The Gilded Years (16 page)

Anita, suddenly unsettled, looked across the room at Lottie, her eyes wide and worried.

“Don’t give me that face, Anita Hemmings, I know you are quite aware that we’ve been writing each other, and sisters always have sway over brothers, so please go ahead and sway. I know it will be a yes, though. How could he say no to a trip to see his little sister?”

“Big sister,” Anita corrected her.

“Big, is it? But he’s not so much younger, is he?”

“No. Just one year,” she reminded her.

“Fine, then. And as I’m a youthful twenty-two, that works swimmingly.” She threw the fan on the floor and stood up. “Anita, I absolutely cannot wait for Phil. It’s our very last one! Then we’ll never go to dances like Phil again because we will be old, wrinkled dowagers as soon as we step off campus with our diplomas. We’ll be the walking dead. The educated walking dead!”

“I thought you were moving to the Orient and earning your doctorate in chemistry while eating piles of fish?”

“Am I?” said Lottie, grinning. “Oh, thank goodness. My future
does
sound entertaining. Maybe I won’t run away from it, after all.”

Two days later, Lottie had news from Frederick about the Phil Day dance, and it was not what anyone was expecting.

When Anita came into the parlor room with Belle behind her, both girls with songbooks and sheet music under their arms, having just finished choir practice, Lottie’s face was a deep pink hue and she had a noticeable line of sweat on her forehead. Her head was hanging off the bed, her body nearly upside down, and she had the pieces of a torn letter in her hand.

“Lottie! What on earth is wrong? Are you ill? You’re all red!” Belle rushed over to her bed with Anita a step behind.

“You do look ill, Lottie. We should take you to see Dr. Thelberg,” Anita said. “You need a mustard plaster on your chest. I knew we should have asked the maids to take our flannels out of the catacombs before November. Do you think you can stand?”

“It’s not an illness, Miss Hemmings,” said Lottie in a gravelly voice. “It’s so much worse.” Anita looked more closely at Lottie’s bed and spotted the rest of the torn-up note, instantly recognizing Frederick’s even hand.

“Frederick!” she exclaimed. “Is he ill?”

“Your brother is perfectly fine, Anita. Unless you think academic probation is something to worry about. I was constantly on it as a freshman, and now I’m practically top of the class. So, yes, Frederick is thriving, but I am not! He, your own brother, has rejected me! He will not be coming to the dance, will not be my date for Phil Day, and as it’s already November twenty-fifth, I won’t be able to arrange another date. I will be the only senior at Phil with an empty dance card. I will die on December fourth, 1896, of public humiliation.”

She hung her head off the bed again and started turning a fascinating shade of fuchsia.

Anita was furious with her brother. She had known he would never come to the dance, but was academic probation the best excuse he could conjure up? It wasn’t even a believable one. Lottie had met him, and they had spoken about their shared love of chemistry and how they were both flying through with perfect grades their senior year. And now Lottie, the person most responsible for her own happiness this year, had been left devastated by his rejection.

Anita picked up the pieces of the letter, extracting the ones in Lottie’s hand, and read it over twice. It was not remotely credible.

Together, she and Belle sat Lottie up on her bed. Then she attempted to salvage the situation.

“Lottie, you know you can find a date for Phil as easily as you can pick up a pen. I’m sorry about Frederick, but if he’s on academic probation at Cornell, you understand, don’t you? He can’t leave. He is a senior. If it were one of us, we couldn’t attend the dance even though it will be just downstairs.”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” said Lottie, “but I feel so very ill. I don’t want to attend Phil my senior year with just anyone. I want to be escorted by Frederick Hemmings. This all comes as such a shock. In his last letter, he stated that he had never met a woman who wanted to be a chemistry professor and had traveled to the Far East. He said I was the most fascinating woman he had ever met! This does not bode well for my future confidence in men, Anita,” she concluded.

