The House of Velvet and Glass (6 page)

Even the discomforts of life at sea didn’t trouble him. He never cared much about food, always eating absently, whether roast squab at his father’s dining table or boiled salt pork out of the galley. He enjoyed the rigor of the watches, the technical precision of the rigging, the clarity of knowing what duty required, and what it did not. While the other men went distracted in their craving for female flesh, Lannie held himself aloof with stern self-assurances of his innate gentlemanliness and piety.

Perhaps that was his mother’s voice, stressing piety. Gentlemanliness, at any rate.

He stood on the long wharf off of the Bund, testing his legs, his hands thrust in his pockets. Around him throngs of people pressed, ragged children clawing for money, ageless women with rotted teeth. Multicolored lanterns cast flickering light, and Lannie absorbed the clamor, basking in the mingled fear and excitement that he had craved when signing on as part of the clipper’s crew. The mysterious land of his father’s stories was not some wild fairyland in a storybook, but was
here
.

“Day breaks on Marblehead,” Lannie muttered, grinning to himself.

A shouted discussion was under way as several of his shipmates, already three sheets to the wind, debated which of the needs of men several weeks at sea should be met first, and in what quarter. The old walled city, or the International Settlement? The French concession? But who wants those bony white Shanghailanders, when the land of a thousand flowers is just along the creek?

After a time the group started to move, a decision not having been made exactly, but motion seeming the order of the night. Lannie had gone barely a block before he stumbled as the ground seemed to undulate under his feet.

“Drunk already, Greenlet! Haven’t we taught you to hold your liquor better’n that?” bellowed the sailor next to him, a grizzled fellow named Tom, who was missing three teeth from a wide hole on the side of his jaw. Early in the voyage he’d claimed to Lannie that they’d been lost when he caught a musket ball in his teeth, but the bosun’s mate informed him later that they’d been pulled by the barber for common rot.

“No!” Lannie protested, looking with confusion at his feet. He lurched, catching himself, without meaning to, on Tom’s shoulder.

“You’ll be needing those land legs again.” Tom smiled with roguish certainty. “We’ve only little time ashore, then it’s back for home and six weeks of salt pork stew for us, by God. And those fancy long three girls won’t have yis, if they think you can’t handle yourself.”

Lannie tried to smile, glancing sideways at his shipmate. Tom’s horrible mouth was smiling, but his eyes were harsh in the fragile evening light.

“Right,” said Lannie, shrugging his shoulders in a way that he hoped seemed careless, but which, he thought too late, could be construed as haughty. Tom watched him, eyes narrowing. Lannie squirmed under the scrutiny, aware that the verdict on him was out.

He smiled again, more fully this time, looking for a way to reassure Tom of his gameness.

“What’s a long three girl?” he asked finally, already fairly certain that he knew the answer.

Tom tossed his head back, guffawing, and clapped Lannie on the shoulder. Lannie felt the tense moment pass as Tom said, wiping his nose on the back of his wrist, “Something tells me you’ll be figuring that out soon enough.”

Chapter Three

The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 15, 1915

The front hall of number 138½ Beacon Street, the Back Bay, was a more modern version of the hall that Sibyl had just left at Mrs. Dee’s, though darkened by deeper shadows. The town house, a four-story brown creature with a fat bay window bellying out under an elm tree, possessed a facade obscured by twining fingers of ivy, which cast the hall in gloom. In the summertime the ivy leaves spread dark green over every surface of the house; in the autumn they flushed bloodred, and in the winter the leaves shriveled and blew away, leaving dried husks of vines snaking over the house’s face like ossified veins. Springtime, the ivy burst to waxy life, tinting the shade inside the house with pale green.

The house was built by Sibyl’s father, after his own design, in 1888, and presented as a wedding present to Helen upon their return from a honeymoon tour of Europe. Sibyl’s mother had thrown herself into decorating their new house in the height of modern style, and Lan Allston, not usually an indulgent man, acquiesced to almost every desire of his new, and much younger, bride. As such, the interior of the house reflected in its purest form the incoherence of Helen’s taste.

