Coming Up Roses (41 page)

But, damn it all, he loved her! Just because
he’d had a momentary lapse in judgment after they’d made love and
panicked when she’d mentioned marriage didn’t mean anything. Just
because he’d shied away from that one little word didn’t mean he
didn’t want to keep seeing her.

Pausing in his headlong dash to exit the
World’s Fair for the day, H.L. realized he’d just committed another
error in word choice. Damn his prejudices, anyhow. Absolute honesty
compelled him to admit that he wanted more than merely to keep
seeing her. He wanted to see her for the rest of his life. He
wanted to be sure he had her by his side forever and ever. Even if
that meant marriage.

Marriage
. He
braced himself for the sensations of panic and entrapment that
usually accompanied the word to overwhelm him. They remained
absent, so he tested the word again, even speaking it
aloud.

“
Marriage,” he muttered into the air,
scented with the fragrances of the Columbian Exposition. “Marriage
to Rose Gilhooley.”

When he added the
to Rose Gilhooley
part, the word didn’t seem to
create such blind fear in his brain. Interesting. “Rose Gilhooley
May,” he murmured, testing both the name and his reaction to it.
Still no sense of impending doom swooped down to extinguish his
nerves. “Mrs. H.L. May.”

He noticed people staring at him as he stood
in the middle of the Midway Plaisance talking to himself. He didn’t
give a hang about them, and scowled back, adding a black grimace
for good measure. A little boy, who’d been gazing with interest at
him, uttered a soft cry and hurried after his papa.

“
Damned snoopy busybodies.”

Nevertheless, he decided any conversations he
aimed to hold with himself would be better carried out away from
the public’s prying eyes, so he shuffled over to a beautifully
sculpted marble bench and sat. He contemplated buying a bag of
popcorn to help him think, but the notion of food made his stomach
rebel. He’d heard that the inability to contemplate food was a
classic symptom of lovesickness, but he’d never expected to be a
victim of such an absurd illness himself.

The more he contemplated losing Rose,
however, the more he realized that he’d already become one. He,
H.L. May, was pining away for the love of a woman.

“
God, what a come-down.” He buried his
face in his hands, dislodging his sporty, reporterly summer straw
hat. When he saw his headgear from between his fingers, residing on
the Midway between his feet, he had to suppress an urge to leap up
and stomp it to death. Hell, it wasn’t his hat’s fault H.L. was in
this pickle. He was a mess because he’d allowed himself to fall in
love with Rose Ellen Gilhooley. What a predicament. He heaved a
stockyard-and-popcorn scented sigh.

Then again, he supposed he couldn’t be held
to be a total fool for having fallen in love with Rose. After all,
Rose wasn’t just any woman. She was special.

Still and all . . . Marriage? H.L.
scooped up his hat and set it on the bench beside him. He had to
worry his hair a bit more before he put his hat back on. Marriage
would completely scuttle his image. He’d worked so hard to perfect
it, too. All the young cub reporters at the
Globe
tried to emulate his style, his
insouciance, his damn-it-all, go-to-hell attitude. If he got
married, his image would be blown to smithereens.

Lifting his head and propping his chin in his
cupped hands, H.L. thought about that. What good was a reputation
if it could so easily be shattered? Surely, he’d been more adept at
image-creation than that.

Hadn’t he? The good Lord knew, he’d worked
hard enough at it.

“
Hmmm.” Cocking his head and staring
without seeing at the crowd of fair-goers walking past him, H.L.
contemplated the nature of self-image and the importance thereof.
Crumbs, if he’d done as good a job at creating himself as he
thought he had, perhaps marriage wouldn’t blow it all to
hell.

The word
marriage
had always brought to his mind images
of men shackled and cuffed, tied to their wives and children out of
duty alone. It hadn’t occurred to him until Rose Gilhooley galloped
into his life that perhaps those men, who had seemed akin to
unwilling prisoners to him, had actually
chosen
their bonds.

