Ellis Island (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I went back downstairs, furious. I started to work as a distraction from my rage, unpacking all of Mrs. Flannery’s boxes haphazardly, unsure whether to bother placing the cheeses, cold meats and milk in a cool place or simply throw them out immediately. I could not take the food back, untouched. Even if I had not been told it was a “secret,” I could not have offended the housekeeper in that way. As I worked I tried to imagine the lies I would have to tell about how much the food had been enjoyed, but I could not.

The more I unpacked, the more I became aware of the pointlessness of my task—until, in frustration, I emptied the linens in one hard shake onto the long kitchen table. They fell from their bag like white birds, wings unfolding onto the bleached wooden surface, landing lifeless, untouched, their meticulous, pressed beauty barely damaged. I grabbed at handfuls of them, scrunched them up in my hands to try and make them look as if they had been used. As I pulled and tugged at the starched fabric, my anger reached boiling point. I wiped the napkins across my face and mouth, until I felt my skin turn raw, and the more I rubbed and tugged, the angrier I got. Here I was putting on a show so as not to hurt Mrs. Flannery’s feelings and to cover up for Isobel’s sins. I had been looking forward to this weekend, to being in charge, meeting some more of Isobel’s “eccentric” set and playing at being her friend. Now, here I was, alone. Everybody catered for except me.

I picked up a heavy towel and attempted to tear it apart to loosen some of my rage. It was too strong, so I tried to split the edge of it with my teeth. As I held it up to my mouth, I caught sight of myself in the base of a copper saucepan, my mouth contorted and my eyes wide with rage. I was struck by the absurdity of my anger and it deflated, leaving a terrible hollow feeling in its place. I took a deep breath and decided I would go upstairs and try to enjoy the house. Maybe set a fire, then sit and read a book or perhaps write John a long letter.

I walked from room to room, running my hands along the bookshelves of the study, locating paper and pens on the small lady’s bureau, plumping cushions on the sofa and noting coal in the scuttle—but neither setting a fire nor sitting down to write. I could not settle. I was standing at the drawing-room windows, considering closing the drapes, when I noted there was only a little light left in the sky. It was a cold night. Soon it would be dark and the ice would begin to harden. Now would be the time to go for an evening stroll and let the cold evening air settle some sense into me.

Isobel had a second set of furs in a downstairs closet. Not the mink she was wearing, but a lesser fur—soft and black, rabbit perhaps. I put on the long coat, then the hat whose sides flopped down across my cheeks, then stuffed my ungloved hands into the huge muff. The black fur next to my skin felt deliciously soft and decadent, as if I was a blackbird flying through a cloud of soft, black soot.

A thin layer of snow had fallen since my arrival and it crunched satisfyingly under my feet as I trotted down the street. I breathed in, and the bite of cold air against my chest felt clean and refreshing. As each breath released itself with a visible white cloud, my earlier frustration disappeared into the night. I was alive and walking, undisturbed, through an expensive suburb of New Jersey in a beautiful fur ensemble. I felt happy and energized, and walked faster until it started to snow again and I decided to go back and finally set a fire.

As I reached the path to the house, I lost my footing on the hardening ice and fell. When I tried to get up, my right ankle flared with pain, and I collapsed back down to the ground. Gingerly inspecting the damage through my stocking, I thought it was not broken. Yet it was a bad sprain, and I would surely have to wait a while for it to settle before I tried to stand on it again. I packed some of the icy snow around my ankle to reduce the swelling and turn it numb, but my fingers went numb first. The street I was on was sparsely inhabited, and all of the neighboring houses were dark and empty. This was an area where the wealthy kept their weekend homes, and few of them were used during the winter. A veil of snow continued to fall like white feathers disappearing into the black soot of my fur coat. My hands were burning with the cold, but as I reached out for the fallen muff, my foot shot through with pain again and gave me permission to cry. So I lay down on the white ground, my hot tears of anger freezing on my cheeks, my heart pounding hard against my chest in self-pitying sobs. I knew I should call out for help, but the greater part of me just wanted to continue lying there, my glamorous costume reduced to a heap of fur, like a dying street dog. I felt completely alone. I was helpless and weak, the fight gone out of me. My anger softened to despair.

