Unrivaled (4 page)

“Oh my, yes! Harriett Marcus did. And Julia Shaw.” She paused as if debating with herself about something. When she spoke, it was in a whisper. “Julia . . . eloped.”

The horror! I groped for the chair and sat in it, feeling rather disoriented. Annie and Julia had been my closest friends. They’d married—eloped, even!—and I hadn’t known it. “Did anyone
not
get married?” Wasn’t there anyone who was still like me?

“Cora Taylor went away to college. To Vassar . . . or was it Swarthmore? I can never keep them straight. And Stella Lawrence went off to the Orient to be a missionary, if you can believe it. I don’t know what’s gotten into young girls these days.”

Suddenly, St. Louis felt dismal and friendless.

The maid presented herself and passed me the stack of newspapers I’d asked for. That dreadful murderer glared out at me from the top page. I turned it over so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“I’m sure Harriett Marcus would be happy to see you, although she’s Harriett Patterson now. She’s at-home for calls on Tuesday afternoons.”

I didn’t want to call on her, I wanted to
see
her. To go up to her room and dance while we listened to phonograph records. I didn’t want to sit in some strange parlor and talk about . . . whatever married people talked about. “Whom did she marry?”

“She married Archie Patterson.” Mother said it with a bend to her brow as if daring me to disapprove.

I’d never liked Archie Patterson. And now Harriett was living with him in some new house, taking calls on Tuesdays, and . . . sitting with him at church on Sundays! All of my girlfriends were gone.

“But Winnie Compton is still here. And she’s not married.” Mother reached across the table and patted my hand. “We can post your gift to Annie in Kansas City. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”

She’d probably forgotten all about me . . . the same way I’d forgotten about her. I thought I’d returned to a city that was just the same, but everything had changed while I was gone.

I slept most of the way to St. Louis as the train swayed along the tracks. The previous day I witnessed my mother’s marriage and visited the grave of my little sister who’d died several years before. I hadn’t told anybody I was leaving. I figured it was better if no one knew where I was headed.

I’d decided to give my father’s company a try. He owed me that at least. If it didn’t suit me—and why should it?—then I’d skip town and head out to Seattle. Or San Francisco, maybe.

As the gaps between towns narrowed and the landscape outside my window lost its wheat fields and gained more roads and smokestacks, I sat up straighter. Spitting into my hand, I smoothed it over my hair and then I used my reflection in the window to straighten my tie.

I set my derby back on at a tilt, barely pushing it down on my head, and regarded my reflection. A club man stared back at me. I grasped the hat by the brim and set it straight. Then I took hold of my rubber collar and stretched my neck, adjusting
the way it lay. That was better. Now I was just plain old Charlie Clarke, who could be anything he wanted. I glanced around the train at the men riding in the car with me.

There wasn’t anyone with Manny’s style. No one who wore his hat with the same tilt he had or held himself with quite the same flair. But then again, none of them had probably ever beaten a man to a pulp in an alley. I put a hand to my tie and tried to make the knot smaller. Tighter. The way everyone else was wearing theirs.

I wished I could have traded my blue shirt for a white one. That’s what all these respectable folks were wearing. Slumping into the seat, I stared at myself while the world rushed past.

I hadn’t seen my father in fifteen years. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Had Mother told him about Manny? She couldn’t have. If she had, he never would have asked me to come. I wondered if it were really true that he had asked for me. That he wanted me.

He hadn’t before. Why should anything have changed?

As I sat there, staring out the window, I thought of everything I’d done in the past fifteen years. There wasn’t one thing I was proud of. A familiar wave of fear lapped at my stomach. That old sense of doom. The thought that I could do nothing that would please my father. I pulled my flask from my pocket and downed a swig of whiskey, reminding myself that I was headed toward a new start, a new chance. Telling myself this time I wasn’t going to make a mess of it.

He wasn’t there. After the crowd meeting the train had melted away, I’d found myself alone. But what had I expected? That he’d be there waiting to greet me like some long-lost son when he hadn’t even bothered to say good-bye all those years ago?

