Woman's Own

  When he had taken the address from the hotel, it had been his plan to spend a night, perhaps two, until more spacious and convenient lodgings could be found. Emily’s neighborhood was a long ride from Fairmount Park, the Centennial Exhibition site, and from the business and government district of Philadelphia. Besides, he would have slept on a street corner rather than spend a single night in his aunt’s house. Then he saw Emily. And before closing his eyes on that first night, he knew he had met the woman he wanted.

  He planned a slow advance. If she learned that he boarded in her house because of his desire, her morals might be outraged. She could evict him. Meanwhile, he was trying to think of a way to convince her to take a stroll with him or pack a picnic lunch for two. He’d suffer through Sundays of services if he could sit beside Emily. He wasn’t sure how long he could indulge this idea of temperance, and his impatience for a drink made him chuckle aloud. No woman had ever persuaded him to forego a late night card game or a glass of whiskey.

  “You’re about the only man I know can look so damned amused all by yourself.”

  He turned toward the familiar voice and accepted a glass of champagne from an old friend.

  “Thank you, General.”

  “Think you’d call me Daniel at least. I got scars all over my backside from where you unloaded me of shot. I still don’t sit a horse good.” He sipped from the glass and made a face. “It just doesn’t go down right, does it?”

  Noel took a drink. “Keep your eye on the senator. He must have a private stock somewhere.”

  “I reckon he’ll open it up later. If he leaves the party and ducks into a parlor or library, I’m on his trail.”

  “And I’m on yours,” Noel laughed. He gestured to the ballroom at large with the hand that held the glass. “Nice little place the senator’s got.”

  “Twenty-five acres all told. Sixteen bedrooms; fanciest damned thing you ever saw. I’m staying in one that looks like a damned bordello. Have you met Senator Tilden yet?”

  “Nope. Do I need to?”

  “Yessir, before we find the senator’s private stock. Tilden’s pure temperance. He’s got more goddamn virtues than I got shot scars. You’re gonna have to shake a lot of these hands.”

  “Sure is a mess of silk out there,” Noel said.

  “Yep, but I don’t see it. If my eyesight is worth a damn, Mrs. Wilkensen gets her liver up.” Daniel Wilkensen lifted one bushy gray eyebrow as he surveyed the room filled with whirling, beautiful women, a sparkling rainbow of frocks, furs, gems, laces. “There a Mrs. Padgett to make your life miserable yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you always did like buckskin on a woman.”

  What would he think, Noel wondered, if he knew that I was turning myself inside out over a woman in plain gray muslin with a white starched collar? Emily dressed like a preacher’s wife or a country schoolteacher. No matter how sincere the attempt, she could not make herself ordinary; she was beautiful, her skin creamy and smooth, her hair lustrous and thick even though she pinned it back, tamed it down. Were she to wear evening toilette or a ballgown she would be more beautiful than any woman in this room.

  Daniel Wilkensen’s low monologue interrupted his thoughts of Emily. He had met the general fifteen years ago in Colorado. Daniel had been a colonel back then, commander of a special detachment of frontiersmen. He was shot in the rump by a bunch of advancing Free-Soilers who confused the un-uniformed pack of soldiers for the enemy. Nothing can humble a man like retreat, except maybe getting shot in the sitting joint. Noel had been an infantryman. It had taken Noel just about as much whiskey to get up the nerve to pick that shot out of a colonel’s butt as it had taken the colonel to endure the pain.

  “How’s your pa?” Daniel asked.

  “Dead now, Daniel. He died last year.”

  “Great loss,” the general said after a somber moment. “Was he sick long?”

  Noel remembered his father’s tenacity. “He’d been slowing down, had a bad cough for a few months, but an expedition came through, and he wouldn’t be left behind. He’d been up the Oregon Trail enough, you’d think. But no amount of coaxing or bullying would get through to him. He died on the trail.” Noel looked down for a moment. “Almost like he planned it,” he added sentimentally. And then, more brightly, “He was sixty-eight; a long life for a man who lived like he lived. Hope I see sixty-eight.”

