Chapter Thirty-Two
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I N WHAT FELT LIKE THE BLINK OF AN EYE, T HOMAS’S AND E VELYN’S existences transformed into one—a life jointly lived instead of two that happened to intersect. A cash infusion into The Empire, contingent on the place finally opening, necessitated a celebratory dinner at Delmonico’s. Thomas’s one-line daily logs included oblique references to his love (“ hosted a guest at home this evening and stopped by a shop window this afternoon to inspect rings—just to look” ). The days between their coming together and The Empire’s grand opening were packed with business: rehearsals, preparations, paperwork. Amidst it all, they snatched half-moments and fragments, enough to stitch together a tapestry of a shared life, a lifetime’s worth of romance crammed into only a few weeks.
There was that second night they spent together, when he kissed a trail down her spine, marveling at her softness and how it felt beneath his lips.
“May I confess something, Tom?” she asked.
“You have all of my confessions. Sharing yours is only fair.”
“You said you wanted to court me, yes?”
“I remember. I also remember you rebuffed me.”
Her voice went small. Almost timid . “It’s just that I’ve never been courted before.”
“Never been courted?”
“Never properly. My relationships are more … straightforward than that. They’re exchanges, really, more than they are relationships.”
Resolve settled in his bones. “Well, we’ll just have to change that, won’t we? I would be some sort of cad if I let a beautiful woman go a lifetime without being courted.”
And then, there was the morning when she was called down to the sitting room of the boarding house, where he waited with his hat in his hand, surrounded by all the women with whom she shared her home.
“What’s this?”
He adopted the posture and voice of a perfect gentleman. The kind of character she’d never seen outside of a playhouse. “Miss Cross, I have asked your most esteemed chaperone here if I might take you to a fine supper. She’s agreed so long as I have you home by nine. Would you be so good as to allow me the pleasure?”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. She couldn’t make it too easy for him, could she? She turned to one of her friends, adopting an air of her own. “What kind of man is this, inviting me somewhere without flowers? I have half a mind to send him elsewhere, Annie.”
“Ah. Yes. I nearly forgot.”
He retreated to the boarding house’s front door and threw it open … revealing a line of delivery boys twelve long on either side, each holding a bouquet of flowers—each more stunningly appointed than the last .
Evelyn lost her ability to speak—much less her ability to play her part in this drawing room drama of theirs. Tom, though, merely shrugged.
“You said you’ve never been courted before. I’m only making up for lost time. Giving you at last what you’ve always deserved.”
And that time they returned to Coney Island for an evening stroll along the water at sunset …
“Why did you choose me?”
“You’re the most confident woman I’ve ever known. Why are you suddenly so insecure?”
“I’ve just been wondering, that’s all. You had so many reasons to refuse me. Why didn’t you? Or what interested you enough to even think you might want me?”
“You are the most chaotic, unexpected, wild, thoroughly unsuitable woman the world could have placed in my path—”
“Tom, we really must work on your complimenting skills.”
“And when we’re together, I feel, for the first time, that I’m actually living my life instead of breaking it into shape.”
A pause .
“What about me? Why have you chosen me?”
Another pause. She leaned in to whisper close, and he thought he had finally extracted a confession from her.
“Because you’re the most spectacularly generous lover God ever put on this Earth. Shall we return to the Italianate Boat Ride and confirm my feelings on that point?”
And after that bank appointment, when a man with whom she’d once been associated cut her, pretending not to know her for fear of embarrassing himself with her acquaintance …
“Thomas, I just want to leave. This is humiliating.”
“No. We’re not going anywhere.”
“But—”
“Not until I kiss you and remind him what he’s missing. ”
And the day he drove to the back of The Empire, interrupting her fire-escape luncheon with the others …
“What are you doing?” she called, running down to the pavement. He held out a white duster for her, helping her to shrug into it, leaving warmth everywhere his hands touched.
“Taking you for an afternoon drive.”
She considered, then decided she was not interested. “No, I don’t think so. But I will take you for an afternoon drive, thank you very much.”
“But you don’t know how to drive a motorcar.”
“Then I hope you’re a skilled teacher.”
And the Saturday when they visited their elephants …
“Why did you save them?” she asked, reaching down to feed a handful of peanuts to the baby, who gobbled them up with ticklish gusto. “You didn’t have to. You’re only getting one day of work out of them at the grand opening before you ship them off to that farm. So why?”
“I suppose I saw something of myself in them. Forced to perform tricks for others. Made to be something they aren’t. Trapped.”
“And do you still feel that way?”
“Not now. Not when I’m with you.”
Evelyn wouldn’t admit it. Not then. Perhaps not ever. But it was the same for her. The time they spent together was the only time either of them were allowed to really, truly, unashamedly be themselves.
Perhaps most important, though, were the letters.
Dear Miss Cross,
I am given to understand that love letters are the cornerstone of any courtship. I am also given to understand that you do not believe in love and will then be unable to write a love letter of your own to me. I resolve, therefore, to write one every day until I have convinced you to love me in return.
To begin this correspondence, I will merely say this. You are the only person under Heaven with whom I am fully myself. And whether or not you choose to see this courtship through to its end, I will always treasure that gift. And I hope I can be that same refuge for you. Always. Let us love one another, then, as if we are the only two people who have ever had the pleasure of it. For, indeed, maybe we are.
Yours Most Sincerely,
Tom Gallagher
The letters came every day, one after the other, each containing such prose as she’d never read before. And every day, after she opened a new one and let the words flow over her like baptizing rain, she picked up her pen to write a letter of her own.
And every day, she forced herself to set the pen down again. She could not write love letters to Tom Gallagher. She couldn’t write what she didn’t allow herself to feel.
A NOTE FROM THE HISTORIAN
I don’t know anything that happened during that time in Evelyn and Thomas’s life together. It’s all made up. But I don’t care.
As a historian, I know that most of our work is often about misery. What went wrong, who caused it, and how that negatively impacted generations to come. I cannot remember the last time I’d picked up a nonfiction book that gave me a peek into someone else’s quiet moments of happiness.
That’s fine for some books. But I don’t want to miss out on Evelyn and Thomas’s joy in favor of a chronicle of their suffering.
As a person, too, and not just a historian, I couldn’t handle that.
Once, Armitage accused me of being sentimental about their story. That I was reading into everything so I could imagine a fairy tale in the gaps. I don’t think that I am now—and I don’t think I was then either.
True, most of the stuff I imagine happened between Evelyn and Thomas during their courtship is made up. Influenced by my own experience. Stolen from real life and shoved into a historical costume tailored for their personalities and quirks and baggage.
I mean, I’m an adult. I was from the start. I know that every time something good happens, there’s a horrible thing stalking around the corner to ruin it. Evelyn would probably agree with me that stories like her and Thomas’s simply don’t end in happily ever afters.
But I don’t care. Let them be happy. Even if just for a few pages. For a few stolen, golden days in someone else’s half-borrowed memory.
After all, if Nehemiah Alban had his say in it, their happiness wouldn’t last very long anyway.