‘You want me to buy this rough lump of t-turquoise?’ His tongue stumbled a little, as it seldom did nowadays.
Fey felt the change in him. She knew that at that instant of contact he had begun to see her as a desirable woman. If I let him buy it, she thought, I can get it back later. I know I can get it back. With this darting shield she held off a fierce thrust of shame, the echo of Natanay’s words, ‘You still wear the sky-stone, may you never lose it.’ What has an old savage in that faraway country to do with me? she thought. This is what I want and if the stone can help me get it—she thought of her baby waiting for her in the Infirmary ward amongst all the sickly wailing ones.
‘Yes, Mr. Tower,’ she said, ‘I want you to buy it.’
He understood from her tone that there was something portentous about this proffering of the turquoise, and this kept him from telling her at once that it was worthless to him. He was not interested in crude unset stones, and certainly not in one so common as the turquoise. But he felt that he had perhaps misjudged her.
‘I might be interested in buying it, but I’d like to have it appraised first,’ he said. ‘Suppose you tell me something about yourself.’
Fey deftly, and without embarrassment, buttoned up hex collar. Her poise had returned, and her faith in her star.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want you to know about me, and I want you to like me.’ She sat down again and gave him her slow, seductive smile.
Simeon swallowed. Their positions were abruptly reversed. It was he now who felt nervous and uncertain. She troubled Him, He had become very much aware of her body, all the more so as she seemed unconscious of it. She sat in a voluptuous attitude, turned a bit sidewavs so that her slender hip line showed, and she looked at him through her lashes, the strange gray eyes caressing and intimate. And yet it didn’t seem deliberate: nothing so simple as blatant sexual invitation. That had never appealed to him. .
‘Where shall I begin?’ asked Fey softly. ‘My story is a little long, you will not understand much, but I will tell the truth, and then you will advise me, please?’
Simeon laughed. Suddenly he felt relaxed and young. At his elbow were that day’s market quotations to which he had been giving his usual single-minded attention before the interruption. He could, however, return to them later instead of going to see Pansy.
‘How about tea with me, Mrs. Dillon?’ he said jovially. ‘Much better than an office for this long story and advice.’
‘I would be very pleased,’ said Fey, rising, ‘but I must be home at six.’
‘Why?’ asked Simeon, also rising. Husband, he thought, with a faint repulsion.
Fey gave him a long, considering look. ‘I will tell you why later,’ she said.
Simeon shrugged, opened his closet door, put on his ulster, gray derby hat, and lemon-colored gloves. He ushered Fey out of the office and noticed that he could look right over the top of her head, a rare experience for him. It gave him an agreeable sensation of masculine dominance.
In the outer office Lemming sprang to attention. Caution this time enabled him to hide the shock he felt at the two of them going out together. He stood, breathing hard through flaring nostrils, but otherwise deferential while Simeon gave him instructions.
Fey did not glance at Lemming. She loathed him and knew that it was mutual. It was not in her to use subterfuge. The coyote, she thought negligently, let him yap. It is his nature. And she stood calmly waiting by the stairs until Simeon finished. This composure disconcerted Lemming more than anything else had. It was as though something had been settled in there, her attitude appeared to him proprietorial. He watched the welcoming smile she gave Tower as he joined her, saw the chief smile back. Not the quick, rather nervous grimace with which he usually expressed good will, but a true light-hearted response.
Lemming went back to his desk muttering his frustrated and angry curiosity.
Simeon considered taking Fey to Delmonico’s and immediately thought better of it. Too many people he knew would be there. His life had been extremely circumspect. He never took Pansy out in public, and he was unused to têtes-à-têtes with a woman. When he entertained, either those on the fringes of society who accepted him, or the smart actresses who built up the man-of-the-world picture, he always did the expected thing, and he moved always in a group.
This little excursion with an unknown, mysterious woman was unprecedented. They went out on Wall Street and the electric sunlight of the October afternoon added to his agreeable feeling of excitement.
‘My carriage is around the comer,’ he said. ‘Shall we drive up to the Park and have an ice at the Refectory?’
