CHAPTER 26
The sounds of feet and chattering stopped the women’s voices. Simultaneously they turned toward the door. As Analee entered with Maggie again on her hip, the little girl pulled at Analee’s lower lip, and both dissolved into a hoot of laughter.
“Do it again, Analee,” Maggie begged.
Analee pursed her lips and blew a noisy breath onto the child’s cheeks, evoking another howl of laughter. Analee pulled the thick Sears Roebuck catalog from the cabinet and set it in the chair with one hand, then settled Maggie on it with the other. Delia climbed into her own chair and surveyed the meticulous organization of her paint supplies.
“Who fixed my stuff so good? You do that, Mama?”
“No.” Constance nodded at Alice.
Delia jumped back down from her chair and threw her arms around Alice. “Aren’t they so pretty?” she asked. “I’m going to paint one for your room tomorrow.”
Constance studied Alice’s face, searching for some indication to reassure her that Alice would even be here tomorrow. What she saw was a smile of acceptance at her older daughter.
“You can help me paint it, if you want to.”
* * *
Though the tension never left her now, the following days of sketching ideas, rearranging pieces of cut fabric and trim, pinning and basting, and scrutinizing in the standing mirror at least diverted Constance’s attention from her anxieties. Together, she and Analee kept a close eye on the children, the guardian role passing wordlessly between them in a carefully choreographed dance, where a mere glance, hand motion, or lift of the chin elicited a response. Alice watched and in subtle, unobtrusive ways joined in the guardianship. The girls took to her, especially Delia, who was entranced at having an admirer and assistant for her artistic endeavors. She stood beside Alice for hours, watching her sketch or match the subtle shades of one fabric to another, this thread to that fabric. Here was a curious and interested child to whom Alice could show her own talents and in whom she could nurture inherent young talents.
* * *
The gown became a collaborative work, involving both women and, unexpectedly, Analee, whose innate artistic bent emerged from some hiding place she had maintained for years. Analee’s secreted talents enhanced a design that would be meaningful to Constance, realized through Alice’s knowledge of what might and might not be done with the materials they had and the limits of her skills.
Constance set up repeated trips to the library for the two of them, and took the girls along, in search of information regarding the symbolism of the queen she would attend, symbols that could inspire her own ideas for the nascent design. With stacks of books in hand, Constance and Alice would settle in the children’s area, with much shushing. The assortment of picture books would entertain the girls while they conducted their research.
Constance was interested only in the actual history of the real woman Semiramis. The wild mythologies and legends that had grown up around her over the centuries bit too deeply into Constance’s own uncertainty and guilty fear. She could not bear the legendary, magical figure featured in multiple, sometimes conflicting embellishments, certainly not the damned creature of Dante—consigned to Hell in the Circle of Lust—or the tragic figure of Voltaire or Rossini’s opera. But the real woman Semiramis, who had taken the throne at her husband’s death and remained there until her son came of age, who had ruled, expanded, and stabilized the Assyrian Empire, here was a woman who could lend her hope. Aside from history, the only myth of Semiramis that touched her was that of an abandoned girl raised by doves.
Whatever ideas she and Alice came up with must be toned down, simplified. Though there were four queens, rather than one, the gown of an attendant should be modest in design. Any number of ideas excited Constance, and her excitement passed to Alice, and vice versa, but only by working backward from that excitement to something simpler could they find an appropriate balance. Underneath it all, there was for Constance the consideration that she was a recent widow and that she must be unrecognizable.
In truth, Constance felt unrecognizable, even to herself. Who was she now? Who had she ever been? Someone who was no one, other than to her children. And Analee. Her father had been essentially absent, much like Benton, except that his absence had not been physical. Her father’s absence had been of the heart and mind. He’d been present only as a keen observer of her manners or lack thereof, of her social graces or lack thereof. He had been repetitiously fond of the old English saw that children, specifically girls, should be seen and not heard. Apparently, that had applied also to girls who had grown into women, like her mother. As a child, Constance had simply observed, with unnamable feelings, absorbing lessons as children did, how he silenced her mother with a look or a dismissive, derogatory umph. One barely audible.
As Constance had grown older—old enough to visit other homes in the neighborhood with her mother—the differences she experienced in those homes had brought into question the set dynamic of her own. Children were both heard and seen in those houses in a manner denied to her at home. They sometimes ran right through the house, to her alarm. When nothing bad happened, when no one called them down, she joined the play, at first hesitantly, as they called to her to come on. Their raucous running and jumping on their galloping stick horses frightened her as she stood at the side of the room, watching. It was a sweet girl named Suzanne who pulled her from the sidelines and handed her a little whisk broom from the fireplace to join the stampede. And she did. Her anxiety made her clumsy, and she tripped. Suzanne’s mother picked her up, laughing. “You just need a better horse,” she said, brushing the ashes from Constance’s skirt and fetching her an unused broom with wide bristles from a kitchen closet. Yes, it was so much more stable, and fun. But a fun tinged by anxiety about her father’s response to the dark smudge of ashes that clung to her gingham skirt.
Her mother was a different person during those outings. She came alive, laughed, and chattered away with her friends. Constance listened in rapt attention when conversations settled on serious business. She was amazed at her mother’s emphatic opinions about riding horses, women’s subjugation, the vote, even politics, all punctuated by the dance of her lively hands and the engaged responses of the women, rapt in deep conversation while the children scampered about. Who was this inspired woman who, once they crossed their own threshold, became so grimly silent; who rushed her to her nanny for a bath and clean clothes before her father returned from his office; who sat with her hands in her lap and murmured amen to her father’s tedious blessings; who never lifted her own fork until he did; and who scolded Constance in a quiet voice if her eager hand touched her own fork before her father lifted his to the plate?
