Decorum (6 page)

C
HAPTER
8

Francesca had nothing of the Miss Havisham about her, but, untouched and shrouded in dustsheets, the very personal chambers of her parents and brother threatened to upset the balance she had struggled so hard to achieve. The house’s other sixteen rooms had given ample vent for her energies. Lighting had been modernized and the new telephone hung in the back hallway. The kitchen had been refurbished and bathrooms overhauled with porcelain fixtures and black-and-white tile. The servants’ rooms, too, had been given fresh paper and paint, curtains and quilts. Eventually she could avoid them no longer. The time had come to go through the last of her family’s belongings to make the house ready to receive her new husband.

John helped her. Jurgen Lund’s manservant and head of the servants’ hall, he had moved with the Lunds from Denver to New York when Francesca and Oskar were children. He had dispatched the rescuers to the lake and sent the footman Harry for the doctor and the police on that awful day and knew better than anyone the devastation that followed in the wake of the Lunds’ deaths. He had kept the devastated household together, moving mechanically. Now, if she lost her nerve, John would keep her to her task.

Her parents’ honey-and-primrose bedroom felt otherworldly—the carved oak bedstead, the tall oak bureaus, the shaving stand, all hovering specters beneath their dust sheets. The Labradors, Coal and Chalk, obediently followed from room to room, their nails tapping on the parquet between the carpets, their acute noses sniffing at the fading scents beneath the coverings. Determined to vanquish the ghosts, Francesca tore away the sheets and turned out closets, bureaus, and trunks, separating clothing for charity, for the servants, and the few things she would keep. John followed behind her, lifting, moving, cleaning.

“I’ll keep these,” Francesca said as she fingered the beads on her mother’s bodices of black velvet encrusted with jet beads, plain blue-gray velvet, and blue moiré.

“I remember that blue one, miss, for the mayor’s reception.” Then, as if reading her mind, “Any of them would look well on you, if I may say so, miss.”

Three of her father’s flannel suits would become jackets for her, his neckties crazy-quilt pillows. Small personal items she chose for Maggie and Jerry, and for John and Harry and the cook, Mrs. Howell, and for her own maid, May. Her favorite items of her father’s would go to Edmund—a stunning gold pocket watch on a stunning chain, and two heavy gold rings—a signet and a deeply carved crest her father had used as a seal.

“John, I don’t believe I’ve ever told you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for the family these last four years. These can’t have been easy years for you. I’m very grateful.”

“You’ve said it many times,” he said with a slight smile.

“Have I? It seems to me I never say it enough.”

“It may seem so, miss.”

“It has been important to me that you’ve been here, to see to things. At nearly twenty-three—I was mature, yet immature in many ways. There are so many things I wish I could have done to shield you all, and make things eas . . .”

“You needn’t say, miss. I understand.”

Their progress was more rapid than she expected. Granted, a heap of questionables lay on the bed, but the worst was over. All had been excavated amid quiet reminiscences and even a little laughter.

In the week following, Francesca launched an assault on Oskar’s room. Fastidious in neither furnishings nor clothes, it was her brother’s exercise equipment that brought her low, so evident was vitality of a young life cut short. The rings and a punching bag still hung from the ceiling, the well-used tennis rackets displayed on the wall, the dumbbells, baseball bat, and golf clubs—somehow she would find a place for these. She felt where Oskar’s long fingers had molded the fabric lining of the boxing gloves and batted at the air, then turned her fury on the punching bag. When she stopped, her face was glowing and her arms were sore.
I could have used that punching bag at the Jeromes’,
she thought. The decision now was whether to leave it in this room or have it removed to her own.

Her father’s study was last. Might Edmund change this room with the cocoon-like oak paneling, its dark blue-papered ceiling strewn with gold-leaf stars and bordered with paper in patterns of gilt crenellation and Greek keys? So many men used their libraries as showplaces of masculine bravado for drinking, cigar smoking, card playing, and deal-making. Jurgen Lund’s library had been for work and study—a private haven for a gentle and private man. Francesca and Oskar had regarded it a privilege to share it, to read aloud to him or to study with him as he worked, times of quiet companionship. The trio would leave Sonia reading or sewing in her little butter-colored sitting room until the family assembled there for evening devotions.

