by John Jakes
“Yes, Peg’s thirty-three. Well, she’s taken care of now. That leaves only me.”
He bent to kiss her cheek. “A poor, benighted twenty-four.”
“Practically an old granny!” Her smile seemed forced.
“As long as your family believes we’re married, they won’t fret about—”
“Matthew Kent,” she interrupted, stopping by a news kiosk. “Let us not debate that again. You know we don’t agree. I came with you to Paris of my own free will, but that does not change certain facts about our situation. My parents believing we’re married and the two of us actually being married is not the same thing and never will be. Really”—she gave a little shake of her head—“sometimes you’re terribly stubborn. We really must sit down for a serious discussion about this whole situation—and soon.”
Right then he would cheerfully have bashed her sister Peg square in the face. The holiday hadn’t helped their relationship at all. It had only exacerbated the unhappiness developing in her. His worst fears were coming true—though he was puzzled about one thing. It didn’t seem like her to be upset by her older sister finally catching a man and scheduling a wedding. Was there anything else behind her quietly determined statement of a moment ago?
ii
They lived in two rooms in a house on the Rue Saint-Vincent, a pleasant, winding street. The house belonged to Madame Rochambeau, a widow whose husband had been the well-paid manager of one of the gypsum quarries on the Butte de Montmartre. She spoke of the departed gentleman fondly. A lusty spouse, she said, though always with gypsum dust in his pores—the “plaster of Paris” known the world over.
Madame Rochambeau had been left in reasonably comfortable circumstances. She owned the house without debt. But it was still necessary for her to supplement her income by taking in boarders. She fulfilled the duties of concierge herself, thus realizing an economy. She liked Matt and Dolly, but was less enthusiastic about their friends the Strelniks who occupied the other two rented rooms with their infant son Anton.
“Ah, Madame Kent!”
The landlady jumped up from the flowerbed she’d been cultivating and rushed to embrace Dolly. She was a huge breadloaf of a woman with a cheery, mole-dotted face. Matt closed the door to the street and leaned against the wall.
Madame Rochambeau was a militant Catholic, and didn’t like a great many modern things, including the land speculators who were invading her little suburb, and the Bohemians who practiced “free love.” He and Dolly had felt it prudent to fib about their marital status to her as well. To reinforce the fib, Dolly wore a cheaply plated gold ring on her left hand. Matt had bought the ring from a junk dealer.
“I am delighted to see you home.” Madame Rochambeau pinched Dolly’s cheek. “Your mama and papa fed you well. There is a little extra under the chin, eh?”
Old meddler, Matt thought, smiling. Always saying what she thinks!
“Oh, maybe just a little, just a little—” Dolly acted quite flustered about having a weight gain pointed out. Matt hadn’t even noticed.
“There is a piece of mail for your husband,” Madame Rochambeau said with an admiring glance at Matt’s wide shoulders. “The late post brought it. The quarters have been swept and all the dirty laundry put in a pile.”
Ruefully, Dolly looked at him. He was supposed to have maintained the rooms in reasonable order while she was gone but of course had completely forgotten, being occupied with the problems of his work.
“Well, I’m home,” she said softly with a wry little smile. “And nothing’s changed.” She started inside.
Matt swung the portmanteau onto his shoulder and squeezed Madame’s arm affectionately as he passed beneath the branches of the old plane tree. The landlady turned scarlet and covered a giggle with her hand. Above the garden, the vanes of one of Montmartre’s windmills turned lazily in the fading light.
Their rooms were in the south wing, which they entered from a door directly off the garden. Pattering footsteps ahead of Dolly told Matt the Strelniks’ child was romping in the corridor.
“Ah, Anton, you imp!” she exclaimed, bending to pick up the year-old toddler. She laughed and patted the gurgling child. His face curved into an immense, snaggle-toothed smile. She kissed him and rumpled his thick russet hair.
From the doorway across from theirs drifted the odor of boiling cabbage. A woman in her late twenties appeared. She was slender, drably dressed. Her delicately pretty face resembled that of an Italian Madonna, though in fact she was Russian.
