El Paso: A Novel (11 page)

UP IN HER SECOND-FLOOR ROOM,
which also overlooked the ocean, Xenia sat by the window watching from a different angle the same scene that Arthur was witnessing. She felt sorry for Timmy, because she knew how much he hated shooting, and Xenia knew something about hate, since for the past two months she had been hating herself.

Xenia Shaughnessy was a tall, graceful woman in her prime at the age of thirty-two, with bright bluish green eyes, dark lustrous hair, full lips, and an aristocratic aquiline nose—a classic Anglo-Saxon beauty. And yet she wasn’t that at all. Xenia was in fact of Polish extraction; her parents had emigrated to Pittsburgh a quarter century earlier and her father, after laboring in a foundry, scraped up enough money to start his own coal and ice delivery business, which grew into one of the few success stories that could be told by Polish immigrants.

Arthur had met her in the north of England while climbing in the hills near the Scottish border on the only true vacation he’d ever taken. The Colonel had presented him with a summer in Europe after his college graduation. Xenia was there with her mother and they were next headed to Paris, a gift, like his, for graduation, in her case from finishing school. One day he came to a country inn where Xenia and her mother were having lunch. They fell into conversation and Arthur was quickly smitten. He canceled his plans to go to Scotland, took the Channel ferry to the Continent, and followed her to Paris, where they secretly met in afternoons or mornings when Xenia managed to slip away from her mother. Paris became their enchanted city.

“OH, ARTHUR,” SHE’D SAID WITH A LAUGH
one day as they lay on cool sheets with the breeze blowing a translucent curtain through the window of Arthur’s rooms near Xenia’s hotel off the Champs-Élysées, “it’s impossible!” Paris was beautiful in June, before the sun of July and August turned it into a sweatbox. The parks were full of flowers and the skies deep blue and cloudless.

“Why? I think it’s perfectly proper. Besides, it’ll give us an excuse to see each other in the evenings. For dinners, I mean.”

“
Tout au contraire!
” she exclaimed almost condescendingly in her finishing school French. They were lying spoonlike, he pressed tightly against her, absorbing her smells and feeling the pulsing of her blood against his skin.

“Why not? Why wouldn’t your mother be glad to find an American in this city, one whom she’s already met? What could be the harm if I took the both of you out to dinner now and then?”

“She’d suspect something immediately,” Xenia replied. “Oh, she might acquiesce once, but then she’d watch me like a hawk. No more freedom to go out on my own on afternoons like this.” She turned and made a slicing motion with her hand across Arthur’s nose. “
Nez coup! N’est-ce pas, mon cher?
”

“Because you’ve done this kind of thing before?” he said peevishly.

“No, silly, but I know Mama. She’s shrewd. There’s no way you could disguise the look in your eyes if we were to meet with her—nor I in mine. She would see you looking at me
tout nu
, and it would all be over. Mama is a noticer—she notices everything. She’d put me on the leash.”

They had all been in Paris for three weeks, and it was the longest and grandest three weeks of Arthur’s life.

He’d found out from Xenia where she’d be staying before they left England and upon arriving in Paris had immediately taken rooms a few blocks away from her hotel. He’d hung around there in the shadows for several days until he spied her and her mother at an outdoor café, which he correctly concluded was where they went in the afternoons. After several days of this, when her mother once left the table, he gave a waiter ten francs and a note he’d kept in his pocket since arriving, telling her his address and asking her to leave a note of her own at another café near his apartment if she would like to meet him sometime. She did, next morning.

“But I can’t stand it,” Arthur said, “just seeing you for an hour or so—and not even every day, at that.”

“It will have to do, darling,” she told him. “And now I must go.” She got up from the bed, stripping the top sheet with her and wrapping it around her figure like a Greek goddess. Her bright eyes gave Arthur a shimmering thrill of excitement, as if she were the only woman in the world for him, which of course she was. He wanted never to let her from his sight.

“We’re going back to the Louvre in the morning,” she said. “Mama will be tired after that. She’ll take a nap after lunch. I’ll say I’m going out for a walk on the Champs. I’ll meet you at the Rive Gauche between two and three—
à la bonne heure
!”

“Yes, but—”

“You must stay out of the picture for now,” Xenia said firmly. She was seated on a chair next to the bed, picking up her underclothes, and gave him a loving squeeze on his wrist. She had thought of all the Polish boys she had known back in Pittsburgh—nice enough, for Polish boys whose families had also made something of themselves other than fruit-stand peddlers or garbage men—but they were rough-and-tumble compared with Arthur Shaughnessy of Boston, Massachusetts.

What Miss Walton’s School had taught Xenia Kzwalskci was that there was more to life than what her parents had had in mind for her, and in her four years there she’d developed a fierce determination to become something better than what was expected, which in her case was to find a nice Polish boy with a career and to bear a succession of Polish Catholic grandchildren so her parents would have a legacy of little ones bouncing on their knees for the rest of their natural days.

