A Proper Pursuit (2 page)

‘‘Violet . . . Violet. . . ?’’ I looked up when I heard Father addressing me. ‘‘Daydreaming again,’’ he muttered. ‘‘Kindly pay attention, Violet. Mrs. O’Neill has asked you a question.’’

‘‘Oh, pardon me. Would you be kind enough to repeat it, Mrs. O’Neill?’’

Maude’s smile may have appeared innocent to the untrained eye, but I thought I detected the proverbial ‘‘gleam of malice’’ as she said, ‘‘I understand that Herman Beckett has been courting you. He is such a fine young man, isn’t he?’’

‘‘Yes, ma’am. Mr. Beckett is certainly above reproach. But I would hardly regard our two Sunday afternoon outings to Dellwood Park as a courtship.’’

I searched for a way to change the subject. It seemed obscene to discuss my own courtship so soon after hearing the shocking news about Maude and my father. Old people had no business courting, much less getting married. But Maude seemed determined to engage me in a verbal tennis match. I knew the rules of polite conversation, but I lacked the will to play.

‘‘I happen to know that young Mr. Beckett is quite serious about your courtship,’’ Maude said, leaning closer. ‘‘I know his mother very well, and it seems that he is absolutely smitten by you.’’

She had lobbed the ball into my court, but I let it lay there. If Herman Beckett was truly smitten with me, he hid the evidence well. I longed for a suitor who would gaze deeply into my eyes the way the heroes in Ruth’s romance stories always did. Someone who would kiss my ivory fingertips and whisper endearing words in my ear. The beau in one story had even nibbled on his beloved’s earlobe. That didn’t strike me as romantic at all, but perhaps my imagination had been tainted by an adventure story I had read the same week that had featured cannibals.

‘‘Herman comes from such a fine family,’’ Maude insisted.

‘‘Yes, ma’am.’’

‘‘You would be wise to encourage him before some other girl snatches him up.’’

‘‘Yes, ma’am.’’

I had no idea what else to say. I wished Madame Beauchamps had spent less time teaching me the proper way to consume a dinner roll—
‘‘Delicately tear off one small morsel at a time, girls, and apply
butter to each individual piece with your butter knife’’
—and more time teaching me how to rid my life of scheming widows with romantic designs on my father. I had no heart for meaningless conversation after Father’s absurd news. I wished I were a child of nine or ten, like Horace and Harriet, who were expected to be seen and not heard.

After supper, good manners required me to play the piano for everyone’s enjoyment. Maude’s piano sounded as out of tune as a hurdy-gurdy, but I poured all of my sentiment into the music—and I had a great deal of sentiment that evening. If only a world-famous impresario would chance to walk down the street on his evening constitutional and hear my earnest performance and pound on Maude’s door, declaring that my song had touched his very soul!

‘‘Let her come with me,’’ he would beg. ‘‘Let me nourish her budding
talent until it blooms and flowers!’’ We would travel the world together,
and I would perform before the crowned heads of Europe. Later we would
be married, and—

‘‘It’s time to go home, Violet.’’ My father stood beside the piano, holding my wrap.

‘‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’’ I said dutifully as I rose from the piano stool. I scurried through the door as Maude lunged to embrace me.

‘‘I would like to know where Mother is buried,’’ I said as soon as Father and I started walking up the hill toward our home. ‘‘I would like to visit her grave.’’

‘‘Listen, Violet—’’

‘‘I know that everyone considers me fragile and frail, someone who must be protected from every unpleasantness in life. But I’m no longer a schoolgirl, Father. I’m a woman.’’

‘‘Yes, I’m well aware of that.’’ His voice sounded flat and emotionless. The village streets were too dark for me to see his face and discern if he was grieving for my lost childhood or if I had angered him with my demands. I plowed forward.

‘‘And you had no right to hide the news about Mother from me. I have every right to grieve and mourn her death, even if I haven’t seen her in years—’’

“She isn’t dead, Violet.”

