Clara and Mr. Tiffany (37 page)

T
HE SKY CRACKED OPEN IN A VIOLENT THUNDERSTORM ON MY
way home from work. What a way for April Fool’s Day to announce itself. I’d been hoping for spring sun. My umbrella popped inside out at the corner of Fourth and Twenty-third. I fought with it for seven blocks and was soaked to the skin when I arrived home. In my room I dropped my wet coat, dress, shift, corset, shoes, and stockings onto the floor, dried with a towel, put on my nightgown, and climbed under the covers.

In my comfortable semi-doze, I heard an urgent knock.

“I have to talk to you.”

“Yes, George. Come in.”

He would anyway, but I liked to remind him that permission was needed.

Even with my eyes closed, I knew he saw the heap of clothes by his cluck of disapproval, tidiness being one of his sacred principles. I heard him hang my dress and shift and coat on hangers on the curtain rod, and imagined him laying my corset and stockings over the back of the chair. The bed gave way as he sat next to me.

“Edwin is alive.”

A jolt into consciousness. I shot upright.

“I received a letter. He wrote it on New Year’s Day. But he must have had second thoughts about sending it. Look how rumpled it is.”

George gave it to me to read. Postmarked San Francisco. I had trouble holding it still. The handwriting was similar, but faltering and uncontrolled.

“What election? McKinley’s in ’96? That’s hard to believe. We saw him often around that time. I didn’t notice any change in him after that day. Did you?”

“No.”

“He was completely lucid. He didn’t forget what he was saying. He didn’t go off on a tangent.”

“I know.”

“This suggests that he remembers what came before election day. His extravagant claims that he’d loved me since the day he met me, for God’s sake!”

George winced.

“We weren’t engaged until the new year, so he’s forgotten that? He remembers an election, but he’s forgotten that he loved a woman enough to want to marry her? He’s forgotten Lake Geneva? Our night of love? Escaping in the morning? He doesn’t remember how he got rid of me?”

“Clara, don’t say it that way!”

I pulled up the covers and read on.

And that was all. End of letter. No mention of me. No hint that there was, vaguely, in some folded recesses of his dark and troubled brain, a woman in his life.

“He considered me of no consequence to mention.” My voice was pinched with the truth. How little I mattered. I was a woman of no importance.

“We don’t know if all of this is true,” George said. “We’ll probably never know.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know the truth either.”

Numbness gripped me. How fragile my victory over self. I had not conquered The Me Obsession by simply tearing up a job offer.

“Do your parents know?”

“Yes. I told them right away, and was going to tell you immediately after. I’ve had the letter for three weeks, but they asked me not to tell you until we found out more. It’s been hard seeing you practically every day and keeping it from you.”

“Don’t think about that. For their sake I’m glad he’s alive. I can hardly imagine how they’ve suffered.”

“They contacted a psychiatric doctor in San Francisco who has located him and has sent his son to the mining town to observe him for a while. The report just came today, saying that there’s no reason why Edwin should not stay working there, so I felt I could tell you now.”

I examined Edwin’s letter for a clue to his state of mind, but I could deduce nothing. I wondered whether he had money enough to purchase the paper, the pen, and the ink, or whether he had borrowed them. To some degree, he had focused his thoughts. He had folded the paper evenly, not haphazardly. And then he had kept it for a couple of months, unsure. Or had he mislaid it and was content not to write another, and then discovered it unsent? Did he reconsider sending it, or did he post it without much thought?

“He must have had conflicts we didn’t know about,” I said. “The intensity
of his social dreams distorted his rational mind. The poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free proved too much for him.”

George sighed. “What a future he might have had.”

Well, it was nice to think so. I let George have that, though the reality might have been that he knew he was a lesser man than we had built him up to be. Maybe he left Lake Geneva before he had a chance to fail in politics. Maybe he knew his reason could not match his zeal. There would always be this mystery. The letter did nothing to resolve that.

One thing that had bothered me all these years rose up again. How awful that Edwin couldn’t feel our compassion. I would have to leave it to George to convey that, if he chose to. Along with compassion, I still felt concern for Edwin’s safety, especially at a mine. He was entirely capable of forgetting where he was going or not knowing what he was doing.

“Another occurrence could happen again without warning,” I said softly, “and yet it would be unjust to put him in a home for such people.”

The thought startled him.

“Should I go see him?” he asked.

“Would it make you feel better?”

“It depends on what I’d find.”

“It’s a little frightening, isn’t it, not knowing what you’ll see?”

His face was drawn tight. “Do you want me to tell him about you? To see if he’ll remember you? I’ll go there for that reason alone if you want me to.”

“That’s good of you, George.”

A chance that my being could be reinstated. A temptation to feed my obsession with self. I had yearned too recklessly for love. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

“I don’t wish him ill, but he’s been as if dead to me for nearly six years. It’s best that I keep it that way. Please don’t be hurt when I say I’m grateful for my own escape. No, don’t go on my account.”

“Then I don’t think I’ll go at all. I’ll write to him, though. That’s only right. Do you want me to mention you?”

“No. That might disturb him. I don’t want to destroy the calm he has achieved.” I reached out to hold his hand. “I need to let him go, George. Like the beautiful, wild goose you painted.”

