The House of Velvet and Glass (18 page)

“Harlan?” Ben said, his voice stiffening. “Has something happened?”

“Something has,” she said, her fist pressing against the telephone booth glass. “I’m afraid that Harley was badly beaten this evening. I can only assume”—she paused, horrified at what she was about to say—“I can only assume it has something to do with the debts. That you mentioned to me. I have to believe he took out a loan from some unsavory people to pay them. But the truth is, I don’t know.”

She heard Benton take a sharp inward breath. Then he said, “And?”

Sibyl closed her eyes, hating having to tell Benton these things. “He was in a roominghouse, on Harrison Avenue. They expect that he’ll live, but he’s unconscious. A broken rib. And his face, Ben . . . I could barely recognize him.”

“I see. He’s expected to recover, you say?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. Then, swallowing, preparing herself, she whispered, “There’s something else.”

Sibyl paused, pressing her cheek to the glass and peering down the hall to the room at the end, where she was meant to be waiting for her father to emerge from his conference with Harlan, if her brother had been conscious enough. She inhaled, and let the air out in a long hiss.

“What something?” Ben pressed. She found the sound of his breath in her ear oddly reassuring.

She swallowed again, trying to decide how to say it. Finally, for lack of anything more delicate, and too tired to be circumspect, she simply said, “There’s a girl with him.”

If she had expected him to sound shocked, or even surprised, Sibyl was mistaken. He only said, “I’ll be right there.”

Chapter Nine

Pulling aside the glass partition of the telephone booth, Sibyl peered down the hospital corridor. A few scattered patients in wicker wheeled chairs, abandoned alongside the whitewashed walls, blankets tucked around their knees; a cluster of nurses bustling through doorways, heads bent together. No sign of her father. Perhaps she shouldn’t have left them alone. But there was no way around it. The Captain would have his say whether she was there or not.

Sibyl started down the hall, eyes on her feet, arms folded over her chest. Her head ached, as though metal bands had been wound around her skull and tightened with screws. A hand found its way to her temple and massaged it as she walked. She couldn’t remember the last time she was up so late. It would probably have been for a party, when she was still being invited to the big winter balls and receptions. So, perhaps . . . three years?

Three years.

Not that she wasn’t invited places still—she was. But there had been a subtle shift. Those first few seasons had been nights of dances, cards full of scribbled names attached at the wrist with a minute gold pencil, rounds of waltzes, breakfast served in the morning room while the music played, trays of scrambled eggs and bacon, stewed tomatoes and fried codfish balls. Leaning in the shadow of a giant porcelain urn, the corner of her dance card grazing her lower lip while she laughed into the face of a steady progression of college boys. Nighttime was for pleasure, for enjoying feeling young. Pleasure first, later tinged with increasing pressure, the dark shadow lining the sparkling edge of a night spent dancing, which was the knowledge that she had better secure one of those boys for herself. Soon. And Benton . . . Well.

Benton.

Her steps slowed. She should be in the room with Harley, shielding him from their father’s rage. The rage would be there, she knew, but her presence would temper its expression; it always did. Sibyl was the baffle between Lan and Harley. She stepped in when Helen was no longer there to do it.

Her brother was just a boy, really. He pretended, puffed himself up like all boys do. Gradually, they forgot they were performing. Sibyl had seen it dozens of times. One day, the playacting of manhood ceased being a joke and became the actual man. Maybe her error was her tendency to see through the puffery to the frightened boy underneath. Too late, she realized that the men of her world might not appreciate being seen through.

But Harley wasn’t there quite yet. Sibyl wondered if this woman knew what a boy her brother really was. She imagined Harley moving with his self-satisfied smirk through sordid places, God knew what kind of people, which seemed through their sordidness to be more authentic to him than the carefully wrought drawing rooms of the Back Bay. Worlds where he could pretend to be another person, where he found this woman who would let him pretend. Sibyl’s breath came faster, her pace agitated.

