The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 6

  “Which one was it?” she asked flatly. Would her fate be the balding, potbellied X, with his twenty thousand a year and his deer parks, or Y, with his shipping company, his crooked teeth, and his strange smells?

  “It is Monsieur Le Cherche!” her mother gasped.

  The shock that went through Electra at that moment jolted her upright and out of her chair. “But Mama, how could an offer from such a man interest you?”

  “You misunderstand, Electra. The proposal is from Judge Henri Le Cherche. Not his disreputable brother the viscount Basil Le Cherche. He has asked permission to come this evening to make his offer to you in person.”

  Henri Le Cherche? The dark figure dressed in expensive black silk and fine leather boots? A judge? Had she even danced with him? No—she had not even been aware of his noticing her at the ball.

  “Does the man’s family relationship with a thief and seducer not give you pause, Mama? Basil Le Cherche is his brother!”

  “Not a moment’s pause, my dear. Years of disrespect and poverty will be washed away in an instant. All you must do is make your way to the altar, where you will say ‘I do’ and we will be admitted into every circle in Europe!”

  But what Electra knew, more clearly than she had ever known, was that she did not wish to be admitted to every circle in Europe. She wasn’t sure where she wanted admittance—but something in her was awakening, something that pressed for its own concerns to be shaped and addressed. The creature inside her was only just in its infancy, but it had a pulsing vitality.

  “He has asked for a private audience this afternoon,” her mother chattered. “We must hurry!”

  “Why?”

  “There is so much to do! You must be at your most beautiful, and there are but a few hours to prepare.” Her mother called in servants, who helped her truss and curl and bejewel her daughter without protest or question. They were, in fact, unsurprised by the extravagant grooming rituals, as if they had been expecting them. At the appointed time Electra was called to the parlor for the meeting with her suitor. He was not waiting for her. “Have a seat, miss,” the servant said. “He’ll be here direct.” She sat upon one of the only two chairs in the room to await her fate. A moment later Judge Henri Le Cherche entered. She did not rise.

  “My dear,” the judge greeted her, sweeping off his hat and making a leg. “Thank you for honoring me with your time upon such short notice.”

  Indeed, it was the finely dressed man she had seen across the ballroom. “We are pleased to receive you,” she replied, nodding and retaining her seat. The judge took the other chair before he was invited to do so and turned a smiling face upon her. “You were perfectly mesmerizing at the ball. The dress … such beautiful breasts.”

  “Pardon me?” She stiffened. Never had a man addressed her so vulgarly.

  “Do not pretend to be so missish, my pet. I observed you with my brother—not the ideal match for any woman, and I’m sure you knew it when you accepted him as your dance partner. A woman who would wear such a thing, move with the … shall we say the carnal sensuality … with which you moved … that woman is ready for the kinds of things that I have to offer. And I am here to offer them.”

  “I am afraid you mistake me, sir.”

  “I do not. Your mother confirms your eagerness to marry me, and I am here to lay out my expectations.”

  “My mother speaks only for herself. Not for me. I am not interested in your expectations, and I do not give you any kind of assurance or consent.”

  “You needn’t. Your mother is your guardian and she has the legal right to sign documents on your behalf, including a marriage license. She is eager to sign such a document. So I will proceed. Let me make my preferences in love clear. I enjoy the hunt, sometimes the spirited resistance, and the release that domination provides. My sense is that you will not only accommodate these tastes but will perhaps be talented at satisfying them. On occasion I have enjoyed companions that could be regarded as very young women. Very, very young women. Control is important to me. I enjoy the theatre of submission. Do you understand?”

  Electra was young and she had been sheltered, so the specific images that this conversation called up were vague. They were, however, horrible to her, as was this monster sitting across the room from her now. His enjoyment of her discomfort was clear. But there was another sensibility bubbling directly beneath the man’s thin veneer of amused contempt—hostility toward her, a woman he did not know and had come to bend to his will. And perhaps … was she right about the hesitation just before the raised eyebrows and curled lip? She had a sudden and very certain sense that this man was afraid of her as well, and therefore terribly dangerous.

  “You will not have my hand in marriage or any other part of me,” she said coolly. “Please leave.”

  He continued smiling. Not moving.

  “I asked you to go!”

  “That is of no consequence to me. Your mother and I will have a final tête-à-tête and settle the financial details. She knows nothing of my … proclivities. But my dear, I suspect that if she did, she would still sign you away. And I also imagine that if you attempt to describe the details of our conversation to her when I leave that she will believe nothing you say. She will see you as willful, attempting to avoid your adult responsibilities in order to continue an indulgent childhood. So you see, there is no point in struggle.”

  He rose, moved to her, and pulled her to her feet. He slid his hand inside the bodice of her gown and firmly tugged it downward, then stepped back to inspect what he had exposed. Her hands flew to her breasts, but he restrained her. He smiled. “They are perfect. As I expected.”

  Enraged, she covered herself again the instant he released her. “Did you ask Mr. Z to invite my mother and me here specifically so you could stage this ridiculous charade?”

