The House of Velvet and Glass (53 page)

“That’s why I sneaked out,” she finished, speaking to the seam along the edge of her skirt as she toyed with it. “When Papa told me it was possible to see alternatives, I thought—I knew I had to do something. To help Harlan. But I wasn’t doing it right. Every time I turned the glass, I saw the same thing.” Her voice caught in her throat.

Benton sat next to her, listening. After a time he said, speaking with care, “You know, there are worse things than dying.”

Sibyl stared at him, aghast. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What could possibly be worse than dying?”

He looked sidelong at her, his expression mild. “Well,” he said. “We all die. Right?”

She blinked, sitting back.

“Perhaps worse than the dying itself,” he mused, “is living a life with no meaning. A life that’s wasted.”

“Wasted,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Benton said. “You said that in all the alternatives for Harlan, if you stopped him from signing up to fight, he died after living a short, miserable, and dissipated life.”

“Yes,” Sibyl said, waiting for him to finish his thought.

“And we must admit,” Benton said, treading lightly, “that’s not such a surprising outcome. Given the way things have been going for him lately.”

“But I can’t accept what Papa said. He said that everything is foretold, and all we can do is submit to our fate. Why can’t things be different? Why can’t Harlan just stay here, and be happy?”

Benton got to his feet and moved to rest his hand on the globe under the window. He gave it a thoughtful spin.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I approach the world scientifically, Sibyl. I don’t believe in God, at least, not the way your father does. But I do believe in Newton. If I pick up this coffee cup and drop it, I believe it’ll fall. Is that fate? It’s just obeying the laws of physics. But then, so are we. There simply aren’t infinite possibilities in the universe. Either for this coffee cup, or for ourselves.”

“Then you agree with him,” Sibyl said, her face crumpling with dismay. “If we can’t control what happens to us, then there’s no point. We can’t be moral people.”

“What do you mean by that?” Benton asked her.

“Papa said that he knew he’d sinned. He sees this—skill—that we have as a curse. He thinks he’s damned. It’s as though the ability to be a good person has been stolen from him.”

She paused, feeling an emotion for her father that was so alien she at first could not identify it. After a moment’s reflection she knew it for what it was: pity.

Benton stopped the spinning of the globe with an abrupt hand. Sibyl saw that it had come to rest on the eastern coast of China.

“I think,” he said, toying with the globe, “our childhoods create the template for the people we become. But that’s not the same as fate. Not exactly.” He paused, gazing in meditative silence at the globe under his hand, rolling it this way and that. “It’s character,” he said finally. “We are the men that we are. Whether that is because of our childhoods, or God’s hand, or nature, doesn’t much matter. Perhaps your father’s wrong. It’s not a curse at all. Your father, and you, have actually seen the best possible outcome of Harlan’s life. And it’s the path that he wants to choose.”

She stood, running her hand along the telescope at the window. “I hate it,” she whispered. “I hate that we can’t be free.”

She paused, feeling his surprised eyes on her back. Without looking around she said, “I suppose that shocks you, coming from me. Who’s always lived the life that’s been laid out for me.”

“That doesn’t shock me at all. But don’t misunderstand me. Those basic laws hold sway over us like the laws of physics hold sway over this cup. But as we attain reason, we become free to act. We’re free to assign whatever meaning we wish to our lives. We act, and in doing so, the choices that we make have meaning.”

“That’s a very perverse kind of freedom,” Sibyl said, irritated.

“It’s the best kind,” he countered. “Freedom of thought. What matters isn’t Harlan’s death, as such. Harlan’s death is assured. As is yours.” He paused, glancing at her. “As is mine. What matters is the life he chooses to live. The meaning he gives it. He must have the opportunity to choose to live his life with honor.”

Sibyl stared at Benton with a sinking heart.

“You’re right,” she whispered, her obsidian eyes wide with comprehension. Her grip tightened on the telescope, and she turned to look out the window, following its aim. It was pointed up into the sky over Cambridge, which had opened into a perfectly clear, crystalline blue day.

“In a way,” Benton remarked, moving from the globe to stand near Sibyl at the window. He took her hands in his, rubbing his thumbs over her knuckles. “It gets back to the debate between Edwin and me. He thought that understanding death would give life its meaning. But I think that someone who spends all his time waiting to die might as well be dead already.”

