“No, she said, rising and gripping her pocketbook, “I will not put in a word with Graham Dylan, even if I ever see him again. Which I doubt. Nor will I with Royal, because if he’s got money, he needs it for Peggy and her family. And I will not—never, with my father. Because the truth is,” she said, swallowing hard, for it was as hard a truth to swallow at last as it was to say, “that he doesn’t care much for me, or my opinion. The whole point of living on my own is to be sure I’ll not owe him anything anymore. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Kyle said, taking her hand so that she couldn’t leave, “for you. But not for me. I don’t need your father’s influence,” he said, though he would have liked it, but now he knew it was as impossible to have as it would eventually be unnecessary. As Hannah sank down in her chair again, he said vehemently, clutching her hand hard, “Nor do I want Gray Dylan’s, I assure you!” That was true enough, the Dylans had a history of raiding his company, and a look at Gray Dylan’s face as they’d left him showed him that history might repeat itself if he wasn’t very careful. “And though I believe Royal Atkins has enough money to support Peggy and an entire city block with her. I’ve no need of his support. I can get the investors. I need you for another kind of help.
“This time,” he said, with a look in his dark eyes that showed Hannah he’d have dearly loved to pace around the crowded tearoom and made her grateful he couldn’t, because he was irresistible once he got to his feet and started emoting, “I’ll need a proper office, in a good district. Letterhead paper and a telephone,” he said, his eyes glowing, as Hannah caught her breath, because the only man she knew personally with a telephone was her father, “and a secretary—you can play one until we get one,” he said offhandedly, “and then we can put a company together again.
“A very good one, this time. But that’s not the main thing. No. The main thing is the investors I will interest in our company, and my plan. And I will, because I believe I know how to now. The odd thing,” he said thoughtfully, “is that theater itself isn’t the main thing anymore. Publicity is. Fame itself is. And then, too, there are new ways to make money whilst we try to make money. I understand from some of the other troupers I met that there are now songwriters here in New York who’ll pay you to sing their songs. Anywhere. Isn’t that astonishing?” he asked with wonder. “That way you can make money two ways: singing for the writers and for the audience. Lovely,” he sighed.
“But that’s all to be,” he said with more energy. “That’s the point. I need someone like you behind me in this, doing exactly what you’ve done so well all these past weeks: holding the troupe together, assisting me. Are you with me, Hannah? I’ll pay well, better, when I can,” he added quickly.
“Well, I…” Hannah began. Then he went on, “It will be here, in New York, if that’s what’s bothering you. We won’t need to follow the tour until I get it together and that may take a while…Or,” he asked, with a great show of disdain, “are you thinking that as you might be marrying soon, you wish to cut your connection with the theater as soon as you can? Or is it that you feel the wedding’s so imminent that you don’t need to work for your keep any longer?”
“What wedding?” Hannah gasped.
“To Gray Dylan?” he asked sweetly.
“Kyle,” Hannah said, as she snatched her hand from his so he wouldn’t feel it shaking, for he’d said the thing she could never allow herself to even fantasize about in order to court sleep. “That will, and can never be. Even if he’d the slightest interest in such a thing with me, which I promise you, he has not. The thing is,”she said, and turned her head so that he couldn’t see how it hurt her to say it, “that I had a very bad marriage. Very bad. You cannot know the whole of it—and that is literally so. So no matter who asks me in the future. I’m resolved: I will never marry again. I’m not being coy. If you never believe another thing I say, believe this: it is for the best. Nor will I ever approximate that state with any man, even though I have been brought up in the theater, I will not and cannot,” she said severely.
“Ah, well,” he said softly, “that takes care of the next question I was about to ask, so I’ll forget it, as you say.”
Of course, he never specified which of the two he was going to ask of her. She might have said she’d no intention of either matrimony or being a mistress, but since the point was now moot, it was better unspoken. It was a disappointment to him, either way. But he didn’t doubt her. She was a great actor’s daughter and a fair actress herself, but to a man who dealt in daily fictions, truth was such a rarity that he knew it immediately when he saw it. And regretted it, for whatever reasons it was so. She was lovely, even in her distress. Her averted face showed him the side view of long lashes closed over those speaking eyes, a straight nose, and those incredible lips, as tempting in profile as they were in any other view. A downward glance showed him a different, equally entrancing profile. He sighed. But accepted it. She was not touchable, he could only hope she was still employable in other ways.
“I understand. I rue it, but will honor it. But why should that change our relationship? I still need you and want you. Will you be my assistant, Hannah?” he asked solemnly as he’d ask her to be his wife. For if it were all true, that position would also link her to him for life—or until he was done with her.
