• 21 •

HAVING BEEN LIBERATED from the auditions, Beulah found it a relief to be out in the chill of early evening. No one else was about. From inside the mess hall came laughter and a pair of voices raised in song. They were singing decent songs now, about a sweet home far away and a mother praying for her son. Constance must’ve seen to that.

Across the field, a Red Cross demonstration was under way in one of the classroom tents. The campers inside were mostly quiet. Beulah could hear only Nurse Cartwright, who was lecturing in a loud, clear voice. “If you can’t find anything that will answer for a splint,” she was saying, “take his belt and lash his legs together, like so.”

Beulah shuddered at the thought of it. What gave nurses the courage to tend to wounded and dying men? Beulah was probably more at ease with the bodies of men than any girl at camp, but not when they were suffering. Not when they were in agony.

She’d known every kind of man during her years down on Mayo Street. At first, when she was only thirteen and looked it, men would try to have their way with her, but they would only go so far. They liked to hold her on their laps, and bounce her up and down, and rock her back and forth. They liked to put their hands on her, and to go all the way up her skirt, and to put a finger somewhere they shouldn’t. Sometimes they’d take her hand and put it down their trousers. Beulah always kept her eyes closed at those moments. That made it seem more like a game, or something she was only imagining.

She couldn’t remember exactly when it progressed beyond that, but Henry Clay wasn’t her first. He didn’t get that privilege. She couldn’t remember who did. They were all like him, though: fresh-faced, milk-fed, strong-jawed southern boys raised on fried chicken, biscuits, and sorghum syrup. They came to Mayo Street with sharp haircuts, clean shirts, and pockets full of their daddy’s money. Beulah sought them out particularly: she couldn’t stand an older man, or one who wasn’t clean.

Even though Henry Clay wasn’t the first man to take her to bed, he was her first in another way. He was her first love and, to this day, her only love. He was the only one she ever thought of when she was apart from him. He was the only one who talked to her — really talked to her, about his innermost thoughts — and the only one who seemed interested in hearing hers.

“Strange as it seems,” he said to her one night, when they were up in her room at May Stuart’s, “you and me have something in common. We don’t want to live the lives we’ve been given. I don’t want to run my daddy’s store, and you don’t want to keep house with your Meemaw.”

“That’s exactly right,” Beulah said. She had her head on his chest and she was smoking his cigarette. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Run off, I guess,” he said.

Beulah’s heart turned over when he said that. That was how she knew she loved him.

HOW, THEN, COULD Henry Clay ever marry another woman? She was so astonished to hear about his nuptials, only a year after Henry Clay Jr. was born, that she had to see it for herself.

Beulah had been off in Alexandria, at the school Meemaw chose for her, although she only lasted a month at St. Mary’s before the teachers there realized exactly what sort of girl they had in their possession and told her she wasn’t welcome. The rest of the tuition money stayed in Meemaw’s pocket, as did most of the money for the upkeep of the baby, until a home was found for him.

Meemaw never could bring herself to deposit the baby at the Catholic home as she’d sworn she would, nor did she have the wherewithal to place him in another town, far away from Henry Clay’s family. She kept him for so long that Beulah thought Meemaw wanted him for her own, and never imagined that she’d give him away.

But just before Christmas, a neighbor girl came over to say that her family was looking to adopt a baby, and pointed out that Meemaw seemed to be in possession of one that could not possibly be her own. It took very little convincing for the child to change hands. Beulah wasn’t told about any of it until months later, in the middle of summer, when cholera took the baby away. The funeral was over by the time she knew a thing about it.

Beulah returned to Richmond to lay a wreath at her baby’s grave. With that wreath she also laid down all of her regrets: her regret for surrendering the child at all, and making it so that the baby would never know its mother, and her regret for not taking seriously Meemaw’s intention to give the baby away. What made her think that an old woman could raise an infant by herself, or would want to?

