The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) (7 page)

She would have liked to dream of her baby, but those dreams never came. She had only the memory of him, of holding him in her arms for a precious five minutes before he was whisked away.

Bronwyn dreamed instead, always and only, of those lost moments in the garden. Her dreams betrayed her. They tormented her with what could have been. What she had believed would be.

Now, after her night in the Cellar, she woke slowly, dry-mouthed and miserable. Hot June sunshine poured generously through her window, and glittered on the dancing waters beyond the glass, but the glorious weather held no joy. The taste of last night’s Fallen Angels was sour on her tongue, and her head throbbed with the aftermath of homemade gin. She could barely stand the brightness of sun in her eyes. She kept them half shut as she pushed aside her blankets and staggered into her bathroom. She splashed water on her face and ran her damp hands through her tangled hair. When she could open her eyes fully, she stared at herself in the mirror.

It hardly seemed possible three years could make such a difference in a person. Bruise-dark shadows dragged at her eyes, and her cheeks were hollow and pale. Her belly was marked with puckered lines where the baby had grown, the baby that was gone. Even her hair seemed to droop, to have lost the luster she and her mother had been so proud of. She should do something about all of it, she supposed. She hardly cared enough to try.

She walked back into her bedroom and opened her wardrobe. For long moments she gazed at the dresses hanging there, all neatly pressed and arranged by Betty. She would have to put something on. She would have to comb her hair, and go downstairs to endure her mother’s worried face. She would have to think of something to do to fill the long empty hours of the day.

The morning mail, waiting on the sideboard in the breakfast room, brought a card from Clara. Iris, her face bright with forced hopefulness, laid it beside Bronwyn’s plate. “Look,” she said. “Something from Clara! Isn’t that nice?”

Bessie had stopped speaking to Bronwyn when she and her family learned of her pregnancy, but Clara, it turned out, was a more faithful friend. She had written to Bronwyn every week during her exile. She had been waiting at the ferry dock when Iris and Bronwyn returned home, disdaining the whispers and shaken heads that followed them. Clara was married now, with her own tidy brick home just off Lawrence. Bronwyn was always welcome there, so long as Clara’s straitlaced husband wasn’t present. He knew, of course, about the Cellar, and the Fallen Angels, and all the rest of it. All of Port Townsend did, Bronwyn supposed. She told herself—and Clara—that she didn’t care, but it wasn’t true. She couldn’t help caring. She was nineteen years old, and the empty years of her life stretched ahead like a desert.

She picked up the small blue envelope with Clara’s familiar handwriting, and slit it open with the silver paper knife. “She’s having a tea,” she told her mother. “Next week.”

“You’re invited,” Iris said. She gave her daughter a brave, hopeful smile. “How nice!”

“We’re both invited, Mother, but . . .”

Iris gave a little, girlish clap of her hands. “Oh, dear Clara! Like old times! We’ll need new dresses, don’t you think?”

“Oh, Mother, I won’t be going,” Bronwyn said as she laid the card aside.

“But, dear heart, why not? It would be good for you to get out a bit.”

“It won’t be like old times, Mother.”

“Bronwyn, you need to see people. You should make some friends.”

“I have friends,” Bronwyn said. She kept her eyes down, avoiding her mother’s gaze.

“You never see them,” Iris said in a plaintive voice. Bronwyn didn’t answer, but slid the card back into its envelope.

There was a silence at the table, broken only by the maid carrying in a platter of toast and a coffeepot. Neither of them spoke again until she had backed out of the breakfast room, leaving the coffeepot on the sideboard. Bronwyn said then, for the dozenth time, “I need to leave Port Townsend, Mother.”

And for the dozenth time, Iris answered, “Oh, no, Bronwyn! Please don’t say that. You just have to be patient. Everything will settle down. Everything will be fine.”

Bronwyn, filled with sorrow for herself and her mother both, gave up the argument.

 

In the hospital in Vancouver there had been a doctor, a middle-aged, pleasant-looking man, who examined Bronwyn, spoke with her mother, then ushered Iris out so he could speak to Bronwyn alone.