“
Don’t be an ass, H.L.,” he grumbled.
Of course, they’d chosen their bonds. It’s only that they hadn’t
seemed like bonds at first. The true imprisonment of marriage crept
up on a fellow; it swooped down on him as he contemplated other
things, and had him by the throat before he knew what had happened
to him.

“
Look, Papa. That poor man’s talking to
himself.”

H.L. peered up and bared his teeth at the
sweet little girl who had uttered the comment. The girl squealed
and darted off. The little girl’s papa cast a fulminating glance at
H.L. and went off to tackle his daughter. H.L. said, “Hunh!”

A second later he sat up and swiveled his
head to see where the father and daughter had gone off. He saw the
man pick up his little girl, hug her close, and give her a smiling
explanation of H.L.’s bad behavior. The little girl, after looking
frightened for a second or two, let go of a startled laugh and
hugged her father, as if he’d said the one thing that could
transform her worry into something jolly and happy. As he stared,
H.L. came to the reluctant conclusion that the girl’s father didn’t
have the haggard, beleaguered appearance of a man who’d been
trapped into a hateful life sentence. He looked mighty pleased with
himself, as a matter of fact.

Turning and narrowing his gaze, H.L. pondered
this phenomenon. After he’d done that for a minute or two, he
mentally substituted himself for the father in the recently enacted
scenario. Naturally, his and Rose’s daughter would be much prettier
than that admittedly pretty little girl, and she’d be much too
intelligent to be frightened by somebody making a face at her, but
still . . .

H.L. experienced the strange sensation of his
heart getting soft and gooey as he considered comforting a child of
his loins. A darling little girl, perhaps. Or a sturdy lad. A lad
with a decent name. H.L. would never burden a child with a name as
awful as his own.

His image slapped him in his mind’s eye
again, and he frowned. Hell. No matter how pleasant certain aspects
of the marriage state might appear in contemplation, there was
still his image as a care-for-nobody to consider.

All of his colleagues would laugh at him if
he told them he was getting married. H.L. considered the comments
he’d surely receive.

“
So,” he imagined Wiggins saying, with
a sly wink, “somebody trapped you at last, eh?”

“
H.L. May as a married man?” he
imagined his editor saying with a loud guffaw. “You should have
kept your drawers buttoned, H.L.”

H.L. winced. Damn them. They didn’t know
Rose, or they wouldn’t say such things. Rose was special. Any man
would be lucky if she agreed to marry him.

He sat up straighter on the bench as the
truth of his last thought sank in.

By God. Any man
would
be lucky—indeed, he’d be honored and
privileged—if Rose Ellen Gilhooley agreed to marry him.

For the first time, H.L. wondered if he was
approaching this marriage concept from the wrong direction. Maybe
he ought to think of it in terms of his meeting with Rose as a
serendipitous occurrence; an occurrence not given any other man in
the world but only to him. How fortuitous had that been?

Hell, he might have lived his whole life
without their paths having crossed. The thought of never having met
Rose made his chest ache. He pressed a palm against the sore spot
and thought some more.

By the time he’d thought himself to a
near-collapse, H.L. had decided what he had to do. He only hoped
Rose would cooperate.

# # #

H.L. had stopped haunting the Wild West. He
hadn’t been by her tent or Annie’s for three days. Rose knew it for
a fact, because she’d abandoned Annie’s tent for her own two days
ago.

The knowledge that H.L.’s interest in her
hadn’t lasted a full month caused a heaviness to pervade Rose’s
whole being. She aimed to perform tonight and, while her bruise had
healed, she wasn’t sure she could summon the lightness of spirit it
took to do all those tricks she had to do. She’d been practicing.
All yesterday afternoon and all this morning, she and Fairy had
practiced. So far, she hadn’t fallen off the horse and cracked her
skull, but the day was early yet.

“
Stop it, Rose Gilhooley,” she muttered
as she slipped into her costume. As miserable as she felt about
having been made a fool of by H.L. May, she still didn’t really
want to take a tumble from Fairy’s back and kill herself. Not only
might it be painful, but it would certainly be humiliating, and
Rose had suffered enough humiliation lately to court any more of
it.

