The House of Velvet and Glass (17 page)

Under the bruising of his skin Harley flushed with disgust. Beaten. He’d been beaten, soundly. He lay in his hospital cot, imprisoned in his weakness, and in the certain knowledge that he was a disgrace, as he’d always secretly feared he would be.

Harley pushed through the fog in his mind, thinking. A few images swam by, none of them particularly clear. Nighttime. And Betty, sturdy Betty with her freckles and her wild hair. He’d kissed her. Finally. He’d wanted to do that for years. Harlan tried to smile, but his face refused to obey. The memory of Betty’s buttery taste on his tongue pushed away the pain. But only for a moment.

Then, with sickening certainty, he remembered. Had he even landed a punch before he went down? A wave of nausea washed through him, and a white explosion of pain burst across his eyes. As the expression on his face changed, the person holding the cloth, whoever she was, caught her breath.

“Don’t,” the woman said. “Just relax.”

Again the soothing pressure of the cloth over his eyes. It was delicious, the gentle care being lavished on him. Quiescent, he allowed himself to be tended to, saying nothing.

Maybe the woman didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe she would assume that he had behaved with bravery and was overpowered through unfairness, or lack of sportsmanship, or . . .

He grimaced again, his shame intensifying. He inhaled, and the pressure of pain from a cracked rib tore through him with new urgency.

“Harley,” the visitor’s voice whispered close to his ear. “Are you waking up?”

The visitor’s elbow depressed the edge of the mattress, and the faint jostle of the bedding sent arrows shooting through his trunk, causing him to gasp, a fresh tear rolling out of the corner of his eye.

The woman emitted a worried murmur. “Shall I call the nurse?” she asked.

“Not yet,” barked a gruff voice, and then Harley knew with a sinking certainty who was in the room with him.

“Papa, he’s clearly in pain. He needs morphine,” said the soothing voice, which Harley now recognized as belonging to his sister. His mortification deepened. To have his weakness revealed before Sibyl, perfect and judging Sibyl, was bad enough. But now he would have to face Lan Allston, too.

“I have no doubt of that,” his father’s voice agreed, sounding hard around the edges. “But not before we’ve ascertained how he got himself into this mess. And what he plans to do about it.”

“But, Papa,” Sibyl started. “He’s hardly in a state to—”

Their father cut her off with a grunt.

“I’d like a word alone with the boy, if you don’t mind,” the Captain’s voice said, its chill cutting into Harley’s bones. “It’ll just take a moment.”

Harley heard his sister protest and felt her weight rise, pulling away from his cot. Sibyl spoke with a hushed urgency to their father, but Harley couldn’t hear what was being said. He wished Sibyl wouldn’t go. He wished she would stay and protect him.

“Of course, my dear, I understand,” their father soothed, setting aside whatever her objections might have been. “Why don’t you take a moment to go out and talk with that”—he paused, and cleared his throat—“young woman.”

Harley’s mind reeled at this reference, confused, before finally realizing, with a sour sinking in his stomach, how his family came to know where he was, and in what state he might be found.

Dovie.

Dovie had gone to the Beacon Street house. He should never have told her where it was. He certainly shouldn’t have driven her past it one laughing, carefree night after they stumbled together, drunk and happy, out of Mabel White’s evening salon. It was reckless of him, stupid. But he’d wanted to impress her. He never thought for a moment that she would dare to . . . but she did. And now they’d know.

They’d know everything.

Harley’s breath quickened with mounting panic, wishing his eyes would open fully so that he could see what was happening, so that he could prepare to face his father.

“But, she’s . . . ,” Sibyl said, leaving her thought unspoken, but no less certain for what she did not articulate.

“Yes, I know. But all the more reason we might wish to know her a little better, wouldn’t you agree?”

Harley was surprised to hear his father suggest that cosseted Sibyl, who circulated only among the nice and the good, whose world was bounded by so many ladies’ committees and drawing room teas, who could barely bring herself to operate the telephone, should be seen speaking, in public, with the likes of Dovie. It would be comical, if it weren’t so tragic.

He heard his sister swallow, thickly, and then without another word her footsteps moved across what he now understood to be his hospital room, making a hollow, echoing sound of brisk boot heels on cold tile. His lower lip trembled, willing her to return, for her not to leave him alone.

