With that, I wondered what Phaegin must think of me and of all I told her. For a man who had hardly lived until a year ago, I carried a weight of skeletons on my back enough to belabor a workhorse.
I imagined Chin standing by the railroad track. It was bitterly cold in Nebraska now. “If the livery doesn’t feed her, I’ll kill them,” I vowed, but this did little to assuage my conscience over the big horse, head down, drifted in. I groaned.
Quillan opened the door of his office, his arm shielding his face once more. “I am not convinced you are not contagious. There is quite a foreign population at that boardinghouse of yours. You may well have picked something up, and I don’t have the time to get it. Go to bed, Ned. Don’t come back until you’ve recuperated … but make it snappy.”
I snatched at opportunity. “My mother’s address, sir?”
He waved me off. “Not now. Out with you, out!”
Bells sounded as I entered the dim cigar shop, thick with spicy aromatic notes of tobacco leaves. Cubbyholes from floor to ceiling were filled with oily rolls of leaves. A glass case, dividing the room side to side, displayed stacked balsa wood boxes of cigars, in myriad sizes and prices. Even with the frigid outside temperatures I could feel leaking through its glass, the shop was hot and humid. Phaegin smiled when she saw me, her hair curled damply around her face. A sheen of warm moisture arose on my lip.
A somber man bowed formally to me. His rugose skin the same shade as the lightest tobacco; his handlebar mustache dyed a telltale blue-black; while his thick hair, on his scalp, in his ears, and beetling in a long stripe across his brow, was candescent silver. He asked, with a lilt to his voice, “Sir, may I help you?”
Phaegin shook her duster free of tobacco. “Mr. Cordassa, this is Ned. May I take leave, please?”
He pulled a silver watch from his waistcoat. “It is early, but a slow day.” He bowed to her as well. “You may go, Miss Harte.”
She curtsied back. “Thank you.”
Phaegin grabbed her coat and bag. The old man watched her with a faint smile as one would watch a particularly winsome puppy. As Phaegin left, she pecked him on the cheek, and his faint smile grew, even as he waved her off with a flap of large hands and a “Shew, shew, Miss Harte.”
“You like your boss,” I observed, after the shop door rang shut.
Phaegin, holding her bag in her mouth as she threw on her coat, nodded. She spit out the clutch. “Very much. Came from Cuba, a tremendously rich man there. There was some revolt and he left with a knife at his back. Now he barely gets by, sends all he can back to what family he’s got left, and he’s a gentleman to everyone, and I mean everyone: me, the guttersnipe who delivers the oil paper, the rag lady. If I didn’t have the future to think about and didn’t hate brown fingers, I’d be happy.”
I took her hand and looked at her fingertips. “Nothing wrong with work, and I suppose you’ll be marrying before you know it.”
She snorted as she pulled her hand back. “Men just can’t bear to hear someone refusing to enter into the exalted state of marriage. My brothers foam at the mouth when I turn down one of their port-rat pals. Like I told you last night, I won’t marry.”
She spit on her fingertips, rubbed them on her coat, and held them up to show no effect. “I tried peroxide, lemon, bleach, pumice, arsenic powder. None of them work enough, and some of them took the skin off, but not enough to take the stain away. I figure I’m brown to the bone by this time.”
“What’s wrong with marriage?”
“You’re either a bauble, like that Mrs. Quillan, or a slave. Actually, I might think about it if I could be a bauble, but as it stands the only opening for my sort is slave. So I’m going to open a shop when I get the money.”
“Tobacco?”
“No. Men buy tobacco from men. Hats, I suspect. I’m too bunglesome for a dress shop. Tried one of them famdangle Singer’s and sewed right through my finger.”
“Shouldn’t you be working in a hat shop now, then?”
“Lord, no. At the wages a feather trimmer makes, I’d never get liberated. Might as well work Chicopee cotton for a dollar a week.”
She looked up from her fingers to appraise me. “I thought you’d be in worse shape.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine, thinking about the dancing.”
She grinned ruefully as we walked along. “I have had second thoughts over introducing you to a dance floor again. My poor bruised feet could hardly take my weight this morning.”
