Chapter 17 Faith

17

FAITH

For hours now, Faith had been alone in the tower, with little to do but think.

At first, she’d felt relieved to have escaped Pearl’s wrath, to have a chance to catch her breath. But it was too quiet in here, or not quiet enough: she could hear infants mewling in the nursery, just beneath her; seamstresses going about their work in the upstairs wing; two girls singing “Daisy Bell” as they swept the stairs. Leigh and Dolly had come up, chattering about the tom turkey Mrs. Overlock had brought for the slaughter, a veteran of the yard whose meat was sure to be tough. Still, they hoped that if they helped kill the old gobbler they’d be entitled to the wishbone.

It was hard to listen to them go about their day as though nothing had changed. Restlessness overtook Faith, then confusion, and finally, after Miss Rhoades came and went with her tray of afternoon tea, anger. She’d assumed the Sisterhood of Bethany were good women, with the inmates’ best interests, including Faith’s, always at heart.

Yet Mrs. Mendenhall had done exactly what Faith’s mother used to when Faith became “disrespectful.” What Priscilla Black had done, as well.

To the highest tower with you. To the attic, to your room, for the good of the others.

You’re making everyone uncomfortable.

Stay here until I say you can come out.

They’d moved to Faith’s uncle’s house when she was four, after her father died in a mining explosion in Oliphant Furnace, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Trudy, had initially planned to stay for a while in their little company home, collecting her husband’s pension checks until she could afford a house on the seashore in New Jersey. Her dream. But people in town began to whisper: it wasn’t appropriate for such a young widow, such a pretty one, to collect her husband’s pension, or the life insurance furnished by the company, especially when the boy himself had hardly put three years’ worth of work into the mine. Quickly, Faith realized that her mother was seen as dangerous, worse even than the stick of dynamite that had buried her father and two other men in rubble. The other mothers pulled their children away when Faith tried playing. The cashier at the company store refused to let her mother shop. Within a fortnight, her mother had packed their things and hired some cart men and had given a forwarding address to the mining company: her brother Clyde’s house, in Buffalo.

The mood those first few days at Clyde’s felt celebratory. He and Trudy rejoiced that now they’d be able to share Clyde’s post-and-beam home and József’s pension checks, which neither of them yet knew would stop coming after three years, the length of József’s tenure at the company.

Uncle Clyde commented once, as Faith ran a little wooden truck over the carpet and her chubby baby brother bounced in her mother’s lap, that it felt nice to have children in his house. That made Faith pause. Without thinking, she asked: Didn’t Clyde have a wife? What about children of his own? She barely had a chance to watch her uncle’s face darken before her mother set the baby down and whisked her into the dining room.

“Shut your mouth, Peg,” her mother whispered.

Faith had been called “Peg” then, a nickname that didn’t sound anything like “Margaret” but somehow made sense: a name like a wooden peg, something to hang things on.

Her mother’s breath smelled of the corn whiskey she and Uncle Clyde had been drinking. “Don’t mention Nicola again. Christ, you ask too many questions.”

Faith had never heard of Nicola before, and she started to protest, but her mother gripped her wrist, harder than she ever had before. “Don’t say a word about your father, either. Clyde never liked him, and you’re liable to set him off.”

It seemed to Faith that her mother and uncle had actually been discussing her father a great deal, or at least the money he’d left all of them in death. But she didn’t say this. Over the years, those long, dreadful years in Buffalo, she learned to speak less and less. Any subject could set her uncle off, especially when he was three sheets to the wind. She found herself yanked into that rarely used dining room more times than she could count.

Don’t ask Uncle Clyde what kind of work he does.

Don’t you dare press him to send you to school—do you think he can afford the books?

Don’t talk so much about Pennsylvania.

Don’t talk back.

Don’t talk. Don’t talk. Don’t talk.

When she reached her teenage years and surpassed her mother in stature, her very presence became intolerable to Clyde, even in her silence. All she had to do was squint and stare at him a little too long, and he’d become visibly irritated, scratching at his neck and hollering for Trudy to check the girl’s insolence. And Faith began to realize that this ability to cause such a reaction, even a negative one, was in itself a form of power.

