CHAPTER 2
Raindrops skittered from the ribs of Margot’s umbrella as she hurried through the squall toward her streetcar stop. Several people nodded to her, and two said, “Good evening, Doctor.” She smiled and responded, cheered by their acceptance.
She had been uncomfortable in this neighborhood at first. The residents had been startled, even suspicious, at the sight of a tall white woman walking along East Madison. They whispered to one another as she passed, and some stared openly in ways that made her neck burn. There had been no respectful greetings in those early weeks.
One evening, just as darkness was closing in, a lanky young man in coveralls and a porkpie work hat had stepped right up to her and said, “Slummin’, are ya?”
Margot had tried to walk on, but he stood in her way, leaning insultingly close, treating her to a sour gust of bootleg whisky and cheap tobacco. His eyes were red, and his dark face distorted with drunken resentment. He reached a grimy hand toward her medical bag. “Whatcha got there, missy?”
Margot instinctively pulled the bag away, out of his reach. Her hospital experience had rendered her reckless with her own safety, but in that bag—a gift from her father to replace the one lost in the fire—was a necessary supply of drugs. She carried morphine and laudanum, atropine and adrenaline chloride, none of which were safe in the wrong hands. There was no alcohol, but she knew that for some, any drug would do. She tried to sidestep the young man. He laughed and mimicked her steps, reaching around her toward the handle of her bag.
It could have been a bad moment. It would have validated everyone’s worries about Margot’s trips on the Madison streetcar. Blake, in particular, once he was able to speak, worried over her visits. Her father, Hattie, even Sarah Church had tried to dissuade her from coming so often, and so late in the day.
But that night, an elderly woman in a shapeless housedress and an assortment of shawls resolved the situation by bursting from a nearby house with an attention-arresting bang of her front door. She stood on the stoop, hands on her skinny hips, and called, “William Lee Jackson, you get on in this house right this very minute!”
The hapless William started as if someone had struck him. His shoulders slumped, and despite his adult height, he seemed to shrink to little-boy size. He dropped his head and backed away from Margot. As he turned and started up the cracked cement walk of the house, the old woman glared at him as if daring him to disobey. She was half his size, but that seemed to make no difference. Under her gaze, he slunk into the house without a word. The woman followed, but not without casting Margot a hard glance. She didn’t scold her, but that glance told Margot she was in a place where she didn’t belong.
That had been months ago. Now that Blake had been in the East Jefferson Convalescent Home for more than a year, her regular visits had made her a familiar sight. Sarah had been a great help, informing the families who lived around the Convalescent Home that one of its residents had a white doctor. A young lady doctor.
As the word spread, it became common for Margot to find someone waiting on the steps of the Convalescent Home after one of her visits. Occasionally, one of the workingmen of the neighborhood had an injury or an ailment, and no time during the day to visit the office of one of the Negro physicians. Often it was a worried mother with a baby on her hip or a gaggle of toddlers clinging to her skirt. Margot followed these people to their homes, single-story houses built like little boxes, divided into three or four sparsely furnished rooms by the thinnest of partitions. In these modest places she treated earaches, burns, sprains, fevers. Once she attended a case of food poisoning that kept her at a bedside all night, administering saline and a mixture of bismuth carbonate and salicylate until she was certain her patient, who was the sole support of an alarmingly large family, was going to recover.
The families rarely had any money. They paid Margot with what they had, and without apology. She had carried away jars of homemade jelly, loaves of freshly baked bread, once a vast blackberry pie that Hattie very nearly refused to admit to her kitchen, but which proved so delicious Margot had to beg Sarah to go back to its baker for the recipe.
Margot was aware now, as she strode through the rain, of protective eyes on her. Curtains were drawn over lighted windows, but they twitched occasionally as the women inside watched her pass. Men smoking on their cramped porches nodded to her, and one or two stood up politely. William Lee Jackson, that unhappy young man who couldn’t find work and who occasionally consoled himself with a jug of two-dollar whisky, materialized out of the dusk, touching his dilapidated hat brim and grinning at her. His teeth were very white in the darkness, and on this evening Margot detected no acrid smell of whisky.
