The Dress Lodger (15 page)

What else have these people told him? Gustine wonders. He probably believes every woman here was turned bad by Master’s son, just as every hardworking man lost his job thanks to the cunning devices of a jealous foreman.

“Your dress is expensive,” he remarks. “Did you steal it? I won’t judge.”

The barmaid sets a glass of gin and three sugar cubes in front of Gustine and a pint of whiskey and water before the Student of Life. Gustine bites down hard on the lump of sugar to keep from ordering him to Hell. We need the money, she tells herself. We need the money.

“It’s my landlord’s,” she says.

“You mean pimp?” asks he.

By the door, the barmaid hands Eye a gin, which the old woman stares at for a second, then fists back in a gulp. It is close and smoky in the room, but it feels good to Gustine to be warm. She will just ignore the Student of Life and concentrate on the hot, heavy air thawing her legs.

“Is that woman your pimp?” asks he, when she doesn’t answer. “I saw her following you down the street and I thought, Is that not always the way? Does not old age always dog youth? Does not monstrosity forever shadow beauty?”

His lids have too little skin for his wide-open expression and threaten to rip at the corners. God damn, thinks Gustine, can’t we just go upstairs and get this over with—must I be forced to endure conversation, too? Sitting with Henry at the Labour in Vain was so different. He was sharing with her, telling her his secrets, not trying to pry her open.

“I think I should go,” says Gustine, rising.

“No, wait!” He leaps out of his chair and pulls her back down. “I want you to tell me about yourself.”

“There is nothing to tell,” says she, exasperated and growing more self-conscious by the minute. “I’m just a potter’s assistant.”

“Potter’s assistant!” He claps his hands and jots it down. “How rich!”

“Really,” says Gustine flatly.

“I see. You are modest.” The Student of Life reaches across the table and grabs her hand before she can draw it away. “Let me tell you about yourself then.

“You are young,” he starts. “What, eighteen? Nineteen? You obviously haven’t been at this long, not to know the Red Door,” he continues, gesturing to the hall. “You haven’t yet turned to drink, nor become hardened and bitter. You still hope for a better life. How did you fall? No! Wait!” He throws out his other hand. “Your story is written on your face. You gave your heart to a young man of property a year ago, two years ago; he put you up in an apartment, bought you beautiful things, promised to marry you—but when he grew tired of that pretty, sad face, he turned you out onto the street, ruined and friendless, to fend for yourself. You’ve pawned every trinket save the dress on your back. You can’t get a character to become a maid or shop girl. Your parents won’t take you back. You have no other option. Don’t be ashamed,” says the Student of Life. “You are without blame in this matter. Our society is set up to make a prostitute out of you.”

Gustine stares at him in open disbelief. What in the name of God is he talking about?

“Darling,” says he, “I am here to give you a voice.”

“First of all, I am not ashamed,” says Gustine, “of anything other than sitting here listening to you. And secondly, I work for a living. I work all day in the mud and I work all night on the streets. I do not need a voice—do you understand me? I have a quim. Now, do you fucking want to see it or not?”

The Student of Life lunges for his tablet and before Gustine knows what he’s about, has sketched a girl who looks nothing like her, a cranky jaded creature with full breasts and open, voluptuous lips.

Gustine shoves back her chair and storms toward the door. She pushes past a barely conscious woman held upright by a pair of lover’s hands on her ass, past the Eye, still holding her empty glass of gin, and out onto the street.

“Wait!” she hears behind her, but she does not slow down.

Outside, the sky scatters heavy crumbs of snow. The cold, coming after so close a room, brings tears to her eyes and sets her nose to running. What does he mean by giving her a voice? She has a voice. She uses it every day to ask for clay and to soothe her baby and to placate men. She uses it to cuss out the Eye and to sing when she’s happy and to scream at the other lodgers when they wake her with their snores. She has a loud, unpretty, ferrety voice for day and a soft, throaty, helpless voice for night. Gustine stomps down the street, with the Eye on her heels in a matter of seconds. God damn it, she does this every time. The old woman breathes down Gustine’s neck until the girl can’t take it anymore. Gets up close upon her, breathing down her neck whenever Gustine walks away from money, breathing to remind her she belongs to Whilky, that she is not at liberty to pick and choose when she is inside his dress.

