Coming Up Roses (32 page)

Rose had subsided into Annie’s arms and
allowed herself to cry. Annie would understand. Sniffling, she
said, “How? It was mean, what he said.”

“
Perhaps he was only trying to be
honest,” Annie said, sounding as if she didn’t believe it. “Perhaps
he didn’t mean to belittle you.”

“
Hunh!” Rose didn’t buy that one. After
spending so much time with H.L. May, if he hadn’t come to
understand how sensitive she was about her lack of education, he
was a really lousy reporter, and Rose didn’t believe that for a
second.

# # #

When H.L. moseyed around to the Wild West
encampment late on Monday morning, he was surprised not to find
Rose exercising one of her pretty white horses in the arena.
Glancing around, he saw no one at all, not even Little Elk
searching for coins.

“
Huh.” He guessed he’d just have to go
look for her, then.

She wasn’t in her tent. When she didn’t
answer his call, he lifted the flap and peered inside. No Rose.
Since she liked to hang out with

Annie Oakley, he made his way to the Butlers’
tent, the flap of which was down. Unusual, that. The Butlers
usually kept the flap up during the day, to catch the Chicago
breezes. He stood outside and hallooed.

He was startled when, a second later, Annie
popped outside, dropping the tent flap behind her. She looked as if
she was as mad as a wet hen, and he jogged backward a step.

“
What are you doing here?” she asked
without preamble.

Taken aback, H.L. stumbled over his response.
“I-I’m looking for Rose. Miss Gilhooley. You know. Rose. Wind
Dancer. To interview.”

Reaching up, Annie wagged a finger in his
face. H.L. blinked in time to the movement of her finger. “Rose
doesn’t want to see you again, Mr. May. That article you wrote
about her was not only mean and degrading, it was awful. I don’t
know how you can live with yourself, writing things like that about
people.”

Dumbfounded, H.L. could only stare down at
Annie, who knew an advantage when she saw one and continued to
berate him.

“
If you didn’t discover, in all the
hours you spent with Rose, that she’s sensitive about her limited
education, you’re a pure idiot, Mr. May, and I don’t believe that.
I think you’re too smart for your own good. You did what you did on
purpose. You humiliated her in print, and that’s unforgivable. You
ought to be horsewhipped.”

“
Shot,” came from inside the tent. H.L.
recognized Rose’s voice.

“
Rose!” he cried. He was feeling sort
of numb, not having anticipated this reaction from the woman he’d
written about in such glowing terms.

“
You can’t speak to her,” Annie said
abruptly. “And you assuredly can’t see her. You said the most
dreadful things about her in that article. You made her feel awful,
and you just get out of here now!”

She whirled around and ducked back into her
tent.

H.L. might have tried to enter the tent after
her, except he saw, by the indentations on the canvas, that she was
tying down the flap. He also didn’t care to have one of Annie
Oakley’s famous guns aimed at him, mainly because she was too good
with her weapons and he didn’t want to annoy her more than she was
already annoyed. His mouth hanging open, he stared at the tent flap
for a few minutes, trying to think.

Damn. He’d humiliated her? Rose? He shook his
head hard, attempting valiantly to figure this out. How could an
article that fairly glowed with admiration for her humiliate her?
How could she object to his having exalted her brilliance, both as
a performer and as a person? She was angry because he’d pointed out
her lack of a formal education? But he’d explained all that! Plus
which, he’d admired her continuing attempts to make up for her
ignorance, and had written so clearly and enthusiastically in his
article. How could that humiliate anyone?

He stood outside the Butlers’ tent for almost
ten minutes, trying to understand Rose’s reaction to the pieces
he’d written about her, but he couldn’t. He’d meant those articles
to be paeans of praise for a woman he admired above all other women
in the world. How could she take them so completely the wrong
way?

By the time he finally gave up and left
the Wild West, he hadn’t come up with an answer. The only thing he
knew for certain was that he couldn’t let things rest like this. He
needed to talk to Rose; to make her see reason—to make her
see
him
.

He had a vague and unsettling feeling in his
gut that if he couldn’t persuade her to see him again, he’d waste
away and die.

