by Marlowe Benn
For all but the most fanatic collectors, this third book was her first true imprint, the piece that announced Capriole’s rise from juvenilia: Wednesday, a four-page, nine-sentence reverie about clouds, more or less, that Mrs. Woolf let Julia print to debut her first foundry fonts of Baskerville. She’d ordered a font of the beautiful italic caps in double pica for the title, so large she set the word in three justified lines down the page, ending in that fine fellow of a cap Y, doffing his hat to whatever unlucky character had to follow him in the line. The book’s jewel, though, was Eric Gill’s full-page engraving, a sweetly sensuous image that bore no relation to the text. (What image could?) If Mrs. Woolf minded, she never said; certainly no one else did. Except poor David, on discovering his shepherdess had muscles, means, and a very modern head.
The esteemed typographer Stanley Morison had been down at Ditchling when Julia took Gill his copies, and both men praised it with gratifying warmth and less gratifying surprise. Morison paid her five pounds for a copy. (She’d been flummoxed when he asked her price; Capriole was a private press! Her naivete prompted a cool laugh, droll remarks about collectors, and the banknote, with advice that thenceforth she take nothing less than a tenner.) Within the week he’d shown it round, and all thirty-two remaining copies (she held back five) had sold. Requests continued to arrive from collectors claiming they were out of the city that week, or the wife’s surveillance of the book budget had only just lapsed, or one of the other familiar laments that circulated endlessly among bibliophiles.
Julia examined her treasures for the thousandth time, seeing their flaws (not so many, really, considering) and loving them not a shred less. She was glad for their company, even if it might have been mad to bring them to New York—as gifts, she’d thought, if the right moment arose. Glennis was now the only possible recipient, but she would have no idea what to make of the paper’s feather-thin deckles and the Irish linen hand stitching. Or, heaven knows, of Mrs. Woolf’s musings and Gill’s nymph and satyr.
The afternoon dragged by in idle ideas for text and artist pairings and restive layout sketches, equally hypothetical and outlandish. As her next book project was still uncertain, Julia could do little until she returned to London. May Sinclair had offered a set of poems that would suit, but she refused to be paired with Gill’s images, and Hester was busy on other projects. David Jones and Paul Nash were possibilities for engravings—but likely beyond her reach. Julia could only tinker and bide her time, sketching ever more frivolous thoughts for Capriole ephemera.
After dinner she was desperate for diversion, but all that came were more calls to the telephone for Glennis’s lamentations and visits from Pudd’nhead and Pestilence, Philip’s two elderly gray tabby cats. They looked like ordinary barn cats—short-haired, scarred and scuffed, missing a tooth or notch of ear—but were both friendly as kittens, defying their frightful names. (But literary! Philip had protested when she said as much.) Settled across her lap and against her hip, the cats brought a drowsy calm, which mercifully hastened the day’s end.
By Thursday, the prospect of another long rainy day was even more intolerable. Again Philip was gone before Julia rose, leaving the day’s papers in a disheveled heap. She smoothed the sheets, hoping some new light had been shed on Naomi Rankin’s queer death. She scanned page after page but found nothing—as if Naomi had vanished from memory after two days. Instead headlines trumpeted news of the sensational murder of Dorothy Caine, a pretty blonde artists’ model dubbed “the Broadway Belle” for her roles in stage revues. The police were tight-lipped about the investigation, but Assistant Superintendent T. E. Kessler assured the public the assailant would soon be brought to justice. Julia pushed aside the sprawl of newsprint and poured herself fresh coffee. If the killer qualified as “fiendish”—Philip’s supposed sort of criminal adversary—this would explain his unnaturally early morning departures.
Julia resented facing another idle day alone while her nominal host (Stay at my flat, he’d said. Call it a last fling at this sibling business) careened about the city in pursuit of some clever quarry, abandoning her to ennui. He knew she was no vapid squealer. Why hadn’t he invited her along on the adventure? The man infuriated and intrigued her. No sooner did he sketch a study of sleeping Pestilence than he pitched it into the waste bin when Julia admired it. He mocked her taste one moment (as if she’d brought Mr. Arlen’s book for pleasure) and applauded it the next, dashing to the piano to play her favorite of Satie’s Gymnopédies. He seemed to be leading her in some strange dance, gliding toward civility, then shying away with sharpened elbows.