A leaden silence descended on the room. Harley heard rustling fabric, which indicated his father’s pulling out the chronometer from his vest pocket to consult it, or perhaps just to finger it, as was his habit when agitated or angry. Harlan lay motionless, wondering if he could feign sleep and so push away the inevitable, but also knowing that the pain was holding him awake, prostrate but conscious, presenting him to his father like a gutted fish on a platter.

Lan understood this kind of pain, Harley suspected. He would have experienced it himself in some distant port years ago, and so for that reason could not be expected to sympathize the way that Sibyl might. He would expect his son to bear it. Any failure to do so would bring nothing but contempt, Harley reminded himself as his father settled himself in a chair at his bedside.

Lan Allston cleared his throat. Harley stiffened.

“It’s no business of mine,” his father began, the words measured and deliberate, “if you want to gad about with whores.”

In a flash of righteous anger Harley’s mouth worked, and he tried to object, but before any words could come out Lan continued.

“I should think, however,” his father continued, “you’d have better sense than to become the
patron
of one.” He spat out the word with such dismissal that Harley physically recoiled. “Particularly given the opinions on such patronage likely to be held by her
pimp
.”

The word sounded wrong, even obscene, spoken in Lan’s elegant Boston accent. Harlan felt in his father’s hostile pause the appraisal of his roving gaze, taking in the bandaged ribs, the battered face, the split mouth. So his father assumed that Harley had been beaten by Dovie’s procurer. Harlan would have smiled, a cruel smile it’s true, but a smile all the same, if he had been able. He said nothing.

Lan continued, “But it’s the privilege of the young to be stupid, and so stupid you must be.”

A sour ball of resentment knotted itself in Harlan’s stomach. He knew his father disapproved of him. He knew he was a disappointment. He was bound to be one, no matter how successful he might seem to the rest of the world. But he would show his father that he had honor of his own. Lan Allston couldn’t take that from him, too. Harley summoned his strength, building the words in his mouth before speaking. The effort of moving his tongue caused tears to squeeze out of the corners of his eyes.

“Yes?” his father prodded. “You have something to say for yourself ? Well, I’m at your disposal, my boy. By all means. Speak.”

Harley’s nostrils flared with anger. How could his father know so little! He held himself aloof, hidden away in his precious Beacon Street house. Blind to the world, the way the world really was. Not like Harley, who craved experience, who refused to lock himself away as Sibyl allowed herself to be locked up, a prisoner in that infernal life. That tomb of his dead mother’s taste. It was time Lan Allston got a dose of the real world. Harley steeled himself, and spoke.

“I . . . love . . . her,” he said. He spoke each word with perfect clarity. His heart swelled when he said it, speaking the truth aloud for the first time to someone other than tender Dovie, or his own reflection.

His father leaned in close to his face, close enough that Harley could smell the port and tobacco on his breath.

“
The hell you do
,” his father hissed.

Harley lay in his cot, resolute, and tried to force his eyes open. The white splinter of light pierced the darkness, and then widened into a thin band, vanished as he blinked, then opened to the blurred blob of a face that could only belong to his father. Harley riveted his eyes to his father’s, hoping that he looked like a deadly serious man, and not a frightened little boy.

“She’sshh . . . not . . . a whore,” Harley slurred through his blistered lips as a door opened to admit a nurse in a starched apron, white gaiters pulled up over her sleeves, carrying a glass syringe on a tray. She noticed the man in conversation with her patient and hesitated in the door.

Harley’s father leaned in, blotting out the form of the nurse behind him. Lan placed a hand on Harley’s arm with the steel grip of a man whose life had depended on a firm grasp of ropes while at sea. Harley clenched his teeth against the bite of his father’s thumb digging into the flesh of his arm.

“That is
precisely
what she is,” Lan stated, voice too low for the nurse to hear. “Whether you believe her to be or not. I’d think that your current state would convince you.”

“Here now,” the nurse interrupted, appearing at Harley’s bedside. Lan released his grip, moving his hand to the vest pocket that held the chronometer. “He’s awake, then, is he?”