Who was this mother—not the lively woman she had watched all afternoon—this silent woman of no opinion? But Constance learned from her how to be not just two women but as many as it took to please, to play the part, depending on whom she was with and what was expected of her. As she grew, Constance learned to measure the cues from whatever company she was with as to who she was expected to be. Without being aware, except by a pervasive anxiety, she read the responses of those around her: the slightest opening or squint of an eye, the most minute raising of an eyebrow, the invisible tapping of a toe under a long skirt, a throat clearing, or a face turned aside. Though she worked hard, harder than even she knew, to be acceptable to others, she was haunted by her perceived failures, especially with her father. She avoided him if she could. She stood or sat quietly if she could not, head down, trying to think ahead what he might ask next. Her truncated answers to his rare questions left her unfulfilled. Sometimes she blurted out withheld bits of herself, only to be shushed by her mother.
Constance’s one consistent time alone with her father was while reading, he with his newspaper, she with whatever book might be her current assignment. Sitting at an angle from him, with her sharp farsighted eyes, she could read the front page and the less interesting back one as he held the opened paper in front of his face. She especially loved his subscriptions to the New York newspapers. Now and then, a headline would be such that she could not contain herself.
Such were the headlines—and especially the images—for the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. She was less than ten when she put aside her book and tiptoed close to his open paper. She stood transfixed at the sight of what she could only decipher as the towers of a castle and the hypnotic symmetry of line after line running to and from those magical turrets. It proved impossible not to put her finger on those lines, trace them to the looming towers of a nonexistent castle, fireworks blossoming from them, all the while murmuring, “A bridge, a bridge.”
The paper snapped as her father whipped the page sideways and into his lap. Her stomach lurched as they stared at one another, the moment frozen.
“Sit down and open your book, Constance,” he said. Then, after a moment, he looked again at the mesmerizing image on the front page. “I’ll give it to you when I am finished.”
Constance gulped in the next breath. For once, her father would actually give her the news. It was not until he rose and took the one sheet from the paper, handed it to her, and folded the rest under his arm that she actually believed he had meant it. She devoured the words, the curving symmetries of those lines, marveled at this feat of human ingenuity. Days later Constance would read the headlines, in much smaller print and without images, of the deaths of twenty-five in a panic on that bridge when a woman fell on the steps. There was no need to touch those words. She hardly needed to read past the subtitle. Something in her deflated, like a balloon punctured and gone flat. When she tried to speak to him as he lowered the paper to turn the page, he simply said, “You are too young for such things.” And that was that.
Until, of course, to prove the reliability and strength of the structure, an entire troupe of elephants was marched in a grand parade across the bridge. Such a show! And her own resilience rose. Her father let her keep that page, as well. The whole endeavor transformed into a great fairy tale for her. She kept the papers from her father carefully folded in a dress box from Maison Blanche that her mother gladly provided.
In the years that followed, she added another page to the box, one that announced the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Another page or two about the much-anticipated World Cotton Centennial in New Orleans, but she discarded them after her father took the family for a thrilling, but ultimately tiring, visit to the exposition, which was emblazoned with hundreds of newfangled electric lights, almost bright as day. The strings of neoteric bulbs left nothing hidden, including her excited exuberance, which her father immediately squelched with admonitions to “Calm down and behave like a lady.”
Constance’s reminiscences shifted to her marriage. Realization dawned on her that she had simply traded her father for Benton. She had been a lady, and it was a lady Benton had wanted. Perhaps any lady would have done. Constance had been convenient and available. And as her father’s daughter, she was Benton’s stepping-stone through his own magical gate into New Orleans society. She had not been the bridge he needed, transporting him into social acceptability, but she’d been good enough, and likely as close to that social entrée as he might hope to come regardless. From there she was simply an accoutrement to his ambitions. She would do, as long as she didn’t laugh too loud or talk too much, didn’t express her opinions or start to tell an anecdote he considered his own, and didn’t ever contradict him. Most of all, she had to keep her hands in her lap or folded and still, in spite their being as unconsciously necessary to speech as her tongue, just like it was for her silent mother. In that sense she had married her overbearing father and become her silenced mother. Both in one package.
To her great surprise, the world around her found her beautiful. She could never understand why. Regardless, she became Benton’s primary improvement project: Would she please pull down her skirt? Was she aware the toe of her boot was scuffed? Her hair was too flat against her head. Did she not understand how to fluff it? Why was she wearing that open-necked dress to dinner? These were business partners, and she needed to be covered with a jacket. Would she stop talking with her hands? She must learn to speak without pausing—her hesitancies were such an irritant. The list was endless. Yet she devoted herself to trying. She put her life’s energy into every detail: herself, the girls, the house, the household management, her failure to be alluring to him. That last item was the one that pained her, emotionally and physically. If she opened herself to him, tried to make herself tempting with a new gown, an open robe that revealed a bit of flesh, he rebuffed her. If not, he took her silently and only for his own gratification, often in ways that repelled her. If she addressed the issue in any way, he reminded her that this aspect of marriage was meant for the indulgence of men. She was a lady, after all, not a whore. If he needed to remind her of that, he would. And did. She wept her secret tears alone in the attic, longing for something different, for the romantic affection encountered in novels, hinted at by twittering friends at intimate luncheons, or at soirees where she might witness a husband whispering in his wife’s receptive ear if he thought no one was looking. No, she was not a whore, though his manner toward her sometimes made her feel like one.