The day yawned before her. She listened, hearing only the crackle of politicians’ cant on Mrs. Cheadle’s radio set in the kitchen, before slipping down the hall and into Philip’s library, his private sanctuary.
She understood why he preferred it. It was a beautiful room, lined with bayed cases of mahogany. French windows opened onto a wrought-iron balcony overlooking a leafy courtyard. Two chestnut leather armchairs flanked a broad fireplace and mantel. A permanent depression in the seat nearest the fire told her where Philip liked to sit. She could picture him, brandy in one hand, cigarette in the other, a book abandoned across his knee. She imagined a sordid sheik novel or treatise on phrenology. Neither seemed likely, but both fit her mood, and she forced them into the scenario.
She moved to the nearest bookcase and scanned the usual meat and potatoes of any library, the sensible shelves of histories and biographies and science, the interminable Dickens and Trollope and windy Russians. Like a truffling boar, she quickly found the prizes. Her Oh! lifted both cats’ heads. Who would have guessed that Philip owned a copy of the Ashendene Horace in its original vellum binding or Charles Ricketts’s Cupid and Psyche, with all those lush engravings? He seemed to favor the private presses of the nineties with their decadent poets and illustrators. Julia preferred more modern fare, but she understood Ricketts’s many-tendriled appeal. Fathoming Philip’s interest was more difficult. She moved to other cases, more surprises.
It was some time before she realized why the collection was eerily familiar. What a clot she was. Of course. Much of it was from their father’s library. After Lena’s death Philip had supervised the sale of the family home (torn down now) and most of its furnishings. Philip allowed Julia to keep what she wished from the library—she’d selected a quarto German incunable with picaresque woodcuts and the prize little Aldine sixteenmos (none of which she could read, then or now). Precocious if eclectic taste, she thought smugly, for a thirteen-year-old girl. Apparently Philip kept for himself the English private press material: the two Kelmscotts, a few minor pieces from the Doves Press, and the Eragnys. He’d added the lovely Vale Danaë, which Julia took down merely to breathe in its mournful vapors, and a swathe of trifles from the Bodley Head. So Philip was a Beardsley man. Intriguing.
She unfastened her shoes and stretched out across the Chesterfield sofa. Mrs. Cheadle brought in a plate of apple slices and a wedge of Stilton—when persuaded it truly was all Julia wanted for luncheon—and another pot of coffee. She pulled the draperies and started a fire in the grate. Julia had to insist she was no invalid—please, no blanket and pillows—before the good woman would leave her in peace. She suggested the kind housekeeper might try restoring her burgundy shawl, badly wrinkled after lying for hours in the seat of the captain’s chair, where Glennis had flung it before Naomi’s service. Made of fine Egyptian wool embroidered with an intricate pattern of amber beads, it would have to serve Julia on further occasions during her stay.
Feeling like a pampered odalisque (albeit in a lemon shantung morning frock), Julia again surveyed the room. She admired Philip’s taste in art, even if she didn’t precisely share it. He owned a first-rate Braque watercolor, several abstract modern photographs, and a series of Sargent pencil studies that David could sell at a breath-catching price. The African tribal masks flanking the French windows were stunners, peering down at her like some ancient brooding jury. Crimson wallpaper glowed
through their round eyeholes like patient volcanoes.
Julia found herself musing at the two oil portraits above the mantel, painted in the style of Sargent but signed by an artist she did not know. Both were of Philip’s mother, Charlotte, a Mediterranean beauty looking regal but weary. In the painting on the left, an infant who could only be Philip slept in her arms. There had been other pregnancies and at least one other baby, Julia knew, but none that lived more than a few days. A young version of Milo beamed from behind Charlotte’s chair.
Philip favored his mother as much as Julia resembled hers. Neither bore much trace of their father. Except for the hazel tint Milo’s brown eyes had stirred into Julia’s blue ones and the toasted shade of her hair, as if he’d been a passing flame that singed her Nordic coloring, Milo Kydd had disappeared completely from this earth. There he stood, beaming but already transient. Julia’s memories of her father grew even fainter.
