Chapter Twenty-Six. Rose
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ROSE
Despite the summer sun streaming onto the porch, MR. Harrow looks dour—gloomy—funereal in his charcoal suit and pomaded dark hair.
As Grace trudges away, my anger shifts to trepidation.
I’ve never been alone with her father. And there’s something odd about the way he’s looking at me. Like he knows something I don’t.
Does he think I’m fast because I kissed Cooper on our first date? It’s not the twenties anymore, for heaven’s sake! And there were petting parties and champagne speakeasies even then, though I can’t imagine he ever partook.
“Grace was content enough before you came along,” he declares.
Grace, content, here? With Stanley? I’d laugh if it weren’t infuriating how little he knows—or cares to understand—his own daughter.
“Grace can think for herself.” Why do he and Stanley continually underestimate her? “She’s smart enough to know she can do better than a man who talks down to her.”
She can do better than a guy like Stanley—or like her father. Mr. Harrow catches the implication, and his pallid cheeks go red.
“I find it curious that you’ve become so invested in Grace’s happiness,” he says. I don’t know why it’s surprising; Grace is my friend. “But I can assure you, Stanley will provide for her. He’s an only son; he’ll inherit his father’s drugstore one day. People will always need a drugstore.”
Is that all he thinks his daughter is worth? A small-town drugstore? “But she doesn’t love him! And he’s a dolt. She’ll be miserable. She could—”
Harrow interrupts me with a churlish little chuckle.
“You may not find him intellectually stimulating, but Stanley will keep a roof over Grace’s head and food in her belly.
I have lived through two world wars and a depression, and I can assure you that that matters a great deal more than love.
My daughter cannot afford your ideals, Miss Thorpe. ”
“But Grace is dead clever. She could provide for herself. She could go to college!” I make an effort to stand up straight. Arguing with Mr. Harrow feels like running headlong into a brick wall. “During the war, women worked all sorts of jobs.”
“The war is over. A woman’s place is in the home, as it should be!
” He huffs. This is clearly a sore point.
“I will provide for Grace until she marries, then Stanley will. Grace has never mentioned college … Is this really about what she wants?” He raises his thick eyebrows.
“I assume that you plan to attend college, Miss Thorpe?”
“Yes, sir. Barnard. In New York.”
“And do you plan to find work afterward?”
Somehow he’s turned the tables, and I’m the one fumbling for answers.
College is simply what girls in my circle do.
Some see it as a way to meet men and obtain their MRS degrees; others want to study art history or the classics or French for a few years.
I see it as an opportunity to live in New York City, to meet all kinds of people and have adventures that will inform the novel I dream of writing someday.
I’d never tell Mr. Harrow that and risk having him throw it back in my face as the silly dream of a spoiled child.
“I want to study the classics,” I say instead. “Perhaps I’ll work as an editor at a publishing house.”
He lets out that ugly, condescending chuckle again. “Learning for learning’s sake. A lofty goal! Granted, your father has the money to waste.”
“If money is the issue, Father could endow a scholarship,” I suggest.
“No. Your father can raise his children as he sees fit,” Harrow says. “Or appoint a host of nannies and aunties to do it for him. Grace and Cooper are my children, and it is my duty to raise them as I see fit.”
I grit my teeth. It’s true that Father raised us with a sort of benign neglect, leaving the important bits to Nanny. It was lonely. I wish I knew my sisters better; I wish my father occasionally chose us over his work or his latest wife. Still.
“I don’t think we’ve turned out so badly,” I say, my chin high.
Harrow laughs far longer than is polite.
“I beg to disagree. You are too bold by half. You do not respect your elders. You stick your nose into matters that don’t concern you.
” I open my mouth, stung, and he holds up a hand to forestall my argument.
“Hush! I am not finished. You are defiant, stubborn, and argumentative. You lack humility, modesty, and—if what I witnessed the other night with my son is any indication—chastity. Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
For one long and horrifying moment, his blazing eyes boring into mine, I honestly fear he will snatch me up and turn me over his knee.
Then he smirks. “I’ve known girls like you before, Miss Thorpe.” At first, I assume he means wayward girls and I bristle. I’ve kissed and petted a little, but only above the waist! Then he clarifies: “Meddlesome girls. I think it’s high time for you to head back to Washington.”
The nerve of this man! Giving me an account of all my faults, and now trying to run me out of town! I glare at him, any veneer of politeness forgotten. “We’ll be here until my father and his wife return from their honeymoon. Perhaps until the Grand Opening.”
The hotel is scheduled to open on Labor Day weekend.
Harrow’s voice goes silky. “Plans can change, can’t they?”
Unease pricks down my spine. “Ours haven’t.”
“But they could. Given the right incentive.” He reaches into the inner pocket of his charcoal jacket and pulls out an envelope. There’s something showman-like to the gesture, as though he’s playing a royal flush. He holds the letter out to me but maintains his grasp on it.
The penmanship is familiar. How many school papers have I read in that swooping, round, almost childlike hand? I feel a rush of affection. I knew Clara wouldn’t stay angry forever.
Then confusion washes over me. Why does Mr. Harrow have my letter?
I grab for it. “That’s mine!”
