by Mark Dunn
Molly shivered in consideration of the latter scene. And then she found herself steeped in sadness, for any prospect that did not put her together for eternity with her beloved Pat or her troubled father, for whom there was so much that still wanted to be said and mended, or her four circle-sisters, who were like extensions of her very own self, was an outcome too tragic for her even to contemplate.
It came to pass that Molly did not have tea and biscuits with Mrs. Colthurst and her temporarily docile cousin Jemma, for when they arrived at the shop Carrie was waiting there to take Molly to Higgins’ Emporium. Molly had not heard what had happened to Tom Catts and who it was who’d done it to him, and the intelligence sickened and crumpled her.
Carrie was frightened by what Holborne and Castle might do in retaliation, not only to Lyle but to all of We Five. What Carrie did not know—what none of the circle-sisters knew—was that Jerry Castle was preparing to betake himself to Manchester, to put himself back into the fold of his adoptive father, the cheesemonger, and his adoptive mother. But first, Jerry Castle wished to bid good-bye to the woman who bore him and who he knew he should never see again. When the day before he had fled from her house and run and run and thrown himself into a farmer’s stew pond in shame, he had thought only of the ardency of the feelings he had owned for the girl who turned out to be his sister. Now he came to regret the fact that he had not engaged her mother—his mother—the woman who had foisted him upon the world and nursed him at her breast…and then cruelly tossed him to the winds of fate.
It was an interview he now most urgently wished to have before he left Tulleford. And it would take place whether or no that woman wished it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
San Francisco, April 1906
Clara Barton set her valise upon the bed and walked over to the mahogany wardrobe. As she was about to open its doors she noticed out the window, a flock of seagulls circling lazily in the bright afternoon sky. Clara never tired of her crisp “springtime” view of the city from this window, unobscured by rain and fog. She had lived here upon the near-summit of Washington Street hill for all her years in San Francisco. John Barton had chosen this third-story flat for its sweeping prospect—one of the best spots in San Francisco for taking in this rolling, terraced city in full panoply, as well as the scenic landscape that lay beyond. Pacific Heights was Johnny’s gift to his young bride. It was given to her at a time in which she felt he loved her and wanted only the best things for her.
Though the view continued to enchant and inspire her, the same could not be said for the man responsible for it.
And now there was another man who had offered Clara his heart—a beautiful gift that had unfortunately become desecrated, even in this early season, by tragic circumstance.
Clara went to the window. She sat down on the cushioned built-in seat her daughter so frequently occupied. From here one could see San Francisco Bay and the shore of Contra Costa. Laid out before her: the great city of Oakland and its neighbor, Berkeley, and across the bay, the sleepy fishing villages of Tiburon and Sausalito. Towering in the distance were the majestic crests of Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpais. In the foreground: the green tidewaters of the narrow Golden Gate inlet.
Clara looked down at the jumble of roofs that descended, in stair-step fashion, the precipitous slope below. Then came a great confusion of chimneys and cupolas and still more roofs, both gently and steeply pitched. These houses possessed all the architectural ornamentation—the windows in triplicate in a Serlian motif, the arches and dentils and oriels and gables, the classical columns and terracotta panels and gingerbread tiles and fish-scale shingles—of the Queen Anne style—an idiom marked by a predominance of wood and brick and slate in colorful and fussily constructed idiosyncrasy that gave Clara to think on occasion of the Queen herself coming and waving her magical architectural wand and transforming the city into a storybook for the eye. Clara imprinted the scene before her onto the pages of her memory, even as she knew it could not hold. A perched gull, the feathery top of a lone Canary Island date palm, a solitary sailing ship in the Bay, Goat Island in the distance—these things individually she would remember; yet the scene in aggregate would blur over time—would blur and fade even if the canvas were not about to be ripped from the wall altogether by means of geoseismic catastrophe.
The rustic cabin belonging to Clara’s former brother-in-law Whit was miles and miles away on the Klamath River. It was an old gold miner’s shack Whit had fixed up for the wife who left him. Clara hoped that it would be here that Michael could hide himself until those who were looking for him gave up their search, and here that Jane’s brother Lyle would also find refuge. But leaving this city which Clara and Maggie both loved would be painful.
Clara returned to the wardrobe to select the few clothes she would be taking with her. But she’d hardly had time to remove a gingham house frock from its hanger when she was startled by the sound of someone pulling the bell chain downstairs—pulling the chain that signaled the arrival of a visitor to the flat. She went down to see who it was.
Jerry Castle looked pale, almost gaunt. He looked to Clara as if he hadn’t slept for several nights, though, in truth, he’d only lain awake one night. She detected, as well, the smell of liquor on him—a smell with which she was well acquainted. Standing at the front door, she said, “She isn’t here. If you are looking for—” She very nearly said, “your sister,” but checked herself. “She isn’t—”
“It isn’t Maggie I want to see. It’s you. Can I come in?”
“Well, I don’t—I’m really qu—quite busy,” Clara stammered, suddenly frightened by her son’s presence, which now felt importunate and threatening.
“So you won’t see me?”