The desk and bookcases had remained locked except for one bank of open shelves that held the well-loved and well-worn books—Shakespeare and Dickens, the great poets, classical mythology, Tolstoy and Caesar’s
Gallic Wars,
modern machinery, sports, religion, and science in English, Latin, German, French, and Norwegian. The massive desk had been specially designed so that Oskar and Francesca could study there, with specially made chairs and footstools. The desk and all the books would stay. She couldn’t imagine any man objecting to a fine collection of books.

Jurgen’s presence was everywhere as if he wanted to speak to her. She drew up her special chair and remembered how it was. Three gleaming white-blond heads bent over their work on a winter evening. Their father holding some small mechanical curiosity under the lamplight, explaining its intricacies and pointing to tiny parts with his pen, three pairs of gray-blue eyes straining to see. “Move, Oskar, I can’t see; your head’s in the way” and “Move yourself, silly, you’re just a girl,” she could hear them say and Jurgen’s gentle rebuke, “Let Francesca see, too, Oskar. Girls can know things.”

As Francesca unlocked drawer upon drawer she found to her amusement that this reserved, fastidious man was a pack rat. The drawers were crammed with small glass jars, old cigar boxes and pipe tobacco tins, tea tins, and matchboxes, all neatly labeled in Norwegian—broken jewelry pieces, lengths of watch chain, mismatched clasps, thousands of objects from a jeweler’s lens to a glass jar filled with nails, screws, nuts, bolts, and washers.

In the back of the center drawer, she found several packets of well-thumbed letters in Norwegian tied with blue ribbons. Francesca pulled two or three from their envelopes to look at her mother’s writing and the signatures, glimpsing phrases, spilling flower petals and carefully replacing them before tying the letters up again. She found another envelope in this drawer, and in it a folded paper containing two locks of baby-fine hair the color of tow, each tied with a white ribbon, and a longer, coarser, thicker white-blond curl. Across the paper in Jurgen’s neat, precise hand was written, “Sonia, Oskar, and little Frankie.”

The discovery took her breath away and tears, to which she had not yet given way in all this project, suddenly sprang into her eyes. She sat in her father’s chair, holding the locks of hair—her mother’s, her brother’s, and her own—the last physical remnant. Grief exploded inside her in wave after painful wave, purging and cleansing her psyche, until her sides and shoulders ached.

Exhausted and hungry, she rang for tea. She needed sustenance to complete her task—the largest and deepest desk drawer. Francesca turned on the desk lamp in the fading afternoon light, and over tea and sandwiches pulled several folders from the drawer and stacked them at one side of the desk. Page by page, she quickly grasped each account and determined that most of the business contained there had already been dispatched. Notes on subjects of interest, jokes and funny stories, and articles on current affairs, literary criticism, and psychology she threw away without regret and set aside the business files for more careful scrutiny.

As she came to the end of the drawer, a folder bearing the uninformative label “T.—E. F.” emerged. She laid it flat upon the desk and, the second half of her sandwich in hand, began to leaf through it as she had all the others. The first sheet was a page torn from a ledger, titled “J. K. Shillingford, Expenses” and whose first entry was listed as “$20—advance on expenses” and dated March 10, 1886. There followed several other entries, some for fees at a rate of eight dollars and fifty cents a day, others for reimbursements of direct expenses for transport and lodging and indicated a business journey to Baton Rouge and a place called the Felicianas in Louisiana.

Louisiana. A distant alarm bell began to ring in her mind at the mention of the destination of this Shillingford. Few Southerners were among their family acquaintances and none who had called Louisiana home. The engagement of Shillingford may, of course, have had something to do with business at the bank where Jurgen and Jerry were colleagues. Yet she had a sinking feeling. She dawdled over a dish of rice pudding, decided the tea in the pot had gone cold, and rang for more.

