“Oh.” I’d never considered any of this, had not thought much of the appearance of my boots beyond special occasions, of which daily life was not one. My greatest concern had been that my boots be comfortable enough to walk in all day. They were clean and polished and I’d congratulated myself on their practicality. Lovise may have congratulated herself on other things – delicacy and extravagance. Perhaps I could temper my dependability with a bit of both.
“Once you secure a position, one of your first purchases should be a good pair of boots. Until then, don’t worry, I’ll lend you one of mine.”
“All right.” I was skeptical. “And how will I find this mysterious gentleman who is going to accompany me from shop to shop?”
“I can lend you one of those as well.” Lovise winked.
Six
Though his manners were probably fine, and he was very well dressed, the man who Lovise arranged to accompany me around to the shops seemed a little rough, unfinished. His face was heavy, the skin thick on his cheeks, sagging at his chin. He had the teeth of someone who wasn’t from the city. Even I could see this, though he tried to hide his mouth with a thick moustache. I looked at his boots. They were so polished that they looked wet, laces thick enough to seem to cast a small shadow over the gleaming leather. He bowed slightly toward me, one eyebrow cocked, mouth clamped over those teeth, so all seemed a mockery of proper manners.
We went into only the most high-end shops, none of which I’d been in yet as they’d seemed too exclusive to me. The man spoke, introduced me as Miss Inger-Marie Jüül of Gudumlund estate and asked if my assistance might be needed in any way. The shop ladies looked at him as though he was suggesting something scandalous and regarded me as though I was either to be pitied or reviled. I looked down at Lovise’s boots on my feet and concentrated on the pain radiating from my cramped toes, aching heels. When we left the shops, I would give the slightest, most discreet nod and almost a curtsy, as though to convey that they were wrong. I was not the girl they thought me to be; this man had no purchase over me. I owed him nothing. I didn’t believe I did. By the end of the afternoon, the man seemed more hindrance than help, and I thought of the grasping quality of both him and Lovise, how they pretended at wealth and class. How thin their veneers. How cheap Lovise now seemed after a day spent not with her but with the man she’d sent me out with as though it were a favour.
As with most things that set our fate, it only takes one – in this case, one shop, one shop matron to ask me some questions about my experience and the position I sought. I was honest about my limited experience, equally so about the position. “Whatever you see fit for me to do.”
“Well, as it happens, one of my dressers left unexpectedly this week. I can only imagine why.” She directed this to the man. “I wouldn’t usually hire anyone off the street, but I am in an awkward position with her departure. Can you begin tomorrow?”
I felt such relief when we left the shop. We walked a few steps away from the storefront and I turned to the man, smiled at him for the first time that afternoon. He suggested we have supper together. “We’ll celebrate. It makes me feel good to be able to help a young lady out. It’s as much my celebration as yours.”
I felt like I’d been too hard on him in my mind, had judged Lovise harshly in her absence. Who was I to pass such judgment? Both had helped me.
I went into the supper club through the ladies’ door and met him in the dining room. As we ate together, I attempted to make conversation, but I wasn’t sure what was proper in this situation. I praised the food in the club, but I kept my comments brief. I didn’t want to come across as effusive. The man didn’t seem to mind. He smiled and nodded and ordered several drinks. I declined and he seemed happy to drink without me. When I suggested that I was fine to walk back to the pension on my own, he swallowed hard, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his palm splayed toward me, and waved his arm for a waiter. “Absolutely not,” he said, spitting a bit as he did. “I will escort you home.”
We were a block away from the pension, nearly there. “Come.” His voice gravelled in his throat. I followed him into a lane, and it wasn’t until we were shadowed from the street lamps that I questioned why I had. When he turned to me, I thought he might give me an explanation or pay me a compliment, but instead he pushed me up against a building so forcefully my hat fell off. I bent to try to reach it, and the man slammed me against the wall by my shoulders again. “Got you a nice little job, didn’t I?” His lips strained against his awful teeth, eyes glazed in a way I’d seen with animals in distress. “A nice little job for a nice little girl.” He took my hair in his fist and pulled my head back. Shock of cold air against my neck, my hair strained against my scalp. When his hold on my hair loosened, I thought, that’s it, that’s done, but it wasn’t. His hand became a clamp on my skull, and he slammed my mouth up against his, his tongue forcing open my lips. He smelled of smoke and sour alcohol and some deeper, base, more disgusting smell, not unlike that of a dead stag that my brothers brought home from the northern woods after hunting season. He jerked his head back. “Oh, you’re going to hold that little mouth of yours tight, are you? I like a tight mouth.” He pushed me down onto my knees in front of him.
The man hooked my mouth with his thumb and pulled it open as he unbuttoned his pants. He pushed himself at me, his wretched smell, the wire of his hair. He shoved himself against my nose, my chin, sloppy in his need. I tried to close my mouth against his thumb, against the sour smell, against him, but he wrenched it open and forced himself in. I could feel how he hardened, and I gagged so much that I thought my throat would seize. I couldn’t breathe, concentrated on how my vision was going black. I would see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing but that black. I stayed in the blackness until my head slammed back and stars spilled across my closed vision. I rolled to my side, then went forward onto my hands, a line of spit coming out of my mouth until I was able to vomit. I emptied my mouth of him, my stomach spasming.