  “Ahem,” the general cleared his throat, “I’ll see it first. You ought to dance, Noel. Now that the old man’s gone and there ain’t no one to badger you, get a woman.”

  “Maybe,” he said, seeing nothing on the ballroom floor that intrigued him nearly so much as another evening on Emily’s porch.

  Daniel leaned closer to provide commentary while Noel mentally compared each woman who swirled by to his idea of perfection. “That’s George Corliss--his machine engine will start the Exhibition by lighting all the lights. I ain’t never seen the like…Walt Whitman--that man still don’t own a decent suit of clothes…See Julia? There’s a lesson. Even getting her husband elected president can’t make a woman pretty.”

  Spending the next few months with a bunch of eastern politicians and businessmen was the last thing that interested Noel, but the territory of Wyoming had sent him as a representative to the Centennial. They needed a great deal from the United States government: cavalry support to quell the Indians, guns, money, land grants, homesteaders. They needed major connecting railroad lines for their towns, for towns to become cities. All Noel could think about tonight was how far Wyoming was from Philadelphia. How long before Emily would use his first name without whispering?

  There would be many gatherings like this in the course of the fair. The more he could get out of one, the fewer he would have to attend. He was just about to excuse himself from Daniel and start shaking hands when a flurry of lavender silk and satin distracted him.

  He squinted in the direction of the young woman. His mouth dropped open. She danced gaily, tossing her blond curls with coquettish intent, smiling suggestively into the handsome face of her young partner. She was one of the most beautiful in the room and he could not help but notice the eyes that followed her. She swayed gracefully, beaming with rehearsed, flirtatious guile. She was an artist, and this room was her canvas.

  She had somehow fooled her mother. Emily could not have provided such a dress, would not have helped fashion a coiffure so modern, and must be ignorant of her daughter’s whereabouts. The handshaking would be delayed for Noel, for he felt compelled to keep an eye on her.

  “Maybe I will dance,” he told Daniel.

  “Patricia,” Mary Ellen whispered furiously. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m dancing. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

  “By now I’m certain Wilbert regrets bringing you. You’re ignoring him completely!”

  “I am not! He’s ignoring me! He hasn’t come near me all evening. He was very precise in telling me that he did not like to dance and that I should enjoy myself while he talks to his father’s friends.”

  “He hasn’t come near you because you’re dancing with all the other men! How do you expect to impress his family when you’re acting like this?”

  Patricia wrinkled her nose. She hadn’t been particularly impressed with the Kennesdow family: they were all as awkward and withdrawn as Wilbert, and no one seemed to know them. All the important introductions of the early evening were the first for them, too. “Wilbert doesn’t want to dance, Mary Ellen. He told me to enjoy myself, which is more than you’ve done.”

  “Enjoy yourself? You’re making a spectacle of yourself! Don’t you see how people are looking at you?”

  Patricia glanced around and saw two men watching her from a short distance away. She met their eyes shyly, one at a time, and received a smile from each in return. “For goodness’ sake, Mary Ellen, don’t you even know when a woman is being admired?”

  “Where’d you stuff the tulle?” she asked hotly.
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  Patricia’s cheeks became rosy. She had removed the sheer tulle wrap that served to keep the low-cut gown which dipped off her shoulders more decent for a young woman her age. She had left it in the powder room with her borrowed cloak. Bosoms had great power; she wasn’t very tall, and the men she danced with would be looking down at her all evening. She wanted to be asked where they might call to see her again. And she had been.

  “Why don’t you want me to have fun?” she asked Mary Ellen.

  “Fun? Is that what you call it? It looks more like P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth.”

  “Oh, Mary Ellen, don’t be mean. I’ve never in my life been to a party like this…and I may never have such an opportunity again!”

  “There’s a clever girl, you may not indeed. I tried to warn you, but since you won’t listen…if Wilbert never calls on you again, it won’t be anyone’s fault but your own.”

