Chapter 5 May

5

MAY

M arguerite the Magnificent. The name invoked such grandeur, such power, that May couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. Still, it was only gossip, likely untrue, and if Faith had ever merited such a lofty title, she’d sure tumbled far.

Occult practitioner or not, Faith definitely showed no interest in attending church. The girls were encouraged, though not required, to practice religious observance, either at the home’s chapel or with their own congregations. As May dressed for worship in silence, she studied her roommate of one week: a tangled, sweaty mess of dark hair and pale skin. Despite the murmurs that Faith didn’t bathe or bathed in blood (a particularly vicious and ridiculous rumor), May had come to expect her to keep a clean room, to rise, reliably, in time to bake the morning’s bread, and to complete her morning toilette with a cloth and ordinary water, just like everyone else.

May studied the veins at her roommate’s temples, the translucent skin of her throat. She crept to her table and pulled her own hand mirror out of the drawer, the glass splotched and cracked with age. Carefully, she applied a sweep of lavender powder over her face and neck. She dipped her fingertips into a pot of (forbidden) rouge and dabbed them lightly on her cheeks. The trick was to look just a bit consumptive, a bit bluish and haunted—she applied the rouge under her eyes as well—but not too much. Not like a whore.

“Farewell,” she murmured to Faith as she left. Faith’s mouth twitched at its corner.

If only she would speak. She hadn’t even defended herself when Pearl, at lunch, had accused her loudly of having tricked Dolly into ravaging those biscuits. Everyone in the dining room watched in stunned silence, waiting for Faith to protest, but she’d said nothing, and Pearl had helped herself to the browned half-apple and slice of holey cheese on Faith’s plate.

This exchange only doubled the rumors: to allow Pearl to take tribute from her like that seemed an admission of guilt.

“She isn’t even with child,” Pearl said that morning as they flowed with the crowd down the front steps of the Church of the Redeemer. Leigh and Dolly walked behind her, their arms interlocked, forcing May to bring up the rear. It was a spectacular early-November day, sky like a bluebird and a manageable chill to the air, yet May walked with head hanging. Hal hadn’t shown at the service this morning, for the third week in a row. Sometimes, she knew, he slept late on Sundays, which she took to mean he cared more about sleep than he did about her. She felt foolish with the finished cigar case in a carpetbag on her shoulder.

“Certainly not,” Dolly replied, stepping slowly down the stairs, holding on to Leigh for support. “All skin and bone, that thing. Her mams look like they haven’t even grown yet.”

The other girls erupted in laughter. “Dolly!” May hissed, as a woman in a feathered hat cut them a stern look.

“If she isn’t knocked up,” Leigh said, “what would she want with the Bethany Home?”

“What do you think, May?” Dolly prodded her. “What would the new girl want with the Bethany Home?”

Pearl saved May from having to answer. “You kidding? Bed and board.”

A strong arm flung itself around May’s waist, stopping her momentum and causing her to drop the carpetbag. Her embroidery and a length of purple silk spilled out onto the stone steps. Churchgoers grumbled and stepped around them.

Pearl shaded her eyes with her hand, looking up at the man behind May and, fortunately, not the mess on the ground. “Well, hello, there, Hal,” she called, lips pursed.

May felt a rumbling laugh in the chest of the man behind her. He had her pressed up against him, her tailbone to the front of his trousers.

Blood thundered in her cheeks. The rouge hadn’t been necessary after all.

“Damn it, Pearl, you gave me away.” Hal let May go, and she hurried to retrieve her bag, her thoughts racing. He was here. Had he heard Leigh say, “Bethany Home”? He offered May his arm, and they began strolling down the steps, the other girls in front of them.

“Anything I can carry for you, darling?” Hal asked.

“No, thank you, I’ll manage.” She wished that she’d fiddled with her dress the way Pearl had, to make it more fashionable. Pearl had gored her skirts so they’d lie smooth along her hips, then used the extra fabric to puff up the sleeves. If it weren’t for Pearl’s worn leather boots, she’d have been a Gibson model.