“Yes, Kyle, I will,” she said.
It would be nice to take a hansom cab, and Hannah felt she could justify it, too. She’d just secured a new position and had money in her purse that she’d reaped from the old one. And after Aspen, she felt she was accustomed to some sort of luxury. But her rooms were near the Elevated Railway line, and since she’d already arranged to have her great domed wardrobe trunk sent on ahead, her two travelingcases weren’t that heavy, and she’d plans for the new money in her keeping. If she’d had to drag her bags through the streets toward Third Avenue, she might have splurged, and succumbed to the lure of the cabs and horses waiting all in a line for passengers outside in the street. But there was a branch line to the Elevated right at the Depot. A hansom cab cost fifty cents for the first mile, twenty-five for each additional, as well as the matter of a gratuity for the driver; the Elevated was a mere nickel, however far downtown she needed to go. She might have to wait for the Elevated, though. But for all she longed to get home, when she thought about the moment after her arrival, when she’d close the door and find herself home, alone, at last, she found she wasn’t in that much of a hurry, after all. She took the Elevated home.
When she’d left the city, she’d seen men in light jackets or with them folded over their arms, their arm garters holding their rolled-up sleeves, and all the ladies had worn pastel-colored dresses or white shirtwaists and gay shawls, with straw-brimmed hats shading their eyes. Now everyone was swathed in wool and fur in the several shades of a New York winter, black or brown, or cobblestone, soot and pigeon gray. But otherwise they were the same: their expressions as blank and inwardly directed as they moved just as quickly through the teeming streets. It was she who’d changed. It wasn’t so much that she found herself staring at the brick, stone, and steel buildings, astonished to see some rising high above the level of the Elevated itself. It was that all of it seemed unfamiliar now.
The numbers of people around her suddenly staggered her, and the fact that she seemed invisible to them struck her as odd, just as the way their eyes sidled away from hers when they encountered her bemused stare did. Lord, she thought, as she sat and watched the city move by, far below her—a few months in the West, and I have become a tourist!
Then she remembered who it was who always said “Lord!” and remembered that her long vacation from reality was as lost to her as autumn was. The mountains, the brooks, the golden aspens trembling in the breeze beneath a lucent sky as blue as—she shook herself. They had nothing to do with this great gray city or her life. She was lucky she remembered that in time, she thought, her inner visions fading as the outer world pressed in, as she looked down and blinked. Then she stood up and fumbled for her bags, because she’d almost missed her stop.
Her landlady called a greeting, and she had to pause in the hallway and say all the inconsequential things expected of her. It turned out she had to listen more to tales of the landlady’s cat and the weather than she had to talk about her travels, before she could decently plead fatigue and go to her rooms. Then she opened her door, and was greeted by the airless, unused smell of unoccupied rooms as she put her bags down. She felt her heart plummet. Everything was exactly as she’d left it, and she’d taken pains to leave it neat.
There were her books, her pictures and her tables, her chairs and her fringed rug, all as if she’d left them yesterday, and all looking as they would if she left them again tomorrow, or ten years from now, or twenty, she thought. At least by then, she mused as she trailed farther into her parlor, she’d have more books to leave. But not medical ones, she decided, staring at what suddenly struck her returning-traveler eyes as the one inappropriate thing in what was otherwise a modest, pleasant woman’s home: a shelfful of books entitled:Women and Her Diseases, Everyman His Own Doctor, The Cottage Physician, The Practical Home Physician, Medicology…and so many, many more. All the fat volumes with their fold- out color plates and testimonials, and all with the same advice that amounted to no advice at all for her. A woman ought to have classics and bound volumes ofHarpersorLady’s Wreathson her shelves, and not such rubbish, she thought. For that was all it was, and all it amounted to.
She picked up a calf-covered volume and blew off the dust that had gathered on the gilt at the top of its leaves. Not one of the chapters had helped her. Not one illustration bore any more relation to her than a picture of the back of the moon might have done. She knew. She’d looked. Now the thought of it amused as well as pained her. Then, she had been panicky and shamed, her door locked, ears tuned to any unfamiliar sound, her hands hot and trembling, as though she were doing something secret and vile that was detailed in the chapters entitled: “The Solitary Vice: The Dangers of Self-Pollution,” rather than just trying to look and see, and know for herself what it was that was wrong with herself. She’d held a mirror up to life, literally.