Bronwyn felt a wave of panic as she watched her mother leave. The doctor, whose name was something difficult, Hargreave or Harcourt, closed the door firmly behind Iris and turned to Bronwyn with his arms folded over his white cloth coat, his eyes suddenly gone hard behind his thick spectacles.

“Do you understand what’s happened to you, Miss Morgan?” he said.

Bronwyn had to swallow to moisten her dry throat before she found her voice. “I—I think—yes. I’m in trouble.”

“In trouble.” Dr. Hargreave, or whatever his name was, scowled. “That, Miss Morgan, is a euphemism.”

“I know,” she whispered, dropping her gaze to her lap. She was covered with a white sheet, but the doctor had looked under that sheet, probed her belly and her private parts while she scrunched her eyes tight in an agony of embarrassment. “I know what a euphemism is,” she said.

“What does it stand for, in this case?”

She stole a glance at his face from beneath the fringe of her hair. He looked tired. He also looked angry, but she didn’t think he was angry with her, which was a change. Everyone else in the world seemed to be angry with her. She looked down at her lap again, and wished she could put her clothes back on. “It means a baby,” she said, in a voice barely audible even to her own ears.

“That’s right. You’re going to have a baby.”

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she murmured. “I—I didn’t know.”

The doctor sighed, and there was a rustle of clothes and the whisper of his shoes on the tiled floor. Bronwyn said, “I’m sorry.”

“Of course,” he answered quietly. She lifted her gaze, and saw that he had turned his back to her. He had crossed to the window, and was staring out as he stripped the rubber gloves from his hands. “I don’t suppose there’s any question of the father meeting his responsibility?”

Her throat ached suddenly. “He died,” she said. That wasn’t the whole story, but it was the part that mattered. The part that left her without hope.

“Died.” The doctor sighed again, and Bronwyn thought he must be very tired indeed. When he turned, he didn’t look so much angry as he did sorrowful. “You didn’t understand you could get pregnant, I suppose, Miss Morgan.”

Bronwyn looked into his dark eyes, glistening and large through his round spectacles. “I thought he loved me. I didn’t really know—I thought he was courting me.”

“Do you know how babies get started?”

She shook her head.

“Well.” He sighed again, and threw the rubber gloves into a basin on the counter. “I’ve heard the same story from far too many young women like yourself.” He moved to the sink, where he turned on a tap and began to wash his hands, over and over, as if once wasn’t good enough. “It troubles me.” He stopped soaping his hands at last, rinsed them, and turned off the tap. As he took up a white towel, he said, “I’m going to tell you as much as I can about what happens when you have a baby, and I also want you—before you leave my hospital—to understand how a baby is conceived. And—” He finished drying his hands, and dropped the towel into a basket. “I’m going to make certain you know how to prevent it, if that’s what you want.”

“My mother . . .” Bronwyn began, but then stopped. She bit her lip. She didn’t want to be disloyal to her mother, but she was beginning to understand.

The weary look came over the doctor’s face again. “Yes, your mother. Most mothers, in fact, in your social class. She didn’t want to tell you, because she thought ignorance would keep you safe. Would keep you chaste.”

“Ignorance?”

“It’s an ancient concept, and it has never been effective, but it persists just the same.” He pushed his thick glasses up to the top of his head, pushed his chair closer to the examination bed, and sat down. As he began to talk, using plain words and sometimes gestures, Bronwyn’s cheeks burned with shame.

The things the doctor told her had nothing to do with the moments of sweetness she had shared with Preston. The words, body parts and reactions and fluids, were coldly scientific. Impersonal. It was like hearing her father talk about bolts and screws and railroad ties. The doctor’s lecture had nothing to do with the love she had felt. He spoke of sponges and spermicides and condoms. He pointed to her belly, and discussed due dates and labor pains and forceps. She tried to listen, but her head began to ache and her mind to spin. None of it seemed real. None of it seemed to apply to
her
.

The feeling of unreality didn’t last. When her labor started, it was all too real, and very, very personal. Dr. Holcomb, which she knew by then was his name, was calm and reassuring, and stayed with her throughout the hours of agony, but it was still a wrenching experience.

