The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) (9 page)

It didn’t take long to fold some lingerie, two pairs of stockings, two shirtwaists and a skirt, a nightdress, and a coat. She wedged these into the valise, which smelled significantly better for having sat open to the breeze. She added a hairbrush and some toiletries, and she was done.

A much harder task, one that required twice as much time, was writing the letter to her parents. In truth, she thought of it as a letter to her mother. She was certain her father would be so angry he would no longer care what became of her, but she would address it to both of them out of respect. Her stationery set, engraved with her name, waited for her at the small, girlish desk she had used all through school. She sat down on the matching chair, and drew a page of her stationery onto the blotter. She dipped her pen into the inkwell, but it took her so long to think of what she could say that the ink dried, and she had to dip it again.

Finally, her throat aching with sorrow, she wrote:

Bronwyn reread what she’d written while she waited for the ink to dry. The words brought fresh tears to her eyes, but she blinked them away. It was too late now for tears.

She folded the note in half and slid it into an envelope. She wrote their names on it, and laid it on her pillow where Betty would find it, and carry it to her mother. It would be kinder if they knew she had really gone. Kinder, too, if she didn’t mention she was going in search of her lost child. Daddy would be furious if he knew what Mother had told her, and Mother would be sad enough without cringing before one of Daddy’s tempers.

She slid the packed valise under her bed before she went down to dinner. During the meal, she did her best to behave as usual, although she could hardly remember, now, what usual was. Her mother sighed once or twice, and spoke little. Her father tried to spark a conversation, but with the women both withdrawn, by the time Mrs. Andrew sent in dishes of blueberries in thick cream, he gave up. They ate their dessert in silence, and Iris and Chesley rose to carry their coffee out to the garden. Bronwyn surprised her mother by catching her arm, and leaning close to kiss her cheek.

“Bronwyn?” Iris said. “You’re not—going out?” Her voice cracked a little on the sentence. Bronwyn knew her mother hated and feared her nightlife. Iris never asked where she went at night, and Bronwyn understood it was because she didn’t want to know.

Well. After today, she wouldn’t have to fear it anymore. Bronwyn responded, “No. I just—just wanted to say good night. I’m going to turn in early.” She felt her father’s scowl prickling her neck as she went up the stairs. He had made no secret of his displeasure with her, and she supposed he would never forgive her now. She had stolen his respectability. Shattered the family honor. He should be relieved when she disappeared. He might be able to restore his good name without his fallen angel around to remind everyone of the family’s embarrassment.

C
HAPTER
9

Blake was unusually quiet as he drove the shining green Cadillac down Aloha to Broadway, and onto East Madison. At first Margot didn’t take notice of his silence. It was going to be a long day, and she was riffling through a pile of forms, double-checking for errors or omissions. The papers were due at the governor’s office to secure the funds she had promised Olive Ryther. Margot wished she could hire someone to handle the paperwork.

She clicked her tongue as she closed the file. “This,” she said with disgust, “is not what I trained for.”

Usually, Blake would chuckle at such a remark, and ask her for details. This morning, though, he didn’t respond, and she lifted her head to eye him in the rearview mirror. He looked much as usual, his cap settled firmly on his head, his driving gloves and jacket spotless as always. Margot set the file on the seat beside her so she could lean forward. “Blake? Is everything all right?”

There was a touch of the South in his pronunciation when he answered, and she knew what that meant. “I think,” he began.
Ah think
. “I think Nurse Church is going to be upset.”

“Sarah? Why? Has something happened?”

“Something is going to happen, Dr. Margot. Next month. It doesn’t directly affect me, but for Sarah—this is a hard moment.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

Blake’s gloved fingers tapped an irritated rhythm on the broad steering wheel. “I don’t know, Dr. Margot. I don’t want to upset you, too, especially when there’s nothing you can do to help.”

“I can listen, Blake,” she said. “Anything that affects Sarah—or you, even indirectly—matters to me. I think you know that.”

Still he hesitated. She let the moment stretch, turning her head toward the small, square houses of the neighborhood they were just passing. The Women and Infants Clinic was, by design, located in the Negro district. The homes were often shabby, in need of paint and repairs, but in the yards, hydrangeas and sunflowers and even a few roses bloomed in the June sun. Margot had made calls to a number of such houses, and she knew how hard it was for the people who lived in them to pay their rent and feed their families. Planting flowers was a gesture of courage and hope. It touched her, and she admired the housewives for doing it.

They reached the turning for the road south out of the city, and she looked ahead again, still waiting for Blake to speak.

He cleared his throat. “The Klan is having a meeting next month,” he said in a deep, hard voice. “In Renton.”

“You mean the Ku Klux Klan? Here?”

“Yes.”

She heard his effort to keep his voice even, but the anger that underlay it startled her. “They can’t touch you, Blake. Father would never allow that.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s Nurse Church I’m worried about.”

“Sarah! Why?”

