A-Splendid-Ruin(21)
“You’ll love it, I know! Come, come, we must hurry! There’s so much to do!” She came to me, laughing, urging me from my chair, and pulling me into an impromptu dance, whirling me about the room until I was giddy with joy.
Goldie was as good as her word. She threw me into the life I’d been promised, the one of which I’d dreamed. We attended more dances and dinners, operas and theater than I’d thought possible. We went to church on Sundays and promenaded after. We went on carriage rides, shopped and lunched and made calls in the afternoons. We roller-skated, and Goldie took me on a tour of the impressive city hall, with its grandiose pillars and its dome reaching over three hundred feet from the curb to Freedom’s torch at the top. She was as proud of it as if she’d built it herself, and made me proud too of Sullivan Building’s achievement.
These were the activities my mother had taught me to long for. These were the glittering, wine-and laughter-chased conversations and entertainments I’d imagined, lasting well into the night, until one collapsed exhausted into bed, sleeping away the morning until it was time to wake and do it all again. My sketchbook and pencils admonished me from my bedside table, unopened, ignored. There was no time.
The weeks passed in a whirlwind, then the months, one and then two and then a third. There were days when I was home only long enough to sleep. Days when I didn’t lay eyes on my uncle except for Sunday service, or when the only news of my aunt was Shin’s “She is just the same, Miss May.” There was no more mention of my mother’s letter. Goldie shrugged away the subject with, “Does it matter? You’re here now, where you belong.”
And yet . . . after all my longing for this life, it felt strangely empty, beautiful but hollow. I did not want to admit that I found it boring, or that I was floundering in its shallows. How little they thought about anything but their own amusement. Their lives were so easy, so full of beauty and money. How much they could do with it, and how disappointing to find them so vacant.
I missed my drawing with a startling intensity. I missed things I never expected to think about again. At the boardinghouse in Brooklyn, my mother and I had gathered every night for dinner with the other boarders. It had been one of my favorite times of the day—in spite of the food, which had been cheap and tasteless, if filling—because of the warmth of real companionship, even if it had only been for an hour. But whenever I suggested to Goldie that we might go home to have dinner as a family, she seemed confused by the very notion. “That’s so old-fashioned, May. Who does that anymore? It’s almost . . . vulgar.”
The truth was that what I enjoyed the most were the society columns in the Bulletin. As I sat through another boring conversation about so-and-so’s new bay gelding that was entered in the third race at Ingleside, I would amuse myself remembering how Alphonse Bandersnitch—which could not possibly be his real name; it must all be part of his anonymity—had made mention of the racetrack.
Wednesday night’s theme at the Literary Club dinner was “What Do Women Need?” The answer, apparently, was not Miss Lucille Traynor, who was given the cut direct early in the evening by Miss Sarah Pastor, in spite of the fact that just last week, the same two ladies were seen arm in arm, pushing against the fence at Ingleside, screaming for their favorites and waving their betting tickets like the veriest hoi polloi. One wonders if Miss Traynor’s rumored friendship with jockey Robert Rudford skewed the betting pool to Miss Pastor’s detriment? On Friday the Traynors departed on a “long-planned” trip to the Continent. Now that Miss Pastor is deprived of her racetrack partner, one hopes she does not take to visiting the gambling hells incognito like the rest of society.
The day after I’d attended Celeste Johnson’s reception with Goldie, I laughed so hard at the columnist’s irony that I nearly snorted coffee from my nose.
At Miss Celeste Johnson’s reception at her new home in Pine Street, she shared photographs and brochures from her visit to the Exposition. She was most anxious to tell everyone of her experiences with the tattooed and obscene savages in the Igorot exhibit, and the ferocious Congolese Pygmy with his pointed teeth, whom she declares “the most frightening cannibal I’ve ever known!” Which of course makes one wonder who in our fair city is hiding a terrible secret.
Goldie had been mystified by my laughter. “What’s so funny?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d missed his jabs. Her friends often seemed equally dense. He was making fun of them, how could they not see it? But either they didn’t, or they were so glad to be mentioned in his pages that they didn’t care. I began to think of Mr. Bandersnitch as belonging to me, somehow, a confidant. Someone only I understood. I was never at an entertainment where I didn’t wonder if he was there too, though I had no idea what he looked like, and no one else seemed to know, either. He was either a master of disguise, or he was a member of society slumming as a reporter, and there was a great deal of speculation either way.
I personally leaned toward the member-of-society theory. I imagined him as rather short. Portly, with a love of sherry and cream puffs. Blond, perhaps, well dressed, educated, and with a sense of humor and an eye for absurdity. No one I’d met matched that description, but I thought of what I might do if I found him, how the two of us would stand back in a corner and watch and comment, amusing ourselves all night long with our asides . . . Oh, but that too was a fantasy, and I resigned myself to spending my hours pretending this was exactly what I’d always wanted and trying not to disappoint Goldie. I didn’t want her to accuse me of being a Mabel. My ever-present loneliness only grew worse. How could I complain? I’d come from nothing. I was the luckiest girl in the world. I had a family now. How ungrateful I was, to want anything more.