And it was all for nothing. She heard her baby cry, and held him in her arms for only moments before he was gone, disappeared, as if he had never been. Her mother hugged her and promised that now they could all go back to normal. That they would forget all about it.

But Bronwyn knew better. Even then, despite her mother’s assurances, she knew it couldn’t be true. There would be no normal, not for her. And there would certainly be no forgetting.

C
HAPTER
7

Preston dreamed, too, but not of Bronwyn Morgan, though he had taken such pleasure in seducing her in her own back garden, right under the noses of her parents. She had been by no means his only seduction, that summer of 1920, but she had been particularly luscious, with such young, sweet-smelling flesh and beguiling innocence. It had been abundantly clear that she knew nothing whatever of men or sex, yet she had quivered beneath him, crying out in ecstasy. If Port Townsend had not been such a long journey from Seattle he might have visited her again, but he hardly needed to go so far afield for his pleasures. Of course, he was wearing the sapphire around his neck in those days, and he was all but invincible.

It would have been nice to dream of such things as an assignation in a garden above the waters of Puget Sound. It would have been even better to dream of Roxelana, the long-dead sultana, the slave girl who had become a queen. He loved Roxelana, though he had never known her. He loved the idea of her, a woman who was both beautiful and ruthless, powerless and yet all-powerful, because she let nothing stand between her and what she wanted. He had taken possession of her sapphire, that ancient and mysterious stone, and taken upon himself all of Roxelana’s strength and determination. Once he had the jewel, all of his abilities, all of his talents, found their focus.

Yes, it would have been good to dream of Roxelana, but the mind was a strange thing. At least,
his
mind was a strange thing. The thought made him bark with hoarse, self-mocking laughter. In sleep, when he was trying to escape the grim reality of his waking life, his mind served up all the things he wanted most to forget.

There was the fire, and that awful moment when he heard the bursting of the oxygen bottles in the storage room of Margot’s filthy clinic. The fire had accelerated, flared out of control, and the consequences had been worse than he could have imagined.

There was the ghastly period of recuperation in a remote country hospital, where no one knew him, or cared about him, and where they were so stingy with the morphine sulphate prescribed for his pain that he was tempted, once he was released, to set fire to that place, too. Only the fear that some savvy policeman might connect the two events had stopped him.

There was the side trip to Port Townsend, all impulse and no thought. He knew there had been a baby, and he hadn’t cared, not when he received the girl’s letter. But now—now that there would never be women in his life, now that any woman who saw his monstrous scars averted her eyes—somehow he needed to know the baby had been born, had survived. In those days he clung to anything that might have meant life would go on. Really, people were shockingly easy to manipulate. That cook—Andrew, her name was, as sour an old puss as he’d ever encountered—handed over everything he wanted to know. He crossed her palm with a few dollars, and she spouted all of it—that the baby had been born, was a boy, and had been shipped off to Seattle. The boy might be living in comfort and security with some good family, but in his dreams he was lost and alone, perpetually wandering in a wide world of danger.

Those dreams were bad, worthy of being called nightmares, but they weren’t the worst. His worst dreams, the ones that made him wake shivering with misery, were dreams of his mother.

It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, a decorated war veteran, a noted columnist. He was also, he reflected with neither irony nor regret, a criminal. An arsonist. A murderer. It was laughable that such a person should dream about his mother.

He would certainly have laughed at any other man fitting that description, but there was no disputing its truth. Preston Benedict was incapable of empathy, as a general rule. It was something he had known about himself since childhood, something that had been useful to him in his efforts to get his sister out of his way. His father, and his brother, worshiped Margot as if she weren’t quite human. Only Edith, his mother, had truly cared about him.

It wasn’t that she saw through Margot, not the way he did, though she wasn’t as foolishly enthusiastic over Margot’s scholarship and achievement as Father and Dick. They behaved as if no woman before Margot had ever managed to get through medical school. Edith had put her youngest son first in her affections. She loved Preston for himself, and celebrated his special gifts. She didn’t want him to go into the family business, or to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or any of those things the pater so valued. Edith wanted Preston to be happy.

And despite everything that had happened, despite his crimes and his incarceration, despite his hideous disfigurement, she still did.