“I should have attended her funeral, at the very least, and … w-what did you say?”

“Your mother isn’t dead.” He stopped, winded from the uphill climb.

I stared at him, stupefied. “Then how can you possibly marry Mrs. O’Neill?”

Father exhaled a long, slow sigh like a train releasing steam at the end of a weary journey. “Our marriage has been dissolved by the courts. Your mother and I are divorced.”

“But that’s so heartless! Marriage vows promise ‘in sickness and in health until death do you part.’ How could you even dream of abandoning Mother when she’s ill? That’s so cold and … and cruel … and—” He gripped my shoulders and gave them a gentle shake. “Stop the theatrics, Violet, and listen to me. Your mother was never ill. She left home of her own free will.”

“Never ill? Of course she was ill! She—”

He shook his head. “She hated her life with me, hated living in a small town like Lockport, hated being tied down. So I let her go.”

“That means … That means you lied to me?”

“You were a child. I thought at the time that it would be kinder to lie than to tell you the truth. But the fact of the matter is, she abandoned us.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said in a whisper. Then my voice grew louder and louder as my shock turned to anger. “If you admit that you lied eleven years ago, why should I believe anything you tell me now?”

“I’m sorry, Violet. I’ll show you the divorce papers when we get home, if you’d like, but I’m telling you the truth.”

I demanded to see them. We went straight into Father’s study the moment we arrived home, still wearing our cloaks. Father removed a sheaf of papers from his desk drawer. The top one bore the official seal of the State of Illinois, and I saw several sentences that all began with
Whereas
. Then I saw my mother’s name: Angeline Cepak Hayes. Beneath the printed type was her signature—bold, flamboyant.

Alive.

I remembered her then—the woman she had been long ago when I was very young, not the tired, sad woman who had gone away. Her dark, untamed hair, so like my own, had been a wild tangle of curls. I’d inherited my dark eyes from her as well. She had worn bright, silky clothing that had blazed with color, and I remembered how she had danced with me, lifting me into her arms and laughing as we whirled breathlessly around the parlor. She smelled like roses.

“I’m sorry, Violet,” Father said again. “I should have told you the truth years ago.”

I glimpsed a Chicago address beneath Mother’s name before Father whisked away the papers and stuffed them into the drawer. I stared at my father as if at a stranger as I struggled to grasp the truth.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I murmured.

He took a moment to reply, silently fingering his watch chain. When he spoke, his voice sounded hushed. “I’m sorry… . I think … I think I always hoped she would come home to us again.”

Chapter

2

I
couldn’t fall asleep that night. I had too much information to digest along with Maude’s indigestible mutton. My stomach ached in protest.

Father’s engagement to Widow O’Neill had shocked me badly. But to suddenly learn that my real mother hadn’t been ill all these years but had abandoned us to live in Chicago—I couldn’t comprehend it. My mother was a traitor, my father a traitor
and
a liar. Where did that leave me?

I had to stop Father’s wedding, of course. I’d always thought of the two of us as happy, living a quiet, comfortable life in our home on the hill overlooking the canal in Lockport.We had Mrs. Hutchins to keep house for us and cook our meals—wasn’t that enough for my father? How in the world could he expect me to share him with a stringy widow and her dreadful children, Homely and Horrid? I had decided I would secretly refer to Harriet and Horace by those more appropriate names. Yes, I must stop the wedding at all costs. But how?

I climbed out of bed and lit the gas lamp, then retrieved my journal from under my mattress and opened it to a clean page. I wrote
PREVENT FATHER’S MARRIAGE!!!
in bold letters across the top and underlined it three times, breaking the pencil point in the process. I found another pencil and numbered the page from one to ten.

What to do? What to do?

Perhaps with a little detective work I could prove that Maude had murdered her first husband and send her and her odious offspring to prison for the rest of their lives. Homely and Horrid had been accomplices—I was certain of it.

