-lined East River waterfront led him to the Battery, then on to Greenwich Village.
He felt half-dead in a city that glutted on life. Everywhere he looked he saw it. Fashionable matrons bustled into well-appointed shops while in the poorer districts, women sat on crumbling stoops in front of tenement buildings, nursing babies and scolding children. People swarmed to the impressive new Grand Central Station, or paid ten cents to ride the Staten Island Ferry. In Brooklyn, young lads made dodging out of the way of the dangerous new electric streetcars into a game, and dubbed themselves “Dodgers.” Time swept on. Trends caught hold, events caught fire. People played mahjongg, marched in suffragette parades and wondered why the assassination of some archduke in Europe received such wide play in the newspapers.
Many were even more surprised when foreign countries fell into a war like so many dominoes. First Austria, then Russia. Germany’s entry into the conflict prompted England to join in. Turkey followed, then Italy. France was mixed up in it somehow, as well. It was like a wildfire sweeping rapidly over the land, drawing everything it neared into its bright, malevolent combustion. After awhile the entire destructive spectacle seemed too complicated to comprehend. Which were the good countries and which were the bad? No real need to sort it all out, went popular opinion. It was a European civil war. Nothing to do with the United States.
Reece, who had roamed the globe with his parents, knew better. His search for Tara did not blind him to the fact that the world was on the verge of enormous changes.
• • •
Ten-year-old Patrick Flanagan—for that was how he thought of himself now—stood on a scrubby hill sloping upwards from the railroad yard, a pile of rocks at his feet. The faraway war did not worry him. He was planning to wage his own little battle, right here.
He took a deep breath.
Three men were unloading coal from a flatbed car. Their years of manual labor were evident in the sinewy strength, the heavily muscled arms that swung shovels full of the gleaming black mineral chunks into waiting wagons.
Patrick picked up a fist-sized rock and heaved it at one of the men, striking him in the back.
“Hey, ya bums!” he shouted. “How ’bout that?”
The man howled with surprised rage. He threw down his shovel and reached for the closest ammunition—a lump of coal—and hurled it at the boy, who dodged the projectile and cackled insolently, pantomiming a weak toss.
“You call that a throw? Ya sissy!” Attempting to add injury to insult, Patrick picked up another rock and pitched it at the railroad men, missing his targets but achieving his goal.
Enraged, the men grabbed pieces of coal and sent them flying in the boy’s direction. A furious battle ensued, with rocks flying one way and coal the other.
Patrick was thin but wiry. He whipped rocks at the men again and again, keeping pace with his larger, stronger opponents. His aim was good but theirs was better. One shot knocked his cloth cap from his head. His left cheek was soon bleeding profusely. Bruises were forming on his ribs and right thigh and he had a tear in his knickers by the time his supply of rocks was depleted.
He ducked down quickly and stuffed the chunks of coal on the ground around him into a burlap sack he’d brought for that purpose. The men threw a few more pieces at him for good measure. Their anger finally spent, they returned to their work.
Patrick slung the heavy sack over his shoulder and headed homeward through dreary streets filled with coarsely dressed, hollow-eyed people and rotting tenements. He tried to avoid looking at the bloated carcass of a horse lying in a gutter near his building, but it was impossible not to smell it. Two small boys—waifs who had no home, by the look of them—ran past. One of them reached out a leg and kicked at the dead horse, laughing at the swarm of flies he raised.
Tomorrow, or the next week, maybe, an offal cart would come and take the horse away, just as the dead wagon came to take away the tenants of his apartment building when they gave in to consumption and influenza and unnamed diseases that stole your breath away in the night. Babies in his neighborhood died off even faster than adults. Maybe when they got a good look at the world and saw what awaited them they decided to go right back to heaven, he thought morosely.
What if his mother died? The thought aroused in him a razor-edged pang of anxiety. He knew she wasn’t his real mother, and she wasn’t a very good mother, but she was the only person he had in the whole world. It mattered little that he took care of her more than she of him. Young as he was, Patrick knew that Mrs. Flanagan was not a strong woman. Not strong in her mind, not at all. She was driven by fears and fantasies, often talking to voices that only she could hear. He wished he could hear his sister Tara’s voice again. But that was impossible, because he wasn’t daft in the head like Mrs. Flanagan. He only saw what was actually there. That’s how he knew he had to be the one to take charge of things.
Patrick wondered vaguely if one of his ribs was broken. It pained him enough, that was s
ure. He shifted the bag to his other shoulder and tried to take only short, shallow breaths. It hurt less that way.
He’d done well today. He was sore, in places, and the blood drying on his cheek made his skin itch, but he and his “mother” would have enough coal to warm them for four or five days. Maybe even a week.
• • •
Frustrated that his efforts had not succeeded in turning up any useful information on Tara, Reece engaged the services of a man reputed to be an expert in locating people. It would further deplete his savings, but he didn’t let it deter him. He instructed the man to search all the boroughs.
Reece himself changed addresses. The income he earned from his aviation work was not sufficient to keep him in his fashionable rented brownstone on the Upper East Side. For the first time in his life, he was forced to regard money as a scarce resource. Unfamiliar decisions had to be made. Should he secure a modest apartment and end the lease on the rented warehouse which housed the prototypes he was working on? He could not afford both.
The warehouse won out. He moved a cot into it and slept there until Hap found out about it quite by accident one day, spying Reece’s makeshift living arrangements when he came to inspect some new engine modifications. Deeply and loudly insulted that his friend had not turned to him for help, Hap insisted that Reece come and stay at the boarding house free of charge.
“After all you done for me and Delores, Reece, I won’t take no for an answer. Why, we wouldn’t even have the boarding house if it wasn’t for you! And we’ve got an empty room. I know it’s not the fancy lodgings you’re used to, but—”
A Song Across the Sea Page 24