That was not for Xenia, and she felt that this handsome, shy American, this collegiate man who she could tell was from an important and cultured family in the fabled and cultured New England stronghold of Boston was like a dream come true for the daughter of an ice-and-coal man from Pittsburgh. She had read of the great New England aristocracy, and Arthur seemed certainly to be one of these. His father owned a railroad company! It never occurred to her that his name, Shaughnessy, was one that, simply on the face of it, wouldn’t have allowed him to be a part of that rarefied class of Bostonians she’d read so much about.

Dressed now, Xenia bent to Arthur in the bed and gave him a long kiss. She could scarcely believe she had actually given herself to him—and after only ten days. But it all seemed right and true, and so she did not stop to dwell on the horror with which her parents would have greeted her behavior, let alone the Church.

“
Bonjour
, darling,” she said, blowing a kiss, opening the door.

“I don’t know why you so worship the language of these people,” Arthur said as a parting shot.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “how can you have any respect for a man who, when his house catches on fire, he starts running around in the street shouting, ‘Foo, foo, foo’?”

She stuck out her tongue at him.

FOR HIS PART, ARTHUR
had never met anyone like Xenia, either.

In his time with the Shaughnessys, he’d attended tea dances with the daughters of Boston’s lace-curtain Irish, smiling, snappy colleens who giggled and shrank back to their mothers and later, as they became adolescent, into the Church, so he could barely manage a kiss on the cheek. There were of course Protestant girls whom he’d met at day school or at his father’s bathing club near Gloucester, but they seemed stuffy and shy.

Then, during his short, dreadful experience at Groton, when they’d had swaps with Miss Porter’s and other boarding schools, the girls not only ignored him but in some cases most obviously whispered about him—tuned in, as they were, by his ruthless and mean-spirited classmates: “He’s Irish,” they’d say. “He’s an orphan and a mackerel snapper,” they’d say. “He was left in a basket on the Irishman’s stoop.”

In time Arthur managed to develop friendships with others like himself—the sons and daughters of wealthy Bostonians who were on the fringes of Yankee society like the Shaughnessys were and, because they weren’t born into it, would never be invited in, no matter how witty and charming they were, and so they formed their own outer circle with their own parties and dances at their own clubs.

But in all of this, Arthur had never met a girl to fall in love with. Perhaps he was too busy to fall in love—or even have a girlfriend. Mostly, what hours he did not spend studying or working at the rail offices of the NE&P he spent in a top-floor room of the Shaughnessy mansion with his collections.

When finally Xenia and her mother departed Paris several weeks later, Arthur promised to visit her in Pittsburgh on his return. When he got home to Boston the next month, there were numerous letters from Xenia, the last announcing that she was pregnant.

The Colonel and Beatie had had great plans for Arthur that did not include the daughter of a Polack from Pittsburgh. For her part, Xenia was faced with the nauseating prospect of informing her parents of her condition. Arthur, being the gentleman he was raised to be, visited Pittsburgh as soon as possible and on his return announced to the Shaughnessys his intention to marry Xenia Kzwalskci without delay. In the uproar that followed, Arthur stood his ground for one of the few times in his life with his father. Beatie, if not happy, at least resigned herself to the event, and two weeks later, they all journeyed down to Pittsburgh in the Colonel’s private railcar to attend a Polish wedding.

It became an awkward affair for all concerned, in no small part because, beforehand, Beatie had told everyone that Xenia was the daughter of a Polish count, which was not exactly the truth. At the reception, as the groom’s small party stood aside from the throngs of Polish guests, Colonel Shaughnessy coarsely wondered aloud whether they should have brought a pound cake. Beatie felt grateful that Mr. Kzwalskci had ordered an orchestra to play classical music (even if it was Chopin) and she managed a nice chat with Mrs. Kzwalskci about tatting lace. Afterward the couple took a brief honeymoon to New Orleans, which neither of them had seen. Then he and Xenia went back to Boston, where he joined the company full-time. All this occurred in 1903.

Seven months later, Katherine Shaughnessy was born, and two years afterward Timothy Gray Shaughnessy came into the world. Arthur never regretted his decision, and as the years went past considered himself one of the world’s lucky men. Xenia’s finishing school in Pittsburgh had given her an abiding interest in literature, music, and the arts. They were a good fit, the Polish girl and the orphaned descendant of whatever-kind-of-immigrants, both just a generation or so removed from poverty and servitude. “Only in America,” as the Colonel was fond of saying.

TEN

I
n the drawing room Arthur tired of waiting. He walked outside just in time to hear Beatie, who had returned from a walk on the beach, cry, “Oh, no, John! Not before lunch!”

“Pull!” the Colonel shouted, and snapped off two roaring shotgun blasts, powdering a double of clay pigeons out over the water. Beatie clapped her hands over her ears and Timmy Shaughnessy put his hands to his own.

“Now you try it,” said the Colonel.