Chapter 16 May

16

MAY

S omeone to care for. Someone who needed her. It was all May had ever wanted, yet now that she’d figured out a way to take care of Hal, she felt racked with guilt.

Miss Rhoades called to her just as she stepped from the front walk onto the curb, and May whirled around in terror, certain she’d been caught. She squeezed her pocketbook tightly under her arm.

“May!” Miss Rhoades ran to her, arms bunched to protect herself from the cold. Bits of ice dusted the shoulders of her plain black dress; she hadn’t bothered to put on a shawl or replace her house shoes. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, child. Where are you going?”

“I…” May blinked the freezing rain, quickly turning to snow, from her eyelashes. She watched Miss Rhoades look her up and down, taking in the worsted-wool skirt, another item pinched from the charity closet. In the commotion surrounding Pearl and Faith, once Pearl had retreated to her room and Mrs. Mendenhall and Mrs. Overlock had taken Faith away—after May had stolen down to Mrs. Mendenhall’s office—May had been able to slip back into her room and change.

“I’m going to see a friend,” she said, teeth chattering.

“A friend?” Miss Rhoades looked at her with infuriating concern. “I hope this is a true friend, not someone who’ll…who will use you badly, May.”

Miss Rhoades’s tone suggested she might know how it felt to be used. Through the scant snow, May studied the matron: her long, thin hands with careworn knuckles, her knobby arms, the large bun at the base of her neck, yellower than the gray at her crown. No one here, from the board down to the smallest child, really looked at Miss Rhoades as anything beyond a means to an end: the helpmeet who kept schedules and broke up quarrels, who could produce a clean handkerchief or wipe away vomit. There were rumors about her: she’d once been a governess to a wealthy family in the Finger Lakes; she spoke French and Lakota and played the piano masterfully; she’d been raised in Indian territory and ran away from her rough-handed husband, a fur trapper. Not all these tales could be true, of course. May wondered now if the matron’s background, in fact, looked a lot more like the inmates’ than anyone suspected.

She lifted her chin. “He’s my betrothed, Miss Rhoades. You needn’t concern yourself.”

“Oh.” Miss Rhoades’s expression changed, though May couldn’t read it. “Well, that is grand. I just meant to say you don’t need to resort to old ways of sustaining yourself. Mrs. Mendenhall has decided—”

“I’ll hear no more of this.” Abruptly, May turned and began walking toward the tram stop. She was being rude, yes, but Hal would be waiting for her, and she couldn’t very well treat him rudely, could she? Her face burned in the biting cold.

Miss Rhoades called her name a few times, but her voice got lost and distorted in the wind. “You can stay for as long as you’d like, May! That’s all I meant. May! Please don’t stay out too late! We’ll need you to help prepare…”

May crossed the street, walking in a hurry, chin to her chest. When she finally turned around to look at the home from a safe distance, she saw that Miss Rhoades had gone inside.

—

A dowry. That was what the money she’d stolen would amount to. A sort of hope chest she’d provide herself, in the absence of a proper offering from her family. It was Faith’s money, she knew, but Faith didn’t seem to want it. May might as well put it to good use.

She’d had a hope chest once, a modest but respectable collection of embroidered pillowcases, eyelet napkins with a matching tablecloth, crocheted afghan blankets, and five pairs of knit socks. One set had been meant for a future, imagined baby: pale-green booties with a matching bonnet. She and her mother had prepared it all together, when it had seemed she would marry Enzo, before she’d fallen pregnant. What had happened to it? Had Emmanuel ever worn the booties? May would never know. She’d had to surrender everything when she left the city.

She felt wistful when she remembered Enzo, the way his smooth arms, tanned from working outdoors, cradled her naked torso as they kissed. Thanks to Enzo, she knew how tender life could be. Also, how tragic. She couldn’t help looking on her memories of Enzo with wrath in her heart as well. He’d moved on to a new girl, a fresh, innocent one with a trousseau of her own, while May’s life had never recovered from the mistake she’d made: loving him with too much fervor.

She reached the streetcar stop before Hal did and stood beside the post, keeping herself moving to stay warm as she watched carriages cut through the slush. What did passing strangers think of her, a woman alone on the street? What did Hal think of her? He’d called her a rogue, but presumably he still assumed he’d be getting a virgin bride, a young woman of no more than twenty-one or twenty-two who’d just left her home in Chicago to find work in a different city. It was a common story: hordes of girls poured in from farms and small towns, lured by the high demand for domestic labor in booming Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In actuality, May was nearly twenty-five and far from inexperienced. She’d been living here on her own for over three years.