The hall stand coiled up the entryway wall, a monument to American aestheticism, but still serving its essential Victorian function by bristling with umbrellas and forgotten hats. A silver tray was cluttered with visiting cards, most of them dropped off by drivers as their owners idled outside at the curb. Lan never received anymore. Sibyl glanced at her reflection in the hall stand mirror, her face cast in green pallor from the ivy over the windows.

To the rear of the grand staircase, which wound its vinelike way up to the canopy of the upper floors, glowed Helen’s finest achievement: the La Farge window. She had always made a point of touring visitors past this organizing feature at the far end of the hall to admire its woodland scene of a babbling brook overhung with trailing wisteria, made of nubby layers of stained glass.

“The La Farge,” Helen had called it, always leaving off “window,” though Sibyl as a girl found the scene unsettling. There was something off-putting about a scene like that, moving water captured so cunningly in shattered and reassembled glass. Like a live bug caught in amber.

The pocket door to the front parlor was closed, and Sibyl’s hand hovered above its lacquered surface, twin peacocks furling inlaid tails below her fingertips. There was no telling what sort of mood she might find waiting in the drawing room. Lan Allston wore many discrete faces, and Sibyl suspected that she had only ever seen a handful of them. The one usually reserved for her, a pleasant but closed face, masking general if detached approval, she knew to be different from the one allotted to her brother. Several of Lan’s faces, she knew, had vanished years ago under the surface of the Atlantic ocean.

In silence she slid the pocket door aside and slipped into the front parlor, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. The room was done in varying shades of blue, with dark woods and lacquer. Helen’s fetish for the art nouveau dominated, with tree boughs and curling birds echoed in the patterns on the Chinese rug and in the
objets
clustered, almost tastefully, on occasional tables. The bay window held benches upholstered in heavy yellow silk, which Sibyl, when small and hungry for sensation, loved to stroke. Velvet curtains blotted out the streetlights. Most of the houses along Beacon had long since run electrical wires to wall sconces and chandeliers; it was a simple process, not even that expensive, but Lan kept the house lit with orange gas flame. He was loath to spend the money, she knew, but she also detected her mother’s preferences haunting Lan’s choice.

“Electric light does nothing for the complexion,” Helen insisted in her mind, as usual delivering instructions. “Women look so well in softer light.”

Sibyl turned to the parlor fireplace, its mantel carved and froglike in shape. Above the fireplace was Helen, or rather a life-size effigy of Helen, caught in swirls of paint by Cecilia Beaux shortly after her marriage. The paint-Helen stood frozen, eyes illuminated by globules of white, her hair up in curls at the back of her head, white collarbones exposed, circlet of pearls at her throat. Helen clearly wished to appear “artistic” when she posed. Sibyl could imagine a naïve Helen in the artist’s studio, anxious to seem worldly, yet uninformed how to do so. The effect was of a young woman unsure of herself, an awkward slipper peeking out from under her gown, one arm folded at her waist, eyes wide, lips about to speak.

As a child, Sibyl liked to sprawl on the carpet before the fireplace, gazing up at the painting like a miniature supplicant. She was supposed to keep away from the front parlor—no children in the good rooms was the rule—so her hours communing with her mother’s likeness were stolen from time during which she was assumed to be sleeping, or working on lessons. Neither Harlan nor Eulah were drawn to the parlor the way Sibyl was; or at least, she had never caught them there on her expeditions to the front of the house. Eulah had no need for a substitute; she could command the attentions of the actual Helen. Harlan, in contrast, spent his energies avoiding close observation. It was difficult, being the son.

Sibyl gazed up at the portrait, her mother looking as surprised and tentative as always. Lately, Sibyl had felt the curious sensation of passing her mother in time. She was now older by some five years than the paint-Helen was. A strange dual awareness situated Sibyl, in the painting’s presence, as at once lady of the house, and yet also a small girl, trespassing in a room that was forbidden to her. She always felt the mingled thrill and guilt of getting away with something when she entered the front parlor. Even if she was doing so to receive.

