Chapter Thirteen #3
“No, Lucy,” Josh said decisively, as Hannah was about to demur, and though she had no intention of imposing, her heart sank at the finality in his voice.
“Gray’d find a way to stir up their baths, if I know him,” Josh said with a wry smile. “As long as he’s in the house, there’ll be chaos. If you want to talk, let’s all go to dinner, instead.”
“I couldn’t, I can’t…” Hannah began to stammer.
“We don’t mean to impose if you’ve other plans—but it would be such fun,” Lucy said eagerly. Then Josh put in, “No place fancy, I promise. If I gave my wife a chance to change clothes again, it’d be a midnight supper, and I’m starving.”
Hannah hesitated, and Gray asked quietly, “Have you another appointment? If not, would you come with us? I know it’s short notice, but we did plan to have luncheon together, and we stayed out way beyond that.
I can’t take you home hungry. Say yes, please?
After all, how else will we know which restaurant to recommend to Royal and Peggy? ”
She nodded, but taking a deep breath and all her courage, said clearly, “But I must get home early. I’ve work tomorrow, you know.”
“Hannah works in the theater,” Gray said easily, as they strolled on with his brother and his family, and Hannah missed her step as she did her next heartbeat.
He steadied her and then added, “I met her in Denver when she was on tour with the company of the fellow she works for, an entrepreneur, name of Kyle Harper.”
“No!” cried Lucy Dylan, stopping short and wheeling about to stare at Hannah.
Hannah had heard of people with violent antipathy to the theater, but having been brought up in it, had never come face-to-face with such censure before.
She trembled and raised her chin. Lucy’s face was flushed and her huge brown eyes were wide.
“Kyle!” she said, “I haven’t seen him in ten years.
Never say you work for him? But so did I!
I was his ‘Josephine’ in Pinafore,” she said, before she added, with a tilted grin, as she motioned to her grinning husband, “and although I was never as good as this fellow says, I must say, I think I wasn’t half-bad. ”
“And even the other half was pretty good—or anyhow, pretty,” Gray said, and won himself an indignant frown, and then laughter for it.
They parted company, with promises to meet again at the restaurant in an hour. Gray helped Hannah into the carriage, and then amid much waving, they drove away.
“Josh is right, if you stop at your place now, you know you’ll want to change something, and then something will have to be changed to match that, and so on, for quite a spell,” he told Hannah as they rode out onto Fifth Avenue again.
She had a moment’s unease realizing how well he knew women, before he went on, “You look perfectly fine, amazingly fine, in fact, to me. So shall we ride right down to the restaurant, and wait for them there?”
It was so simple to say yes to him, she thought with sorrow. But her day wasn’t over yet, so she looked up at him, smiled, and said, “Yes.”
Hannah wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or disappointed when they drew up in front of “ROEBLING’S FAMOUS BEER GARDENS”.
Because, she thought, as Gray leaped down from the driver’s seat in order to come around and take her hand to help her alight, she was either being accepted as an equal or condescended to, and she couldn’t be sure which it was.
Yes, Gray had told her all of his sister-in-law’s history on the way downtown, and Lucy Dylan had been in the theater.
But only a few weeks, and only because she’d been an orphan with a lovely voice and no other way to make her way in the world.
And she’d been in a Gilbert and Sullivan production, which was like playing in a symphony compared to what usually took place on the stage.
And that, only until Josh had lured her away—or, the unspoken, possible implication in Gray’s voice said—had saved her, by taking her as his wife.
Now, it was true that the Dylans couldn’t invite another two persons to dinner on such short notice, and Gray did seem to send the children into raptures that were hard to control, and which could be considered unseemly for strangers to see, Hannah thought.
But it may have been that the Dylans simply didn’t want her in their home.
It was also true that they weren’t dressed for Delmonico’s or even the Rathskeller, or any other elegant dining house.
But it didn’t always take hours to change clothes, and it was still very early for dinner.
And Beer Gardens on the Bowery were often patronized by the wealthy, as a lark—and Hannah could only hope she wasn’t being so, too.
It was a clean, cheerful place. The waiter’s aprons were spotlessly white, the sawdust on the scrubbed wooden floors was fresh, and the tables were all covered over by gaily checked red and white cloths.