No one was calling the Walla Walla Sanitarium a prison, at least not out loud, but that’s what it was. They all knew it: his father; his brother, Dick; and especially—probably reveling in the fact—Margot. Here, they spoke of him as a guest rather than as a patient. His medicines were administered by a pretty nurse in a long apron and starched cap, and a cook sent menus to his room for his approval. It was all charmingly deceptive, but no one was fooled, least of all Preston himself. It was as well-appointed a prison as anyone could expect, but it was still a prison. The pretty nurse never showed up without the burly orderly known as Oscar. Oscar even escorted Dr. Dunlap, or his wife, Nurse Dunlap. The cook never came at all, sending his trays up in Oscar’s hairy and brutish hands.

The Walla Walla Sanitarium was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the city jail, and infinitely less unpleasant than the state hospital had been, but it was a jail, nonetheless.

Preston’s dreams were of his mother weeping as she gazed out her bedroom window in Benedict Hall. His mother alone in the dark, crying for her favorite son. And he, Preston Benedict, as cold-hearted a bastard as was ever born, felt sorry for her. He even
grieved
for her.

It was ludicrous.

 

In the year Frank had lived in Benedict Hall, he had never seen the door standing open to the big bedroom at the front of the house, just across from the one Margot had occupied before their wedding. It mystified him at first, an airy front bedroom with all that space, an attached bath, two tall windows facing the park, all of it sitting empty.

His own boyhood home, the ranch house where his parents still lived, had only three bedrooms on its cramped second floor. Until he went to college, he and his parents and the ranch hand had used an outhouse set thirty yards from the back porch. The building of an attached bathroom hadn’t taken place until the summer after his freshman year. It occasioned a lot of talk and laughter in the community, but after a few neighbors tried it out, imitators sprang up everywhere in the Bitterroot Valley.

His and Margot’s rooms at the back of Benedict Hall were luxurious by contrast. From their windows they had a full view of the garden. Often, when the clouds parted, the shimmering silhouette of Mount Rainier hovered on the horizon in white-shouldered glory. There was a private bath, a sitting room that was almost as big as the small parlor on the main floor, and an enormous bed of black cherry, shipped around the Cape in the previous century. Before he and Margot returned from their wedding journey, someone had covered it with a wedding ring quilt and smooth, new, white sheets.

Benedict Hall was a lively place. The servants lived on the third floor. The family occupied the second floor. Margot’s old room was kept ready for guests, dusted and cleaned, the windows opened frequently, the bedding aired often. Only that one bedroom at the front of the house remained always empty, its door closed. Edith Benedict forbade anyone to go into it except the maids, and then only under her supervision, and he knew Margot worried over that symptom of her mother’s obsession.

“He’s never coming home, Frank,” she had said, the night she explained about the closed bedroom. “But everything in that room is just the way he left it. Once a month or so it gets dusted and swept, but Mother watches the maids as they do it so that everything is put back where he wanted it.”

“Have you talked to her about it?” They had been relaxing in their sitting room, Frank with the
Times
spread out on the small coffee table, Margot with a medical journal in her lap.

She closed the journal, and idly smoothed its cover with her fingers. “No. I’m not the right person.” She gazed out toward the dark garden and the glimmer of light from Blake’s apartment above the garage. “Mother can’t talk to me about Preston.”

“She must know about him by now. What he’s done. What he
is.
”

“You would think so. I’m sure Father has tried to make her understand. I’m not sure if she listens.”

“What about Dick?”

Margot’s lips tightened at the corners. “It was always different with Dick. I’m sure Mother cared for him well enough, and he’s always done what was expected. He wasn’t a girl, obviously, so Mother didn’t need him to be—well, feminine.

“She wanted something different from me, some interest in clothes, hairstyles. I passed up a debutante year in favor of getting myself into the University as early as possible. I was a terrible disappointment, I’m afraid. Dick tried to help, but—when a parent has a favorite, I suppose sometimes there’s nothing anyone can do.” Her shoulders hunched in a way he recognized, a gesture that appeared when something hurt her. He closed the newspaper, ready to go to her, to soothe the pain, but she drew a deliberate breath and straightened. She gave him a quiet smile. “It was all a long time ago,” she said. “I should be over it by now.”