“Dr. Margot, I’m allowed to live on Capitol Hill because of my position at Benedict Hall. But for Sarah—and her family—she hasn’t said anything, but I’m worried.”

“Because of the Klan?”

He flashed her a look in the mirror, and his eyes were as hard as his voice. It was so rare to see Blake angry, with fierce lines drawn around his mouth, that it stopped her breath for a moment. He said tightly, “I found a pamphlet on the porch. I didn’t show it to anyone, because—well. There seemed no point.”

“What did it say?”

“It was put out by the Klan, and describes how they have been ‘assisting’—that’s the word they use—neighborhoods to rewrite their covenants. The Church family has a home near the Sound, a modest one, but they own it. This pamphlet proposes rewriting neighborhood covenants to exclude anyone not of the Aryan race.”

“No!” Margot leaned forward to speak over the edge of the seat. “Blake, they can’t do that! It’s not legal—it can’t be!”

The muscles of his jaw bunched, then released. “They can do it,” he said heavily. “They just haven’t done it yet.”

Margot leaned back, blowing out a breath, and folded her arms tight around herself. “That’s revolting,” she muttered. “Have we made no progress since the war?”

“Which war would that be, Dr. Margot?”

She gave a sour chuckle. “Excellent point. There are far too many to choose from.”

“I have to agree with that.”

“Maybe nothing will happen, Blake,” she said thoughtfully. “This is Seattle, after all. This is an immigrant community, and we have citizens from all over.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Dr. Margot,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“If you come across another of those pamphlets, save it for me. I’ll show it to Father. He might want a word with the mayor about something like that.”

The fingers beat on the wheel again, then straightened. Margot could just see, by the curve of Blake’s cheek, that he was smiling now, and the atmosphere in the motorcar lightened. He said, “I thank you, Dr. Margot. I’m sure if you add your voice, Mr. Dickson will listen.”

She relaxed her arms, and tilted her head so he could see her answering smile in the mirror. “I’m fairly certain, Blake, that my father listens to everything you say, whether you know it or not.”

“Well,” he said. “If that’s so, I’m honored.”

They drove on in silence, and Margot gathered up her forms to go through them one last time. It hadn’t been easy to persuade Olive Ryther to let her and Sarah vaccinate and examine every one of her children, but now that it was done, she felt an obligation to secure the funds she had promised. The only problem she could foresee was Mrs. Ryther’s poor record keeping. She and Sarah both had spoken to her about it, but Mrs. Ryther dismissed their concerns.

“God will take care of my little ones,” she had said. “He leads them to me, and He protects them when they leave. Where they came from, where they go, those aren’t my worries.”

Sarah said, “What if someone is looking for a particular child? Sometimes families get separated.”

“People should watch over their children more carefully,” Mrs. Ryther said. When Sarah and Margot exchanged a frowning glance, she added, “Let go, let God. That’s my motto.”

Later, on their way back to the Women and Infants Clinic, Margot said, “She sounds like Hattie sometimes. ‘Let go, let God’ is one of Hattie’s favorites.”

“I like it better from Hattie,” Sarah said, and Margot and Blake had both laughed.

 

The day trip took even longer than Margot and Blake had expected. By the time they returned to Benedict Hall, the dinner hour was already past. Hattie had been watching from the kitchen window for the Cadillac, and she bustled out to open the front door for Margot.

“Land’s sake, Miss Margot, you must be worn out!” she said. She took Margot’s hat and coat, and hung them on the rack. Margot submitted to this assistance meekly. She was, in fact, exhausted.

It was just as well, she thought, that Frank was away tonight. He had flown to Spokane with one of the Boeing pilots to have a look at an airplane under development by the Ford Motor Company. They would spend the night at a hotel near the airfield, he said, and be back the next day. The house seemed empty without him, but his absence meant she could go straight to bed and to sleep.

“You get yourself into the dining room now, Miss Margot, and I’ll bring you your supper. I bin keepin’ it warm in the oven.”

“Hattie, why not just let me have it in the kitchen with Blake? That will save you a few steps.”

“Now, Miss Margot, that’s just not right. Blake won’t like it. I’ve got Thelma here, and she’ll serve you.”

Margot, too tired to argue, did as she was told. Her place setting had been left, but the rest of the table was empty. The candles in their elaborate silver holders had been snuffed out, and all that was left of the dinner service was a silver butter dish and a cut-glass saltcellar. Margot sat down as Thelma came in with a small bowl of tomato soup and a single roll on a saucer. Margot gave the maid a weary nod of thanks. “Thelma, just bring everything at once,” she said. “You don’t need to keep running in and out just for me.”

Thelma, gray-haired and plump, was as silent a woman as the other maids were chatty. She said, “My orders, miss,” and turned to leave. Margot could have pointed out that her own orders should take precedence over Hattie’s, or Blake’s, but it seemed too much trouble. She chuckled to herself as she picked up her soupspoon.

“What’s funny?”

