by Megan Chance
The next Sunday, Uncle Jonny received a call just before we left for church. He came out to the carriage, where Goldie and I waited, with a large envelope and an apologetic smile.
“There’s no help for it, I’m afraid. These papers need to be at Farge’s before the afternoon.”
I said, “But it’s Sunday! Surely Mr. Farge will be at church as well.”
“He’s as caught up in deadlines as the rest of us.”
Goldie warned, “We’re going to be late.”
“Surely Petey can deliver them,” I said.
“Petey is not my liaison to Farge. You are.” My uncle put the envelope into my hand as he helped me from the carriage. “Farge is at his office now. He’s expecting you. You’re to wait until he’s gone over them, in case he has questions. I don’t know how long that will take, but I’m afraid you’ll have to miss the service today.”
“Won’t there be talk if I’m not at church?” Uneasily I remembered LaRosa’s comments about my being fast—among other things—even as I had to admit that a day spent learning at Ellis Farge’s side sounded far more alluring than a sermon.
“We’ll smooth all the ruffled feathers,” Goldie assured me. “You’re festering from some dire illness and simply cannot show your face to the world.”
My uncle climbed into the carriage. “Petey will have the buggy ready in a few moments.”
The carriage door closed; they drove away. I did not have to wait long until the stable boy appeared with the buggy, and we were off.
I glanced at the envelope in my lap, wondering what could be inside that was so important it must be delivered on Sunday, but I didn’t really care; I was just glad to be the courier. When we reached the Montgomery Block, it was as busy as the other times I’d been there—apparently I wasn’t the only person skipping church.
I was sorry to see that Coppa’s was closed, however, and pleasantly nervous to note that Ellis was the only one at his office. The place felt empty.
“Ellis?” I called softly.
“May, is that you?” His called answer was followed quickly by Ellis himself. He smiled brilliantly when I gave him the envelope. He slid it open, leafing through the papers inside. “Thank God. I thought I’d mislaid these.”
“My uncle was determined that you should get them today. I’m to wait until you go over them. I’m missing church.”
“I hope it won’t imperil your immortal soul,” Ellis said.
“I expect God makes allowances for emergencies. Are they very important, then?” I craned to get a look.
Ellis put the envelope on his desk. “Crucial to the project. Please, sit down.”
He sat at his desk, and I took the chair across. He scrutinized the papers while I looked about his office and tried to contain my fascination with the framed plans, the photographs, the wooden case with the drawing tools nestled inside, F. Hommel-Esser stamped in gold on the blue velvet.
Impatiently I waited for Ellis to put the papers aside, and then could not wait another moment to say, “Have you considered the design?”
“I’ve been unable to without these. Now all I need is a bit of inspiration.”
“Perhaps I can help. Is it to be an office building? My uncle spoke of leases, but that could be anything. I’d just like to know what it should feel like.”
“What it should feel like?”
“Isn’t that how you begin to plan?” I asked. “Isn’t the way the building should feel the first thing to come to you?”
“The use comes first.”
“Of course, but”—I struggled to explain—“but like this place. It’s meant for artists, you can tell.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“The high ceilings. The windows everywhere. So much light. Of course artists would flock to it.”
Ellis chuckled. “I rather think it was the cheap rents.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, of course.”
“But yes, I suppose the light has something to do with it. They called it Halleck’s Folly when it was first built. No one thought all the rooms would ever be filled. And like attracts like. You know what they call it now? The Monkey Block.”
I laughed. “That seems appropriate.”
He made a face. “Indeed. Nothing but monkeys here. Speaking of which, why don’t we go over to Coppa’s?”
“It’s closed.”
“Ah, it only seems that way,” he said mysteriously.
I did not need much convincing. I had already missed the service, and my uncle and cousin would be busy with social obligations for hours yet. Not only that, but Goldie would have told everyone I was too ill to attend church, and it would not do to suddenly appear in perfect health.