“Just tell Whilky and see if I care,” Gustine wheels and shouts at the Eye. “You should have seen what he drew ofyou\n

Gustine storms up Playhouse Lane, pushing through the last-minute stragglers running for the ticket booth to the Theatre Royale, where the curtain is about to go up on “Cholera Morbus.” She sees well-dressed men inside the lobby, tapping their watches and shaking their heads over friends who’ve yet to show, sees their wives gossiping in brightly colored clumps about what best gets frog blood out of Turkey rugs. Gustine is passing the door on the other side of the street when a hired cab careens around the corner and nearly runs her over.

“Jesus!” she cries, snatching the skirt of her dress away from the slush thrown up by the carriage.

Trapped between the cab and the wall, Gustine helplessly watches as a girl gets out, a young girl probably no more than seventeen, laughing at the snow that melts upon her black velvet mantle and lame gauze turban with ostrich feather, stretching her slippered foot far over the gutter and leaping down. She looks like me, Gustine thinks, if I could ever laugh at snow. But how put together she is, how perfectly arranged. Embroidered velvet muff complements mantle and shoes; jet flowers linked with garnets in a chain about her neck match the trinity of black and red flowers in each white earlobe. To own a set of something—what would that be like? Eye steps up so close behind her, she can smell the smoked sprats the old woman gnawed for dinner. Is this my set? she wonders. Am I always to be paired with this hag as to my own death?

A man follows the lovely young lady out of the cab, stretching his own long legs across the slush. He has on tight-fitting black pants that button underneath his boots and a night green pinch-waist coat with high collar. She barely recognizes him so dressed up. His face is easy and relaxed, not tight with despair as she has memorized it. The girl of matched jewelry holds out a tidy gloved hand for him to take and as he does so, his eyes fall on Gustine.

“Potter’s Assistant! Come back!” Gustine cannot believe her ears. The Student of Life is sprinting up the lane, his coat unbuttoned, his hair sizzling and popping about his brow. “I was wrong! I do want to see that quim! I do! I do!”

Audrey squeaks at the sound of the word and covers her mouth as if she’d said it. But Gustine’s eyes are fixed on Henry, whose initial look of surprised confusion turns to horror and—oh god, is it fear? She watches his hand go quickly to the center of the young woman’s back, watches him practically push her into the theatre, where they disappear into a sea of black coats and lame turbans, matched earrings, necklaces, and drooping ostrich feathers. From inside they might all laugh at the snow, how it falls in sheets now, upon the bedraggled blue girl standing outside in it, on the one-eyed old woman breathing, breathing behind her, on the half-dressed Student, who on his knees begs her forgiveness—please God, dear lady, we don’t have to talk. And please, dear lady, won’t you please just come back to work.

Do you know that woman?” Audrey asks as Henry pushes her into the crowded lobby and then stands in the door, blocking everyone’s way. Men shoulder past him, women politely pardon themselves, but he cannot tear his eyes from the scene being played across the street: a well-dressed young man pleading with Gustine to come away with him, Gustine furiously shaking her head no; he seizing her hands and peering up into her face like a naughty child begging forgiveness, that old woman over her shoulder (who is she to Gustine?), and the girl finally relenting, letting him slowly draw her away, out of the gaslight, around the corner, back into darkness.

“Do you know her?” Audrey asks again, this time more plaintively. Henry turns back to find his fiancee’s shortsighted green eyes pleading with him. He forgets how young she is, almost young enough to be his daughter. What is wrong with him?

“No, of course not,” he lies. “I thought I recognized the man.” He steers her through the crowd and over to the staircase that leads up to Uncle Clanny’s box. They are late and his uncle is probably waiting.

“That was dreadful, wasn’t it?” Audrey laughs nervously, warming to the dreadfulness of it. “I haven’t heard that word since I was in school.”

“You shouldn’t have heard it tonight,” says Henry, horrified she’s ever heard it. “I’m sorry to have exposed you to it.”

“Silly.” Audrey taps him with her muff. “As if it were your fault.

But wasn’t it? Did she not follow me here? Henry takes Audrey’s mantle and hangs it on the peg in the vestibule, knocking on the door to their box and bowing to Uncle Clanny when he reaches over and lets them in. Did she not purposefully seek me out in my personal life? It could not be mere coincidence that she would be passing by at precisely the moment Audrey emerged from the carriage, so close that she might reach out and touch her. Audrey settles down next to Henry’s uncle and politely answers his questions on her mamma’s health (better, thank you, for the calomel tablets he prescribed), the status of her father’s ship (still quarantined in Riga, they were sad to learn), and where on earth she got that lovely dress. Her papa sent the material from Paris this summer and the trim came from London, she says with a smile, not adding that it pinches her awfully and she can’t raise her arms more than a few inches before they go numb, or that she never would have had a dress like this made if she didn’t think Henry would find it pleasing.