She was roused from her reverie by John’s appearance with the tea. As he quietly withdrew, she moved the ledger sheet to the left-hand side of the file. Next were invoices and an envelope filled with receipts, mainly railway ticket stubs and inn receipts and handwritten chits for meals that documented the ledger entries. Buried among the receipts was a business card presenting “J. K. Shillingford, Detectives” and an address on Bleecker Street. Loath to go on, she put down the envelope and began to pace, stalling over paintings and books.

When she could avoid it no longer, she came back to the desk and looked again at the folder. Four items of correspondence followed, each in its envelope, as was her father’s habit, to keep all pertinent dates together—the envelope’s postmark, the date upon the letter itself, and the date received, which he noted on all business letters. These she passed by and took up a short but more formal-looking document, typewritten, headed by the same name and address as on the card, with the addition of the title, “Contract,” and signed by her father and Shillingford. With increasing dread, she picked it up and read it.

C
HAPTER
9

Tracey couldn’t wait to see the expression on Nell’s face when he told her that Francesca had finally accepted him. He lulled himself to sleep the night before rehearsing what he would say, how he would look, even what he would wear to irritate her most. When he told her the next day, he thought Nell betrayed shock—that momentary widening of the eyes, the mouth about to form the words, “Oh, God,” and stopping just short of the “Oh.” She used the seconds it took to pour them tea to regain her composure. When she sank onto the chaise, her attitude unpleasant, he thought he had reckoned accurately.

Nell smirked and sucked playfully on a cigarette, and peered at Tracey through the haze of smoke with narrowed eyes. At ten-thirty in the morning she was unprepared for this visit. She was dressing and Anton had left for work only a half hour before. She lounged against several pillows, wrapped in her silk kimono with a throw over her feet. The hennaed hair piled on top of her head was neat enough, but her face was unpainted and sallow. In the glow of his triumph, she looked bloody awful to him.

“You certainly have a lot of gall, don’t you, now that the dirty deed is done?” she said, drawing on the cigarette. “You must think rather highly of yourself.”

It was true. He exulted in his achievement. He could scarcely believe it himself, his labors having been so long and fruitless. How much longer he could have acted the long-suffering lover he dared not speculate. The betrothal had given him renewed vigor with which he hoped to smooth out some of the more stubborn wrinkles in the complicated fabric of his existence. As much as he dreaded being married to Francesca Lund, the prospect of freedom from his dependence on Nell Ryder made him almost giddy.

“I did tell you that persistence would pay off,” she said.

“Are you trying to take credit for my good fortune?”

“You certainly couldn’t have done it without me.”

“And just how do you figure that?” he asked. He went over to the table where the breakfast tray had been laid out and helped himself to a piece of toast. He slowly, deliberately spread it with a gooey gob of marmalade and watched her out of the corner of his eye. She crushed out the cigarette in an art glass dish and took another from the silver box on the side table. She held it aloft before setting it in the perfect
O
that was her lips. He grinned and bit into the toast and crossed to Nell, put one knee on the chaise and bent across her to retrieve the silver lighter and lit her cigarette. She was watching his every move. He enjoyed these games with Nell—but only when he was winning.

“If I hadn’t urged you on and kept you in finery all these months you would have had to sneak back to New Orleans with your tail between your legs.”

“I do not sneak anywhere,” he said with mock indignation.

“No. That’s true. Sneaking doesn’t become you,” she said, drawing on the cigarette and tilting back her head as she exhaled. “You do like attention, don’t you?”

“When it’s the right kind.” Tracey chuckled and slowly licked the marmalade from his fingers, brushing the crumbs from his hands and examining the well-manicured nails.

“I suppose congratulations are in order.”

“You needn’t trouble yourself.”

“I might wonder where you got the money,” she began.

“What money?”

“The money for the ring.” She was allowing him no emotional latitude. “I suppose there is to be a ring, isn’t there?”

“You needn’t trouble yourself about that either, my dear Nell. As it happens, I was able to turn your small contribution around sufficient to acquit myself quite creditably.”

