Beacon Street Mourning (4 page)

As soon as those words were out of my mouth I wished I had not said them. Yet I had uttered the word—
dead
—and it
set up a resonance, a vibration inside me that turned my spine to a column of dread.

Numbly I nodded when Michael brushed by me, saying quietly as he passed, "Let me disembark first, Fremont, and give me time to put down the bags. I want both hands free to help you."

I did not protest when he placed those strong hands under my arms and lifted me from the train's steps as if I were light as a feather. Instead of protesting I was praying silently, to the God I believe in now more than I used to, even though I haven't a clue to understanding what the true nature of this God may be: "Please let me reach Boston safely before my father dies. And if it isn't too much to ask, please let him not die but live, and be healthy once again."

Boston
·
February
7, 1909

FATHER KNEW THE DATE of our anticipated arrival, and so did William Barrett, but I'd told Augusta nothing, not even that we were coming. I'd taken a suite at the Parker House, as that hotel, though old, is still quite respectable and not too far from our house—generally called Pembroke Jones House as Pembrokes too lived there in the previous century—on Beacon Street.

Michael had reserved a room for himself on the same floor as my suite. We do not travel as husband and wife, nor do we live that way openly; in the eyes of the world I hope Michael and I appear to be close friends and business partners, no more. If our friends conclude we are also lovers—for I suppose we cannot conceal the fact all the time—then they must think what they will.

What Father would think . . . well, that was a bridge I
would cross when I must, and not before. Father had said, when he was in San Francisco last year for my twenty-fifth birthday, that he wanted to see me married. He'd hinted broadly that he wished to examine Michael as the most likely prospect; but Michael had been, by design, away at the time.

Today, as I looked around the Boston train station for the first time in five years, gazed up at the familiar ribbing of the roof that had so often protected me along with other arriving and departing passengers, my old stubbornness hardened again in my heart. I wanted to be a single woman, a woman alone and independent. This I had wanted for as far back as I could remember. Yet now I was in love and loved. Was it fair to want to love and be loved yet still prefer my essential aloneness, and my independence?

It would be best, I knew, not to think on this subject any longer. I had never found the solution, the answer to that question; and dwelling on it tended to make me crazy.

Michael provided a welcome distraction by grumbling about our hotel reservation, and the crowded conditions in the station, and the consequent difficulty we'd most likely have in finding a taxicab, either auto or horse-drawn.

I placated him, though I supposed he had cause for grumbling, at least about our hotel rooms. Due to bad-weather delays we'd missed our anticipated arrival date by one full day. From Chicago we'd wired ahead to ask that our rooms to be held for us, but being unable to receive a reply when on board the train, we did not know if the hotel would do as we'd asked.

"I expect the hotel will honor our reservation," I said, "even if we are arriving a day late."

Michael said, "Humph."

That response is a slightly disgusted version of the same thing he means when he says, "Hmm." It neither merits nor requires a reply.

I was walking slowly along the platform toward the main station, watching my balance in the perilously crowded conditions, when over the general hubbub someone called out:

"Caroline? Caroline Jones?"

I had the oddest visceral reaction to hearing myself called by my old name for the first time in so many years: I shuddered, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

Yet there was an eagerness in me, too, as I searched for the owner of that masculine voice. I didn't see a recognizable face in the crowd, not a single one.

"Who is that?" asked Michael on a suspicious note.

"I don't know. I didn't ask anyone to meet us," I said quietly, scanning the thick stand of black bowler hats that surrounded us for one familiar face.

Then suddenly I saw him. And though my stomach did something peculiar again, I smiled, shifted one of my canes so that I could wave a greeting, and said aside to Michael, "It is William Barrett, the family friend who has been assisting me with Father. Unless he told people at the bank, no one else knew I was coming." Then I raised my voice and called, "Hello, William!"

I started off in his direction as he also headed toward me through the crowd, but he was in a sense swimming upstream; thus I made better progress with my canes than might have been the case otherwise. Burdened with our hand luggage, Michael still managed to stay right on my heels—and he was throwing some kind of protective mental armor around us so thick I could feel it, even if it was invisible to the eye.

"Welcome home, Caroline," William said a moment later when we converged. He snatched his hat off his head and kissed my cheek, which was how he had always greeted me for as long as I could remember; then he quickly stepped back, his face reddening. "I beg your pardon, you are a woman now, I forgot myself. I didn't mean to be overly familiar."

I smiled and murmured some words designed to put him more at ease. William Barrett had a nice face, clean-shaven and fair, with a narrow nose perhaps a trifle too long, and clear gray eyes with long, light brown lashes to match his light brown hair, which was thinning on top. He seemed not as old as I remembered him to be, which greatly surprised me. In fact, he was most likely no older than Michael.

Now it was my turn to think, but not to say: Hmm.

