Chapter One #2
When they reached the Astor, Julia followed Michael toward a table of three men and one woman. When the woman turned, and Julia realized it was Florence North, a Barnard senior, she stopped in her tracks. Upperclassmen were terribly hard on “freshies” who broke the rules.
Miss North cupped her hands and called out, “Don’t worry, I’m not a snitch!”
Julia laughed, and feigned wiping her brow.
They made room for the newcomers, and Michael introduced Julia.
“Seaborne, I never thought to see a scapegrace like yourself with such a charming-looking young lady,” Michael’s friend George Atlee said.
Michael leaned back and looked at Julia appraisingly, as if just noticing her. Julia sat up straighter and raised her eyebrows, awaiting a compliment.
“Splendid frock, Jules. You do look fetching.” He looked at his friends and added, “Don’t be fooled by those blue eyes. She once threw a dead fish at me.”
“The fish was not thrown, but catapulted,” Julia said. “And it didn’t even hit you. Besides, you deserved it for being in league with my older brother.”
Naturally, an explanation was demanded, so Julia told them about the summer idyll she and her friends created on an island off their coastal Maine summer community, Haven Point.
Julia was ten at the time of the incident Michael mentioned.
When the girls saw the boat sailing by, close to the shore, they knew it was a spy mission.
Julia’s stuffy older brother and his friends were forever trying to figure out what they were up to.
The girls ran to the beach, filled their skirts with whatever they could find, loaded the catapult, and let loose their arsenal.
“You girls built a catapult?” Mr. Atlee interrupted.
Julia raised a finger in correction. “My parents’ caretaker built a catapult. And a lookout tower. In hindsight, I believe he was reliving his own childhood.”
“It sounds just like the Liberty Island books,” Florence said, admiringly.
Michael and Julia exchanged an amused glance. “Funny thing about that,” Michael said. “Julia’s aunt wrote the Liberty Island books.”
“And Michael’s mother illustrated them,” Julia added.
Florence’s eyes went wide. “I adored that series! Were they based on you, then?”
“Very loosely! We never saved passengers from a wrecked ship, or faced down sharks, or anything like that,” Julia said.
She was proud of her aunt’s books, and of the island that inspired them, but it felt boastful to bring up the subject herself.
Michael never hesitated, though, and she invariably enjoyed the reaction.
When Michael and his friends fell into conversation about the Columbia rowing team, Florence turned to Julia. It turned out she was born in Boston, too, but her family moved to New York when she was in high school.
“They’d never have let me attend Barnard if we didn’t live here,” Florence said. “How did you convince your family?”
“That wasn’t the first hurdle!” Julia said.
“First I had to persuade them to let me go to college at all. Once they were convinced I was serious, I conspired with my aunt. She went to Radcliffe, where I couldn’t have gotten in on a bet, but she knew some high-society Barnard alum, who wrote my parents and told them how respectable it was. ”
“And how closely they keep an eye on their students,” Florence teased.
“Precisely,” Julia replied primly. “I believe her exact words were ‘Our girls are never, ever at the Astor when they’re meant to be at a violin concert.’”
Florence laughed, and repeated her vow not to snitch; then the orchestra returned from a break. Julia enjoyed a turn on the dance floor with Michael, and another with Mr. Atlee, after which Michael pointed at his watch, and Julia reluctantly bade everyone goodbye.
“I feel like an infant,” she said with a sigh, as Michael walked her toward Morningside Heights.
“I am fairly certain they did not see you in that light,” Michael said. “In fact, I should ask if you are keeping your vow to remain unattached, as I think Mr. Atlee was quite interested.”
“I remain determined.” Julia tried to sound resolute.
She had told Michael at the beginning of the term that, having miraculously been admitted to Barnard (a beneficiary, she knew, of the school lowering standards to attract girls from outside New York), she was determined to see it through, which meant no romantic entanglements.
She did not feel the need to mention that a certain Pelham Stewart might have challenged that notion. After all, she still had not even met the man.