Across the street, another girl came to huddle at the tram stop, waiting to travel in the other direction; her head was uncovered, which likely meant she was very poor. May stared at the girl’s plain dishwater-colored hair, the red tip of her downturned nose. She wondered how long the girl had been here and if she’d yet turned bitter. May knew how the story went: girl arrives in the city with high hopes, but quickly realizes that the life of a scullery maid—or a weaver in a textile factory, or a wool scalder, working for ninety cents a day with hands reddened, lye-stained, and swollen—can be a fate worse than death.

How long would it take for this girl, plain and skinny as she was, to decide that brothel work would be preferable? The hours, after all, were superior, the pay and living conditions more comfortable.

How long until this girl’s turn in the Bethany Home?

A set of black wheels pulled to the curb, right at her toes, and May realized she’d been watching snowflakes fall on the dark fringe at the edge of her shawl. Perfect, innocent, oblivious snowflakes showing off their lacy points, melting into the wool without a care.

Now here was Hal, handsome, red-cheeked, and merry. How had she ever considered him second best? He rubbed his hands together and blew into them. “Get in, daft girl. I’ve a warmer on the seat.”

She laughed and flung herself in beside him. He slapped the horse’s back with the reins, and they took off. May made a point of not looking at the girl as they passed her. She exhaled. She felt so relieved to have a carriage to climb into that she put her hand on Hal’s thigh and planted a kiss on his cheek. “I have a surprise for you, darling,” she told him, and his mustache twitched. He smacked the horse to go faster.

“You brought the pistol, didn’t you?” he asked her, eyes on the road.

“I did. I brought something else as well.”

—

She’d braced herself for his apartment to be a disappointment—that’s what the money was for, to purchase them a proper home—so she was surprised to find the Ozark Flats clean and elegant, fixed with electrical lamps in the corridors and up-to-date plumbing in the units. The housemaid had left a basket with two pumpkin muffins and a pot of butter beside Hal’s door—yes, the building employed one housemaid, he informed May, and a rather disgusting custodian—along with a note asking if he’d like her to clean his apartment on Wednesday.

“Of course, I’d damn well like her to clean,” he muttered. “It’s her job, isn’t it?”

“How grand, to have a maid,” May said.

“None of them last long here. Two, three months at best.”

May stood in the center of his large living room, still in her boots, hat, and gloves, feeling out of place. The warmth in the apartment hadn’t yet penetrated her cold, stiff clothing. The apartment occupied a big corner of the first floor, with tall windows arched at the tops. Heavy taupe curtains provided privacy. She let her fingers drift over the surface of his small dining table. The furniture was sparse but respectable, though there were few pieces of art on the walls and even a couple of empty hooks.

“This is rather charming,” she said, looking through his window at the snow-dusted city. How did someone who claimed to be in perpetual debt afford this? “It all feels very modern.”

He shrugged and made a face. “My father owns the building.”

“Your father! Do you not pay rent?”

He crouched before the fireplace and began propping up kindling and logs, twisting old newspaper. “What’s it to you?” he snapped. Something about this seemed to bother him—his father’s ownership of the block of flats—though it made no sense to May. And why would he have described it as a rough place to live?

“Nothing,” May replied hastily. “Only, I do feel foolish now.”

“Why is that?” He touched a match to the newspaper and stuffed it under the kindling. Shaking the smoke from the match, he stood up and pinned her with those beautiful blue eyes.

He’d stopped moving, leaving the two of them with nothing to do but stand facing each other. May felt the weight of his presence and hers, filling the space like a ringing in her ears. All she had to do was take one step forward and reach out her hand, and then she’d be touching him. The magnitude of what they’d come here to do together hung between them, made them break into nervous laughter.

She had to do something. She fiddled in her carpetbag until she found the money pouch, and she handed it to him.

He weighed it, first, in his big hand, then took out the gold and counted it: a bit more than seventy dollars in specie. She held her breath. He fanned the greenbacks—ten five-dollar bills—studied them closely, said nothing.

“I thought we could use this to set up house,” she said shyly. “Unless you’re obligated to stay here.” She had to sneak a glance at the ruby ring he’d given her to steel herself. He wanted this. He wanted her. Didn’t he?

“Where did you get this much money?”

May licked at the dry patches on her bottom lip. Hal came to put his hand on her shoulder.

