“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 i
n 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.”
He broke her embrace, laughing, embarrassed by her sudden show of emotion. “Oh, come now,” he said with a grin, shaking her off.
But as Sibyl gazed on him, she thought she might never have seen her brother so determined. And, she realized, she might never have seen Harlan look so happy, either.
The gaiters, of course, were never found, and when the taxicab arrived Harlan was still asking Mrs. Doherty if she could look just one more time in the laundry room, to see if they could have ended up there after a hunting expedition three months’ earlier. While she insisted to him that they were not there, had in fact never been there, and while Lan Allston remarked to the hall stand that he felt certain gaiters could be obtained for a reasonable price even in the impenetrable wilderness of New York City, Benton Derby helped the cabbie load the trunks onto the rear of the taxi, lashing them one on top of the other as it idled at the curb. At last the trunks were secured, the gaiters were given up for lost, and Harlan stood with a rucksack over his shoulder on the front steps of the Beacon Street town house, facing his family.
“Harley,” Dovie burst, unable to contain her objections any longer. “I wish you wouldn’t go. What do you want to go for? It’s nothing to do with you! Don’t go. Don’t.”
He grinned, glanced at his father and sister with a twinkle in his eye, and then leaned down and kissed Dovie flush on the mouth. The kiss went on for a while, long enough for Benton to clear his throat.
“Come on, Doves. It’ll be swell,” Harlan said, gazing into her eyes with tenderness mixed with excitement. “I promise. And you won’t even know I’m gone, I’ll be back so fast.”
The girl brought her hands up to her mouth, her eyebrows rising in the middle of her forehead into an inverted V of misery. The sound of sniveling could be heard behind her hands, and her eyes were two emerald pools of water. Harlan placed his hands on her shoulders and this time planted a kiss square on the top of her head. “You be a good girl, now. And you write me. Write me all you want. All right?”
She nodded, but the sniveling continued.
Harlan then turned to Lan Allston, whose chiseled face reflected a stoic impassivity that the Allston children had long taken as a substitute for emotion. Sibyl watched her father out of the corner of her eye. Deep beneath the false impassivity she could read the subtle signs of a man seized with grief. A man who had known this day would come, even before his son was born. She finally understood that the frozen features of her father’s face were there to hide not how he felt about his children, but to hide what he knew from them. The stoic mask, one of the many faces Lan Allston showed the world, was worn at great cost to keep them free.
“Captain,” Harley said, extending his hand. Their father took the young man’s hand, shook it, and then he pulled his son to his breast and embraced him. His wrapped his arms tight around his son’s shoulders, eyes squinted shut, jaw set in granite. He said nothing, their father. But Sibyl watched him hold his son, hold him tightly, and at the very corner of her father’s closed eyes, she saw a glimmer of a tear. Lan Allston was not the sort of father to tell his children, in so many words, that he loved them. Sibyl knew it. Harlan knew it. And in that moment, he didn’t need to.
Last, Harlan turned to Sibyl. “Well, Sibs,” he said, with a grin. “I didn’t go back to school. Think you’ll ever forgive me?”
Sibyl smiled, and as she did so, she realized that she was wearing a stoic mask of her own. Deep inside her heart, where no one could hear, she screamed, Harley, don’t go! Stay here! Whatever you do, stay here, stay safe with us! She felt two sets of eyes on her, belonging to her father and to Benton, watching, waiting. She swallowed, her fists taut at her sides.
“I guess you can always finish up when you get back,” she said. Her cheek twitched, and she covered the twitch with a broader smile.
Her brother laughed a delighted laugh, threw his arms around her in a spontaneous embrace, and lifted her off her feet.
“Harley!” she cried, kicking her feet while the others laughed. “Come on! Put me down!” He put her down, grinned, and turned to Benton.
“Well, Derby?” he said. “You ready to go?”
“Just about,” Benton said.
The bottom fell out of Sibyl’s stomach.
“I beg your pardon?” she said, looking at him.
“He’s on my same train,” Harlan said, opening the back door of the taxi and tossing his rucksack inside. “Better run. Wouldn’t want to miss it.”
She stared at him, a strange buzzing in her ears. Benton looked down at her with a sad smile.
“What is he talking about?” Sibyl said, her eyes widening in panic. She reached out and took hold of his jacket sleeve. “Ben? What’s Harlan talking about?”
“I’m going, too,” he said, softly.
“But you can’t.”