“My Granny Jackson sent me,” he said. “She says she won’t give me no dinner if I don’t see you to the streetcar.”
Margot said gravely, “Please thank your grandmother for me. I hope your dinner is excellent.”
They walked side by side the remaining two blocks. William didn’t speak again, but he stood beside her as she waited in the darkness. The rain fell hard enough to splash from the sidewalk and wet her ankles. Her umbrella dripped furiously, and she began to shiver despite her woolen coat with its warm fox collar. She was relieved when the streetcar came clicking up East Madison from the lake.
She thanked William again, and swung up into the car’s lighted interior. She dropped her nickel into the fare box and sat down in the first available seat. The bench seat was hard, but the car was blessedly warm, and she shivered a little with relief. She shook the rain off her umbrella as she rode up the hill and out of the Negro district. She had to change cars at Broadway, dashing through the rain.
In the second streetcar, she propped her umbrella against her knee and gazed out the window. The houses seemed to grow, bit by bit, as the car clicked its way northward. Neat picket fences appeared, occasionally flanked by garages. The gardens expanded and the rooflines rose. This alteration of the landscape from one neighborhood to another was a phenomenon she hadn’t really noticed before this year, when she had begun taking the streetcar everywhere.
She thought wistfully of the days when Blake, rain or shine, light or dark, would wait for her outside her clinic or in front of the hospital. She loved riding in the polished Essex with its sparkling windows and cozy plush seats. Blake was inevitably attired in his driving coat, cap, and gloves. There had been something restful about the ritual, something comforting about being welcomed into the automobile’s warm interior, relinquishing her responsibilities, relaxing into Blake’s hands.
She chided herself for her nostalgia as she climbed down from the Broadway streetcar and started up the steep slope of Aloha Street. Those days were never going to return, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that Blake was healing. There had been a very real possibility, after the heart attack and its subsequent complications, that he might never wake again. She still had questions about the event, about the accident his heart attack supposedly precipitated, but he refused to speak of it. He said it made no difference now, that there was no point in dwelling on it, and perhaps he was right. Her younger brother, Preston, her tormentor since an early age, was gone. She was safe from him, and though the family was bruised and nearly broken, it would recover. Except, perhaps, for Edith.
Margot’s stockings were soaked by the time she reached home. She hurried to her apartment above the garage, stashing her umbrella at the bottom of the stairs before dashing up to get out of her wet things and change into a suitable frock for dinner. She caught sight of the blue celluloid clock on the bedside table, the one she and her brothers had given Blake for Christmas long ago. She was late again.
She shrugged out of the shirtwaist and skirt she had worn all day and into a wool crepe sheath with a dropped waist and shawl collar. As she pulled on a fresh pair of stockings and fastened them, she remembered that the last time she had worn this sheath had been a dinner date with Frank. A sudden rush of longing for him made her press one hand to her heart.
She blew out a breath and dropped her hand. There was no time to indulge her weakness. She had to gather herself to face the gantlet of dinner, her mother’s wan face, her father’s struggles to behave as if nothing were amiss. Her older brother’s genial bewilderment didn’t help. Her sister-in-law, at least, though her efforts were sometimes awkward, was doing her best to step into her mother-in-law’s place and keep the house running smoothly. Without Blake, that wasn’t easy.
All Margot could do was be present for dinner as often as she was able. She washed her hands, straightened her frock, and went down the stairs to take up her still-wet umbrella and cross the back lawn into Benedict Hall.
Allison tossed her hat onto the green frieze plush of the Pullman drawing room seat. “It’s pouring out there,” she said. “We’ll be a sodden mess in five minutes!”
“I have your umbrella.” Ruby spoke plaintively, a bit defensively, as if responsibility for the weather in Seattle fell squarely on her own habitually hunched shoulders. “And we won’t be walking that far. The Benedicts are supposed to send a car . . .” She broke off in the face of Allison’s irritated glance.
Allison knew she wasn’t being fair, but she was in a ghastly mood. She had been imprisoned in this compartment with Ruby for the entire journey from San Francisco, and she was nearly rigid with boredom.