Frank said stoutly, “So should she.”

Margot’s smile widened. “Fair enough. So should she.” She leaned forward to put her long-fingered hand on his. He turned his hand over to hold hers as tightly as he dared. The flicker of the small fire in the grate set reflections dancing in her dark eyes. “She can’t help it, Frank. Poor Mother. She just can’t.”

That conversation had taken place during the winter. Preston had just been moved from Western State Hospital, leaving Edith deprived of her weekly visits to him. It was too far, over snow-blocked and poorly maintained roads, to drive. The train journey was an arduous one, south to Portland, east to a tiny place called Wallula, then across the Columbia River. Dickson had forbidden his wife to make the trip in winter. In fact, Margot said her father had forbidden her mother to make the journey with just a maid, as she proposed to do. He would take her himself, he promised, when his schedule allowed.

That hadn’t happened yet, and Edith, though she wrote regularly to Preston, had begun to mope again, to stay in her room, sometimes for days on end. Frank didn’t know if Preston wrote back to his mother, but there were always packages going off to the sanitarium, Hattie sending tins of cookies, Edith collecting books and magazines and toiletries.

Once, when a brown paper package, neatly tied with white twine, was waiting on the hall table for the mailman, Frank had seen one of the twins spit on it. She didn’t know he was watching, and he stepped back quickly into the dining room so she wouldn’t see him. When he told Margot later, she said, “Oh, that must have been Leona. She’s never forgiven Preston for what he did to her sister.”

He had seduced her, Frank remembered. Impregnated her, and then arranged an abortion that nearly caused her death. “I didn’t say anything,” he confessed. “Didn’t think a little spit would hurt him.”

“No,” Margot said wryly. “And it probably made her feel better.”

Edith was another matter. On a sunny June afternoon, Frank came home early, having caught the streetcar rather than telephone for Blake. He meant to go out to the Sand Point Airfield and meet one of the Boeing pilots. Tyndall had been testing the Model 15, the first Boeing-designed fighter airplane, and Frank was going to go up with him, see how the new arc-welding process was working. He hadn’t flown in months, and he was as excited as a boy. When Bill Boeing gave him the assignment he had to school his face to hide the thrill it gave him.

He let himself into the hall through the front door. He would have preferred to use the back, and to climb the back staircase, but too often he encountered the maids there, and they embarrassed him by curtsying and stepping hastily out of his way. He would never, he thought, get used to having servants. They were just not the same as the hired hands he had grown up with. Frank and his father worked side by side with those hands, haying, plowing, rounding up cattle, branding. There was very little difference in their social standing.

He hooked his Stetson onto the coatrack and started up the front staircase with his briefcase under his arm. The house was quiet, but not silent. He heard Hattie humming in the kitchen, and the chirping voices of the twins coming from the dining room, with the lower, rougher voice of the maid Thelma answering. He supposed Louisa was napping, with Nurse watching beside the crib. Often Edith rested in the afternoons, too, rousing only to change for dinner, coming down to preside, in her somnolent way, over drinks in the small parlor and the family gathering for dinner.

On this day, something was different. Frank saw, as he reached the landing, that the door to Preston’s bedroom stood half open, the afternoon sun slanting through it to cast wedges of light on the patterned carpet. He heard a sound from within, a sibilant murmur, the rustle of fabric, the click and slide of drawers being opened.

It was, of course, none of his affair. He and Preston had never been friends. When Frank first arrived in Seattle, Preston had pretended they were, but that had been for the sake of having a larger audience. Once Preston knew Margot cared about Frank, all pretense evaporated. The tension between them had turned into naked hatred. Frank had no sympathy left for Preston. He knew him to be without remorse. He doubted he possessed any human feelings at all.

But Edith Benedict would never be convinced, and Edith was now his mother-in-law. If he couldn’t hold her in the same regard he held his own mother, she was still the only mother Margot had, and Margot worried over her. If something was wrong—or if someone was disturbing the room she kept guard over as if someday her son would return to it—perhaps that should concern him. Quietly, he set his briefcase down, bracing it against the newel post, and walked along the corridor toward the bedroom.