“That’s Abigail Adams,” Mrs. Winston said, nodding at a painting over the bureau.
Both she and Mrs. McGruder were obviously waiting for me to say something that would reveal how impressed I was.
“This is a beautiful and very comfortable-looking room,” I said.
“And immaculate,” Mrs. McGruder added.
“Why don’t you settle in?” Mrs. Winston said. “I’m going to make a phone call for you right away.”
“Phone call for me?”
“I’m calling my nephew Ken Dolan. He owns Dolan Plumbing Supply and is always looking for qualified help. I’m sure he’ll grant you an interview, maybe today,” she said.
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Winston.”
“Yes, well,” she said, glancing at Mrs. McGruder, “you can call me Amelia.”
“Thank you.”
“Mrs. McGruder is not as fond of her given name and likes to remain Mrs. McGruder.”
“Oh?”
“Hortense,” she said disdainfully. “My brothers had a good time with that, as you can imagine.” She rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue.
“Now, as to the rules,” Mrs. Winston said, cutting discussion short. “Obviously, we don’t tolerate any smoking in the house or on our grounds.”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Good. Hopefully, you’ll keep to that. It goes without saying that drugs and alcohol are off-limits as well. We do serve wine at dinner, and we do from time to time provide after-dinner brandy and a homemade elderberry wine. I don’t think it will do you any harm to partake despite your age. We do that mainly on holidays or other special occasions, but no alcohol is permitted in any of the bedrooms.”
I nodded.
“We expect you will respect the furniture and the linen and towels we provide. Everything is replaced daily, but how you keep your room tells us pretty quickly how much you respect it. As to comings and goings . . . you’ll be provided with your own front-door key, of course. We’re not here to supervise anyone. We just ask that you take care to move about quietly after eleven. There are no overnight guests permitted,” she concluded, and pressed her lips together quickly, as if to keep any other reference to such a thing from slipping out.
“You two are the only ones I know here,” I said.
“For now,” she instantly retorted. “Any young lady
as pretty as you will soon have a trail of young men coming to the door. We permit socializing in the living room during decent hours, of course, and you can offer anyone tea or coffee and biscuits during the visit if we know about it in advance.”
She took a deep breath and looked around the room with the expectation that I would follow her gaze.
“As you see, there is no television or radio in your room,” she continued, “nor is there a telephone. This is what I meant when I said we run a very quiet rooming house. There is, of course, a television set in the den downstairs. So, unless you have any questions . . .”
“No, everything is wonderful,” I said.
She smiled. “Mrs. McGruder will bring your towels and washcloths shortly. As we said, you’re sharing a bathroom on this side with Naomi Addison.”
“She’ll be surprised,” Mrs. McGruder muttered. “She’s had it all to herself up to now. That’s a woman who is used to her own personal comfort and not used to sharing anything except her troubles and unhappiness.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you will not monopolize the bathroom, nor will she,” Mrs. Winston said firmly. “As in any good rooming house, we are all dependent upon everyone else, respecting everyone else, Mrs. Addison included.”
Mrs. McGruder grunted with some skepticism. Mrs. Winston glanced at her, thought for a moment, and then turned back to me.
“Mrs. McGruder is of the opinion that Mrs. Addison . . .”
“Soon to be ex–Mrs. Addison,” Mrs. McGruder corrected.
“That ex–Mrs. Addison has her sights set on my nephew, Ken Dolan, and that this was her true intention when she came here to stay until her matters are settled. Ken’s wife left him soon after she gave birth to their son, Liam. Ken had a daughter with her, too, four years earlier, Julia. Liam is twenty-one, and Julia is twenty-five. Neither of them is at all fond of Mrs. Addison—I mean, the soon-to-be-ex–Mrs. Addison—but men are blind when it comes to the wiles of coquettes.”
I couldn’t help smiling. The wiles of coquettes?
“Amen to that,” Mrs. McGruder said. “My husband made an absolute fool of himself whenever he was confronted by a bubbling bosom or a seductive wisp of a smile to accompany a wiggling hip.”