  “It is not a charade, and yes, Mr. Z knew your mother would be pleased to come here—so far from the opinions of her vulgar little acquaintances. We conduct a great deal of business here, Mr. Z and I, and he knew I preferred to manage this transaction with your mother far from anyone who might intercede with rude gossip. Or worse.”

  “We are leaving as soon as we pack.”

  “I doubt that. Mr. Z’s loyal staff will not help you leave for any destination at all but one that I myself name. And at the moment I name none.” He turned on his heel and left her angry, disgusted beyond measure. Dumbfounded, she stood exactly where she was and listened to the distant, polite sounds of the judge’s departure and her mother’s simpering goodbyes.

  “Electra!” her mother called. “Come and say goodbye to Judge Le Cherche.” Electra adjusted her bodice, walked woodenly to the door, and nodded slightly as he bowed. The door closed behind him.

  Electra’s first words were icily flat and crystal clear. “I will cut my throat before I enter a relationship of any kind with that man. He is not human. I do not know what he is, but he will never touch me.”

  “The matter is settled. I have spoiled you! And I will stand for no disobedience here, young miss!”

  The two women each strode angrily away in different directions. When Electra reached her room, she drew a bag from beneath her bed, stuffed it with the sturdiest, most practical clothes she had with her, and opened a window. She would be as far away from this place as she could be by morning, nowhere to be found when Judge Henri Le Cherche sought his intended plaything.

  Fate had forced her to become mistress of her own future. She swung her leg over the sill and jumped.

  * * *

  The day after I read this section of The Pirate Lover I sat in Mrs. Daniels’s living room, again, reading a column from Ladies Good Housekeeping. I closed it. “Mrs. Daniels,” I said, “have you ever run away?”

  “Of course. Anyone worth their salt runs away from home at least once.”

  Well, no. I hadn’t. And I was certainly worth some salt. “When did you do it?”

  “Twice. The first time I was angry with my mother, I was perhaps six. S
he had spanked me to impress some lesson upon me, now lost to time, and I actually put a handkerchief stuffed with apples and two snickerdoodle cookies on a stick and marched off down our road. Very picturesque. I got as far as the first big hedge, where I sat down and ate all my provisions. Then it got dark and cold and, having run out of cookies, I returned home. No one noticed I’d been gone.”

  “Where did you run to the second time?”

  “France.”

  “France?!”

  “I was running from my second husband. It seems I hadn’t outgrown the old strategy, though I packed more intelligently.”

  “What did he do to you to make you run away?”

  “That is a mature subject for a much later date.”

  I’d tried to imagine what a mature explanation for a runaway wife might be, and the exercise was difficult due to youth and inexperience. Now, sadly, I know more and I can imagine lots of reasons for a wife to run away. But when the questions first popped up, I’d read between a few of the lines in the more explicit monster and fantasy comic books under Snyder’s bed. I had read marital advice columns touching on intimate subjects. Still—nothing that I imagined made sense when it was applied to the woman across the tea table from me: fleshy wattles and wide waist, dark circles under both eyes and ankles like popovers. She’d watched me scan her from hairline to toes, and one of her eyebrows popped up. “It isn’t all pretty bows and tiny waists, my dear—other things command men’s attentions if you are interested enough in those attentions to cultivate and use them.”

  “Other things like what?” I’d asked.

  “If you ask the question in such vague terms, then you are too young for the conversation. Now—I have a short story here by Mr. Fitzgerald called ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair.’ Ready?”

  I had been ready and I said so. Mr. Fitzgerald’s story made perfect sense to me. Maybe I’d never run away from home but I knew what it felt like to wake up in the middle of the night burning with the desire to chop off all of someone’s hair because they did me wrong by day.

  “That’ll show her,” I said when we reached the moment when Bernice clipped Marjorie’s beautiful long hair and ran into the night with the braids dangling from one hand.

  “Yes. I thought you’d like that one. Go to the kitchen and tell Violette to fetch us brownies.” Mrs. Daniels’s cook was a wizard at brownies. I ate mine thinking about all the terrible thoughts and actions in the grown-up world, a place jam-packed with lusts and betrayals.

  “Mrs. Daniels, can I ask Violette to show me how she does it?”

  “Does what?”

  “The brownies. The other things.”

  I thought Mrs. Daniels looked disappointed in me but she sighed and said, “You may ask her. Never let it be said that I stood between a child and her capacity to bake brownies.”

  That Saturday I came very early and learned to cream sugar and butter. Violette was patient and free with the kitchen’s startling wealth. The room was saturated with light, orderly, calm, smelling of chocolate and melting sugar. I loved it so much I worried, just a little, if it was wrong to bake with Violette in Mrs. Daniels’s kitchen. Was it petty and silly? Electra Gates would never concern herself with how much lard should be in pie dough, I thought; but then, I was not Electra Gates. I wanted pie, something that didn’t seem to interest romantic heroines.

  * * *

  The next week Mrs. Daniels and I read passages from Leaves of Grass:

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.… Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.… If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

  I can’t say I understood what I was reading, but I had the uneasy sense that these words had something to do with Electra Gates’s dress and how that dress made men feel. Also made her feel. But I couldn’t turn to Mrs. Daniels to help me figure out why they seemed so connected because, of course, she didn’t know I’d stolen The Pirate Lover and I wasn’t about to let her know now. The air was dry and cool and the sugar cookies were as big as soup plates. I ate three and was offered a bag with four more to take home for Snyder, Jane, and Lilly.