“Ben,” she said. Fear ran cold in her veins, but she decided that she had to know the truth.

“Yes?”

“Why did you pick Lydia over me?”

There was a long pause, and the skin along the back of Sibyl’s neck prickled, alive to his nearness.

His eyebrows furrowed, and he seemed at first not to know how to answer. “But I didn’t,” he said at length. “I suppose, after waiting for an assurance from you for so long, I—I thought you didn’t want to have me.”

She looked up into his gray eyes, soft with regret, about to argue with him, but before she could speak he took her in his arms and moved his mouth to hers, enfolding her in a tight embrace. Her eyes drifted closed as she surrendered to the feel of him, the warmth and taste of him in her mouth, his breath on her cheek, the certain hold of his hands at her waist.

“But, Ben,” she murmured in his ear as his lips found the delicate spot below her ear, and then traced a lazy line down the side of her neck. “I did. I did want to have you.”

He pulled away, his eyes leveled at hers, smiled, and growled, “Good.” Then his arms were around her, and she laughed, his hands moved up her back, his mouth met her throat, her jaw, her mouth again, drinking her in with all the urgency of years wasted.

Sibyl heard her blood rushing in her ears, felt herself melting against his body, and as she sighed with pleasure and threaded her hands through his hair, reflected that she had never felt more alive.

When they arrived back at the Beacon Street house, Sibyl suggested, quietly, that they come in through the back door facing the river. She knew she was fooling herself if she thought that her absence from the house would escape notice, particularly given that she was still dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing the previous day, now rumpled, stained, and missing an overcoat. She tidied herself as best she could at Benton’s apartment, repinning her hair and scrubbing the dirt from her face. But her eyes were bloodshot with fatigue and emotion, and her hands were shaking even worse than before.

They made it as far as the rear hallway before they were discovered, by Mrs. Doherty, of course, the usual first discoverer of anything that occurred in the Allston home. She waylaid them by the kitchen door and, passing a cursory if observing eye over Sibyl’s obvious disarray, said, “I’m so sorry to bother, but I’m afraid we’ll have to discuss the girl when you’ve got a minute, miss.”

“Dovie?” Sibyl exclaimed. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“No,” Mrs. Doherty said, her eyes darting to the kitchen door. “Not Miss Whistler, miss.
The girl.
She’s up and quit on us.”

Sibyl had never been able to ascertain why Mrs. Doherty persisted in calling Betty Gallagher “the girl” rather than use her name. She didn’t think she’d heard the housekeeper speak the cook’s full name once in all the years of their joint employment. But apparently that would no longer be an issue below stairs in the Beacon Street house.

“Oh,” Sibyl said, confused. “My word. But she didn’t give any notice.” She turned to Benton, perturbed. “Why, I only just spoke to her last night. Told her you were coming for breakfast.”

“She didn’t, at that,” Mrs. Doherty said, managing to imply that she’d always expected this would happen. “And I wouldn’t’ve said anything right off like this, you just coming in and all, only the kitchen help had to get the breakfast up themselves, and— Well, they did the best they could. I’m afraid it weren’t quite up to snuff.”

Sibyl thought back to the cook’s angry, miserable face when she inquired about Harlan’s leaving. She saw that Betty must have developed softer feelings for her brother than Sibyl had realized.

“That’s all right, Mrs. Doherty, thank you. Is everyone up, then, I take it?”

“Oh, they’re up, all right,” the housekeeper said. Sibyl waited to hear if any further details might be forthcoming, but none were. The housekeeper only nodded with a knowing glare at Benton and disappeared into the kitchen. Sibyl and Benton exchanged a look, and then made their way into the front hall.

The first floor of the house was unusually bright, as someone had pushed back the heavy velvet curtains and left open both sets of pocket doors to the dining room and outer drawing room. Sibyl caught her breath, taken aback by how refreshing the carved biomorphic shapes of Helen’s aesthetic imagination looked when illuminated by sunshine.

“But have you seen my gaiters?” she heard Harley call down the second-floor hallway. Footsteps and a thunk, as of a trunk being tipped over. “That’s what I’ll need, you know. They’ve given us a list.”

