The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) (5 page)

C
HAPTER
4

Bronwyn drank another Fallen Angel, and then another, determined to drown the memories that swam in her head. She danced again, and again, until unladylike perspiration ran down her sides and soaked her beaded headband. Johnnie gave up, retreating to their table to nurse his gin and wait for her to tire herself out. She danced with anyone who would join her, and when there wasn’t a man free, she danced alone.

At length the player piano emitted a final tinny chord, and ceased playing. Bronwyn had no money with her, and it seemed no one else wanted to put in a nickel. The room spun gently around her, as if she had been doing somersaults, and reluctantly, she teetered back to Johnnie. He had ordered another drink for her, and it waited on the table. “You’re some hoofer, kiddo,” he said. “Get off your dogs, there. Have one more jolt!”

His slang grated on her ears. There had been a day when she wouldn’t have dreamed of spending a moment in the presence of someone like Johnnie Johnson, but that day was a memory now, added to all the other uncomfortable ones. Johnnie had spent a lot of money on her tonight, and not out of sympathy, or even admiration. As she picked up the cocktail, she tilted her head and gave him an exceedingly polite smile, as if they were having tea instead of overpriced, illegal liquor. “Thanks so much, Johnnie. It’s been a swell evening.”

She saw by the sudden narrowing of his eyes, the forward thrust of his head, that he understood she was saying good night, and good-bye.

He wanted more, of course. That was why his wallet was wide open. It was why he had tolerated her dancing without him, why he was still waiting at this table when most of the bleary-eyed crowd had disappeared into the night. He put out his rough workingman’s hand, and seized her wrist. “Think again,
kiddo
.”

This time the word carried both disdain and danger. She heard it clearly, and she saw it in the slackness of his mouth, the flush of his heavy face. He was no more than a year, perhaps two, older than she, but anger and resentment and lust made him look infinitely older, nothing like the young man she had agreed to come out with.

With effort, she pulled her hand free, and his thick fingernails scraped on her skin. “I’m tired, Johnnie. I want to go home.”

“You’re tired?
Now
you’re tired?” He leered at her, and thrust a thumb in the direction of the dance floor. “You weren’t tired thirty seconds ago!”

Bronwyn shot to her feet. “I’m tired now, Johnnie Johnson. I said thank you for the nice evening, and if you’re the gentleman you pretend to be, you’ll now see me home!”

He lurched up from the table, sending his chair flying. The barman glared at them both, as if Bronwyn were as guilty of the interruption as Johnnie. Maybe she was, but it was too late to worry about that now.

Johnnie snarled, “I took you where I was takin’ you already, Miss High and Mighty! You got that bitty nose in the air, you can just follow it home on your own!”

Bronwyn put her hands on her hips. “You’re going to just leave me? Do you know what my father would say about that?”

Johnnie gave a bark of derisive laughter. “I don’t think your father has anything to do with it,” he said. “Those days is past for you, my girl.” He laughed again.

Bronwyn picked up her cocktail glass and flung the remnants of her Fallen Angel at his face. There wasn’t much left, and only a few greenish drops reached him, but it felt good just the same. “Don’t you ever call on me again, Johnnie Johnson,” she spat at him. “I’m still an Uptown girl, whatever you may think.”

“Ha,” he said, wiping the drops from his cheeks. “You can’t kid a kidder, my girl! What do you think all your snooty girlfriends think of you now? You’re fast, that’s what you are. You’re fast, and everyone knows it!”

Willy forestalled the rest of their argument by calling from behind the bar, “Closing time, ladies and gents! Drink up!”

Bronwyn spun on her toes, and marched past the handful of remaining customers to the door. Johnnie shouted after her, “Hey, princess, gotcher carriage out there?”

She heard titters of laughter, and though her neck burned, she lifted her head higher and walked with a determined step. When she reached the doorway she paused. The lights from the street above shone down on her head. Deliberately, she drew a fresh Lucky Strike from her bag and fitted it into her cigarette holder. A man near the door jumped up, grinning, and struck a match to light the cigarette.