‘I’d like that,’ answered Fey simply. ‘I have never ridden in a private carriage.’
Simeon gave her a quick, puzzled look. Such naïveté did not belong to her expensive clothes, her composure, nor the forceful way she had maneuvered their interview.
‘You’re a strange little lady. I’m getting very curious about you.’
She did not answer, but she looked up at him and smiled. In the smile there was promise.
The victoria was waiting around the corner on Broadway. Briggs, the coachman, jumped down off the box when he saw his master’s bulky figure approach. He was astonished at the earliness of the hour. Mr. Tower wouldn’t usually leave the office until six. He was more astonished at the sight of a lady and orders to drive up Broadway to the Mall. ’Ere’s somethink new, he thought, as he touched his cockaded hat and tucked the mink rug around Fey; master, ’e do look different, younger like, might be ’e’s going courtin’ at last. He returned to the box and clucked to the horses, and, while he drove expertly through the heavy Broadway traffic, he speculated in some gloom upon the effects of having a mistress over the easygoing Tower household.
No such idea entered Simeon’s head, but by six o’clock, when at Fey’s insistence, he drove her back to the Infirmary door, he was bewildered and flattered, and he was beginning to be romantically interested.
She had made him feel young and physically attractive. With her he had forgotten that he was thirty-eight, that his blond hair was thinning on top, that his stocky framework carried too many well-fed pounds. She was so small and lightly boned that in walking beside her he had forgotten the stretching for height which plagued him when he was with women. He had even for once forgotten all the extraneous paraphernalia of personality with which he built up the figure of Simeon Tower, Baron of Finance and Prince of Good Fellows. She had made him feel that she thought him truly a great man. She had led him on to boast a bit about his financial astuteness, about the rapidity of his rise. He knew in his soul that this quick acquiring of a fortune was not unique. Vanderbilt, Morgan, Stewart, Gould, Drew, Fisk, had all done it in the same period, and a dozen more were coming up——It took knack and concentration; one must be unencumbered by scruples and ready to grab every chance to exploit the new resources of the expanding country before someone else got there first. Given these traits and a bit of luck at the beginning, it wasn’t so difficult. But Fey and her wide-eyed admiration had made him feel that it had been. She reflected back to him the image of a dashing, invincible conqueror. She had been the perfect Desdemona, and he had found it so pleasant to talk to her during their two hours’ drive to Central Park and back that it wasn’t until he delivered her to the dingy brownstone building on Second Avenue that he realized how little he had learned about her. She had come from the Spanish country out West somewhere, she had been married and had a baby. His impression was that she was a widow. She lived for the moment in a hospital, because one of those unsexed women medicos was her friend. This much he knew, and it had not seemed important while he was caught by the magic she had conjured up between them.
Briggs was already standing at attention on the littered sidewalk before the Infirmary when Simeon came to himself and threw a disgusted look at their surroundings. ‘See here,’ he said, ‘you can’t really live in a place like this.’
‘I hate it,’ said Fey.
‘You’re hard up?’ asked Simeon, frowning. He had forgotten his first suspicions of her. The scene in the office had become overlaid by this new enchantment.
‘I have no money at all,’ she answered. ‘ That’s why I brought you the turquoise.’
Oh, that turquoise, he thought impatiently. Can she really think it’s of any value! But he no longer cared if it were a pretext.
‘Let’s drive out again Sunday!’ he cried boyishly. ‘It’s been great!’ He knew that he sounded young and exuberant. The real thing, not the counterfeit he often used. ‘I’ll be here about four. Bring you the price of your stone.’
‘Yes,’ said Fey. ‘Thank you.’ She turned and put her hand in his for farewell. He was electrified by her touch. On impulse he bent his head and pressed his lips to the small gloved hand. The coachman and two dirty urchins who were hanging around the carriage were transfixed. Fey had never had her hand kissed any more than Simeon had ever yielded to such an extravagant European impulse. But she received the salute with the quiet grace of her Spanish forebears, and therefore saved Simeon from the immediate backwash of feeling that he was ridiculous. He was grateful and all the more fascinated. It was her special gift that, while she evoked in him a sensual passion, she also gilded and bejeweled it with romance. She was not a romantic, she was a mystic and a realist. She knew what she wanted, and she knew instinctively what Simeon wanted.
