Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  Julia and Philip returned to the library. She accepted a cigarette but waved off more brandy. He settled in his chair and smoked nearly his entire cigarette before speaking.

  “Too bad your young swain couldn’t stay. Maybe next time he’ll undress.”

  Julia coughed on a startled draw of her cigarette.

  “A wise old eye can always tell, you know.” He tapped at the corner of his. “The difference between clothes thrown off in haste and those merely slept in. Better luck next time.”

  She wanted to resent his teasing, but he was right. It had been a ridiculous ruse, that Sunday morning when Hannity’s visit had roused her out of bed. She’d wanted to appear worldly with a lover in tow, but the pretense had been comical. She had to smile. One could only laugh at oneself, in the end. “I was mortified,” she admitted. “He slept on the divan. He preferred to safeguard my virtue.”

  Philip smiled too.

  “At any rate, about this morning, brava,” he murmured. “Though it must have pained you to sacrifice that rather fetching little shoe. No doubt your dress was maimed by the same steely hand? Well, I suppose they had to be sacrificed, under the circumstances.”

  Philip stretched out his legs and loosened his tie and collar. “Nice work tonight, first to last. Things might well have happened as you described, though I suppose you know the tale’s full of holes. Any good lawyer could send marching bands parading through it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. We may never know with absolute certainty, but my version makes sense. I believe it’s true to the spirit of what happened, if not the exact letter. Nothing refutes any of it.”

  “Hence its beauty, yes. That business with the initial was positively spine tingling. Do you think the lady had the foggiest notion it read both ways?”

  Julia had described the mystery of the scratched initial in her ramblings as they’d returned home that morning. She shrugged.

  “Willard Wright could use it in one of his shillin’ shockers.” Philip cooled his amusement with a swallow of brandy. “Yet I’m afraid your lovely work tonight will evaporate in the harsh light of tomorrow’s scrutiny.” His voice lilted softly. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Julia rose and poured herself more brandy after all. She wouldn’t sleep tonight—a headache later was a fair price for immediate solace. She returned to her chair and rested her head against the smooth leather wing so that she could look out into the black night.

  “Kessler’s a good fellow, but consider his position,” Philip mused. “Timson may be unmourned and unmissed, but Wallace? The morning editions will hemorrhage ink over his death. Politicos across the state will don black armbands. They’ll dance to dirges at every debutante ball. Charities will keen for their handsome benefactor. It will be damp and noisy—all that clamoring for justice. And smack in the center, bearing the brunt of their woe, will sit Kessler.” Philip issued a lazy procession of smoke rings into the room. “What will he do? He’ll sit down at that imposing desk of his and tot it all up in his usual thorough manner.”

  Philip went to the trolley. Returning with the decanter, he poured another finger’s depth into Julia’s glass and refreshed his own. “And what will he have? Two murders and one suicide. One murder clear and undisputed, the other still in some question.”

  Julia took a fresh swallow of brandy. She couldn’t prove the identity of Timson’s murderer, not yet, but there was plenty to dispute about Wallace’s death. Even to call it murder was a travesty. Wallace had brought death upon himself by refusing to let Eva go. Had he acted one last time as the calm and reasonable man he’d aspired to be, she and Jerome might be on their way to Paris by now. Julia despised the Wallace revealed to her that morning, but she pitied him too: brought down, as so many ambitious men were, by his own pride.

  Philip took a deep breath. “How do you think poor Kessler will answer that lachrymal chorus of whys? Will he bow to your compelling deductions and proclaim the truth about Mr. Wallace? Will he tell the world that the charming friend of orphans, bankers, hostesses, and senators was a murdering rapist felled by his avenging victim?”

  Julia closed her eyes. Wallace had been charming. He’d been a friend to orphans and all. Those facts about him would always be true, no less than the violence he’d once turned on Eva. If Julia could barely hold both Wallaces in her mind, she despaired that anyone else could ever do so.

