Harry had arrived at the house while Reisden and Gilbert were still looking at the blank white front room where William Knight had died.
“Who broke the window?” he asked, looking at the gloomy house. And, after he had been upstairs and come down again, “Where’s the bathroom?”
There was none. No inside W.C., though Gilbert said, stricken, that he believed there was one behind the barn. No bathtub. No shower. No hot water. No running water at all except through the pump in the kitchen. Reisden looked at Gilbert. Gilbert looked at Reisden.
“I really think we should stay with Charlie,” Gilbert said with extraordinary firmness, “and have the plumbers in.”
Within the next day or so Gilbert had decided how he was going to deal with his father’s house. The plumbers came in, and the carpenters, and the painters. Two male decorators wandered through the rooms muttering darkly to each other and left samples of paper and paint. Gilbert walked through the house with a sturdy wooden box, took down each white china motto, wrapped it in newspaper, and stowed it in the box, murmuring with each one, “Forgive me, Lord.” Workmen carried heavy furniture, drapes, and some very large pictures out of the house.
“We will make it quite modem,” Gilbert said nervously.
Charlie Adair offered them two of what had been the Federal Hotel’s suites; amusingly, at the opposite end of the building from Perdita Halley’s room. Charlie Adair took his duties as chaperon very seriously; Harry and Perdita could not go out for a walk without Charlie’s knowing where.
Perdita’s piano was in the small parlor on the first floor of the Clinic. Reisden, wakeful in the early mornings, heard her practicing softly downstairs, well before anyone else was awake. Often at other times of the day he heard her practice: while Harry was out working on his sailboat, playing golf at the small links behind the Lakeside Hotel, or playing baseball with a scratch team. Harry dealt with tension by being athletic. Perdita by practicing early in the morning? No, she said when Reisden casually asked her, she always practiced then, she had since she was a child. Reisden wondered if Harry knew how close his sweet young girl came to working professional’s hours. For that matter, did she know it herself, or realize how well she avoided making it plain to Harry? It would not work forever. Reisden could not imagine Harry happy alone in a cold bed at five in the morning while his young wife practiced piano.
Adair added himself to their evenings of reading and talk and piano playing, speaking mostly to Gilbert. As if by mutual agreement, Reisden and he never spoke.
🙚🙚🙚
Two days after they arrived, Reisden met the mistress of the green-and-yellow house, the redoubtable Mrs. Fen.
It was at a party for donors to the Clinic. Perdita was playing the piano in the comer of the Clinic’s big reception room; Harry was telling someone, in the middle of her playing, how well his girl played. Standing in the comer of the room was a tall, handsome woman in a red hat. She had her finger to her lips, half kissing it, and her eyes on Harry.
Amused, Reisden watched the byplay. The woman looked away for a moment, as if thinking, then looked back into Harry’s eyes. Harry reddened angrily and looked away. When Harry looked back the woman was still watching him, her long frank gaze under the brim of her hat defining the situation as pointedly as a pin through a butterfly. Harry went red down into his collar and turned to face in the other direction, holding Perdita’s arm. Lay off, darlin’, Reisden thought at the woman; he’s virtuous.
She turned around as if she had heard him, and her face froze in shock. Reisden knew the reaction. He wondered which of the Knights he reminded her of. She was in her late thirties perhaps, too young to have been acquainted with any of Gilbert’s brothers.
Gilbert, perhaps?
No. Of course. Jay French. The back of Reisden’s neck chilled.
Someone introduced them. “Richard Knight?" She had a low, gravelly, intimate voice. She tried a long sexual look on him. He’d no intention of being taken for Jay French, but he held her hand a little too long, for the experiment’s sake. She blushed red.
The question was how well she had known Jay.
“We must talk over old times, Mr. Knight,” she murmured.
It was a certain offer to let him find out.
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“My dear, the scandal!”
Perdita’s aunt Violet paced up and down the parlor in the Clinic. Perdita’s cousin Efnie, Violet’s blond daughter, yawned idly on the window seat. Perdita herself sat on the piano bench, the uncomfortable object of Aunt Violet’s interest, and Charlie Adair stood at the door.
