We Five

by Mark Dunn

  Cain smiled. He pulled his watch from his fob pocket. “It’s almost time for lunch,” he said, closing the watch with one hand while patting his stomach with the other. “And the agency has quite outdone itself in the way of provisioning our palates.”

  “I thought the store was footing the bill for our lunch.”

  “Of course it is. But Mr. Pemberton won’t know until he gets our invoice of expenses how very well we ate on this day.” Cain winked as Ruth laughed. “There’s a nice picnic area over by the children’s quarters. What would you say to the two of us having lunch together—that is, if you don’t have other plans?”

  “I haven’t any other plans,” said Ruth. “And I’d like to hear if there are other things you enjoy writing besides advertising copy.”

  “Only if you tell me what kind of writing interests you.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Ruth shyly.

  The photography at the windmill now having been completed, Holborne was in the process of gathering up his equipment and returning it to one of the two rented carriages that transported the dozen from one end of the long park to the other and everywhere in between. It was up to Harrison, as chief wrangler, to round up all the other members of the photography party, but first someone had to round up Mr. Harrison, who could not at that moment be located.

  “What do you mean you don’t know where he is?” sputtered Katz to Castle.

  Castle responded with equal irritation: “Just what I said.”

  “Check the beach. You’ll probably find him splashing around like a two-year-old. Then remind me why my father hasn’t fired him yet.”

  “Because he’s your cousin,” shouted Castle over his shoulder as he loped off.

  Castle didn’t find Harrison on the beach. But, playing a hunch, he walked the four blocks up the Great Highway which overlooked the ocean, and confirmed his suspicion that his agency colleague had ambled up to the Sutro Baths.

  And quickly learned that Harrison hadn’t ambled up there alone.

  Pat and Molly—Molly still dressed in her stylish mustard-colored lawn dress from the windmill session—were standing on the Sutro Heights promenade watching an ambulance pull up in front of the street entrance to the baths. From the knot of onlookers also milling about, they learned the reason for the ambulance’s sudden appearance: one of the tobogganing bathers inside hadn’t cleared away quickly enough from the spot where the chute deposited its wet merrymakers into the pool, and he was knocked in the head beneath the surface of the water. The woman next to Molly, cloaked in a dripping wrapper which covered her bathing costume, surmised that the young man was probably dead. Her male companion disagreed. He argued that the poor bather had more than likely merely been struck unconscious, and once all the water was pumped from his lungs he “would be back to his old self in no time.”

  Castle, who had sidled up next to his fugitive ad-man and the fashion model with whom he was playing hooky, said, by way of announcing his presence, “No time to find out how this little drama turns out, children. Your carriage awaits.”

  Maggie sat in one of the two horse-drawn carriages, wondering when Jeremy Castle would return. In the other carriage, Jane conferred with Miss Colthurst and Miss Dowell over how the remainder of the day would proceed.

  Carrie climbed in next to Maggie. “Do you see that woman over there on the bridge?”

  “No,” replied Maggie. “All I see is those buffalo.”

  Carrie turned Maggie’s head with a light application of palm to chin. “Over there. See her now?”

  Maggie nodded. “What about her?”

  “She was watching our photography session. We started talking to one another. She thinks she knows you.”

  Maggie squinted in the bright sunshine. “The woman’s too far away for me to know whether I know her or not. Why doesn’t she just come over here?”

  Carrie shook her head. “She isn’t dressed very well. I think she’s in service. You know that maids can be timid.”

  “Are you suggesting I walk over to the bridge and talk to her?”

  “Only if you’re interested. There’s certainly time for you to at least say hello.”

  Maggie sighed. “Of course, now you have piqued my curiosity.”

  Maggie drew herself up and out of her cushioned seat, steadying herself with a hand upon the side of the open-topped landau, which generally took visitors through the park on day excursions but was now being put to a different form of commercial use. The woman, seeing that Maggie was now traversing the open field which separated the windmill from one of the little ponds where the park’s anachronistic buffalo herd came to drink, cut the distance short by meeting her halfway.

