The Chaperone

  Cora put her hand to her throat. It was as if sour vomit and gin had somehow found its way to her own belly. Edward Vincent, with his combed hair and his smug smiles in church, always sitting in a front pew next to his wife. And Myra? What kind of mother let her daughter pose for those kinds of pictures? What was wrong with that woman?

  “Louise,” she said quietly. “Are you sure she knows… the extent of what happened? I find it hard to believe any mother would do nothing if she knew a middle-aged, married man had… compromised her fourteen-year-old daughter.”

  “He didn’t compromise me. Why do you keep using that word, Cora? We fucked, okay?” She smiled wolfishly, then laughed. “I like to fuck. Maybe you don’t, but I do.”

  Cora looked away. If the girl meant to shock with her language, her casual vulgarity, she’d succeeded. And she was clearly enjoying herself, playing the liberated little flapper, leaving Cora, and all her generation, dumbstruck and aghast. But when Cora turned back and looked hard into the girl’s face, she didn’t see liberation so much as posturing and bravado, real uncertainty underneath.

  “No, Louise. No. If what you’re telling me is true, Edward Vincent took advantage of you. You were a child. You still are.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I said I enjoyed myself, and I did. I liked fucking him, Cora. You’re just so old and dead you can’t understand that.”

  Cora sucked her lips, so hard they hurt. Even drunk and flailing, Louise knew just where and how to strike. But that didn’t matter. Not now.

  “The minister needs to know.”

  “No! No. Don’t get Eddie in trouble. Jesus.”

  “He’s still teaching Sunday school.”

  “So?”

  “So what about other girls?”

  The dark eyes moved to the ceiling. “What about them? It’s not like he’s some kind of sex fiend. He liked me in particular. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. And if some other girl does get him next, bully for her. I’m in New York. What do I care?”

  She was convincing, Cora thought. Perhaps it wasn’t just bravado. Perhaps she was really so sophisticated, so nonchalant, her thinking so unlike Cora’s that they couldn’t understand each other. But she felt unable to just give up.

  “He did a terrible thing, Louise. If what you’re telling me is true, he did a terrible thing. He abused his position. And when did all this happen? Last year? When you were fourteen? Thirteen?”

  “Oh, God. Hold the fire alarm. If you really want to know, he wasn’t even my first.” She laughed again, rubbing her nose. “Okay? How’s that, Cora? Now you’ll really lose your mind. I was compromised before we even moved to Wichita. Okay? Since long before Eddie. How do you like that?”

  Another roach scurried out from behind the toilet to a crack under the opposite wall. Cora watched it with dazed eyes. It was a nightmare maybe, this middle-of-the-night misery, no more real than her drinking beer out of teacups with Alan and Raymond Walker. But the roach seemed real. And the tiles on the floor were smooth and hard beneath her. The red paint on the walls looked as garish as it did in daylight. And Louise still had real spittle on her chin.

  “What are you talking about, Louise? Your family has been in Wichita for years.”

  “Just four.”

  “Are you telling me you had another affair when you were eleven?”

  Louise looked up at her so blankly that Cora regretted the sarcasm. But she couldn’t imagine. She just couldn’t imagine. She’d never in her life had a conversation like this.

  “Not an affair,” Louise said dully, her toes pointing up on either side of the toilet. “But we were friendly. He was nice to all the kids. But nicest to me. And I was the one who went to his house.”

  “Whose house? What are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Flowers. He lived by us in Cherryvale. He was nice to all the kids, nice to my brothers. June was too little to play with us. He said he had popcorn at his house. He’d leave candy on his porch. So I went over. I was the only one who went over.” She puckered her mouth. “Odd, isn’t it? I lost my cherry in Cherryvale. I was deflowered by Mr. Flowers. Kind of funny.”

  Cora put her hands over her eyes. Everything in her wanted to believe that Louise was toying with her, making up some hideous story to distract her from the problem at hand. But this was a different Louise, this drunk Louise, slumped unglamorously against the tub with the black hair pushed behind her ears, her nose still red at the tip. Cora’s very body believed her, her breathing fast and shallow. She wasn’t even wearing her corset, and she couldn’t get enough air.

