CHAPTER 33
Alice descended from her room after her rest, a habit she had adopted as her pregnancy progressed, to find Constance and the girls in the sewing room. Entranced at the pearls and iridescent crystals in Constance’s palm, they did not notice Alice at the door. Alice could not quite make out the girls’ awed whispers, but she watched their tentative hands coming close but not quite daring to touch. I must make a beaded pouch for each of them, she thought, or, better, a collar to wear on simple dresses. Had she seen them with such dresses? she wondered. Always in ruffled pinafores. What was she thinking? She would need to work quickly if she intended to make anything, even something simple, for these girls. Her time here was limited.
“You be so pretty, Mama,” Delia said. After turning to see Alice there, “Miss Alice!”
Alice found herself enveloped in an ardent, if diminutive, hug.
“You making Mama beautiful!”
“Well, Delia, Mama is beautiful without my doing one thing. You know that?”
Delia tilted her face up to Alice. “I know.”
“I am hoping to make something for her that is as beautiful as she is.” How she would miss these girls. But at least for a while, she would be in the company of the older girls at the orphanage. It would not be the same. Far from it. But it would be something, for the time being.
“Alice and I are going down for some tea, girls,” Constance said. “I will send Analee up to play with you and help you straighten your playroom.”
“Can’t we go outside, Mama? I promise I won’t go near the fence,” Delia demanded, tugging at her mother’s skirt.
As Constance’s face blanched, Alice took her by the elbow.
“Not today, young ladies,” Alice said, stepping in. “There’s a bit too much breeze for your doll babies. And besides, I’ll bet it’s time they had some tea of their own. One whispered to me that they would love a tea party. Now, don’t tell them I gave away their secret. Oh, you have a tea set right here.” Not releasing Constance, Alice leaned over the play table and picked up a blue flowered teapot. “So lovely. I’ll ask Analee to bring up a bit of tea—or maybe juice, if you prefer—and some cookies for you. How would that be?” She set the teapot between the girls.
“Cookies? Oh, yes. We don’t have to have the tea,” said Delia.
Constance laughed. Laughing herself, Alice released her, but nothing could release the acute sense of the cost of fear.
Downstairs, installed in her room, Constance breathed deep, laid her head back on the upholstered padding of her chair. Alice watched her rock her head from side to side.
“Will this ever be done with?” Constance said. “Will this ever go away?”
Alice sat quietly, giving Constance time. She saw the strain on her face, the tension in her arms, even with her hands listless in her lap. There was nothing to say. No answers to such questions existed.
Analee entered with a tea tray, set it on the table between them. When Constance failed to open her eyes, Analee looked at Alice in silent questioning. Alice shook her head.
“I think the girls are waiting for cookies for a tea party.” That was all she could say.
Analee nodded and left the room as Alice poured a cup of tea. She studied Constance’s unresponsive demeanor. After setting the cup quietly on the table, Alice shifted in her chair and leaned toward Constance.
“Do you miss him?” she asked.
Without moving, Constance said, “No.” Then sat up in her chair and held out her hand for the cup of tea. “No, not in the least.” Alice felt Constance’s direct gaze. “Do you, Alice? Miss your husband?”
Alice was unprepared for such a question. She remained silent for a moment. Then, “No,” she said. “Not in the least.”
Constance dropped a cube of sugar into her tea, stirred it, then sat back and took a sip. “Are you looking for him still?”
Again, Alice was taken by surprise. She looked away, then answered candidly. “I sometimes see someone from a distance who I think might be Howard.” She also sat back. “It never is, of course. But it gives me a jolt. Then I wonder if I saw him, happened to bump into him on the street, what would I do? What would I say? I’ve no idea.”
“And you’ve no idea what happened to him, Alice? None. The police . . . ?”
“The police did nothing much. One officer was kind and seemed concerned. The others were blatantly convinced he had abandoned me.”
“They didn’t search at all?”
“I don’t know, really. Perhaps at a minimum. Only one seemed to offer any help or consolation. Nothing led to anything.”