She could hardly imagine what those last months must’ve been like for little Henry Clay Beattie Jr. (she called him Clay, during the short while that she had him), being passed from one family to another, with such a bewildering array of new faces to look up at through those deep blue eyes, blinking at each face like a star winking in and out. For his life to be over before it started — it was terrible to think of. What had she done by abandoning him, and to what end? School had nothing to offer her. She knew it wouldn’t. She’d lost her little boy, and gained nothing by it.

She laid that wreath down for her mother, too, although she hadn’t any idea whether her mother was alive or dead. Meemaw didn’t want to hear Jessie’s name spoken in her presence. That was another regret: Why hadn’t Beulah ever gone looking for her mother again? Couldn’t she, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, have found some kind of steady work and rented a room for the two of them? If her mother was so terribly ill, shouldn’t Beulah have provided her with a bed, at least?

It was a mournful day in the graveyard. All of Richmond seemed gray and drab. She couldn’t stand to stay in that town for another minute. She would’ve left right away, but then she heard about the wedding.

Henry Clay was to marry Louise Welford Owen, a girl from a good family, a girl who wore the approval of Henry Clay’s daddy like a garment label. Beulah remembered hearing Henry Clay talk about a girl named Louise, a girl so bland he couldn’t ever find a word to say to her. Louise and Henry’s mother could talk endlessly of old family connections, of grandmothers’ china patterns, of cousins who married well and nieces who didn’t. It bored Henry to tears, all this talk of lineage and inheritance and propriety. Henry couldn’t imagine how his own father had seen fit to marry a society girl.

“He must never have known a girl like you, Beulah,” Henry said to her one afternoon, as they lay in bed together passing a bottle of wine back and forth between them. “If he had, he would’ve known what he was missing, and that would’ve been intolerable. I have never once seen my father laugh at a single thing my mother said, and you make me laugh all the time, girlie.” He chucked her under the chin when he said it.

No wonder Beulah felt special. No wonder she harbored particular expectations as to their future.

No wonder his wedding was such a strange and stilted affair.

Half of Richmond turned out for it — the rich half, that much was plain. Beulah had never seen such finery and flowers inside a church before. The pews were overfull, and Beulah was compelled to stand in the back, which she didn’t mind at all, as she had no right to be there anyway. Instead of giving her name at the door, she said only that she was “a Beattie neighbor girl,” a phrase that somehow insinuated that she might be the daughter of a servant, and for that reason she was admitted inside as long as she didn’t take up a family pew.

Beulah wore black for a month after her baby died, which was the reason why she wore a black veil to Henry Clay’s wedding. She would’ve gone in an ordinary afternoon dress, but Meemaw had declared that to give up her mourning only a few weeks after little Henry Clay Jr. went into the ground would bring a curse upon the entire family. Beulah didn’t know about curses, but she wore her black crepe nonetheless. It was an effective disguise. Besides, she was not the only woman in black at the wedding. It had been a terrible summer for cholera and others had lost family, too, most of them small children.

From the rear of the church she could only see the hats and the backs of the necks of Henry Clay’s mother and sisters. His father must’ve been one of the men alongside them, although they all looked the same from this distance and she couldn’t guess which one he might’ve been. She recognized some of his ne’er-do-well cousins. One or two of them might’ve recognized Beulah, even behind her veil.

As for Louise, Beulah saw nothing but frills and lace, and a bevy of similarly attired attendants. What did she matter, anyway? She meant nothing to Henry Clay and was only lucky enough to marry him because Henry Clay’s parents had prevailed at last. It wasn’t a love match. She would never have Henry Clay, not the way Beulah had. And Beulah carried the secret pride of having borne his first (and so far, only) son. What did Louise have to put up against that?

The ceremony was overly long and the church was hot. Beulah dozed off, leaning against the back wall. When she came to, there was organ music and a great rustling of petticoats, and the couple was walking back down the aisle to a waiting coach. Henry Clay had the side of the aisle nearest Beulah. She edged over a little to get a better look at him. There was a smile across his face, but his eyes were blank. He shook hands with the men along the aisle, and accepted kisses from the women.