  Even before the two came together, Maggie could see that the woman was someone she indeed did know. It was Mary Grace, the live-in housemaid who had worked for the Bartons when Maggie was a girl and then had to be let go when Mr. Barton could no longer afford her.

  The two embraced like old friends. “I thought that was you!” exclaimed Mary Grace, holding Maggie apart from her with straight arms so as to get a better look at her. “Come up in the world, have you—posing all pretty and proper for that man’s camera.”

  Maggie smiled warmly. “I work for Pemberton, Day. They’re putting advertisements in all the papers to promote the new summer fashions.”

  “You always was a beautiful little girl, and now I see that you’ve blossomed into a fine and lovely young lady.” Mary Grace reached out and gingerly touched Maggie’s cheek. “And hardly any trace of the pox at all.”

  “Oh, the magic of modern cosmetics! Although it helps that the pock marks don’t go too deep.”

  “I thought we was going to lose you too, just like your sister Octavia. And after your poor sister Eleanor died of consumption. Some families get all the hard luck, it seems.”

  “The deaths of two of their three daughters wasn’t something my father and mother bore very easily,” Maggie said with a sad nod of concurrence. “I know that it contributed to my father’s downward slide into dissolution, and turned my mother into such a terrible hypochondriac. I wish there were somewhere we could sit.” Maggie looked around for a convenient bench, but the only one she could spot was presently occupied by two young women sitting back to back like bookends while having their double-caricature sketched by one of the park’s roving lightning artists. “I’d so love to catch up with you. Mama’s getting remarried. Can you believe it? To a dentist. I’m not very fond of him but my opinion doesn’t seem to count for much. I know, I know! Come sit with me in the carriage. I’ll introduce you to my friend Carrie. She and her mother have a maid who reminds me a little of you—but only a little. She’s colored.”

  Maggie introduced her family’s former maid to Carrie.

  Carrie offered Mary Grace a boiled egg. Carrie had, only moments before, successfully sniffed out the three baskets of lunchtime provisions gathered for the photography party. “It’s an absolute feast!” she marveled, flipping back the hinged top to one of the wicker baskets. Mary Grace whistled her own amazement in the presence of such an excess of culinary riches. Carrie excitedly itemized the contents, as if her two companions hadn’t eyes of their own: “Eggs, crab salad—what are these—ham sandwiches—the devilish kind, it appears—and one—two—three—four different kinds of fruit.” Carrie plucked up a banana. “I just adore bananas. I’m a regular monkey. Oh, is this beer? Bottles of beer, oh my goodness!”

  “Are you quite finished, Carrie?” asked Maggie through a scowl. “Because I’d like to talk to Mary Grace. I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Don’t let me stop you,” said Carrie, unpeeling a perfectly ripe banana.

  As Mary Grace was undressing her hard-boiled egg and letting the pieces of shell drop daintily into the napkin Maggie had spread upon her lap, she said, “Miss Maggie, you spoke of you three girls. But you made no mention of your brother. Why is that?”

  “Because I’m not sure there ever was a brother. Do you know somethi
ng I don’t know?”

  “Your mother never said nothing about him?”

  “She mentioned a son when she was talking out of her head one night with a high fever. I asked her about it later and she denied having said any such thing. Either she was imagining a boy she never had, or—I sometimes thought—perhaps there was a child who died at birth, and to lessen the heartbreak my mother and father agreed that each of them would simply pretend he’d never been.”

  Mary Grace neither nodded nor shook her head. Instead, she chewed her egg in enigmatic silence.

  After a long and trying moment, Maggie could no longer contain herself and erupted, “Well, is it true or not, Mary Grace? Because if there has been something deliberately kept from me for all these years, I would very much appreciate your setting the record straight. Did Octavia have a twin brother—as my mother mumbled that feverish night—and did he die shortly after birth?”

  “Are those Uneedas? I do love Uneeda soda crackers and cheese.”