Margot glanced up, and found her older brother peeking in through the open door. “Dick,” she said, smiling. “Come and sit down. Keep me company.”

He grinned at her, and she thought how much he was beginning to look like their father. Like Dickson the elder, Dick was beginning to thicken at the waist, and his dark hair already showed strands of gray. He had his father’s prominent jaw, too—but then, she reflected ruefully, so did she.

“You’re late tonight,” Dick said, pulling out a chair opposite her and settling into it. “Hospital?”

“No, actually,” Margot said. “Not today.” She tasted the soup. “Gosh. This is good.”

“Hattie’s getting better, I think,” Dick said. “Mother leaves her alone these days, and she can cook the things she’s good at.”

“How is Mother? I doubt Ramona has time to watch over her the way she did before the baby came.”

Dick pushed the butter dish closer to her hand. “I don’t know about Mother, Margot. I see her at dinner, like you do. Breakfast. Mostly she stays in her room, I guess. Ramona says she goes days without seeing Louisa at all.”

“What a shame. That precious little girl! These days won’t come back, when she’s so small and so—” She waved her spoon, not sure of the right word.

“
Adorable,
I think, is the word you’re looking for,” Dick said drily. “I hear it from my wife all the time!”

“Well, Louisa
is
adorable,” Margot said. She took another spoonful of soup. She felt better for the food, but she could feel her eyelids growing heavy already. “She’s like a puppy, tumbling every which way. Always happy.”

“She’s more like Coyote,” Dick said.

Margot smiled. “You mean the Trickster.”

“I do! We can’t keep the child corralled for more than an hour at a time. Poor Nurse is run off her feet.”

“I wish I had more time to spend with her,” Margot said, spooning up the last of the soup.

“Well, it’s Nurse’s job, isn’t it? I’m just glad Ramona doesn’t have to chase after the baby all day by herself. I can’t imagine how women manage who don’t have any help.”

“No,” Margot said, sobering now. “No, Dick, you probably can’t, nor can Ramona. I see lots of them. They’re more or less permanently exhausted.”

After a moment, Dick said, “So, if you weren’t at the hospital, what kept you so late?”

“I had to go to Olympia today, to drop off the Sheppard-Towner forms. For the Ryther Child Home.”

“Oh, yes. I knew that, but it slipped my mind. They haven’t finished the Capitol yet, I understand.”

“You and Father have your fingers in that pie, don’t you?”

Dick leaned back, linking his hands across his small paunch, making himself look even more like their father. “We do,” he said with satisfaction. “All our fingers. Or I should say, we did. Lots of hullabaloo about costs, but Father saw that coming, and saw to it we were paid on delivery.”

“You’re not responsible for those pricey spittoons, I hope,” Margot said wryly. She split the fresh roll, and the enticing scent of yeast rose from it. “Not much to be proud of, from what I heard.”

Dick laughed. “No, we didn’t handle the spittoons. Not sure who did, but Hartley’s screaming that they charged nearly fifty dollars apiece.”

“I heard the same. What did you and Father sell, then?”

“Masonry for the dome, mostly. And we imported some stone and marble, for the floors, columns, that sort of thing.”

“The dome’s finished, at least. It’s impressive.”

“We didn’t choose the style, but we like it,” Dick said. “It’s a great design, though, don’t you think? The classical look. I was down there when they first started building it a couple of years ago. Glad they didn’t move the capital to Yakima, or wherever they were talking about.”

Thelma returned with a serving of white fish and asparagus, and set it in front of Margot without a word. When she had gone, Margot said, “Does that woman ever speak to you, Dick?”

“Sometimes.”

“I never hear her say a word.”

“They’re all afraid of you, Margot. The great doctor!”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He smirked at her. “You are a bit scary,” he said. “You go around looking so stern.”

With a mouthful of fish, that somehow Hattie had managed to keep moist despite the hour, Margot shook her head. When she had swallowed, and touched her lips with her napkin, she said, “I am
not
scary, Dick.”

“Not to me,” he said. “But I’m used to you. You still scare Ramona a bit, though. Most certainly not Louisa!”

Thinking of the child made her smile. “I don’t think Louisa is frightened of anything.”

“No,” her brother said ruefully. “I’m the one that’s frightened, when I hear about her escapades.”

They sat in a comfortable silence while Margot finished her meal. Thelma came in with a freshly made cup of tea, which Hattie knew Margot liked at night. Margot said, “Thelma, Dick might like a coffee,” but Dick said no, and sent the maid off with the used china.

It wasn’t until her tea was half gone that Margot remembered Blake’s worry of the morning. “Dick,” she said. “I almost forgot. Blake is hoping we can do something to help Sarah Church’s family. It doesn’t seem possible to me, but evidently the Ku Klux Klan in Seattle is having an influence on certain neighborhood covenants.”

“It hardly seems possible we
have
a Ku Klux Klan in Seattle.”

“That’s what I thought, too, but they’re having some sort of rally next month. Down in Renton.”