I began to follow him, and then remembered the Anderson ball and stopped. “Will Dante LaRosa be there?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I saw him the other night. At a dance. He was reporting on it.” He had written nothing of me in his article on the Anderson soiree. I wasn’t certain why, but I was grateful.
“I hope he didn’t trouble you. He’s a bottom-feeder, May. You should avoid him.”
“You don’t like him. Why?”
“Dante LaRosa never met a snide comment he didn’t like. He’s tried to destroy me more than once.”
“Destroy you? Why?”
“Who knows? I suspect simply for the fun of it. He’s very eager to write anyone’s bad opinion of my work. Did he say anything about me at this dance?”
“He seemed more concerned about my uncle.”
“What about your uncle?”
“I don’t know. Something about city corruption, and bribery—”
“The same old thing. He’s been talking of that for months. He’s trying to find a story that isn’t there,” Ellis assured me. “He’s desperate to move from the society beat. You heard him say it himself. What’s more likely to happen is that he gets fired.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m not the only one he’s annoyed with his articles. Sooner or later, someone is going to go after him.”
“Why haven’t you exposed him? Why hasn’t anyone at Coppa’s? You all know who he really is.”
“Who would believe me? No, I’ve no wish to play his petty games. Let him roll in the mud without me.” Ellis glanced away, and I understood that, like me, he was afraid of what Dante LaRosa knew; Ellis Farge too had people or secrets he wished to protect. I wanted to ask what they might be, but I did not want him asking in return, and so I buried my curiosity.
Ellis went on, “Those at Coppa’s love anything that snips at the status quo, and LaRosa does snip. His articles are their favorite entertainment. They’ll never expose him. Come along now, before they drink all the wine.”
“Wine? So early?”
“Oh, don’t be so bourgeois,” he teased.
Ellis ignored the CLOSED sign on Coppa’s front door and rapped softly. It opened, and we were greeted by a rotund man with a long black mustache and a black skullcap. He ushered us inside quickly.
“Poppa Coppa, this is Miss May Kimble,” introduced Ellis.
Coppa bowed over my hand. “Miss Kimble, welcome. Go on back, go back! Tell them I am bringing the wine and do not draw over Martinelli!”
The tables had been shoved together in the middle back of the restaurant, reminding me of the last time I’d been here. Several people were gathered there, gulping wine and making sandwiches of bread and cold cuts. Wenceslas Piper had tied back his auburn hair. He stood on a stool, drawing a caricature of Gelett Addison hunched over an enormous bottle of ink, laurel wreath slipping over his ear. Nearby, on another stool, Edith Jackson added embellishments to the words she’d already written: Something terrible is going to happen, and Gelett gestured at her with his wine, spattering it over the table.
“Why, it sounds a portent, Edie! Whyever would you put such a thing on these walls?”
“It’s from Oscar Wilde,” she retorted. “From
Salomé.”
“A wretched play. A doomed play. And now you’ve doomed us all!”
Wence laughed and leaned over to draw a heart over the i in terrible. “There, I’ve made it all better.”
Edith glared at him and scratched it out.
“Ah, there she is! Our newest freak!” Gelett called out.
“How tiresome you can be, Gelly,” Blythe Markowitz said from where she leaned beneath the painted motto, Oh, Love! dead and your adjectives still in you!
Ellis led me to the table and poured wine for us both. We watched and talked with the others and ate sandwiches until the wine and the company combined to make me languorous and easy, and I forgot the passing of time, or that anyone might expect me home again. But then, as if to remind me, Dante LaRosa came through a back door. The mist of the morning had turned to rain that spattered his hat and the shoulders of his coat. When he saw us, he stopped; I saw his quick recalculation, a forced smile. “Well, look who’s here.”
“No soirees for you to dim today?” Ellis asked.
“It’s Sunday. Even the stupidest of society don’t dance today.” Dante’s glance came to me. “No church for the wicked, hmmm?”
“You’re here, I see. I didn’t know newspaper reporters painted the walls of Coppa’s,” I said lightly.
