The Impersonator (15 page)

I gathered from the way Aunt Victoria bit her lower lip when I came down the stairs that my best dress and gloves were not up to the mark. Caroline had lent me one of her white lace squares and I pinned it in my hair as she and Valerie did, but it seemed that the rest of my clothing did not meet Carr standards.

Six of us rode into Dexter that morning in Henry’s Packard. Grandmother had pleaded a headache. Oliver made no excuse at all; he just stared at me with a horrified expression that told me, too late, how badly I’d blundered. Religion was not a subject we had covered back in Cleveland.

I kept my eyes glued to Aunt Victoria, very much aware that Henry and Ross were keeping their eyes glued to me, waiting for the Good Lord to strike me down with a lightning bolt. Aunt bobbed a curtsy before she entered the pew; I did the same. She knelt; I knelt. She recited mumbo jumbo; I faked it. It wasn’t really much different than following a dance routine, and I had had plenty of practice there, so I suppose I acquitted myself well enough. Nonetheless, I heaved a huge sigh of relief when it was over. I vowed to take a page from Grandmother’s script and cultivate headaches for the next four Sundays.

At the conclusion of the service, the congregation trailed into an adjacent social hall for hot tea and warm shortbread—and a close-up look at the lost-and-found heiress. It was dangerous ground, and I knew it. I kept close to Aunt Victoria whose good breeding required her to smooth every social introduction with prompts.

“Good morning, Eleanor,” she said in her unfailingly gracious way. “Won’t you help welcome Jessie back to Dexter? Jessie, dear, you remember Mrs. Gaskin, don’t you?” I made suitable remarks, watching Ross and Henry warily out of the corner of my eye.

To my surprise, neither one paid much attention to me. I thought they’d be trying to trip me up. Instead, Ross was deep in conversation with the minister, discussing the dead Indian girl, and Henry was busy working the crowd. With the panache of a seasoned performer, he circulated around the room, exchanging a kind word with each lady, shaking hands respectfully with each older man, slapping the backs of the younger ones, and accomplishing it all without a shred of pomposity. As I sipped my tea, I watched him pat the head of a darling blond girl, flirt with two plain young women who looked like sisters, and nod gravely over an old man’s opinion, pausing only to scoop up a tiny tot running away from his mother, lift him like an airplane and fly him back to her arms. Everyone chortled fondly. It was enough to make me doubt my own judgment. Who had replaced the self-important Henry Carr from Cliff House with this utterly charming Henry Carr, a man so affable that he might very well win his election after all?

“Jessie? A moment, please?” Henry motioned at me from across the room. The two plain sisters were beside him, and I tensed, expecting a trap. “Jessie, you probably don’t remember Mabel and Roxanne Laughton, but a more talented pair you will not find in all of Dexter. Our Jessie, you know,” he confided to Mabel, “spent the last seven years on the stage and she’s become quite musical. Mabel is a fine pianist and Roxanne sings like an angel.” Right on cue, the girls blushed, giggled, and protested the compliment. “You girls will have to let Jessie teach you some of her vaudeville songs.”

Finally, after everyone in the hall had had the opportunity to look me over and say a few words, Aunt Victoria herded us home where Marie had a simple three-course dinner waiting. Out of the spotlight, Henry dropped the charming behavior, putting me in mind of those protean acts—some call them transfigurators or quick-change artists—who can change their clothing and transform their characters in front of the audience with lightning speed.

We ate mushroom soup followed by a spicy chicken dish with whipped potatoes, fresh corn, and salad, and finished with blackberry pie and ice cream—my first opportunity to demonstrate my skill with an ice cream fork. Sundays were a day of rest and reflection, and since that precluded outdoor activities like my expedition with Buster, we gathered in the parlor after the coffee cups had been cleared. A long afternoon loomed.

Ross opened the gramophone cabinet and lifted out a stack of records.

“I expect radio will be the death of records,” said Oliver, stuffing his pipe with a fragrant tobacco. “Why pay for records that shatter so easily when the radio will bring you the music for free?”

“Oh, my,” exclaimed Aunt Victoria with an anxious flutter of her fingers. “Mr. Beckett, I am dreadfully afraid…”

“Ah, yes, my apologies,” he said, returning the pipe to his pocket. “I almost forgot. The asthma hasn’t improved, then, Ross?”