“No, I haven’t seen your cursed gaiters!” Dovie cried from the opposite side of the second-floor hall, a mixture of aggravation and misery. There was more pounding of feet, and a door slammed. Sibyl smiled gamely at Benton, and squeezed his hand.

“Why don’t you go see if Papa’s in the drawing room,” she suggested. “I want to have a word with Harlan.”

Benton stared hard down at her. “What are you going to say?”

She smiled, a sad, resigned smile. “I don’t know yet,” she confessed. “I just want to have a minute with him. I think I’ll know when I get there.”

He nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’m just going to make a quick telephone call, if I may?”

She pointed him to the toadstool-shaped telephone nook under the stairs, and reflected, as he moved away, that silhouetted like that against the La Farge window, Benton looked like a Lapith in a Thessalonian glade, one of those mythical relatives of the centaurs, descended from Apollo. She smiled and made her way up the stairs.

“Harley?” she said, tapping softly on his door. It opened under the pressure of her knuckle.

She found her brother’s room in a state of frantic disarray. Trunks stood open, and piles of shirts and woolen sweaters heaped in leaning towers.

“Did you find them?” he asked, his back to her as he rummaged through a drawer.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Sibyl said, smiling. He glanced over his shoulder, tossing the stubborn lock of hair out of his eyes, and broke into a grin.

“Oh! Well, hi there,” Harlan said, a glimmer of knowingness in his eyes. “Sure missed you at breakfast.”

She arched her eyebrow at him and leaned against one of the posts of his bed, folding her arms.

“Looks like you’re making an awful lot of progress,” she said, surveying his packing.

“Well, I guess I’d better if I want to make my train,” he said. “Got to go down to New York, you know, and change and catch another one to make the camp upstate. All the fellows are going.”

“Even your friends from school?” she asked.

“Well, sure.” Harley grinned, his eyes shining with excitement. “A lot of ’em are, anyway. We’ll get in fighting shape, and then we’ll join up with the Canadians. Can’t sit around waiting all day for Wilson to get his head on straight. Fritz’s got plenty of fight in him, looks like. I just hope it’s not all over by the time I get there.”

Sibyl smiled, surprised. “I never knew you to be such a follower of current events,” she said.

He stuffed another few sweaters into the trunk on the floor, sat on it with his full weight, and lashed it closed.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you’re not far wrong. But for some reason—” He paused, staring into the middle distance. A shadow passed over his face, and he scratched under his chin as it went. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just couldn’t believe they’d torpedo that liner.
Lusitania
. I just couldn’t believe they’d do it. All those people. None of them had anything to do with the war at all. They had no reason to die like that. Did they?”

She watched him, waiting.

He paused again, his hands hanging between his knees. “I mean, you read in the papers about everything that’s going on over there, the Belgian orphans and the chlorine gas and everything, and it’s so—remote. I guess for a long time it didn’t seem like it was real. Or if it was, it didn’t seem like it had anything to do with me. But then, that ship going down . . .” He trailed off, gazing out the window at the street below, and then met her gaze. “What kind of man would stand aside, idle, when something like that happens? I feel like I have to do something. I have to. I’ve sat aside long enough.”

“Aren’t you worried that it’ll be dangerous?” she asked, as carefully as she was able.

He stood, shaking off his passing study, and bustled back to the pile of shirts on top of his highboy.

“Dangerous?” he echoed with a laugh. “Why, sure it’ll be dangerous. It’d better be dangerous!”

“What makes you say that?” Sibyl asked, her eyes glimmering under a sheen of tears. She held very still, not blinking, to keep them in her eyes, where he couldn’t see them.

He sighed, looking up at himself in the highboy mirror. Sibyl could see his face in the mirror, which looked older than when he came home from school those few short weeks ago. More like the man he dreamed of being.

“I guess,” he said, gazing on his own reflection. “I guess there just comes a time, Sibsie, when a man has to distinguish himself. That’s what it is. It’s my time.”

As he said this Sibyl wrapped her arms around her waist, cupping her elbows in her hands. She hesitated, then moved to stand next to him. He looked at her with some surprise, and she threw her arms around him, clasping him tightly to her. “Harley,” she whispered in his ear. “Always my little lieutenant. I’m so proud of you.”