“Stop that!” he yelled. “Get up. Get up now.” He pulled me up by the back of my dress, as though I were a kitten. Once I was standing, he handed me his handkerchief. I wiped my mouth, smelling him on the fabric, felt the saliva build in my mouth again. He cleared his throat, once, twice, then said, “You all right, miss?” his voice softer than it had been all day. I nodded. “Here, look at me.” I did. I let him straighten out my clothing, allowed his hands to push the hair off my face. When he was finished, he smiled, looked proud, congratulatory. It seemed he might reach over and pat my head as though I were a child. He walked me the remaining block back to the pension, bowed slightly and took my hand at the door, pushed coins into my palm and tipped his hat.
One might think that I would refuse the money, throw it at his feet as I spat into his face. I wonder if that would’ve been the larger thing to do, but I was so small. I clutched them like a child, felt the coins’ heat in my hold. In my room, I spilled them onto my bed, brought my palms to my face, smelled the tang of metal. I returned the boots to Lovise’s side of the room and sat staring at her as she slept, then lay on the bed on top of the bedclothes. Every time I felt as though I wanted to clutch my knees to my chest and sob, I lay straight and still, told myself that I was stronger than that, that I cared less. A shudder crawled along my skin, burrowed in, and I got out of bed, gave up on sleep.
I made my way to where I’d seen Lovise take a bottle from out of the narrow chest at the foot of her bed, heard the tight gulps of her throat as she swallowed, the quiet smack of her lips. Blood banged in my ears, my palms itchy with sweat as I tried to ease the cork out quietly. When it left the bottle, the noise inflated in the room, but Lovise didn’t stir. I waited a minute, a minute more, then brought the bottle to my mouth. What was it? Brandy or moonshine, I didn’t know. It seared against my lips, marked a flame down my throat, burst into heat in my stomach.
As tense as I’d been earlier, I lay as loose, cushioned by
warmth and then buffeted by cold as dawn blanched the room. I got up and went down the hall to wash myself with water that had been sitting in a pot on the radiator all night. I dressed in my cleanest, plainest, most humble clothes and boots and went to work.
The shop lady outfitted me again from undergarments to satin-laced shoes as she showed me how I would dress the ladies who shopped at the store. “This is the proper way to roll a silk stocking. This is how you arrange the stays.” And finally, “This is the last time I will show you any of this; I expect you to do this as gently and as perfectly as I have shown you from now on.”
“Of course,” I answered. I had followed her fingers across my skin, her palms smoothing fabric as she charted out not only the right way to dress a lady, but a new map of my body. The gentle neutrality of her hands absolved me as much as the night before had stained me. Tarnish and absolution, I could carry both. I considered what to do with the money all day. It was a small amount but enough to buy a ticket home to visit my family. Instead, I went in and out of banks until I found one that would allow me to open my own account without it being countersigned by a man. “My father is dead,” I told them. “I have no brothers.” Both lies.
“Perhaps you should wait until you get married,” one banker suggested.
“I don’t believe I will be marrying any time soon.”
Who’s to know if, in that moment, I thought this to be true? It hardly matters anymore.
Seven
I moved into a thin building cramped between two others on a narrow street behind the Royal Theatre. I lived there with three floors of young women, each of us in simply appointed rooms, only those facing the road with windows. Originally for actresses, it also housed those like me, who worked in high-end shops, and a couple of girls who modelled clothing. The girls who had been there longest had the front rooms, if they wanted them, with the understanding that the rest of us would crowd toward the windows, jostle to feel the sun on our skin through glass. In warm weather, we would push panes open, dangle things out the window – scarves, garters, even our hair, loosed from pins, as we leaned into the street – until we were reprimanded as though we were children. No men were permitted in the residence and there was a small staff – a cleaning girl, a cook who provided breakfasts and light dinners. There was an older woman, a spinster and patroness of the arts, who ensured the household was kept in a way fitting for the young ladies who lodged there.
My employer had recommended me to the residence. “We’ve a certain standard to uphold in this shop – each of us do, and that extends beyond our working hours.” She looked at me closely, as though to gauge whether I understood. “The residence is held in high esteem. It’s an appropriate place for a single young lady like yourself to live.”
“I understand.”
I woke early, breakfasted, walked to work and back. Some days I would stop at the library, others I would sit on a park bench and read. I had learned French in school and was teaching myself English. I began work at ten in the morning, finished at six each evening, an hour on either end of opening hours to arrange and steam the clothes, unpack any new shipments, lay out and later lock away the jewellery. When I returned to the residence, I would peel away the garments that kept me so tightly presented each workday, work my fingers into points of pain and pressure in my feet, circle my ankles, stretch my arms overhead and feel the slip of my undergarments ride along my skin.
