The Chaperone (33 page)

And to think he’d apologized. For finishing fast, he said. He hoped she would give him another chance. He’d smiled, so she smiled, too, though she didn’t really understand—nothing had seemed fast in comparison to what she remembered from those few, lightless evenings with Alan. And Joseph had kept his hands on her, his mouth on her, his gaze on her. She was annoyed with herself. In comparison, she’d been a rag doll, too shy, too uncertain, to do more than put her hands on his shoulders, to even glance at his eyes, and even that had taken such will.

She would need another chance, too.

His room was spare and neat and small. From the bed, she could almost reach out and touch a clean white sink with a water pump. On the other side of the sink, a small icebox sat on what looked like a nightstand. The unpainted walls were bare except for two pairs of overalls and two white shirts, each garment hanging from its own nail. He’d converted the closet to a bathroom, he explained—no tub, just a toilet. He put it in himself, having learned about plumbing when he helped install toilets for the nuns and the girls. The plumber appreciated his help and told him where he could find used pipes and a stool.

“The first time, I make mistake,” he said. “Not enough insulation. I didn’t know. The pipe was outside, and in January, it froze, burst. Ruined. So I do it again, this time right.”

When she’d first come in, feeling as if she were about to jump from a great height, he’d offered her one of the two chairs at the little table by the window. He’d offered her peanuts, too, apologizing, saying peanuts were all he had. She assured him she wasn’t hungry, that a glass of water would be fine. A shelf above the sink held two mismatched glasses, two plates, and just one sharp knife. His daughter came over on Sundays, he said. They both liked sandwiches. He bought cheese and cold cuts at the deli. Through the week, the nuns fed him, whatever the girls didn’t finish. It wasn’t so bad. Oatmeal for breakfast. Peanuts. Bread. They got donations from the Hudson Guild. Sometimes fruit, vegetables. Most of the grocers in the neighborhood were Catholic, generous with the nuns.

He asked if she ever got the letter from Massachusetts, if she’d found out anything else about her mother. She told him briefly about the meeting at Grand Central, the family in Haverhill she would never know. He asked questions, and he made it clear he was ready to listen to an expanded account, but she kept trailing off, distracted. Just the other day, she’d wanted so much to talk with him about Mary O’Dell, to have someone to confide in, but now that she was here, she was only thinking about how he was looking at her, the slant of gold in his right eye. And being alone with him in a small room. On the wall above the table was a bookshelf, or really, a row of books resting on a long board supported by metal brackets screwed into the wall, with two bricks serving as bookends. Sipping her water, she’d scanned the dustless spines.
Principles of Wireless Telegraphy. Electric Oscillations and Electric Waves.
Essentials of English.
Automobile Engineering, Vol. III. Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children.
Some of the titles were in German.

She asked him if he missed Germany or being with people who were like him. It would be easier, she imagined, living where the language was his own.

“I miss it sometimes.” He set his water on the table.

“You miss your family? Do you have siblings? Are your parents alive?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “That was not so good. My older brother was a difficult person. He and my father were the same. My mother died.” He shrugged. “Greta is my family.”

Cora nodded. “I’m glad you have her.”

He laughed, sadly. “Me, too.”

“But do you ever feel…” She tried to pin down what she wanted to know. “Do you ever worry that you’re supposed to be in Germany? You were born there. I understand your family was difficult. But they’re yours, your blood relations. I know your daughter is, but all of your other relatives are there.”

He shook his head.

She’d thought that he didn’t understand her question, that her English was too Midwestern, too slanted or too quick. She tried again. “But you’ve had such terrible luck in this country. You don’t ever wonder if it was all a mistake? If you were supposed to stay there, with people who are your relations? Where your history is?”

He shook his head again, more decidedly this time. “Germany is where I was born,” he said. “Only that. I am supposed to be where I go.”

Not long after that, they were on his narrow bed, and she was helping him tug at the buttons of her blouse. Even then, she was full of dread, knowing what she had to say, the words she had to actually speak.