Mrs. Winston cleared her throat and gave Mrs. McGruder a chastising look. “Yes, well, I wasn’t going to turn her away. How would that look? A woman in the midst of a bitter divorce left out in the cold. But I’m not worried. Ken won’t fall for a woman who resembles his first wife. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“Amen to that, too,” Mrs. McGruder said.
“One of our current two other guests is Mr. Jim Lamb, a twenty-four-year-old man who teaches English in the Adams School for Girls,” Mrs. Winston said. “It’s a private secular school for grades six to twelve. He mostly teaches the high school students. He’s a very serious young man. And our other guest is Mr. Martin Brady, a man in his fifties who is a dental supply
salesman. You’ll meet everyone at dinner, if not before. Do you have any questions, dear?”
“No. I’ll just settle in, as you say,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll let you know what my nephew says.”
They both left and closed the door behind them, their looks and voices fading quickly, like breath in very cold air. The resulting silence felt heavy.
Everything that had happened to me and everything I had done had gone by so quickly that I hadn’t paused long enough to think about it all and fully contemplate the possibilities that loomed on the horizon. Now that Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder had left me alone, it all came flooding back at me. The reality was that this was the first time I was really on my own, the first time I was away from whatever family I had known, and the first time I was totally responsible for myself.
As it would for any older teenage girl, that prospect filled me with mixed emotions tugging against one another, especially excitement and concern. For a few moments, I thought only of my freedom to do whatever I wanted. The rules Mrs. Winston had described were restraints that applied only in the house. Out there, I could dress, say, and do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to worry about what my father would think or say, what Mrs. Fennel would think or say, or what Ava would think or say. The only one I had to please was myself. If I wanted to get drunk and make a fool of myself, I could. I didn’t have to be careful about whom I spoke to and what I said, as long as what I said had nothing to do with the life I was fleeing.
I wasn’t afraid of my freedom, either. I had always had great self-confidence, even though there were times when I doubted or questioned it. In my heart of hearts, I knew that I could compete with any other girl my age or older in any way on any field. None of them was as well equipped for life’s normal challenges as I was.
Now, on my own, I was even more grateful for my extraordinary intelligence, the speed with which I could master any new subject, the breadth and depth of my memory, and the perception I possessed, a perception that for other girls came only after years and years of experiences and acquired wisdom and that wasn’t guaranteed. Mine was inherited. There was no ordinary human being I couldn’t handle, master, and defeat if I had to. Look at what I had just been through with that fiend who had pretended to be an attorney. I smiled to myself, imagining how Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder would have reacted at lunch if I had described those events in any detail.
How silly and insignificant their concerns for me were. My biggest problem should be sharing a bathroom with a divorcée who was full of herself.
All of this filled me with optimism, but when I gazed out of my bedroom windows and looked down at the bright, Norman Rockwell streets reeking of peace and contentment, imagining the happy families that occupied the other houses, with their manicured front lawns, their sparkling driveways and walks, their potted flowers and sprawling old trees that had quietly witnessed the birth of a nation, I could imagine the creeping, crawling, dark shadows seeping in and over it all,
finding the cracks in the perfection, slipping through any tiny opening, oozing over the immaculate streets and sidewalks, embracing the houses and darkening the hearts of parents who would suddenly fear for their teenagers as much as for themselves.
Was Daddy ever far away? Had I been deluding myself?
I opened the window and listened to the breeze tiptoeing over the tops of houses and trees until it circled the house to dance a ballet in the sunlight. On the right side of a house across the street, a tree of metal butterflies jingled. Down toward the west end of the street, a car door slammed. Someone called out to someone. There was a trickle of laughter. High in the sky above, a twinkling star metamorphosed into a commercial jet. I suddenly could hear Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder below discussing the dinner menu and then dropping their voices into whispers, surely to talk about me. How quickly they had begun to care and worry about me.