An hour later, Julia sat opposite her dearest friend, Louisa Murphy, drinking cocoa by the little fireplace in the living room of their suite.
At barely five feet, with a smattering of freckles over her nose, Louisa looked almost like a child.
Their classmates made that common mistake at first, treating Louisa like a younger sister, but they quickly learned that she was more like a wise aunt.
It was her stillness, the way she had of training her clear green eyes on you and listening so carefully.
Louisa was terribly funny, but with her fine Irish wit, she said a great deal with very little.
Louisa, an orphan, had always been sickly, and when she was eight, a social worker brought her to Haven Point for the fresh air her doctors recommended. She and Julia had spent every summer together since.
“How was it that you went out with Mina and ended up with Michael?” Louisa asked.
Julia knew Louisa was wary of Mina, so she answered carefully. “The party was crowded and smoky. Michael happened to be there, so I left with him.”
They had met Mina a few days into the semester when she appeared at their door, swished in, and flopped into the wingback chair.
Rather than the standard-issue ankle-length black skirt and white shirtwaist, Mina had worn a gray skirt in some flowing material, a blouse with kimono sleeves, and an Egyptian scarf wrapped around her head.
“I’m in hiding, and you duckies looked like fun. I’m Mina Ellis. What are your names?”
They introduced themselves; then Julia asked what sent her into hiding.
“I fear I irritated my roommate, Miss Marvin,” Mina said, feigning a sorrowful expression.
“What happened?” Julia asked. Isabella Marvin was the only girl on their floor whom she could not abide. She suspected it would not be a hard task to annoy her.
“She was putting up more dried flowers, and I happened to mention that I thought it was an odd custom.”
“Oh, my!” Julia laughed. Isabella was very rich, very pretty, and—if the row of dried flower arrangements hanging from their curtain rod was any indication—also very much admired.
“But it is odd, is it not? A beau gives one flowers, alive and fresh with scent. They shrivel and die, then one smashes them between the pages of a book or hangs them upside down. I merely said it struck me as an inapt metaphor, all this desiccated vegetation.”
Mina shrugged, as if she had just been innocently commenting rather than firing a shot directly at Isabella’s considerable ego. Even Louisa had to laugh.
After Mina swished out the door again, Julia slumped into the chair she had just vacated.
“Oh, she is just how I want to be—so languorous and sophisticated. Like a cat!”
“You want to be … languorous?” Louisa was clearly straining to hold back laughter.
“Yes!” Julia closed her eyes and waved a lazy hand. “Languorous, with an air of mystery that makes people burn to know my hidden secrets.”
“Well, all right, then.” Louisa shrugged.
Julia knew Louisa, who did not have a particle of envy in her, was not jealous of Mina.
She had merely noticed that Mina was a rather elusive sort of friend, and she did not like Julia being treated cavalierly.
Julia also knew that Mina was not terribly reliable, but Mina had told Julia a great deal about her dreadful mother and her sad childhood, which Julia felt at least partially explained her erratic ways.
Louisa was not privy to any of this, as Mina had shared it in confidence.
“By the way, I mentioned to Michael you made me join basketball because I’d become obnoxiously restless.”
“Did he find that hard to imagine?” Louisa raised an eyebrow.
“He called it Newton’s fourth law: ‘Julia Demarest must move.’”
Julia’s effort to become more Mina-like had mostly consisted of avoidance of any activity that seemed too “college girl.” Louisa took it in stride, as she did all of Julia’s fancies, until one rainy afternoon in early November.
They were in the living room, Louisa doing homework at her desk, while Julia sat at her own, trying to disentangle two necklaces. She let out another exasperated groan. “I swear this one necklace is a predator! It eats all of the other ones.”
Louisa smacked her pencil on her desk. “If you don’t join the basketball team and get some exercise, I’m moving out.”
“You don’t mean that,” Julia scoffed, still struggling with the knotted chains.
“I know you wish to adopt the blasé attitude of a serious intellectual, but you are not making allowances for your nature. You are not a house cat, Julia. You are a sheepdog.”
