Chapter Ten
Ten
On the following morning, Henry felt ready for the excursion to the planetarium.
He had slept from seven p.m. the night before to seven a.m., which had shocked him.
Ordinarily, he had a propensity for insomnia.
Rose pointed out that he really hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before that, and reminded him that the time travel had made him dizzy.
After they left the apartment building, she led him to the corner and pointed at a bench covered with a small roof. “Here’s where we wait for the bus. Which is, like, a big car with lots of passengers.”
As they waited, Rose asked him about his mother, who had died giving birth to him, and seemed glad to learn that his much older sisters were still alive and happily settled with children.
She asked him about how his father died, and when she learned it had been after a long bout of consumption, she pointed out that expected deaths were still difficult.
He learned that her mother had died when Rose had been twenty, of cancer, but her father had been killed years before that, in a road accident. Henry expressed his condolences again. He did not say that he never would’ve guessed such a lively lady had such a tragic past.
“Thanks. Ryan and I miss them a lot,” she said. “They really loved each other, too. They got engaged after seeing each other for three months!”
“Is that unusual?” Henry asked. “I courted Charlotte for two before proposing to her, and we were wed the month after that.”
Her pretty mouth fell open. “That’s so fast! And it’s not much time to plan a wedding.”
“There is not much to plan, is there? We obtained a special license from the archbishop in London, and set a date at the parish church. It should have been sooner, but one of my sisters and her husband insisted on attending, despite living far away.”
She tilted her head. “How many people came to your wedding?”
Henry counted them on his fingers. “My other sister and her husband, a neighbor with whom I had attended Eton, Charlotte’s brother and his wife, and her parents.”
She looked astonished. “Why so small?”
The question struck him as silly. “Seven witnesses are surely enough. When the Duke of Devonshire married Lady Georgiana Spencer, there were only five.”
“Huh.” She shook her head. “Here and now, people usually have at least a few dozen people. Some of them have a hundred, two hundred guests.” She grinned, evidently enjoying his expression of horror. “And they all go to a fancy party afterward.”
“A breakfast, you mean,” Henry prompted.
“Uh, it’s usually in the afternoon, or the evening, like Emily and Griffin’s.”
“But at that hour, do not the newlyweds wish to be alone?” The words escaped his mouth before he realized how suggestive they were. “For private discourse,” he clarified.
Her lips curved upward. Really, he had to stop staring at her lips. They were perfectly ordinary. On the full side, perhaps. And they looked very soft…
“Private discourse,” she teased. “I never heard it called that.”
He never had to worry about scandalizing Rose. She would outdo him at every turn…while making heat course through his veins like molten gold.
It was her fault he kept imagining her in his bed—or hers, given that he had no bed here. Her naughty words and immodest dress were to blame. Not to mention her frank and open manner, and the playful look she sometimes had in her blue eyes.
No, not her fault. Nobody compelled him to stare.
And the rational part of his mind, which he had lately realized was not nearly so dominant as he had assumed, acknowledged that she was making no conscious effort to seduce him.
Despite her love spell, when he’d said he wanted to go home, she’d accepted that.
He was the one who could not stop thinking about her spectacular breasts and what he might do to them…her mouth and how she might employ it on him.
“Anyway, I wish I could’ve known your wife,” she said sincerely. “I know I would’ve liked her.”
“Yes,” he said absently. “Rose was truly exceptional.”
A strange look came over Rose’s face. “Charlotte,” she said.
“What?”
She gave a little shake of her head. “Nothing. You said Rose instead of Charlotte.”
How mortifying. Prickly heat rose on the back of his neck. “Ah,” he said stiffly, while frantically searching for an excuse.
“Everybody does that sometimes,” Rose said with a wave of her hand.
The so-called bus pulled up with a hiss and a cloud of noxious fumes.
She had told him it would be large, but as they boarded the vehicle, its size still shocked him.
Once they were on their way, he marveled at the driver’s adroitness as she sped down a broad street, darting in and out between other rushing cars.
They disembarked on a street where buildings in the near distance stood taller than Henry could’ve ever imagined, some of them made of glass and steel, glinting in the sun. Henry paused for a moment, staring up at them.