  They both knew the answer to his question, but only Philip had the courage, or the cynicism, to speak it aloud. “I fear not,” Philip said. “How much tidier and more plausible simply to add one more crime to the résumé of the late Miss Pruitt. She is a murderer, after all. Why not twice over? Can it make any difference?”

  Julia took another quantity of brandy into her mouth and let it burn her tongue, inscribing itself into her palate, before sliding down her throat.

  “Two dead murderers were carried out of that apartment this morning,” Philip continued, his voice as smooth as the liquor was vivid, “both guilty, both already punished. Does it even matter how we choose to understand? Would Kessler’s losing his job—as he well might, should he announce your version of things—make the slightest difference to anyone concerned? He’s a pragmatist, you know. Be content that what you understand allows you to sleep at night. He’ll simply choose the same prerogative for himself, and for those suffering hordes at his door.”

  Julia accepted another cigarette, and they smoked for some time in silence, both absorbed in the starless night sky beyond the French doors. Sleep at night? Would she ever again sleep in quite the same peace?

  At last she spoke. “You might call Eva a murderer, but her action was the single jot of justice in this whole appalling affair.”

  “Agreed,” Philip said amiably.

  “She chose her death, you know. She wanted Jerome to live.”

  “And now you’ve helped her succeed.”

  Julia traced an aching groove along the bridge of her nose. “I was a fool, Philip. A monstrous fool. I was taken in. I believed him. I fell for his charm. No, that’s not right. I fell for his refusal to ply me with charm. I thought that made him honest and direct. Trustworthy. And attractive.” Her cheeks stung to remember her desire. “I thought I knew him. I mocked your warnings, but I was careful. I chose to go with him that night. I wanted to go with him.”

  She looked away, aghast at what she was telling Philip. She didn’t even speak to Christophine about such things. Was she drunk? Or simply so shaken that every normal signpost in her life had toppled over? She was finding her way through a landscape she’d thought she knew but didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to say it: she’d been seduced.

  “Yes,” he said, a sound as pensive as his rising smoke ring.

  “But we were interrupted,” she went on, “and I had to leave. I wanted to stay, Philip. Is that shameful? I mean, that I gave myself to him, not seeing any hint of the man he truly was? Yet even at the time, some small part of me was glad to go. Maybe that bit, that tiny bit, saw his treachery, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “Shameful?” Philip mused. “Hardly. But maybe old Kessler did one thing right by you in this whole wretched business, eh?”

  It took a long moment for Julia to process. Kessler? How did Philip know it was Kessler who had telephoned at that ungodly hour that night? She sat up. “How on earth . . . ?”

  “Surely one has a few prerogatives.”

  “You? You asked him to telephone? To call Wallace away?” She could barely speak for rising outrage. Her suspicions that night had been justified.

  He lifted his palm, both accepting and halting the barrage.

  “Not even a brother—which you are not—should ever interfere like that.” Her voice dropped at the secret, though no one could hear it.

  “I’m sure you’re right, under most circumstances.”

  “Under any circumstances.”

  He sat back, face suddenly dark. “No, you’re wrong there. I stand by what I did
, however heinous in the faux-sibling department. You need to hear a story. Or I need to tell it. Either way, you must swear never to repeat it. Do you swear?”

  She did, cautiously.

  “Yes, I’ve pestered you about Wallace from the start, and it has nothing to do with your virtue or our little lark of passing as siblings. This isn’t my confidence to share but Leah Macready’s, and today she gave me permission to tell you.” He gripped his knee.

  “Wallace raped her when she was nineteen.” Julia’s head swerved to dodge yet more excruciating news. “Yes. And it’s worse than that. She was poor then, very poor. Working the streets. She was a prostitute, Julia. She was beautiful, charming, smart—every bit the woman she is today—but she was a prostitute. Wallace took a fancy to her, and not in the debonair ways you so extravagantly experienced.”

  Julia listened with closed eyes. She felt blindfolded, condemned to hear what had once been (and still at times remained) unimaginable. Certainly unfathomable. How a man she’d found caring and considerate could once have been so vile. She held her breath, bracing for Philip to go on. Every muscle feared what he would say next.

