The Chaperone (21 page)

She felt sorry for him. Before the end of her pregnancy, they’d gone out to parties and dances together. Now she felt like a walking eyesore, her body still too swollen to squeeze into a corset, her breasts too large with milk. And really, she didn’t want to be away from the twins for long. But having people over for dinner also seemed too challenging—and embarrassing, as she was still an exhausted and potentially leaky vessel. She was only comfortable with visits from Alan’s family, for whom it seemed she could do no wrong.

Alan said it was ridiculous of her to apologize, that she didn’t have anything to be sorry for. Of course she needed time to recover.

“You almost died,” he reminded her, taking a bite of a pancake coated with sugar, a favorite dessert of Helgi. “And I’m hardly dissatisfied. We’ve been married a year, and we have two healthy sons. You’ve been a devoted mother to them.” He smiled across the table. “I have no complaints whatsoever.”

She cut into her pancake and glanced up at him. He was still dressed for court, still wearing his coat, even, though he’d removed his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. The skin beneath was a faint shadow in the glow of the table’s candles. Her gaze moved to his hands.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I want you to know…” She swallowed and looked down at her plate. “I want you to know that I look forward to my full recovery, when I can be a wife to you again as well.”

There. She had said it, as plainly as she could. She didn’t know what else to do. He hadn’t been in her bed since she told him she was pregnant. She’d assumed that this was a common practice, and that having relations when she was pregnant would harm the child in some way, and that her doctor was too embarrassed to tell her. And Alan, so considerate, might still think her too tired or fragile for relations. But now, looking at him in the candlelight, even with Helgi still cleaning up in the kitchen, she wanted to go to him and sit in his lap and put her arms around his broad shoulders, and press her nose against his Adam’s apple, breathing in the peppermint and the scent of warm skin underneath. She didn’t want him to be considerate forever.

She heard him set down his spoon. When she looked up, his smile was gone. He turned toward her, his knee grazing hers under the table.

“Cora,” he said, reaching over the table’s corner to take her hand. “I’m afraid I have to tell you something.”

She held her breath, waiting. His hand was warm against hers.

“We can’t have any more children. Or we shouldn’t. I didn’t want to tell you while you were still weak, but the doctor was clear.” He stared at her. “What happened with the twins’ birth could likely happen again, and he can’t guarantee you would be as fortunate.”

She looked into the candle’s flame. He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already suspected. But she’d put the thought out of her mind—she’d long dreamed of a big family with Alan, finally, to make up for the years of being alone. She’d wanted to be one of those women with a house full of children who would know only love and togetherness, all of them calling her Mother and wanting for nothing. She’d wanted this so badly that it had felt like a need, a mission. But now, hearing the hard facts, her fear trumped all that. Alan was right. She loved the twins more than these imagined children. She wouldn’t risk leaving them motherless. And really, it was more than that. She remembered with clarity the feeling of life truly pulling away from her. She didn’t want to die, or ever feel that pickax again. She wanted to live a long life and be in this world with her beautiful husband and her baby boys and her pretty house with the turret and the afternoon sunlight slanting across the wooden floors. Even for herself, even without the twins, she didn’t want to bleed to death. She was grateful Alan hadn’t left the choice up to her, or implied they might try for another child anyway. Because she wanted to live even more than she wanted more children, but saying that aloud would sound unwomanly, and cowardly, and selfish.

She leaned down to kiss Alan’s hand. “You don’t mind?” she asked, looking up.

He smoothed back her hair and shook his head. “I couldn’t bear it if something went wrong,” he said. “We need you to live.”

He never came
to her bed again. He kissed her cheek, and kissed her hand, and sometimes moved his hand over her hair, but even when the twins were sleeping through the night in their own room at the end of the hall, and even when she could fit in her corset again, and wear pretty dresses and dance with him at parties, he stayed in his own room at night. She understood he was being chivalrous, protecting her from his desire.