  “When you were a child?” Her voice came out as a whisper. “Louise? You were eleven?”

  “No. That was a couple of years before we moved.” She frowned at the tile floor. “I came home and told my mother, and she was mad, so mad at me.”

  Cora stared. Nine, then. Nine years old.

  “She said I must have led him on. Really, though, when I remember it, I just wanted the popcorn.”

  A grown man, Cora thought. A grown man luring a child with popcorn. For what? What kind of craving? It had never occurred to her. She’d never heard of such a thing.

  “Did she tell the police? Did she tell your father?”

  The question seemed to perplex Louise, as if she hadn’t considered it before. “She might have told him. But she told me not to tell anyone else, because people would say things about me. And not to go over there again. And to think more about the way I conducted myself.”

  “You were a child.”

  She shook her head, the black brows lowered, as if Cora were pestering her with unintelligent comments. “That didn’t matter. Even then, there was something about me, something he saw. That’s what she meant.”

  Cora, silencing a moan, remembered their first day in the city. What had she said to Louise? What idiotic thing had she said about the low-cut blouse? Do you want to be raped? And more. She leaned forward and tried to touch the girl’s knee. Louise turned it away, out of reach.

  “Louise. Your mother was wrong. You were a child. An innocent child.” And wasn’t she still? Cora wanted so much to reach out, to console, to smooth down the black hair.

  “When I went in, maybe. But not when I came out.” She looked at Cora coolly. “Don’t be hard on Mother. She was right. People would have said things about me.” She narrowed her eyes. “You would have. You would have been the first to. Because my candy got unwrapped, right?”

  Cora felt it like a slap, the recognition of her own words. She held up her palms. “Forget I said that about the candy. Please. That has nothing to do with what you’re telling me. Please forget I said that.”

  “I won’t forget anything.”

  They looked at each other, and Cora, for the first time, had the miserable experience of seeing herself, truly seeing herself, the way Louise saw her. A confused, hypocritical old biddy. A fool on a fool’s errand, indeed. She’d been a fool all summer, an unhappy woman spouting hurtful, stupid maxims about candy and virtue, telling lies to an injured child. And weren’t they lies? Didn’t she know that already? For what had been the real value of her own virginity, her own ignorance, at seventeen? Why had she been so very eager to teach this girl to be as delusional of its worth as she’d been? Why? What was in it for her?

  Louise turned around and used the rim of the bathtub to pull herself to her knees. She had red marks on the backs of her legs, impressions from the tiles.

  “I want to brush my teeth,” she muttered, rising to her feet.

  Cora nodded. She thought of extending a hand, wordlessly asking the girl to pull her up, but she was fairly certain she’d be turned down. She reached for the edge of the sink and hoisted herself up, feeling achy and older than she was.

  “Could I have some privacy?” Louise asked, not looking at her now. “I have to pee.”

  Cora walked stiffly out into the bedroom. Innocent when I went in, not when I came out. The curtain was still pulled back from the window
where, just fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, she’d kept her angry vigil. She went to close the curtain and saw the streetlights were still on, though the traffic on the street and the sidewalks had thinned. Was it four? Past four? She lay down on her side of the bed and pulled the thin sheet up to her chin. She would listen to make sure Louise came to bed and got at least a little sleep. But she understood the girl wanted privacy, or at least the illusion of privacy, even for the few remaining days they had to share this room. So Cora turned toward the wall and closed her eyes, though she already knew she wouldn’t sleep.

  SIXTEEN

  The hook-nosed Russian at the corner grocery told Cora she was his first customer of the morning, continuing with friendly chatter until he noticed her blank, exhausted stare. Without having to make further conversation, she purchased a New York Times, a loaf of bread, strawberry jelly, a stick of butter, a tin of black tea, and six oranges. Out in the street, it was still early enough that the air was comfortable, almost cool, the sun only starting to brighten the sky.