The dance floor was circular, enclosed by a wooden trellis, covered over by artificial vines.
The band, all in German costume, were a merry lot of mustached fellows who played popular tunes for the customers to dance to.
Those patrons Hannah could see were both young and old, and all nicely, if not elegantly attired.
They could have been either millionaires, as the Dylan’s were, out for a different sort of night on the town, or simply shop clerks out to enjoy themselves as best they could afford to do.
“The sausages here seem to be popular,” Gray said nervously, watching Hannah’s face, wondering why she’d suddenly frozen over.
He saw her teeth fretting her lower lip, and noted the way her fingers clenched on the menu card.
“Maybe we should’ve gone to ‘monico’s, after all,” he said, thinking aloud.
“Wouldn’t have taken that long to change.
But Josh likes to relax on the weekends, he says he gets enough of society all week at work.
To tell the truth, I figured we’d check ‘monico’s out for Peggy and Royal, since everyone should go there once and the food’s superb.
But it always makes me uneasy, too. Well, a man can have money, but it takes a special sort of man to keep bragging on it, and that’s the sort that loves ‘monico’s best.”
Even as Hannah assured him she’d no desire to go to Delmonico’s, Gray thought of what he’d just said and suppressed a groan.
He couldn’t have said worse, he decided.
Since Lillian Russell had taken to displaying herself at Delmonicos, it had become as popular with theater folk as it was with the rich.
Maybe Hannah had been looking forward to it: then he must have sounded like a man telling a hungry friend he wouldn’t be able to have dinner with him because he couldn’t take a bite—he’d such an upset stomach because of the rich lunch he’d had.
Poorly done, he thought wretchedly, studying her downcast eyes with his own bleak blue stare.
“What? They’ve poisoned the sauerbraten, or did our waiter just die?
” Josh Dylan asked as he came to their table.
But as his lady seated herself and sent him a warning look, he added, suddenly oblivious to the nervous tension at the table, “Well now, then, let’s see what Oscar has on the carte tonight. I’m starved.”
They ordered, and Lucy Dylan told them merry tales of the children’s misadventures in the bath.
She’d just asked Hannah how Kyle was these days, and how he looked, when a tall, perspiring red-faced fellow with truly impressive waxed mustaches appeared at the side of their table, beaming at them, although his light blue eyes were anxious.
“Madam. Mister,” he said in heavily accented English, “Goot eaffenink. My pleasure to haff you here vonce more. But. If you vuld be so goot, if you vuld be so kind as to sink for us as you did last time? Zah fellows in zah band unt I vuld be pleased unt proud.”
“Wretch!” Lucy accused her husband as her color rose, “So that was what you were doing on the telephone before we left!”
“Ach! No, vee are not on zah line yet,” the fellow protested. “But,” he added with painstaking honesty, “if you vish to kail ‘Henry’s Gartens’ down the street, zey vill give us zah message qvick.”
Lucy laughed, and arose. “For such honesty,” she said, with a little bow, “and such flattery, I will.”
When the band stopped playing a two-step, Lucy took her place on the flower-decked dais with them.
She whispered to the leader, and in a moment, the opening strains of “Willow, Titwillow” from “The Mikado” was heard.
And then Lucy sang. And then Hannah understood that Lucy had certainly been in the theater, and could still be there if she wished.
For her voice was pure and true, and she felt all she sang, so her piquant face was alight with love as she did.
She wore an apricot silk gown, and though she wasn’t slim as a girl, she seemed to be, and her red-gold ringlets shone as did her eyes.
The truth was she was every inch a performer, and so her loveliness was both an illusion and a reality, in the best tradition of the stage.
The applause when she was done was tumultuous, and she bowed low as Kyle might do.
But when cries of “more! more!” were heard, she grew a mischievous grin.
And without asking the band to strike up a note, she clasped her hands in front of her waist demurely, threw back her head, and simply sang.
It was a sweet, sad, old country song, and needed no accompaniment but the sighs of her audience as they listened to her.
“When I was single,” she sang slowly and sweetly,
“Dressed in silk so fine.
Now I am married—
Go ragged all the time.
Lord! I wisht I was a single girl again!”