“So, you decided to come south?”
How much would she be willing to divulge? She hardly knew this woman, yet here she was, living under the same roof, cared for and respected, as if she belonged. Yet shortly she would be gone. She would be back at the orphanage, and then what? She felt hopeless to anticipate what future she might have with her newborn child. She envisioned, with a clutch of fear, the very real possibility of poverty, of squalor, the fetid odors of the tenements. What would it be to confide in this kind woman? She’d never confided in anyone, unhappily, not even in her mother. Her mother’s love, her closeness was Alice’s treasure. It was what had held her in life. So she had held her hurts with her brothers, her distant father, deep within her. Her mother had loved them, too. Of that the evidence was clear. If Alice had felt shunned, unimportant in the family, she had kept it to herself. She had stitched it into every piercing of the needle as she sat with her mother, quilting scraps of her outgrown clothes, working in daises and ivy with the power of colored thread.
“Not right away. I thought he might come back. I found work doing alterations.”
“What was his occupation?”
“He works . . . worked . . . I don’t know . . . in the cotton brokerage. Travels a great deal back and forth to Memphis.” Alice went quiet.
“Did the police inquire at his office? Surely, they would. I can’t imagine . . .”
“I’ve no idea, Constance. They never said.” Alice paused. “However, I did.”
Constance’s cup clattered as she set it down. “You? Alone? You went to his office? And what did you find? Surely, he was working, or else his office would have been frantic to find him. Somebody had to pay attention. What did they say?”
Alice took a deep breath, let it out. “They had no idea who Howard Butterworth was. As far as they knew, he didn’t exist. Never had.”
Alice’s fingernails bit into her palm as she clenched her left hand. She did not divert her eyes from Constance’s face, watched the information refuse to register, then break in with all its incredulity. Constance leaned forward, no sound coming from her open mouth. Alice watched her sit back, close her lips, blink. From upstairs the sound of children’s laughter broke the silence. No one spoke.
Constance rose and paced about the room, then stopped, as if to speak, shaking her head. “I thought I knew what some men could do, what they are capable of. Alice, I can’t imagine.”
Alice waited, her mind lost in her wanderings around the Chicago Board of Trade, the confusion of seeking directions, the clanking of that elevator, the slight grind of the hinges on the door to the cotton exchange, the dry feeling of her tongue as she asked that efficient woman if she might see Howard Butterworth. Howard, who did not exist.
“Would you want him back, Alice?”
The question brought Alice back into the room. For a second, she sat remembering where she was and why. Would she want him? Whoever that man was had failed her from the day she married him.
“No.” There it was. From her own lips.
“But he is the father of your child. He may not be Howard Butterworth, but he is someone. He should be accountable. To this child. To you.”
Alice had struggled with just such a conviction. And she had released it.
“I will make a life for us, Constance. I have the skills to do that.”
“Your skills do not set him free of his responsibility. You have searched for him?”
“Yes. In Chicago, at the board of trade.” Alice felt the finality, the shock and hopelessness, the disbelief with which she had closed the heavy glass door to the cotton exchange behind her; felt the disorientation with which she had made her way to the elevators, an empty space beyond recall until she sank into the chair by the window after she locked the door of the flat behind her, the flat where she had lived with an unknown man. “I also searched in Memphis. His travels took him back and forth along that route.”
Alice felt the bulge of her pregnancy as her hands tightened over her abdomen, over the hardness of the corset she loosened more day by day.
“And nothing?”
“Nothing at all. He said his mother lived there, but it wasn’t true. He was buying a skirt for his mother in Memphis when I met him, but he never took me there. When I arrived, I discovered the vague address he had given me was on a street of saloons and gambling establishments. So I got back on the train and came to New Orleans.”
“He didn’t come here to New Orleans?”
“Not that I ever knew. Not that he ever said. Only Memphis and Chicago.”
“That seems odd. New Orleans is the very hub of the cotton trade. Why wouldn’t he have come here?”