  “He was ruthless, violent. He tracked her down, repeatedly. He damaged her inside. That’s why she never had children. He scarred her. She has several small burns, from cigarettes, on her left hip. He called it his brand. He treated her like an animal.”

  Philip tapped a column of ash into the overloaded dish at his side as Julia absorbed the word. Brand. She saw again the constellation of small scars on Eva’s hip. Was it over now? The worst of what she would have to live with for the rest of her life?

  “So when I learned you’d gone with him, I understood what would happen. Oh, I never doubted he’d treat you with every gentlemanly care—you’re nothing like a prostitute or chorine, of course—but I simply couldn’t let him take his pleasure. Not from you. Preferably not from anyone, but especially not the one woman in this world for whom I can claim some right—however misguided, however fraudulent—to intervene.”

  Julia had never seen Philip like this. His low voice might punch through tin. In a moment his wry mask would return, but in that instant his dark eyes loomed bottomless.

  Words clotted in her throat. She remembered the white bearskin, its teeth and claws. Wallace’s attraction had been beguiling, almost a drug. “I seem,” she said, “to have vastly overestimated my powers of discernment.”

  A smile quirked Philip’s cheek. “You’re a dervish of discernment, my dear. With one or two lapses.”

  The levity helped but faded. “I once thought I’d fare rather well in the men department, you know,” she said. Since they might never again share such a frank conversation, it seemed safe to sustain it a moment longer. “I’d hoped to find someone in New York, you know. Not a boyfriend, not a husband. Just someone. You understand?”

  He nodded, wry again. Of course he understood.

  “And now my two prospects have both gone awry. One turns out to be a killer, and the other, well, more of a brother.”

  They smiled. In truth Austen had never really been a prospect. She liked him and enjoyed his company, but while Wallace had ample allure, Austen had none. He was, for Julia, too . . . happy. “I seem to have gone from having no brothers to having two, neither of them the slightest relation to me.”

  It was a lament, however lightly made. Julia’s hand returned to her forehead. The evening was beginning to etch itself into her skull. Philip stood and helped her to her feet. She lifted her chin, eyes closed, and received two kisses, one on each cheek. “You’ve a few last conversations, I imagine,” he said, hands warm on her shoulders. “But you’ll triumph. We Kydds live well with our ghosts. Even if I’m only a nominal member of the tribe.”

  The night was still heavy with heat, and the house was silent. Christophine had long since gone to bed. Julia’s own bed awaited, sheet turned down, nightdress laid across the pillows. A vase of yellow roses stood beside the packet of Luminal and glass of water. In the heat the flowers’ fragrance swelled.

  Julia undressed, laying her frock, stockings, and chemise across the back of the chair at her dressing table. She drew on her sheerest orchid pyjamas. She tied the drawstring across the hollow of her belly. When had she last eaten? Days ago? No, she remembered strawberries. Swallows of cheese, a croissant.

  This was not right. She pulled the pyjama bodice over her head. She wanted to feel something, not that teasing cloud of weightlessness. She dug into drawers until she found what she wanted: a thin boy’s cotton undervest that she wore when she wanted to erase all but the faintest swells of her figure. Normally she needed no bandeau to achieve the flat, swift line of fashion, but for acute occasions, she used this little vest. She struggled to pull it on, wiggling into it as a lean sausage into a casing. That was it, the squeeze to numb the ache.

  Her effaced form in the mirror pleased her. She padded back through the dark apartment and out onto the library balcony. A few stars punctured the low sky but offered no light. The chaise’s white cushions guided her forward. Wood decking licked the heat from her feet.

  The cushions gasped at her weight, disturbed by this meaningless vigil, this determination to witness every hour of this day of death. That was what one did with life. One held tight and rattled it; one gave it no respite, demanding more when it offered less.

  Julia twisted, stretching backward on the chaise like an acrobat in midtumble. Her back sloped down where her calves should rest, her legs poking up into the night from sagging silk trousers. Her hands splayed across her abdomen, collapsed into its bony bowl. The Mozart aria from Figaro throbbed in tempo to the pain in her head.