A wiry old man wearing a suit festooned with shiny brass buttons came over and squinted up at me. Then he reached for the satchel I held in my hand. “With looks like yours, you’ll be Mr. Clarke’s son. I’m to take you on up home.”

I followed him out to a touring car that had the top pulled up. The dark green chassis had been polished to a shine. I squinted from the sunlight’s glare off the white tires. It was the kind of car I had only ever dreamed of riding in. The mayor of Chicago himself had nothing half so fine.

The man opened the door for me. I stepped up inside. The black leather seat was so long and so comfortable, I could have laid down on it and gone to sleep. And it smelled . . . it smelled just like money.

Though I spent the ride through the city staring out the window, I couldn’t have told anyone what I’d seen. Eventually the driver slowed the car to turn onto a street lined with some of the biggest houses I’d ever seen. And then, down at the end of the long block, he stopped the car entirely.

“
This
is my father’s house?” It was too big, with too many columns, too many steps and . . . too many windows. I couldn’t live here.

“Fifty-four Portland Place. Guess it’s your house now too.”

My house.

No. It wouldn’t be my house. It would never be my house. My house was back in Chicago on the South Side. People like me didn’t live in places like this.

The driver hopped out, then came back to open the door for me.

I didn’t want to get out.

“Are you coming, sir?”

Of course I was. I wasn’t some seven-year-old kid anymore. What did I have to be afraid of? What more could my father
do to me than he had already done? If anyone was leaving, this time it would be me. Maybe I should have done it right then, because as the driver was reaching past me for my satchel, the door to the mansion opened and my father walked out.

He’d hardly changed since the night I’d last seen him fifteen years before. But I knew now what I would look like when my dark hair turned gray and my already thick eyebrows got tangled up with hair. The mouth that had been so swift to make promises, the eyes that had been so quick to wink, had left lines in his cheeks.

He paused. And then he smiled.

It was that same smile I used to see in my sleep when I was younger. The smile that had always made me feel as if everything would be all right. The smile that used to make me cry when I’d wake up and realize I would never see it again.

He jogged down the walkway and came up to me, arms extended.

I stuck out my hand.

He took it between both of his and pumped it up and down. “It’s good to see you again.”

I bit back the first reply that came to mind:
It’s good to see you again too
. I’d been right there where he’d left us for all those years. He could have seen me anytime he’d wanted to. Apparently he hadn’t.

Some sort of fancy-smelling oil had finally managed to tame the hair that had always fallen forward, onto his brow. “You look good.” He clapped me on the forearm. “Come on inside. We’re leaving for the theater in just a few minutes, but that’ll give you a chance to get settled.” He propelled me up the walkway with a hand to my back.

I walked a few steps ahead of him in order to be rid of it, but that meant I was first through the front door. Once I was inside,
I didn’t know what to do. I’d stepped into a cavern framed by shiny wood panels that stretched two stories above my head.

My father stopped to talk to the man who had opened the door. Then he joined me, hand extending toward my satchel.

I gripped it tighter.

“Is that all you brought?” He glanced at it with a frown. “I’ll have the butler take you upstairs and make sure you have everything you need. The kitchen will have supper ready for you whenever you want it.” He pulled a watch from his pocket. “I was thinking of having a drink and smoking a cigar before I go. If you care to join me, I’ll be in the library, just there.” He nodded down the hall.

I didn’t care to, so I followed the butler up a long, curving flight of stairs and then took my time putting my few things away. And I didn’t go back downstairs until I was sure he’d left.

I woke to the sound of . . . nothing at all, to find I’d slept straight through the night. There’d been no fights on the streets outside. No sounds of an argument in the apartment next door. Indeed, there was no apartment next door. And this morning there were no wheeled carts tumbling through the streets. No clatter of horses’ hooves. No cows mooing in their pens as they waited to be taken to the South Side slaughterhouses.

Maybe this is what wealth bought: silence.