What a wonderful choice I had made. Life here was surely a breath of fresh air. I told myself that Ava, Daddy, and the others most likely expected that I would flee to some darker sanctuary, a place where my inherent nature would feel more at home. They’d search for me in urban alleyways, large, busy cities where someone like me, and like them, would have an easier time disappearing. For a frightening moment, I wondered if they weren’t right to assume that and if I wasn’t wrong to ignore it. Would my true nature be too obvious in a place like this? Would these people take second looks at me, see the veil of darkness that was always beside
me, step away, and then choose to avoid and ignore me? Would they, in short, become afraid of me?
It didn’t matter that they could not identify what it was exactly that turned them off to me. Whatever it was, they would instinctively feel that it was something born out of a netherworld, some grotesque swamp crawling with repulsive creatures, some so loathsome that they weren’t even imagined in nightmares. My terrible fear was that they would sense all of this, and I would soon be on my way again, fleeing, searching for that impossible place that would enable me to deny my second self and let me become ordinary.
I couldn’t help wondering, maybe wishing it, if such a hopeful dream existed for my sisters, too, if during some free moment when they were alone, they permitted themselves to admit to the same longing. For them, however, the moment they opened that door, the terror and guilt came rushing in behind their fantasy, ripping and tearing it apart, growling and roaring until they cowered and chastised themselves for having even a moment like mine. It occurred to me that they might be pursuing me not out of anger but out of jealousy. I had gone farther away than any of them had. They couldn’t tolerate the fact that there was one of us who could escape, because that reinforced and drove home their own failure. And for me, at least right now, their own doom.
I would not succumb.
I would not surrender.
I would not turn back.
Daddy would turn back. In the end, he would
reluctantly decide to let me go. He would be touched by mercy and also by the love he once held so strongly for me. Maybe it was the last trace of humanity at work in him, some part of his early existence that had lingered. At least, that was my prayer.
I turned to my small suitcase and unpacked my things. The very act of settling into another room in another house felt like another big step in my emancipation. I decided to take a shower and change into fresh clothes. While I was dressing, there was a knock on my door.
“Yes?”
“When you are ready to come down, let me know,” Mrs. Winston said through the closed door. “My nephew just called back. He would like to interview you this afternoon. He’ll send a car around for you.”
“Really?” I opened the door, even though I was still in my bra and panties. I saw that wasn’t something Mrs. Winston easily accepted. Her eyes widened, and she looked away.
“You have to be more discreet, dear. Anyone could have been in the hallway,” she said, still not looking directly at me.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just so excited with the news.” I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around myself quickly.
“Yes, well, all young people today have trouble harnessing their horses,” she said.
“It’s the first time I’ve been outside of my own home. It does take some getting used to, I imagine.”
“Yes, it does,” she said, with a little more understanding and forgiveness in her tone. “Put on
something nice but not something that’s . . . that’s . . . what’s the word they use today, obvious? I’m sure you know what I mean. Shall I call him and tell him you’ll be ready in ten minutes?”
“Yes, thank you so much, Mrs. Winston.”
“Amelia,” she said.
“Amelia.” I smiled and closed the door.
Could all of this happen for me so quickly? Was there some good angel looking out for me after all?
I went into a small panic. This was no time to make any mistakes, but I had only two outfits from which to choose. One was a skirt and blouse, and the other was a pair of designer jeans and a blouse. Which was more conservative? The skirt’s hem was about two inches below my knees. Was that too “obvious”?
I decided not to risk it and settled on the pants outfit. I pinned up my hair quickly. I rarely needed more makeup than a little brush of lipstick. Any more than that might ring some alarm bells. After one more look at myself, I hurried out and down the stairs, to where both Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder waited to inspect me.
“I don’t have very much with me,” I said, nearly moaning when I didn’t hear either offer some approval.
“With her looks and figure, you can’t do much more to be subtle, anyway,” Mrs. McGruder said.
Mrs. Winston nodded. “That’s fine. For now,” she added. “If you should get the job, you’ll need to buy some appropriate dresses, however. Ken has a number of young men working for him.” She made them sound like a disease.