Daylight dwindled in the little empty room. Faith wished she had something to do other than reminisce: some knitting, or a jigsaw puzzle. She fashioned her blanket into a shawl, sat on the hard bed, and watched through the oval window, only the tips of her toes balanced on the frigid wooden floor, waiting for May to return. Miss Rhoades had mentioned that May was out, seeing her beau. The matron had been puzzled when Faith responded with a stifled sob, then bit down on her knuckle to keep from crying out further.

She’d have to find a way to warn May about him. And then maybe she and May could snatch her money from Mrs. Mendenhall’s desk and use it to leave this place, together. But where would they go? The police would indeed be looking for Faith, if they cared to investigate Priscilla’s death. West, maybe, farther west, into unknown and unclaimed territory.

The snow fell all afternoon, as soft as cottonwood seeds. The tips of the grass, grown golden and dry, grew shorter and shorter and eventually disappeared. On tenterhooks, Faith paced, the floor creaking beneath her; she kept wondering what Hayward could possibly see in May, what good he felt she’d do him. His entanglements, Faith well knew, were exclusively designed to benefit himself. After he got what he wanted from you, he’d throw you out like yesterday’s garbage.

Or worse.

—

The Sunday afternoon when she first sneaked out of the Lundbergs’ house with Johnny, Faith had expected to meet the woman he’d mentioned, the one who needed her palm read. Instead, Johnny took her to the West Hotel.

She stood shivering, dripping rainwater on the richly patterned carpet of the lobby, as Johnny handed their coats to the valet. The ceiling soared two floors above her head, buttressed by wide marble columns. Clusters of globe lights gave the room a soft ambience. The hotel rivaled the best in the East, Johnny had told her on the way over, and meant Minneapolis had really come into its own. Behind the front desk, the staff in their brass buttons watched her suspiciously. Trying, she assumed, to know what to make of her in her slate-flannel dress, the only decent one she owned, and the leather boots come all the way from Buffalo and missing a button or two.

She forced herself not to cower, to meet their gazes until they were the ones who looked away. By now, she’d had some practice arranging her face into different expressions to put others off their guard or confuse them. She stared at the bellhop as though she were here to inspect his work, and she watched him clear his throat and tug at the ends of his sleeves.

“Ready?” Johnny said, touching her elbow. She felt a little quiver run through her body. She stood close enough to see a line of hairs he’d missed with the razor, just beneath his bottom lip. “Harry’s waiting for us in the lounge.”

“Harry?”

Johnny’s features softened. “You have an exquisite voice, do you know that? I’m covered in gooseflesh when you speak to me. You should do it more often.”

He led the way into the hotel lounge, an extension of the lobby, with two-story-high ceilings and a gallery around the perimeter. The space was quite crowded, with mahogany tables and gray velvet armchairs, and men, dozens and dozens of men. In the near corner, what looked to be the Park Board were celebrating under a banner and some paper rosettes; a man in a sash gave a toast that Faith couldn’t hear over all the laughter, sloshing his glass here and there. The underside of his white mustache and top of his beard were soaked in brown liquor.

As they pushed through the crowd, Faith kept her eyes focused on the back of Johnny’s head, his close-cropped hair, his neck. Without turning around, he reached slowly behind him, his fingers seeking hers. She grasped his hand. No one could see them holding hands, his warm fingers held close to her waist. It felt like a secret.

“You said ‘Harry,’?” she murmured, close to his ear, thinking about what he’d just said about her voice. “I thought your friend was a woman.”

Chill bumps rose on the back of his neck. “Harry’s the one who needs you to talk to her. Here’s the bastard now.”

The curse had barely a chance to register when she realized they’d reached the far corner of the room, where an elegantly dressed man sat with his back to the watered-silk wallpaper. Mr. Hayward stood and introduced himself to her, kissed her gloved fingers between the second and third knuckles before they all took a seat, the men facing Faith, she with her back to the room. She could study only her two companions, and her eyes were drawn to Hayward. He possessed a cold kind of beauty, his hair the same shade as the sandy icicles that formed along Lake Erie after a vicious winter storm. His eyes were freshwater ice.

He signaled the waiter and ordered drinks for Johnny and himself. He was the one in charge here, Faith noted, not Johnny. Next to Hayward, Johnny looked like a boy tagging along with his older, more self-assured brother.

“And a Jack Rose for the lady,” Hayward told the waiter.

She blinked out of her stupor. She’d been staring at Hayward so intently, she hadn’t realized he wanted to order her a mixed drink. She shook her head. “Sarsaparilla,” she managed, the first word she’d uttered at the table.