Chapter Sixteen

Rose managed to clear her mind of thoughts
about H.L. May so she could perform that night. She knew better
than to clutter her brain with extraneous matter when she was doing
potentially lethal acrobatic tricks on horseback.

The crowd roared when she rode into the
arena. While that was not unusual, this evening the yells of
approval sounded even louder than normal. This surprised her, since
she hadn’t anticipated it. In the pit of unhappiness into which
she’d sunk, she’d expected nobody to show up at all after reading
that article about her. Or, if anyone showed up, she figured they’d
jeer at her.

But they didn’t. They applauded and cheered
and clapped and whistled as if they were all madly in love with
her. They even gave her a standing ovation before she’d done more
than ride out of the tunnel and circle the arena. Odd, that. Rose
didn’t understand.

She went through her routine, keeping her
mind on her business, although spontaneous eruptions of applause
continued to surprise her throughout her act. When she’d taken her
last dancing bow on Fairy, the crowd went wild. She looked around
at the audience, and couldn’t understand why they were so much more
enthusiastic tonight than usual.

The colonel rode out to salute the crowd, and
gave her a hug from his horse as he sometimes did. Rose feared for
her ears, the clamor got so loud. The people sure loved the
colonel.

“
They sure love you, Rosie.”

Rose jerked her head around and stared at the
colonel. Did he think the audience was going crazy for her? She
glanced back at them, decided she ought to give them another wave,
did so, and almost had to clap her hands over her ears when another
deafening roar split the air.

“
You gotta give ‘em another dance
around the ring, Rosie,” the colonel said, grinning from ear to
ear. “They love you. That reporter fella did us all proud with that
article he wrote about you.”

He did? Dazed with shock, Rose didn’t respond
with words, but did as the colonel had suggested. Waving and
smiling at her admirers even though her head was in a whirl, she
circled the ring again, nudging Fairy into a high-stepping trot.
After they’d made the circuit, she directed Fairy into the center
of the ring, had her take one last elegant bow, and decided enough
was enough. The show would get seriously behind schedule if she
kept taking extra bows.

The uproarious thunder of the audience’s
appreciation followed her out of the ring. In a fog, she took the
moccasins Annie handed up to her.

“
They love you, Rose,” Annie told her
with a radiant smile. “They absolutely
love
you.”

“
Thanks, Annie,” Rose mumbled,
beginning to feel a trifle uncomfortable about all the
noise.

She slipped her moccasins on, slid from
Fairy’s back, and guided the horse through the masses of cavalry
and Indians waiting to head out into the arena to enact Custer’s
Last Stand. As she returned her friends’ waves and congratulations
by rote, her brain started churning.

Was the colonel right? Did that horde of
people out there love her because of what H.L. May had written
about her? Rose trusted the colonel implicitly, but she wasn’t sure
about this one, mainly because it made no sense to her.

After she’d finished reading those articles,
she’d felt as if H.L. had knifed her in the back. She’d felt as if
he’d stripped her naked and paraded her around Chicago, revealing
to the masses every single one of her faults and deficiencies.
Annie had understood exactly how she’d felt, because she’d shared
her view of the articles.

Could the two of them possibly be wrong? Did
the people of Chicago like her even better now, knowing she’d
overcome certain obstacles? Rose gave her head a shake, making her
feathers jiggle and tickle her caves, and she realized she’d
forgotten to take off her headdress. She did so as she walked to
the stables, still attempting to make sense of everything that had
transpired in the last day or so.

She was so involved in puzzling the matter
out that she didn’t at first see H.L. May, who was waiting for her
inside the stable. When she saw him, she stopped in her tracks,
confusing Fairy, who whickered with irritation. Fairy’s favorite
part of the day was the few minutes after her performance, when she
got pampered.

Rose blurted out, “H.L.”

He pushed himself away from the wall he’d
been holding up and walked over to her, ignoring the horse. “I need
to talk to you, Rose.”

Even as her heart soared with joy at seeing
him again, she knew she didn’t want to talk to him. Not about those
wretched articles. She felt foolish, as if she’d made a big deal
out of nothing.