“I can’t get pregnant.” She’d breathed it out, her eyes closed. Really, this was the bigger leap, the harder one, even more than just coming to his door. “I mean, I can. It’s possible, but I shouldn’t. The doctor said. Also, I don’t want to.”

She opened her eyes. He pulled his face back from hers, looking alarmed, his spectacles askew. She heard the low horn of a ship.

“Okay. Sorry.” He rolled off of her, facing the ceiling, his hands behind his head.

She sat up. He’d misunderstood. She had no time for misunderstandings. “I don’t want to get pregnant, I mean. That’s what I don’t want.”

He looked up at her, surprised again, and all at once she was falling, terrified of what he might be thinking. This was why Margaret Sanger and her talk of birth control was called obscene. It changed everything, what Cora had just admitted, to Joseph as well as herself: she had not come to his bed in a trance. She had not been seduced in a moment of weakness. No. She was lying here with him because she wanted to be, and wide awake enough to stop and think beyond the moment and know what she didn’t want, as well.

He might think she was crazed, unwomanly. There were names for women, the kind of women, who said the kinds of things that she’d just said. She moved her arm across her chest, her unbuttoned buttons.

But there was no contempt in his eyes, no judgment. In fact, he looked as abashed as she did. “I have nothing.” He held up his palms as if to show this were true. “I’m sorry. I have been alone.”

She waited. She couldn’t say anything else. She’d already said more than she thought she could.

He cleared his throat. “I can… you want me to get something?”

She managed a nod. He laughed, and unbelievably, she did, too.

“You will wait here?”

She nodded again. What did he think she would do—go with him? No. No one would pay attention to him, whatever he bought, wherever he could buy it. She, on the other hand, would be treated differently.

“Fifteen minutes. Okay?” He stood, tucking in his shirt, and she understood he hadn’t been asking her to come with him. He was only asking if she was willing to wait.

It was after he left
that she let herself get a closer look at the framed picture propped up on top of the icebox. She’d noticed it when she first came in, but she’d thought it best not to inquire about it or even look at it too long, given the circumstances, and how unfair it might be to him. He hadn’t known she was coming here tonight. As he’d said, he’d been alone in this room. Now that he was gone, she moved closer and saw the photograph was what she’d suspected: Joseph with a full head of hair, wearing a good suit, his hand on the shoulder of a seated woman who held a baby in a baptism gown. It was a formal portrait, and the two adult faces were somber, but the baby, not knowing the rules, seemed to be caught mid-laugh.

Right away, Cora felt the pressure of tears. Greta. A happy baby who couldn’t know what was coming. Influenza. Her mother’s death. Her father’s long absence in Georgia. Loneliness. Probably hunger. The New York Home for Friendless Girls, even after her father’s return. The next years would be cruel to all three of them. Cora didn’t dare touch the frame itself, but she leaned forward to study Joseph’s younger, unlined face and also, to look more closely at the wife and mother, who was fair-haired and a little stout, and even prettier than Cora had imagined. But she felt no jealousy, no selfish resentment or need to turn the picture away. She felt only a pained sorrow for this luckless mother with the serious eyes. If anything, the dead woman’s youth and beauty seemed a reprimand, not because Cora was here now, the first woman in this little room, but because she’d waited so long to come here at all. She’d lived too much of her life so stupidly, following nonsensical rules, as if she and he, as if anyone, had all the time in the world.

They had to leave
well before dawn, he said, before the nuns were up. He would see her home. Cora suggested going to breakfast. When he hesitated, she felt a punch of fear. Was it true, then, what she’d been told about men? Did they soon tire of what came too easily? She was being presumptuous and naive, perhaps, assuming he felt the same urgency. But in a few days, she would be gone.

“Breakfast would be good,” he said, though he looked anxious, and only then did it occur to her that he likely hesitated because of money. Of course. She was a dolt. How insensitive could she be? He lived on oatmeal, peanuts, donated fruit. Since Cora had come to New York, she and Louise had gone to restaurants every day without giving much thought to the bill. She had money from Leonard Brooks, money from Alan. She could easily pay for breakfast for both of them, but she knew that even suggesting this would likely be a mistake.