“I can,” he said, still smiling. “I must.” He brought a hand up and laid it, softly, against her cheek.
“But,” she protested, her eyes flushing with water. “But I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay here.”
He leaned down, not caring who saw, and kissed her. Sibyl lost herself in it, in the feel of his mouth on hers, in the gentle insistence of his lips and his hand cupping her cheek. He kissed her like he was sipping cool water, like it was the most natural and perfect thing in the world. Then he pulled away, and whispered, “I’ve had my things sent along to the station.”
She held fast to his sleeve, her knuckles white. “Don’t,” she whispered, eyes looking up into his, pleading.
He leaned in, his mouth close to her ear, and said, “You didn’t see me there, did you? Maybe I can look after him. Maybe we’re freer than we know.”
Then he turned, holding her steady in his gaze, and climbed into the taxicab next to Harlan. Twin streams of tears started snaking down Sibyl’s face. Her father’s hand slipped into hers and squeezed. On her other side, Dovie edged nearer, wrapping her arm around Sibyl’s waist.
The taxi gunned and pulled away down Beacon Street. Sibyl couldn’t stand it. Just when she finally found him again, Benton was leaving. Her lower lip trembled, and she bit down on it, hating him for going, hating herself for being unable to stop him. The taxi honked a merry awoo-gah, and Sibyl, Lan, and Dovie each raised a hand in farewell.
Before the cab had gone half a block, Harlan stuck his head out the rear window and called out, “Good-bye! Don’t let old Baiji die on me, now!”
And then the taxi rounded the corner of Marlborough Street and was gone.
The three of them, Lan, Dovie, and Sibyl, stood in a knot on the front steps of the house for several minutes, as if waiting to see if the cab would come back. When it didn’t, Lan finally let go of Sibyl’s hand, and fumbled in his pocket for the chronometer.
“Hmmm,” he said.
Sibyl turned to look at him, and said, “What is it, Papa?”
He smiled at her, and behind his ice blue eyes Sibyl saw the true, echoing depths of his sadness.
“Looks like they’ll just make their train,” he said, in a tone that Sibyl found impossible to read, and stepped back inside the house.
The door closed, and when it clicked shut Dovie’s arm dropped from around Sibyl’s waist.
“You,” the girl hissed, turning miserable, accusing eyes on Sibyl. “You! Let! Him! Go!” With each word her voice rose in pitch, until on the last one it was ne
arly a scream.
“What do you mean?” Sibyl said, confused, so lost in her own grief that at first she didn’t know what the girl was talking about.
“You said you’d talk to him!” Dovie shrieked. “You promised! How could you just let him go like that? How?”
Sibyl’s heart quickened with mingled confusion and fear, and she remembered that Dovie was right. She had promised to speak with Harlan. And, of course, she had spoken with him. Just not the way Dovie had wanted her to.
“Dovie,” she said, reaching a tentative hand toward the girl, who was shaking with sorrow and rage. Sibyl heard the sound of a window sash opening, somewhere down the street, and she swallowed, anxious to keep the girl from making a scene.
“No!” Dovie exclaimed, stamping her foot. “You promised! Now he’s gone. Oh, he’s gone, he’s gone.” With a moan the girl sank to the ground, her knees pulled up like a street urchin, burying her face in her hands, weeping. Surprised, Sibyl took a step back. Dovie wrapped her arms around her knees and sobbed into her skirts. “He’s gone,” she moaned. “What’ll become of me now? What’ll I do?”
Slowly, peering up and down the street to ensure that they were unobserved, Sibyl seated herself next to Dovie and wrapped an arm over her thin shoulders. “Dearest,” she said gently. “You’ll be fine. It’ll be hard, having him gone, but you’ll manage. You’ll see.”
“No, no, no,” Dovie bawled, rocking back and forth. “You don’t understand.”
“Sure I do,” Sibyl murmured, stroking the baby-fine hairs at the base of Dovie’s neck. “You love Harlan. I know that. It’s awful, saying good-bye to someone—” She paused, an uncomfortable realization dawning inside her. “To someone you love,” she finished.
“No,” she wailed. “I mean, yes, I do, of course I do, but that’s not it.”
“It’s not?”
Dovie turned wet green eyes, black kohl puddling beneath them, onto Sibyl. Her nose bubbled, and her ruby lips were swollen from crying. Sibyl smoothed the hair away from her brow and kissed her forehead.