That evening, both Belle and Anita wired their dates for Phil to inquire whether they knew a handsome senior they could bring with them for Lottie. In the next few days, both girls were overwhelmed with suggestions, which almost spurred Lottie out of her depression. The three, along with Caroline Hardin, sat up until the final bell the
day after the responses arrived, eating plates of charlotte russe and debating which would be better for Lottie, a Harvard or a Yale man. They had it down to two: Harvard man Joseph Southworth from Boston and Yale man Philip Hinkle from Philadelphia. Anita lobbied heavily for Philip, as she was concerned that someone from Boston might pry into her family name, but Belle and Caroline won when they mentioned that Joseph was related to Commodore Matthew Perry, the man who helped open Japan to the West in 1854.

“How could I turn away such a man?” said Lottie. “I’m sure there are no other twenty-two-year-old girls who know as much about Japan as I do. I may have to sneak him up here to show him my collection of woodblock prints.”

“Don’t you dare, Louise Taylor,” cautioned Caroline. “I am not going to spend the rest of my senior year crying over you when you are dismissed from college, dragged out by your little ear.”

“I wouldn’t dare, but it does sound agreeable,” she said, running her finger over the faded blues and oranges of the works on the walls. “And I’m sure old Prexy Taylor would understand. He is an art connoisseur. Just look at the dear college’s museum. There are two Durands and three oils by Frederic Church.”

So it was settled. Anita wrote back to Porter and told him that his classmate Joseph Southworth had emerged the winner and that she and Lottie were both looking forward to their December arrival.

“Please know I am still brokenhearted, Anita,” said Lottie, when they were alone in their parlor room that night. “And if Frederick can find a way to escape awful Cornell, I will drop Joseph Southworth immediately, even if he is related to the esteemed commodore.”

“That’s awfully committed of you,” said Anita. “One meeting, and you’re so taken with my brother. Isn’t he lucky?”

“It’s you Hemmings children,” said Lottie, propping herself on her elbow and letting her blond curls hang dramatically over her face. “There’s something quietly charming about you both. Such beautiful faces, such elegance, all wrapped up in a bewitching sort of humility. And don’t say you can blame me, Anita. He’s your brother!”

Yes, Anita thought, that was the problem.

The following day, Anita received a response to her latest letter to Frederick. She had been asking the maid for the mail early every day so that it was never brought to her room when both she and Lottie were there. Any letter from Frederick would have been torn out of her hand by Lottie to be delivered as a monologue.

She folded the envelope and stuffed it in the pocket of her dress. She was already wearing her heaviest, a deep blue wool and silk with a trumpet skirt and a wide shoulder, purchased with her tutoring money before her sophomore year. She walked down to the library and chose a table in the middle back, surrounded by twenty thousand leather-bound books. She took the letter out of the envelope, already planning to burn it a few minutes later, as she did all Frederick’s letters.

He had always been the mouthpiece of her family. He told her what her parents were doing in their day-to-day lives—about their health, their worries—along with news of their younger siblings. But she knew that was not the subject of this letter. She would have to wait for news of her family until she returned home for Christmas. Anita lifted the page. The paper was thin and cheap, not the thick, embossed stationery Frederick had used to reply to Lottie.

Dear Anita,

By the time this letter reaches you, you’ll know that I’ve been communicating with Lottie, but you being you, you were well aware of it already.

I often think about you there, a Vassar girl just like the others—yet not. And I forget at times that it must be extremely difficult. When I check into a hotel in Poughkeepsie as a white man, or when I’m writing to a woman like Lottie (a very rare occurrence), then I remember the difficulty. How hard it must be to constantly remain alert, to appear effortless with so much effort, to leave the reality about yourself somewhere else. Will it die, you might wonder? Will I just become this person I am pretending to be?

This is my way of apologizing. I’m sorry I was less than understanding with you when I was in Poughkeepsie last. Being a Negro student at the Institute of Technology is difficult. I attend the school, but I am not a part of it. There are teachers who try very hard to make me feel like just another student, but there are students who won’t let me feel that way. I’ve been taken for a worker, a servant. Once a freshman from Georgia handed me his formal shoes, thinking I was a bootblack, even though I was in my nicest suit. My situation is not ideal, but I need to remember that neither is yours. I have not been wearing the mask of a white person for almost four years. And when I think about you having to do so, not just for a weekend, but always—awake, asleep, in class, with friends, with strangers—it exhausts me, and my admiration for you is renewed.