I roused myself to make the introduction. "William, may I present my business partner, Michael Archer Kossoff ? Michael, this is William Barrett, a colleague of my father's, whom I have known for most of my life."

Michael put down the bags and he and William exchanged handshakes and greetings warily, in a way that put me rather in mind of two seals taking each other's measure at the beach. I suppose one must be grateful that in the course of our evolution human beings have lost much of our sense of smell, or else males in particular would forever be sniffing each other out, as do the rest of our animal kin.

The male inspection ritual over, William rubbed his gray-gloved hands together and said, "Well then. I have brought my automobile and will be happy to drive you to Beacon Street."

"That's very kind of you," I said quickly, before Michael could speak, "but you must drive us to School Street instead. We are staying at the Parker House. I didn't want to inconvenience Augusta."

"Oh, I see."

But by his puzzled expression I could tell that he didn't see; well, I was not going to enlighten him.

"Of course I'll be glad to take you wherever you want to go. Your, uh, partner too, naturally."

"Good of you. Appreciate it," said Michael gruffly.

We entered the station's great main hall and I took a seat in the waiting area while the two men went about the particulars
of retrieving both our baggage and William's automobile. Meanwhile I was content to breathe Boston air, and to allow fragments of memories to flit through my mind. Such as the times my family had been to New York, or down to Princeton; once to Philadelphia, where we'd seen the Liberty Bell with its famous crack. Then I realized, with a jolt: All those trips had been when I was quite young, before my mother died. Father and I had never traveled alone together, anywhere.

And now most likely it was too late. I'd never be able to take a trip alone with my father, never ever. It seemed a great loss. Why had neither he nor I ever thought of it before?

Eventually Michael came back for me, and said William and the auto were waiting. As it had turned out, the automobile could not accommodate three passengers plus the luggage, so Michael had hired a man with a horse and cart to follow us to the hotel.

The air outside was so cold, it was like breathing shards of ice. I was glad to be wearing a muffler of Russian sable that Michael had insisted I take from a supply of furs handed down in his family. (The Kossoffs had made their fortune in the fur trade between Russia and California, and Michael has great stores of such furs put away in trunks lined with a certain wood that discourages moths and other ruinous critters.) In fact, as I felt my nose redden and my ears go numb, I wished I were also wearing the matching hat. Generally I detest hats and so had left it packed in my trunk during the train trip.

As was considered polite, Michael allowed me the more comfortable front passenger seat in the auto, while he himself took the back seat. I sat next to William and felt Michael staring at the backs of our heads. But I ignored him, and as soon as the auto was put-putting down the street, I asked the question uppermost in my mind.

"Have you seen Father recently, William? How is he?"

"He continues to improve."

I waited for more.

After an uncomfortably long silence, during which I could not help noticing from the corner of my eye how high the snow was piled on either side of the street, and how dingy and soiled it looked, William said in an overly solicitous tone, as one might use with a child or a very young person, "Your father will be greatly changed from what you remember, Caroline."

I blinked. Lowered my head for a moment, rubbed the cold tip of my nose with one hand. "William, Father is not the only one who has greatly changed."

Michael made some kind of sound in his throat, as if he were inhibiting a word or more. Fine, let him inhibit.

I continued, looking resolutely at William Barrett's long-nosed profile: "I wonder if you could possibly call me Fremont, not Caroline. I know it will seem odd to you at first, but I really am no longer Caroline Jones. I am not the girl you used to know, and if you will call me Fremont, then perhaps the changes in me may come as less of a surprise."

"Very well then: Fremont."

"Thank you. I assure you I'm prepared for the worst. So I ask you again, how is he? Really?"

"He is conscious most of the time. He can take nourishment. He is alive, when if he had not gone into the hospital at the time he did, Searles Cosgrove says he would almost certainly have died. So all of this is to the good, Car—I mean, Fremont."

"He knows I am arriving today, and Dr. Cosgrove knows too?"

"Yes. Your father is anxious to see you. As is Augusta."

"Augusta! But I didn't tell her I was coming! I didn't want her to know. In fact, it was crucial that she
not
know. Oh, this is terrible. I wish you hadn't told her. William, how
could
you?"

The auto had stopped at a busy corner, a significant corner where I could feel the weight of colonial history all around me, but for the moment I would neither look nor pay it any mind.

William's gray eyes met mine, and he looked wounded. "If what you mean is, how could I tell her—I didn't. I expect your father did."

"Father? Father told her? But she shouldn't be allowed to
see
him, nor to speak to him, not after the way she neglected him. Surely Dr. Cosgrove must know, he must have sense enough to see that Father's condition is Augusta's fault!"

"Fremont," said Michael darkly from the back seat, "we discussed this. How it is not wise to make accusations."

"Oh
bother
what we discussed. Really, William, Augusta should be kept away from Father."