Julia finally looked up, aghast. “A sheepdog!”
“Or a collie, if you prefer,” Louisa continued, unapologetic. “Any of those intelligent breeds that eat your furniture if you don’t work them hard enough.”
Julia paused for an outraged moment and then began to laugh. “We have been in this dormitory for more than a month, and I have not consumed so much as a table leg!”
Julia could not be angry. Louisa took Julia’s desire to shed her patrician Back Bay skin and remake herself along more intellectual lines with the same equanimity she had Julia’s childhood aspiration of becoming a pirate or a smuggler. Her concerns were purely practical.
“Well, just as you must move, I must sleep,” Louisa said now, rising from her chair. “I have to work tomorrow.”
Louisa’s professional ambition was to help poor, wage-earning women, but she was pursuing a teaching certificate as a backup. Given that she’d already landed a part-time job assisting a labor expert at a foundation, Julia knew she’d never need her backup.
Once Louisa was in her own room with the door closed, Julia grabbed the blanket off the back of the divan, dragged a chair to the window, opened it, and sat with her chin resting on her hands. (Louisa was accustomed to Julia hanging out of windows, but she objected when it was below freezing.)
Julia loved their view of Milbank Quadrangle.
During the day, she watched girls walking arm in arm, or sitting on a bench reading, or listening to the noontime stump speakers.
At night, she liked to look out at the inky darkness.
The breeze was from the west this evening, and it carried a briny smell, and occasional sounds from the night boats on the Hudson.
She could hear the city, too, another layer of sound, comfortably far off.
Julia’s sociability and innate buoyancy fortified her against lingering disappointment. “A hummingbird,” Mr. Atlee had called her this evening, having observed her turning from one person to another, eager to catch all the interesting and amusing things people had to say.
Julia’s tendency to exist in the present was not well suited to achieving her goals, however. She was determined to be more deliberate and felt it was time to consider where things stood.
Her first months at Barnard had mostly been wonderful.
Julia was awed by her brilliant classmates and loved being on intimate terms with girls so different from those she knew growing up.
They often piled into her and Louisa’s suite, lounging on the divan or among the downy pillows on the floor while Louisa fixed something in their chafing dish.
But while Julia had dreamed about such “dorm room spreads,” she had imagined debating interesting intellectual movements.
In reality, they chewed more on fudge and Welsh rarebit than ideas.
To realize their ambitions, her classmates had to do far better in school than the men, which left little time for causes.
Julia hoped to find stimulating conversation at the Suffrage Club, but when she tried to join, she learned they did not even allow freshmen.
From the first, Julia sensed that Mina Ellis could be her ticket to the smart set, so she was disappointed when she moved to an apartment a few blocks from campus.
“It was a nice experiment, living in Brooks Hall, but doomed to failure,” Mina had said. “I’m a terrible college girl, not up for all these dorm room shenanigans.”
When Mina approached Julia after botany class one day and asked if she’d like to skip the stringy meat in the lunchroom and have a bite at a nearby restaurant, Julia accepted eagerly, and their friendship was launched.
Julia was flattered that the most fascinating girl in their class had taken an interest in her, and when Mina landed a job at The Current, it seemed to validate her instinct that Mina was in the thick of the intellectual and artistic movements that she found so alluring.
Still, progress was lagging. Julia had to peg away at her studies, just to keep her head above water, and her hopes for this evening had not been realized.
Mina was her only real connection to the smart young intellectuals bent on changing the world, and as Louisa pointed out, she was not terribly dependable.
Julia closed the window with a defeated sigh, but as she got ready for bed, she scolded herself.
Where is your initiative? She had always despised being at someone else’s mercy, and not all avenues to stimulating conversation required Mina’s unreliable patronage.
It took little time to hit on an idea. The Suffrage Club!
An advantage of Julia’s hummingbird nature was that she had gotten to know just about everyone in her class.
If anyone could start a movement to challenge the Suffrage Club’s silly prohibition of first-year girls, she could.