Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) (3 page)

“Papa!” Allison jumped up, still hugging herself, and stared down at her father. “It was nothing! We were just having fun—do you even remember what it’s like to have
fun?
”

“Your mother says—”

“Mother! Mother
hates
me!”

Henry glared at her, but she saw the flicker of his eyelids, the slight compression of his lips. He knows, she thought, and a wave of sadness swept over her. She hugged herself tighter, frightened by the realization. He knows. But he doesn’t care.

That meant she was alone. She must have always been alone.

Her knees felt suddenly weak. She sank down again onto the childish stool and stared helplessly up at her father. He said, “You’re not a child anymore, Allison.”

“No,” she said through a tight throat. “I’m not.”

He pulled down the corners of his mouth and stroked his chin as if contemplating the gravest of thoughts. “You will learn one day,” he said heavily, “how difficult it is to be a parent. It is a terrible responsibility.”

“What do you want from me, Papa?”

“I want what all fathers of our class want.”

“Our
class?
” she repeated. “I’m not sure we really fit into
our class
.”

She saw fresh anger spark in his eyes, and she knew she had made another mistake. It was one of the barbs Adelaide had been tossing for years, because she knew it was the one that hurt the most.

“Listen to me, my girl,” Papa said stiffly. “I’ve come up in the world. I take pride in that, and you should be damned glad I’ve done it.” He pushed himself out of his chair and shoved the slip of paper back into his pocket. “Your mother and I want the best for you.”

“The best for me? You mean, marriage.”

“Naturally. That’s the proper course for a young woman of means.”

“What if it’s not the course I want to follow?”

He shook his head. “Your parents know what’s best for you.”

Allison jumped up once more, then had to seize the edge of Papa’s desk to fight off the sudden dizziness that assailed her. She blinked hard, hoping he hadn’t noticed. Breathlessly, urgently, she said, “Papa, listen to me. You want to be a modern man, I know you do. Women can do other things, have careers.”

“I disapprove of that,” he said ponderously. “You’ll understand when you have your own home, your own children.”

“I’m too young,” she said.

“No younger than your mother was.”

Allison gazed at his heavy features, his stubborn mouth, and wondered if there was anything at all she could say that would move him. “Do you think being married so young made Mother happy?” she asked, half under her breath. No one in their home could think Adelaide was happy.

“What else was she going to do?”

Miserably, in a barely audible voice, she said, “A hundred things, Papa. A thousand!”

“She knew her place. And we raised you to know yours.”

“But, Papa, I want to study, to work. I’m
smart,
” she said, her voice breaking on the word.

“What difference does that make? It’s my job to see that you’re settled. This—this incident—it threatens all your chances. What good family is going to accept you if this news gets out?”

“Papa, I told you. I didn’t
do
anything.”

“That’s not what Adelaide says. She says all it takes is for one person to get word of your escapade, and—”

“Get word? Why should anyone
get word?
” Her voice rose, sounding thin and childish. “No one from San Francisco was on board, Papa. No one would know anything if Mother would just—would just—shut up about it!” Her father’s face darkened at the insult, and Allison clapped both her hands over her mouth to stifle a sob.

It was a circular argument, in any case. Allison was, in fact, a smart girl, smart enough to know she had lost this battle. In the ongoing war with her mother, the advantage rested with Adelaide. She had maneuvered Allison into a position of weakness, and Allison, foolishly, had allowed her to do it.

“I have written to our family in Seattle,” her father said gravely, doing his best to affect an air of the benevolent paterfamilias. “You were there in the fall of last year, I believe, so you’ve met them.”

“Papa—”

“Don’t interrupt. Your cousin Margot—the doctor, you remember—telephoned this morning. Your uncle Dickson has generously invited you to stay the winter with them.”

“Papa!”
Allison cried. “No! I want to go to college.”

“No point in sending girls to college,” he said. “Waste of time—and money.”

“But you said, after my Grand Tour—you said we could talk about it!”

“You should have thought of that,” he declaimed, with a pomposity that made her want to scream, “before you stripped naked to jump into a swimming pool with a young man you barely knew!”

