With such banter, they distracted me during the measurement process, which could have been awkward and embarrassing. Instead, the time passed quickly and in a spirit of fun.
When she had all the numbers she needed and I was once more fully dressed, Miss Merrimen promised that she would choose the fabrics from her current inventory, cut them herself to patterns that she created, and put three seamstresses to work that very night. She would return on Tuesday morning with two sets of fine undergarments, two robes, and pajamas. The remainder of my new wardrobe was to be delivered over the next two weeks.
Looking as fresh and purposeful as when she had arrived, she kissed each of us on the cheek, asked us to pray that the parking valet was not dead in her ruined Pierce-Arrow, and breezed out of the bungalow, the pack of Pall Malls clutched in her left hand.
I used my bathroom, washed my hands and face with a soap that smelled like lemons, and brushed my hair. Although I didn’t need to hide my hands from Loretta, I put on gloves as a matter of habit.
When I returned to the living room, I found that Loretta, too, had freshened up and had produced a deck of cards from her luggage. She proposed that she would teach me rummy.
Just then the doorbell rang. Startled, I whispered, “Captain,” and I stood up straight, shoulders back, hands fisted in my gloves, ready for whatever might come. If Loretta heard my soft exclamation, she made no comment. She opened the door to admit a bellhop pushing a food-service cart. Sooner than later, I needed to bleach away the memory of Captain Farnam until he became a faded figure on the fabric of the past, with no power to cast a shadow on my newfound happiness.
Loretta had ordered an afternoon tea. The cart served as a table, draped with pink damask and laden with delicious little sandwiches, scones, and two-bite cakes. When this delectable production had been wheeled in front of a window and flanked by chairs brought from the dining nook, the two of us settled before a view of the gardens, to what Loretta called “a divine refection.” I felt as if I were in an English novel, in a story rife with challenges and travails that would nonetheless end in justice and gladness.
Ten
Between the afternoon tea and a late dinner, Loretta taught me rummy, and we competed toward a winning score of five hundred. She won the first two games; however, I squeaked out a win in the third. Rummy was fun, although the best part of the competition was the conversation that came with it. All my life, I had been talked about and talked at, but I had seldom known anyone whom I could talkwith. Captain spoke of little but himself, and he did not require—or appreciate—feedback from me. Loretta was witty, with a trove of fascinating anecdotes and opinions.
She was kind enough to say I was more articulate, well read, and sensible than any girl of seventeen she’d ever known. “Or most women of twenty-five,” she added. I discovered that I had a thirst for praise. I had long been parched from want of it. I warned myself that I should not let her words inflate me too much, even if they were as sincere as they seemed to be. Pride comes before a fall.
She asked me when I learned to read and if Captain, of all people, had taught me. I had been reading as long as I could recall and had no memory of being taught. I must have first read Kenneth Grahame’s wonderfulThe Wind in the Willowswhen I was four. The carnival season that year had been sweltering, the long spring and summer shaken bynumerous thunderstorms. I vividly remember reading that book over and over as the sky roared and lights flickered in the Museum of the Strange, where Captain paced and ranted because the bad weather kept the marks away. My indifference to the plunging box office receipts infuriated him, so that he tore the book from my hands and threw it on the stage floor. I got off my padded stool and retrieved Mr. Grahame’s treasure. As I returned to my seat, Captain approached me, one fist raised above his head as if he were master of the storm and would call down its violence upon me to make my skeleton glow visibly within my flesh and leave me smoldering. I recall meeting his eyes and holding his stare as I’d never done previously. I thought of Badger and the other brave little animals of the wildwood, and I neither looked away from Captain nor shrank from him. The walls of the tent thrummed in the wind, and the taut canvas ceiling glowed with a reflection of the lightning. He reached for my book, but I pressed the volume against my chest. His hand stopped short. While light chased shadows, it seemed as if we held that tableau for minutes, though the truth was mere seconds. As if some secret tenant living in the darkness of Captain’s heart warned him that the power rocking the sky existed also—and doubly strong—within the book, he drew back his grasping hand and turned and went elsewhere to rant. By the following year, I had read, among other things, all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I loved Holmes because he was a gentleman who was never dismissive toward anyone other than fools and criminals.
Shuffling the cards, Loretta said, “Good heavens, you were a child prodigy.”