“Of course I’ll see you,” said Clara, and then putting deed to word, she stepped back from the door to allow Jerry to enter. “Come into the parlor. We’re allowed to entertain visitors in here if they don’t smut the carpet.”
Clara led Jerry into the front parlor, which was used by all the residents of the large house. “I have nothing to give you to drink,” she apologized as she sat down on the sofa.
Jerry did not sit.
Clara indicated with an open palm an armchair upholstered in gaudy patterned chintz. “Please.”
In an act of inconsequential insolence Jerry claimed a leather-seated high-back instead.
“I’m going away, you see,” she elaborated. “That’s why I can’t be a very good hostess at the moment. I’m preparing to take a trip.”
“I can very well guess why you’re leaving. I don’t care about that. There’s only one thing that interests me. I want to know why you did it.”
“Did it?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Clara, whose eyes had been half-avoiding Jerry’s intense gaze, now looked at him dead on. “Maggie hasn’t told you?”
Jerry shook his head. “I haven’t seen Maggie since I left here yesterday. And I have no need ever to see her again. I’m taking a trip too. I’m going back to Sacramento—the place where I thought I was born, but now I know differently. I know a lot of things I didn’t know before—things people shouldn’t have waited so long to tell me. Why did you do it? Was it a matter of money? Did you think you couldn’t afford to raise me?”
“That wasn’t the reason. I wish Maggie had talked to you. She might have said it in a way you’d understand.”
“Maggie did tell me about our father’s ill treatment of her. Was this it? Did you send me away because you were worried he might hurt me too?”
“I wish that were the reason. That would certainly exonerate me, wouldn’t it? No, in truth I—well, I just didn’t want another John Barton in this house. From the moment you came into this world, I could see him in you. Your face was his, your little hands—the way they bunched themselves into tight, angry little fists. So I got rid of you. I didn’t know at the time that it would have been easier to divest myself of him instead. Because eventually he d
id go, and he didn’t put up a fuss about it. But by then it was too late. You were gone and there wasn’t any way for me to get you back.”
Jerry thought about this. He picked up the wooden stereoscope resting on the table next to his chair. He put it up to his face and looked at the composite image presented by the card in the slot. The view was of some place in the Orient. There was a pagoda in the foreground. Behind it were trees that would have looked unreal had Jerry not seen a good many such strangely trimmed trees in the Japanese Tea Gardens at Golden Gate Park. He tried to push from his mind the day he spent at the park with Maggie and her four shop-girl friends, the way he’d forced himself on her, kissing her, touching her rudely upon the hips with his hot hands. The thought came with shame and with anger. It did not have to be this way. If he had known she was his sister he surely would have suspended his pursuit and gone after one of the others instead.
“But I turned into him anyway, didn’t I?” he said bitterly. “For all the good your sending me away did.” Jerry paused. He studied the Oriental rug on the floor. He didn’t raise his eyes as he said, “I had thought about killing myself. I had thought about killing the both of us.”
At first Clara couldn’t find words to respond. She rose from the sofa. Then she said raggedly, “I think you should go. As I—as I have said: I have packing to do.”
Jerry got up as well. But not before flinging the stereoscope to the wooden floor. It made a loud clatter, the handle breaking away on impact, the picture card flying off. Clara started. She took a step back.
“It doesn’t look real!” Jerry raged. “They say it’s supposed to look real and lifelike when the pictures come together. All well and good, but they’re still in damnable black and white. We don’t live in a black and white world.”
“No, we do not,” said Clara, her voice aching with pain. “I—I’ve seen cards where the pictures are color-tinted.”
“Like putting rouge on a corpse.” Jerry was breathing heavily. He took a moment to catch his breath. “I can’t hold you accountable for what was done to me. You are a stupid, frightened woman. You would have made a stupid and frightened mother, who would have been of no use to me.”
Clara nodded quickly in a frenzied travesty of agreement.
“It was better that I was raised by the cheddar-heads.”
“I don’t—I don’t know what that means.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going. I’m sorry for what I did to your daughter. I’m sorry for casting this brief shadow over your life. I needed to see you—not for you to apologize—just to face for one last time the woman who would do this. Now I’ve faced you. But I am not changed. My heart hasn’t softened. I thought it might, but it hasn’t. I don’t wish you well. I wish that the rest of your life were one long trial. And that you’ll regret to your dying day the stupid thing you did.”
Clara spoke softly: “I have always regretted it.”
Jerry left without saying another word.
Clara sank back onto the sofa and wept. She remembered Lucile Mobry’s words from the morning—what she said about men, and how, frankly, undeserving they were of redemption, and then she remembered opposing words from her daughter, who felt that a man could be changed through the tendance of a loving, caring woman. Now Clara came to see the truth as it was unveiled to her by the example of Jerry’s belligerent visit—the truth that lay somewhere between the two extremes.
She walked over to the stereoscope and picked it up. She wondered if she could repair the handle before her landlady came home from her errands and discovered it broken. She picked up the stereographic card containing the two images of the same Japanese pagoda and scrutinized it. She saw no difference between the two pictures printed side-by-side on the rectangle of thumb-smudged grey-green cardboard. Yet together the images were supposed to create a single picture of fuller dimensionality. Clara shook her head and returned the card to the box of stereographs.