“I wasn’t
naked!
” she cried. “Ask Mother! Make her tell you the truth, Papa! I
was not naked!
”

“If Adelaide says you were, of course I accept your mother’s version of events.”

It was bitterly, extravagantly unfair. More protests sprang to Allison’s lips, but she let them die unspoken. She almost wished she had done the thing she was accused of. It might have been her last chance at any excitement.

He pulled out the slip of paper again and waved it at her. “It’s your choice, Allison. The sanitorium or Seattle.”

Which was, of course, no choice at all.

On the platform of the San Francisco train station, Mother had dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, pretending sorrow at the parting. Papa had gripped Allison’s arm with his short fingers and growled that she was not to set foot out of the drawing room he had reserved for her and Ruby. She was forbidden to go to the dining car. She was under no circumstances to step out to the lounge. The Pullman porter, under his explicit orders, would bring all their meals in.

“And for God’s sake, Allison,” were his final words, “eat something. You look like a starving sparrow!”

At this, Allison turned her head to meet her mother’s gaze. Adelaide sniffed her imaginary tears, and Allison, with a toss of her head, claimed this one small victory for herself.

During the whole slow trip north, the porter did just what Papa had said. He showed up often, bringing tea, offering newspapers, carrying fresh towels or pitchers of water. Allison had no doubt Papa had paid him well to spy on her. She felt certain Ruby was making a little extra for the purpose, too. Between them, they had trapped her. She wondered if Cousin Margot was also on Papa’s payroll and had accepted her at Benedict Hall as her prisoner.

Seattle, for pity’s sake! Rain and dirt streets and fishermen. No doubt lumberjacks overran the town, swearing and spitting.

Allison sagged back on the sofa, arms folded, fingertips tapping. “Can a person die of boredom, Ruby?”

Ruby looked up from an apron she was stitching together with tiny, precise stabs of her needle. She was a wizard with a sewing needle and really good with a flatiron. She had an amazingly unsubtle mind, though, and she never laughed at any of Allison’s jests. “No, Miss Allison,” she said now, placidly. “I don’t think so. But then I’m never bored.”

“Oh, you have to be! Following me around all the time, or Mother? It must be excruciating.”

“Not in the least. This is a very good position, and I’m happy to have it.”

Under normal circumstances, Allison would have let that drop as a subject that would only intensify her ennui, but now—there was literally nothing to do but stare at the rain-washed view of trees and water and mountains, all blurred to an anonymous gray by the steady downpour. “You must have hoped for something more,” she prodded the maid. “Some excitement! Didn’t you ever want to be a film star, or a vaudeville dancer, or—I don’t know, something interesting?”

Ruby gave a prim little tut before she bit her thread neatly in two. “Oh, no,” she said. “I always knew I’d be in service. Mama trained me for it, starting when I was just young.”

Allison tilted her head, eyeing Ruby’s sallow face. “How young?”

A bit of color tinged Ruby’s cheeks at the unaccustomed attention. “I was ten,” she said. “Older than some, you know.”

“Ten! How old do other girls start—what do you call it, training?”

“Oh,” Ruby said with a little shrug, lifting the apron and scanning the hem for stitches out of place. “Some start when they’re just four or five. They don’t go to school at all. I,” she said, with simple pride, “was in school until the fourth grade.”

“Oh,” was all Allison could say. “That doesn’t seem fair at all.”

“It was fair enough,” Ruby said. She spoke in her usual monotone, as if the subject weren’t of much interest. “Mama wanted me to know how to read, so I could follow recipes and read patterns.”

“Where did you go to school, Ruby?”

“In the city. But the earthquake, you know. The school fell down.”

“Oh!” Allison said again. “I was only four. I don’t really remember.”

Ruby seemed no more interested in this than she was in her own history. She shrugged. “After the school fell down, there didn’t seem to be much point. We had to go to Oakland, because our house fell down, too. And burned,” she added indifferently.

“So, Ruby,” Allison pressed, her boredom eased by this bit of information, “was your mama a lady’s maid, too?”