Henry is listening with only half an ear, ostensibly examining the gallery while he replays the scene outside over and over in his head. Gustine pressed against the wall, staring fixedly at Audrey as if to.devour her. That man running half-dressed up the street screaming profanity, practically throwing himself upon her as she watches Henry with a look of—was it triumph? Oh God, groans Henry, what could she mean by that? He is so tired from working on the cadaver Liss for the past few days—getting less than two hours of sleep a night, he cannot think straight. He wanted to work tonight, didn’t want to attend this play in the first place, but Uncle Clanny insisted and he knew Audrey was waiting for an opportunity to wear her new dress. And his day is far from over. He promised Audrey that directly after the play he would go see that poor family she discovered this afternoon. The woman who glows in the dark and the baby with the extraordinary heart.

“Darling? Are you all right?” she asks.

He turns to Audrey, dimly lit and lovely in the candlelight. To what ravages has he exposed this trusting creature? And did his own dirt)’ thoughts not compel her here tonight? Has he not a hundred times in the past two days thought of the girl and remembered the feel of her tiny cat ribs? He draws Audrey’s hand to his mouth and gently bites the pearl engagement ring he gave her three months ago.

“Yes.” He squints at it like an old pawnbroker. “It’s real all right.”

Audrey laughs delightedly.

He shakes Gustine from his mind and joins Audrey in nodding to the other prominent families of Sunderland. Next to the empty box perpetually reserved for the local aristocracy the Marquis and Marchioness of Londonderry sits Sir William Chaytor, showing himself as much as possible around town with the hopes that when the Reform Bill is passed, Sunderland will elect him its first MP. Another box barely contains the Gourley family: shipbuilder John, his enormous wife Mary, and their erupting young son Edward. Cuthbert Sharp, mayor of nearby Hartlepool and renowned antiquarian, has taken up residence in the box belonging to the Vaux family of wealthy brewers, and next to him sits his placid wife Elizabeth, whose beautv twenty years ago, so the story goes, caused young Cuthbert to steal her and elope. Audrey has been helping her mother plan a large wedding with relatives coming from as far away as London, but secretly Henry wishes he could tap upon her window one night and whisk her off to Gretna Green, where they might be married without the family’s knowledge or handshakes from anyone.

Down in the pit, he sees, the people are growing restless. We are witnessing the end of British Theatre, Henry tells Audrey, when Congreve and Sheridan are sluiced away by the blood-and-guts melodramas written for these people below. When he left London, new auditorium-style theatres were popping up everywhere, designed so that as many as thirty-five him drcd might gather to watch mindless equestrian shows or the cataracts of the Nile crash down upon live camels and pachyderms; where a fully commissioned civil war might be waged or love won and lost atop an erupting volcano. How humble and old-fashioned the theatres here in Sunderland are by comparison, so quaintly behind the times they are lit still by candlelight years after others have installed gas. Stagehands spend hours trimming the wicks and wiping the sooted glass chimneys, and still smoke chokes the audience and forces them to mop their brows for the heat. It is safe to say that only the ladies and Henry will regret the passing of candlelit theaters— Henry for nostalgia’s sake, the ladies because candlelight is by far kinder upon the female skin than gas or sunlight; it goes gently over blemishes and pits, serving the same purpose here as it does in the market on Saturday night, by which we mean convincing those who are looking that the goods for sale are sound.

The old Theatre Royale is constructed of wood: its floor is wood, its pewlike seats wood, the back walls paneled with wood. The raked stage is widely planked and the orchestra pit parqueted; the columns that support the mezzanine and boxes, too, are wood, though painted red and in disguise. When the people below stomp down the aisles the whole building creaks like an ancient galleon, which illusion is further helped along by the salty, fishful smell caught in the net of their clothing. Smoking is strictly prohibited in this wooden tinderbox, so pipes languish until intermission and snuff is passed about. Coster boys hawk the score of tonight’s performance to the musically inclined while entrepreneurial girls walk the pit wearing boxes of oranges like Gothic necklaces around their throats. A girl about Gustine’s age glances up and catches Henry’s eye. She holds up a plump ripe orange and mouths, “Want it?”