Chapter Twenty-Four
I move like a wraith around my rooms. All solid substance feels vaguely foreign; even my own flesh feels as though it is no longer real, not part of me.
Flesh, after all, has betrayed me. I bathe, hating the too-sweet scent of the soap that Stanny gave me.
Scrubbing my thighs, washing away the stains, the taunting evidence of my brokenness.
I close my eyes and remain underwater for as long as my aching lungs can bear it and then a bit longer.
I am a carved-out casing, hollow and cored, the only thing inside me a dull and constant throbbing.
I’m glad my mother is not here. She’d know; she’d see my unraveling. Mamma. But she’ll be back in a few days. It’s as Stanny says: I must pull myself together before she returns. Before she, or anyone else, can sense that something deep within me has shattered.
I do as Stanny insists: I get myself to the theater for the next evening’s show. I feel a bit wooden, a bit tense, but I make my way through the steps, even my solo number, and the audience applauds as if they don’t notice anything too terribly amiss. They are all just happy that I’m back.
The girls are their usual bubbly selves backstage, and I do my best to smile and play the part of the Evelyn they all know.
I’m grateful that the makeup and costumes do their bit to hide me.
Only Dinah seems to guess something is amiss, holding me with a lingering look before she leaves for the night, but otherwise the evening goes off uneventfully.
Or at least, that’s what I’m thinking. But when Penny lingers beside the backstage door and grabs me on my way out, my hopes of getting through the night without incident are dashed. “Kid, everything all right with you?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, not meeting her eyes as she hooks her arm through mine.
“You seem…not your usual self.”
“I had a sore throat.” We emerge into the chilly night, and Penny pauses our steps. She’s staring at me, but I still won’t return her gaze. I wish I could—but to let her look into me might break me open all the way.
She keeps her pointed gaze fixed on me as she whispers, “You’d tell me. Right, Ev?”
“Tell you what?” I blink, fighting against the needling in my eyes.
“You’d tell me if there was anything wrong? If you needed my help?”
“ ’Course I would.” I shrug, sliding out of her arm, pretending to be distracted by the hoots and hollers of the men gathered all around.
But I can’t stop thinking about Stan’s words: You do know that every girl does it.
Does Penny do it? But to ask her would be to reveal that I did.
Or, at the very least, to open myself up to further questions.
No, I can’t possibly broach all of that with her. Not now, not yet.
It’s for that reason that I’m actually slightly relieved to see Stan’s cranberry-red auto waiting for me outside the theater. I kiss Penny’s cheek, tell her good night, and hop into the warm back seat. I’m less relieved, however, to see Stan seated inside. “Oh, hello,” I say.
“Hello, Kitten. Surprised to see me?”
I fumble for words to form some reply.
“It is my motorcar, after all. And chauffeur.” Stan offers me a playful wink. “Good show. I’m proud of you.”
“I didn’t see you in the theater.”
“I couldn’t make it tonight. But I heard from…I heard you did well.”
“Oh,” I say, turning away to look out the window. What, does he have spies reporting to him from inside the theater?
I don’t have anything further to say, but he does. “I thought I’d see you safely home. Get you some dinner ordered up from the kitchens. I promised your mamma I would take care of you.”
Now I pull my gaze from the window and look at him, incensed by the fact that he’s brought her up. “I doubt Mamma would approve of…you know….” I arc an eyebrow, but he doesn’t take up the thread of my words. It’s as though he wants me to say it. So I do. “Of what you did the other night.”
“What we did,” he corrects me, shifting in his seat. He throws a look toward the chauffeur in the front, and then turns back to me, his words barely a whisper. “Evelyn, darling, you’re absolutely right.”
I’m so surprised that he’s agreeing with me that I remain silent. He goes on: “Kitten, your mother would be so terribly jealous.”
“Jealous?” I nearly spit the word.
“Darling, it’s always been the three of us.
I’ve always taken care of you both. And I always will.
But now, well, this is something special that only you and I share.