“Charlie, I blame you completely. A man cannot look after a girl.” Aunt Violet laid down the law with one gloved finger, as certain as the Women's Manual of Good Sense and Etiquette. “The only proper chaperone is an older female relative. Perdita is an engaged girl, and as such she is at a particularly delicate time in her life. Her reputation is at stake. What does it look like when she is living here, practically out of town? And her fiancé living in the same building? She must pack her bags and come to us at the Lakeside at once.”
Efnie yawned. “Mama, thank heavens you don’t spend so much time worrying about me.”
“Euphemia, I will thank you not to take the name of the Lord’s judgment seat in vain.”
“Pooh.”
Perdita had sat through many of Aunt Violet’s discussions before. “Aunt Violet, it’s only until Island Hill is repaired. Then Harry will go there, of course.”
“We’d be honored to have you here, Mrs. Pelham,” Charlie said. “It’s not as fine as the Lakeside, there’s no elevator and you’d have to share a bathroom, but it’d be no problem for us. We could find a room or two right up at the top of the house, with a fine view.”
“I blame Gilbert Knight for this. I blame Harry. Imagine considering only their creature comforts, instead of Perdita’s reputation!” Aunt Violet swooped magnificently upon another subject like an eagle upon a mouse. “Perdita, it’s not merely that you are living here, in a rackety way, on the edge of town. Or that your nearest neighbor will be your own fiancé—when he has the decency to move out of this very house—and Gilbert Knight’s supposed nephew, whom I certainly don’t believe in. And Anna Fen, the least respectable woman in town.” Aunt Violet paused dramatically. “It is this diversion that you intend to engage in this summer. Playacting. Scenes from Shakespeare. An engaged woman painting her face? Spending every afternoon in the company of a woman known to be utterly without reputation? Displaying herself on a stage? Perdita, an engaged woman should be quiet, enclosed, like a walled garden, contemplating the great responsibilities of her married life.”
“Mama!” Efnie jumped up and shrieked. “Don’t be a prune! I’m going to play in Scenes from Shakespeare. All the good boys in town will be in it. And Perdita hasn’t even got a real role, not half the one I have.”
“You are not engaged yet, my love. But Perdita, your reputation—your reputation!” Aunt Violet added, “Anna Fen had her eyes glued to Gilbert Knight’s so-called nephew yesterday. I knew her when she was young. She was nobody from nowhere, and she and Susan Crandall used to hunt men in packs.”
When Aunt Violet had gone, Perdita stayed behind a moment to talk with her uncle.
“Thank you, Uncle Charlie, you were wonderful. I didn’t want to go stay with her at the Lakeside. ”
“Me neither, you’d have to share my room.” Efnie yawned.
Charlie Adair chuckled. “Ah, she’s a good woman and she has your best interests at heart.”
Efnie giggled.
“Oh, I know, Uncle Charlie. But she worries about such strange things.” Perdita hesitated. She knew she could trust Charlie not to laugh at her. “Uncle Charlie—Efnie—I didn’t even really know what she was worrying about.”
Efnie stared. “Perdita, you’re such a muff.”
“I believe she thinks that Harry might mistake being engaged for being married,” Charlie Adair said bravely.
“What does that have to do with living in the same house?” Perdita said, still puzzled, and then understood what he meant. “Oh.”
“You’re a good girl.” Charlie patted her on the hand and left the room.
“We would never,” she said, distressed that Aunt Violet— who knew her!—would think such a thing.
“You wouldn’t,” whispered Efnie maliciously, “but Harry might.”
“Efnie! Harry and I don’t think about that,” she said. “We’re not married yet.”
“Pooh.”
But what if Harry did? Half of being blind was not having opportunities to learn. She knew quite well where babies come from; she had held the hands of women in labor in the Clinic, which certainly gave her some experience. But she didn’t know how babies were got. How were men shaped, what did they do? What would she have to do when she and Harry were married? Other girls learned by looking at animals, hearing things on the street, asking their friends at school, looking into their father’s or brothers’ books. But she had been tutored and her brothers were out West. She could write her mother. Dear Mama, Please tell me all about sex. Yours truly, Perdita. But it would take weeks to get a letter West and back.
And in the meantime, Harry and she were living in the same house, away out of town, practically together.