Beacon Street Mourning (5 page)

YOU FORGOT to thank him," Michael said, turning to watch William Barrett drive away. "No," I said, not wanting to deal with the hotel doorman and on my own steam pushing through the newfangled revolving door of the Parker House, "I didn't forget."

I was burning with . . . with something—I supposed it was hatred, or something very akin to it. All I could think was that Augusta was having her way with my father
again.
Again and again and again. Only this time, it could cost him his life.

TWO HOURS LATER, having unpacked, rested, and changed my clothes, I exited the hotel not through the revolving thing but by a more normal sort of door to one side, this one manned by a uniformed doorman with epaulettes on his shoulders dripping gold braid. He inquired if I wished transportation.

"Soon," I replied, "but I am inclined to walk a little, and take the air."

"As you wish, madam," he said, touching the brim of his cap, which sported more gold braid, and I continued on to the
corner of Tremont Street. There I paused to get my bearings. Slowly I began to
feel
my way back into Boston.

Cold: that was my first and most predominant impression. All of Nature seemed so cold and white and barren. I shivered, feeling the cold all the way into my bones, from the tip of my nose down to my very toes.

Except for a few yards here and there where the sidewalks had been scraped bare—in front of the Parker House, for example—every horizontal surface was covered with snow. The snow had packed down hard and flat on the streets and walkways but piled up elsewhere, in mounds of every size, from tiny ones in the crooks of tree limbs and atop window moldings, to some formidable streetside barriers. Icicles hung from the eaves of buildings and from the limbs of trees. As my eyes adjusted and began to discriminate, all that snow no longer seemed so white but took on a more realistic and often sullied appearance.

Directly across Tremont Street from the corner where I stood was the entrance to the Old Burying Ground, which occupies a kind of excrescence of land off Boston Common—that is, the area is attached but not a part of the Common proper. There, tall skeletons of ancient trees raised naked branches to the mottled gray sky, guarding the old graves as they have done for more than two hundred years. But I did not cross Tremont Street, although I felt those trees beckon to me; instead I crossed School Street with the intention of paying my respects at King's Chapel.

My father has always been fond of King's; when we attended church, which after Mother's death was not often, this was where we came. As one might surmise from the name, King's was founded as an Anglican church, but ever since the Revolution, they have held Unitarian-Universalist services there. King's has a graveyard too, and it was there I went, passing first along the portico beneath the heavy columns of the
small but substantial church building, which is made entirely of local granite.

They had run out of space for burials here at King's long ago, or else I supposed this might be where Father would want his bones to lie for his eternal rest—if there is such a thing. Instead he would be buried next to my mother in Mount Auburn Cemetery, across the Charles River in Cambridge. Mother—who had known for a good many months before it finally happened that she would die—had made that choice herself.

I walked back and forth among the graves, forcing myself to accept the likelihood that Father would die. The thought weighed on me. Indeed, in this place, with its tombs of John Winthrop and Paul Revere and such venerables, one felt the whole heavy weight of history. That weight is part and parcel of Boston, it was what I wanted to feel.

"Fremont, you are not in San Francisco anymore," I said softly to myself. Stating the obvious, yes, but I needed the reminder. San Francisco ways of thinking would not work for me here, nor the more open, casual manner of dealing with people. Boston was everything I'd run from four years earlier, that was true; yet this place was in my blood, my origin if no longer my home.

Surely if I remembered to draw upon the maturity that had become mine through experience during those four years I'd been away, I could do well in the difficult time I knew lay ahead of me. I might have been a child here—even here in this very graveyard where I used to come out of morbid curiosity—yet I did not have to let this city evoke in me the frustrating, helpless paralyses of childhood.

Slowly I raised my gaze from a tombstone I'd been contemplating, whose principal decoration was a skull with wings where its ears should have been, and looked toward the New
State House. "New" it is called, though it was built in the 1790s or thereabout. Different from San Francisco indeed.

Across a few blocks of rooftops I could see architect Bulfinch's golden dome of the State House glowing like a beacon, making its own light in spite of the grayness of this cold afternoon. All the buildings around were equally old and equally different from what my eyes had become used to during the past four years. Dark red brick and stone formed the predominant materials here, with roofs being made of even darker slate.

In this part of Boston—even on my own street, Beacon Street—the architectural style is most often plain; the buildings, whether designed as places of business or family dwellings, are flat-fronted and without ornament, save for the occasional pediment or pilaster. Pembroke Jones House was no exception. I used to know the name of the architect who designed the family home, someone famous; but such things were never very important to me and I had forgotten. The style of architecture, that I could remember: It is called Federal.

I stood in the graveyard a few moments longer, breathing more easily and deeply of the cold air as my body adjusted to a changed clime, and my mind did too. I was wearing both the fur hat and the muffler, and leather gloves of course, though they were not lined. My full-length, fitted coat of burgundy wool was the heaviest available ready-made at San Francisco's best (at least in my opinion) department store, the City of Paris—yet I feared it was not really warm enough for Boston. If we—if I—stayed here very long, I would need something warmer. And perhaps of better quality. I should have to see what Augusta and others were wearing.

I sighed. I had to think about these things again, and I didn't like it. Clothes and fashion and style and such trivia can clutter up one's mind interminably once one lets that sort of thing get
started. Yet I had a purpose here, things to prove, points to be made; and if I must dress and act the part of my father's daughter, his only rightful heir taking her place in society, in order to achieve my purpose, then most assuredly I would.

