The Museum of Extraordinary Things(75)

“It’s a good thing I heard you had been hired by Dreamland, otherwise I might have fainted to see a man who’d vanished so completely from my life. I mourned you,” I said bitterly. “For no good purpose it seems.”

“We thought it best if you knew nothing of my presence,” he told me. He seemed bashful now that I was a grown woman; perhaps he had seen me recoil when I first spied him.

“I wouldn’t have said a word to my father.” I was still quite hurt that the secret of his presence in Brooklyn had been kept from me. Since I’d known he and Maureen were still together, I hadn’t made a single slip of this confidence.

“Your father is a man who can figure things out without any words being said. We did it to protect you as well. That was our concern.”

“And now he knows you’re here and will be working for our competitor.”

Mr. Morris shrugged. “All men must work.”

I noticed he had a bouquet of spring flowers, white tulips mixed with red anemones. I gathered they were for Maureen, but Mr. Morris took me by surprise when he mentioned they were meant for Malia, the Butterfly Girl. Just then Maureen left our house, hurriedly making her way down the street, so I could not question Mr. Morris any further, though my face was hot with anger. Maureen was wearing her best dress, a green muslin with black silk trimming, along with a hat I hadn’t seen before, gray felt decorated with pale blue feathers.

When she saw me there with Mr. Morris, her expression darkened.

“I see your friend has returned,” I said to her. “But of course I’ve known that for some time.” I did not let on that I had often followed Maureen, but I suppose she knew, for she shook her head sadly, as if I was the one who had disappointed her.

“He was gone for two years, back to Virginia. He wrote letters, but of course I never received them, for they wound up on the trash pile as soon as they were delivered. Your father saw to that. When Mr. Morris realized he could not stay away, he came back to Brooklyn and we renewed our friendship. I thought it best that you not know that he’d returned.”

“You made that decision for me?” I responded bitterly. “Even when there were rumors he would be at Dreamland you said nothing to me. Less than nothing, for you lied.”

“Is the truth always the best remedy?” Maureen wondered. Perhaps it was a question she asked herself. As she thought this over, she saw that I had been to the market, and had tarried when I spied Mr. Morris. “You should be at home, miss. The fish must be put on ice immediately or it will go bad and I shan’t be able to make supper tomorrow. You wouldn’t want to be poisoned by a piece of bad fish, would you?”

“It’s stinking already,” I said. “Unlike the flowers for Malia,” I continued, with a meaningful nod to the bouquet in the Wolfman’s hands.

I didn’t wish to hurt Maureen but rather to protect her, for I worried that Raymond Morris might not be as trustworthy as he appeared. For his part, Mr. Morris stammered and said a few words about the splendor of flowers, quoting from Whitman, “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” This may well have been the great Whitman’s opinion, but I knew for a fact that Mr. Morris valued books above all other things. If he might misrepresent his high regard for books, he might be willing to lie about other issues. I wondered if I’d caught him in a clandestine relationship with Malia. Maureen, however, did not share my suspicions. Instead she turned on me, rapping her knuckles on my head, as she used to when I was a little girl and she found me misbehaving.

“Do you think I don’t know who these flowers were meant for?” she said to me. “Are you trying to embarrass Mr. Morris?”

She then hotly announced they were on their way to a wedding, even though Mr. Morris tried his best to hush her. The bride in question, she went on, before her companion could stop her, was none other than Malia.

“That’s what you get for snooping around, miss,” she said to me. “The truth and nothing but.”

“But why wasn’t I invited?” I had tried to befriend Malia from the start, when we were only girls. Despite my attempts, she had always been shy and somewhat standoffish. Still, I was surprised not to be invited to such an important event.

“Don’t you understand? Your father can’t know—he doesn’t believe in such unions. The groom is a regular fellow. Your father would waste no time in letting Malia go. If you had known, there might be a situation.”

I was hurt and mortified that I’d been kept in the dark. “A situation? Do you mean to say I would tell him and betray her?”

Who were we to each other, after all this time? Did she not know where my loyalties lay? I glared at Maureen and briskly moved away from her, as though she were a stranger, for at that moment I thought perhaps she was. Now she was the one to look at me with a hurt expression.

“You weren’t told out of concern for your welfare,” Mr. Morris stepped in to say. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“Really?” I said, blinking back tears. “When you didn’t know the world, when you’d never spoken to a woman or walked down a street or stood in the rain, that didn’t hurt you?”

Maureen approached and tried to make amends. “Please understand,” she said, but I did not. I was deeply wounded by yet another deception, having been treated as if I were a child who couldn’t be trusted. When Maureen attempted to embrace me, I shrugged from beneath her touch. I wouldn’t say good-bye, and watched sullenly as they went on their way.