“You can tell me, May. I won’t judge you for it.”

“I took it from my roommate,” she whispered.

He didn’t move, just looked at the money for a while, blinking his golden eyelashes. At last, the hint of a dimple appeared in his right cheek, and then he broke into a full grin and turned those impish, sparkling eyes on her.

“Oh, you’ve made me very happy, May. Very happy indeed.”

“Have I?” She smiled widely, relieved.

He nodded. “Oh, yes.” He put the money back into its bag on the table, and then he pulled May into his arms and kissed her. “Come here,” he growled, half closing his eyes in something like hunger, and tugged her into the dark cocoon of his bedroom.

—

Half an hour later, May studied the gray light slipping around the curtains and wondered what time it was. The girls at the home would be busy in preparations for the Thanksgiving feast in two days’ time, rolling piecrusts and roasting apples. Afterward, they’d go up to bed, chatting, wiping their floury hands on one another’s aprons, and sharing nips of cooking sherry.

By God, she wanted to go home.

As with so many of her life’s disappointments, she’d expected intimacy with Hal to be one thing, and found it to be quite another. She had worried he’d be able to tell she was no virgin, and feared what he might think of her body, if he’d notice the faint white scars striping her belly below the navel, where she’d stretched to carry Emmanuel.

But Hal hadn’t seemed to look at her much at all. As a lover, he’d been quick, perfunctory, leaving her vastly unsatisfied. He hadn’t done any of the things men could do to ensure that women had a good time; instead, he yanked her this way and that, dragging her leg here and turning her torso there in uncomfortable and near-painful ways. It was all she could do not to cry out. Meanwhile, his face had taken on a sort of blank expression, a ferocity; he’d vanished into a fog of his own pleasure and seemed almost not to notice she was still in the room. After they shed their clothing, he hadn’t even bothered to kiss her.

At first, she’d tried to shut her eyes and picture the bright young man she’d once supposed him to be, the one she had first encountered at church and longed for so profoundly. She was with that young man now, she reminded herself. She should enjoy this.

When that failed, she’d gone to the maple grove.

It was an old trick she’d learned to use, in moments when she no longer wanted to be with her body. She’d picture the underside of maple leaves, backlit by sunlight, and promise herself: One day, someday, you’ll actually be there . She wasn’t sure where the image of the maples had originally come from: A park near her childhood home? A line from a book, made real by her own imagination? Whatever the source, it worked. In uncomfortable moments, she could easily go there, to rest under the maples in early summer, staring up at the veined backs of fresh green leaves, and feeling the sun on her face. One day she would be there, and all this would be behind her.

Hal turned onto his back now and crossed his naked legs, looking down admiringly at his spent, stubby member. He’d pulled a cheroot cigar from his nightstand, and now the air filled with the tangy odor of cherry wood. Smoking, he wiggled his toes, tufted with blond hair. She pulled the sheet to her chin and inched away from him.

“The pistol,” he said, scratching himself. “Where do you have it?”

“It’s in my little carpetbag,” she said, gesturing toward the living space.

He flung himself out of bed and, after a few long steps, was in the parlor, rummaging through her belongings with the cigar clenched in his teeth. Then he came right back, twirling the revolver alarmingly on one of his index fingers. The barrel gleamed.

“Fantastic, a Grape Shot!” he cried. “You’ve outdone yourself, May. Look at these charming engravings. No mistaking a lady’s handgun, is there?”

She watched him pull open the top drawer of his shiny wooden dresser and place the gun there. She sat up against the pillow, still clinging to the sheet and quilt. “What are you doing? I thought you were going to help me load it.”

He flung himself back into bed with enough force to drop ash. She worried he’d set the sheets on fire.

“I’m too tired, can’t you see? Pipe down, you’ll get it back.” He blew a sharp breath toward a lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “Why don’t you tell me a story about yourself?? Tell me something you’ve never told anyone. Go on, I’m feeling bored.”

The fire in the living room made a loud popping sound. He wanted her to make him feel important by trusting him with a secret. She knew from experience that this sort of exchange made certain men feel powerful. What could she say? She could tell him she lived in the Bethany Home. She could tell him about Emmanuel. But she wanted to do neither of these things, and she wondered what that meant. Was she afraid of scaring him away? Or was she afraid of him?

She could tell him she was a liar. Or she could simply lie.

“My name isn’t May Lombard,” she said after a pause. “May was a neighbor of mine, back in Chicago. A girl a few years older than I was, whom I admired. She seemed to have gotten everything right. I guess I wanted to be her, to give myself a chance to be like her, when I came here. My real name is Susannah Green.”