But she also wondered, from time to time, if so much chivalry was necessary. Surely not all relations led to babies. Many women she knew had ten or more children, but some had only three or four, and it was hard to believe that all of the married women who weren’t having babies each year lay alone in bed every night as she did. And what about bad women? They certainly couldn’t risk a baby every time they had relations. There must be some trick, something other women knew and she didn’t. Would it be safe if they just didn’t complete the act? If they stopped before he spilled out? That would certainly be better than nothing. But who could she ask? Not the doctor. Not Viola or Harriet. Either one would likely be offended, or horrified, and think her some sort of bad woman. She could say she was just asking for Alan’s sake, for the sake of a happy marriage, but she might just embarrass herself.

She wondered if he went to bad women. If he did, then he was right to stay out of her room. There had been a notice in the paper that had bluntly warned men not to visit bad women unless they wanted to bring syphilis and all sorts of other diseases home to their wives and likely make them infertile. Cora knew a nice woman who had been married five years, with no children at all, and Viola Hammond said she was sterile because her husband had visited a bad woman and brought home a disease. It happened all the time, Viola said, and then she’d looked at Cora so steadily that Cora wondered if she was implying that Alan was similarly responsible for the twins’ difficult birth, which for all she knew, he could have been. Would the doctor have told her? She didn’t know. There was so much she didn’t know, and no way to find any of it out.

But she couldn’t come out and accuse him. Not on such shaky ground. And not when he was so good to her and the boys. Once Howard and Earle were toddling around, Alan would get down on the floor to play with them, even after a long day at work, letting them climb up on his back and crawl underneath him, laughing and blowing raspberries into their bellies until they were laughing, too. And he often surprised Cora with a present—a new hat from the Innes store, or something nice for the house. If she would remind him that it wasn’t her birthday or Christmas, he would tell her he was aware of that, but that he was also aware of what a wonderful wife and mother she was, and that it wasn’t his fault that she had the kind of head that looked good in any hat.

When the twins
were four, Cora thought it would be fun to take them to Wonderland, which was just over the Douglas Avenue Bridge, a trolley park with a carousel, a roller rink, and even a roller coaster called The Great Thriller. Out of her own excitement, she made the mistake of telling the boys her plan in advance, and she was so pleased with their thrilled response that she promised to take them the very next Saturday if the weather was good. Alan had been working long hours, but he said he was curious about Wonderland himself, and he thought he could manage to free himself for a Saturday. Harriet and her new husband, Milt, said they wanted to come along as well, as they would soon be moving to Lawrence, and they knew how much they would miss their little nephews, not to mention Cora and Alan, once they were three hours away.

But when Saturday came, a cloudless morning suggesting a beautiful day, Alan said he didn’t feel well. It was just a headache, he said, tightening the belt of his robe. And maybe something with his stomach. He didn’t need a doctor, just some rest at home. They should go on without him.

“You’re sure?” Cora asked, reaching up to press her hand against his forehead. They were in his room with the green velvet curtains, the same fabric covering the bed. Five years they had been married, and she’d hardly been in this room. She’d never so much as sat on the bed. “We could just go another day.”

He took her hand from his forehead and kissed it. Even now, she found him so arresting to look at. He’d grown a mustache like Teddy Roosevelt’s, and she was surprised at how much she liked it on him.

“I’d hate to disappoint the boys,” he said. “It’s all they’ve been thinking about. Really. I just need some rest. I’ll be fine.”

Before they left the house, her own head started to ache a bit. She tried to ignore it, because the boys were already sad that their father wasn’t coming and she was determined to make the best of things. But by the time they met up with Harriet and Milt on the trolley, the ache was making her snappish with the boys, too sensitive to their collective volume. She realized she was shivering a little, too, though the sun was shining and everyone else said the breeze felt good. If Alan hadn’t fallen ill that morning, she might have kept pushing herself, but since her symptoms trailed his by just a few hours, it seemed likely that she really was getting sick. And though she’d been looking forward to seeing the boys have fun, a day at the amusement park with two excited children hardly seemed what she needed now.