  “Very well, I’m warned. And I can’t help it if he won’t dance and is just too awfully shy to even stand beside me.”

  “Not that you will be standing still long enough for him to approach you,” Mary Ellen returned, the sarcasm in her voice bitter as bile. She lifted her nose and glided away.

  Patricia pursed her lips in annoyance and glared at her friend’s departing back. Then she looked uncertainly in Wilbert’s direction and found his eyes were on her. She flashed him her most dazzling smile, lifting a hand as if to wave, but he started to grow pink immediately, a wash of color flowing up his neck, through his fuzzy new beard, scorching the pimples on his cheeks. Although Wilbert was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Harvard, and involved in the working world of business, he had all the physical attributes of a seventeen-year-old boy. Except for his height: he was well over six feet and lanky, towering above her with rounded shoulders and a head hung as if in perpetual embarrassment. He was polite enough, but he had said hardly ten words. He remained in conversation with his father and a dowdy looking old man with a horrid gray mustache--a poet of some kind, Patricia had been told.

  Mary Ellen had enjoyed the task of making Patricia beautiful right up until the moment she had accomplished the feat. The dress, lavender satin covered with an overskirt of white Chambery gauze, was layered in a series of puffs that led back to a demitrain skirt, each puff caught up with garlands of silk flowers. It flounced and moved and seemed to breathe with her while she danced. And of course the tulle strip had been added about the shoulders because the straps were little more than a thread of small flowers that dropped off. Far too brazen, Mrs. Jasper had said, for a young virgin. The tulle strip covered the white lace ruche at her breast, the prettiest part of the dress. It also obstructed the view of her bosom, upon which Patricia depended.

  More daring still was what she had encouraged Mary Ellen to help her do to her hair. Copying a fashion plate in Harper’s Bazaar, they had clipped the hair around Patricia’s face and curled tiny ringlets with a hot iron. Patricia knew Emily considered this latest fashion hoydenish, but all the women in this room wore similar and even more provocative styles. Her mother would be furious, but she decided to face that predictable wrath. It was time her mother let her make a few of her own decisions--at least about her appearance.

  When they had arrived at the ball, it had been easy to see that the gown Patricia wore was nothing in comparison to the others. Women were arrayed in all manner of expensive and flamboyant frocks: dresses were sewn with jewels, stones, feathers, pearls, and even costly furs although it was spring. The coiffures were far more extravagant than Patricia’s; women wore peacock feathers, gems, and even sprinklings of gold dust in their hair. But it didn’t matter that there were newer and more expensive dresses; no one could outshine Patricia in natural beauty. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips to see the number of painfully homely women who were expensively bedecked. More money than the Armstrong household spent in a year had been wasted in efforts to cover fat, fill in thin-boned figures, or draw the masculine eye away from a long sharp nose or dull, vacant eyes. Patricia, in her slightly out-of-date dress, was not left wanting for dance partners.

  Mary Ellen was more than piqued. The moment Patricia stood before the mirror in Mary Ellen’s gown, looking far more fetching than Mary Ellen could with the help of a hundred dressmakers, Mary Ellen had become surly and envious. Whereas she had earlier promised dancing and champagne, now, after the third dance and the second glass, she had begun to grumble and scold. Patricia felt the knot in her stomach tighten, but it did not show on her face. She was accustomed to envy in others. Mary Ellen would probably rescind the invitation for the over-night stay unless Patricia dashed to the powder room to retrieve the tulle wrap and proceeded to stand with her back against the wall, lonely and perfectly miserable.

  But she would not. She had saved enough to ride the horsecar, although a number of pleasant young men seemed generous enough to hire a coach for her. And Wilbert, although timid and gawky, was probably decent enough to see her home even if he had a terrible time with her. She had overheard a young lady in the dressing room comment that at the senator’s last ball they had all danced until dawn, and that had filled Patricia with hope; she would happily sit by the roadside in the early morning and await the first horsecar of the day. She did not consider dangers; there were no dangers tonight. It might as well be the only night of her life.