It was that silliness on Berengaria, when she hadn’t done a single thing wrong! Well, hardly anything, at least nothing that mattered. She protested over and over that nothing had happened, really, nothing to be upset about, but her mother had raged on and on about her ruined prospects, her compromised reputation, carrying on until she made herself ill. Ruby and Jane, between them, hadn’t been able to calm her. She had shut herself up in the stateroom for the better part of the crossing.
Allison had been humiliated. Adelaide emerged to sit at the captain’s table the next evening, but Allison had to stay in their suite. She was allowed to walk on the deck only in the company of the two maids, and forbidden to speak to anyone. Adelaide ordered her meals brought to their rooms, where the steward laid a table nearly as elaborate as the ones in the Dining Saloon, and Adelaide sat with her, glaring, ordering her to eat something.
Allison refused to touch anything but water and an occasional cup of tea. Though Adelaide raged at her over this, as well, Allison would not relent. It was the only weapon she had, and it was all the more powerful because it was one her mother had given her. She hoped Adelaide grasped the irony of that.
The moment they reached home, after the interminable train journey from New York, her mother closeted herself with Papa. Allison and Ruby, unpacking upstairs, could hear Adelaide’s shrill complaints and Henry’s loud, terse answers, their voices reverberating through the tall, narrow house. The next day a doctor showed up, ordered by Henry, admitted by Ruby, and ushered into the parlor where Allison and Adelaide waited in tense and antagonistic silence.
Dr. Kinney seemed ancient to Allison. He had white hair growing out of his ears, and his foul breath made Allison wrinkle her nose when he leaned close to look in her eyes and her mouth. He pinched the flesh under her arm and pressed on her belly with blunt, icy fingers. He didn’t speak to her at all. He directed all his questions to her parents, as if Allison were an infant, unable to answer for herself. Or a mental defective, not to be trusted.
Dr. Kinney listened gravely to Adelaide’s account of Allison’s depraved behavior aboard Berengaria. When Allison tried to interrupt, to tell her own version, he held up a hand to silence her. Papa joined in, growling at her to be quiet. Adelaide, with the air of a warrior winning a battle, tossed her head in triumph.
In the end, Dr. Kinney handed down his diagnosis in the manner of a great judge sharing his learned wisdom. Allison, he declared, was a hysteric. He used some sort of complicated name for her condition, repeating it several times, a little louder in each instance, as if that made it more convincing. Allison suspected he would charge Papa three times over for using Latin no one could understand.
Allison, deflated and defeated, burst into tears. She sobbed, over and over, that it was not she who had had hysterics but her mother. Her protests were worse than useless. For Dr. Kinney, her uncontrolled weeping was merely the confirmation of his diagnosis. He took a slip of paper from a pad, wrote something on it with a shaky blue-veined hand, and gave it to Papa. Henry read it, then made a great show of folding it and placing it into his breast pocket.
Later that day, Adelaide disappeared into her room with her maid in attendance while Papa called Allison into his study. He made Allison sit on a stool beside his heavy leather armchair while he took a long time fussing with his pipe, tamping the tobacco, striking a long match, puffing on the stem with his thick lips. When the pipe was drawing well, he pulled Dr. Kinney’s paper out of his pocket and brandished it between two fingers.
“You know what this is, Allison?”
She glanced up at it, then dropped her gaze to her folded hands. “No, Papa.”
“This,” Henry pronounced, in a tone of gravitas, “is the name of a sanitorium. Bella Vista Rest Home in Sacramento. It’s a place for females of fragile mental health. This is where Dr. Kinney has suggested I send you to deal with your hysteria.”
Allison gripped her hands together so hard her fingers ached. “I’m not hysterical, Papa. You know I’m not.”
“You’re out of control, Allison.”
“I am not!” She released her hands and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “It’s not true!”
“Your behavior on board ship—”
“Papa!” Allison jumped up, still hugging herself, and stared down at her father. “It was nothing! We were just having fun—do you even remember what it’s like to have fun? ”
“Your mother says—”
“Mother! Mother hates me!”