“Regretfully not, sir. However, there is a new medicine that is a great help whenever an episode strikes.”

“As for radio,” Aunt Victoria resumed, pulling her needlepoint from a wicker sewing box, “I will always prefer my recordings because I can select what I like to hear rather than what the radio offers. Play the Chopin first, Ross, dear.”

“There’s not much danger of having to choose between the two,” replied Ross as he shuffled gingerly through the fragile discs. “Portland just got a radio station two years ago and I doubt Dexter ever will, not this far away from civilization.”

“Radio is like vaudeville—entertainment for city folk. What do vaudeville performers think of radio, Jessie?” asked Oliver. Always so careful to avoid drawing suspicion, he would not speak directly to me unless others were around to hear our innocent conversation.

“They don’t like it at all. Personally, I don’t think radio will ever threaten vaudeville. People want to watch their entertainment, not just listen. You can sing over the radio or tell jokes, but try listening to Houdini’s escape tricks or Bojangles’s stair dance or W. C. Fields’s juggling act. The Venetian Masqueraders are nothing if you can’t see their fabulous costumes, and I can’t imagine listening to a performance of the Cat Circus,” I said, experiencing a pang of homesickness as I wondered what Angie, Walter, and the felines were doing at this very moment. “Vaudeville is so much more than sound. Radio will never compete.”

Grandmother nodded over her poetry book as the conversation swirled around her.

“Are you reading
my
fashion magazine, Caro?” demanded Valerie.

“Oh, pooh, fashion.” She tossed it back. “Who cares? Let’s play cards!” Valerie was willing, and together they badgered their brothers into joining them for Hearts. I was about to excuse myself to my room when Aunt Victoria foiled my escape.

“I’m sure Jessie would like to play too,” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you, I have to—”

“Nonsense! Ross, a chair for Jessie,” she commanded.

Silent count to three, then Ross straightened up like a man headed for the gallows and carried a fifth chair to the table. I tamped down my annoyance and sat.

“Do you know the rules?” Ross inquired coldly.

“Yes.”

Henry poured himself a full glass of Seagram’s VO over ice and began shuffling cards, showing no trace of his earlier geniality. I tossed my head and pretended I wasn’t the least disconcerted by the repeated shifts in his manner. No one else seemed to notice it at all. No doubt they were used to Henry’s mood swings.

Hearts doesn’t take much concentration and I wasn’t giving it any when an odd movement made me look twice at Henry’s hands. I thought I saw him deal his own card from the bottom of the deck. Certain I was mistaken, I watched more closely without seeming to, thinking perhaps he was cheating to lose as many adults do when playing with youngsters.

But no, the sap was cheating to win. He peeked at cards passed to him before discarding his own and kept a close eye on the twins, waiting for them to turn their hands enough for him to catch a glimpse of their cards. He was a reasonably good cheater. Good enough to cheat at poker or one of the more lucrative card games. That I could understand—cheating for profit. But cheating one’s younger siblings for the pleasure of seeing them lose?

I said nothing. Henry won every hand he dealt as well as half the others. Perhaps that was how he funded his comfortable life away from Cliff House.

“I believe I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a while,” said Grandmother when we reached a break in the game. “Jessie, will you help me up to my room?”

“Yes, of course, Grandmother. Please continue the game without me,” I said to the cousins as I stood up from the card table and took Grandmother’s arm. With me on her left side and the banister on her right, she managed the steps quite easily. When we reached her room, she let go of my arm and closed the door behind us.

“He was cheating, you know,” she said, settling herself on the overstuffed chaise lounge.

Taken aback, I said, “I did know. But I’m surprised you could tell.”

“My eyes are sharp for distance; I only need these for close work,” she said, indicating the magnifying glasses she wore on a chain around her neck.

“I didn’t mean that. I meant that I’m surprised you recognize cheating when you see it. Most people don’t. Unless they’ve had a lot of experience with card playing.”

“And you don’t think your old grandmother knows about cards?” Every wrinkle in her face deepened with her wide smile. “Come sit here by me, girl, and I’ll tell you a tale no one alive today knows. When I was young, before I married your grandfather, I worked some months in a saloon.” She paused to see the effect of her pronouncement on me—I nearly fell off my footstool—and when she was satisfied that she had shocked me to the core, she went on.

