Love and Other Consolation Prizes(88)

Happiness. Sadness. Like all things, they both come to an end.





VAGRANTS


(1911)



Ernest helped Professor True haul an enormous, dripping block of ice into the kitchen from a delivery wagon in the alley. The man gripped his end of the block, which was the size of a small steamer trunk, with giant metal tongs, and hefted it into the top cabinet of the icebox. Ernest felt the radiating coolness of the ice on his face, wet from perspiration. Then he latched the lid and followed the Professor back out through the alley and around to the front of the building, where they sat on the steps and basked in the glorious spring sunshine, stretching their backs and warming up their hands.

“You heard from the Mayflower lately?” Professor True asked as he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and lit a cigar with a kitchen match, puffing away.

Ernest shook his head. He knew that like most everyone else, the Professor had been slow to accept that Maisie in all likelihood wasn’t coming back. A year had passed, yet he kept asking, kept hoping for some postcard, or bicycle messenger to show up with a telegram from Germany, or Seattle, or…somewhere.

Ernest remembered how a few weeks after she’d moved out, Maisie had called Mrs. Blackwell to announce her travel arrangements, but she didn’t ask for him or Fahn. The Gibson girls had gone down to the King Street Station, where they gave the Mayflower a balsam wreath with ribbon candy and waved goodbye. Even after all these months, they still talked about how Maisie had been dolled up in a long mink coat, toting an angora-trimmed handbag as she stepped out of a long white sedan. Servants from Speedwell had arrived as well, portering a small mountain of luggage onto the train as they accompanied Maisie and Turnbull on their journey.

Ernest and Fahn decided not to go—they were too afraid a farewell would be goodbye forever. In that strange way, they held out hope. They imagined Maisie taking on the world, though the upstairs girls never once mentioned if she smiled or not.

From the Gibson girls’ superficial reactions, Ernest realized that to them, Maisie had unwittingly hit the bull’s-eye that Madam Flora had encouraged all her charges to aim for. It was not quite true freedom, he supposed, but a form of social dependence so elevated and grandiose that it looked like freedom to them.

Was this any different than party girls trading favors for silk stockings, bottles of brandy, and dinners in fancy restaurants—or society girls carefully doling out pleasure for the promise of a colorful courtship and a proper wedding?

Ernest had lain awake many nights and wondered. Girls were complicated, women confounding, their challenges almost insurmountable. The world was a rigged game, stacked against them. But maybe Maisie had played to her advantage.

“No one’s heard from her. Not a word.” Ernest stretched the truth, just a tad. He had received a note from Maisie a week after she left; she was in New York City at the time, about to board a steamer to London. She’d said she felt as if she were living in a fairy tale, a world that couldn’t reflect her previous life. She regretted not giving him or Fahn a proper goodbye. And she left a mailing address care of Louis Turnbull. But when Ernest had replied with a picture postcard of himself and Fahn holding hands at the Milwaukee Pier, Maisie never wrote back.

Ernest thought Fahn might have received a note in reply, but if she did, she never mentioned such a thing. And a few days later she moved upstairs into Maisie’s room.

Ernest suspected that whether Maisie found her mother or not, the Mayflower had set sail for good and was never coming back. She’d sealed her deal with her silence.

That revelation was finally confirmed when Mrs. Blackwell discovered Maisie’s wedding announcement a few months later in the society pages of the Seattle Times.

“It says here that Louis J. Turnbull and his young ward, the lovely Margaret N. Turnbull, have returned, after a European courtship and a marriage at sea, with plans for a honeymoon cruise around the world.” Mrs. Blackwell had sat down for once, as though the truth wearied her. Though the maids and the upstairs girls almost swooned.

The article didn’t mention Madam Flora. Not that Ernest was surprised.

“What is it with robber barons and their young puppy wives?” Mrs. Blackwell asked rhetorically. “First it was the copper king, William Clark, and his young ward, Anna Eugenia, now our Mayflower. God bless ’em all.”

Since hearing of Maisie’s nuptials, Ernest would occasionally notice her in the newspaper, where writers would describe her elegant dresses, her curled hair, dyed a light pink at the tips, an indulgence in the latest fashion craze, and the glittering diamond necklaces and bracelets she wore to yacht races or tennis matches at Viretta Park. But the articles on Seattle’s newest continental debutante never once mentioned her humble beginnings. It was as though Margaret Turnbull had been conjured out of thin air.

“She’s someone else these days,” Ernest said.

Professor True said, “There are people in our lives whom we love, and lose, and forever long for. They orbit our hearts like Halley’s Comet, crossing into our universe only once, or if we’re lucky, twice in a lifetime. And when they do, they affect our gravity.” He said, “You know what I mean? These people are special.”

Ernest nodded. Halley’s Comet had come and gone and the world hadn’t ended. But it wasn’t ever the same again. And if he ever missed Maisie, he only had to console himself by walking past the less glamorous places where she might have ended up, the cribs that Madam Flora had tried to shut down.