Henry glared at her, but she saw the flicker of his eyelids, the slight compression of his lips. He knows, she thought, and a wave of sadness swept over her. She hugged herself tighter, frightened by the realization. He knows. But he doesn’t care.
That meant she was alone. She must have always been alone.
Her knees felt suddenly weak. She sank down again onto the childish stool and stared helplessly up at her father. He said, “You’re not a child anymore, Allison.”
“No,” she said through a tight throat. “I’m not.”
He pulled down the corners of his mouth and stroked his chin as if contemplating the gravest of thoughts. “You will learn one day,” he said heavily, “how difficult it is to be a parent. It is a terrible responsibility.”
“What do you want from me, Papa?”
“I want what all fathers of our class want.”
“Our class? ” she repeated. “I’m not sure we really fit into our class.”
She saw fresh anger spark in his eyes, and she knew she had made another mistake. It was one of the barbs Adelaide had been tossing for years, because she knew it was the one that hurt the most.
“Listen to me, my girl,” Papa said stiffly. “I’ve come up in the world. I take pride in that, and you should be damned glad I’ve done it.” He pushed himself out of his chair and shoved the slip of paper back into his pocket. “Your mother and I want the best for you.”
“The best for me? You mean, marriage.”
“Naturally. That’s the proper course for a young woman of means.”
“What if it’s not the course I want to follow?”
He shook his head. “Your parents know what’s best for you.”
Allison jumped up once more, then had to seize the edge of Papa’s desk to fight off the sudden dizziness that assailed her. She blinked hard, hoping he hadn’t noticed. Breathlessly, urgently, she said, “Papa, listen to me. You want to be a modern man, I know you do. Women can do other things, have careers.”
“I disapprove of that,” he said ponderously. “You’ll understand when you have your own home, your own children.”
“I’m too young,” she said.
“No younger than your mother was.”
Allison gazed at his heavy features, his stubborn mouth, and wondered if there was anything at all she could say that would move him. “Do you think being married so young made Mother happy?” she asked, half under her breath. No one in their home could think Adelaide was happy.
“What else was she going to do?”
Miserably, in a barely audible voice, she said, “A hundred things, Papa. A thousand!”
“She knew her place. And we raised you to know yours.”
“But, Papa, I want to study, to work. I’m smart,” she said, her voice breaking on the word.
“What difference does that make? It’s my job to see that you’re settled. This—this incident—it threatens all your chances. What good family is going to accept you if this news gets out?”
“Papa, I told you. I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s not what Adelaide says. She says all it takes is for one person to get word of your escapade, and—”
“Get word? Why should anyone get word?” Her voice rose, sounding thin and childish. “No one from San Francisco was on board, Papa. No one would know anything if Mother would just—would just—shut up about it!” Her father’s face darkened at the insult, and Allison clapped both her hands over her mouth to stifle a sob.
It was a circular argument, in any case. Allison was, in fact, a smart girl, smart enough to know she had lost this battle. In the ongoing war with her mother, the advantage rested with Adelaide. She had maneuvered Allison into a position of weakness, and Allison, foolishly, had allowed her to do it.
“I have written to our family in Seattle,” her father said gravely, doing his best to affect an air of the benevolent paterfamilias. “You were there in the fall of last year, I believe, so you’ve met them.”
“Papa—”
“Don’t interrupt. Your cousin Margot—the doctor, you remember—telephoned this morning. Your uncle Dickson has generously invited you to stay the winter with them.”
“Papa!” Allison cried. “No! I want to go to college.”
“No point in sending girls to college,” he said. “Waste of time—and money.”
“But you said, after my Grand Tour—you said we could talk about it!”
“You should have thought of that,” he declaimed, with a pomposity that made her want to scream, “before you stripped naked to jump into a swimming pool with a young man you barely knew!”
“I wasn’t naked! ” she cried. “Ask Mother! Make her tell you the truth, Papa! I was not naked! ”
“If Adelaide says you were, of course I accept your mother’s version of events.”