Lucile Mobry and Clara’s daughter Maggie had spoken of men and women as if there were worlds of difference between them, but Clara wondered. She saw in each the same elemental needs and then that one great, overarching need: to snatch at happiness whenever one had opportunity, and to use it as a salve for all the aches and throbs that come from human existence. Men and women engaged life, they engaged one another, in very different ways, but in those things that made them most human they were like the pictures on the stereograph: very much alike and very much in need of one another to make the whole picture.
Whatever that picture might be.
Clara climbed the stairs to her third-floor flat, the one with the window and the fine fogless view and the plush seat where one could sit and gaze out and do one’s best to push aside dark memories and feelings of painful regret. But Clara did not sit. Instead, she returned to her packing.
She did not hear the wicker of the gelding below, shuffling and unnerved in the street by a portentous vibration below ground undetected by any of the two-legged creatures passing nearby.
Two policemen came looking for Lyle. Will Holborne had told them who he believed had killed his friend in their shared flat on Telegraph Hill. He directed the cops to the Emporium. What they found when they got there were four young women finishing up the last morsels of the supper they’d prepared together. (Ruth had removed herself to the larder, so as not to draw unnecessary speculation as to the reason for her injured face.) Jane was taken singly into the parlor and questioned by one of the two officers.
“I don’t know where he’s gone,” she said in a businesslike manner. “He flew out of here a couple of hours ago.”
“So you don’t have a clue as to where he might be headed.”
“That’s what I said. What is it you think he’s done?”
“Killed a man.”
Jane opened her eyes widely in an expression of shock and dismay that served. “My brother wouldn’t kill anyone. It would take too much effort.”
“How about you make a little effort to take our questions seriously, Miss Higgins? A man is dead and there’s one who said it was your brother who did it. He said your brother had it in for the victim.”
Jane was sitting on the sofa. That sofa. It could not be avoided. She didn’t like the way she felt just being in the room. Everything reminded her of what had happened there only a few days before. “Did the person who said this—” said Jane, while effecting a look of serious inquiry, “—did he also say why my brother wanted to see this man dead?”
“Not in the few minutes I had opportunity to question him. But we know there’s a reason there. He said he was nearly positive it was your brother who was the one that did it. We like that phrase ‘nearly positive,’ Miss Higgins. It tends to make our job easier. Anyway, somebody will get it out of him. Sometimes it can be a simple thing: one man doesn’t like another man’s politics. Or his religion. Or the way he’s looking at him. And they exchange words. And they’re both lit, and things turn violent.” The policeman sniffed. “Your brother drinks. I can smell it all around the place. We’re going to make our search now. You go back in the kitchen with your friends. You have some very pretty friends.”
“Thank you. I’m the team mascot.”
“You’re a funny one. Are you girls having a party?” The officer craned his head to see past the door and into the kitchen down the short connecting hallway.
“Not really. We just like to get together now and then, away from work. We’re salesclerks at Pemberton, Day.”
“My wife was there only yesterday. She bought a tam o’ shanter for my daughter—for her birthday. Maybe you sold it to her.”
“I don’t think so. I’m in the ribbons department.”
The policeman led Jane back into the kitchen. Then he and his partner looked around the showroom and through all the back rooms of Jane and Lyle’s living quarters. After searching the house, they went out to the yard in the back. There was a storage shed, where some of the stock was kept. It was locked. Jane gave them the key. Twen
ty minutes later, the police officers were gone.
We Five agreed to wait in the kitchen until they felt confident the men weren’t coming back. They took this opportunity to come to one mind about the fate of Jane’s brother Lyle, who was presently hiding in a crawlspace above his bedroom.
“I’m not comfortable harboring a fugitive from justice,” said Ruth. “But you know already that this is where I stand. And I know that I’m outvoted. The three of you think that Lyle shouldn’t have to pay for what he did. And Molly, having yet to make up her mind, abstains.”
Maggie, who was sitting next to Molly at the table, the two having lovingly patched up their differences so that they now held hands in sisterly affection beneath the table, said, “Molly’s torn in two different directions when it comes to her father. It’s too much to make her decide the fate of Lyle Higgins as well.”
Molly shook her head. “No, Mag, I have made up my mind about Papa. He is my father and I love him, and I don’t trust a judge or jury to be lenient with him. As for Lyle, I’ll go along with whatever the rest of you want.”
Ruth, who had been pacing back and forth, now stopped and addressed the three young women sitting at the table and the tall one washing dishes at the sink: “I was raised to understand the difference between right and wrong. But I was also raised by a minister and his sister to recognize how murky is the swamp that lies in between. Mobry himself has given shelter to men—Negro men, who are alleged to have committed crimes—but in these cases it was to shield them from the lawlessness of mob justice. It’s a complicated matter deciding what’s totally right, what’s half right, and what’s only a little right. And if I’m to be perfectly honest, I’d say that keeping Lyle from arrest is only a little right—the kind of right that comes from selfish love. But it’s the same kind of selfish love that would make me do the very same thing for any of you.”