“Dolly! Matt said you would be home today!” she cried in halting English.
“And you’ve been practicing, Leah. That was very good.”
The young woman blushed. Because Leah’s husband talked about emigrating to America someday, Dolly had volunteered to teach her the language.
Leah dabbed her sweaty cheek with an apron. “But while I was practicing, it seems my son was scampering about naked again.”
Dolly handed the little boy to his mother with a particularly fond and lingering look, Matt thought.
Tartly, the English girl said, “Whatever you’re doing, you should make Sime tend the baby once in a while.”
“Here, don’t pick on the poor man when he can’t defend himself!” Matt laughed, slipping past her to open their door. He slid the portmanteau in. Bless Madame Rochambeau for straightening up after he left for the station!
A gruff, amiable voice said, “But he is able to defend himself. Welcome back, Dolly.”
In French more correctly pronounced than his, she said, “Thank you, Sime.”
Matt waved. “Hello, Sime. Figured out how to overthrow the Emperor yet?”
Leah hung Anton from the crook of her arm and put her other hand to her lips. “Sssh! That sort of thing isn’t safe to say, even in jest.”
Sime Strelnik scratched the front of his wine-spotted shirt. He was a short, overweight man in his mid-thirties. He had round, innocent-looking dark eyes and a beard and hair the color of fire. Strelnik had been born in Russian Georgia and had come to Paris via Berlin, the home of his only living relative, an older brother. Both of them were active in the workingman’s movement. Strelnik carried a card in the First International founded in London in 1864. He spent half the day sleeping, the other half reading or writing pamphlets, and most of the night attending meetings with people Madame Rochambeau characterized as “atheistic, unwashed and sinister.”
For Matt’s benefit, Strelnik had several times tried to differentiate between the various hues and tints of radicalism found in those with whom he associated. There were Jacobins, Proudhonists, Internationalists, Blanquists and several other variations. It was all a meaningless and uninteresting hodgepodge to Matt. But not to his landlady.
“One doesn’t need labels to know what they are. It’s simple. They’re rapists and criminals. Lawless anarchists bent on stealing the wealth of hardworking men and the virtue of decent women. I admit Mr. Strelnik doesn’t look like that, which is somewhat confusing, but I know he’ll show his true colors if the Reds ever stage another insurrection such as the one in forty-eight. I suppose he wants to bring that mad revolutionary Blanqui back from exile in Brussels, too. And where do you suppose he gets the money to send all those thick letters to Berlin and St. Petersburg? The authorities will inquire into that mysterious correspondence one of these days, you mark my word!”
Leah passed the child to her husband. “Kindly see that he gets a diaper before he catches cold. I’ve supper to fix, you know. Dolly, it really is wonderful to have you home again.”
She disappeared. Strelnik dangled the child from one forearm and wedged a cigar stub into his mouth with his other hand. He lit the cigar. The smoke set Anton to coughing. Dolly’s eyes narrowed with disapproval.
The paunchy man hoisted the baby over his shoulder and patted the bare rump. “I don’t know why you make snide jokes about the Empire, Matt,” he said in a rather prickly way. “Of all people, Americans should understand the evils of a repressive gov
ernment. You fought your way out from under one a hundred years ago.”
Matt shrugged. “That spirit’s long gone in my country. Now all the people care about is money.”
The other man smiled. “Perhaps you’ll let me take your place as a citizen, then. I’d love to expropriate and share the wealth of some of those American capitalists.”
“Such as my father?” Matt grinned. He genuinely liked the little Russian, but teased him because he found his pronouncements so pretentious. “Sime, I don’t think you have the nerve to strip so much as a sou from anyone. You’re a man with a conscience.”