It was bitterly, extravagantly unfair. More protests sprang to Allison’s lips, but she let them die unspoken. She almost wished she had done the thing she was accused of. It might have been her last chance at any excitement.
He pulled out the slip of paper again and waved it at her. “It’s your choice, Allison. The sanitorium or Seattle.”
Which was, of course, no choice at all.
On the platform of the San Francisco train station, Mother had dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, pretending sorrow at the parting. Papa had gripped Allison’s arm with his short fingers and growled that she was not to set foot out of the drawing room he had reserved for her and Ruby. She was forbidden to go to the dining car. She was under no circumstances to step out to the lounge. The Pullman porter, under his explicit orders, would bring all their meals in.
“And for God’s sake, Allison,” were his final words, “eat something. You look like a starving sparrow!”
At this, Allison turned her head to meet her mother’s gaze. Adelaide sniffed her imaginary tears, and Allison, with a toss of her head, claimed this one small victory for herself.
During the whole slow trip north, the porter did just what Papa had said. He showed up often, bringing tea, offering newspapers, carrying fresh towels or pitchers of water. Allison had no doubt Papa had paid him well to spy on her. She felt certain Ruby was making a little extra for the purpose, too. Between them, they had trapped her. She wondered if Cousin Margot was also on Papa’s payroll and had accepted her at Benedict Hall as her prisoner.
Seattle, for pity’s sake! Rain and dirt streets and fishermen. No doubt lumberjacks overran the town, swearing and spitting.
Allison sagged back on the sofa, arms folded, fingertips tapping. “Can a person die of boredom, Ruby?”
Ruby looked up from an apron she was stitching together with tiny, precise stabs of her needle. She was a wizard with a sewing needle and really good with a flatiron. She had an amazingly unsubtle mind, though, and she never laughed at any of Allison’s jests. “No, Miss Allison,” she said now, placidly. “I don’t think so. But then I’m never bored.”
“Oh, you have to be! Following me around all the time, or Mother? It must be excruciating.”
“Not in the least. This is a very good position, and I’m happy to have it.”
Under normal circumstances, Allison would have let that drop as a subject that would only intensify her ennui, but now—there was literally nothing to do but stare at the rain-washed view of trees and water and mountains, all blurred to an anonymous gray by the steady downpour. “You must have hoped for something more,” she prodded the maid. “Some excitement! Didn’t you ever want to be a film star, or a vaudeville dancer, or—I don’t know, something interesting?”
Ruby gave a prim little tut before she bit her thread neatly in two. “Oh, no,” she said. “I always knew I’d be in service. Mama trained me for it, starting when I was just young.”
Allison tilted her head, eyeing Ruby’s sallow face. “How young?”
A bit of color tinged Ruby’s cheeks at the unaccustomed attention. “I was ten,” she said. “Older than some, you know.”
“Ten! How old do other girls start—what do you call it, training?”
“Oh,” Ruby said with a little shrug, lifting the apron and scanning the hem for stitches out of place. “Some start when they’re just four or five. They don’t go to school at all. I,” she said, with simple pride, “was in school until the fourth grade.”
“Oh,” was all Allison could say. “That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
“It was fair enough,” Ruby said. She spoke in her usual monotone, as if the subject weren’t of much interest. “Mama wanted me to know how to read, so I could follow recipes and read patterns.”
“Where did you go to school, Ruby?”
“In the city. But the earthquake, you know. The school fell down.”
“Oh!” Allison said again. “I was only four. I don’t really remember.”
Ruby seemed no more interested in this than she was in her own history. She shrugged. “After the school fell down, there didn’t seem to be much point. We had to go to Oakland, because our house fell down, too. And burned,” she added indifferently.
“So, Ruby,” Allison pressed, her boredom eased by this bit of information, “was your mama a lady’s maid, too?”
“Oh, no,” Ruby said. She folded the apron neatly, smoothing the sash and tucking it under the bodice. “Mama’s a laundress.”
“Was anyone hurt in the ’quake? Your family?”
“My father disappeared, but we never knew if he got killed or just ran off.”
“That’s fascinating! Tell me about it.”