John had said there was something wrong with her. He’d said his doctor had said it. He’d said he couldn’t come into her because she wasn’t made right. But every time she undressed and looked in a long mirror, she saw a perfect anatomical illustration of a female. Her problem lay deeper. What she wished to see requiredmore courage than she knew she had, a hand mirror with extra magnification, and convolutions worthy of an acrobat. Perhaps it was as bad a vice as self-pollution, she was sure it wasn’t a thing a decent woman would do. Nor a thing she could have done unless she’d been driven by worse than demons—and she was: by confusion and despair. She was fearful, but determined. It was the year she’d received word she was a widow, around the time that she’d met that charming Tristram, a time when she’d been so tempted to know more, to try more, of everything. Or rather, as she knew now, a time when she was unwilling to know there was to be no more for her, not even an answer.
When she’d finally managed to grip the mirror tightly enough in her sweating hands to hold it fairly steady, and discovered how to hold it so she could shed light on the subject, she’d seen herself as never before. And was horrified. The anatomical plates had left out much of life, and it took her a minute to realize that they never illustrated body hair. When she’d taken a shaky breath and disregarded that, and positioned herself so more could be seen, her trembling hands won her wavering glimpses of a welter of pink fringes, as well as smooth portions, folds, and nubs of what appeared to be extra flesh and dark caverns…damp, pink, red and black—what was normal, what was not? It was not only dreadful looking, like seeing an internal organ on the outside, but impossible to know what was supposed to be right or wrong in such a jumble.
She’d dropped the mirror, but didn’t worry, because she didn’t know how she could have worse luck. The problem might lie even deeper, as he’d said, but surely, no normal female looked like that. She felt a flash of acute shame for how she’d have looked to John if he’d ever glanced at that portion of her. But she hadn’t known.
She still didn’t, and her desire to understand hadn’t died. After a few years passed, she began to wonder if her fears and ignorance mightn’t have magnified things as much as the mirror had, and decided to dare to see a physician again. She wrote to him in the hopes that he’d request an office visit. By doing so, she’d hoped to outsmart herself as well, reasoning that despite all shame and fear, there was no way she would have denied a physician’s request. Then his letter had come, assuring her that an unmarried woman needn’t bother discovering the reason for her problem.
But there were other doctors, and the need to know was growing keener. If she could conquer shame and terror…She was twenty-four years old and growing older, she needed an explanation—at least, a reason. And perhaps she’d still a fairy-tale hope it could somehow be remedied. They’d invented telephones and electric lights since she’d been born, hadn’t they? It was an age of miracles, after all.
Then she’d had to go West. Now she’d returned and knew that it didn’t really matter anymore. She couldn’t bring herself to shame herself with a strange physician anymore than she could with a man she loved. She didn’t know if she could cope with pity if it were offered by the one, but knew now that she could certainly never bear disgust, however well concealed, from the other.
She put the book back on the shelf and reminded herself to dust them all in the morning. She couldn’t throw away a book, much less a shelf of them. When she’d lived with her parents, she’d hidden them to hide her disgrace. Now she’d leave them there as a reminder of why she’d sit in her parlor alone every night until the authors of all those books were dead, and she herself near to it. That mightn’t banish sorrow. But it would, at least, explain it. And that was all she could reasonably expect. She picked up her traveling cases and set to unpacking. She was home again.
New York had changed since he’d last visited, but Gray would have been more surprised if it had remained the same. The city was growing up in every way: uptown, as well as up high. Each new building seemed to think it had to add a new story to top its neighbor. Gray counted several buildings six and seven stories high as his hansom cab drove past them. He knew better than most how many new buildings were being built uptown where there’d only been fields and squatters before. His brother had laughed when he’d put good money down on the new apartment he’d chosen to be used for his New York visits, even though the plans had looked impressive. “Scout, you just never give up the wild West, do you?” he’d asked, rumpling his hair affectionately, as though he were still the boy he remembered.
But Gray had only grinned, because it was half true. The building had actually been named for the West, they’d called it the “Dakota” just because it was as far uptown and out of the city limits of respectability as that territory was from therest of the nation. That had been part of its appeal to him. The other reasons, as he’d explained to his brother, had been the nearness to the wilderness sections of the park, where he might ride full-out, and the fact that it was new and daring, and designed by a fine architect. Since he needed a place to call his own when he stayed in New York City, he’d said—ignoring the things his brother had to say about that as he looked around his own spacious town house, subsiding only when his wife murmured something about “bachelors”—he wanted something that was unique.
But now, sitting by himself, he grinned and admitted the truth. As if that mattered. It was the elbow room. He loved the city, but more when he could have the freedom of the West in it. Just as he loved the West, and even more when he could avail himself of eastern comforts there.