Bronwyn drew on it, and blew a cloud of smoke back into the room before she turned, the cigarette holder poised at a jaunty angle, and went out into the night. She maintained her attitude as she climbed the stairs, and walked up Water Street with smoke trailing behind her until she left the glow of the streetlights and reached total darkness. There she pulled the cigarette out of the holder and threw it into the gutter.

Johnnie wasn’t the first to think because Bronwyn Morgan drank Fallen Angels, and because in the eyes of the town she
was
one, she would open her knees for any man. As if one lapse had determined her entire life.

It had, though. At this inescapable thought, all the elation of alcohol and dancing drained away from her in an instant. One lapse had determined her life and stolen her future. It had left her with nothing but ruins.

She shouldn’t be here in the lower town at all, she knew, and especially not at night. The businesses were shuttered, but the alleys were alive with loiterers. There were men too drunk to make it home, and sailors loath to return to their uncomfortable bunks. There were streetwalkers calling out to the men who could still stand and might have money in their pockets. Bronwyn gripped her handbag and hurried her pace, pursued by an occasional catcall. Every stone and curb bit her soles through her soft shoes as she half ran until she reached Monroe. There, panting, she began the long hike up the hill.

The moist air from the Sound filled her lungs, and cooled her burning cheeks as she trudged along the steep street toward home. There were no footsteps behind her. Johnnie must have given up. She felt now as if she hadn’t drunk a thing. All the feelings she had tried to submerge welled up again in a tide that nothing could stem. In the darkness, spring flowers glowed faintly against the dark shrubbery, peonies and rhododendrons and azaleas, their beauty mocking her misery.

It was her own fault for bringing out the clipping once again. She should have burned it the moment it came into the house.

 

Daddy had carried the copy of the
Times
home in his Gladstone bag after a business trip to Seattle. When he unpacked the bag to bring out the perfume and taffy he had brought home for his wife and daughter, he took out the paper and laid it on the Westinghouse radio in its place of honor on the sideboard in the breakfast room. Absently, knowing her mother didn’t like anything on top of her brand-new wireless set, Bronwyn picked up the newspaper.

She hadn’t meant to read it. Since that day when she read about the fire, and the death of the youngest Benedict son, she hadn’t once touched the
Times
. She read the
Leader,
and the fashion magazines, and she read library books. The
Times
she avoided as if the newspaper itself had been responsible for the tragedy that had left her bereft, grieving her lost love.

But on this day, before she realized what it was, it was in her hand. It was already, for some reason, folded to the society page. She couldn’t help seeing the headline.

The type had been set in the florid font used for the society pages, with lavish curlicues and sweeping capitals. It practically shouted “The Benedict Wedding” at her. Bronwyn’s heart lurched when she saw it.

She should have stopped then. She should have thrown the paper into the breakfast room fireplace, but she didn’t. Perhaps resisting temptation was not an aspect of her character.

Standing beside the walnut sideboard with its array of coffee cups on their copper hooks, she gazed down on the photograph of a tall, willowy bride standing beside her dashing groom. They were smiling, the dark-haired bride looking up at her new husband, the husband’s arm snug around her narrow waist. Even in black and white, Bronwyn could see that everything was perfect. The flowers, the bride’s beaded dress, even the shine of the polished banister where she rested her white-gloved hand were so beautiful that Bronwyn forgot herself in a wave of sorrow. She groaned aloud, and pressed her palm to her chest, where her heart contracted as if squeezed by a pitiless hand.

Her mother had come running from the kitchen, where she and Mrs. Andrew were having one of their awkward conversations, the ones in which Iris tried to order menus while Mrs. Andrew announced what would actually appear on the table. Iris burst into the breakfast room, crying, “Bronwyn! What is it, dear?”