“The sheer size of this church makes it awfully hard to find someone,” May told Hal. “I assumed you’d stayed in bed.” She shut herself up at the word “bed,” distracted by the thought of Hal in his sheets. Her sordid mind at work, yet again.

But, Lord, he was handsome. A better match for Pearl, the two of them with their fair hair and their tall, proud carriage. Yet he chose to have May on his arm. One of life’s mysteries, and not one May wanted to resolve anytime soon.

“Will Amelia allow you a promenade with me?” he asked May when they reached the street. “Or are you wanted at home?”

The others’ faces broke into broad, knowing smiles. May glared at them. Dolly, who’d largely escaped punishment for ruining everyone’s breakfast earlier in the week, was especially conspicuous. It would be a miracle if Hal hadn’t noticed her girth or the lack of a wedding ring. Scrawny Leigh—who hid tobacco inside her bottom lip and liked to dispose of the evidence in the home’s potted plants—had surrendered her own baby for adoption right away, in the spring. And Pearl had bragged with sacrilegious fervor the entire streetcar ride to church about one of her regulars when she’d worked at Jennie Green’s parlor house, a man who once made her howl like a coyote. Lumberjacks, she claimed, made the best lovers. Pearl had a three-month-old son, currently in the care of the nurses at the home, whom she was still deciding about.

May hated them all. They were pretty ceramic vases that, if you looked closely, were riddled with cracks.

Pearl locked eyes with May, grinning wickedly. “Ah, yes, Cousin Amelia. How lucky you are to have a cousin to live with, May, while we’re stuck in a mere boardinghouse.”

“But we’re not due back till three at least,” Dolly replied. “I think we’ve time for a pint and a slice of cake, don’t you, Leigh?”

“Golly,” said Leigh, “but I didn’t bring any money. May, what’ve you got in your change purse? We’ll pay you back, of course, next time we see you.”

May gave a tight smile and placed six Indian-head pennies into Pearl’s outstretched hand. Her heart ached as she saw them go. The thirty-dollar stash she’d arrived with last year had dwindled nearly to nothing, thanks in large part to this kind of extortion.

“Mighty kind of you, May,” said Leigh, turning with Dolly to go.

“You’re a true friend, May.” Pearl pocketed the change. “Say hello to Amelia for me! Farewell, May! Farewell, Hal!”

May and Hal watched them charge down the block, Pearl’s arms thrown around her friends’ shoulders, the three of them howling with laughter. A dark fantasy came unbidden into May’s mind: herself holding raw eggs, launching them at the girls’ backs. How satisfying it would be, the sounds of shells cracking, the drip of yolk down their coats and onto the sidewalk. She wondered how badly the eggshells would hurt the girls as they broke.

She blinked away the thought. “You’ll have to forgive them,” she said to Hal. Her own voice sounded funny to her. “They weren’t raised in nice homes. Not their fault.”

“Unlike you.” He grinned, his handsome face framed by the mostly bare branches of a ginkgo that was still clinging to a few yellow fan-leaves. His mustache, as always, looked perfectly trimmed and combed, almost fastidiously so. His blue eyes gleamed, the pupils small in the sunlight.

A crisp breeze caressed May’s cheek, sensuously lifting the hair on the back of her neck. Her fingers moved to take the cigar case from her carpetbag, before her better sense took hold of her. A drake and his hen, a matched pair—was she daft? How presumptuous, to assume he’d want such a thing from her. This was the extent of their courtship so far. He’d take her arm and walk with her, around the block and to the streetcar.

But he had his hand in his pocket, and he was pulling out a billfold. “How much do you need, darling, to recoup what they took? Five? Ten?”

“Goodness! But that’s much more than…” Take it, a voice in May’s head insisted. Allow him to feel he’s taking care of you, so that later you may take care of him. The bills felt flat and new in her hand. She’d have to break them into coins, somehow.

“That can’t seem like much money to you,” Hal said. “You were brought up in the lap of luxury, is that right?”