I knew my place in our residence. There were young women who were more attractive, some who were better bred. Some were more adventurous; others took their roles as ladies very seriously. I was one of the good ones – quiet, kind, petite. In a word, unintimidating. I was one of the women who the others would come to saying, “Oh, Marie, what am I going to do?” faces sloppy with tears, or dry-eyed, mouths in slack lines set by exhaustion. Most, if not all, of the time, the problem was men. Men pushing their hands under skirts, between stays. Men getting in or being kept out. Men moving on or wanting more or marrying other women. What did I know of men? Very little, but I suspect this is why the other women came to me – they told me things for which I had little context to get an honest opinion, to titillate, to make their own lives seem more meaningful, perhaps, in the drama they created. I didn’t know why they came to me, but I listened and offered little advice. I hardly felt qualified.
* * *
Nearly a year after moving into the residence, I returned from work and found a man standing on the top step. I cleared my throat as I approached the stairs. He turned and smiled as though he were expecting me, then leaned against the ledge, arms folded in front of him, and blocked the door. I stopped before the last two stairs. “Can I help you?”
“Perhaps.” He didn’t say anything else, held his mouth as though his bottom lip were pushed up against his teeth, top lip plumped out. A smirk or a suppressed laugh. I looked to his eyes for a cue. He raised an eyebrow, his eyes directly on mine when I met his.
I tried to keep my own expression neutral. My mouth was tight and heat gathered under my clothes, pressed into my ribs, as if with the effort.
His eyebrow dropped and he nodded toward the residence. “Do you live here?”
I cleared my throat and kept my eyes on his. “Yes.” If this was a test or a joke, I wouldn’t stand down.
He pushed off the ledge and fiddled with his collar as he looked down the street. “So does my cousin.”
“Oh?” His cousin could’ve been any one of a dozen other girls.
“Anita.” He looked back at me. “Do you know her?”
“Yes, of course.” She was one of the actresses. It wasn’t unusual for men to come around for them, even pretend to be family to gain entry.
“I’m visiting from Zealand and would like to call on her.” He’d taken a step down toward me, top lip parting into a smile over teeth perfect but for one rogue incisor. “You can let me in?”
“No, I can’t.” My voice sounded flat, tired. Did he really think this appeal would work? “No gentlemen are permitted in our residence. You’ll have to make other arrangements.” I spoke as though I was reading from a posted page of rules.
“No gentlemen permitted?” He raised his hands, palms toward me, and then dropped them. “What about a simple workingman?”
He didn’t look simple, or much like a workingman, his pants pleated, jacket too long. I suspected he wore suspenders rather than a belt. More like the men in the theatre district than my brothers back home. I didn’t answer and the man sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “Yes, that’s what the woman who answered the door told me.”
I had a hard time not looking at one errant curl, held upright as if by its own will. “And you hoped someone else would come along and give you a different answer?”
His laugh was soft, kind. “That, and I was considering what to do next.” He looked at me directly again, and I could see a scar nicked into the top of one of his cheeks. The man reached out his hand. “You can come up, you know. I don’t want to keep you from your own door.”
I took his hand and walked past him to the landing above. “It’s hardly my own.”
“No, I suppose not, if you have to adhere to someone else’s rules.”
“Only those I would apply myself.”
“Well, can you pass on a message to my cousin – or, can you ask her to come to the door?”
“Oh, you weren’t told? Anita will be at the theatre tonight.”
“The theatre? What will she be doing there?”
Perhaps he wasn’t a suitor, but he certainly didn’t seem to know his cousin well. “She’ll be on stage.”
“Oh, of course she will be.” He looked out to the street, hand against his mouth, then he dropped it, looked back at me. “Well, then, I guess I should see her perform. Would you like to accompany me?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“To the play. What time will it start?”
>
“It must be starting soon.” I reached for the door. “I’m sorry, I can’t come.”
“You’ve a prior engagement? Or perhaps I’ve not been enough of a gentleman?” He winked, then began stepping down the stairs. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I’ve been a bother, I can tell.” He turned and took another step or two, then stopped to face me again. “Unlike Anita, I’m never sure how to act, especially when in front of a young lady as beautiful as you are.” He put his fingers to his forehead and bowed slightly, a kind of salute.
I stood with my hand on the door handle, watched him go. It had been a year, I reminded myself. Nearly a year since I’d moved to the city, found good employment, a respectable place to live. A year of vigilance at our barred doorway, turning away the men who came for my flatmates. This man had come for someone else, as well, but it had been I who was there – why shouldn’t I go with him?
I called, “Wait!” Something held in my throat, tight and round, like a small plum lodged there. The man turned, slowly, as though I was going to say something to further disappoint him. “I’ll come with you.” He smiled and folded his hands, stood up straight, stiff, as though he were a porter or wait staff, playing a part.
* * *
The play was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which, I knew from my flatmates, played every couple of years between premieres. “You’ve seen this before?”
I hadn’t. “I’ve not yet seen Anita in this role. I’ve heard she plays it very well.” I was inventing myself as I went along.
I’d found out that the man was Mr. Bertram Bruun, visiting from the seaside village of Tisvilde. “She’s not playing Nora, is she?” he asked.
Little Fortress Page 5