Bronwyn dropped her hand, and drew a shaky breath as she turned hurriedly away. She thrust the paper beneath her arm so the photographs didn’t show. “It’s nothing, Mother. I’m sorry. I just—I stubbed my toe.”

It had been two years since the disaster, but still her mother worried about her. Worried so, in fact, that her doctor had prescribed laudanum, and warned against the strain on her nerves. It was another reason to feel remorseful, and Bronwyn did that in abundance.

She managed to give her mother a weak smile before she hurried out of the breakfast room and up the stairs, the paper burning beneath her arm as if it were on fire.

After all she had been through, it was foolish to torment herself, but she couldn’t help it. It was like chewing on a fingernail that was already ruined, even though you knew it was going to bleed. She spread the newspaper on her bed, so the pictures and the headline blazed up at her.

Properly, the headline should have read “The Benedict-Parrish Wedding,” but the groom, it seemed, wasn’t from an important family. His nuptials would no doubt have passed unnoticed were it not for his bride. It was the only daughter of Dickson Benedict Senior and his wife, Edith, who was newsworthy.

Bronwyn read every word, and matched the descriptions to the photographs.

There was more, a list of the most prominent guests, and a description of the refreshments. Bronwyn read the whole thing twice through. She pored over the photographs, taking in every detail of Benedict Hall, trying to guess which guest was which. Most of the men were in cutaway coats and vests. The women wore the latest in hats, with furs draped around their shoulders.

It was all very much as she had imagined it should be, except of course she had pictured herself and Preston as the wedding couple. She ran her finger over the photograph of Margot Benedict in her wedding dress. Her own gown was to have been quite different. For one thing, she would have worn a veil, a nice long one, secured with a coronet of flowers. There would have been a train, wide enough to drape across the staircase in shimmering folds. Preston might have worn his uniform, the way Major Parrish did, and Bronwyn would have had Clara as her maid of honor, and Bessie as a bridesmaid. And for a wedding journey, Preston would surely have taken her to Paris, or at the very least, New York.

But Preston was dead; their child was gone. There was nothing left to dream of.

It was a funny thing about innocence, she thought. While a girl possessed it, she wasn’t aware of it. Losing it was a shock made worse by not having known it was there in the first place. You paid a bitter price for something you had never truly enjoyed. Her girlish dreams, herself as the dancing princess, as the beautiful bride, as a
Benedict,
mocked her now. Her fairy tale had turned into a grimmer reality than any she could have imagined.

She went to her dressing table for the pair of sewing scissors she kept in the drawer, and came back to cut the two columns of the article from the page. She folded the clipping into a flat square, and slipped it beneath a stack of lingerie in the bottom drawer of her wardrobe before she crumpled the rest of the newspaper and threw it into the fireplace. She stood for a long time, watching it burn, wondering how long grief could last.

C
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5

There were evenings at Benedict Hall that seemed interminable to Frank. He wanted to take Margot’s hand and pull her away from the formal dinner, the after-dinner ritual of listening to the radio, the polite talk. He wanted to rush her up the stairs to their own rooms, where their intimacy had become so easy, and so tender, that sometimes thinking of it during his workday made his belly tighten with longing.

It was Wagner tonight, broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and Frank didn’t care for it much. Dick and Ramona had said good night to their daughter, and Louisa had insisted on toddling up the stairs on her own unsteady legs, with Nurse close behind her. The family was finishing their after-dinner coffee now. Frank was settled on the short divan with Margot beside him, her head propped against his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but he could feel her awareness of the music, and her contentment at the quiet moment. Dickson was drowsing in his usual armchair, his cigar forgotten and cold in its ashtray. Edith sat staring into space, an unreadable expression in her eyes. Frank stole a glance at her once or twice, remembering with a pang the pretty woman he had first met, who welcomed him as Preston’s army friend and eagerly pressed him for details of what she believed to be Preston’s heroism.