Lan rose to his feet, his gaze on his son as he folded his hands behind his back. “He is.”

A long pause ensued, with Lan’s cool eyes resting on Harley’s face. Harley held the look as long as he could, his innards tightening in anger and shame, his lip trembling. Finally, with a miserable exhalation of breath, his eyes slid away.

“I think you’ll find,” Allston said, “that the boy is in quite a lot of pain.”

“Oh, we’ll fix him up right enough. Needs his rest,” the nurse assured the gentleman as she busied herself with the syringe. She held it up to the light, withdrawing amber liquid from a small glass ampule, tinking the syringe with her fingernail to clear away the air bubbles. She bent over him, and Harley smelled the ripe scent of her body as she drew near with the needle. He closed his eyes in delicious anticipation.

“I’ve no doubt about that,” he heard his father say. Harley tensed his arm, waiting for the needle’s sting in his inner elbow. “But I’m afraid we can’t allow him to have any morphine.”

The nurse glanced up, confused, needle poised in the air. At the tip, a tiny bubble of liquid trembled, catching the light. “But, you yourself said . . .”

Harley’s eyelids flew open, and he turned to his father with naked panic. A punishment. He had been given morphine before, knew its power to fill his limbs with delicious warmth, to spread from the crown of his head along his skin, into his mouth even, down his neck, to wash away every last iota of suffering. His body remembered the delectable feeling, and the indifference of it, the drug’s profound power to free him from care, and every cell of his body cried out, weeping for release.

“This is not open for discussion.” Allston gave the nurse a sharp look. “We’ll have to rely on Providence to relieve him while he heals.”

Not bothering to conceal her troubled expression, the nurse placed the syringe back on its tray and drew herself up to her full five feet. She glanced down at her patient, and Harley worked his mouth, the pain clawing at his body. He felt himself floating, the sensation of the bed receding.

“Well then,” the nurse’s voice said, distant, as though spoken through a speaking tube like the one in his father’s parlor. “Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. The boy’s injuries place him at great risk of infection, and we must limit his contact with visitors. For his own protection, you understand.”

“Indeed. But no morphine, or I’ll have your job,” said his father, but his voice was muffled, spoken from the bottom of the ocean itself. Lan Allston started to say something else, something that might have been “This conversation is not over,” but Harley couldn’t be sure, because he was floating very far away, alone in a river of pain.

Sibyl moved down the hospital hallway, her hands cupping her opposite elbows, throat closed against the stench of sickness. Her pace quickened as she planned out in her mind what she would say to the young woman who awaited her.

Sibyl strode past a succession of open doors, each ward a hangar of identical white cots, each cot holding a suffering body. Sibyl quailed in the face of so much need, at the smells of the bodies and the cries for help. The wards were nothing but a holding pen for hunks of human flesh, soul prisons, before they were finally freed from whatever miserable indignity was tormenting them.

An abattoir.

Sibyl hesitated by a bank of wooden telephone booths, thinking. Making up her mind, she pulled a door aside and stepped in.

She supposed it was Benton’s comments about the everyday horrors of human life, his sympathy, that made her want to telephone him. Sibyl sat on the Women’s Hygiene and Improvement Committee, and had toured tenements with baskets of fresh linens to distribute. She had flattered herself that she knew what it was, to be poor in Boston. But she had never seen suffering like this.

“Boston, I have Cambridge, Massachusetts, for you,” said the distant, nasal operator at the other end of the line. “Go ahead, Boston.”

“Hullo?” rasped a sleepy male voice. Sibyl suppressed a shiver of pleasure as she imagined Benton, in his bed, asleep, roused by the jangling of the telephone. She pictured what he might look like while he was sleeping: rumpled striped cotton pajamas, with a thrown-on dressing gown. Then she pushed the thought aside, appalled at herself.

“Ben, I’m so sorry to wake you,” she began, voice thick with mortification, worried that he might be able to somehow overhear her thoughts underneath the neutral words.

“Miss Allston?” he exclaimed, voice growing instantly more alert. “Sibyl,” he corrected himself. He sounded sleepy, confused, but growing more awake. “What time is it?”

“So late that I can’t possibly tell you,” she said, voice low. “I’m so sorry. But you see, I’m calling about Harley.”