Which brings me to Lottie. It was with you in mind that I first responded to her. When you spoke of her at Smith Brothers that memorable autumn day in Poughkeepsie, you
emphasized that she is a Taylor and that one cannot treat a Taylor casually. Thus, I did not. I responded to her letter, and I would be dishonest if I said I didn’t feel immensely flattered by her interest in me. Frederick Hemmings, Negro student, mistaken for the bootblack, attending the Vassar Philaletheis Day Dance with Lottie Taylor. We both know my skin is noticeably darker than yours, but she did not seem to see it, and if she did, she did not care.

But the compliment didn’t entirely cloud my clarity of mind. It can never happen. Only for you, when I come to Vassar, do I live a double life, and if I attempted to do so full-time, I am sure I would be caught. It is not so simple to move fluidly between the black and white worlds. Yours are in separate compartments, and only when you are home during the summers do you become you again, a Negro again. Even over the Christmas holiday, there is not enough time for you to recover your habits. You seem foreign to all of us until we have you back for months.

You are white at Vassar, and I am a Negro at MIT, and because of it, it’s dangerous for me even to be in Poughkeepsie. I’ve visited these past three years because there was no Lottie Taylor. No one took an interest in me or noticed me off-campus with you. But she has, and it’s a flattering, yet dangerous problem.

I have handled Lottie’s advances as I hope you would have wanted me to. I was as polite as I felt I could be without swaying her affection further my way, but short of rude enough for her to feel disdain or anger toward me. I am hoping she will eventually feel detached enough to forget me altogether. Because that’s what we need to be when we walk in and out of these two worlds, Anita. Forgotten.

She may—and part of me does hope she will—be
upset by my poor excuse for why I cannot attend Phil Day. Please convince her that it is the case, that I have secretly been struggling with my studies. And then find someone she can quickly forget me for. Someone memorable.

I know you will be attending Phil, but I urge you, sister, in fact I beg you: Do not attend the dance with Porter Hamilton. If he is there, grant him one dance, be civil, but dance with other men, one dance with each. Do not show any interest, past politeness, to anyone. You have done this so well all your years there. Continue to do it well now.

I can imagine your face as I write this—bridling at the unfairness of it all. But it must be, Anita. You cannot, must not, get close to a man like Hamilton. It is the most dangerous thing you can do. If he ever knew, Anita, if you ever slipped and told him the truth, you would never see Vassar again.

But I do not want to end my letter this way. I want to say that when I spent time with Lottie and you in Poughkeepsie, when I felt her warmth toward me and then had it confirmed by her many letters, I felt a great surge of pride. I wanted to be the type of man who could attend Phil Day with Lottie Taylor. I felt what you must feel with Porter. So it is with shame that I write what I write, but it is because of my love that you must follow my warning. You’ve known that since you were still at the Girls’ High School and said to me, “I won’t be staying here long. I’ll be attending Vassar College soon.” And you did.

Your brother Frederick

Anita reread the letter three times, the second two readings when it was hidden in one of her Greek texts. Frederick never used the word
Negro
in his letters. He knew better than to write anything that would be harmful to Anita if
read by another. But this time, he had. She imagined that he was doing so as a threat, as a way to make her more fearful about attending the dance with Porter. She looked at the dangerous words on the page, then crumpled the letter, walked quickly to the new senior parlor, and let it tumble into the fire as she pretended to warm her hands. She watched as Frederick’s warnings were turned to ash. In ten days’ time, despite her brother’s disapproval, Porter would return.

B
efore the first morning bell rang on December 4, Lottie was at Anita’s bedside in her nightclothes. She wrapped her silk-topped blanket tight around her, climbed on the bed and shouted, “It’s Phil Day!” jumping up and down as best she could with Anita’s legs in the way.

Her roommate turned groggily over and watched her with amusement. Outside the window, Anita could see that it was snowing heavily, and she was happy that her last Phil Day dance would be bathed in snow, the fairy-tale setting of the campus in early winter.