After a few minutes of hushed consultation, Harriet agreed that Cora should probably go home.

“Darlings,” she said, turning around in her seat to address the boys. “Your mommy is sick, maybe with what your daddy has, and she needs to go home and rest. You can go home with her and try to be very quiet all day and maybe not have anyone make you something to eat, or you can come to Wonderland with me and your uncle Milt, and you can go on roller coasters and carousels and have us fill you up with sweets, and take you home only when you’re good and tired.”

Cora was surprised, and touched, to see that the twins actually had some trouble with the decision. They wanted her to come to Wonderland, they said. Earle started to cry, and it was only when Cora promised that she would take them again the very next Saturday when she was feeling better, and let them show her around, that they agreed to go along with their aunt and uncle. When they got off the trolley and she stayed on, she was a little heartbroken, though she waved and smiled and called for them to be brave boys. If she and Alan were both laid up, it would be best to have them out of the house.

She was quiet
when she came in, slipping off her shoes in the entry. She thought he might be sleeping and she didn’t want to disturb him. But on the turn of the stairs, she heard a sigh, or maybe a yawn, and she decided she would let him know that she was home, and see if he needed anything. But when she got to his door, her gloved hand already balled in a fist, ready to knock, she found not a closed door but a sunlit view of her husband lying naked and almost on top of Raymond Walker, who was also naked, the sheet pulled up to their waists, one of Alan’s hands embedded in the flame-colored hair, the fingers of his other hand moving slowly over Raymond’s freckled shoulder. Raymond’s eyes were closed, and Alan was staring down at him so intently he didn’t notice her standing there.

She was still. She’d once been kicked in the chin by a calf while helping Mr. Kaufmann in the barn. She remembered her head snapping back, that first flash with no pain, just the certainty that pain would come.

“Oh God,” she said, and put her hand to her mouth. Her other hand went to her belly.

Alan sat up, looked at her. She stared. She’d never seen his naked chest, the tufts of dark hair around his nipples.

“Shut the door!”

His voice was so commanding, and so loud that she complied, or tried to, reaching out for the knob. But her corset was tight against her ribs, and she couldn’t breathe. She grabbed the edge of the door frame, believing she would faint, hoping she would faint, if only to escape what was happening, what she had just seen, and fall into nothingness as she had during the twins’ birth. But something obstinate in her wouldn’t fade out, and wouldn’t go down to the ground. She was still conscious, still standing, still horribly aware. She turned away, wheezing, and started for the stairs, wanting only to get away, to get out of the house, but her vision darkened and she couldn’t get a good breath. She turned back, her eyes closed tight as she stumbled past Alan’s doorway to her own room, humiliated by the guttural gasps she couldn’t stop. She fell onto the bed, yanking off her gloves so she could undo the buttons on her collar. A button came off in her hand. She threw it, and it ricocheted off the wall. She unhooked the belt of her skirt and reached up to tug at the front ribbon of her corset. And still her terrified mind would not go out, would not let her forget what she’d seen.

Her life was over. That was clear. Her husband, the father of her children, was wicked, debased. Nothing was as she’d thought.

As her breathing quieted, she heard their murmuring voices, and the clink of a belt buckle, the snap of suspenders, and then feet moving fast down the stairs, the front door opening and slamming shut. Were they leaving together? All she could see, with her eyes open or closed tight, was Alan’s fingers moving over the freckled shoulder. So loving. She thought she would retch.

She heard water running and then slow, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. She tried to get up and close her door, but she couldn’t get up fast enough, and then Alan was already there in the doorway, wearing his green robe and black pajama bottoms, holding out a glass of water. His eyes were mournful, stricken.

“Take this,” he said.

She shook her head, turning away from him. The window was open. A bird chirped, and she felt a cool breeze against her face. Alan walked past her to a chair at the little table in the corner of her room. He put the water on the table and sat with his knees apart, an elbow resting on each, his fingers together and his head bowed. She shifted, and he looked up.