Cottonwood (10 page)

“That’s a natural question, I suppose. I was tiring of the slaughterhouses and thinking I wanted a change, and my Maggie never did cotton to city life too well. The highborn of Chicago never did take us up socially, and I found that I had a yearning for the open spaces of my youth. When I learned from an associate that the Kansas City, Illinois, and Nebraska railroad was planning to make this a cattle depot, I saw my opportunity before me. I sold my packing interests and began making preparations to move my household here.”

The exaggerated formality of his enunciation didn’t sound quite natural in his mouth, but it struck just the right chord with the crowd. “You see,” Herbert hissed at Alf, “innocent as a babe.”

Alf shrugged, unconvinced but unwilling to press his point in the company of the man himself. Though Marc was not a large man—five foot five or six, I’d guess, without his boots on—he had a more impressive presence than many a six-footer I’d known, and just standing there managed to intimidate him in a way large, angry Herbert had not.

Later in the evening when things had slowed somewhat Marc and I stepped out behind the building, ostensibly to discuss the trip he and Maggie were planning back to Chicago to attract more capital for the town, with time spent in Kansas City to meet with railroad officials. I was startled, then, when he grabbed me by the lapels and gave me a little shove.

“Listen to me. When you hear talk like that starting up, I expect you to shut it down and do it quick, you understand me?”

Resisting the temptation to remove his hands from my jacket, I responded as calmly as I could. “Man’s got a right to speak his mind, Marc.”

“Not when he’s talking about me. Or my town. And not when he’s in my saloon. Is that clear?”

“Mister Leval, I’ll ask you only once to remove your hands from my person.”

He let go and even in the dim light out back I could see him pouting. “I picked you, out of all the citizens of Cottonwood, to be my friend and right hand. You’re poised to make yourself a fortune in the coming years, and you ought to remember that when you speak to me.”

Feeling a little better I adopted a friendly air, not too obsequious. “You wanted to talk to me about your trip to Chicago?”

“I did,” he said brightly, apparently relieved that I hadn’t taken offense. “There are things you’ll need to occupy yourself with while I’m gone. I can’t trust Tiny Rector with anything.”

He stopped speaking when the front door opened and someone came stumbling out. He walked right past us in the dark, muttering to himself, and we both recognized Alf’s voice.

“Cletus,” Marc shouted.

“Huh?” Alf peered in our direction and saw nothing.

“It’s Marc. Bill’s here, too. Come around back.”

Alf seemed to hesitate, then I saw his shadow making its way carefully in our direction.

“What is it?” Alf asked, sounding none too friendly.

Marc clasped his shoulder. “I just wanted to say Cottonwood needs men like you, who aren’t afraid to speak up and say what’s on their minds. No hard feelings.”

“Oh . . . that’s good, I suppose,” Alf said, full of whiskey and mistrust as he turned and wandered off into the night.

“Better put a muzzle on that cur next time he opens his maw.” He smacked me on the arm and sauntered off into the night. “I’d go back in for another shot, but drink hinders what Milady awaits.” For a minute or two I stood there in the dark, looking up at the sky and hating my best friend in the world; then I forgave him and went back in.

By the first of April I had engaged the third bartender, a dutchman named Hans who claimed to have tended bar in Westport. Since three men were only required on Saturday, I began to take Tuesday and Thursday nights off. Before the arrival of the Levals I wouldn’t have sought a free evening away from the saloon or known what to do with one. Now I dined with them on those nights at their newly finished home, the undeniable centerpiece of our little town and the new standard against which all future buildings would be measured. A mansion of red brick with a mansard roof in the Parisian style, it stood at the end of First Street a block off of Main, its chimneys and its widow’s walk visible from almost any vantage point in Cottonwood. Off the master bedroom and the two guest bedrooms were canopied balconies, and two columnated verandas ran along the outside, a large one in front and a smaller one before a separate entrance to the drawing room. Nearly every sort of filigree within the bounds of architectural good taste found itself incorporated into its design, and upon first stepping inside after its completion I had to suppress a laugh, thinking as I involuntarily did of my first crude dugout house, the one I’d built awaiting the arrival of Ninna and the boy. Here was a house with velvet wallcoverings, marble statuary, and classical molding not three miles from that pathetic troglodyte structure, and scarcely more than three years hence.