  One ghost haunted her body; the other haunted her heart. Fused in death, Wallace and Eva clung to Julia together, their weight oppressive. The heat was ferocious. Bound into a child’s underthing, face flushed, skin slick—she couldn’t breathe. There was no conversation with these ghosts, only a wringing, a weeping of skin and sex. Eva and Wallace were dead. Ghosts of her making.

  Julia twisted to right herself and sat up. She jumped to her feet. With a wrench she jerked apart the side seam of her vest, pulled it over her head, and tossed it away. The cool air felt glorious on her damp skin.

  She went back into the apartment and, for the first time, walked past the dark kitchen and Christophine’s quarters, down the short hall to Philip’s rooms. No light shone from below the door. She tried the knob. It turned, and she went in.

  He sat sideways in a deep window seat, his profile silhouetted by a distant streetlamp. He was smoking, a saucer for ashes balanced on his raised knees. They were dressed alike, he in black pajama trousers, she in orchid silk ones.

  For a long moment they looked across the room at each other.

  He ground out his cigarette and set aside the saucer.

  “Lock the door, love.”

  EPILOGUE

  Several weeks later, Julia stood at the typecase with her stick in hand, composing a thirty-pica line of Garamont italic. Packing crates remained scattered about the studio, contents waiting to be sorted and organized. They could wait. She was eager to print invitations to her first party, a press warming three weeks hence. Jack had promised a small wood engraving that would also serve as a new pressmark, a fresh interpretation of her namesake gamboling kid. Although ephemeral, the invitations would mark Capriole’s baptism with American ink.

  “Where else would we find her?”

  Philip’s voice spun her around. He stood in the doorway, beside Christophine. He was back.

  He’d been due to return last night after a long trip to visit friends in Cairo, Istanbul, and Athens. Slouched against the doorframe, he was lean as ever and dark as a Bedouin. He carried a parcel wrapped in brown paper wedged under his arm. “Silks!” Christophine exclaimed, lifting an armload of Mediterranean colors: lime, citron, azure, pomegranate.

  “Clever man. Welcome home.” Julia set down her composing stick and extended both hands. He took them, kissing her lightly o
n both cheeks.

  “I brought you something too,” he said. “Though it’s only from the bottom of my accumulated mail.”

  Christophine made a clicking sound on the roof of her mouth—After so long away? Nothing better for his very sister?—and carried the colorful bounty to her new atelier in the second bedroom.

  Julia kept hold of Philip’s left hand, revisiting its weight and warmth, those long, lithe fingers resting between her palms. “Good trip?”

  He quirked his familiar smile. There would be tales to share, she understood, but later, deep in the lovely night ahead. He gave her the lumpish parcel from under his elbow.

  Julia recognized Jerome Crockett’s writing before she read the return address.

  “What do you hear of him?” Philip asked.

  Jerome had moved to Chicago. The police had dropped all charges once their firearms expert had concluded that Timson had been shot by a gun found at the back of Wallace’s locked desk drawer. Jerome’s name was never mentioned in the tumultuous newspaper coverage of Wallace’s death at the hand of what everyone was soon calling the Harlem Hit Girl. One rag called Eva the Harlem Angel of Death. Nor did they mention that Wallace’s body was claimed after two days by his father, Pavel Walachevsky, who’d been located in a Queens boardinghouse for the aged infirm.

  “He’s started another novel, nothing to do with Harlem.” In a softer voice she added, “He was never jolly, but I’m told he gets up every day. I think he’ll be fine, with time.”

  “What’s become of Eva’s book?”

  Through a series of legal negotiations Julia could only imagine, the jewelry recovered from the Half-Shell’s backstage had been awarded to Goldsmith’s publishing firm to resolve their claims against Eva. After liquidating the collection and deducting their expenses, Goldsmith had allowed the rest of the money to go to Jerome, along with the remaining fragments of manuscript recovered from Wallace’s library. He’d accepted the money but wanted nothing to do with the manuscript. Duveen had snatched it up.