“Oh? Your game must be improving,” she said. He laughed at this. “Or you chose the right dog, or horse, or rooster, or
rat
for once.” Nell drew on the cigarette, expelled the smoke, and then ground it out—quite viciously, Tracey thought. She was irritable, like someone rudely rousted from a much-needed nap. “You certainly are strutting around like a peacock. And what of the peahen, or should I say the Chickadee? Is she happy?”

“Most assuredly. She was overcome by my generosity and good taste. The Magpie was enraptured, too, which reinforced the rosy picture of our forthcoming wedded bliss.”

“You may spare me the sentiment. I can picture it all quite nicely, thank you. What about money? I mean, how do you think you’ll be fixed?”

Tracey knew what lay behind the question: any hint of money in quantities sufficient to shift the delicate balance of their relationship. Nell liked dependents in all sizes and proclivities. She didn’t take kindly to any of them walking away under his own steam.

“I expect to do quite well. I’ll admit there may be an obstacle or two. I dearly wish that Jerome would leave matters well enough alone.” Tracey’s tone became more serious. “The Magpie clings to the old-fashioned method of running a family’s affairs and would like nothing better than for the Chickadee to leave all of those worries to me.”

“Nothing would suit you better.”

“Indeed, nothing would. Unfortunately, Jerome may be henpecked, but it doesn’t prevent him from having opinions or acting on them. Through his offices my beloved is not so pliable as she once might have been. It would have been so much easier if I could have—”

“Exerted your charm forcefully enough to get her to marry you earlier? Yes, she certainly was smitten when you first appeared, wasn’t she? However, there’s no sense talking about what might have been. You should be looking at today and tomorrow, darling, not yesterday. You may have the Magpie to champion your cause, but I think you should prepare yourself for some unpleasantness. Jerome won’t let go easily.”

“Since you have already taken credit for my present good fortune, what do you suggest for my future financial happiness?”

“You should try to get control of all of it, of course, darling. You may succeed, but I doubt it. Next best thing would be to get a large portion.”

“Your confidence in me leaves me speechless.”

“I know how touchy you can be when you don’t get your own way. You’re like a little boy. Women only like little boys when they’re adorable and need mothering, not when they’re spoiled and temperamental. If you’re not careful, you may find yourself sent to bed without any supper.”

Tracey felt the balance shifting again, out of his favor. Nell’s picture of reality did not conform to his ideal. Frustration began to rise inside him at the thought of the work involved in bringing Francesca to heel. Charm grew tiresome and Nell was right about his temper.
These women with their money,
he thought. Of all of them, Nell Ryder was the worst. Suddenly he felt as if he were no closer now to his goal of independence than he was before.
That’s ridiculous,
he thought. Of course he was further ahead. He was just casting his mind back to the happy thought of life without Nell when she interrupted his musings.

“I assume you’ll need money until the wedding. You certainly can’t let yourself begin to look careworn. We must make the little Chickadee proud, mustn’t we?”

His expression confessed as much. He would need Nell’s money.

“I do wish you could manage to buy things for her without my money. Oh yes, the ring. You did manage that, didn’t you? A hopeful sign.”

“The most hopeful sign,” said Tracey, “is that a year from now you won’t have to worry about my buying anything that isn’t purchased with my own money. Until then, my dear Nell, I expect we shall continue as we have always done.”

“What do you mean, ‘until then’? I expect to continue a good deal beyond that.”

 

“Now, what did you really want to see me about?” Jerry said. If she looked as sheepish as she felt, Francesca thought, he had exposed her motive.

The waiter had cleared away the plates and scooped the crumbs from the linen cloth. They were waiting for coffee and dessert. Francesca had asked Jerry to take her to luncheon to discuss business. Jerry seemed a little impatient at having been corralled in the middle of a workday when all her innocuous questions could have been dispatched at another place and without appointment.

“Jerry,” Francesca began, “do you remember when the Burnhams were married a couple of years ago? Freddy didn’t really have any money of his own, did he?”