Indeed, why wouldn’t he? “He didn’t talk much about his work. Actually, he didn’t talk much about anything. But no, only the Memphis-Chicago connection.”
“If he was hiding his identity, why wouldn’t he also hide where else he might be? New Orleans is crucial to the cotton industry. It’s at the very center of things. And New York. I know New York is vying also. Have you considered New York?”
Alice shook her head. No, he had ridden the train to Memphis. Of that one thing she had no doubt. He had mentioned it too often. Complained about the train schedule, the Memphis station, the heat, the mosquitoes. Never had he mentioned New York.
“Why, he could be right here. Right now. It’s possible, Alice. Out there on the wharves. Right now, as we are talking! Have you considered that? Or at the cotton exchange downtown!” Constance’s excitement was clearly rising. “Yes, at the cotton exchange. Why not?”
Alice could not follow Constance’s rising excitement. Unclear what she would do if she should find the man who was not Howard, Alice sat quite still, waiting for Constance to return to this room. To reality. Was this energy somehow more about her own widowhood than about Alice’s abandonment? Alice leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Yes, yes! The cotton exchange. Oh, my, it is a magnificent building!”
The image of the Chicago Board of Trade flashed through Alice’s mind, all these magnificent buildings, all erected to honor the enterprises of men. With well-dressed women on their arms at their social engagements, events where women’s importance depended on finery and a man offering an elbow or pulling out a chair at the dinner table, all the rituals of etiquette that elevated women who belonged beside those men—or to them. Alice opened her eyes, gazed up at the ceiling, that high ceiling designed to keep the heat away. But the heat of the moment was entrapping her.
“Do you have a photo, Alice?”
How did Constance keep hitting her with the unexpected?
“Yes,” she said, her voice faint. Why was she reluctant? Because Constance had not one photo of her dead husband anywhere? An unfaded rectangle on the drawing room wallpaper was the only evidence Alice had noticed of where such a photo might have been. Was its absence grief? She pondered Benton’s invisibility in the house. She had imagined it to be grief.
“What sort of photo?”
“A wedding photo.” Alice felt a slice of apprehension. She had answered the question with as clear a description as she could muster. Why on earth had she kept that photo? Why had it not gone into the trash when she moved? “We eloped,” she said. “Went to a justice of the peace. No wedding. And now, the truth of it, no marriage.”
“And the photo?”
“Some poor-quality print from a fellow on the street trying to eke out a living from photos of marriage-mill couples.”
There. She had told the truth. To a woman she hardly knew, but with whom she felt such kinship Alice could begin to imagine what her life might have been had she had a sister along with those overly valued brothers.
“Well,” Alice said, rising. “I have pearls to sew.” She left the room, went up the stairs to her work, each step taking her a bit closer to the day she would need to leave this place of respite.
* * *
As she twisted the fine cording, her fingertips satisfied with its smooth stitching, Alice snugged it beneath the beaded bridge, transformed now into a torch, a symbolic way across impossibility and a light for the way. She dropped the sewing into her lap and stared out the window, comforted by the presence of leaves and the absence of concrete. What if Constance were right? What if Howard had concealed more than his identity? Alice was relatively certain he had not concealed his line of work. He knew too much about the cotton business and had never indicated a hint of expertise in anything else. His travel schedule seemed a verification of that. How many other lines of work had that sort of schedule? Of course, Constance had seemed to suggest something similar in Benton’s line of work, so perhaps Howard might have been engaged in something different. She dismissed that almost without hesitation. However, the information that New Orleans was a major center of the cotton trade, coupled with the fact that it was just a few hours more on the train, did strike her as at least interesting. Intriguing, in fact.
Alice picked up her handwork again. Perhaps she would inquire. She had a few months yet to stabilize her life. In truth, she would as soon never see Howard’s face again or hear his voice, but he made a fair living. Of that much she was certain. Wherever he might be, he was the father of this child she carried. If she could find him, he could be made financially accountable.