Frank watched her from beneath his lowered eyelids as she breathed a small sigh and shifted in her chair, her gaze blank and distant. Her hair was no longer fair, but a yellowish gray. He hadn’t heard her laugh in a long time, and only rarely seen her smile. She was as different from his own mother as any woman could be.

Jenny Baker Parrish, daughter of a rancher, wife of a rancher, had known nothing but hard work all her life. She had borne three children, two of whom hadn’t survived their infancy. She had worked steadily through her pregnancies. She milked cows and branded calves. She cooked three meals a day for the ranch crew and tended her hens and her goats in between. She wore stained straw hats and rough leather gloves, and her skin was lined and worn by weather. Her hair, the last time he had seen it, was still mostly dark like his own—in fact, he had more silver in his hair than she did. But her eyes, which had been the same dark blue as her son’s, had faded over the years from sun and wind and unrelenting work. She was, he supposed, about Edith Benedict’s age, but she looked a decade older.

Jenny Baker Parrish would understand Edith’s grief. She would never, though, countenance Edith’s preference for Preston over her other children. Jenny, Frank thought, the woman who had buried two babies and mourned her son’s war injury, would have taken Edith’s hand and chided her for not facing the truth about her youngest son, and for neglecting her other children.

The music came to an end with a crash of brass and timpani. Margot startled, bumping her cheek against Frank’s shoulder. “Oh,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. I fell asleep.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. He stood and offered her his hand to help her up. “Long day.” She had told him, as they dressed for dinner, of the stream of patients in the accident room. There had been a fire in one of the broken-down cottages in the Tenderloin, and several of the crib girls were hurt, though none seriously. He knew well that if anyone had been badly burned, or had a life-threatening injury, Margot wouldn’t have come home at all.

She smiled up at him as she gave him her hand, and when she stood, he put his arm around her waist. The touch of her never failed to stir him, even after a year of married life. He tried to moderate his eager smile as they said good night to the family. Together, they left the small parlor and turned up the wide staircase. The servants had gone to bed, and the big house was dim and quiet. The murmur of voices followed them as they climbed to the second floor and made their way to the back, toward their own rooms, and the restfulness of being alone together.

“I’ll draw you a bath,” Frank said as they reached their doorway.

“Oh, no,” she said, yawning. “I’m much too sleepy. I don’t have anything tomorrow. A day off! I’ll bathe in the morning.”

They undressed, side by side, and got into their nightclothes. Margot refused to even consider a lady’s maid, saying she was perfectly capable of managing her own clothes. Hattie was the one to help Edith with her hair and her baths, insisting she didn’t mind in the least. Dickson said he was just as glad. “Don’t like servants sitting up at all hours waiting for the family to finish whatever they’re doing,” he explained. Frank thought this was eminently wise.

He pulled the bedclothes back for Margot, and folded her into bed. She smiled at him drowsily, and was asleep almost before he completed his good-night kiss. He turned off her bedside lamp, leaving just his small reading light burning on the other side, and stood for a moment, looking down at her.

In the dimness, with her face relaxed, she looked like a young girl. Her short dark hair fanned on the white pillow like the wing of a bird, and her lips were slightly apart as she breathed.

“The great Dr. Benedict,” he whispered, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. “Carrying the world on your shoulders.” Though she wouldn’t know it, he bent and kissed her again, breathing in the scents of soap and shampoo, savoring the smoothness of her skin.

He had a book he meant to read, Rickenbacker’s memoir. He was hoping there would be something useful in it. The drive to develop airplanes that could carry more weight ruled them all at the Boeing Airplane Company just now, and every insight, every clue, was useful. The Sand Point Aviation Field was being developed to test army pursuit planes, but Bill Boeing was still focused on the problem of weight in non-military craft. Frank wanted to keep his hand in that research, even as he worked on the Model 21, the navy trainer.