  “Here. Take the whole damned box. Tell me what you know.”

  Mary Grace, to Carrie’s surprise, did not quail in the face of Maggie’s sudden burst of temper—evidence of years of exposure on Mary Grace’s part to employers and their families who attacked their servants either purposefully or collaterally without care or cause. “You are right, child. There was a baby boy. I was there at his birth. He came several minutes after his sister. The healthiest little newborn you ever saw. Could you open this package? I have arthritis of the fingers. Thank you. Squalling and kicking his little legs like he was eager to take on the entire world.”

  “But then he died?”

  “Died? That baby didn’t die, Miss Maggie. It was sent away.”

  “Sent away?”

  Mary Grace nodded. Carrie produced a saltshaker. Mary Grace shook her head. “I have these salty crackers now. And this salty cheese. I’m well set.”

  Some of the color had escaped from Maggie’s cheeks. “I don’t understand.”

  “Your mother didn’t want it. Him. They never named him but it was a healthy little boy, all right, all right. He came at the time when your father had taken to drinking so much after the death of the oldest one. I heard your mother say it to your father late of a night when the little babe was but a few days old. She said she didn’t want a boy-child raised in the house what would only grow up to follow in his father’s drunken footsteps. She said it was hard enough to watch what had become of your father; she didn’t want to see it happen with a son. I surely would have thought that some day one of them two would have told you the truth about it all.”

  Maggie didn’t speak. Carrie did. She said, “May I say, Mary Grace, that what you just said is absolutely outrageous. You should apologize to Maggie this very instant for fabricating such a preposterous story.”

  Mary Grace shook her head with casual indifference. “Wish I could.” She crunched a Uneeda Biscuit soda cracker. “It is every word of it the truth. It isn’t in me nature to tell falsehoods.”

  Maggie could scarcely release the words from her mouth: “So my parents just gave my sister’s twin brother away? A snap of the fingers and he was gone forever?”

  “There was a family your minister knew about who’d been wanting a child. They couldn’t have none of their own. They was mighty grateful over it, and there’s the end to that story.”

  Carrie shook her head slowly in disbelief. She looked at her friend Maggie, who was doing the same, although Maggie’s look was deeply contemplative and inscrutable.

  Carrie took a deep breath and said, “This doesn’t sound at all like the Clara Barton I know. She has a kind and loving heart, just like the famous nurse who shares her name. I simply cannot conceive it: that she would give away her very own son, and for such a ridiculous reason.”

  Maggie found her voice: “If you’d truly known my father during all those terrible years before he died, Carrie, you could half understand what would drive my mother to do such a thing, especially if she knew there was a good family in great need of a child. I don’t excuse her, but perhaps I could find it in my heart to forgive her. Just as important, though: I must speak to the Reverend Mobry and find out if he knows anything of the family that raised my brother. I suppose they moved from San Francisco many years ago, or I would have heard something about them from someone before now.”

  Mary Grace looked contrite, even as her hand reached for a jar of pickled pigs’ feet she spied in the open basket. “I hope I haven’t upset you too much, miss.”

  “No, no, no, Mary Grace,” said Maggie, clasping the woman’s hand, which seemed filled out and strong and hardly arthritic at all. “It was more than proper that I should know the truth, and I apologize for kicking the messenger in the shins.”

  “Then we’re all squared. That’s fine. And that bottle you’d be holding, Miss Hale—may I have a wee swallow? I’m a bit dry in the throat.”

  Mary Grace finished the entire bottle of beer in five or six pulls, while Maggie gazed absently at the browsing buffalo and thought about the possibility of meeting the brother she never knew, and Carrie meanwhile set off to find Mr. Holborne, for no other reason than his quiet company.

  On their walk along sandy Ocean Beach to the join the others at the carriages, Pat noted how upset Molly had become after seeing the ambulance which was to take the unfortunate young man either to the hospital or to the morgue. “If I’d known that’s what was in store for us once we’d reached the baths, I wouldn’t have suggested we go up there,” he said apologetically. “But you said you’d never been to the baths, so I just figured we’d give it a look-see.”