Elaborate, multi-course meals were prepared on these nights by a tall and buxom Frenchwoman of forty-five or so known as Madame Renée, thin of lip but otherwise not unattractive except for a distractingly dead right eye. Her English had the charming lilt of the Bretons, as Celtic as it was Gallic, and one afternoon she deigned to speak with me while she prepared a duck liver terrine for that evening.

She had been thrice married and widowed, she told me; the first husband was gored by a bull when she was a girl of twenty and pregnant with her first and only child, a son who was now a functionary in Nantes. I tried to imagine her minus twenty-five hard years, in wooden sabots and
costume folklorique
, weeping over the broken farmboy whose baby she carried. Her second husband, a watchmaker, had died more prosaically on board the ship that was taking them to America and rested now in Davy Jones’s locker. Soon after her arrival in America she settled in Boston with a Beacon Hill family; she was an experienced domestic cook, having plied that trade in France between her marriages, and a French cook was a fashionable extravagance at that time. Seven years into her service there, without her employers’ permission or foreknowledge, she married the head butler, with whom she had been dallying for nearly that entire period.

The head of the family reacted to this news by summarily dismissing them both. Madame Renée’s reaction was angry but philosophical; she had held no fewer than eight such jobs in the twelve years between the death of the Breton farmer and her marriage to the watchmaker. Her new husband, however, had been in the family’s employ in one position or another since arriving from Liverpool more than twenty years earlier, and his first instinct was to abandon his new bride and beg for his position back; upon being refused he drowned himself in Boston Harbor. She shook her head as she described her trip to the morgue and the haranguing she’d given her waterlogged bridegroom, for she’d already found work with a family that was in need of a butler. That was the end of marriage for her but not, she said with a wink of her good eye, the end of love. I was not unmoved in her presence—her speech alone brought pleasantly to mind another youngish French widow of my early acquaintance, and a murmured
“prends-moi”
would have been enough to rouse me to the task—but she was employed in the household of the woman I loved, and I resisted the temptation to respond to her coquetry. When she asked me, then, why my wife never accompanied me to dinner I thought it best to change the subject; I complimented her effusively on the elaborate meal I had shared with the Levals two nights previous, and she replied with justifiable pride that her employers ate that well and elegantly always, whether in the presence of guests or not.

But guests there were, that night and nearly every other: primarily bankers and railroad men anxious to court Marc’s favor, though the prominent citizens of Cottonwood also joined them at table with some frequency. With my own exception, though, I don’t believe the Levals counted any of Cottonwood’s own as friends. Katie had not been replaced in Maggie’s affections by any of the local women, though by and large these women seemed to think kindly of her, particularly those who had been her dinner guests.

After the meal had been served we would retire to the parlor where Maggie would play the violin and I the piano, together and separately. I was an indifferent accompanist at best. When first invited to play I had not laid my fingers upon a keyboard in five years or more; my former facility might have returned to me with an hour or so’s daily practice, but pending the arrival of the piano we’d ordered for the saloon this was impossible, and so I served her mostly as timekeeper for sentimental Irish tunes and bits of Italian opera. On one occasion we were joined by an officer of the KCI&N, who sang an adaptation of Bach for solo baritone with great skill and sensitivity. Afterward he explained gleefully over Leval’s brandy how the railroad was going to chisel a bunch of farmers out of some land for its right-of-way to our west.