Of course, his little jaunt had gotten all too real this evening. She wondered what sort of hideous men could have been responsible for rendering her strong and healthy sporting dog of a brother into a battered heap. She pictured thugs, drunken, snub-nosed simians like she saw in the illustrated newspapers, carrying clubs, grubby hats pulled low, bearing down on him with their base heft and greater numbers. Or some shylock gangster, piggy eyes, greasy hair, caring only for the debts, ballooned by outrageous interest and unfair terms. It was unconscionable, such people preying on a fine boy like him.

A boy! She corrected herself with scorn. He was twenty-one years old. He could be married at that age. He could have children of his own. A bitter wave of contempt washed over Sibyl. Harley’s helplessness was learned, was handed to him by birthright. It was a privilege, his naïveté, his guileless wandering through worlds where he had no business. And she participated in this petting of him. He was like an infant, dead set upon throwing itself into the fireplace because the flames were so bright and pretty.

Perhaps the time had come for it to stop. Perhaps Harley should be allowed to fail.

But first, she must address this . . .
woman.

Sibyl rounded the final corner, her mouth flattened into a dour, spinsterish line. She marched to the room at the end of the hall, pressing her hand to the swinging door and flinging it open.

The woman—girl—spun from where she had been pretending to gaze out the waiting room window. The room was a grim whitewashed void, furnished with uncomfortable-looking bentwood armchairs and a few cheap tables heavy with ashtrays. Low electric light from two bulbs overhead cast the woman-child’s face in a sickly pallor and transformed the multipaned casement windows into so many dingy mirrors, reflecting in fragments the scene within. The girl was alone, but the windows reflected a dozen different angles of the back of her head and tops of her shoulders, as if she were guarded by an army of versions of herself, each one slightly different from the last.

The girl stood with one arm wrapped protectively around her waist, left hand flickering close to her face like a moth, tossing ash in unconscious movements from the end of a cigarette. Her green eyes were open wide, translucent lids blinking, and the violet circles under her eyes had deepened in color. When she spotted Sibyl standing in the doorway the girl took an involuntary step back, the blood-stiffened tunic making a rasping sound as she moved.

The two young women regarded each other across the empty waiting room. The only motion was the faint coil of smoke drifting up from the girl’s cigarette. The moment dragged on as Sibyl took in the details of the girl’s fragile face and roved through her mind for the right way to open the conversation. How could she possibly understand the first thing about this woman’s lonesome nights in that awful room above Harrison Avenue? What could she say to bring them into any understanding? Sibyl’s shuttered mind cracked open for an instant, affording her a fleeting, imagined view of this young woman’s life, with its own parade of men offering security and support, but of a very different type.

Perhaps not that different. The men passing through this girl’s room, this girl’s pasty thin arms even, must have interests as peripatetic, as subject to fits of whim, as dependent on money and all it could offer, or take away, as the string of boys sharing late-night scrambled eggs with her. She imagined the girl’s false laughter, the sparkle that she would conjure in her eyes to make whatever man she was with feel special, and understood, and seen in the way he would most like to be, and so trick him into drawing nearer, into giving the girl what she wanted. In a sickening flash of recognition Sibyl understood that the differences between them were, possibly, academic. In fact, she saw with sudden certainty, they must have smiled up into the faces of some of the very same boys. But all Sibyl did was smile, of course.

Sibyl’s nostrils twitched from the burning tobacco. She opened her mouth, wondering what she was about to say, when without warning the girl cried out, dropping the cigarette to the floor, and plunging her fingertips into her mouth. Her lips were dark ruby red, and as she soothed her burnt fingers between her lips she gave the appearance of a terrified child.

Sibyl ground the cigarette ember under the toe of her boot, and then took the girl’s unoccupied hand and eased her down into one of the armchairs. She turned frightened eyes on Sibyl, fingers still in her mouth. The eyes looked frightened—at first, anyway. As Sibyl peered closer, she saw the twin green pools under the darkened brows were representing frightened eyes, without conveying a depth of feeling that would have been true.