I never thought of myself as such, and I denied it now. “The only thing special about me is what made me such an attraction in Captain’s ten-in-one. Ihadto learn to read. Learning to read was necessary for survival. Without books, without being able to escape into the worlds within them, sitting on that stage day after day with no distraction, Iwould have gone stark, raving mad. You know how they sometimes throw little kids in a pool and say ‘sink or swim,’ and so they swim? With me it was sink or read, and I stayed afloat. That’s all.”
She looked at me in silence for a moment and then said, “You’re really something.”
“It’s nice you think so. But I am just what I am, and I’m okay with that.”
“No, dear. You’re more than what you believe you are.”
I thought that was an odd statement, but I didn’t say as much.
When we were finished playing cards, we sat down to dinner. Loretta had ordered the same for each of us from room service—roast chicken, French-fried potatoes, and a sort of soufflé of eggs and corn. Every meal we ate was better than the one before, and the aroma of this dinner was almost divine enough to make me faint.
She said, “People find carnivals exciting, magical. But even when there’s no attraction as tawdry as a ten-in-one, I suspect it’s like life in Hollywood—little that’s pretty under the glitter.”
“Carnies are very tolerant of one another,” I said. “They’re outsiders. They don’t fit in the straight world and don’t want to. They have their demons and twisted histories, but most of them are no worse than people anywhere, I think. They have one another’s back, aligned against the world that doesn’t want them and they don’t want. But no one in their world seems to get truly close to anyone else, at least not for long. I always felt there was an inescapable sadness to it all.”
“How so?”
I put down my fork, my dinner unfinished. “Well, I guess one thing is ... like how they mostly marry. There’s no minister, no justice of the peace, no paperwork. After the midway closes down for the night, the carnies that are friends of the bride and groom ... they gather around the carousel to be witnesses. The couple getting married ... they ride together, only them, just three times around. That’s it. That’s all. Ifthe night comes where one of them wants a divorce, then after closing and in front of witnesses, he or she rides three timesbackward. And so the marriage is over. I saw two divorces like that, and it seemed so sad I couldn’t ever bear to see another. I went to a wedding, thinking maybe that would be better, two riding together toward the future, but it was every bit as sad. Anything that really, truly means something—it shouldn’t be that easy.” I picked up my fork but didn’t use it. “Divorce is so sad, like a kind of funeral. Don’t you think divorce is sad?”
“When children are involved,” Loretta said, “I believe it’s near impossible. Frank and I don’t make commitments lightly. There’s no carousel ride in our future, dear. If we ever got sick and tired of being married, the only way out would be to shoot each other, and neither of us is suicidal. No need to worry.”
“Oh,” I said, “I was just talking about the sadness of divorce in general. I didn’t mean you and Franklin might ever.”
Of course I had been asking about them indirectly, and she knew it. She smiled. “Is something wrong with your dinner?”
“No, no. It’s delicious.” My appetite returned, and I put my fork to work until nothing was left on my plate.
There was so much I wanted to know about Loretta and Franklin. This was their story, not mine. I am rather like any horse or dog for which a novel is named—only apparently the central figure, when in fact the story is about the family, about their gain and joy and loss and grief. I didn’t yet know how to ask about their past, their lives, without seeming to be inquisitive or even meddlesome.
That night I dreamed. I didn’t yet believe that dreams mean anything. You’re lying there unconscious, doing nothing, going nowhere, so your brain gets bored. It starts making up stories to entertain itself until you get your lazy butt out of bed. That’s what dreams are. If I had believed they were something more, the dream I had that Sunday night would have been disturbing. I found myself on a carousel, astridea painted horse that pumped up and down as the motorized platform and decorative cornice rotated around the inner drive. There was no music, only what sounded like heavy footfalls. For the longest time, no source of the sound could be seen. Then Captain came into view, walking in the opposite direction from that toward which the carousel turned, approaching me, making his way between the rising-and-falling horses. He smiled and said, “Welcome home,” and I saw blood dripping from his scarlet hands, not the claret of his own veins, but the blood of innocents.
Eleven
Monday, the day before we would return to Bramley Hall, proved to be less eventful than Sunday. A previous guest had left a jigsaw puzzle in a drawer of a sideboard. Loretta and I worked it together.