“Exactly!” Strelnik retorted. “And because I have a conscience, I can’t tolerate what I see around me. A worker receiving only two or three francs for a twelve-hour day while that harlot the Countess de Castiglione gets a million francs for giving herself to some English milord for sixty minutes. The only way to redress such injustice is by force! By—” Anton shrieked. The smoldering cigar stub clenched in the corner of Strelnik’s mouth had briefly touched the wiggling infant’s bare leg.
“Oh my God,” Strelnik gasped. Anton howled. The bearded man’s eyes filled with tears. “Leah? Leah, help me! I’ve hurt the baby—”
Strelnik rushed into his quarters. Matt shook his head, his smile growing cynical.
“Well, Dolly, there’s the marital bliss your sister’s leaping into. I’m glad you’re not interested in that kind of clerically approved misery.”
It was quite the wrong thing to say, nearly as bad, in its way, as his remark to Lepp about an invasion. And it produced the same sort of angry reply.
“I know you and your friends sneer at any kind of convention. But the truth is, I’ve changed my mind. I am interested in marriage. That’s another subject we must talk about. Perhaps it’s the most important subject of all.”
With an intense glance from those lovely eyes, she hurried into their rooms. Stunned and shaken, he stood staring at the open door. This was worse than anything he’d anticipated. Far worse. Something drastic had changed her while she was away.
Chapter IV
Dolly’s Secret
i
POOR STRELNIK WAS still wailing for Leah to come to his rescue—which she always did. While he scurried from meeting to meeting, agonizing over political schemes and Utopian programs, she provided the family’s income by working six hours a day in a laundry which serviced the fine hotels down near the Rue de Rivoli. The moment Leah closed the hall door and took charge of Anton, the little boy stopped crying.
Matt walked into the quarters he shared with Dolly. He’d wanted rooms with northern light but hadn’t been able to find any. The large outer room had a slanted skylight facing the southwest. The spring sun cast elongated, slow-moving shadows of windmill vanes on the whitewashed wall at the skylight’s east end.
Directly under the glass stood Matt’s easel and two small cabinets of equipment. On the easel rested the unfinished portrait. The subject of the portrait had already retired to the bedroom with her portmanteau. He could hear her unpacking.
He walked around several tall stacks of books to the one decent armchair in which Madame Rochambeau had piled the dirty laundry. He flung the laundry on the floor, sat down and glumly stared at the work on the easel.
The painting was done on a linen support he’d prepared with a coarse textured ground. He’d posed Dolly in her best dress—the new realism forbade classical drapery—but the picture still looked stiff and unnatural. So far he hadn’t progressed beyond endless repairs on the underpainting.
Dolly returned to the outer room, having put her pelisse and hat aside. She seemed more composed. A scattering of light from overhead created a kind of nimbus around the top of her head. Her face, by contrast, was darker, in shadow. The result was a softening effect that made her features indescribably lovely, and seemed to enlarge and diffuse her eyes, as though Matt were gazing at her under water.
He glanced at the portrait. He’d completely missed the living, breathing reality of his subject.
Her eyes seemed touched with sadness as she sank onto a rickety stool and uttered a little sigh. “Oh, my. The trip was more thing than I thought.” She brushed back a stray yellow curl. “I owe you an explanation for what I said outside.”
“I’d just as soon wait—or dispense with it entirely.”
Firmly, she said, “We can’t, Matt. You see what the post brought while I pour some wine. Then we’ll talk. It won’t become any easier if we wait.”
She patted his hand as she walked by. Somehow he felt as if she’d announced an execution.
ii
Dolly rummaged in the little alcove that served as a combination kitchen and dining area. “I can’t find the wine. I can’t find anything in the middle of these mountains of dirty dishes. Didn’t you wash anything while I was gone?”
“My face.”
She wasn’t amused.
“I forgot about the wine,” he said. “Madame Rochambeau borrowed the last bottle yesterday. She had company unexpectedly.”
“I’ll be right back.”
The outer door closed. He was gripped by a feeling of panic. He didn’t want to sit down for a talk of the sort she had in mind. What she wanted to discuss was obvious from her remarks about her sister.