Hayward and Johnny looked vaguely disappointed. Hayward nodded at the waiter, who scurried off. “Johnny tells me you’re a medium.”

Again, she shook her head.

“A palm reader,” Johnny corrected him.

“A palm reader! Even better.” Hayward drummed his fingers on the table. “Can you explain to me what a palm reader does?”

She inhaled slowly. The air smelled, quite pleasantly, of cherry tobacco and whiskey barrels. Hayward had his right eye narrowed, the side of his mustache raised in a smirk. She wondered what kind of answer he wanted: the mystical, or the realist.

“I’d like to learn the tricks,” he added. Realist, then.

She slid her hand across the table, reaching for his palm. He turned his hand over in hers. “If I were reading your palm…” she whispered, and she sensed him react to her voice. His wrist stiffened. He leaned in to hear. “…I’d notice that your life line is very short. See—here.” With one fingernail she traced a line, scarcely touching his skin. “It’s bisected by the line of fate.”

Hayward listened keenly. “But would you tell me that if I were a paying customer?”

“No.”

“What would you tell me?” he asked. Their drinks arrived—a red cocktail garnished with apple and a cherry for each of the men, a bubbly sarsaparilla for her—but nobody touched them. Johnny paid the waiter.

Faith waited, and thought, before responding. What did she know, so far, about Hayward? He wore a white tie and tails, as though he were heading to the opera. He hadn’t paid for the drinks; Johnny had. Hayward’s hands were softer than Johnny’s, the nails manicured.

He needed her to talk to someone, a woman. Presumably, to persuade her to do something that would benefit him.

“I’d say you were about to come into a lot of money.” She chose an arbitrary spot in the center of his palm and circled it, gently, with the tip of her index finger. “I can see it right here.”

Hayward smiled. He took his hand back and lifted his glass toward Johnny. “She’ll do.” He clinked cocktails with Johnny, then slid a five-dollar coin across the table. “That’s for the palm reading,” he told Faith. “Plenty more of that in no time, my dear.”

She smiled as she took the coin, and the men beamed back at her.

—

Shameful, she thought now. It humiliated her, how she’d craved their approval, how good she’d felt just to be with those two handsome young men. The men were beautiful, the hotel was beautiful, she had felt beautiful in their presence. More than that, she’d felt needed, appreciated, special—as though she were not at all the same person who’d grown up in that dreadful place near Buffalo, her uncle’s house. She felt rewarded, even glorified, in her peculiarity; that which nearly everyone else had tried to snuff out in her, these men wanted to ignite.

When Johnny and Hayward had mentioned they had a room reserved upstairs—for talking, they assured her, to get away from the noise of the crowd—she’d known what they expected of her, and she’d gone up with them anyway. She had only herself to blame for that. She’d wanted to forestall her return to the endless drudgery of domestic work. And curiosity, she supposed, had gotten the better of her; she wanted to see how the men planned to impress her, for she had a sense that both were eager to win her admiration. She’d have preferred to be alone with Johnny, but Hayward intrigued her with his mysterious, dangerous charm, and after a cocktail—eventually, they’d worn her down and ordered her that Jack Rose—she found herself squeezed between them in the elevator, the doors rolling shut, the reflections of all their faces flushed and expectant in the polished brass.

It hadn’t been her first intimate exposure to men. Once you’d broken that dam, it was easy to do it again. There’d been her neighbor, Brooks, in Buffalo, and the young stevedore she’d sneaked out in the middle of the night to see. But both had been mere boys, amateurish and nervous in their affections. Hayward and Johnny knew what they were doing. They’d started by kissing her on the white skin of her long neck, one on each side of her, making her quiver. Under their touch, she felt like the queen of Minnesota.

She knew now that they’d been testing her, lulling her. Preparing her for something else. Unfortunately, she’d passed the test.

Faith’s stomach twisted. She sat up, remembering that Miss Rhoades had left her a few sheets of stationery. She couldn’t write very well, her education having ended in primary school, but she reached for the paper now. Her belly was becoming heavier; though its charge was invisible on the outside, it felt like a medicine ball on the inside. She scooted across her mattress and dipped the nib in the inkwell.

Mae, she wrote. Haward is no good. Trust me don’t see hem agin. Your frend, Fathe

After a moment, she added a postscript:

I have money and can help. Come, please come, to the towr.