  “Mrs. Daniels, did you like being married?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have done it twice if I didn’t. Though no two of them are alike, and you can’t know going in how it’ll turn out.”

  “What happened to your husbands?”

  “They died.”

  I must have looked stricken, because she added, “Everyone dies, child.”

  I received this information in silence. The men in the pictures of the Great War had died. I knew that. The newspapers were full of people who were shot or strangled or who fell off buildings. But I hadn’t imagined that this had anything to do with me. This was the first time in my life, listening to Mrs. Daniels with The Pirate Lover and Leaves of Grass all tangled up in my head, that I felt the truth of this—everybody died. Such a dark discovery, but also so wild and satisfying. There was a pull toward dark things in the poem and in the romance, both. What did it mean that there was this terrible, sweet pull?

  When I got home I crawled under Snyder’s bed again and pulled out another Marvel Mystery Comic. A miniature alien riding on what looked like a huge ant was being held under a clear glass bowl by a pair of giant hands. It was going to die. I flipped to the advertisements on the back page: EXPLODING HAND GRENADE. This menacing hand grenade looks and works just like a real one. All you do is pull the pin. Throw the grenade and watch the fun as the caps explode!

  Little boys were going to pretend to make things die. I understood this even as I also knew that if I tried to explore this sudden and strange feeling I had right now with a grown-up, I’d be told that there was something wrong with me. Maybe there was.

  HYPNO COIN. In just moments your subjects will follow your commands while hypnotized by this powerful visual tool.

  THE INSULT THAT MADE A MAN OUT OF ME. The Charles Atlas dynamic tension program will change your life.

  I opened the bag of cookies that Violette had given me. She had included a Hermit Bar for each of my sisters and Snyder as well as one for me. I ate Snyder’s cookie. Then, because I couldn’t explain why his cookie was missing, I ate Jane’s and Lilly’s. A spider skittered across the floor. I caught it, put it carefully between the cover and first page of Snyder’s comic, and squashed him. This made me feel better, then worse. I went out to play.

  The next time I went to the library, I asked the librarian if I could use the poetry section—it was a skimpy little shelf with maybe twenty titles, most of them there because the local high school assigned a poetry paper every year for the twelfth-graders and they had kept asking for titles that weren’t in the school library. There sat Leaves of Grass, which I slid off its shelf and opened.

  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

  For reasons I could not explain, once again that made me think of Electra Gates’s dress.

  NEAVE

  What Happy Women Do

  In the months leading up to Pearl Harbor there was no barrier, no domestic happiness, that could keep the coming war from saturating our daily lives–movie newsreels, newspapers, radio shows, talk on the street and in living rooms and diners and churches. Then Pearl Harbor and we were in the fight ourselves. Only Janey was untouched, protected by her naturally sunny nature and our habit of turning off the radio when she came into the room. If she asked anything about it, we told her everything would be fine. I don’t know if she believed it. Being sunny does not necessarily make you stupid.

  Rationing made turning to the relief of making a pie
or a tray of cookies almost impossible. Mom and I hoarded sugar and traded Daddy’s tomatoes for a neighbor’s eggs, and we scraped together a cake about once a month. I still read for Mrs. Daniels, who didn’t seem to live in the land of rations. At Mrs. Daniels’s house, cookies still came floating out of the kitchen; crusty pumpernickel bread still got slathered with butter. I didn’t know how and I didn’t ask why. I just begged her cook to let me come early some days and bake with her. She said yes and at least once a week I would come an hour before Mrs. Daniels expected me and I’d sit in her kitchen getting a ball of perfect pie dough ready to roll out. I loved that kitchen.

  At home it felt like the war sat down with us at the dinner table every night. Snyder was turning eighteen. The draft notice would be in the mail any day. All around us were boys who were begging parents to sign release forms to let them get in early, boys who talked about not wanting to miss their war. Snyder, I’m pretty sure, wanted to miss the war. He was restless and thin-skinned and just about impossible to be around. He was frightened.

  I know it started with a scuffle between me and Snyder, but I don’t remember over what. We got in a lot of scuffles that year. Whatever the argument was about on that particular day, some of it happened in the driveway behind the car. Snyder grabbed my collar and yanked, hard enough to make me choke. This upset Mr. Boppit, who flung himself between us. Snyder kicked Mr. Boppit, which made me slap Snyder. He stamped over to the car and turned on the ignition, yelling about going away, going far, far away, and not looking behind him at all. Ha. That’s what I said. We wish.

  I heard the brake being pulled free and the ignition cranked but I wasn’t making connections, looking ahead at what could happen but failing because I was busy thinking about how much I wanted to hurt him. I didn’t really believe that Snyder would unlock the brake. Then he did and he and the car started backward with me right in its path. Snyder’s intentions weren’t clearly murderous, because as I said, he was still yelling “far, far away” and I honestly don’t think he was in his right mind. I just happened to be in his path.