He crossed to the window to draw the curtains. He liked looking out at the starlight, but as summer approached, dawn came earlier and earlier, and he didn’t want the rising light to wake Margot. She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in several days. His father-in-law had been right when he warned his new son-in-law: Marriage to a doctor meant phone calls at all hours. Margot kept the candlestick telephone close beside the bed, within easy reach of her hand. When it rang, she often lifted the bell to her ear while she was still half asleep. He could hear the voice on the other end, “Dr. Benedict? Seattle General.” That always brought her fully awake.

As he drew the curtains he glanced to his right, where Blake had his apartment over the converted carriage house. A faint light gleamed from the corner, no doubt meaning Blake was reading in bed, just as Frank meant to do. Frank turned to the bed with a yawn of his own, and was about to untie his dressing gown when the bedroom door creaked, and opened six inches.

A small plump hand crept around the door like a pale starfish inching along a dark beach. Grinning, Frank moved to the end of the bed and squatted, waiting.

A tiny fair head followed the hand, peeking from the dim hallway.

“Escape artist!” Frank whispered. “Does Nurse know you’re out of bed?”

Now he could see her merry smile, her eyes sparkling like blue crystals in the lamplight. “Fa!” she gurgled.

“Yes, Fa,” Frank murmured. “Uncle Fa. But don’t wake your Auntie Margot!”

Louisa toddled forward into the room, her short arms outstretched toward him, her rosy lips pursed in concentration as she put one foot before the other. Frank waited, his own arms out and ready to catch her. She looked up at him once or twice from beneath her tumbled hair, then back to her shapeless little feet, her stubby toes splayed like pink pearls against the carpet.

When she was two steps away from him, she tripped, and pitched forward, laughing, into his waiting hands. Behind him Margot stirred, and muttered something, but didn’t wake. Frank swept Louisa up in his arms, putting a warning finger to her lips. She grabbed the finger in a fierce grip, and said in a fake whisper, “Fa! Shhhhh!”

“Yes, shhh,” he murmured in her ear. With her cradled against him, he backed out of the bedroom and pulled the door closed with his bare foot. “You, Miss Louisa Benedict,” he said, when the door was shut, “are a rascal. You’re supposed to be in bed!”

She wriggled in his grasp. “Fa!”

“I hope you don’t call me Fa forever, young lady,” he told her, as he turned toward the nursery. “I’ll never live it down.”

She kicked and giggled, warm and soft in his arms. It wasn’t the first time she’d climbed out of her crib and gone exploring, although it was later than usual for baby excursions. There had been very few children in Frank’s life, and he loved having this one. He pressed his nose to her hair to inhale the ineffable baby essence of powder and lotion and thoroughly bleached diapers. She relaxed against him, both arms around his neck, her short legs dangling. “Fa,” she sighed.

He kissed the top of her head. “Uncle Fa,” he said again. “Louisa is Uncle Fa’s favorite girl, isn’t she?”

“Fa,” she breathed again, and was suddenly, soundly asleep.

Frank edged the door of the nursery open with his foot. Nurse was also asleep, mouth open, beaky nose pointed at the ceiling. Frank carried Louisa to her crib, an elaborate affair in ivory enamel, with cloth-covered springs and satiny quilts. It had a drop side, but the side was still in its upright position. Athlete, Frank thought. She won’t stay in it if she doesn’t want to!

He laid her down without making a sound, and pulled one of the quilts over her. He stood for a moment, listening to Nurse’s raspy breathing, and watching the rosy baby sleep. She was enchanting, and he felt a tug of love for her, liberally mixed with fear. It was the nature of love, he supposed, that such a pure emotion should be tainted by nameless anxieties.

As he padded out of the nursery, and made sure the door latched behind him, he thought of his mother for the second time that night. How had she borne losing two infants? Louisa wasn’t even his own daughter, and he couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. Yet Jenny Parrish had persevered. Endured.