Then, just as I was closing my eyes, I heard the crunch of footsteps and a man’s voice was saying, “Are you all right?”

I jolted up with surprise, and then cried out in pain.

“Ouch!” he said. “That doesn’t sound good.” He squatted down beside me and, touching the hem of my coat, asked, “May I?” I nodded. The light was all but gone and his hat shadowed his face, but something about him felt safe, almost familiar. He gently lifted the black fur where it flapped at my feet and looked at my leg. I didn’t know why I was allowing him to diagnose me. I knew my foot wasn’t broken, but I was just happy not to be alone. To have somebody—even a strange man—seem to care. “Yep,” he said. “One—two legs. I’m no doctor, but they’re still both attached.”

I smiled, and as I did I cried a bit again, just at the fact that I was smiling. I felt such a fool, smiling and crying like that, but then he pushed at the rim of his felt hat, setting it back from his forehead, and smiled at me. In an instant twist of excitement, I recognized him as Charles Irvington.

“Look’s kind of chilly down there. Let’s see if we can get you up?” He slipped his hands under my arms and pulled me up onto my good leg in one strong move. “Now—let’s get you into the house.” Trying to keep the weight off my right foot, I leaned into his long cashmere coat, my head barely reaching his shoulders. How did he know where we were going? Why was he here?
“I’ll invite him again—for your benefit!”
I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. I didn’t know whether to be pleased he had been there to rescue me, or mortified at the idea that Isobel had invited him there for “my benefit.”

“Looks kind of dark in here,” he said, as we limped through the gate. “Where is everyone? I thought this was supposed to be a party? Oh, this is too awkward—here.” And quite suddenly he scooped me up into his arms and started to carry me up the steps to the house. I laughed. And then I cried a bit more again, because now I was laughing. It was as if the catch I kept on my emotions had been released in my fall, and now all these messy, vulnerable feelings were spilling out of me. Through my semi-hysteria I suddenly realized that I had no key to the front door—only the large black key for the tradesmen’s entrance that was in the apron I had on under my coat. “Sorry,” I said. “You’ll have to take me to the kitchen door.” I added, “Around the back.”

“Sure thing, Ma’am,” he said, changing direction, and I felt disappointed for a second that he had showed no great surprise at my servant’s familiarity with the kitchen door. When we reached it, he let me down on my good leg and I scrabbled around for the keyhole in the pitch dark. He took a lighter out of his pocket and held it to the door so that I could see what I was doing, but my hands were trembling. “Allow me,” he said, and took the key off me and opened the door.

“Well, thank you for your help,” I said, formally holding out my hand.

He took it firmly, and I felt the warmth flood back into my skin. “Is there anyone else at home? No party?”

“No,” I said, avoiding his face as I pulled my hand away. “I’ll be fine. Thank you again.”

He did not move away and, in my anxiety, I stood on my bad ankle and collapsed, just inside the door. He rushed to pick me up and helped me over to a chair. “Would you like me to go and get a doctor?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m sure it’s not serious.”

“It seems pretty serious to me,” he said. “Let’s get you settled somewhere more comfortable.”

“There’s no need.”

But he lifted me up in his arms again. “Nonsense. A lady can’t be expected to travel up the stairs on one foot. By the way,” he said, stopping for breath in the hallway. “I’m Charles—but you probably don’t remember me.”

He carried me all the way up two long flights of stairs to the small drawing room and laid me down on the chaise longue, pulling my damp coat away from my shoulders and throwing it carelessly onto a chair to dry. “Now, I’m going to light the fire.” A fist of warmth opened in my stomach. Nobody had been this kind to me in a long time. He squatted at the grate. His woolen trousers were straining across his knees, shirtsleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders as he picked lumps of coal from the scuttle with his bare hands. His arms were thick, striped with veins and bulging with muscle, like a workingman’s arms. He smiled at me over his shoulder. “We met on the
Celtic
? There was a party in the first-class dining room and we talked for a few minutes? About my teeth?”

