Chapter Forty-Three
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
T HE NEXT DAY, ON THE OCCASION OF HIS TRIUMPHANT GRAND opening, Thomas Gallier was married.
Andrew handled all the details. After receiving Evelyn’s letter of resignation, he facilitated the collection of Evelyn’s things from her dressing room, ensuring that no traces of the woman would remain in the theater. He shuffled the vaudeville bill so that Jules Moreau was the headliner. Dr. Samson handled the press admirably, too, informing them that Thomas was so swept off his feet by this whirlwind romance with Miss Alban that he could hardly think straight, much less give interviews.
Nehemiah Alban was busy with Thomas’s elephants, to which Constance had evidently taken a liking. The newspaperman overruled Thomas’s original plan to facilitate their retirement, instead granting a parcel of parkland in the Bronx from his considerable holdings, from which they could be brought out as an entertainment for The Empire’s most special events.
Alban also arranged for a popular performer from down the street to pad her body and lead The Dancing Dozen, and her act was as big a hit as the good old city had ever seen—a very funny joke at the expense of all the truly fat women in the chorus line.
The ceremony and The Empire’s grand opening were all lovely and perfect and everything Thomas could ever have wished for. Thomas became the toast of the town before the evening ended. The lines to enter the pleasure palace circled around six city blocks and tickets for the vaudeville were impossible to get for the next three months.
And Thomas walked through it all like a dead man.
That night, he retired to his home—along with his wife and her servants. The ghostly manor had first been his haunt, and then, for a short time, become his and Evelyn’s nighttime hideaway. Now, it pulsed with the signs of someone else’s life. Laughter. Chatter. Heeled shoes tapping against wooden floorboards. Perfume clouding the air. Trousseaus being unpacked.
As his bride made herself well enough at home, Thomas retreated to the darkness of his study, with its unlit lamps and barren fireplace. The shadows matched his mood. He closed the curtains to shut out even the streetlamps.
This was his life now. An eternity of this empty room. The companionship of a woman he could never love and the well-earned hatred of the one he could never stop loving.
Eventually, the pain of it grew too much to bear. He glanced at the whiskey decanter on his bookshelf, the one he only kept for guests.
He uncorked it in one swift move. Not even bothering with the dusty snifters, he slammed back his first sip of alcohol in ten years.
That burn was the first time he’d allowed himself to feel all day. It was a delicious pain, one completely out of his control. Liquid self-harm.
He took another sip. And another. And then the sips turned into swallows which turned into glugs and by the time he resurfaced, he had no idea how many drinks he’d had. He only knew the decanter was empty.
On his wedding night, he did not retire to Constance’s bed. Instead, he waited for the sunrise in his office, letting the alcohol deaden the blow of his last, most bitter revelation.
He had spent most of his life lonely. Meeting Evelyn had changed that. She’d taught him the beauty of community, of companionship, of love.
It was appropriate, then, that failing her brought him back to that horrible first state. He had begun lonely, and he would die that way, too.
Except for the bottle. That would keep him company.
It was what he deserved.