When he reached Beulah, his gaze passed across her but did not stop. The corners of his mouth twitched downward for only a second — not so you’d notice, unless you were watching for it — and Beulah was.

He saw her. She was certain of it.

AFTER THE WEDDING, it was almost a year before Beulah saw Henry Clay again. In the time that had passed, she had decided that if he could get married, she could, too — and she almost did. Mayo Street held no appeal for her anymore, but the ball park proved a wonderful place to meet men and find entertainment. She came so close to love and marriage behind the dugout that she went around calling herself Mrs. R. T. Fisher, wife of the infielder, even though they never did marry, even though he’d been traded to Danville and she was back in Richmond. There were certain advantages to going through life as a married woman, chief among them that she could take a furnished room under his name on a more respectable street than Mayo. She even held a job in a shop for a few months and earned an honorable if meager living. Marriage gave her all of that, even if it was a sham marriage.

The fact that Bob Fisher never did manage to put his signature to a piece of paper concerning Beulah, and that he sent her home after she trailed behind him to Danville for an ill-fated month-long stay — none of that mattered, as long as she could lay some claim to him. Bob Fisher was tall and good-looking, with a substantial nose, a toothy grin, good deep lines around his mouth when he smiled, and a sunburn from all those afternoons at the ball park. He was twenty-five, which seemed a solid and reliable age. He carried himself with swagger and confidence, and he was genuinely kind to Beulah. She, in turn, behaved like a perfect little wife, and understood only later that a perfect wife was not what Bob wanted Beulah to be.

After he’d been away for six months without a word to her, Beulah had to own up to the fact that she was not, in fact, Mrs. R. T. Fisher, and might not even see him again, unless his team came through town for a game.

She wished she could call herself a widow, but she’d already made too much of the fact that she was married to the great Bob Fisher, who was doing so well out in Danville that he was rumored to be under consideration to join the Brooklyn ball club. Anyone who read the sports pages would know that she couldn’t possibly be a widow, because the man she claimed as her husband was at that moment kicking up dust in the infield.

She found that she liked ball players, though — their easygoing camaraderie, their muscled shoulders, that way they had of breezing through life. They played a game for a living, the only game they ever wanted to play, and because of that they were entirely at their ease and comfortable in their own skin. They took pretty girls as their due, welcomed them easily, said good-bye without even feigning regret, and made no promises they couldn’t possibly keep.

Beulah loved them for all of that. She loved their beer, their tobacco, the sand in their shoes, the way they’d come off the field hot and dusty, and emerge from their clubhouse an hour later, scrubbed and fresh-faced, with open collars and rolled-up sleeves. Everything about them was easy and good. Beulah couldn’t stay away.

When Henry Clay turned up at the ball park, this time with Louise’s brothers (a far more respectable group of men than his old friends), Beulah was shocked at how he’d changed. After almost a year of marriage, he hadn’t grown fat, exactly, but he was swollen, somehow, and red-faced, and dull-eyed. There was an angry set to his jaw that Beulah didn’t remember seeing before. When she compared him now to the ball players she’d come to know in the last year, he wasn’t nearly the specimen of man they were. What had she ever seen in him?

Beulah sat behind the dugout with the other girls, as she always did, and kept her head turned so Henry Clay wouldn’t spot her from his place in the bleachers not far away. After the game, though, she forgot herself, and milled around behind the clubhouse with her friends, and there Henry Clay spotted her. Louise’s brothers were out on the street, ogling a friend’s new automobile, so Henry Clay took a chance and ran to her.

“I thought you’d left Richmond for good,” he said, panting, when he reached her.

“You don’t own Richmond,” she said. Her friends giggled at that and she walked a little ways away from them. Henry Clay followed.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” he said.

“I don’t know why it matters whether you do or not,” Beulah said.

“I can’t stand to be in that house any longer,” Henry Clay said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“If you’re asking if I know what it’s like to be Mrs. Henry Clay Beattie, you are correct,” Beulah said. “I don’t. But it don’t matter to me now. I married a ball player last fall, and I’ve been all over the country with him, watching his games.”