  The entry of their building looked as it always did, with no sign of the drama just a few hours before. On her way up the stairs, she saw Louise’s shoe, the heel wedged between the rails near the second landing.

  She was quiet as she let herself into the apartment, setting Louise’s shoe on the floor and her purchases on the writing desk. She put water on for the tea, slipped off her shoes, and walked back to the bedroom. Louise was sleeping on her side, her arms and legs pulled close. Her hands obscured most of her face, but with every exhale, she made a soft whistling sound. Cora, reassured, moved silently out of the room.

  The paper had an article about the boy killed on the stoop. It happened just as Louise had said: a police raid on a reported still, bootleggers with guns, the boy walking out to the stoop at the exact wrong time. There was a quote from the police chief saying he regretted an innocent person, a thirteen-year-old boy, had lost his life to violent criminals. Suspects had been arrested and charged with voluntary manslaughter as well as the illegal brewing of alcohol, for several barrels of gin had been discovered and destroyed. There was a quote from the victim’s mother saying her son had, in fact, been a good boy who never once looked for trouble, and there was a picture of the stoop being mopped by a grim-faced man, identified in the caption as the victim’s uncle.

  Cora rested her palm on the picture, lightly, then with pressure, as if trying to blot it.

  She needed something to keep her occupied, something quiet to do while Louise slept, so she read the whole paper, front to back. She regularly read the paper back home, and since she’d come to New York, she’d been reading the Times. But on this particular morning, she was struck by the hodgepodge placement of light stories alongside the disturbing. Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in one day for the second time. A twenty-one-year-old nurse in Rochester had leaped to her death because, according to her roommates, she didn’t know how to tell her fiancé they couldn’t marry: one of her parents was half-Negro. A movie star’s divorce was upheld in Las Vegas. In Germany, the foreign minister, a Jew, had been shot outside his home, and a radical but committed group was threatening to kill more Jews in important positions. Brooklyn planned to create two thousand parking places for Coney Island. Armenians were suffering, starving. President Harding expressed commitment to ending the coal crisis. Textile workers were striking. There’d been another lynching in Georgia, this time of a fifteen-year-old boy. On a happier note, skirts that showed the knees were becoming passé, hemlines having dropped again, and so all across the country, parents, clergy, and educators were breathing a collective sigh of relief, as morality was back in vogue.

  Cora sat back in her chair and stared up at the front room’s pale yellow walls, now bright with sunlight, and the painting of the Siamese cat. Her jaw was clenched. Her hands were balled in fists. There was no use pretending she was still just sad or disappointed. Twice, she had to get up and pace the room.

  At a quarter to nine, she went into the bedroom and slowly pulled open the curtain, wincing at the screech of the hooks as they slid along the rod. Louise turned away from the window, pulling the sheet up over her head.

  “Louise?” Cora walked to Louise’s side of the bed. “It’s time. If you want to go to class, you need to get up now. You need to get up and get dressed. And pack for Philadelphia.”

  There was no sound. But the black brows moved low.

  “I have tea and breakfast in the other room.” She waited. “Louise? If you want to sleep, sleep. I’ll leave it up to you. But if you’re late for class, you won’t get to go to Philadelphia. And you might not get to join the troupe.”

  The sheet lowered a few inches. Louise stared dumbly at Cora, her eyes watery, pink-rimmed. But she was awake now, able to decide. Satisfied, Cora went into the kitchen. She poured two glasses of the cooled tea she’d brewed earlier. She put four pieces of bread in the oven and started to peel an orange. After a while, she heard Louise moving around the bathroom, running water, spitting. Cora carried their plates and glasses to the front room and set them on the table. She folded the newspaper and put it away. She didn’t want a distraction now.