I shrugged and smiled as if I wasn’t sure.

“Then we met again at Isobel Adams’s party? We bumped right into each other?”

He made it sound as if we had both been there as guests, as if I had been wearing a cocktail dress and then disappeared into the night like some modern-day Cinderella. He was still holding a coal, turning it in his fingers, dropping soot on the rug and making his hands so black I was afraid for the white shirt. He was domestically uninhibited. The kind of man who would drop things and make a mess without even knowing it; the kind of man who would make a tidy woman nervous to have about the place. “I guess you just don’t remember me.”

He sounded so forlorn that I asked, “How did the son of a tycoon get a workingman’s arms?” I regretted it immediately. I had not meant to sound so flirtatious.

He grinned and his gleaming white teeth outshone his eyes in the growing flames of the fire. I could feel, more than see, that he was excited to know I remembered him. “Well, that’s because I
am
a workingman. I work for my father’s company, so I get to choose any job I like—and I like to work loading at the docks.” I didn’t know how to respond. It seemed unlikely, yet admirable, that a person of privilege should want to work alongside ordinary men, so I was relieved when he stood up and said, “Well, I’d better wash my hands.”

“Go down to the kitchen,” I said suddenly, surprising myself more than him. “I don’t want you messing the upstairs bathrooms with that coal dust.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, touching his blond forelock and covering it in soot.

When he came back, he was carrying a tray laden down with food. “I hope you don’t mind me helping myself, but I’m starving with the walk here, and I was kind of expecting to be fed!” He had selected some cold meats and cheeses, bread, butter, a bottle of wine. There were two plates and a miscellaneous array of cutlery and crockery that confirmed he was not familiar with organizing his own supper. I hadn’t the heart to send him away hungry, and the sight of food made me realize I hadn’t eaten myself. I sent him back down for some glasses, a tablecloth, butter knives, napkins and various other sundries, so that we might eat, “if not like civilized people, then at least like human beings!”

As we ate, he told me that he knew Isobel Adams only slightly—he found her racy and a little foolish. It had surprised him when she had invited him to this weekend house party a few days ago, by telephone, and it surprised him even more that it had been canceled without warning. “But it’s even better this way,” he said. “We can have our own party.” I should have asked him to leave then, after he had eaten. I was not afraid of Charles—although maybe I should have been—but I
was
afraid of what Isobel had done. It was quite clear she had managed things so that Charles would be alone with me, in her house, and I was shocked that she could be so careless of my safety and my virtue. I must have been looking at him queerly, as he quickly added, “Of course, our party shall be a far more respectable affair than one of Mrs. Adams’s gatherings!”

Although I knew that was the sensible thing to do, the respectable thing to do, I didn’t ask him to leave. Instead, I said, “I’m glad you came, because otherwise I might still be lying outside freezing in the snow.”

We sat and talked. He told me he was staying in the neighborhood himself, preferring to winter away from his family. He talked of his life as a rich man’s son. I told him nothing of myself in return, despite his asking. My life was in such contrast to his, I was certain he would not have understood. So I kept the conversation light, and we talked about everything and nothing in particular: traveling on ships, the making of cheese, the clarity of wine, the ludicrousness of ladies’ fashion and the loosening effects of jazz. The curtains were closed, the electric lamps on, and the ashes built up in the grate until the coal embers glowed orange in the beige dust. He put on the gramophone and danced the Charleston with a mop for a partner. I sang him “My Lagan Love,” then broke the spell by teaching him a rebel song—he feigned shock at its bloody, angry lyrics, until he confessed that he had known it all along from his navvy friends on the docks.

“John taught it to me,” I said.

“John?”

“John. My husband.” I knew immediately that I brought up John’s name deliberately, to put a stop to this pleasant evening. It must have occurred to me that, in talking, Charles and I were making love of sorts.