Perhaps I could even convert these damnable canes into a kind of dignified accessory, I thought as I returned to the hotel. I walked as tall and straight as possible, with an almost normal gait. If every now and then I felt a twinge that caused a hitch in my step, I stopped to stare at some detail of nearby scenery as if my pause had been intentional. I was not fast but I was becoming more and more surefooted with each passing day. The Parker House being so near the Common and the Public Garden, I would be able to take my daily exercise easily. A considerable bonus: There were no hills to climb. Even Beacon Hill, which rises between Beacon Street and the Charles River, is nothing compared to the steepness of our San Francisco slopes.

Nor was the Charles much compared to San Francisco Bay. I would miss my City by the Bay, but I had work to do here, and I was about to begin it. The things that would happen in the next few weeks might prove to be the most important things I would ever do in my entire life.

I SIGHED. It was extremely ungracious of me, perhaps even rude, but I could not help it.

"Michael," I said, trying hard to keep the exasperation out of my voice, "did you even bother to read the note I left you?"

His eyes flashed blue fire, like the hottest part of a flame. "Yes, I read your note. But surely you don't expect me to let you go off by yourself like that! Why do you think I came all the way across the country with you? Go ahead, that's not a rhetorical question. Answer me if you can."

"Shush! You are embarrassing me in front of the doorman, not to mention the passersby." I answered his question, if only
tangentially, in a low voice: "I know you came to be of assistance, but there are times—this first visit to my father in the hospital being one of them—when I absolutely must do things by myself."

Intent on his own agenda, he ignored everything I'd just said and ranted on:

"What if you'd fallen? The doorman told me a woman of your description—and I ask you who else could that have been, even considering that I did not know precisely what you would be wearing—had gone for a walk a full half hour ago. I was beside myself with worry."

"I have no sympathy for you. If you had paid attention to what I said in the note, you would be in your room, or perhaps in the hotel bar, right this very minute. All safe and sound and tranquil as a ... a bug in a rug. A poor metaphor but the only one that comes to me at the moment."

"How can I be tranquil as bugs in rugs or whatever other ridiculous ideas may enter your head for the moment, when you're out doing unwise things that may—probably will—result in your getting hurt again?"

I moved farther along the sidewalk in the other, less traveled direction, away from Tremont Street, where there were fewer pedestrians passing to overhear this argument, which was vexing me more with every passing minute.

"Michael," I said insistently, "in the first place, I didn't get my legs broken because of anything I did, any mistake I made, or the least bit of carelessness on my part. My injuries were not my fault, any more than the broken collarbone that plagued you for quite some time was yours. You and I and many other people were victims of a violent criminal act made to look like an accident, you know that. So just stop trying to make me feel guilty."

He nodded gruffly, but didn't say a word. His eyes were still flaming blue in their depths and a nerve jumped in his cheek,
evidence of—or perhaps a protest from—a tightly clenched jaw. He wore a black bowler hat pulled down almost to the black arches of his eyebrows, and his breath came out in visible puffs like smoke on the cold air.

As he did not choose to speak, I continued: "In the second place, you can just think of it this way: Have I ever complained, even once, about all the times you disappeared out of my life, just went away, sometimes for weeks and sometimes with no warning? Come on, tell me: Have I ever complained?"

He scratched one eyebrow with a black-gloved finger. "Well, no. But this is different."

"Yes, it's different all right. It's different because instead of weeks or months—which is how long you tend to be gone—I'll be away only a couple of hours. It's different because I wrote you a note explaining in some detail just exactly where I'm going, how I plan to get there, when I expect to return—things you have seldom if ever done for me. I did all that, but you still couldn't trust me, could you?"

I was getting wound up, my cheeks were hot, but I couldn't stop myself, the words came pouring out. "Oh no, you had to come down here and hang around the hotel entrance, waiting for me as if I were some recalcitrant child. Well, I'll tell you this right now, I won't have it! I'm not a child and I'm not your wife, and I'm going to do this my own way!"

"God!" he exploded. "You are the most stubborn woman!"

We stood inches apart, glaring at each other, both of us breathing hard and creating clouds of steam that rose between us like a two-headed dragon.

"Go back inside the hotel, Michael," I said after a few moments.

The tension between us broke. He took a step back. "Allow me to assist you into your carriage and see you on your way first. Please."

"That would be most kind of you."

The doorman had been properly trained for his role at a good Boston hotel: If he had been the least bit shocked by our bad manners, airing a disagreement in public, his face did not betray it. He simply summoned a horse-drawn cab for me and I was soon on my way.

THE PRIORY is an old, private hospital overlooking the Charles River, not too far from Massachusetts General Hospital. One hears the latter is becoming rather well known for medical breakthroughs.

At least, I mused as the cab bumped through the ice-rutted streets, I had not been accustomed to keep up with such things in the past, but perhaps I would be wise in the future to change that. In my present situation I would have liked very much to have acquired some base of knowledge, so that I might better understand what was happening to Father. I wished too that I had known more about the nature of my own injuries when they occurred, and what I should have expected in the healing process—what a lot of agony some knowledge might have prevented!

I sighed. As they say, there is no use crying over spilt milk. For me it was too late now. Either my legs were mending properly or they were not; there was nothing to be done except I must continue to rebuild my strength and take care to do no further damage. But perhaps it was not too late for Father. Perhaps William Barrett—that traitor—had not really known what he was talking about when he said all who suffer from what ails Father will surely die.

One can always hope.