Henry Clay hung his head. Beulah couldn’t believe she could hurt him so easily. “Which one is your husband?” he mumbled.

“He’s back in Illinois right now. But I still like to watch the games.”

Henry Clay snatched up Beulah’s hand. She looked around to see who might be watching. His wedding ring dug into her palm. “Meet me tonight, Beulah,” he begged. “Just give me one more good night with you. That’s all I’ll ever ask.”

Beulah jerked her hand away. “Why are you still after me? Go on down to Mayo Street and find yourself whatever you like.”

Henry Clay whispered, “I can’t go down there, don’t you see? I have a hawk for a mother-in-law. She’s got it in for me. She knows all about — what I used to do. Don’t ask me how she found out. But she pulled me aside on my wedding day and told me that if I ever so much as looked at another girl, that would be the end of it between me and Louise.”

“You talk like you don’t much care for Louise,” Beulah said. “Why don’t you just walk away?”

He put his palms against his temples and then ran his fingers through his hair, frantic. “Don’t you remember? If I make one wrong step — I’m out. I’m out of the family, and that damned store, and there’s not one penny for me. My daddy’s got me on an allowance, if you can imagine that. A grown man, and I have to go over and beg for what’s due to me, every Sunday!”

“You could try earning your money,” Beulah said. “You could be your own man and not wait for your daddy to hand you everything.”

Beulah couldn’t believe she had the nerve to say such a thing to Henry Clay. Then again, she’d been running around with these ball players, and to a person they were all their own men. Free spirits, making their way in the world on the strength of their sweat and their talent. What would they make of Henry Clay, crying about his daddy and his pocket full of money, all of it unearned and unappreciated?

“Go on home to your wife, Henry Clay,” Beulah said.

Henry Clay was by then even more red-faced, breathing heavy and almost crying. There was something wrong with him. Something had changed, but Beulah didn’t want to ask what it was.

He grabbed her again, this time by the elbow. “They’re watching me all the time, Beulah,” he panted. “I can’t ever get away from them, not for a minute. I can’t hardly take a breath in my own house without someone looking at me funny. You’ve got to come with me. Just give me one afternoon. Let me be my own man again, for just a few hours.”

Beulah picked his fingers off her elbow, one at a time. “Is that Louise of yours expecting a baby yet?”

Again he hung his head. “She’s just a couple months away.”

“And do you intend to raise this one, or are you going to throw it away like you did your first-born?”

He was crying now, really crying. Beulah had never seen a man weep and found that the sight of it made her queasy. “Of course I intend to raise it,” he said, sniffing and shaking like a little boy coming out of a nightmare. “And I never did throw that other one away. I wanted to see him, but your Meemaw wouldn’t let me.”

Beulah knew better. She knew her Meemaw told him he could come around and see that baby. He never did. “It don’t matter what you wanted to do. It only matters what you did. You stayed away.”

“I wish I’d seen him once. Your grandmother sent me a note after the funeral and told me I wouldn’t have to worry about a baby anymore. I keep thinking it’s my fault, what happened to him.”

“Your boy took the cholera like so many babies did. I shouldn’t have said you wanted to throw him away. I know you didn’t.”

That seemed to placate Henry Clay, who wiped his eyes and looked around for his brothers-in-law.

“Go on back to your people,” Beulah said, “and stop making yourself so damn miserable. You have a wife and a baby and a house and plenty of money. You ought not to cry and complain and make such a mess of everything. Go on home.”

The ball players were coming out just then, and the other girls were starting to gather around. Beulah was eager to get away from Henry Clay.

“But how can I find you?” Henry Clay said. “Just — if I need to. Not to bother you again like this. I just want to know where you are.”

Beulah was distracted watching those ball players and didn’t think much about how to answer Henry Clay. “I’m Mrs. Fisher now,” she called, an easy lie to toss off as she walked away. “But don’t come around looking for me. You had your chance.”