Yet it hadn’t been nothing to her. Those
articles had hurt her so badly, she’d been totally crushed after
she’d finished reading them. She was ashamed of her lack of
education, and of his calling her an unschooled bumpkin. Annie had
called him a fiend for that one. Just thinking about it made the
heat creep up the back of Rose’s neck. The thought of the whole
world learning her deepest secrets made Rose want to crawl into a
hole and hide.

Knowing she was in no condition to make sense
of anything, she withdrew into herself. Renewing her forward
progress, much to Fairy’s relief, she muttered, “About what?”

“
You know about what.” He fell into
step beside her.

Rose felt hemmed in, as she had that first
night, with H.L. on one side and the horse on the other.
Uncomfortable, she sped up. H.L. kept up with her, blast him. When
they got to where Rose’s equipment was laid out, H.L. subsided,
thank God. He went over to lean against another wall.

“
I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,
Rose. You must know that.”

“
Must I?” She glanced at him out of the
corner of her eye as she reached for Fairy’s brush.

“
You have to.” He sounded almost
desperate. “Those articles praised you to the skies, for God’s
sake!”

Rose sniffed. “I didn’t get that from
them.”

“
Obviously.” Now he sounded cranky.
“You’re too damned sensitive. Do you know that? Somebody praises
you for rising above your circumstances, and all you do is get mad
because they mentioned the circumstances. Did you pay any attention
at all to the rest of the articles?”

“
Yes,” she snapped. She was beginning
to feel as if he were shoving her into a corner, and she didn’t
enjoy the feeling. “Yes, I read the whole thing, thank you, in
spite of my
unschooled
background. Of course, it took me a long time, since I had to
sound out a lot of the words.” She sniffed imperiously.

“
Ah, Jesus.” H.L. flung his arms in the
air in a gesture of supreme frustration.

Rose resented that. Anybody would think it
was she who was at fault here. She pointed the curry brush at him.
“You may think it’s fine and dandy to reveal a person’s darkest
secrets to the world, H.L. May, but some of us prefer to enjoy a
little privacy. It’s not enjoyable for me to have the whole world
know how stupid I am.”

“
You’re not stupid,
dammit
!”

He hollered so loudly, Fairy objected,
dancing nervously and nudging Rose. Rose winced at the noise and
comforted her horse. “There’s no need to yell at me, H.L.,” she
grumbled. She did appreciate his emphatic renunciation of her
alleged stupidity, although she’d never say so. Rather, she sniffed
again.

“
A lack of education doesn’t mean
you’re stupid, dammit,” H.L. went on. “Lots of people don’t have
the opportunity to go to school. You’ve done more than most people,
even people with an education. Don’t you see that?”

She glared at him, feeling silly about her
reaction to his articles, but resenting them anyhow. “It’s all well
and good for you to say such things, H.L. May, but look at it from
my point of view for a moment.

How would you like it if the whole world
learned the one thing about you that you were most ashamed of?”
Embarrassed by this statement and the admission of her shame, she
turned back to her horse and clucked gently to her. She started
brushing her, hoping H.L. wouldn’t notice how shaky she was.

“
Damnation, Rose Gilhooley, you’re a
public figure! What’s more, the public eats up the kind of stuff I
wrote in those articles!”

Rose huffed, mainly because she didn’t know
what to say.

“
You may not like it, but the fact is
people want to know about their idols, and you’re an idol for a
whole lot of people. Especially kids.”

A wrenching pain swooped through Rose as his
words sank in. She dropped the curry brush and stared at H.L. “Oh,
my God,” she whispered. “Now every child in Chicago is going to
know I have no education.”

H.L. stalked up to her and took her by the
arms. “Dammit, Rose, that’s not what they’re going to focus on!” He
shook her lightly. “They’re going to read today’s article, and
their parents are going to say to their children, ‘See? This young
lady came from pitiful circumstances, and look at what she’s made
of herself.’ They’re going to say, ‘Don’t you dare complain to me
about your life. Look at Wind Dancer. See what she’s done with
herself. She’s a big star with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and she
was so much poorer than we are, she had to shoot game for her
family to eat when she was just a child. She never had a chance to
go to school, yet she made something of herself.’ Don’t you
understand, Rose?”