Love, Alice

by Barbara Davis

  “Yes. He was. And you’re right about his parents. They just knew he’d come to his senses one day and want a normal life.”

  “Ah yes, a pension plan and two-point-two children.”

  Dovie studied him through lowered lashes, the hardened line of his mouth, the sharp flare of nostrils, as if he’d just caught a whiff of something rancid. Everything about him was bristling with hostility, though she hadn’t the slightest idea why. She’d never met the man.

  “So, you’re down from New York,” she said, hoping to prod him into opening up.

  “I’m in town for a few weeks, visiting my sister. I thought I’d pay my respects. Nice flowers,” he said, pointing to the fresh bouquet. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was also hoping to talk to you.”

  This came as something of a surprise to Dovie, since his initial reaction to finding her there seemed to imply quite the opposite. “You dropped by the cemetery on the off chance that I’d be here?”

  “No. I really did come to pay my respects. I would have called, but I didn’t have your number, and you’re not in the book. I knew you worked at a museum, but Charleston has about a hundred of those, so I figured I was out of luck. And then here you are.”

  “Why talk to me now that William’s dead? We never talked when he was alive.”

  “I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me with something. I wanted to wait until things . . . died down before I came around, but I thought it was finally time. There’s a piece in William’s collection I’d like to have—as a keepsake. It’s the one he was working on when he died.”

  Dovie bit her lip, ashamed to admit she didn’t know what he’d been working on. “I’m sorry. With the wedding plans and all, I’m afraid I lost track. Besides, he was always rather secretive about it. I thought it might be a wedding present, so I didn’t ask questions.”

  “It wasn’t a wedding present. It was something he was doing for me. And I’d very much like to have it.”

  Dovie thought of the studio key lying in a bowl on her dresser. She could take him there if she wanted to, let him in, but she really had no right. The studio, and everything in it, belonged to William’s parents now. “You’ll need to speak to William’s parents about that. It all belongs to them now.”

  “I’ve been trying to do just that since I got into town, but I haven’t had any luck getting them to return my calls. Not that I’m surprised.”

  Dovie was surprised. The Prescotts could be snobbish at times but she’d never known them to shirk the proper social forms. “Why should they refuse to return your calls?”

  Kristopher stared down at his shoes. “That’s rather a long story—and a private one, if you don’t mind.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do mind. William and I were engaged. Anything to do with him has to do with me. We didn’t have secrets.”

  “Well, he had at least one, if the sleeping pills are any indication.”

  The words hit Dovie like a dash of icy water. “I think I get why the Prescotts won’t take your calls.”

  “Touché,” Kristopher said, with a frosty nod. “I’m sorry. That was cruel, and I’m not usually cruel. I’m just . . . Jesus, this thing with the Prescotts is making me crazy. I’ve come all this way. I can’t—I won’t—go back without what I came for. But I’m not very optimistic about my chances. Which is why I was hoping you might put in a good word.”

  Dovie gaped at him. Until ten minutes ago she’d never laid eyes on the man. And in that ten minutes he’d managed to not only insult her looks, but question her relationship with her fiancé. Now he was trying to enlist her help in something that was none of her business. “What makes you think anything I say to the Prescotts will make a difference?”

  “You were about to marry their son, give them grandchildren, make all their dreams come true. They must love you, while I’m just the enemy.”

  Dovie scowled at him. He was probably overstating it, but she got what he was saying. What he didn’t know, what almost no one knew, was that William’s parents had grown rather distant since the funeral, their phone calls to check on her growing more and more infrequent—and more and more strained.

  “Don’t take it personally,” she told him. “They’ve shut out a lot of William’s friends since the funeral. It’s like they’d rather pretend they never had a son than deal with questions about his death. Suicide isn’t supposed to happen in good families, I guess. Anyway, you’re going in with two strikes against you—the friend thing and the agent thing.”

  “Not if you set up the meeting . . . and then went with me.”

  “Go with you?”

  “You could help smooth things over, break the ice.”

  “When did this become my problem?”

  “Billy said his parents were crazy about you. Especially his mother. According to them you were his perfect match in every way.”

  Dovie narrowed her eyes, perplexed by the almost tangible resentment in his voice. Was it possible Bloom saw her as a threat to his interests? Had he been worried that William might, in fact, do as his parents hoped and seek a more traditional means of supporting his wife? It would certainly explain his hostility. “Look, I appreciate what you’re up against, Mr. Bloom, but I’m really not the one . . .” The words died away. “You called him Billy?”

  A shadow darkened Kristopher’s face but was quickly gone. “It was a joke between us. It stuck.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a card, handing it to her. “Look, give me a call if you change your mind. This is important to me, and I could really use your help. If it counts for anything, Billy would want you to do this.”

  Dovie said nothing as he turned to go, just stuffed his card into the pocket of her jacket and watched him walk away.

  Billy?

  Dovie stifled a yawn, then gave her shoulders a roll, attempting to ease the knot that had taken up residence between her shoulder blades. She’d been trying all evening to shake this afternoon’s encounter with the prickly Mr. Bloom, a feat that had proven more challenging than she’d expected, despite spending the past four hours researching Magdalene laundries, as institutions like Blackhurst had been called in their day.