But Ruby seemed to have exhausted her supply of entertainment. She got up to pack the apron into her valise, and though Allison tried to draw her out again, she had no success. After a few moments, she dropped her head on the seat back again and stared disconsolately at the rain-blurred view as the train chugged northward.
Every click and clatter of the wheels seemed to spell out her sentence. Winter in Seattle. Months of rain. The dreary company of conventional relatives, Aunt Edith, Uncle Dickson, Cousin Dick and his wife, Cousin Pres—oh, no. Preston was dead. There had been a fire in Cousin Margot’s clinic. Somehow Cousin Preston got caught in it. Cousin Margot had lost everything, Papa said, and Uncle Dickson was helping her rebuild. Papa thought that was a waste of money, because how was a woman physician going to succeed in a private clinic in a poor neighborhood?
Allison’s lips pinched at the thought of Cousin Margot. Papa wouldn’t have thought of packing his daughter off to Seattle if Cousin Margot hadn’t suggested it. Allison remembered her from her first debutante party, tall and remote in a beaded silk dress and headband. Her young man had been interesting, the one-armed officer in his dress uniform, with vivid blue eyes and a touch of silver in his black hair. And he’d gotten into an actual fistfight with Preston! That had been marvelous, just like a film.
She hadn’t been allowed to watch it, of course. The moment it started, her mother had dragged her into the house and up the stairs, as if watching two men fight would soil her forever. She kept the curtains drawn and wouldn’t let Allison come downstairs until Uncle Dickson came up to tell them the excitement was over. Allison had been forced to miss the end of the drama, and the rest of the event was just like all the other deb parties, boring, predictable, stifling in their sameness.
Her adventure on Berengaria had been the only real diversion since the fistfight. She remembered it with longing.
She had hurried out of the First Class Lounge and slipped down the staircase amidships. It was the first time since leaving Southampton she had been alone, and though she knew her mother would be angry, Allison felt alive, bubbling with champagne and reckless with freedom. She soon found herself standing in the doorway of the Second Class Lounge, where she gripped the doorjamb to keep from losing her balance as the ship rocked.
The molded ceiling here was low, trapping the haze of cigar smoke emanating from the smoking room next door. A jazz band was playing a sloppy but energetic version of “The Sheik of Araby.” Men and women, some not much older than she was, were dancing, many more of them than in the First Class Lounge.
They wore all varieties of evening dress, from smoking jackets and loose ties for the men to georgette dresses for the ladies, some of which reached no lower than midcalf. Beads and feathers, all of which Adelaide deplored, flew as the dancers spun around the parquet floor. They made Allison’s embroidered gauze dress, which trailed to the floor at the back and had been purchased just weeks ago in Paris, seem staid. The vendeuse had sworn it was going to be all the rage in the coming year, but now it seemed already out of date. Allison dropped her wrap and tugged at the neckline of the gown to make it dip a little lower. She couldn’t do much about the length, but she strove for a sophisticated pose in the doorway, hips thrust forward in the S-silhouette the Vogue models used. She tried not to look lost as she glanced around for someplace to sit.
Before she found it, a man strutted up to her, grinning. “Gosh, a new face!” he said, in an accent she couldn’t quite place. He held out his ungloved hand in invitation. “Where’ve you been all this time, fair lady?”
Before she could answer, the ship pitched wildly. Allison found herself gripping the strange man’s hand for balance. The people on the dance floor cried out and seized one another. Even the band faltered for a moment.
As Berengaria righted herself, the man holding Allison’s hand laughed down at her. He was young, she saw, redheaded, and liberally freckled. He exclaimed, “Aren’t you scared?”
“No,” she said. She tried to free her hand, but he refused to give it up.
“Then dance with me, strange maiden!” he demanded. “I swore I would dance with every beautiful girl on this ship, but I’ve missed you somehow!” Still holding her hand, the sweat on his palm visibly staining her white gloves, he bowed, more deeply this time. “Tommy Fellowes, at your service. Newly freed from Exeter College, Oxford University, and delighted to make your acquaintance.”
