The Bride's House (27 page)

“I am sure. Thank you, Papa,” Pearl said in a businesslike manner. And then her voice broke, and she cried, “Would it have been so wrong to let us marry? Did it matter so much if he loved my money more than me?” She broke off and fled, flinging over her shoulder, “Oh, Papa, you should not keep secrets.” She did not see how Charlie blanched at her words.

CHAPTER 12

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER THAT
, as Pearl, Charlie, and Mrs. Travers sat at the supper table, Pearl announced, “I am going to take a trip.”

Charlie seemed pleased, probably because of the coldness that had developed between them over the Frank Curry affair. “Go anywhere you like—Chicago, New York. California is nice this time of year.”

“I am thinking of going to Europe, on what is called the grand tour.”

“I couldn’t accompany you just yet, not until the summer,” Charlie told her.

“I am thinking of going by myself.”

“Alone?” Charlie asked. “Surely you wouldn’t go abroad by yourself.”

“Of course not alone. I’ll take Mrs. Travers.”

The old woman looked pleased, although not surprised, and if Charlie had not been so taken aback at the announcement, he might have wondered if the two women had already discussed the idea. But the look on his face told that he was not thinking about them. In fact, he appeared hurt. “You have never wanted to travel before, certainly not alone.”

“I am a different woman now.”

“Very well.”

“Oh, Papa,” Pearl said quickly. “You mustn’t think we don’t want you. But we’ll be attending plays and visiting art galleries, taking in the opera and the museums, and I know that would bore you. You would hate it.” She seemed almost frantic that Charlie stay home.

“Perhaps you could join us at the end of the trip, Mr. Dumas,” Mrs. Travers said.

Charlie nodded, and his face softened a little. “Yes. That would do. I don’t care much for looking at pictures. Perhaps we could visit some of the European mines. I could make arrangements.”

“Of course,” Pearl said, but only because she knew that would please her father. She did not care much about seeing mines. She only wanted to get away.

*   *   *

The two women left in late winter so that they could spend the spring and summer in Europe. “I don’t fancy looking at snow over there,” Mrs. Travers said. “If I’m going to see snow, I might as well stay at home.” And if the trip were more spontaneous, with less planning than normally might be given for two ladies embarking on a grand tour, Pearl and Mrs. Travers enjoyed it all the more. When they tired of one place, they simply packed up and headed for another. “We’re gypsies,” Pearl wrote her father, not realizing that in the past, that was the last thing anyone would have called her. Pearl admitted to being a little bewildered, but she was enchanted, nonetheless, for she had never realized that the world was filled with so much richness. She might have thanked Frank Curry for opening her eyes to the wonders beyond the Bride’s House. But Pearl did not want to think about Frank, not any more than she had to.

She wrote to her father each week, describing what they had seen and done, remarking about the beauty of old Europe, the elegance of the stores, the collections of ancient artifacts displayed in the museums. She told him about the books she had purchased, the antiques for the Bride’s House, and a cameo for herself, to replace the one she had worn as a girl. “Mrs. Travers says to tell you her feet have been in every museum in five countries,” she wrote.

Charlie wrote, too, telling them he had engaged a Mr. Randal, a bookkeeper from one of his mines, as a secretary, and he would keep track of business affairs so that Charlie could join them later. “He is not so engaging as you, Pearl, but I have complete trust in him.”

The women went to France, where, Pearl wrote, she had contracted the influenza and been ordered to bed. “You must not worry. I shall be perfectly fine and think the doctor overstates the case when he says I am fragile and must rest for several weeks. Aunt Lidie agrees with him, however. So I humor them by staying abed in the mornings like the laziest of creatures. Still, I do want to be fit when you join us, so I do not protest too much.”