A half-truth.

“Susannah Green,” Hal said, in a strange tone. Was he mocking her? “You know, I do like surnames that double as pigments. Susannah Green. Priscilla Black. Do you know who she was?”

May shook her head. The name rang a faint bell of familiarity, but she couldn’t place it.

He propped himself onto his elbow, the cigar dangling between his fingers. “She was a madam, one of the worst. A purveyor of flesh. A cheat. Do you know what happened to her?”

His pupils were alarmingly large and black, as though sex were a drug he’d taken, and now he wasn’t himself. May noticed that the light coming around his curtains was beginning to dim.

“No,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t tell her. She wanted so badly to leave.

“They pulled her body from beneath the paddle wheel of one of the mills. Fish had eaten her eyes.” His lips were pulled back in a grimace, eyes alight.

“Oh my, how awful.” May tried to make it seem as if she were making light of the situation. She began edging toward the side of the bed, feeling around under the quilt for her drawers. “But why do you care?”

“I don’t. Care, that is.” He laughed, tossing his head back so that his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “I just thought it was interesting.”

Her fingers located the plain cotton of her chemise, rougher than his sheets, at the far corner of the bed. She grabbed it and pulled it on. “I really must be going.” She made her best attempt at a demure laugh. “Can’t let you see me this way much longer, you won’t want anything more to do with me.”

Why did she want to leave with such urgency? As she finished getting dressed, he watched her from his bed, where he was still lying lazily, drawing on his cigar so that the end glowed orange. He made no move to dress himself, nor did he offer to drive her home in the carriage. Good, she thought. The streetcars were still running. She could get home on her own. Never would she be so glad to see her own bed, to lie on her side and look across the room at Faith’s familiar face.

She was fastening the belt on her skirt when Hal said, “You didn’t ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

He watched her, propped on his elbow. “To tell you something I haven’t told anyone.”

Slowly, she slipped the end of her belt into the loop. She had to find her shoes. “All right. Go ahead.”

Those eyes gleamed black. Not a hint of blue remained around the pupils. He blew out a long stream of smoke, aimed at the ceiling. “Would you believe me if I said I’d killed someone?”

She paused, stocking halfway up her leg. Someone scraped at the snow on the walk outside, a grating, awful sound. She cocked her head at Hal, pretending to go along with a great joke, even though her heart had begun to pound. She yanked the stocking upward.

“Now you’re just being funny,” she said.

“Am I?” He smirked. “What if I told you I offed a man who cheated me at faro? A foreigner. Someone no one would miss. I put the leg of a chair through his eye and sat on it. You should have seen the blood spurt.” He burst out laughing. “His skull cracked like a walnut shell. I guess it is rather funny!”

May tried laughing with him, but the sound that came from her was more of a sob. The way he’d put it—“offed”—as though homicide took no more effort than squishing a fruit fly, or returning a book to the library. She took a step backward, toward the door.

“And once,” he continued, “I talked a sporting girl into jumping out her own window.” He said it as if he was proud of himself, impressed by his own terrible abilities.

May swallowed hard. She didn’t want him to see her cry. “Hal, stop it! You know I don’t like horror tales.” Why in the world was he trying to scare her? What could he possibly gain? It seemed her fear entertained him, which disturbed her almost as much as what he’d said.

She crossed the threshold into the living room and slipped into her boots without lacing them. Her clumsy fingers found her carpetbag as she kept her eyes on him. “Goodbye, then,” she said. “Enjoy your…” She swallowed.

Her bag felt so light now. He had her gun, and Faith’s money.

“Enjoy the afternoon,” she said.

His mien shifted, and he tossed back the covers and slid out of bed. “Here, I’ll take you home.” He found his trousers, in a heap on the floor.

“Oh, no, don’t worry yourself.” Her hand gripped the doorknob. “I prefer the walk to the streetcar. Fresh air. Look, it’s stopped snowing.” She looked down to unhitch the lock, then back at him. From the front door she could still see him, sitting on the edge of his bed, trousers hitched to his thighs, watching her with narrowed eyes and a sneer curling his lips. The expression flickered away, as though a hand had flipped a switch. He offered her a benign smile, and his gaze softened.

“Farewell,” he called, “my utter darling.” He tossed her a kiss as she pushed out into the hallway. She took care to shut the door quietly behind her before running for the exit.