I
WAS MENDING A STOCKING WHEN ALICE BURST INTO MY ROOM
with Lillian’s news that the twin Queen Anne next to her family’s cottage on the beach at Point Pleasant was for rent from May through September for seventy-five dollars.

“If four of us went in on it, say, Bernard and William—”

“ ‘William’?”

“Mr. York.” The hint of a blush came to her cheeks.

“I’m relieved to know that he owns a first name,” I said.

“If the four of us agreed, we’d only have to pay eighteen seventy-five each. And if we don’t want to cook, we could have our meals at the Palmiés’ for two dollars each for a weekend.”

“There’s only one thing.”

“What’s that?”

Stretching the stocking, I took two more stitches before I said, “Bernard. If he’s engaged, would he want to bring his fiancée? And would we want her there?”

“This would tell you. If he said yes to the plan and didn’t mention bringing her, then you’d know.”

Three more stitches and a knot. I snipped the thread. “Not necessarily.”

ALICE’S PLAN WOULD
force the issue. It was ridiculous not to know after all this time, and it was hard to deny my curiosity. At lunchtime the next day when I knew Bernard wouldn’t be home, I pushed Merry into her niche of an office and closed the door behind us.

“I have a question to ask you, and I don’t want you to tell anyone I asked.”

“You want to know what’s for dinner tonight? That I can tell you, but not much more. I’m not the fountain of all knowledge, you know.”

“I want to know if Bernard is engaged.”

“Oh, Lordy.”

“Well?”

Her puffy face contorted. “As an upright and honest landlady, I can’t divulge my tenants’ privacies.”

“What about as a friend? Alistair said he was engaged.”

She turned to her desk and rearranged the inkwell and blotting roller, and whittled a pencil to a point, all without looking at me.

“As a friend, I’d say that what Alistair told you is or was true.”

“Then is he married now? Where’s his wife?”

She waved her pocketknife vaguely before she closed it with a snap. “Truth to tell, I haven’t got a baldy.”

I slumped on her little stool. “A plague on men with secrets.”

“He don’t appear much married to me. His strange comings and goings is all I know to tell you.”

“I don’t relish being a worm,” I said.

“A worm. What’s a worm got to do with anything?”

“Worms like being kept in the dark. I don’t.”

A throaty cackle, a tsk-tsk, a head wagging from side to side. “He’s a Brit through and through, and like as not, he’ll always play his hand close to his chest. Walk well behind your heart is my advice, dearie.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left, a little embarrassed for having asked.

That evening in Alice’s room I braided her hair, a silly attempt to go back to our girlhood when dilemmas about men were only happy conjectures. “Maybe I don’t want to know,” I said. “It would be easier if there were some chance of him being married.”

“Easier? Why?”

“No decision to make.”

I let her do the inviting. Bernard and Mr. York—William, that is—agreed eagerly. I said to Alice in her room, “All this tells us is that he isn’t
spending summer weekends with her. She might be away for the summer.”

“So? What do you care? You’re a New Woman.”

THE NEXT SATURDAY AFTERNOON
, Marion, Lillian, Bernard, William, Alice, and I rode our wheels along the oceanfront, cooled by wind coming off a solid line of white surf. In the village of Point Pleasant, I skidded to a stop in front of a dressmaker’s shop that had some bolts of colorful fabric in the window. Everyone piled up behind me, and Bernard and William had to wait in the street while we investigated. The cloth was only seven and a half cents a yard instead of the twenty-five it would be in Manhattan. What fun it would be to have colored aprons instead of the standard black like the men used. With much frivolity the four of us picked our colors and agreed to return the next weekend to get them. Mounting our wheels to go home, we found that Bernard and William had bought potatoes and chops and tomatoes and lemon cookies for a beach supper around a fire.

What a lark this was turning out to be. In front of our cottage, we roasted our chops on skewers whittled from pine branches, and ate them right off the stick like primitives. We bit into our tomatoes whole, and used clamshells to scoop out the fluffy potatoes from the roasted skins, everything tasting better than anything cooked indoors. I stole glances at Bernard. Although I ate most of my meals at the boardinghouse with him usually present, this was different. It was an adventure, outside of our workaday lives, freer. Once he caught me looking at him, and I felt my cheeks flush. We finished the cookies in twilight, mesmerized by the flames.

“They look like wind-tossed orange tulips,” I said, and between the flames I saw Bernard looking at me too, with what seemed to be deep interest, maybe even something more, but the light was flickering and I couldn’t be sure.

When the fire burned down for the night, all of us took a little walk together, and Bernard fell into step beside me. We spoke of the softness of the air, all misty and still, the briny tang of the sea, and the goodness
of the day—nothing more significant than that. Then we drifted into quietness with contained feeling, which left me with unbroached questions.

In bed that night, smelling the lingering smoky odor of the beach fire made me wonder whether Edwin had been eating outdoors by a campfire in some California mining camp. If he were here instead of Bernard, would he have enjoyed the day as much as Bernard seemed to? The Edwin that the letter revealed was gravely altered from the Edwin I had known and loved, and my reaction to him now might be compassion and sadness, but it wasn’t love. I turned over in bed to let him go. Content for the time being, I listened to friendly taps of light rain on the metal porch roof and fell asleep wondering if Bernard was listening to them too.