Charlie met them in Paris at the end of the summer, and the three retraced the journey the two women had taken a few months earlier, detouring on occasion so that they could visit mines. In Florence, Pearl admired a diamond bracelet in a shop window, and the next day, Charlie presented it to her. Only a year or two earlier, Pearl would have been uncomfortable wearing such an expensive bauble, but she had become a different woman. The events of the past year along with the worldliness that she acquired on the tour had made her both more sophisticated and more fashionable.

Back at home in Georgetown, Pearl settled into the Bride’s House, although she no longer thought of it as the refuge it had been for so many years. She roamed the rooms that had once delighted her—and her mother—and found them dreary, oppressive. So she threw out the heavy velvet drapes and reupholstered the horsehair furniture with damask—red damask, for Charlie insisted the room be kept the shade that Nealie had chosen for it. She got rid of the old plants in the solarium and added exotic ones, including orchids. She added to Nealie’s knickknacks with antiques that she acquired in Europe. If Charlie noticed, he didn’t comment, perhaps feeling he owed something to his daughter.

Influenced by the fashionable shops in Europe, Pearl changed her own style, as well. She put aside the matronly dresses she had worn all of her life for simpler, more youthful fashions that could be worn without confining foundations. She never again wore pink, but she experimented with colors that complemented her pale complexion and red hair. One day in Denver, Pearl went into a salon and had her hair cut off—not short by any means, but shoulder length. Like Pearl’s body, her hair seemed uncorseted now. It flared and curled around her face, giving her a girlish look. When she returned to Georgetown after the haircut, dressed in a green frock that had caught her eye, and walked into the Bride’s House, Charlie stared at her as if he’d seen a ghost. “You look like Nealie,” he said, his voice choking. And Mrs. Travers put her hands over her face and cried.

Pearl had not intended to cause them distress, especially not Mrs. Travers. The two had grown even closer after Frank broke the engagement. Sometimes when they worked together in the kitchen, Mrs. Travers, her eyes wet with tears, would put her arm around Pearl’s waist and hold her, wordlessly. Pearl herself was distracted and listless at times, melancholy, often retiring to her room in the middle of the day. Charlie blamed lingering effects of the influenza, but Mrs. Travers frowned at him as if to say that Pearl still mourned Frank Curry.

No one other than her father and Mrs. Travers knew about her brief engagement, so people attributed the changes in Pearl to her exposure to the outside world, and to the fact she was no longer her father’s secretary. They thought that Mr. Randal’s replacing Pearl was a healthy thing. It was not natural that Pearl was cooped up in the foul-smelling study with her father all day. That particular change was not Pearl’s doing, however. She had intended to resume her duties at Charlie’s side once they returned from Europe, but Mr. Randal, a small, unctuous man with a great sense of his own importance, made it clear she was a usurper, remarking more than once that as a woman, she did not understand mining matters.

When her father failed to contradict the man, Pearl withdrew, believing Mr. Randal’s ill temper came from a fear of losing his job, and she did not want to be responsible for putting a man out of work. She still kept up on mining, reading reports and prospectuses, but when father and daughter talked about investments now, Pearl did not voice an opinion. Once, the young woman had been full of questions about the mines whose shares her father bought, and her observations influenced Charlie’s decisions. He had valued her insights. But now when Charlie spoke of investments, Pearl listened politely and did not comment. Charlie, for his part, appeared to approve his daughter’s changing position at the Bride’s House. She was less secretary and more hostess.

To outsiders, it seemed that Pearl, who was in her early thirties, had blossomed. She joined a literary society that met monthly and whose members gave papers on a variety of subjects—flower arrangements, table settings, glove etiquette. When Pearl’s turn came to make a presentation, she read papers she had written on ore extraction methods and on increased mechanization underground. She even gave a talk on labor issues in Colorado’s mining towns. If the other women were surprised at her choice of topics, they did not show it. In fact, they were impressed, because despite the fact that mining had waned, Georgetown still considered itself a mining town.