Tommy Fellowes’s hands were bare, but he was otherwise properly attired in a tuxedo with a white vest and tie. He sported a wonderful set of dimples in his freckled cheeks, and Allison couldn’t help laughing with him. She was quite sure Adelaide would have despised him, and though Tommy Fellowes couldn’t know it, that was the highest recommendation he could receive.
Using her free hand, Allison unwound his fingers from hers and smoothed her sweat-stained glove. “Allison Benedict,” she said, dropping a mock curtsy. Then, laughing, “Newly freed from the First Class Lounge.”
“Golly!” her new acquaintance cried. He clapped his hand to his starched breast. “Too posh! I’ll bet they’re all wearing tails up there!”
“Of course they are. And gloves, too.”
He was utterly unabashed by this. “Got too hot!” he declared. “But I promise, I wore them at dinner.” He pulled a pair out of his pocket and waved them at her before jamming them back in and seizing her hand again. “Come on, old thing,” he cried. “Let’s cut a rug!”
A quartet of young dancers, still struggling for balance on the dance floor, called Tommy’s name, beckoning to him. He tugged Allison toward them. The jazz band had found its beat again, and the music struck up more loudly than before. It was all irresistible.
Allison, her silk wrap trailing behind her, followed Tommy, and in moments was trying to dance the Black Bottom in her too-long skirt. Berengaria rolled from time to time, and she found herself holding on to whoever was nearest, sometimes Tommy, sometimes one of the other men, once even one of the girls, a plump, red-cheeked brunette wearing a short beaded dress. When one song ended, the band went straight on to another. Allison, caught up in the moment, stripped her own gloves off and tossed them on one of the upholstered chairs, along with her silk scarf. When the musicians finally took a break, the dancers collapsed into chairs, calling for drinks and grinning at one another. Allison was perspiring, out of breath, and happier than she had been in weeks. In months.
And, she thought now, disconsolately staring out at the drab landscape beyond the train’s windows, if she had stopped then, returned to the suite and to her mother, she would probably be safely at home in San Francisco. She might even be choosing her clothes, packing up her tennis racket, and buying books for her frosh year at Mills. She most certainly wouldn’t be on this train, imprisoned by a turncoat maid and a warden in the form of a Pullman porter, chugging her way toward the most boring winter ever.
Yes, it was her own fault. She should have left brash Tommy Fellowes and the rest of his gay group in Second Class and trudged back up the stairs to the stiff confines of First. Where she belonged. Where, as her papa reminded her endlessly, her future was. Where, her mother would say, she would associate with people of her own class.
She couldn’t make them understand, Papa and Mother and all the other parents who meant to mold their children into younger versions of themselves, that the world was changing. The lines were blurring, not only between social classes but between men and women. Women could vote! Women could serve in Congress! She had been born in the twentieth century, a new world of opportunities! Why, look at Cousin Margot!
But that was a thought she didn’t want to pursue. She was still nursing her resentment of Cousin Margot for suggesting this whole stupid scheme.
In some ways, she envied Ruby. There were many advantages Ruby didn’t have, but Ruby, at least, could change jobs if she wanted to, live where she wanted to, choose her own life’s path. She was limited only by her ability.
Of course, Allison thought, casting her maid a guilty glance, Ruby’s abilities were unremarkable. She knew that.
But what was she supposed to do in Seattle? Was she supposed to play the role of companion, solace to her poor bereaved aunt Edith? Not that she didn’t care! It must be awful to lose a son, such a handsome and charming one, especially after having him come home safe from the Great War. Still, she didn’t want to be trapped in a sprawling big house with a woman who by all accounts barely set foot outside her bedroom. The winter stretched ahead of Allison, dull and dim and relentlessly wet.
Maybe she should have chosen the Bella Vista Rest Home!
She pulled the curtains shut with a snap that made Ruby jump. Allison threw her head back against the sofa, an action that made her head spin. She closed her eyes, waiting for the dizziness to fade. There was nothing to look at in any case. She was already tired of the monotonous view, rain and clouds and tossing gray water, and they hadn’t even reached Seattle.
Ruby was wrong. A person could easily expire from boredom.