“Anyone can write bad poetry.” Dante took off his hat, then grabbed wine and pulled out a chair. “Look at that opus over there.” He pointed to a large devil fishing as he roasted his cloven foot in a fire above the words: It is a crime. Nearby were stanzas that began Through the fog of centuries . . . and ended musing about cat soul mates.
“You see?” Dante grinned and lit a cigarette. “The bar is low.” He grabbed a piece of orange chalk from a grimy, powdery box of different colors and rolled it across the table. “What about you? Why aren’t you drawing?”
“I don’t really draw—”
“Of course you do. Rooms, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you said? Go on. Show us what you can do.”
“I’m not an artist.”
“Neither is Wence, but he’s desecrating with the best of them,” Gelett joked.
“The word should be ‘secrating,’ without the ‘de,’” Wence returned, now adding Ars Vincit Omnia above the caricature.
“Is ‘secrating’ even a word?” Dante asked.
“Only in Wence’s mind,” said Edith.
“I’ve invented it, because there is no other word that celebrates the genius that is me.”
“You see, May? You’d best mark your spot before all the space is gone and the world thinks that the only genius here was Wence,” Blythe said. “Otherwise no one will know you existed.”
“Scream to the universe: I was here!” Edith sang out. “For long after we are gone, Coppa’s will live on!”
“God knows it’s the only thing worth saving in this entire city,” Gelett said, pouring more wine.
Ellis threw the piece of chalk back into the box.
“You aren’t going to let her mark her territory?” Dante asked.
“Go on, May, put a big X on Ellis’s forehead,” Edith said.
I could not look at any of them as they all laughed, and I knew I must be red.
“Draw us something,” Dante urged.
“She needn’t prove herself to you,” Ellis snapped.
“This grows wearying between the two of you,” Gelett said with an exaggerated sigh. “Shall we have fisticuffs at dawn instead?”
“I propose a drinking contest.” Wence lifted a mostly empty bottle of wine. “Poppa! More wine!”
“More wine, more wine, more wine,” came Poppa Coppa’s chiding voice from the kitchen.
“We’re increasing your value,” Gelett called back. “Think how many tourists will come just to see the newest splat that Wence Piper put upon these sacred walls.”
Dante dragged on his cigarette and exhaled a thin, steady stream of smoke, picked up his wine, then said to me, “Well? We’ve voted to let you stay. You might as well prove you deserve it.”
It was a challenge.
Ellis said quietly, “Tell him to go to hell. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
But it felt a test to me, and I suspected there was something more here too, that Dante meant not just to challenge me, and perhaps to punish me for not giving him what he’d wanted at the Anderson ball, but also to embarrass Ellis. I would not let that happen.
I took the box of chalk, and then I picked up my glass of wine and sauntered as casually as I could to a bare spot on the wall, below a satyr toasting a nude maiden with champagne. I confronted the spot as if I were a gladiator in combat—I had no idea what I would draw or what might impress them. I tossed back the rest of my wine in a gesture of bravery, and then, pretending I was brave, I drew the first line.
I was aware of the others talking and joking behind me, the hum of conversation and laughter, and someone refilling my wineglass so it was never empty, but all I saw was the room taking form beneath my fingers, a room of gorgeous decoration, sculpted window and door casings, a floor of colored tiles and narrow mullioned windows, a painted paradise of a domed ceiling, nymphs dancing by a spring as they looked down onto a wall mural of a ball full of glowing lanterns and gilded creatures. All smiling, all celebrating. The color and the light fantastic and strange and beautiful.
I drew and drew, losing myself to time, to talk, to everything, and when it was done, and the vision faded, I stepped back to look at what I’d done.
It was a mockery. Like the bacchante in the Sullivan ballroom, the room I’d drawn was lewd in its overabundance, grotesque, breathless and constricting and empty, and the terror of it had me setting aside my wine, putting my hand to my throat as if that might somehow help me to breathe again. The leering faces of the golden creatures, the lushness with no depth, windows that stared out onto painted walls. All facade, all vacant, enjoyment without sustenance, celebration without boundaries or purpose. It was all terrifyingly close and painfully hollow, the prison that neither I nor my mother had ever seen in the life she’d chosen for me.