Traffic began to move again. There were more horses than autos on the streets, and far less order to traffic procession than we usually had in San Francisco. Part of the muddle was due to the rutted, icy road surface. Animals and machines alike had problems with traction.

For a few minutes William paid close attention to his driving, but I could see he was also gaining control over himself. He was angry and it showed in the heightened color of his pale skin, and in the tightly clenched muscles of his jaw.

Finally he said, "Augusta Simmons is your father's wife. Legally she is his next of kin. It's natural enough, I suppose, that you should blame her since Leonard was so ill, so far deteriorated, in her care. But as I think I explained to you in a letter, it's impossible to say that she wasn't doing the right thing. He might, Leonard might—"

"Well, go ahead," I insisted impatiently, "whatever it is, say it."

"Leonard might have suffered less if he had been allowed to die. We may not have done him any favors by putting him into the hospital. Searles has said as much."

"Yet it was Dr. Cosgrove who ordered Father taken to the hospital, who was shocked that Augusta had not called him or any doctor in. You told me so yourself."

In the back seat, Michael cleared his throat. I glanced over my shoulder and saw him raise his eyebrows—a warning, as in: Fremont, do not go too far.

"Yes, that is so," William said. "But I believe Searles has changed his mind about the neglect, and so have I. Your father has his wits about him most of the time now, and there is no indication that he mistrusts his wife. Far from it, he welcomes her. His eyes light up when she comes into his room, I have seen this myself."

I had seen that too, his eyes lighting up for Augusta; no question but that Father had been besotted with the woman. But he'd seemed much less so during his visit to me last April. I had to find out why. I had to know what was really going on here. And it was going to be much, much more difficult if Augusta knew of my presence in Boston. I had hoped for a few days, at least, to talk to people without her being aware—not to mention wary.

We had reached the Parker House, which looked exactly the same as it has always looked for as long as I can remember: a huge stone structure in a sort of French rococo style, with cupolas and towers and chimney pots, and the occasional arched or odd-sized window; a building that might have seemed more at home on the streets of Paris than here in the Home of the Bean and the Cod.

William stopped the auto but did not take his hands from the wheel. "You'll want to hear this from Searles, from the doctor's mouth—but given your unfounded suspicions of your father's wife, I think it best I tell you first so that you'll have more time to absorb it: Your father is dying, Caroline. Or Fremont, as you prefer. Three weeks of constant nursing care have brought improvements, but they are only temporary."

"You sound so sure of yourself," I said bitterly.

"I'm only telling you what Cosgrove has told me—much of it while you were en route and could not be reached for me to pass the information along to you."

While William and I had continued to verbally hammer at each other, the doorman had come to the edge of the curb and was waiting for some sign from us. Michael had inched forward and was perched on the edge of the back seat. Clearly it was time to move on. I took the hint.

"Thank you," I said, gathering my skirts and reaching for my canes.

"Wait," said William, holding out his hand in a palm-down gesture, "there's more, and you may as well hear it all. Later you can get Searles Cosgrove to confirm it: Leonard has a wasting disease that has affected his ability to digest food. All those with this affliction will die, it is inevitable. And so will Leonard, sooner or later. By bringing him to the hospital we were making a choice for him to die later. When you see him for yourself, you will know what I mean when I say I am not sure we did him any favors by taking him out of Augusta's care."

I was shocked, through and through. My body went numb and my ears rang. I was only dimly aware of Michael reaching around me to open the door; instead I stared at William Barrett, my supposedly good old friend, who had, I felt, betrayed my trust.

"You are saying," I said hoarsely, a sudden tightness in my throat preventing me from speech much above a whisper, "that because I contacted you, you visited my father, and then out of concern called in the family doctor, and, as a result, Father has gone through unnecessary suffering?"

"I am only saying it's possible. I'm saying you should not blame Augusta, who was doing everything she believed was best for Leonard. By not having the doctor, she thought she could shorten his time of pain."

Michael was standing by the auto's open passenger door; he had climbed out around me and was now waiting—and not patiently. The horse-drawn cart had come up behind us with our luggage, and from the corner of my eye I saw my trunk being unloaded. These things were going on but my brain was locked in some separate and coldly calculating place.

"It would be Augusta, I suppose," I said, "who convinced you of this. That my father would have suffered less if he'd never been taken to the hospital but had been allowed to die quietly at home. For his own good."

William squirmed a bit, then seeing there was no way out, he nodded. "Yes, it was Augusta, but Searles Cosgrove agreed with her. That is, he said he could not disagree."

"And if Father had been allowed to die at home, without our intervention, which resulted in his being taken into the hospital, would he have been dead by now?"

"I don't know. I suppose so, but I can't say for sure. You must ask Searles when you see him."

"Oh, you can be certain I will."