“But you promised to teach me,” I cajoled. “You plied me with drink. My clumsiness was your fault.”
She grinned. “Maybe you will be the only man ever to be a better dancer sober.” She threw her hands up. “All right. I’ll give it a try. No more clogging, though. We’ll go dancing for real, at the nickel dump.”
The dance hall was a bleak-looking place, as nondescript as any other building on the muddy block. However, inside it opened into a bright bedlam of light and color. Noise thick as fog with a happy roll of rag piano and wail of gurdy, shouting, singing, shrieks of laughter.
I bought us each a tankard of ale and a boat of fried fish in a paper packet. After we’d eaten, Phaegin pulled me to my feet. “Come on, cowboy.”
Even sober, and perhaps more so, I was a failure at the two-step. I was a failure at the waltz. Phaegin agreed I’d been lighter on my feet, and hers, the night before and insisted I have another beer.
I guaranteed I would get better. I counted careful: one and two, three and … then lost the thread. Phaegin finally lost her patience, and we sat down.
“I’m sure you can do other things, Ned. Though it’s a sad thing not to dance.” She fanned herself with a napkin. “By the way, who is this Lill you were going on about?”
I winced and gave her a shorthand account. Phaegin snorted.
“Men make mistake upon mistake to no bad end. A woman believes in a man, and the rest of her life is lost.”
“Not Lill’s,” I avowed. “I won’t let her life be wasted. That farmer is an ignorant lout, and she’s washing his shirts!”
Phaegin raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want to be a help to her, Ned, or do you just want to feel like some fairy-tale knight righting the fair lady’s wrongs?”
Quillan’s admonition leapt to mind and I spoke without thought. “Philoprogenetive: affection for the weak.”
“Exactly!”
I hastened to make amends. “Lill’s not weak, though. She’s magnificent, profound….”
Phaegin shrugged. “No skin off my nose either way. But it’s not like the world was sprung on her, it’s been like that forever, and it’s the way with every woman, not only your precious Lill.”
Perhaps my dramatics had sounded fatuous, but her sarcasm was unnecessary. Phaegin, however, had been born into a different world from Lill and me, and it was not surprising she would see things with a coarser eye.
Phaegin gazed at me challengingly.
I changed the subject. “Tell me about your family.”
“You could guess. Ma does piecework in the coat factory, Da works on the ships. My two brothers do the same, can’t get work half the time, but drink a fortune anyhow. I don’t see them much. Try not to. Like I said, they’d like me to marry a brother into the family, I suppose throw their dirty socks in to be washed with my new husband’s. They don’t like it much I won’t kick on to their plan.” Phaegin sighed and looked out to the dance floor again. When the music came up she smiled, looking more relieved than truly pleased. “Now’s your chance. They’re spieling. Even an ignorant cowboy like you can manage that.” She stood on the dance floor, her arm out like a pump handle. I set my chin on her shoulder, she hers on mine.
“Hold my waist. Close. No, really close.”
I complied, and she murmured instruction in my ear. “To spiel you make the tightest circle possible, go fast, hold on hard.”
I clasped her waist in the vise of my arm and we began turning. Phaegin clutched the back of my neck. We revolved
faster; my head spun. I had never been so close to a woman and my body was sensitized to immoderate awareness, like the sanded fingers of a thief. In spite of the layers of broadcloth and cotton, wire and whalebone, her hips, soft breasts, and the insistence of nipples were as vivid to me as if she were naked. Legs! Hidden under deep folds of fabric, it was easy to forget women had them at all, but Phaegin’s two pushed against mine, were mine: knees, calves, thighs.
As we spun faster, I panted. Phaegin gasped into my ear. Sweat trailed down my back. We became the earth, revolving night and day, years on end, summers and winters passing, eons back and forward; dinosaurs walked our skins; the future coursed through our limbs; nothing else existed or mattered but that we held tight as one, the fractured world made whole.
When the music stopped, we wobbled like a slowing top and stood staring at each other. Phaegin’s hair coiled in sweaty tendrils around her face; her face flushed to pink; her eyes dark and wet. For once she wasn’t smiling or talking. I myself seemed to have lost my own ability to speak. I had no words to describe—or, worse, even to explain—what charged through me. I stood senseless and immobile. When the music for the next dance began, Phaegin stepped back, then close again, and kissed me.