  She danced again and again. She had a third glass of champagne and a fourth. She gave her house number and street three times, ignoring the frowns of confusion from rich young men who were unfamiliar with her neighborhood. It was midnight and from what she saw, the party was just beginning. She was very tired, but she wouldn’t stop dancing for all the world.

  “I could hardly believe it was you,” someone said.

  She turned toward the familiar voice with a ready smile on her lips which faded when she looked into the brown eyes of Dale Montaine. She formed a little pout, her lower lip thrust out, and opened her borrowed fan. “I saw you earlier,” she said. “Of course, you were ... occupied.”

  “I escorted someone else, is that what you mean? Well, I was hardly encouraged to invite you.”

  “Would you have?” she asked, turning her liquid blue eyes up, tilting her chin invitingly.

  “Why not? But then, since our falling out--”

  “Yes, that. I suppose one of us should apologize.”

  “Ah. I suppose.”

  “Oh Dale, you purposely misbehave! Especially around me. Who is that girl you’re with?” Patricia happened to think she was one of the poor wretches on whom a fortune had been wasted.

  “The woman I brought tonight is a close friend of the family and it was suggested that I escort her. Her name is Dorthea Lancaster.”

  “A friend?”

  “Are you jealous?” he asked, smiling roguishly. “I hope the fact that I’ve brought her won’t keep us from patching things up.”

  “Has she gone home now?”

  “No,” he laughed. “No, dear, she’s gone to fix her hair and get her wrap. I’ll have to see her home. Naturally.”

  “And so we won’t even dance…”

  “I’m sorry, Patricia, not tonight. But I’ll be more than pleased if you’d invite me to come ‘round for you again…so long as there is no confusion about who’s calling on you on that particular evening. That isn’t asking very--”

  “Oh…um,” she faltered, embarrassed. “There could be…well, a problem with that. My mother…”

  “Has she told you otherwise?” he asked, his dark brows drawing together.

  Patricia looked away thinking of what her mother had said. She couldn’t tell Dale that. “Perhaps if you came ‘round to tell her of your regret about--”

  “Better still, why don’t we plan to meet? Then we don’t have to go through all that bother.”

  “Meet? How in the world do you expect me to do that? My mother doesn’t let me run skitter-tail all over town.”

  “We have soirees and dinners nearly every day. Would you like
to come to my home, meet my family and their guests?” He leaned his head to the side, not really pointing. “See that man over there? That’s my father talking with President Grant. They’re very old friends. Any night of your choosing there is bound to be something happening at the house.”

  “My mother wouldn’t allow it,” she said sullenly.

  “Say you’re going somewhere else, then, and send a note for me. I can send the coach for you. Anywhere.”

  “I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about arranging something like that.”

  “You’re joking? Haven’t you ever gone off without Mama? Pack your good dress and hide it around the corner and set off for a lecture like a good little Christian girl. Give me a little warning of the day and time, and I’ll come for you.”

  She laughed with amusement that was wholly contrived. She didn’t notice the way Dale’s smile turned into a smirk, the way his eyes boiled with dark contempt. She had taken her fill of champagne; she felt, erroneously, in control of the situation. And she did not see that beyond Dale, Wilbert cast a last, baleful glance in her direction just as a cloaked and bonneted Mary Ellen pulled him away. Patricia had no idea she’d been left behind.

  “Choose a day and time in advance, when your family makes plans and you can beg off. Think about it,” he urged her. “If there’s no party at the house, I can take you to the theater. Edwin Booth is playing Richelieu. Or, maybe we’ll borrow Father’s yacht.”

  Patricia’s eyes had grown wider, apace with his suggestions. She was possessed by an aching urgency for all those things, not once, not twice, but every day. A trip to Saratoga or Newport for the summer. Yachting. The polo matches. The horse races. Gowns, not wasted on her, for she could do them justice. Her eyes dropped to the diamond stickpin he wore in his lapel.