“No. The Burnhams did have money at one time, and some property here and there, but nothing much to speak of anymore. They were—they are—very respectable people, though, with a good reputation. Freddy held up his end of it and got a good job, did reasonably well and proved himself reliable. In the end that was good enough for the Tomlinsons—at least for Rachel. Why?”

“They seem to be very happy, don’t they? They haven’t had many obstacles to overcome, aside from Mr. Tomlinson’s initial disapproval. I mean, the money part of it has worked out amicably, hasn’t it?”

Jerry leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other as if settling in.

“I believe Rachel and Freddy had a marriage contract worked out before they married, which probably left most of the control of the money in Rachel’s hands. It’s not uncommon, Francesca, and isn’t something you should be afraid to ask about.”

“I feel terrible even thinking about such a thing. You’d think I didn’t trust Edmund.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Of course I do.” She knew the answer was too quick the moment the words left her lips. Doubt had taken on a persona that hounded her since the discovery of her father’s file. It had always puzzled Francesca that she could have known Edmund Tracey for five years and yet he had betrayed to her so little about himself. He had given her no reason to doubt him in any aspect of their relationship; she had only concluded by process of elimination that the money must have been her father’s chief concern. Jerry’s scrutiny was at once unnerving and comforting.

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” He watched her and waited. “And your interest in marriage contracts is purely academic.”

“Yes,” she said, then hesitated. “No. No, it isn’t academic.”

“You shouldn’t feel bad about it, Francesca,” he said again. “Many women with fewer means than yours have marriage contracts. It makes sense to have financial arrangements worked out well in advance. If it’s any comfort, I think your father would have brought up the subject much earlier than this if he were here.”

“Do you think so?” That Jerry’s thoughts echoed hers brought small relief.

“I do. Marriage contracts come in all shapes and sizes, just as people do. There’s no reason that one such agreement couldn’t be worked out amicably between you and Edmund. You could choose to manage all your money and only give him money when he needed it.”

“An allowance? That sounds so humiliating.”

“I know it probably sounds like the harshest of your choices. If you have some measure of confidence in his ability to manage, but feel that his only problem is that he doesn’t have much money of his own, you might consider settling a sum on him—either in one lump or an annuity paid out regularly. Let him manage it while you control the rest.”

“That seems more fair.”

“Fair?” Jerry straightened, put one hand upon the table, and met her eye. “Seems more generous than most men of limited means deserve. If a man hasn’t discovered some way to earn a living, a sudden infusion of his wife’s capital won’t change him.”

“Maggie would think this whole discussion is ridiculous and unnecessary.”

“My dear, for everything that Maggie believes is ridiculous and unnecessary, I can produce at least three things she swears by that are equally ridiculous and unnecessary.”

Such a family discussion played out fleetingly in Francesca’s imagination. “No doubt, she thinks I should simply turn everything over to Edmund at marriage and let him have the entire management.”

“That can be done, too,” said Jerry, leaning back and folding his hands in his lap, “if you wish it.”

She hesitated. “I don’t think I do wish it. In fact I’m sure I don’t.”

The arrival of cake and coffee gave her time to gather her wits. She reproached herself for not having pressed Edmund about money and family, particularly early on when these subjects might have been less volatile. Having come this far in seeking Jerry’s counsel, she could only continue.

“What’s happened, Francesca?” Jerry asked sternly. “What prompted this?”

“I’ve been going through Father’s study. I wasn’t sure about the business papers he had locked in his desk. I almost threw them out wholesale, but then I decided to go through them all myself and consult you on anything I didn’t understand.”

“Sounds reasonable. What did you find?”

She didn’t answer him immediately, but worked at the cake and took a sip of coffee as if to clear her head. Jerry stopped, fork poised in midair, and looked at her.

“Something serious?”

“Apparently Father was having Edmund investigated. Nearly five years ago now.”

She could almost hear a hundred questions rattling through his brain as Jerry allowed an interval for cake and reflection.

“I’m not surprised,” said Jerry, with forced nonchalance, she thought. “You were young when you first met, you know, and very passionate about young Edmund, if I remember rightly. He was certainly paying a lot of attention to you, even then. If there had ever been an understanding . . .”