Soft, she was so soft, her skin dewy and warm. I pressed my lips to hers, turned my face to feel her cheek against mine, kissed her ear, her neck. I put my hands on her cheeks and looked into her eyes again. Phaegin whispered, “Ah, Ned.”
So beautiful. I pushed a tendril of hair behind her ear.
Someone bumped into us, a woman in a scarlet dress, the red skirt twirling like a giant poppy into the crowd. As if the color had broken the spell, Phaegin pulled back abruptly and began smoothing her dress and hair, glancing away. “You’re looking a bit under the weather, Neddy. All that spinning. I should have thought better.”
I nodded, thinking it was true. I didn’t feel so well.
She spoke briskly. “You’ll be all right, another night’s rest. Speakin’ of which, I have work in the morning, so I’ll see you later.” She reached up and kissed my cheek—“G’night”—and disappeared into the crowd. At the far end of the room, the door opened to black, then closed again.
I wandered the streets, cautioning myself. Hadn’t Phaegin herself said she wanted nothing of me? Rightly so; we were worlds apart. Still, I desired nothing more than to follow her home and dance with her through the days, through every night. Also, I loved Lill, had pledged to come back for her and, having done so, possessed a gentleman’s obligation toward her.
But now the baby sat pink-bowed between Lill and Osterlund, riveting the dystopian family together with its doughy hunger. Perhaps Phaegin was right. Was I playing the ridiculous, useless, and painfully unwanted part of the knight?
I turned the corner and almost ran into two men, both heavyset and thuggish-looking, with matching red hair. They looked familiar. One jabbed me in the shoulder. “Working for Peabody, Quillan’s boy?”
I narrowed my eyes and tried to look larger. “What’s it to you?”
He shoved me against the wall. “Keep your hands off what’s not yours.”
I shoved him back and the other grabbed my arm. Mother Fenton opened the door and called out, “Here now, what’s goin’ on?”
I straightened my coat as they backed off.
The one I pushed pointed at me and growled, “Nothin’ better be goin’ on. Remember that.”
Mother watched the thugs depart. “What’s this?”
“Something about Quillan.”
“Well, that’s not all the cark. Some suit man came by an hour ago, grim about you getting this.”
I took the paper from her: my letter to Alan and Jamieson, demanding information, returned unopened. Mother crossed her arms. “Fella told me there’d be action if you didn’t stop trimmin’ whiskers off their egg.”
I started to protest. Mother put up a tiny hand. “Don’t want to know. Just ticker yourself, with this fellow and that professor. Men like them use men like you up. Grist for their mill, Ned. Grist for their mill.”
Though I kept the suit man to myself, I mentioned the redheads to Quillan the next day.
He was apoplectic. “They mentioned my name? My God. Have you told anyone what I’m doing?”
I was a little miffed he didn’t ask after my health but only questioned my circumspection. “No, sir, I don’t talk to anyone.”
“Good, good. Let’s keep it that way.”
That irritated me further still. He had a wife, colleagues. He suffered no solitude and yet demanded my continued isolation? I frowned. “Sir, I must have my mother’s address, or I’m afraid I’m going to have to go looking for her myself.”
He pursed his lips. “Sit down, Ned.”
Immediately, I feared the worst. “She’s ill? Dead?”
“Not at all.”
I sat down slowly. Quillan paced. “Your mother rather vociferously requested privacy, telling my agent she’s left her past painful life behind, full of losses, her name, her husband, her mother, her home … and she wishes to be left to raise the ramparts of a new family, without the specters of the past”—Quillan fanned a hand my way—haunting her. She asked for your forgiveness and understanding that she has nothing to offer you but painful reminders of what was and is no longer.”
He gripped my shoulder. “I have to admit—and apologize—I found this out a week ago. I could not bring myself to relay the message. It seemed cruel to make ruin of Christmas. But truth will tell in the end, and now you know.”
I stammered, “How could she?”