  Alone at the table, Cora ate her orange, though it was difficult to chew and swallow, her dread a knot at her throat. Perhaps she shouldn’t say anything. She could pretend last night’s conversation had never happened, and neither of them would ever bring up Edward Vincent or Mr. Flowers again. In some ways, that seemed the best solution. She was just a chaperone. Perhaps it wasn’t her place to meddle in such a private, awful matter. Still, she didn’t think she could pretend that she knew nothing, not now, when she had an image of Louise, a little girl, invited into a house for popcorn, not when she thought of Edward Vincent teaching Sunday school.

  Louise walked out of the kitchen with her hands pressed against her temples. She’d put on a loose cotton dress, and she appeared to have splashed water on her face and combed her hair. But she moved across the front room carefully as if it were the deck of a rocking ship. To Cora, already seated at the table, it did not seem possible that a person in her condition could be ready for rigorous dance practice in less than an hour. Even if she somehow suffered through it, she wouldn’t be any good.

  “Maybe you should stay here and rest,” she said. “I can walk down by myself and tell Miss Ruth you’re sick. You might only lose Philadelphia.”

  Louise slumped into the opposite chair, looking down at her plate of toast, her peeled orange.

  “It’s not a lie.” Cora buttered her toast. “You are sick.”

  “What else will you tell her?” Her voice was gravelly, low.

  “Nothing.” Cora pressed too hard with the knife, tearing a hole in the toast. She looked at it, and after quick consideration gave up the whole pretense, her knife clanging to her plate. Louise looked up, startled.

  “Louise, I’m not interested in ruining your chance with Denishawn. If you want to go to Philadelphia, go.” Cora smoothed the edge of the oilcloth. “I want to talk about what you told me last night.” She hoped her face communicated all her sleepless regret, and her outrage, too. But in case it didn’t, she cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry… to hear what happened. In Cherryvale, I mean.”

  Louise wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She seemed embarrassed. Cora hadn’t thought it was possible. But the look only lasted a few seconds before the more familiar, collected gaze returned.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Louise.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Flowers? That was his name?”

  “Oh, God.” She pressed her hair against her temples. “I should have kept my mouth shut.” She wasn’t even talking to Cora, just muttering to herself. “I’ll learn. This is why I shouldn’t drink.”

  “Someone should be told, Louise. He could still be luring girls, little girls, to his house.”

  “No.” She held up a hand, waving weakly. “I nev
er heard about any other girl going over there.”

  Of course not, Cora thought. If there had been other girls, their mothers would have told them to keep quiet, too. There was no way to know.

  “And he left town anyway. Moved away before we did.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “No idea. Cora, I’m not even sure that was his name. Maybe I just remembered Flowers. Come to think of it, it might have been Mr. Feathers, not Mr. Flowers.” She smiled. “Maybe I was de-feathered.”

  “This isn’t funny, Louise.”

  “Isn’t that for me to decide?” The smile was gone. “Please drop it, okay? It’s just something that happened. I’m fine. I don’t want you to make a big production out of it.”

  “I’m not out to embarrass you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “But you would embarrass me.” Her stare was hard, unblinking. “So really. Understand. You bring up Eddie, or Cherryvale, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mother won’t, either, just so you know. You’ll just make yourself look crazy.”

  Cora looked at her torn toast. Myra. A sorry excuse for a mother. And Leonard, a blind and preoccupied father. Louise was the real orphan at the table. Cora had had the Kaufmanns.

  Louise put her knife on the table, idly spinning it like a dial. “Did you mean what you said? You really aren’t going to tell Miss Ruth about last night?”

  “I meant it.”

  Louise stared down at her plate, her uneaten toast. She looked too confused to be grateful. “Good,” she said finally. “Then I’ll go to class. I’ll pack now.” She nudged her plate toward Cora. “I can’t eat this. Sorry.”

  “You should try to eat something. Even just the orange. You’ll be in class for five hours. And you’ll be traveling after that.”

  “I won’t keep it down.” She scooted her chair back and stood.

  Cora held up her palm. Louise stared down at her, bleary-eyed. She leaned to one side and steadied herself, her hand on the back of the chair. “What?”