“I don’t know about the lap of luxury, but we had a good life.” She took his arm and continued walking. “Father invested in leather, once they built the railroads and could bring goods from the ranches out west to Chicago.” Her father had been a shoemaker, so this was not technically untrue.

“And how, again, did you find yourself in Minnesota?”

“Chicago had become dangerous, so crowded and dirty. Mother suggested I come stay with my cousin, Mrs. T. S. Winfield, and enjoy the fresh air of Minneapolis.”

May had told him before about Amelia and her red brick home in Kenny. She left out the fact that Amelia lived, along with her four children, above the stables of that fine house, where she worked as a maid. During May’s brief stay with her cousin, Amelia had risen before dawn and returned in the evening to scream at the children, at May, at the absent husband, whose whereabouts May never ascertained. She’d moved out before the newest baby was born.

Hal laughed. “Minneapolis isn’t so fresh anymore.” They were passing the bread line that formed beside the church’s rectory every Sunday. Shabby, ghostlike figures shuffled forward, waiting their turns for a heel of bread or a cup of soup.

“I do miss Chicago sometimes. It’s my younger cousins I miss the most…” May could see the streetcar stop ahead. It could be weeks before she saw him again, and all she’d have done was bore him. Who knew what he’d be up to in the meantime? She could tell by the cut and fabric of his clothing that he had money. He’d spend their time apart at fancy salons while May kneaded dough in a basement.

“I liked the sermon today,” he said, changing the subject. “The bits about Darwin—now, that’s religion I can get behind.”

“I must admit I didn’t listen to the sermon,” she said quietly. She’d been looking for him.

“Oh, May. Why do you even come to church? Not for the entertainment, surely.”

What could she say to that? She did view church as entertainment—it was the best part of her week. An excuse to get out in the fresh air, to ride a streetcar and feel like a regular citizen of this city, and, above all else, to see Hal.

To think she lived all week for the chance to talk with this man for only a few minutes. How desperate she was. How pathetic. She took a deep breath. “I attend because, at this church, there’s no confession.”

Hal stopped walking. For a moment she regretted her surge of honesty—he’d think her a heathen. Then his face broke into a broad smile. “Why, Miss Lombard! What have you done that would turn a priest’s collar?”

She felt a bit startled that she had at last gotten his full attention. And said something her mother would’ve whipped her for. “I shan’t tell a soul,” she replied, trying to sound coy.

“Not even me?” he murmured, coming close to her. They stood facing each other. A wind off the river rushed down Eighth Street, causing all the trees to say hush . He took her left hand. She inhaled as he began plucking at the fingertips of her glove, one by one. Her glove off, he lowered his face slowly, never taking his eyes from hers. When his lips had nearly reached her hand, he paused. He smiled teasingly. He’d never kissed her before.

She felt warm between her legs, dizzy. She wished he would just do it, just kiss her. Her skin itched for it.

“I’d like to court you properly, May,” he said, lips an inch from her hand. “Shall I call on you next week?”

She couldn’t answer. She felt stunned, watching him. Instead of kissing the top of her hand, he turned it over—her heart shuddered—and touched his lips to the inside of her wrist. She felt the tickle of his mustache, the wet touch of his lips. Her veins pulsed rapidly. When he pulled away, the damp mark he’d left behind turned cold in the wind.

“That sounds lovely,” May said when she found her voice. She wanted his lips on her mouth, his bare, flat stomach against hers. But that was a bad thought— bad —the kind of impulse that landed her in the Bethany Home to begin with.

Behind them, the church bells rang, lazily, a few notes of a Westminster chime. Quarter past the hour. It brought May back to her senses. If he were to call on her, he’d have to find out where she lived. “My cousin is very strict,” she told him quickly. “She wouldn’t allow you to see me without a chaperone. And she’s a terribly nosy chaperone.”

“Oh?” He lifted one fair eyebrow. “You’ve had other suitors, then?”

“No, I…” Her face burned. She was saying, and thinking, all the wrong things. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head: You are ruined.

