Love and Other Consolation Prizes(74)

Compared to Maisie, Ernest thought, the others looked like last year’s models.

All of the wealthy men in attendance, with slick hair and waxed mustaches, who wore tuxedos with open collars and sparkling cuff links, cheered. A few of the younger gents dared to kiss the back of Maisie’s gloved hand, but none ventured further, not even for a peck on the cheek. Ernest wondered, wryly, if there was some unspoken etiquette regarding virgins on their nights of deflowering. Or perhaps the distance in Maisie’s smile was enough to keep the wolves at bay.

Like the sober banker who said, “I’ll pay you one hundred dollars for a kiss on the lips, dollface. How ’bout it, sweetheart?”

Or the sloppily drunk man who heckled, “How about five hundred for a bumpy ride in the back of my new car?”

Maisie deflected each offer with a piercing stare and a smile that might have killed had she not lowered its intensity.

Ernest waited along the far wall and listened to the music. The rest of the help were quick to fill an empty drink, replace a full ashtray, or fetch the humidor for a fresh cigarillo. Professor True broke into an original song he had composed for the occasion as Maisie made her way, turning her attention to one patron and then quickly to another, flitting like a hummingbird through the room. The working girls all swayed, mooning over the sweet, gentle music, but Ernest knew that when the song ended, Maisie would be leaving. To his weary heart it sounded like a funeral dirge.

As Maisie orbited the room once more, stoking the fires in the bellies of rich men for the other girls, Miss Amber snapped her fingers toward him. For Maisie, the party was ending. Ernest donned his driving gloves and worked his way to the foyer. Her very presence—her magnetic beauty coupled with her coy aloofness—teased the gentlemen who looked on. They knew they’d been outbid and who the lucky winner was. They raised their glasses and drained them as they toasted their misfortune and jokingly cursed Louis Turnbull.

“Here’s to Old Man Turnbull, the only fellow I know who succeeds at everything he sets his mind to…with the exception of dying!” one bearded fellow yelled above the crowd. “He knows how to pick ’em. Let’s just hope he remembers what to do with ’em!”

Ernest gritted his teeth and stared at his shoes, trying not to think about the age of the man awaiting Maisie in his mansion. In his mind’s eye all he saw was a gray-haired Methuselah in moth-eaten robes, with a face of wrinkles, a tongue darting to the corners of old, cracked lips.

Maybe he’ll have heart failure. Ernest smiled grimly as he regarded a few of the older gentlemen in the room. His eyes wandered back up the stairs.

Ernest had hoped Madam Flora might marshal some of her wits in reserve and find her way down to the party, where she’d perform a miracle by postponing Maisie’s fate the way Governor Hay might have offered a stay of execution.

But no last-minute rescue came.

Instead, Miss Amber held court as best she could. She wasn’t regal, or well spoken, like her flamboyant business partner, but the free-flowing Canadian whiskey and Kentucky bourbon worked well enough. The men laughed and raised their glasses to Madam Flora in absentia.

And then Miss Amber announced that it was time for the belle of the ball to take her leave. The men cheered once again.

Ernest knew that Amber and Flora would be leaving by train soon after the party ended, for New York City, followed by the journey by sea to Europe. And as some of the men began to ascend the stairs with their girls of choice for the evening, it became obvious that they knew as well, as they wished the grande dame bon voyage.

Ernest stood by as the rest of the upstairs girls hugged Maisie. They whispered in her ear, and Ernest could only imagine their congratulations, condolences, words of advice perhaps. Maisie smiled and laughed.

And then the downstairs servants took their turn near the door, forming a makeshift receiving line, though the Mayflower wasn’t a bride.

Mrs. Blackwell, Violet, Iris shared a toast of purloined champagne in servants’ teacups, all but Rose, who barely restrained her sobs, as though she somehow knew that Maisie’s departure foretold the ending of an era.

Ernest, who was drifting in the barrel of his imagination, toward the lip of his own emotional Niagara Falls, had almost forgotten that the end of Maisie’s childhood was almost too much to bear for everyone else as well. For a moment, he wondered why there had been so much vested emotion for Maisie but not for Fahn. He worried that they all knew something he didn’t, that Louis Turnbull was some kind of sadistic creature. Then he realized that in the minds of the downstairs help, if Maisie was leaving, Madam Flora must truly be lost, and no one knew when she’d ever come back. The big heart and little soul of the Tenderloin were both leaving within one sweep of the clock hand.

Ernest stood at the curb and put Maisie’s small overnight valise into the trunk of the roadster. He warmed up the car and watched as Maisie slowly descended the steps. He got out and held the door, helping her inside, offering her a blanket, which she gratefully took to ward off the chill. She sank into the plush leather and closed her eyes, as if leaving had been the hardest part of the evening.

Ernest honked the horn and waved goodbye to a tearful Mrs. Blackwell.

In the rearview mirror he could see that Maisie was smiling but also dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the lace fringe of her long sleeves.

Ernest hesitated and then asked, “Did you say goodbye to Madam Flora?”