Therefore, she had to concentrate. She’d been
concentrating a lot these past few days. So eager had she been not
to think about H.L. that she’d studied the lessons Annie had given
her with special concentration.

Even Rose had to admit that she was a good
reader by this time. She could read everything and, if she didn’t
know all the words in the English language, she knew how to use the
dictionary, and she did. She was every bit as smart as H.L. May,
she told herself with a sniff of longed-for superiority, even if
she wasn’t as well-educated.

Bitterly she wondered where her
self-respect had been hiding out when she’d first met the
newspaperman. Self-respect might have done her some good then. It
seemed merely superfluous now. A cynical chuckle escaped her as she
considered how the word
superfluous
had simply popped into her brain as if it was as familiar to
her as the word horse.

It wasn’t, of course. Rose had learned that
big word, as she’d learned how to read and write: The hard way.
She’d worked diligently to achieve her present mastery of the
English language, and, while she used to feel stupid, she now was
proud of herself. It had been difficult, but she’d done it. Unlike
H.L. May, whose education had been handed to him on a silver
platter, Rose Gilhooley had been required to seek it out. And she
had, blast him.

Stupid man. Going around flaunting his
superior education and so forth. An education didn’t mean a single
thing except that one had been fortunate enough in one’s
circumstances that one had been able to attend school. Rose had
been doing
useful
things with
her talents when Mr. H.L. May had been sitting in school, learning
how to use words.

Rose commanded herself to stop brooding about
H.L. May. Her mother and sisters would be arriving on the noon
train tomorrow, and the colonel had promised Rose that they’d be
honored guests at the Wild West for as long as they remained in
Chicago. What Rose prayed for was that her mother would agree to
stay in Chicago from now on.

Although she hadn’t spoken a word to anyone
else, not even Annie or the colonel, Rose was considering
retirement from the Wild West. She was tired of traveling
constantly, of never having a home to call her own. In spite of
H.L. May and bittersweet memories of lost love, Rose liked Chicago.
It was not only a civilized place, but it was an exciting one. Rose
didn’t think she’d get bored very soon with all the amenities and
interests Chicago had to keep one entertained.

Besides all that, she’d been offered a job. A
good job. A job that would provide her with an ample salary and
that would be plenty enough to support herself and her mother. She
imagined her sisters would return to Deadwood because they’d made
lives for themselves there. Anyhow, Charlotte was set to marry the
youngest Palmer boy, so she was sure to head back to Kansas. Lizzy
could attend a finishing school here and learn a profession if she
didn’t want to marry.

H.L. May wasn’t the only one in the world who
could exist without marriage. It was women who had to do all the
hard work when they married, anyway. Men reaped all the benefits of
the married state and had none of the responsibilities to go along
with it. Well, except for money, but if one prepared oneself
properly, one didn’t need a man for that.

Rose lifted her chin, proud that she
didn’t need a man in order to survive in this troublesome world.
She’d make sure Lizzy wouldn’t need one, too. A woman could survive
on her own. A woman could have a good life—a
fine
life—as a spinster. A better life,
actually, because she wouldn’t have to put up with a
man.

A sob escaped her unbidden, and Rose stamped
her foot. She’d be so glad when she stopped mooning over H.L. May
and her abandoned hopes. What good were hopes? They’d only brought
Rose grief, and she was sick of them.

Rose knew, because she’d grown up the hard
way, that nothing in this life lasted. Therefore, even though she
was going through a rough patch right now, she knew it wouldn’t
last. Sooner or later, her heart would heal. Broken hearts didn’t
kill one. As Annie and her mother had both said more than once, any
experience that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

By the time Rose was through mourning the
loss of H.L. May, she’d be strong as an ox.

Not only that, but she was going to have a
good job. That alone was enough to dim the edges of her grief every
time she thought about it. Mrs. Lucius MacDonald Hereford, a
wealthy Chicago widow and patron of the arts, had offered Rose a
position as curator of a museum of popular culture which the lady
was establishing all on her own, using money she’d inherited from
her late husband, a railroad magnate. Or, as Mrs. Hereford herself
had put it, “a railroad robber.”