My stomach began to rumble, and I decided I should find out what rich people ate for breakfast. I walked around the room opening doors before I remembered which one led into a bathroom. I turned a spigot and water came gushing out into a sink that was attached to the wall. Imagine that! I splashed some onto my face and shaved. After cleaning my rubber collar with a cloth, I fastened it to my blue shirt and dressed. Finally,
after brushing off my coat, I took it from the stand where one of those servants had placed it. Then I fastened the hook on my already-knotted teck tie.

All was quiet downstairs too—there seemed to be no one about.

The previous evening I had eaten supper alone, served in a dining room that had sparkled with china plates and fancy glasses. All of that had been put away somewhere. But a few covered silver bowls were sitting on a sideboard. I lifted one of the lids.

Eggs.

I lifted another.

Bacon.

I looked beneath a third.

Toast.

So rich people ate what poor people did. They only served it from fancier dishes.

“May I help you, sir?”

I turned to see a girl standing at the entrance of the dining room. “I just . . . well . . . I wanted . . . breakfast?”

She took a plate from a glass-fronted cupboard and filled it from the silver bowls. I moved to take it from her, but she stepped past me and placed it on the table. “Please, sir.” She gestured toward the chair.

I sat.

She brought me a cup and a silver pot filled with something. “Is that . . . ?”

“Coffee. Would you like anything else, sir?”

I might have, but I didn’t know what else there was. “No. Thank you.”

She moved toward the door, but there was one thing I wanted to make plain. “I’m Charlie.”

She nodded.

“And you are . . . ?”

“Sir?” For the first time, her quiet confidence seemed to desert her.

“Your name.”

“It’s Jennie, sir.” And she whispered it so quietly I hardly knew if I understood her.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Five years.”

I was just about to speak to her again when a woman walked into the room. She was wearing the kind of dress my sisters had always admired. And her blond hair had been piled on top of her head in a bunch of curls.

I stood.

Jennie, if that really was her name, bobbed her head and left.

The woman smiled at me as she sat at the foot of the table, several places away. “Charles. I must tell you how delighted we are to have you.”

If she was, she was hiding it well. I tried on a smile of my own. “I’m delighted to be here . . . but you’ve got the better of me. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“I’m Augusta.” She said it as if it should mean something.

“It’s nice to meet you, Augusta.” I sat down.

“I’m your stepmother.”

Stepmother? “I hadn’t realized . . .” My father had remarried. I don’t know why it should have surprised me. My parents had divorced long ago. And I’d just watched my mother get married to Andy two days before.

She frowned. “Your father said you hadn’t communicated with each other, but I didn’t really think that . . .” She tipped her head to one side as if considering something. “I should have made further inquiries, but Warren is always so busy. . . .” She
sighed. “This must be awkward for you. But what you probably don’t realize is how awkward this is for me too, Charles.”

“Charlie. Please call me Charlie.”

Her frown deepened. “I’m sure Charles will do. In any case, we’re going to have to decide how to explain your presence.”

“How about: My father abandoned his family fifteen years ago, and now he’s decided to make up for lost time?” I picked up a piece of bacon that had been draped across my eggs.

“I don’t think you understand. People are bound to talk. Scandals of this nature—”

“Listen, I don’t have anything against you, Augusta. You seem like a nice lady. But if you’re expecting sympathy, you’ll have to look somewhere else. While you’ve been living here in this—this
mansion
, I’ve been trying to keep the roof of my house from falling in on top of your husband’s first wife and his daughters. I hope you’ll understand when I say I can’t bring myself to care much about what people will say.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded. “I think I do. I’m sorry for the pain he caused you. It wasn’t right. If I’d known about you sooner I would have . . . I would have done something.”

Easy for her to say.

“I hope we can become friends. In the meantime, your father asked me to tell you that he’ll see you as soon as you’ve finished.”

He’d been waiting for me? I used the bacon to push some eggs onto my fork. As I bent to eat them, I looked up from my plate.

She was watching me, brows drawn together. She wasn’t much younger than my mother, and she wasn’t really any prettier. She was just more . . . proper. “We hold a certain position in society, your father and I. We’ve worked very hard to obtain it. It would be most unfortunate if he were driven from it.”