She smiled good-bye to him, and ran lightly up the Infirmary steps.
Rachel had been drawn to her window by the sound of the carriage and the clop, clop, of pedigreed hoofs. She also witnessed the little farewell scene, and she rushed from her room and stopped Fey on the second-floor landing.
‘My dear child,’ she cried, blocking the way, for Fey was in a fever to go up to Lucita, ‘who was that man, and what has thee been doing?’
Fey caught her lip and looked ruefully up at her friend like a naughty child who knows that its mother will be indulgent. The wind had loosened her sleek hair and soft tendrils curled around her face. She looked very young and she shone with triumph.
‘That was Simeon Tower, Doctor Rachel, dear. He likes me, I knew he would.’
‘Simeon Tower——’ repeated Rachel. ‘ Thee means that rich man in the papers—— But how—and why—? Fey, I don’t understand. And that dress—!’
The light was dim in the hallway outside Ward A and Rachel had just discovered what made Fey look so completely different.
Fey gave an excited laugh. ‘ Oh, he didn’t pay for it! ’ she said, with the outrageous frankness that even Rachel often found disconcerting.
‘I did not assume that he had,’ she said stiffly. ‘But it would be no more incredible than that he should take thee home in his carriage, and kiss thy hand.’
‘I know,’ Fey said quickly, almost maternally. The quivering elation melted into her usual mature calm. ‘It is strange, but I made it happen, and the rest, too, will come. I must go to my baby, she’ll be crying for me.’
Rachel followed upstairs to the third floor. She sat beside Fey while she nursed the hungry baby. She watched them in troubled silence. She was not worldly, but she was wise, and when, after the baby had once more gone to sleep, she drew the story of the afternoon bit by bit from Fey, she saw the true inwardness of the situation. The girl, always reticent, told very little, but Rachel understood. Fey had twice been mortally humiliated and abandoned by life. At her father’s death and her husband’s desertion she had been forced into a degradation of the spirit and body.
Small wonder, then, that now she was fighting life for herself and the baby, that she was determined to wrest from it the prizes which her strong and completely feminine nature now suggested to her as the only ones of value: money, with its attendant power, and a subtle form of revenge. She may succeed, thought Rachel sadly, and it will be sickeningly wrong.
She tried to reason with the girl; she showed her bitter doubts, and it was useless. Fey was remote and dutiful. She insisted on taking the night shift in her ward to even up time lost that afternoon. At midnight she relieved Nellie Molloy and efficiently solved several problems which that sleepy young woman had neglected. The screened corner bed held a scabrous immigrant mother in protracted labor, and at dawn Fey expertly assisted Rachel in the delivery of a feeble scaly infant, misshapen and livid. The baby would not breathe properly, and it was Fey who grimly doused it in the cold and hot basins of water and blew her own breath into its lungs while Rachel worked on the mother. Between them they saved both, and when the chill dawn light sifted through the ward, the mother and child slept normally.
The doctor remained a few minutes beside the cot, then she followed Fey into the utensil room, where she found the girl violently scrubbing her hands under the cold trickle of the single tap.
‘Ah, my dear,’ said Rachel, the relief in her voice roughened by exhaustion, ‘can thee not see what a fine work thee does here! What a future thee might have—honest, clean, unselfish. We saved life tonight, Fey—does thee not feel triumph?’
Fey slowly placed the bar of yellow soap on the zinc drain and turned toward the doctor. The naked gas jet hissed and sputtered and its glare pitilessly exposed Rachel. Her graying hair was disheveled, tired furrows pulled her mouth, the tiny muscle, which exhaustion had lately set to jumping, beat in her cheek. And the coarse linen apron that protected her dress was stained brownish with drying blood.
This tarnishing of Rachel exploded the disgust Fey had been controlling. She threw back her head.