Had Philip known him any better? Growing up, Julia had sometimes pondered her mysterious half brother, wondered about his childhood, so separate from her own. By the time Milo returned to New York with his Swedish bride, he’d missed two of his son’s birthdays. Worse, Lena had confided, he’d reveled in her flourishing pregnancy, bringing her posies and pillows a dozen times a day. Little wonder Philip would have none of either mother or child.
Had Milo ever tried to rekindle some connection to his son? If she knew, Lena hadn’t said. She did believe with a certain relish that her husband kept a “special friend” in the Belafield Hotel. She’d told this to young Julia one day without a trace of distress, and the idea had made Milo more interesting to them both. By that time he’d become little more than a dutiful but absent curiosity.
Julia tried to stir memories of the one Christmas afternoon Milo and Philip had spent with their stepfamily. She was five. Both father and son had been cool, with manners that bristled, and had watched the clock. Thinking on it again, Julia hoped her father did have that mistress, someone whose arms would have welcomed and warmed him. But what of Philip? Was there any warmth for him, then or now? The man gave no clue.
The other portrait above the mantel was of Charlotte alone, framed alike but painted some years later. Here she looked less pinched, more lively. Had life with young Philip rendered her last years a bit more gay? Julia studied the woman’s almost impudent expression.
“She’s a tyrant, you know.”
Philip’s voice boomed from not two feet behind her. Pudd’nhead leaped from her lap. Julia steadied her coffee cup, grateful for the saucer, and lowered both to the table beside her elbow. “I beg your pardon?”
“Aunt Lillian. The formidable lady you’re contemplating.”
“Your aunt?” Julia looked again. That would explain the differences. She felt a pang of regret, realizing that she had hoped Charlotte had found some happiness late in her short life. But it was Charlotte’s sister, apparently, who eyed life with a glint of mischief.
Philip helped himself to an apple slice. He pitched Pestilence from his armchair. “Lillian Lapham Vancill, oldest of the legendary Vancill sisters. Spinster extraordinaire. She lived with us when I was young and stayed with me while Milo went flitting about the globe after my mother died. She was a threat to polite society even then. Seventy-one now and a frightful virago.” He gave a good-natured shudder. “Frightful.”
He licked apple juice from his lower lip. “Would you like to meet her? I’m due in her parlor for tea at five. Meeting you would positively light up the old girl.”
“With contempt?” They both knew the Vancill family had nothing but scorn for “those Jordahl creatures,” as Julia had overheard herself and her mother described as she listened through the upstairs balusters after her father’s funeral.
“True enough, at one time,” Philip said. “But old Lillian may surprise you. Lord knows she surprises me. Please come. Your Rankin chum must be in mourning, so I know you’ve nothing else to do. Come. Let’s wave the white flags and give it a go. I promise you won’t soon forget a Thursday tea with Aunt Lillian.”
Julia frowned at this blithe overture of sibling accord, so lightly made. But her empty calendar offered no resistance, and frankly, she was curious. She sighed and rose languidly to hide her glad relief.
Aunt Lillian lived in a third floor walk-up flat on West Seventy-Sixth. The building was caked with soot and the cramped lobby lit by a sole light bulb. A sullen woman whom Philip greeted as Nancy showed them into a sitting room bursting with outdated furniture. Green velvet draperies, worn to threads at the hem, were closed, and a fire and three candelabras blazed, giving the place not only a theatrical brilliance but also instantly tropical temperatures. Julia shed her shawl and gloves in the breathless heat. As she laid them aside, she noticed the shrine on Lillian’s mantel: photographs of Philip at a succession of ages, his bronzed baby shoes, and a monogrammed silver rattle. Amid the clutter stood a half dozen gilt statuettes, trophies from the Gotham Park Fencing Association, each engraved with Philip’s name. “Vice of my youth,” he said into Julia’s ear.
“You’re a fencer?” It explained his martial metaphors.
“Dilettante. After Milo left, the old gal dug out her foils and taught me herself. We had some fine parries back and forth across the library, I can tell you, though usually she skewered me like cheese. Why she keeps these old baubles, I can’t imagine.”
Lillian Vancill made the imperious sound of a neglected duchess. She sat in a purple velvet chair with oak armrests carved into gargoyles. Birdlike, her legs dangled above the faded carpet. Her hair was the color of granite, marcelled in tight ripples across her skull. A cherry-red flannel circled her throat. She dismissed Philip’s remark on it with a bony shrug. “Catarrh, nothing but a blooming nuisance.” She fastened her rheumy eyes on Julia like pincers.