Quillan sat on the edge of his desk and regarded me earnestly. “I don’t know. I wish I could offer solace.” He spread his hands. “All I can say, though in pale recompense: You have me. You have science and a future, and those are no small things.”
I nodded. “Yes, sir. But please give me her address. You see, I absolutely must contact her, perhaps go to her. If we talk, I’m sure she will feel differently.”
Now Quillan shook his head. “My agent, honorable to a fault perhaps, acquiesced to your mother’s request and sent no address. He did provide her with yours. Perhaps, in time, she will change her mind. I recommend, until then, letting her rest with her decisions while you regain your family’s standing.”
I shook my head, going over what Quillan had reported. “But, sir, it does not sound like my mother: ramparts and specters haunting.”
“Don’t be obtuse, Edward. I was paraphrasing.”
“And that’s the other thing. My mother is quite shy. To talk to a stranger rather than simply explaining to me? It’s hard to believe she—”
Quillan had been patting his pockets. He interrupted. “Your mother obviously has had to learn to make her way in the world. The lower classes can not afford to be shy!” He pulled out an envelope from his coat and pushed it across the desk.
I opened it and found a letter stating Wallace Quillan’s intent to sponsor Edward Turrentine Bayard III’s application to Yale. It was a glowing letter attesting to my high intelligence, myriad abilities, and strong work ethic.
I was dumbfounded for a moment, two realms of information warring for attention, then said, “Thank you, Professor, thank you!” Professor Quillan took the letter back and folded it. “You’ve already made me proud, Ned. Your illustrations are excellent, your effort laudable, smart as a whip.”
With great drama he wrote on the front of the envelope Attention: President Dwight Woolsey and clapped me on the back. “You are going places, Ned. We are going places. The future bright, the hounds are sounding. I have had a glimpse of the fox, he calls a meeting, and I will take not one of the hundreds of brilliant young Yale scholars whom I know, but you, Edward.”
“A meeting?”
“With the vice president of American Coal Company. We will have our season.” He took the letter of recommendation and tacked it to the wall behind his desk. “I’ll walk this to the registrar myself when our little project is finished, so we must begin a
t once.”
He tapped his temple. “Time to put emotion aside, all life’s worries and questions, but for one: How finely to the bone do we cut? There is no room for waste, for folly, for indulgence. We work from dawn to dusk. After we have succeeded, we will turn again to personal matters.”
Quillan lifted a bag from the floor filled with hunks of coal. “The draftsman turns to sculptural arts.” He explained the coal bed fossils were far too fragile, too valuable to be shuffled from office to office by clumsy office boys. But the executives, laymen all, must see, touch, be exhilarated by the anthracitic archaeological remains.
And so I made replicas for days into weeks, I breathed coal dust, blew black snot into a handkerchief, shook black dust from my hair, ate coal on my bread, turned my very skin darker with its sheen. The professor, a wild taskmaster, practically hopped with impatience. We did indeed work dawn to dusk, seven days a week and then hours beyond.
My worries over my mother, my heartbreak over Lill, were blanketed by the choking labors. Mother Fenton clucked at my fagged condition and still I kept on, returning to the boarding-house hours after dinner, rising well before dawn, the sky yet blinkered by night, as if I’d not rested at all. The few times I walked in the midnight hours past the nickel dump and around the cigar shop, I did not espy Phaegin. My visions of her were relegated to irresponsible and undisciplined nights.
And after I dreamed of Phaegin, of her softness and the smell of her skin, I did not ask why it was not Lill who perfumed my reveries; I shrouded my dreams in the cadence of labor.
* * *
Finally, in early February, the wind blew from the southern vane. Quillan met me at the lab door and pumped my hand. “I’ve had word. We go.” He paced, chortling. “Prepare the box of specimens, my files. The paper, of course, the paper for the scientific society.” He looked at me. “Didn’t I say to pack?”
“Now?”
“No, no, I need you at the house. I have a box.”
I followed him to the mansion and waited when he went in, as instructed, on the porch. A few minutes later, I jumped as a window was flung open, then another, and another. Smoke wafted out. Mrs. Quillan shouted, “I can light a fire, for pity sake!”
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