He lifts it out of my reach. “And what interesting correspondence it is.”
Why is he so smug? What has Clara written? Perhaps she isn’t apologizing after all; perhaps she’s doubling down on what she thought she saw between Thea and me.
Harrow is watching me. I rearrange my features into a mask of calm.
He pulls the letter from the envelope, ostentatiously clears his throat, then begins to read: “‘I still think it was absolutely rotten of you to go off with Cec like that when you knew I’d been pining after him all year! But I was in the wrong, too. I shouldn’t have said those things about Thea when I found her in our room.
You know I was only looking out for you, don’t you, Rosie?
You, who are so dear and so kind—even if you did accuse me of snoring!
Anyhow, I’ve just heard that Thea is engaged to that friend of her brother’s, Will Schuyler—she’s been showing off her diamond all over the Poconos this week—a bit tacky if you ask me!
—so obviously those silly rumors about her and Charlotte were just that: rumors!
She’s not a lesbian at all! I hope you’ll forgive me for being rude about your friend, Rosie, and I’ll forgive you for what happened with Cec, and of course we’ll room together again this year, won’t we? ’”
Harrow folds the letter and peers down at me. “So tell me, Rosie, what was this Thea doing in your dormitory room?”
He makes my nickname sound obscene. It makes it all sound obscene.
I feel hot and shaky and sick, but I mustn’t let it show. He thinks he has the upper hand, but this letter isn’t proof. It suggests, then swiftly denies. Thea is engaged. Clara is on my side again.
“I don’t know what you mean. My roommate heard some silly, unfounded gossip about a girl at school.
An acquaintance who saw me home after an end-of-year party where I’d had too much champagne and done a bit of—what do the Brits call it?
—snogging, with a boy she had a crush on.
It wasn’t my finest hour.” I smile, a little bashful—I have to play this perfectly—better he thinks me dissolute than deviant.
“An acquaintance who’s gotten engaged, apparently!
What happy news. I’ll have to write and congratulate her. ”
“She’s beaten you to it.” With the air of a circus magician, Harrow pulls another letter from his pocket.
How long has he been dogging my post, hoping to find something incriminating?
I’m indignant till I recognize Thea’s messy scrawl.
It’s been over a year since I’ve gotten a note to meet her in the stables, but her handwriting is burned into my memory.
“I’ll skip the pleasantries, shall I, and get to the meat of it.
” Harrow scans the letter. “‘I’m writing to tell you the happy news of my engagement. I know this must seem awfully sudden. To tell you the truth, Mother and Dad found some rather scandalous letters from Charlie’—that would be the aforementioned Charlotte, I assume—‘and hit the roof. Dad said no daughter of his, etcetera. Never mind that he’s had an opera singer tucked up in a penthouse on the Upper East Side ever since I can remember!
It came down to I would accept Will’s proposal or I would be cut off.
If I were braver, I would have told them to stuff it.
I would have told them Will is a good friend, but I don’t feel for him one-tenth of what I feel for Charlie.
Or what I felt for you.’” I close my eyes in horror.
“‘But I’m not brave at all. I’m a coward who can’t imagine making it on her own.
So, our families had a lovely seven-course dinner at the Schuylers’ estate to celebrate Will’s graduation from Penn, and he asked me to marry him, and I said yes.
Father considers it a job well done. I hope you will be happy for me, Rose, and not judge me too harshly. ’”
Oh, Thea. My heart breaks for her.
Perhaps she needed to spill her secret heartbreak to someone, and thought I was the safest bet—but how could she be so reckless as to put it all in writing? I’ve never dared to write about her, not even in my own diary!
“Now,” Harrow says, shaking the letter in my face as though I’m a naughty puppy, “I want you to pack your things and go back to Washington.”
“Or what?” I say, through gritted teeth. My chest and neck feel prickly hot with anger. “I could speak to Auntie and have you canned right now for your insolence.”
He gives me an eely smile. “But you won’t, will you? Because if I go, so do Grace and Cooper and Martha.”
Damn him. He’s such a mean, miserable creature! I can’t leave the Harrows without a home or means to save my own skin.
“And I don’t think you want Auntie to know about this, do you?
” Harrow is practically salivating at my downfall, and it makes my blood boil.
“But that’s not my concern. Getting you away from my children, permanently …
that’s my goal. I don’t know what sort of twisted game you’re playing, whether the object of your affections is Grace or Cooper, but it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t listen to reason—if you’re not gone in one week’s time—I’ll show them these letters.
What will they say when they discover that the pretty girl with all her fine manners and her modern ideas is actually a disgusting deviant? ”
I hate him so much, I could burst. I’ve never hated anyone this much, not even Millie. My vision swims, and I grab for the porch column to steady myself.
When it clears, Harrow is backing away from me, his blue eyes wide. In one fist, he holds the crumpled letter from Thea. His other hand is touching his face. Someone’s scratched him.
I blink, my thoughts slow and muddy.
I glance down at my right hand. The nail on my middle finger is jagged and broken.
I scratched him?
He’s still backing away. When he gets to the bushes at the corner of the house, he turns tail and runs like the hounds of hell are chasing him.
Or like he’s seen a ghost.
What have I done?
What has she done?