“It was back during the Civil War—although out where I lived in California, that was just a war to read about in the newspapers. I took a job for a few months at a saloon in Stockton, serving drinks to the miners. Sometimes I did some singing and dancing. Hard to believe, looking at me now, but I had a pretty face and was light on my toes back then. Besides, there were hardly any women in town, so even the plain ones looked good to those prospectors. I met your grandfather in Stockton. We married and moved to San Francisco where we had three children—now Blanche and Clarence are gone and only Oliver is left—and we got too respectable to ever mention Stockton again. What do you think about that?”

I was dumbfounded. It took a lot of imagination to transform this frail old lady in a high-necked, rose silk dress into a young girl in low-cut flounces entertaining a room full of rowdy gold miners. “I’m flabbergasted! Was there a stage? Were you part of an act? What did you sing?”

She chuckled, pleased she had caught me by surprise. “No, no, it was nothing like vaudeville. There was no stage and no act, just a piano that was always out of tune and a vegetable crate beside it to raise me up. I sang ‘Buffalo Gal,’ ‘Darling Clementine,’ ‘Yellow Rose of Texas,’ and anything else the men called out, even if I had to make up my own words. Sometimes I danced with the men.”

“And you learned how to spot card cheats.”

“That was over sixty years ago. Seems like another lifetime. I hadn’t thought about Stockton in years. Not until I heard you had come home and had been working in vaudeville. Your grandfather was ashamed that I had entertained the miners, and he made me ashamed too, but all of a sudden, I got to thinking, just what was so bad about a little singing and dancing with some lonely men? It never went further than that. Your years in vaudeville made a lot of sense to me, because I’d done something like that when I needed to earn my own way. I thought to myself, maybe she got that from me, that little spark of talent and the gumption to show it off. Maybe we have more in common than some think.”

“Seems we do.”

“There’s something else I learned in Stockton. I learned how to take the measure of a man pretty quick. I learned not to look at a man’s face or his clothes, but to watch how he treated others. There’s no better way to judge. And I can tell you this, I’m wary of men who cheat at children’s games. Why didn’t you call him on it?”

“I don’t know. Somehow, it just seemed smarter to hold back that I was on to him.”

She gave me a measured look and patted my hand. “You
are
smart, Jessie. You think before you act. That’s a rare enough trait in young people. Well, now I’m going to lie down a bit. But I’ll be keeping my eye on Henry and Ross Carr. I don’t like them, and I don’t trust them.”

21

No one was awake but the servants when I left my room the following morning wearing my too short, too tight riding britches. I made for the kitchen where Marie packed a picnic for Buster and me. It didn’t seem right to go visiting empty-handed, so I helped myself to several Mason jars of preserved fruit and some of Marie’s scones. I told her that Buster and I were going to spend the day riding, and she promised to let Aunt Victoria know.

Just then, Aunt Victoria appeared out of thin air. “Good morning, dear. You’re up with the sun,” she exclaimed brightly, almost as if she had been expecting me. “Oh, look! You’re wearing your Venetian beads!”

I touched the five bright beads at my throat—Buster’s “Bennis” beads were Venice beads! Souvenirs from Jessie’s years in Italy.

“You know, after you left, I searched your room, hoping for a note of explanation,” she said, unable to keep the note of reproach out of her voice.

“I know, Aunt, I should have—”

She held up her hand. “No, no. What’s past is past. What I meant to say was that I didn’t see your Venetian beads then and thought you must have taken them with you.”

“Actually, I left these in a box of agates in the stables with Buster. We used to call it our treasure. And that’s why I’m up so early this morning. Buster and I are going for a long ride, like in the old days. It’s all right if I take Lady, isn’t it?”

“Of course you may take her any time you wish. But”—and now she took in my ill-fitting jodhpurs—“you can’t go dressed like that.”

“It’s all I can manage for the moment.”

“What about a jacket and boots?”

“I don’t need a jacket, and these shoes have a little heel.”

“Oh, dear, what if someone sees you? Oh, dear, what will they think?”

“No one will see us. We’re just going in the woods.”

“You must have riding boots, my dear. I could lend you mine, although they’ll be far too large for your foot. And my jacket, but you’ll swim in it. And no hat either!” She came closer and fingered my long curls. “You have such pretty hair, just like Blanche’s.”