“Oh, no,” Ruby said. She folded the apron neatly, smoothing the sash and tucking it under the bodice. “Mama’s a laundress.”

“Was anyone hurt in the ’quake? Your family?”

“My father disappeared, but we never knew if he got killed or just ran off.”

“That’s fascinating! Tell me about it.”

But Ruby seemed to have exhausted her supply of entertainment. She got up to pack the apron into her valise, and though Allison tried to draw her out again, she had no success. After a few moments, she dropped her head on the seat back again and stared disconsolately at the rain-blurred view as the train chugged northward.

Every click and clatter of the wheels seemed to spell out her sentence. Winter in Seattle. Months of rain. The dreary company of conventional relatives, Aunt Edith, Uncle Dickson, Cousin Dick and his wife, Cousin Pres—oh, no. Preston was dead. There had been a fire in Cousin Margot’s clinic. Somehow Cousin Preston got caught in it. Cousin Margot had lost everything, Papa said, and Uncle Dickson was helping her rebuild. Papa thought that was a waste of money, because how was a woman physician going to succeed in a private clinic in a poor neighborhood?

Allison’s lips pinched at the thought of Cousin Margot. Papa wouldn’t have thought of packing his daughter off to Seattle if Cousin Margot hadn’t suggested it. Allison remembered her from her first debutante party, tall and remote in a beaded silk dress and headband. Her young man had been interesting, the one-armed officer in his dress uniform, with vivid blue eyes and a touch of silver in his black hair. And he’d gotten into an actual fistfight with Preston! That had been marvelous, just like a film.

She hadn’t been allowed to watch it, of course. The moment it started, her mother had dragged her into the house and up the stairs, as if watching two men fight would soil her forever. She kept the curtains drawn and wouldn’t let Allison come downstairs until Uncle Dickson came up to tell them the excitement was over. Allison had been forced to miss the end of the drama, and the rest of the event was just like all the other deb parties, boring, predictable, stifling in their sameness.

Her adventure on
Berengaria
had been the only real diversion since the fistfight. She remembered it with longing.

She had hurried out of the First Class Lounge and slipped down the staircase amidships. It was the first time since leaving Southampton she had been alone, and though she knew her mother would be angry, Allison felt alive, bubbling with champagne and reckless with freedom. She soon found herself standing in the doorway of the Second Class Lounge, where she gripped the doorjamb to keep from losing her balance as the ship rocked.

The molded ceiling here was low, trapping the haze of cigar smoke emanating from the smoking room next door. A jazz band was playing a sloppy but energetic version of “The Sheik of Araby.” Men and women, some not much older than she was, were dancing, many more of them than in the First Class Lounge.

They wore all varieties of evening dress, from smoking jackets and loose ties for the men to georgette dresses for the ladies, some of which reached no lower than midcalf. Beads and feathers, all of which Adelaide deplored, flew as the dancers spun around the parquet floor. They made Allison’s embroidered gauze dress, which trailed to the floor at the back and had been purchased just weeks ago in Paris, seem staid. The
vendeuse
had sworn it was going to be all the rage in the coming year, but now it seemed already out of date. Allison dropped her wrap and tugged at the neckline of the gown to make it dip a little lower. She couldn’t do much about the length, but she strove for a sophisticated pose in the doorway, hips thrust forward in the S-silhouette the
Vogue
models used. She tried not to look lost as she glanced around for someplace to sit.

Before she found it, a man strutted up to her, grinning. “Gosh, a new face!” he said, in an accent she couldn’t quite place. He held out his ungloved hand in invitation. “Where’ve you been all this time, fair lady?”

Before she could answer, the ship pitched wildly. Allison found herself gripping the strange man’s hand for balance. The people on the dance floor cried out and seized one another. Even the band faltered for a moment.

As
Berengaria
righted herself, the man holding Allison’s hand laughed down at her. He was young, she saw, redheaded, and liberally freckled. He exclaimed, “Aren’t you scared?”

“No,” she said. She tried to free her hand, but he refused to give it up.