” He leans his body toward mine, and I feel the instinctual urge to recoil.
Whether he sees that or not, I don’t know, but he narrows his eyes and flashes half a grin as he says, “Yes, she’d be green with envy. ”
I rip my gaze away, looking back out the window and the stream of lights and buildings that whir by. But I don’t see any of it. No, because my mind can’t stop seeing the image of his pale back beside me in the red bed. Mamma would be jealous?
“We can never tell her,” Stan goes on, his low voice filling the tense quiet. “We don’t want to hurt her, do we?”
Before I find any words to answer, the auto rolls to a halt. Stan looks out the window. “Ah, we’re here. The Audubon Hotel. It really is such a lovely establishment. You’re happy here, right? I’ll leave you to enter on your own, Kitten, now that I’ve brought you safely home. Is that all right?”
It’s more than all right. I nod, sliding toward the door as the chauffeur opens it, stepping out into a blast of cold night air and feeling as though I could weep with relief as I leave Stan behind me.
As much as I loathe the idea of agreeing with anything Stan has said, I do have to figure out a way to get myself back on an even keel before Mamma returns from Pennsylvania.
That’ll mean figuring out how to stop feeling this ache. Or, if I can’t stop feeling it, then I must at least figure out a way to tolerate it. To block it out until maybe, eventually, I will be able to forget it.
It’ll be the work, I tell myself, after a good night’s sleep and a long bath.
It’ll be keeping busy. Rescheduling the missed sitting with Mr. Willard for his marble bust and then taking home my fee.
Showing up at the theater each night and playing my part.
Painting my face and stepping into my costume.
Kicking and singing and smiling for the packed house.
Why should I weep? Weeping won’t bring my innocence back. Tears will do as little in this moment as they did to lift my father’s lifeless body from the dirt. Or put food into our empty larder.
To hear Stanny explain it, he’s given me a gift: he’s initiated me into adulthood. “It had to happen eventually, Kitten, somehow, someway. Shouldn’t it have been with me, who cares so deeply for you?”
He joins me for breakfast at the end of the week, on the day before Mamma’s return.
Sipping his coffee across the table, he eyes me with an appraising look.
Then he says, “Think of it this way: from the day we met, I’ve done nothing but give you gifts.
You were always thanking me, asking how you could ever repay me.
The champagne, the car rides, the piano lessons, the clothing, the home.
All of it. And I won’t stop. I’ll keep showering you with gifts.
This was the one gift you could give me in return.
I appreciate it so much, my darling. I really do. ”
I absorb all of this in a sullen silence, rolling it around in my mind, finding that I no longer have much appetite for the warm croissant I’ve just buttered. But Stanny interrupts my brooding. “Now, I have good news. I’ve secured us a very special invitation.”
I chew my bite of pastry but don’t taste much. Taking a sip of coffee, I notice Stan’s expectant expression, so I ask: “What’s that?”
Stan lowers his own coffee cup as a smile tugs on his lips.
It’s the look I used to love because it always meant he was about to spoil me with something delightful.
Now I don’t feel much of anything. His voice is tinged with enthusiasm as he leans toward me.
“I’ve secured for you an invitation to dance for Lina, er, Mrs. Astor. In her ballroom.”
Mrs. Astor’s ballroom? The place she guards with such unyielding snobbery?
“Lina’s a good friend of mine,” Stan hastens to add. “And it seems she enjoyed your work so much at the home of her rival that she’s agreed to hire you for the evening. To dance for her and her society ladies. She’d like a reprisal of your dance of the seven veils.”
“Salome,” I gasp. Why, for Mrs. Astor to follow in anything that Mrs. Vanderbilt has already done—she must have been impressed by my dance, indeed.
I lean back in my chair, just as the clock on the nearby mantel chimes. So Mrs. Astor has invited me into her ballroom. But only if I arrive as Salome.
I’ll do it, I decide. I’ll dance for these coddled society ladies. And like Salome, I will get what I want. Served up on a platter.