Beautiful Little Fools(51)

I turned the corner, at the lamps, and there in an empty stall, I made out familiar shapes: my eyes roamed from the ground up, strong muscular bare legs, buttocks, back, hulking shoulders. Tom. He was standing, thrusting himself into a woman, who was pushed flat against the wall.

I stood there silently, suddenly weak with shock, frozen, unable to move. Why had Rose led me here? Why had she wanted me to see this truth with my very eyes? It was one thing to suspect, to wonder. But another altogether to watch him, this way. Naked and animalistic and powerful. His arrogance, his betrayal, they were nearly blinding. My head throbbed and I could barely see.

Tom thrust harder, finishing with his own stupid cry, and then suddenly, the woman’s head turned toward mine and she gasped.

And there it was: the churned butter of her curls. The plump rosy hue of her cheeks. Rebecca Buckley. Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Buckley.





Jordan 1921

NEW YORK CITY




AUNT SIGOURNEY LIVED IN A Brownstone Mansion, in a once fashionable section of the Lower East Side. I showed up on her stoop, exactly one week after Jerralyn had shoved that newspaper at me. Aunt Sigourney had opened the door with a frown but had ushered me in all the same.

“You can stay as long as you like,” she’d said. “As long as you don’t make any noise. I don’t enjoy noise.”

I’d promised her, no noise, and into her guest room I went. Aunt Sigourney was in her late seventies and mostly deaf, and the irony was, she wouldn’t hear me even if I did make noise. But even that thought brought me no cheer. Nothing brought me cheer any longer, certainly not old deaf Aunt Sigourney. But where else was I going to go?

Not even an hour after Jerralyn had come to my room that morning in Atlanta, Mr. Hennessey had dismissed me from the team for cheating. He’d handed me a train ticket and told me to pack my bags. No matter that I’d tried to plead my case, that I’d insisted it was all a lie… a mistake. Mrs. Pearce had just looked directly at me, told me to leave before things got worse. And Mr. Hennessey had looked me straight in the eye and swore he and Mrs. Pearce both saw me move the ball. I’d never felt so flattened by the weight of another person’s lie before. His words crushed me, so that the entire train ride from Atlanta to Grand Central station, I could hardly breathe.

Then there was Mary Margaret.

As I’d packed up my own things, I’d noticed that her bag was already gone. The other girls were whispering that she’d already left for Nashville, weighed down by shame. They whispered that it was the shame in knowing what I’d done, in hiding my secret. But their words took on a different meaning in my head. Were they right? Was she ashamed of what had happened between us?

My eyes had stung hot with tears, thinking that everything Mary Margaret was afraid of had happened. She’d been right to be scared. I’d been stupid and foolish, and I’d ruined everything.

Once I made it to Aunt Sigourney’s, I telephoned Mary Margaret’s home in Nashville. Her mama picked up, and when I told her who was calling, I heard her suck in her breath a little on the other end of the line. “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” her mama said sharply. “After what you did, Jordan Baker, you should be ashamed.” There was that word again, that feeling. Shame.

“But… I… I didn’t move the ball.” My protests had begun to feel futile, my words hopeless. No one would ever believe them. Why even keep saying them aloud?

“Don’t call here again.”

“Just tell her that I don’t regret it. I don’t regret anything that happened,” I cried out into the telephone.

Her mama slammed down the receiver in response.

I called back every evening for weeks, but after a few nights, they just stopped answering the telephone altogether.

And then by the summer, I stopped calling. I wrote Mary Margaret a letter, telling her where I was and how she could reach me.

But by the fall that made it back to me, entirely unopened, a big fat Return to Sender stamped across the front.



* * *



LOSING GOLF WAS one thing, but losing Mary Margaret was another.

Sometimes it felt like I’d left my life and my breath and my soul back in that inn in Atlanta. I was listless for months. I slept until noon and got into bed again at five p.m. I only ate a little, one meal a day at best, and my dresses started to hang loose around my frame. My muscles from golf disappeared, and I was just flesh and bones. A barely breathing apparition of my former self. Grief, Mary Margaret had told me once, was forever. An endless, winding river. And here I was drowning.

Each afternoon, I walked. I walked and I walked around the city, never stopping, never talking to anyone. One foot in front of the other. It was funny the way you could be in a place with so many people, and yet you could be so all alone. I both loved and hated that about New York City. I was in no mood to be with other people, anyway. Not even Daisy, especially not Daisy.

She’d written and invited me to come to Chicago, but I hadn’t been truthful with her back in France. I hadn’t told her about Mary Margaret or about that time I’d seen Tom in the middle of the night with their nurse. And were we really best friends if we no longer shared secrets? The idea of being with her now, of seeing her each day and having to talk to her and not tell her the truth about anything at all, or to confess and confide all my truths at once? It was too much. It was just too much.