He took off his prosthesis and laid it ready on the bureau, then turned out his reading light. The book could wait until another time. As he slipped into bed beside his sleeping wife, he reflected that his mother was made of far sterner stuff than Margot’s mother. She was more courageous. More resilient. And, at least in his estimation, vastly wiser.

Perhaps Edith’s upbringing had made her vulnerable. She had been born to wealth, had always been cared for by servants, had never had to worry about bills or food. Jenny Parrish had known damned few of the comforts Edith had always taken for granted. At the wedding the year before, his mother had been wide-eyed and wary at the opulence of Benedict Hall, the formality of the ceremony, the morning coats of the men and the furs of the women. Frank had been grateful to Ramona, who had exerted herself to make Jenny Parrish feel comfortable.

Frank lay on his side, close to Margot, but careful not to disturb her. His eyelids sagged deliciously, and he relaxed. His last thought, before sliding into sleep, was that Edith’s easy upbringing was no excuse for favoritism. He didn’t think she had caused Preston’s madness, but she had perpetuated it. Ignored it. And hurt Margot deeply in the process.

 

Margot woke to watery sunshine filtering through the drawn curtains. Frank had gone, slipping out without waking her. She was sorry to miss him, but it was glorious to sleep her fill. It seemed like weeks since she had felt fully rested.

She threw back her blankets, and rang for a maid. She would have her coffee here, she decided, something she rarely did. Perhaps she would even take her breakfast on a tray. The morning felt like a holiday.

Leona came in, bobbing her usual curtsy. Margot asked for coffee and toast, and for a bath to be run. Leona curtsied again and tripped away, and Margot, in her dressing gown, sat down in the window seat, gazing out at the garden. The roses dripped with rain, but the sky was beginning to clear. It would be, Margot thought, one of those delicate spring days, the air bright and clean, but with a sense of fragility, the awareness that it wouldn’t last. Margot leaned against the casement, savoring her moment of leisure.

By the time she was bathed and dressed, most of the family was off to their pursuits. She caught a glimpse of Allison on her way out, a satchel full of books slung over her shoulder. The girl grinned and waved as she dashed down the stairs and out the front door to make a run for the streetcar. Late again, Margot supposed. Allison never went out without her hair and clothes in perfect order, and that, apparently, took precedence over punctuality. Margot’s own ablutions took barely any time at all. As a general rule a pass with her comb, a splash of water on her face, and clean teeth were all she required to go out into the world.

Smiling over this, she went down the staircase with a medical journal in her hand and a long cardigan over her shoulders. She would dry off one of the Westport chairs on the porch and sit there, where she could breathe the freshly washed air and enjoy the perfume of Blake’s roses until Frank returned for lunch.

She heard the maids and Hattie talking in the kitchen, so she used the front door, and made her way around to the side porch, where the morning sun glistened on the damp pillars and brought clouds of evaporation from the shrubs and grass. She turned the chair cushion to the dry side, then settled herself into it. Blake, returned from driving the men to their offices, crossed the lawn from the garage on his way to the kitchen door. He nodded to Margot. She lifted a lazy hand, and they exchanged a smile. A patter of treble voices, like the chittering of birds, poured out of the kitchen as he opened the door, then faded when he closed it again, leaving Margot in a silence broken only by the drip of raindrops from the eaves.

She riffled the pages of the journal, and began to read a piece on infections of the ear, but a moment later she closed it again. Someone opened a window above her head, and Leona’s and Loena’s voices flitted out. Thelma had more or less taken on Dick and Ramona’s rooms, except for the nursery, while the twins did hers and Frank’s, and all three worked on Dickson and Edith’s. Nurse—who had a name, Mary Everson, though no one used it—was fiercely protective of her small territory, handled everything to do with the nursery, and only showed her sharp nose beyond its door for meals, or when she brought Louisa for her regular visit to the family after dinner. It was a system that seemed to be working, and left Hattie free to assist Edith when she needed it.