He loved Dolly, but he resented this new and unexplained thrust toward domesticity. He was frightened by it, too. He felt as if a trap were closing. He didn’t want to be pushed into choosing between mistresses, as Paul put it.
Well, then, he had to get her off the subject. At least for this evening. He decided to try a not unpleasant strategy that had worked before and surely would again.
Nervous, he paced to and fro in front of the easel. He spied the letter lying on a flimsy taboret. The handwriting and the franking registered slowly. From Gideon!
He ripped the letter open, scanned the paragraphs of family news. Gideon’s wife, Margaret, was well, and so were the children, eight-year-old Eleanor and the baby, Will, born in 1869. Jephtha and Molly were in good health too, though Jephtha occasionally complained of pains in his chest. He was too busy to see a doctor, Gideon said.
The real purpose of the letter was to convey some exciting personal news. Rather than take a position with the New York Union, the highly successful daily newspaper that had come back into the fold after Louis Kent’s death in late 1868, Gideon had decided to use a portion of his inheritance and start a small journal of his own. A journal devoted primarily to the cause of the workingman, in which Gideon was vitally interested.
“Oh God,” Matt said aloud in disappointment. “Not a Strelnik in the family.”
But it was true. The paper would be called Labor’s Beacon. Gideon planned to buy typesetting and printing on a bid basis, but do the editorial work. His office was to be a small rented loft in lower Manhattan. The family had moved to the island from New Jersey a few weeks ago. Another surprise!
Gideon claimed the times demanded a militant response on behalf of the common man who worked for a living. All such men were exploited by those for whom they worked, Gideon believed. Matt was sorry to hear about his new crusade for two reasons. He considered it wasted effort; Gideon could not hope to pit his opinions against powerful business interests and win. More important, he considered it reckless. Gideon could be hurt—physically hurt—if he offended the wrong people. And he had an established family to think about.
Matt wasn’t the only one with that reservation, as it turned out. Just at the end of the letter, Gideon wrote:
—and I might note, in confidence, that Margaret’s reaction to the decision has been odd and not a little upsetting.
As I have so often said before, it was she who brought me to the threshold of the world of ideas, and taught me not to be afraid to enter. It was she who read to me hour after hour in the evening, neither smiling at my inability to understand unfamiliar concepts nor at my clumsiness when I first attempted to pronounce difficult new words which I learned from those readings. It
was she who gave me a thirst for knowledge—which in turn generates a thirst to employ that knowledge to some useful end. To accomplish something. Bring about change!
Nowhere is change needed more than in the affairs of the average laboring man. I began to realize that when I worked as an Erie railroad switchman. Margaret used to agree with me—if not outwardly, then tacitly. Now she has begun to exhibit a different attitude. She expresses fear about my establishing the little paper—
Not fear for my safety, though some of that does seem to exist. But her chief fear seems to be that I will become too fond of my endeavor—
Matt was struck by an unexpected feeling of kinship with his older brother. Margaret’s reaction to the labor journal sounded much like Dolly’s reaction to his painting. Women were not so different after all.
—too embroiled in producing the Beacon, and thus too inattentive to her, and to the needs of the family.
The fear is unfounded, Matt. I must do my best to convince her.
He started as a shadow fell across his legs. He hadn’t heard Dolly come in. She was carrying two goblets of white vin ordinaire. She saw his strained expression.
“Not bad news, is it?”
He folded the letter. “It may be. You can decide for yourself”—he rose and gently lifted the goblets from her fingers—“after we have a proper welcome home.”
He bent to kiss her cheek, slipped his left arm around her. She struggled away.
“Matt, we must talk!”
“Plenty of time for that later.” He pressed her face with his free hand. A shade too roughly, perhaps, but he was desperate.
“Matthew Kent, I bloody well won’t have you trying to get round me this wa—”
He put his mouth on hers. The kiss was long and intense. Her skin smelled sweetly of the lilac water she wore. He ran his fingers up into her blond hair, ruining the carefully created curls.