He asked Rose, “Can we go in one of these buildings, and go to the top?”
She grinned. “Yes! But you should go to the tallest one.” She pointed north. “See the black one, with the poles on top? That’s the Sears Tower. Well, officially, Willis Tower. We need to buy tickets in advance, though.”
“Have you been up there?”
“Yes, but it’s been forever. I’d love to do it again.” She was being very obliging, seeing to his clothing and footwear, and arranging tours of her city.
“The planetarium is about a mile in this direction,” she said, pointing. “Unless you want to take another bus?”
Henry looked around them. The streets seemed to form vast plains of concrete.
Several orange-and-white-striped barrels stood in a line on one side.
He’d always taken great satisfaction in understanding how things worked, from refracting telescopes to naval battle strategy. Here, he understood nearly nothing.
“Let us walk,” he said.
They passed on a bridge over long trains, then over a narrow river, and finally toward a tranquil turquoise sea that she identified as Michigan, one of the Great Lakes. Before too long, they reached a fair green park.
“That’s the Field Museum,” she told him, pointing to an enormous building on their right whose columns suggested a Greek temple.
“Is that where you are employed? And where my portrait hangs?”
“No, different museum. This one is for natural history. And there’s the Shedd Aquarium.
” She pointed to a similar grand building to the other side of them.
“They have giant tanks with octopuses—octopi—and sharks and sea otters and…let me think, what else?” She tapped her fingers on her lips as Henry stared at her, astounded.
“Beluga whales, and penguins, and every kind of fish you can think of.”
“But it is impossible to keep all of these in a building,” he protested. “They all need different climates, different diets.”
She shrugged. “They’ve got it figured out.”
“Can one go inside the building and look at them?”
“Of course!” She beamed at him. “That’s what these places are for. Oh! And you have to see the Museum of Science and Industry.”
Henry found himself gaping at her again. “How many museums do you have?”
“Oh, lots of them. There’s one not far from my apartment, for Mexican art.
And there’s a writers’ museum, and not far from here, there’s one for military history.
” Henry’s curiosity was piqued anew, but she wrinkled her nose.
“No, wait. They moved that one. But the Museum of Science and Industry is huge. You can walk through a submarine…that’s like a battleship that travels underwater, that people lived in for weeks at a time. ”
Henry’s boyhood fascination with battleships surfaced in his mind. “I should like to see it.”
“It’s pretty cool to tour. They used to have a giant heart that you could walk through, too.” He must’ve looked mystified, because she explained, “A model of a human heart, like twenty feet tall. And when you were inside it, it sounded like it was beating.”
Henry raised his eyebrows. “That would be a remarkable experience.”
Rose sighed. “It was. But they destroyed it.”
“Why would they do such a thing?”
She shook her head. “Maybe they thought it was old-fashioned? They broke it up in pieces and threw it in the garbage! I know this is crazy, but I felt sorry for it, you know?”
Henry gave her a sideways glance. “But it did not have emotions.”
“I think like that sometimes,” she said, waving her hand.
“Once, when I was a kid, my mom started crying because the coffeemaker didn’t work anymore.
She was upset about other things. But I was little, so I started thinking, did the coffeemaker have a personality or something?
” She smiled. “And hey, as an adult, I met a stone statue with a personality, so I wasn’t totally wrong. ”
“The coffeemaker was just a coffeemaker, I presume,” he said. Rose had a similar device in her kitchen.
“It was. But I didn’t want my mom to cry, so I told her we’d get a new one, and the spirit of the old one would go into the new one, just like my spirit had gone into my new body.”
That brought Henry’s busy mind to a halt. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh. I kind of believe in reincarnation. Do you know what that is?”
He considered this for a moment. “Like Pythagoreanism?”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“The great mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras believed that the soul was enshrined in one human body after another, until the soul was perfected. Do many people believe that now?”
“Not really. Not in this country, anyway. But I always did. As a little kid, I’d talk about how I used to be a grown-up pretty lady. I had memories of it…but they’re gone.” She had a faraway look in her eyes now. “It’s like a dream, where you forget once you’re wide awake.”
“Perhaps you did dream it, and confused it for a memory.”