‘Look at you!’ she cried, her voice breaking. ‘Dirt, blood, misery. You’re killing yourself trying to stop it. And it’s no use. It’ll go on, no matter what you do. That mother and baby, they’d have died in the cellar they came from. But what good did it do to save them? They’ll go back next week. They’ll go on just the same—dirt, misery, drink, stupidity. What’s the use of helping their bodies a little? You don’t change their souls!’
Rachel’s tired eyes brightened to sudden anger. ‘How does thee know!’ she cried sharply. ‘We’re put in this world to help each other. The bodies first, because those we can better understand.’
The girl’s mouth twisted; she shook her head, and turning back to the sink she began to fill the ward’s water-jug. ‘ I’ve been the “poor” myself, Doctor Rachel,’ she said. ‘Only the strong get out. And they do it alone.’
Rachel sighed, her anger gone. A swimming weariness ran along her bones and she sank on an iron stool beside the medicine cabinet. ‘I would not bother with thee, Fey,’ she said sadly, ‘did I not know thee has glimpses of the Light within, despite thee hardens thy heart. Dear child—we do nothing alone.’
Fey was silent, her bowed head bent over the sink.
Rachel closed her eyes and began to speak, half to herself, quoting the words of the Quaker founder. ‘Every man——’ she paused, and repeated, ‘Every man is enlightened by the divine light of Christ. I saw it shine through all, and that they that believed in it came out of condemnation to the light of life—and became the children of it——’
A tremor passed through Fey. Unwillingly she felt the shock of a different vibration. It was as though a crystal wind blew through the dingy utensil room. She resisted, struggling, resentful, but it caught her up inexorably. For an instant she apprehended meaning. She saw with Rachel. She was Rachel. She was one with that unclean new mother in the ward, with all the other patients and beyond—extended in identity through a million channels which sprayed eternally from the infinite fountainhead. And the water’s essence was pain.
No! she cried desperately.
The brown cupboards and walls of the utensil room sped back encircling and compressing. The tap resumed its metallic drip. Through the wall came the sleepy whimper of a patient.
Rachel, strengthened by the words she had quoted, stood up and untied her apron. ‘Never mind the water-jug,’ she said. ‘Annie will be here to relieve thee.’ She smiled at Fey. ‘Get some sleep, child, this is no time for deep di
scussion. I should know better.’
Fey kissed Rachel silently and went to her room. For a long time she lay awake, holding the baby tight against her. As the sweeps and the milk-boys started crying through the streets she fell asleep at last. When she awoke four hours later, her first thought was of Simeon Tower and that she would see him Sunday.
Chapter Twelve
RACHEL also had made plans for Fey on that October Sunday of 1868. Rachel had been invited to an ‘At Home’ given by the Misses Phoebe and Alice Cary. Their Sunday parties, frequented by the literary, the cultured, and the semi-Bohemian, were New York’s nearest approach to a salon, since it could no longer boast gauzy gatherings of ‘the starry sisterhood’ in Charlotte Lynch Botta’s or Mrs. Osgood’s drawing rooms.
Like them, the Cary sisters were authors, of course. Had not Phoebe written One Sweetly Solemn Thought, Alice written Married but Not Mated, and both a great many affecting songs and lyrics? And had not Whittier himself dedicated a most flattering poem to them after they had visited him in Amesbury? They were, therefore, well-equipped to run a salon and they succeeded where so many had failed. The stately Junoesque Alice understood the proper mixing of human ingredients: solid thinkers for body, a celebrity or two for flavor, and an eccentric for spice.
Phoebe, the domestic one, translated her sister’s mixtures into their literal culinary terms and thereby produced excellent claret lemonade and fruitcake. One enjoyed one’s self at the Carys’. Their house on Twentieth Street near Fourth Avenue had been furnished with conscious charm, and its motif was a forest glade. The thick carpets were patterned in oak leaves; the gasoliers, artfully shaded by yellow glass, gave the feeling of sunlight upon foliage touched by frost; for the vases, satin throws, and bound books were all of autumnal reds and oranges, or lemon yellows.
Horace Greeley, who never missed a Sunday unless he was at his Chappaqua farm, had said in print that the Carys had ‘the sunniest drawing-room (even by gaslight) to be found between Kingsbridge and the Battery.’