Hal pulled his pocket watch from a chain in his pocket. “I have somewhere to be,” he said, taking a few steps back. “Until next time, then, Miss Lombard? Next Sunday?”

Her shoulders drooped. He’d asked to court her, and she’d rejected him. “Next Sunday.” But what if he slept late next Sunday? What if he never came to church again?

Before she could think better of it, she added, “If you can rouse yourself.”

She’d only meant if he could wake up in time. She caught the double entendre too late. Hal caught it, too. He shot her that grin again as he strolled backward, his gait improbably confident.

“Oh, I can rouse myself,” he called to her.

She hurried away, face flushed, blood pounding in her earlobes.

—

“Miss, I assure you,” the dressmaker said twenty minutes later. She pulled a stern face, brows furrowed under her curled black hair, as she tut-tutted over the state of her presumably once-beautiful purple handiwork. “No gown bearing my stamp has ever been sold to a sporting house. Not here, not in New York, not ever.”

“I am sure,” May murmured, mortified.

“What sort of business do you think I run?” Miss Catherine Ging, the dressmaker and, incredibly, store owner, flung out her hands. “Do I look like the personal clothier of Nettie Conley?”

May was surprised Miss Ging knew the name of one of the madams. “No, miss, of course not. I beg your pardon, please. It’s only, this dress…”

She stalled, looking around. The front room of the store, on fashionable Nicollet Avenue, was papered in satin, with polished wood floors and a brown-and-white cowhide rug. Dress patterns were tacked to the walls, and a three-sided mirror with an oak pedestal sat in the corner. A neat cabinet held spools of thread, a rainbow of gleaming colors. A shopgirl flipped idly through a stack of fabric swatches, from fine chiffon to weighty velvet. The soft whirr of sewing machines, feet on pedals, drifted from the back room. For the first time, May wondered if she should have taken up work with the seamstress, rather than Cook.

She swallowed and tried a different tack. “You own this store? How extraordinary. How did you do it?” What she’d meant was, how could a woman own anything that wasn’t a brothel?

Miss Ging sighed. She wore the latest fashions, of course, a creamy white blouse with full sleeves, tucked into the tiny waist of a delaine-wool skirt. A small fur hugged her collar. “I have loans to repay, many loans, if you must know.” She began folding the dress, expertly, crisply, to fit back into the carpetbag, wrinkling her nose again at its sad condition.

“New York, it was? That’s where you came from? I grew up in Chicago.”

“You don’t say.” Miss Ging perked up as the bell over the front door rang; it was only the mailman, however, and she nodded at him, crestfallen, as he dropped a few envelopes into the basket by the door.

“Bills?” May asked quietly.

Miss Ging gave an exhausted huff. She thrust the bag at May. “Good day, miss.”

“Look,” May said, setting the carpetbag back on the counter. “I’m an inmate at the Bethany Home. A girl came in a week ago wearing this dress. We’re attempting to find out who she is or where she came from, but the girl’s a mute. Can you help?”

Miss Ging blinked a few times. For the first time, it seemed, she really looked at May, taking in her plain gingham dress—her best—with the white collar and cuffs; her shawl, a hand-me-down; her straw bonnet, a bit out of season now that the weather had started to turn.

Miss Ging’s eyes cut to the shopgirl, who went back to organizing her fabric swatches. “All right,” said the dressmaker. “I do enjoy a good mystery.” She produced a pair of square-framed glasses and unfolded the dress. “It’s a polonaise, see? Before the hem tore, the overskirt cut away to show off this black satin. A trifle old-fashioned, but some people still favor the style.”

She turned the collar inside out to examine the stamp. May leaned forward, so that the tops of their heads were nearly touching. The tag was simple: tan grosgrain with “Made by Catherine Ging” stamped on in faded pink.

“The problem is, this is my old tag,” Miss Ging said, removing her glasses. “Now they’re embroidered with the customer’s name. I don’t remember who I sold this to, as it was more than a year or two ago. But she was a lady, I can assure you of that.”