  Molly smiled. “It was very sweet of you to take me, and the view of the ocean from the Heights was just as lovely as you said it would be.”

  The two walked on in silence for a moment, several paces behind Castle. Then Pat said, “Would you like some oysters?”

  “When? Right now?”

  “No. Some night when you’re free. I know a place near Fisherman’s Wharf where you can get the best fried oysters and boiled shrimps in town. Do your mom and dad let you drink beer?”

  “I have no mother, and my dad hasn’t a thing to say about anything I might want to do,” answered Molly with slight indignation.

  “Corkers!” Pat exclaimed. “An independent woman!”

  Castle turned. “Pick it up, little ones—everyone’s waiting.”

  Pat hurled back in full voice, “You give me the cramp, Castle. Why are you hustling us just for lunch? What say Molly and me skip the picnic and spend the next hour on our own little stroll back to the boathouse? For eats, we’ll just filch a tamale or something along the way. I saw a Dago’s cart over by the paddock.”

  “Suit yourself,” Castle shouted back, “but have Miss Osborne at the boathouse and in costume by one fifteen prompt, or don’t come at all, because you’ll be out of a job.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” answered Harrison, uncowed. “You—you got me all aquiver, you mush-headed gazabo!”

  Molly’s hand flew to her mouth in surprise.

  As Castle quickened his step, Molly and Pat could see his shoulders bouncing—an obvious indicator of immoderate laughter over the juvenile insult. Pat Harrison wasn’t the best deliverer of put-downs among the clever ad-men with whom he worked (brash young men who had raised masculine verbal abuse to an art form). In fact, he was, as evinced by the aforementioned—which entailed being so obviously laughed at rather than laughed with—quite dreadful at it.

  Pat halted up and Molly stopped alongside him. Pat turned to Molly, his face flushed with anger. “When they talk to me like that—like I’m some snot-nosed inconvenience—I’d like to knock their blocks off.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Molly with a sympathetic smile.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested that—Would you rather—”

  “I love tamales. I also love oysters.”

  Pat smiled. “Swell.”

  Molly glanced over her shoulder in the dire
ction from which they’d come. A shadow of worry crossed her face. “Gee, I hope he’s all right.”

  “You hope who’s all right?”

  “The man at the baths who went down the slide and didn’t pop up again. They really should be more careful.”

  “Accidents happen, I suppose. Some people just have the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I’d like to tell you something, something I haven’t told a single soul—not even my father. I want him to think I’m brave and strong, but sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I worry dreadfully about things.”

  “What are you worrying about right now, Miss Osborne?”

  “It’s a silly thing, really, and I shouldn’t have done it, but there’s a woman in my neighborhood—she lives up the street from my father and me—a Mrs. Froda. She and her husband run a confectionery. Well, they used to. They just moved back east. To New York. That’s where her husband’s from. We’ve become friends over the last few years—Mrs. Froda and me—and I agreed to help her pack up her things in exchange for some candy. I do love candy, and I suspected she had great lashings to give away before she and Mr. Froda shuttered up their shop.”

  Pat grinned. “And did you get candy?”

  A smile peeped out from Molly’s worry-darkened countenance. “Boxes of chocolates and caramels and nougats and bags of lemon drops and candied cranberries and orange slices. My father took one look at all my loot and accused me of planning to drum up business for him by distributing free candy to all the children of Polk Street!”

  “Your father must be a dentist,” laughed Pat.

  Molly nodded. She stopped walking and dipped her head. Pat stopped as well. “I had the opportunity to ask her about their move while we were packing things into boxes—she remarked how good I was and I said this is exactly what I’d been doing for the last six months at Pemberton, Day, which, thankfully, I’ll not have to do again, thanks to my promotion—I asked her why she and her husband were leaving San Francisco. You see, they had been doing quite well with the confectionery, and it didn’t make a great deal of sense to me why they’d want to go.”