“He’s—” Sibyl started to say, but the girl cut her off.

“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” she cried. Her fingers out of her mouth now, both of the girl’s hands fumbled for her tunic, twisting it into a ball in her lap.

“We’ll have to see,” Sibyl said. “He’s receiving the best care, and they’re keeping him comfortable. But there’s a great risk of infection. One of his ribs is fractured.”

The girl choked out a sob, bringing her knuckles up under her chin, eyebrows rising in a peak over her nose. It struck Sibyl as a theatrical gesture, done by an ingénue in a flicker show to demonstrate misery, rather than a real expression. She nevertheless reached a tentative hand to the girl’s knee, attempting to be soothing.

“Broken!” the girl exclaimed. She fumbled in the folds of her dress, pulling out a handkerchief and dabbing her eyes. Sibyl had never seen a woman, up close anyway, who wore so much face paint. Eulah, she knew, had lined her eyes, reddened her lips on occasion, had even tried whitening her skin with some lead-based concoction from an advertisement in one of her fashion magazines. She had done all this with Helen’s tacit approval. This girl, however, had blackened her eyes so thoroughly she almost looked beaten herself. Her tears washed some of the kohl from her eyes, spreading it in pitiful streaks down her cheeks. Sibyl reached a hand to the girl’s cheek, trying to wipe away some of the blacking with a thumb.

As she did so, she murmured, “I’m sure all will be well. But perhaps . . .”

The girl cast her eyes down, tucking her lower lip under a tooth, then glancing up to meet Sibyl’s patient gaze.

“What?” the girl said. Sibyl started at the girl’s tone but smoothed over her discomfort with a detached smile.

“Your name,” she asked gently. The girl was skittish. “I’d like to know what it is.”

She gave Sibyl a dark look, as though trying to weigh her intentions. It crossed Sibyl’s mind that the girl might lie. Why wouldn’t she? She had little reason to tell the truth.

“It’s Dovie,” she said, as though challenging Sibyl to disagree with her.

“Dovie,” Sibyl repeated, smiling. Preposterous. It must be her stage name, or whatever it was these women call it. But it wouldn’t do to seem quick to judge. Already Sibyl was surprised to have gotten that much out of her. In fact, it was a wonder that she was still in the waiting room at all. “And what is your last name, Dovie?”

“Whistler,” said the girl, before adding, “I didn’t make it up.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Sibyl agreed. It might not be a lie, exactly. If she didn’t make the name up, perhaps someone else did.

The two women sat, their hands tangled together on Dovie’s knee as Sibyl took curious measure of Harlan’s lover. Her clothes were fashionable, the skirts hemmed well up. Most startling was her hair. Instead of the dignified bun that crowned Sibyl’s head, Dovie’s frizzy waves were chopped short. The hairs at the base of her neck were as soft and downy as a little boy’s, trimmed to a narrow point. Sibyl watched the curve of the girl’s neck when she bent her head forward to press her handkerchief against the fresh trickle of tears leaking from the rims of her eyes, amazed that the short hair could somehow make her appear more feminine, rather than less.

“Aw, I can’t believe it.” Dovie sighed.

“There now,” Sibyl said, hearing Helen’s voice in her choice of words. “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

“Yeah, but I think it’s gonna blister,” Dovie said, holding up the singed fingers of her left hand for Sibyl to see. Shocked into silence, Sibyl said nothing. She released Dovie’s other hand.

The girl rummaged in a concealed pocket in her underskirt and withdrew a gold cigarette case and matching lighter. She busied herself with lighting a fresh cigarette, careful of the two wounded digits, using her ring and pinkie fingers to hold the cigarette. Sibyl stared at this process while it happened, at a loss.

She was so absorbed in watching Dovie’s hands move through their steady preparations, illuminating her hard features with a flame from the lighter, that Sibyl didn’t notice the waiting room door opening and quick, heavy footfalls approaching her until a hand fell on her shoulder.