“I have toast and jam at my apartment,” she said. “And oranges.”

He held her hand on the subway. Even when they got off at her stop, the streetlights were still on. Only the eastern sky showed a faint streak of rose, and the streets were quiet enough that she could hear the first twitters of birds. They passed a burdened paperboy and a limping woman in a garish gown. But they were often alone on the sidewalk, which at that hour seemed so expansive and uncluttered, as if laid out just for them.

He left before noon.
He had to see if the nuns needed anything, and he had his daily tasks. But if he worked late, he said, he could get ahead, and he would be free to come see her tomorrow morning. No, he said, his hand on her cheek. No, he wouldn’t be tired.

Tomorrow then, Cora agreed, her fingers moving through the light hair on his forearm. She was already thinking of a meal she could make him, or buy prepared, something casual that she could pretend to just have on hand. He could come as early as ten-thirty, she said. Louise would be in class.

After he left, she went to work. She took a quick bath, drained the tub and filled it again to wash the sheets, holding a bar of soap under the faucet until it lathered. She wrung the sheets as best she could before hanging them from the curtain rod in the bedroom. She tidied the rest of the apartment, washing the dishes and cups, shaking the pillows free of indentations. Still, when it was time to leave for the studio, she was certain Louise would know everything, just by looking at her face: her cheeks and neck were still sore from his stubble, and as anxious as she was, she couldn’t stop smiling. She was dazed, distracted by memory. On Broadway, the sun blazing above her, she walked right into the pole of a streetlight. “Watch yerself,” said a passing man, unhelpfully, and two little boys moved in a wide arc around her, as if she were dangerous, or a drunk.

By the time Cora reached the studio, Louise had already changed into her street clothes, and she looked surprisingly alert for having just endured a dance class on the heels of a bus ride from Pennsylvania. But she barely glanced at Cora, and it seemed she truly had no memory of the difficult morning before she’d left.

“My God, it’s good to be home,” she announced as they climbed the stairs back up to street level. “I mean, Philadelphia is fine. It’s certainly a step up from Wichita. A big step, God knows. The audience was wonderful, very sophisticated. You could tell they thought we were amazing. But it was so strange: I felt absolutely
bereft
not to be in New York, even for one night. I just feel so at home here.” When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, she inhaled deeply, her dark eyes taking in Broadway, the windowed towers all around. “Isn’t that something? That I could feel so attached to a place that’s still new to me? It’s not even where I’m from.”

She didn’t seem truly interested in Cora’s answer, as she gave her no time to respond. As they walked, she talked about what a marvelous partner Ted Shawn had made, and the flesh-colored paint all the dancers had to wear so they wouldn’t technically be half naked, how the paint smelled like witch hazel and how silly the whole idea seemed to her. Cora half listened, silently considering Louise’s question about being so attached to a place. If it was strange, then Cora herself was guilty of strangeness—for now, even with all that had happened, she still wanted to go back to Wichita. She already knew that she would think back on these remaining days with Joseph for the rest of her life, with longing, with real grief. But she missed her home. She missed the quiet streets she knew so well, the unobstructed sky. She missed hearing her name called out by friends she’d known for almost twenty years. After the loss of the Kaufmanns, the town had taken her in and made her feel a part of it. She wasn’t an outsider there, and even now, that meant so much.

In any case, she had to go back. Of course she did. Her boys would be back for college breaks, and their home would need to be as it always was—with her in it, making them hotcakes and asking about their lessons and games and plans. And even without the boys, it wasn’t as if she could just leave Alan. He was her family, every bit as much as her sons were. He’d lied to her, yes, but he’d also taken care of her, and he’d been a devoted father. If she left him now, there would be a scandal and then, perhaps, suspicion. He would have to marry again, and hope for his life, his very life, that his new bride would be as naive as Cora had once been, or as loyal as she was now.

They weren’t far from the apartment when she realized Louise was looking at her, taking her in. Cora’s glove went to her stubble-scrubbed cheek. The dark eyes felt penetrating.

“What?” Cora asked, glancing away.