May wrinkled her brow. Everyone at the home assumed the purple dress signified brothel work, though it would be rude to say this. But perhaps, on the right lady, paired with a proper hat and gloves, the gown could be acceptable.

Miss Ging seemed to read her thoughts. “I don’t sell to whores,” she said again. “It would’ve been a gentlewoman. This heliotrope hue was the height of fashion a few seasons ago.”

“Then it must have been stolen. It didn’t arrive on a gentlewoman.”

Miss Ging shrugged. “Maids can have sticky fingers.”

Maids. May hadn’t thought of that. Everyone implied Faith had been a sporting woman, but what did they really know about her?

“Or,” Miss Ging added, “if we’re looking for the least outrageous explanation, the owner of this dress outgrew it and offered it to a servant. It’s rather small. Sometimes ladies order vanity gowns, which never have and never will really fit them, and eventually they give them away. The wealthy are curious people.”

May began folding the dress, poorly, back into its bag. “Thank you for your kindness.” She meant it; the dressmaker hadn’t recoiled in judgment when she’d admitted where she lived. Rather, it had seemed to cleave her sympathies to May.

The bell rang as May let herself out. A gust of wind yanked up a corner of her shawl, and she pulled it tight, walking with her head down.

“Oof.” She ran face-first into someone’s broad chest, just as she was hit by the acrid smell of cigar smoke. That someone gasped in surprise.

“May?”

“Hal!” He stood in front of her, Hal in the flesh, smoking a cheroot cigar. Her heart felt as if it might burst. Guilt overtook her, as if he’d caught her in a lie, but then she remembered she hadn’t mentioned where she was going. Neither had he. “What are you doing here?” she asked, just as he blurted out a version of the same question.

She replied first. “I had an errand to run for a friend.”

“The same,” he said. For once, Hal didn’t seem entirely in control of his body, his face. He looked distracted, pulling on the cigar, blue eyes darting up the street and then behind him. Someone passed with a stout dog on a chain, and he jumped back a little.

May’s fingers curled in her gloves. She’d been much too forward with him earlier. Now he couldn’t even look at her.

“Listen, May, you got me thinking.” He huffed a nervous laugh, his hand on the back of his neck. “Can you give Amelia the slip, and get out without a chaperone? I’ve a dinner to attend on Friday, at the house of a friend. A party of about twelve. Er, rather, there are eleven of us. Fancy making it an even dozen?”

She couldn’t believe her ears. “Are you asking…You would like me to…”

He smiled, a brief motion, up and down. “Would you accompany me to dinner?”

“Of course. Oh, Hal, yes, of course I would.” Was she still being too forward? “Sounds nice.”

“Good, good. Have you a…” He clenched the cigar between his teeth and mimed paper and pencil.

“Tell it to me. Address and time. I’ve a mind like a bear trap: once the teeth set, it holds on to everything.”

Hal stared at her for a moment. “All right, then.” He told her where to be, at six in the evening the following Friday. He flicked the cigar away, then took her gloved hand and kissed it once, perfunctorily this time, dry lips to cotton. A bit deflating, after what had happened earlier, but still. He’d invited her to dinner. She could scarcely breathe.

“Farewell, Hal, until then!”

“Farewell, May.” He reached for her cheek and patted it twice. She stood dumbfounded as he hurried past her. Her hand went to her face.

She heard the bell of Miss Ging’s store ring behind her as Hal went inside. What in the world could he be doing in there? Something to wonder about later.

The butt of his thin brown cigar, still rolling, came to rest near the curb. She hesitated, thinking how nice it would be to put her lips to something he’d just held in his. She wrung her hands for a minute, waiting for a break in the crowd strolling on the sidewalk, then decided she didn’t care. She bent to pluck the cigar from the ground and puffed at it—once, twice—it was still damp—careful not to inhale lest she start coughing. When she opened her eyes, she caught a man looking at her out the window of a butcher shop. She walked away quickly, head down. He might be thinking her a lunatic, which she figured was fair. That, or sensationally poor.