Pearl was one of the founders of a hiking club and was much admired for her tireless climbing and sure-footedness in the mountains. In winter, she determined to improve her skating and did, and although she was never proficient at it, she at least was good enough to stay on her feet. She learned to play tennis, too, and one summer, she asked Charlie if he would permit the side yard to be turned into a court. Charlie said he was happy to oblige and even suggested that he hire a man to string electric lights so that she and her friends—single men and women as well as married couples of her age, many from the Presbyterian church—could play at night.

For the first time since Pearl was born, her life no longer centered on her father. She had become a person in her own right. Charlie did not remark on any of the changes in his daughter, and perhaps he was not much aware of them. Pearl was, however, and knew they had to do with Frank Curry. She wasn’t sure just how. Maybe Frank had given her a sense of herself. More likely, she wanted to show him that her life was complete without him, but if that were the reason, it was of no consequence, because she never saw Frank. Or perhaps it was that in some part of herself, she expected that one day Frank would admit his mistake, would come back for her, and he would love her more than ever.

There was another change, one of which no one but Pearl seemed to be aware. A friend had given her a journal for her European trip, in which Pearl had recorded the sights she had seen. Now, back home in the Bride’s House, she continued to write, sitting at the dressing table in her room, recording her thoughts in pen and ink in notebooks. At first, she made grand and, it must be said, trite observations—“everything in London is so old,” for instance—but as time went on, she developed a keen eye and a wry assessment of the people around her. She wrote about her friends and the ordinary people she met, the grocer, the stable boy, the miners, about their foibles and their virtues, drawing trenchant and often witty conclusions from simple events. Sometimes, she wrote about emotions close to her—loss, unrequited love, betrayal. On occasion, she recorded her thoughts about the Bride’s House, wondering if houses, like people, grew old and died. In her writing, the house was no longer a place of warmth and comfort but a house of secrets, a boarded-up building where life stood still.

Charlie was not aware of his daughter’s writing, and even Mrs. Travers thought the woman was doing no more than recording her days in a journal. Pearl never showed the essays to anyone, although at times, she would have liked to discuss them with Frank. In many ways, she wrote the stories for Frank.

*   *   *

To all appearances, Pearl put the serious, introspective woman she had once been behind her. Now well into her thirties, Pearl found that men began calling on her at the Bride’s House—and not just because she was Charlie Dumas’s daughter. Albert Sabra, who managed the Golden Fleece Mine, met Pearl at a summer frolic. He escorted her about town in his new autocar. They drove down the valley at awesome speeds, and Pearl returned home greatly excited and covered with dust. The roads were poor, filled with sharp rocks that punctured tires. When a tire had to be changed, Pearl helped Albert with the patching, instead of sitting helplessly by the side of the road. On one such occasion, Albert impulsively said they made such a good team that they ought to marry. He took her in his arms and tried to kiss her, but Pearl stepped away from him and told him as politely as she could that his affection was not returned. And after a few attempts to change her mind, Albert found someone else to help with punctured inner tubes.

Otto Hemp, who owned dry-goods stores in both Georgetown and Idaho Springs, a few miles away, was another suitor. He was a widower with two young girls, and all three of them adored Pearl. They ate dinners-on-the-ground in the park or hiked in the mountains, picking wildflowers that the little girls carefully divided into bouquets for friends. When Pearl remarked that his daughters were the sweetest little girls she had ever known, Otto said she might be their mother if she would only say yes to him. But Pearl said no, and Otto looked elsewhere to complete his family.

If Charlie were aware of these romances, he said nothing. Occasionally, he brought young men to the house. Pearl did not know if they were business associates or if her father had softened and was suggesting they were suitable candidates for her hand. Charlie’s reasons were not important to her, however, because none of the men interested her. She would not have her father pick a husband for her. But then, she thought, perhaps her father had introduced them to Pearl for the very reason that he knew she would not care for them. She wondered if Charlie would still oppose any man who wanted to marry her. But it did not matter since no one entered her heart as Frank had, and she did not intend to marry.