I wrote:

#1. Investigate Mr. O’Neill’s death,
then added:
(Re-read
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and Allan Pinkerton’s detective book
for inspiration.)

I spent the next ten minutes drumming the pencil against the page as I searched in vain for another idea.

When my head began to ache from thinking too hard, I turned off the lamp, climbed beneath the covers again with my journal and pencil, and pondered the second piece of shocking news I’d received: My mother had abandoned us.

For eleven years, I’d imagined Mother pining away in a stark sanitarium as she valiantly struggled to regain her health and come home to us. The scene always scintillated in dazzling light:
White hospital
walls, white sheets, white-clad nurses, and Mother in the middle of it all,
her skin as pale as alabaster, clothed in a frothy white nightgown. She
kept a photograph of Father and me at her bedside, and she wept with
longing whenever she gazed at it
.

Now, with three cold, blunt words, my father had shattered that ethereal image.

She abandoned us
.

It couldn’t be true. Why would Mother do such a thing? What was wrong with me that had made her decide to leave? I couldn’t recall being a demanding or difficult child, but perhaps my memory was faulty.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember what life had been like before my mother left us. Days and days would go by when she wouldn’t get out of bed—which surely meant that she was ill, didn’t it? Father hired a young Swedish girl who barely spoke English to take care of me during that time, and Mrs. Hutchins had cooked and cleaned for us for as far back as I could recall. But I remembered crying one day and throwing a temper tantrum because it was Mrs. Hutchins’ day off and I was hungry. I escaped from my Viking jailer and tugged on Mother’s limp arm as I tried to rouse her from her lethargy, demanding that she get out of bed and fix me some lunch. What I really wanted was for her to get dressed in one of her rainbow-hued gypsy dresses and whirl around the parlor with me, laughing the way she used to do. Had my tantrum driven her away that day? I wished I knew.

In the wee hours of the morning, after covering my diary page with dark, impassioned doodles, I realized that if I found my mother I could solve both of my dilemmas at the same time. She would see that I was a young woman now, a graduate of Madame Beauchamps’ School for Young Ladies and no longer prone to temper fits. Once I convinced her to come home, Father would have no reason to marry Murderous Maude. And if Mother still wouldn’t come home, I could escape from my father’s impending marriage by moving to Chicago to live with her.

But how in the world would I find her?

Getting permission to travel alone to Chicago would be my first hurdle. I would figure out how to find Mother once I arrived.

I remained in bed until eleven o’clock the next morning. When I finally did rise, I refused to write Maude a proper thank-you note for last night’s dinner. I also refused to speak to my father for an entire day.

I was sitting alone in the parlor after supper, reading a proper, boring novel, when Herman Beckett came to call. Herman was an earnest young man of twenty-three and my only suitor, so far. I hadn’t decided if I would allow the courtship to continue or not. Herman worked as a clerk for a shipping company, and on our first outing I made the mistake of asking him which commodities his company shipped and where he shipped them. His answer proved so long and boring that I actually dozed off for a moment. Madame B. would have poked me with her parasol for committing such a social
faux pas
.

“Good evening, Miss Hayes,” Mr. Beckett said upon arriving at our door. He bowed as if his dark, dreary suit was too tight and might split at the seams. “I was taking my evening constitutional and thought I would pay you a visit. We could get to know one another a little better—that is, if you’re free to accept callers.”

If he hadn’t explained his purpose, I would have guessed by his somber expression and sober attire that he was on his way to a wake rather than paying a social visit. I weighed the merits of my boring book against an hour spent with Herman and decided to invite him to come inside. Father came out of his study to chat with Herman while I fetched glasses of cider for Herman and me. My traitorous father could fetch his own cider.

When I returned, Father retreated into his study across the hall from the parlor, leaving both doors wide open, of course. It took only a few minutes of idle chitchat to discover that I had made a poor choice; Herman was even more boring than my book had been. I had to do something—and quickly—in order to stay conscious.