  It had been slow going at first, but eventually articles began popping up—each worse than the last—and it soon become evident that Blackhurst had been far from the only one of its kind. While the majority of Magdalene asylums existed in Ireland, similar facilities had operated in England, Scotland, Australia, and the United States.

  It seemed the matter had come to the public’s attention in 1993, when a mass grave containing one hundred and thirty-three unidentified bodies was discovered on the grounds of one of the convents in Dublin. Once the media got hold of the story, the floodgates had opened, and women began stepping forward with vivid accounts of life in the laundries.

  The stories were all too familiar. Women locked up with no say in the matter, hostage to both church and state, to the tune of thirty thousand in Ireland alone. But perhaps most astonishing was the fact that the last Magdalene asylum hadn’t closed its doors until 1996. It was hard to believe such abuses had prevailed so late into the twentieth century, and even harder to believe that after all the publicity, the Church still refused to acknowledge the cruelties or apologize to the women who had suffered at the hands of such institutions.

  Penitents.

  That was what they called the inmates, some as young as eleven and twelve. Even now the word made Dovie furious. It should have been hard to believe such ghastly tales, to imagine being shut up in a place where every moment of every day was dictated by someone else, where even your name was taken from you, where you were force-fed a steady diet of guilt and shame, where the workday was twelve backbreaking hours long, and meals consisted of stale bread and watered-down soup, where you were forgotten by friends and forsaken by family. Voiceless. Friendles
s. Hopeless.

  It should have been hard, but it wasn’t.

  It wrenched Dovie’s soul to think of the lives that had been hijacked in the name of piety, most beyond any hope of reclamation. Without a family member to vouch for them, or money to pay their way out, many of the women had remained in the asylums for the rest of their lives, often taking religious vows. She thought of Marianne, the young novice who had befriended Alice in the infirmary, her only option to take the veil and remain at Blackhurst with the women who had taken her child—a different kind of victim perhaps, but a victim just the same.

  There had been little mention of Blackhurst in the articles she had managed to find, other than a few brief details of its fate. It had become a pensioner’s home for a while, and then a hospital for the mentally ill, before being torn down in 1993 after a fire ravaged at least half the dormitories. There was a certain savage satisfaction in the thought of Blackhurst burning to the ground, the stone walls that had imprisoned Alice and countless other girls pulled down to rubble. And yet the damage remained. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women still living, bearing scars they would never be rid of and wondering what had become of the babies they’d been made to give up.

  Unfortunately, her actual mission, finding some clue as to where Alice’s child might have ended up, had resulted in disappointment. When it came to records, either their existence or their whereabouts, she had also come up empty. She had even researched the Sacred Heart Children’s Society, only to find the agency had disbanded sometime in the late ’70s, its records reportedly lost when the roof of the warehouse where they were being stored collapsed and the building subsequently flooded. And so she was back where she started, exhausted but no wiser.

  It felt good to stand and stretch, and even better to leave the laptop behind, to shake off the melancholy that had stolen over her while scanning dozens of sad-eyed sepia images. It was chilly on the back porch, but soothing, too, as she stepped out into the darkness, listening with closed eyes to the muffled chorus of night things. She loved the sound of the marsh at night, the steady chirp of unseen wings, the croak of soft green throats. It was quieter now that summer was over, but the magic was still there, the pulse of life throbbing just beyond the porch railing, a reminder that despite disappointment, tragedy, and unspeakable loss, life went on.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Dovie sat bolt upright in bed, heart thumping as she threw back the tangled sheets and touched her feet to the floor. She had dreamed of William again, of the terrible hours and days after his suicide. The ringing phone that had jarred her from a sound sleep the morning after her bridal shower. The eerily calm voice on the other end. William’s brother, telling her he’d just found William on the bathroom floor in his studio apartment. An empty prescription bottle belonging to his mother. A half-drained bottle of his father’s Bowman Islay single-malt scotch.

  And then she was at the cemetery, wearing nothing but the Gamecocks jersey she usually slept in, staring at the gaping wound they had dug in the earth for her fiancé. The reek of lilies and Celia Prescott’s signature Shalimar. The sun glinting tawny and warm off William’s rosewood coffin. And all around her, a sea of faces, saddened, stunned, and just a little relieved that it wasn’t their loved one who’d chosen to leave family and friends in such a terrible way.

  But this time there had been a new face in the crowd, one she knew, but didn’t. Kristopher Bloom’s blue eyes had been cold and unreadable as they locked with hers. Was it reproach she saw there? Or a plea of some kind? She had no idea. She only knew that something wordless had passed between them in the dream. Some odd sense of knowing—but knowing what?

  It took a moment to remember what she had done with his card, but she finally found it in the pocket of the jacket she had worn yesterday. She had tucked it away without looking at it, certain she’d have no use for it. She peered down at the heavy gray stock with its crisp linen finish and clean block letters.