Why had I drawn this nightmare?
The room buzzed all about me, but I felt as alone and alien as I had at any ball or dinner in San Francisco. Unnoticed, a ghost of myself, and with this odd sense that I had somehow locked myself inside the room I’d drawn, that I was one of those painted nymphs bending toward the spring, a smile on my face and horror behind my eyes, a lifetime of pretense—Ah, but what have you to complain of? You’ve everything you’ve ever dreamed about.
I had to resist the urge to erase it. I went silently back to the table, and no one said anything. They did not note me as I sat down. I think I might have walked out of Coppa’s without anyone heeding.
Gelett and Blythe argued. Wence had finished his painting and was pulling out the cork of another bottle of wine. Edith sat on the floor against the wall, legs straight out, her turban askew. Ellis, however, had twisted in his chair to watch me. He was dead silent, expressionless. I could not tell if he admired or disliked what I’d done.
Behind a haze of cigarette smoke, Dante LaRosa did not look at my drawing, or at me, but only stared at Ellis, slowly, thoughtfully.
Ellis took my hand, wrapping it in his, and whispered, “I’ve had enough, have you?”
I nodded. Ellis pulled me to my feet. He was unsteady—too much wine, I thought, and I wondered how long we’d been here, how long I’d been drawing. He took me over to my picture and reached out to trace a line with his finger, and murmured, “Beautiful. Everything you do is beautiful,” and there was a tone in his voice I could not decipher—wistfulness perhaps, or no, something sharper, harder. He didn’t see the truth of the picture. I didn’t know how he couldn’t see what was so obvious to me. He drew back again, lost his balance, and before I could steady him, he fell against the wall. The chalk smeared, streaking his suitcoat, colors blending in a swath across the middle of the drawing.
“Look what I’ve done,” Ellis said in horror.<
br />
“It’s all right. It meant nothing.” That was not true, but I was glad he’d smeared it. I wanted the horrible thing gone.
I don’t think the others noticed as we left the restaurant and stepped out into the night—night, how odd was that? It had seemed to be minutes since we’d gone inside. I had no idea what time it was. I’d lost my bearings.
My carriage was just over there, Petey slumped in the seat, asleep. Ellis put his hand to his eyes and let out his breath. I felt him stiffen as if in preparation for something, and I turned to him, waiting for him to say or do whatever it was I felt him ready to do.
He dropped his hand. He wanted something from me, I knew, but I didn’t know what, and I waited, taut and expectant, and was disappointed when all he did was touch my jaw, gently stroking with his thumb. “It’s late. You should go home.”
“Yes.” But the way he looked at me. The way he glanced about, and then back, as if he wished to leave and couldn’t, or as if he disliked himself, or me—yes, it was me he disliked—and his mood gripped me, puzzling, bewildering.
I didn’t understand anything, not where I was or what I’d done. There was only that soft caress that spoke of—what? Regret? Desire? Shame?
He stepped away, releasing me from its spell. “Go home.” He hit the edge of the carriage hard, startling the horse, startling Petey awake, and I had the sense that it had been a deliberate act, though why I didn’t know.
“Miss Kimble?” asked Petey, scrambling from the seat.
Ellis helped me inside. “I’ll see you soon.” His expression was bemused, or perhaps it was only a smile. In the near darkness, I could not tell, and I did not realize how important it would have been to know.
The misty, sea-tinged air hid the moon but for a bit of brightness. It was chill and wet; a clock on a building we passed read nearly eleven. As we reached the drive, I told Petey to go directly to the stable; I did not want to alert anyone that I was coming in so late. I sneaked from the stable to the back door, the stone steps that led to the kitchen. As I reached for the handle, a shiver passed through me. “A goose stepped on your grave,” Mama would have said. I was suddenly cold.