“So you’re the menace?”
Philip spanked the top of her head. “Call her Julia, you old lobster.”
He directed Julia to sit on one end of a shabby green sofa and settled himself at the other. “Aunt Lillian is convinced you mean to abscond with my fortune,” he said. “The thought of thwarting you keeps her alive.”
Where would she get that idea? Julia wondered darkly. It was a blatant distortion—outright reversal of the truth, in fact. She smiled politely at her nemesis.
“Don’t simper, girl,” Lillian said. “Charms don’t fool me.” Her dislike was very real, and Julia’s discomfort turned to irritation. The woman was old and possibly ill, but Julia had little obligation to humor her and none whatever to endure her hostility.
“You’re being a bore, Aunt,” Philip said. “Julia is my sister and our guest. If she can be civil, so can you.”
Lillian’s face creased in fifty places. “Where’s our tea?” she shouted.
Nancy pushed open the door with a cart. She transferred a tarnished tea service and plate of ginger biscuits to the table without a word. Lillian’s hands, thin but contorted, gripped the leering heads on her chair. They were the hands in Jack’s etching, identified by the gold ring on her twisted little finger. Lillian made no move to pour, apparently testing Julia’s breeding and manners.
“Shall I?” Julia duly said.
“Don’t be absurd.” Lillian jutted her chin at Philip, both sparse eyebrows raised. “Took me years to train him.”
“I warned Julia you’re a tyrant,” Philip said, pouring out three cups with dripless skill. “I also said you’d amuse us, so you’d better snap to, old girl.”
This abuse delighted the old woman. She needled him about marrying soon, while “something tolerable” might still have him. This led to a blistering catalog of vices to blame for his bachelorhood: indolence, gluttony, loose morals, disrespect for the elderly, squandering of good family money. Each tirade provoked spirited objections. Julia sat back and sipped the weak tea.
“I’m sure you devoured the obituaries this week, as ever,” Philip said, finally changing the subject. “Did you see that Naomi Rankin died?”
> Lillian exclaimed that she had. “Shocking. Lamentable.”
“I mention it because Julia has a glancing connection to the business. Turns out the youngest Rankin sister is one of her chums.”
Lillian turned her gaze to Julia, and for the first time it was not entirely venomous. “Did you know Naomi?”
“I’m afraid not. I barely know her sister. We were in school together for only a year.”
“Too bad,” Lillian said, as if Julia had failed in some profound way. “Naomi had more spine than a herd of giraffes. I liked her a good deal.”
“Aunt Lillian was heartbroken when she couldn’t chain herself to the courthouse railings with Naomi and the others,” Philip said. “Her wrists would fall right through the manacles, and she’d be sent home to bed.”
“For whom did you vote in the last election?” Lillian demanded of Julia.
Surprise sent a bite of stale biscuit down the wrong pipe.
Lillian watched Julia cough like a stevedore. “I hope not Harding,” she said. “That trussed pig.”
“I was abroad,” Julia croaked.
“Well, Debs could have used your vote. I had to wait sixty-seven years to cast my first ballot. Haven’t missed an election since. La Follette needs me now. I intend to keep at it until I’m a hundred, to make up for wasted time.” Lillian transferred her glower to Philip.
“Nothing would delight me more,” he said, and Julia saw he meant it.
They both noticed that Lillian was tiring. With a flurry of goodbyes and Philip’s attempt to kiss his aunt’s forehead—countered with a feeble swat—Julia’s acquaintance with the woman was concluded.
“La Follette, girl,” Lillian shouted as they left. “Make yourself useful!”
CHAPTER 9
On the third day after news of Naomi’s death broke, Glennis decided it was safe to leave the house. In a stroke of luck for the Rankins, scrutiny of their misfortune was nothing compared to the speculation that swarmed to the lurid Dottie Caine murder case. Without family or servants to ply for information and with members of the Empire State Equal Rights Union just as reticent, reporters’ interest in Naomi’s death faded as quickly as it had flared. Glennis’s prediction was right: reduced to the sad demise of a troubled spinster, it soon drifted from public thought.