  KRISTOPHER BLOOM

  FINE ART

  NEW YORK . SAN FRANCISCO . LONDON

  She was dialing the number before she even looked at the time, hoping Mr. Bloom hadn’t planned to sleep in. The answering voice was gritty and thick, but at eight o’clock on a Sunday she supposed he had a right to that.

  “Mr. Bloom?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Dovie Larkin. I was wondering if you’d meet me for coffee this morning.”

  There was a pause, a clearing of the throat. “Yes. Where?”

  “There’s a place on Meeting Street, the Daily Bread. Do you know it?”

  “No, but I’ll find it.”

  “In about an hour?”

  “That’s fine.” The line went quiet, and for a moment Dovie thought he’d hung up. After another moment, his voice came again. “Thank you, Dovie.”

  Dovie felt the faint niggling of guilt as she ended the call. She knew what he thought, that she had reconsidered his request to help him smooth the way with the Prescotts. She hadn’t. In fact, she hadn’t given it another thought. She had her own reasons for wanting to meet this morning. Maybe she was crazy. Practically everything she did these days was. But for more than a year now she’d been sitting at William’s graveside, waiting for some kind of answer. Perhaps Kristopher Bloom was that answer, or could at least supply it. At any rate it was worth a cup of coffee and an hour on a Sunday morning.

  The smell of fresh-baked bread greeted Dovie as she entered the café, reminding her of Sunday mornings growing up, her mother in the kitchen, up to her elbows in flour and dough, an apron tied about her waist. She really had tried to create a Leave it to Beaver life for her family. Maybe she’d stop by the house later, offer to help out in the garden, or take her downtown for brunch.

  She was unbuttoning her jacket when she spotted Kristopher, hunched over a corner table, a cup of something tall and frothy cradled between his palms. She lifted her chin in greeting, feeling awkward all of a sudden, as if she were on a job interview, or a blind date. She could feel his eyes as she waited at the counter for her macchiato. On impulse, she asked the barista to throw in a pair of bear claws. A bribe of pastry couldn’t hurt.

  She kept her face neutral as she set down the coffee and plates, and took the chair opposite Kristopher. “I ordered you a bear claw. They do the best bear claws in town here. I figure it’s the least I can do after dragging you out of bed on a Sunday morning.”

  Kristopher glanced up from his cup with red-rimmed eyes. He looked like hell, unshaven and gaunt, like a man who’d gone without sleep for far too many nights. Still, he was handsome in a lean, brutal sort of way, one might almost say sensual.

  “I’m glad you called. And a little surprised. I was an ass yesterday. I’m sorry.”

  Dovie tore off a corner of her pastry and popped it in her mouth, stalling for time. She had no idea how to reply, or how to go about asking what she’d come to ask. How did one broach such a subject? By the way, do you happen to know why my fiancé swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills right before our wedding?

  “When did you last see William?” she asked, steering the conversation toward less acrimonious ground. “I mean, how long before . . .”

  “Less than a week. He was up for the show in Soho.”

  “That’s right. I forgot about Soho. We barely saw each other that week. I was up to my ears in wedding plans, and William was locked away in his studio. I sometimes wonder—”

  “Don’t.” The word seemed to burst out of him, ragged and angry. “Don’t say you wonder if there was some way you could have stopped him. That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

  Dovie nodded. “Do you wonder, too?”

  “Every day.”

  “Did you know he was . . . thinking about it?”

  Kristopher looked both stunned and angry. “Don’t you think I would have stopped him, if I had?”

  “I just though
t he might have talked to you, as a friend. That maybe you’d noticed a change in him, some clue that he was depressed.”

  “Depressed?” He repeated the word as if she’d just said something ridiculous.

  “It is the usual state of mind for people contemplating suicide.”

  “I guess I just can’t imagine what he could have had to be depressed about. His career was taking off. He was about to get married. The world was his oyster.”

  Dovie set down her cup and crossed her arms. “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get all snarky, like I’m the enemy or something.”

  Kristopher picked up his fork and began flaking bits of pastry off onto his plate. “I’m just so sick of everyone thinking they knew what would and wouldn’t make Billy happy. No one was ever interested in what he wanted. They were too busy planning his life for him. Now that he’s dead, people suddenly care. It pisses me off, is all.”

  Dovie nodded. On some level, she got what he was saying, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was part of the everyone Kristopher was talking about. “The Billy thing,” she said, changing the subject. “How did that happen?”

  Kristopher put down his fork and picked up his cup, sipping while a small smile formed. “A friend of mine, Brian, owns a club on the West Side. William and I went for drinks after one of his shows. I introduced him as William, but Brian decided then and there that his nickname was Billy Boy. And that was it. I never called him anything but Billy. None of us did, actually. He wasn’t William Prescott the Third when he was with us. He was just . . . Billy.”

  “And he was okay with that?”

  “I think he was, yes. He was suffocating down here, trying to please all the people in his life.”

  “People like me, you mean?”

  “It was his parents, mostly. You just bought the package they were selling. Not your fault. And for the record, he never blamed you.”

  He was talking in riddles. “I have no idea what package you’re referring to, but thank you for that. I think.”