When we played Marc sat back and beamed at his wife with great pride, and it was plain how much he adored her; even at those times, though, I felt no shame regarding my powerful yearning for Maggie, which claimed much of my attention during those months. It was in fact at those times that I desired her the most ardently, listening to her crystalline tone over my leaden hammering, seeing her bosom rise and fall to the beat that my left hand clumsily beat out of the keyboard, watching her face flush over certain difficult passages. Often as not I remained seated at the piano after finishing so as to avoid embarrassment upon standing. I suspected that she received a similarly erotic excitement from our duets, though the only evidence I could have offered then was the fact that she steadfastly refused to meet my gaze while I played for her, and for several minutes thereafter, as though such an exchange would reveal more than she dared.

A crowd the like of which the town had not yet seen gathered in the rain to see Marc off to Chicago. A private railcar had been assigned to him, aboard which he carried a bottle of French wine and a basket of cold foods prepared by Madame Renée. She could be seen in the throng flirting with Herbert Braunschweig, about whom she had asked me the previous week before dinner; her left eye was bad and his right was gone, and the fact that their good eyes met when they faced each other made things seem preordained, at least to Madame Renée.

Maggie managed to develop what appeared to be a bad head cold two days before the trip was to begin. The more forcefully her husband argued that she should come along anyway, the worse her symptoms became, and by the time of his departure she was too ill even to come to the depot, and he grudgingly left her behind in the care of Madame Renée and Rose, the new housemaid. She was an Irish girl of sixteen or so who blushed in Marc’s presence and seemed to wish his wife didn’t exist. Waving to the cheering crowd outside as he stepped aboard, he took me into the private car with him, ostensibly to give me a few last-minute instructions but actually, I think, to show it off. There he put me in charge of his various and sundry construction projects, which in practice meant only that their foremen were to report to me any difficulties that might arise. Stanley Eaton would take over his role at the bank, and Tiny Rector still officially held the mayoralty. Any grave problems were to be reported to him at his hotel in Chicago via telegraph.

I was taken aback several days later to receive at the hotel an envelope with my name on it in Maggie’s elegantly swooping hand. Inside was an invitation card, again in her hand:

Mrs. Marc Leval requests the honor of your presence for dinner Tuesday evening at six P.M.

I was delighted to receive it, as I had nowhere but the saloon to go that evening, and I didn’t want to risk losing my new barman by cutting two of his three working shifts pending Marc’s return. The thought of three weeks passing without Maggie’s company had been weighing upon my mind as well, and it was with a light heart that I bounded onto the front veranda of the Leval residence that evening at six. I was met at the door by young Rose, who looked indifferently at me and directed me to the drawing room, where Tiny and Mrs. Rector sat waiting. His face was covered with tiny beads of sweat, which he mopped with a handkerchief upon my taking a seat across from him. Mrs. Rector, whose first name of Lillian I never presumed to use, greeted me in a friendly manner but was scarcely able to tear her attention from the room’s furnishings.

“Bill, do you suppose that’s silk there?”

“What, the curtains? Sure,” I said, having no idea what else they might be.

“It’s a hell of a place, all right,” Tiny said, and his wife was so enraptured she didn’t scold him for cursing. It was a measure of Marc’s cocksureness that the mayor’s office ought rightfully to be his own that he had never bothered to include the incumbent and his wife among the fair number of other local notables who had dined in his home.

“How many rooms you figure there are, Bill?” Tiny asked in a near whisper.

“I believe there are four bedrooms upstairs. There’s a parlor and a dining room, kitchen downstairs.”

“And all furnished like this?” Mrs. Rector asked me, a look of utter astonishment on her face. She had a squarish, sharp-angled head, softened by large, heavy-lidded green eyes, and looking at you in just the right way she was nearly a beauty.

“I haven’t seen them all,” I said.

Maggie chose that moment to make her appearance, and having welcomed us, led us out of the drawing room and into the dining room. There at the long table a fifth place had mysteriously been set. In the candlelight Tiny’s squinting face looked like a dried-up apple as we sat. Rose poured us each a glass of red wine from a crystal decanter.