Light from the tulip sconces on either end of the mantel gleamed on the painting’s varnish, illuminating it with lifelike warmth. Sibyl could almost feel sorry for Helen as a girl. Her ambition, her curiosity, her fear: everything that Sibyl had known Helen to be could be read in her youthful face. Everything but what was to come, of course. Sibyl’s eyes wandered to the soft white hand pressing into the paint-Helen’s waist, thumb folded into her belly. The same hand, thirty-odd years older, that had reached out for her from unfathomable nothingness. Sibyl’s breath caught in her throat, and she reached her own hand forward, stopping short of caressing the image of the hand that she had longed to touch.

Ashamed, Sibyl pulled herself out of her reverie, realizing that she was dawdling. Castigating herself in silence, she stepped with authority to the pocket doors of the rear drawing room, allowing her footfalls to be audible on the floor. Sibyl hesitated, pressing her palm to the lacquered door, patterned with twin images of whales entwined with tentacled sea monsters. She inhaled, filling her lungs as much as her corseting would allow, and slid open the doors.

The only forms that she could discern in the twilight of the inner parlor were the rounded arms of her father’s armchair, a Greek-revival holdout against Helen’s aesthetic onslaught, and the hulking shape of Lan Allston himself. He stood with his back to her, busy at the fireplace mantel. A rhythmic grating noise emanated from his corner of the room, and Sibyl saw that he was winding the clock.

She opened her mouth to speak, but he got there first.

“You’re back, I take it.”

A pause, while the sound of winding continued.

“I’ve asked Betty for dinner as usual at seven thirty,” she said, wary, as she often was when there was a problem to address with her father. “We’ll be dressing.”

He let out a short bark of a laugh, pulled his timepiece out of a vest pocket for comparison purposes, nodded with satisfaction, and then returned it to the pocket with a practiced motion as he turned to face his eldest child.

Lan Allston, at nearly seventy, was the sort of man whom his contemporaries liked to call “well preserved.” By this they meant not that he had managed to hold on to the illusion of youth (he hadn’t), nor that he had the too-carefully-groomed aspect of the professional class of man, the bankers and the lawyers. Instead they meant that Lan Allston looked exactly as they felt he should look. Rather than graying, his hair had darkened to the color of pencil lead, and he wore it cropped close and brushed back from his brow, with sideburns longer than fashion allowed for anyone who had not made his fortune at sea. His forehead was high and etched with lines burned by a lifetime of ocean weather. His eyes were an unsettling pale blue. He did not wear spectacles.

As long as Sibyl could remember, Lan had looked nearly the same. He wore elegantly cut brown tweed suits, and she couldn’t recall ever seeing him in shirtsleeves. Most importantly, at least to him, he carried a brass marine chronometer tucked into his pocket, won—she had been led to believe—in a card game with another sailor in the Canary Islands. The chronometer was larger than the average pocket watch, and her father made such a fetish of it that his tailor was obliged to render his vest pockets that much larger, and reinforced with silk batting, to accommodate it. His shirt collars were rounded, folded over a plain dark tie held in place with a modest tie pin at his throat.

“It’s all very well to dress if you think it necessary,” Allston said to his daughter, in a tone that suggested that dressing would do nothing to smooth over the Harlan problem. “Though you’ll have to have Mrs. Doherty ring the bell good and loud if you expect me to know it’s seven.” He cast a baleful eye at the mantel clock.

“You should take it in to be looked at,” Sibyl suggested. Lan Allston, she knew, was a man who liked to know, rather than to guess.

Her father grunted in reply. The two enduring Allstons stood, regarding each other in silence. Sibyl had found since she was small that she and her father never needed to say much to know what the other was thinking. Their language was one of implication and assumption, exchanged looks and implied opinions.