Love and Other Consolation Prizes

by Jamie Ford

  He was still worrying when he saw two people standing beneath the glow of a single forty-watt bulb that dangled from the hallway ceiling. Amid the riot of blistered paint, there was a couple arguing.

  “I don’t know why you had to drag me all the way down to this dump,” the man said. “Couldn’t we just meet him at a goddamn restaurant or something?”

  Ernest understood. The Publix was an acquired taste. The address alone might have deterred some people, because the neighborhood wasn’t what it used to be. Most of the fancy supper clubs were gone, replaced by all-night diners like the Bamboo Café. And the neon had faded or burned out. Now the streets from First Avenue to Pioneer Square and on up to Chinatown were illuminated with signs for pawnshops and taverns. Empty, rusting cans of Olympia beer and Brew 66 littered the once glorious cobblestone streets. The avenues, which had been crafted by hand, brick by brick, sculpted around polished streetcar rails, had been buried—slathered beneath a layer of burning asphalt, then strewn with twenty years’ worth of losing pull tabs and cigarette butts. Now the stench of despair was so strong even the rain was unable to wash it away.

  Then Ernest heard a familiar voice.

  “Jeezuz, you were the one who said you wanted to meet my family. Well, this is where my family lives—part of my family, anyway. So deal with it. If you’d rather run off and shoot dice until dawn like you always do, that’s fine with me, but the least you can do is take five minutes and meet him like you promised you would. It’s a surprise.”

  “That’s just you being childish.”

  “Me?” the woman snapped.

  “Yes, you. Eight-year-old girls like surprises,” the man scolded her. “Grown men hate surprises.”

  Ernest cleared his throat. “Not all grown men.” He stepped into the light and waited for their reaction. The man looked annoyed, the woman confused for a brief moment and then…

  “Dad!”

  “Is there a chorus line somewhere in Las Vegas that’s missing its lead dancer right now?” Ernest asked as he removed his hat. “Hanny, this is a wonderful surprise—the best kind. I don’t care what anyone says.” He winked at the strange man, who smiled back, barely concealing his embarrassment.

  Hanny squealed as she dropped her purse and threw her arms around him. “Daddy! I missed you so much—Mom too. Juju called and said that Ma’s been coming back around. So I dropped everything and booked the first flight I could find. We just landed an hour ago. Oh, and I have another surprise.”

  Hanny put her arm around the tall fellow with perfect auburn hair, flawless teeth, and a cleft in his chin like that of the actor Cary Grant.

  Ernest smiled. “I can only imagine.”

  “I’m Rich,” the man interjected as he thrust a hand in Ernest’s direction. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet, I’ve heard a lot about you. Oh, and if you ever need an entertainment attorney, I might know a few—starting with yours truly.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ernest said as he noticed the gemstones on the man’s fingers. The largest rock was the size of Ernest’s thumbnail. He glanced at Hanny, who was beaming and bouncing with excitement.

  “Dad,” Hanny said, “Rich is a lawyer, but he’s also my fiancé.” She held up her fingers and pointed to a tiny diamond of her own. “It belonged to Rich’s grandmother. She survived the sinking of the Titanic—can you believe that?”

  Ernest paused for a moment, hoping Allen Funt would step out of the janitor’s closet with his Candid Camera crew in tow. “Wow, that’s a lot to comprehend,” he said.

  Then he hugged his daughter, wishing her congratulations as best he could, despite the shock. He shook Rich’s hand again, wishing him all the best. Ernest chatted and doted and tried not to imagine what Gracie, lucid or otherwise, might think about this news. He wished she were here and able to say something that would help him make sense of all this, or at least signal a warning to Hanny about the impending iceberg that lay in the path of this relationship. Hanny had always had her choice of suitors—ever since high school—and yet somehow she’d settled for…this guy.

  Ernest realized he was grinding his teeth and relaxed his jaw. Then he drew a deep breath, clapped his hands, and rubbed them together. He wouldn’t allow himself to doubt his daughter, to be that cynical.

  “You know—I believe Rich is absolutely right,” Ernest said. “This is no place to celebrate. Why don’t we all go out and get a late supper?”

  “We flew first class,” Hanny said. “We had chicken Kiev on the plane. But you know me. I can always go for a little dessert. How about the Jasmine Room?”

  Ernest smiled. “That would be perfect.”

  MAYFLOWER ROCK

  (1909)

  Ernest’s heart was still racing, his mind still spinning. He swore he could still feel Fahn’s kiss, even after eating a bowl of porridge. It had been delicious, topped with grated dark chocolate and toasted coconut. And the dairy—Ernest was astonished at the taste, the rich creamy texture of real milk. All those years at boarding school, he’d rarely drunk anything other than tea and the powdered junket they’d served daily, which was supposed to make them healthy and strong, but tasted like warm milk mixed with chalk.

  Ernest wasn’t sure what Mrs. Irvine had been so worked up about.

  I wouldn’t leave this place to go to Heaven, Ernest thought, as he tried to catch a glimpse of Fahn, who was busy in the kitchen. She caught his eye, winked, and then disappeared. Ernest waved back at no one, but smiled nonetheless. At the children’s home the girls lived in a separate building, and in class they ignored him. But here, his new life was off to a roaring start.

  He didn’t even mind spending the next hour shoveling coal in the basement. He whistled, hummed, practically danced in the dusty coal bin as he worked. Then he changed his clothes, cleaned himself up, and helped Fahn and Violet set up breakfast for the working girls. Ernest observed the precise way Fahn arranged the polished silverware, the breakfast plates, elegant eggcups, juice glasses, and different sets of china for tea and coffee. He followed along as best he could while Violet arranged the plush chairs, opened the curtains and blinds, and tended to the flower vases set about the formal dining room. She retrimmed the stems that hadn’t yet bloomed, then weeded out the wilted and the dead.

  Ernest stood at attention as Madam Flora and the rest of the upstairs ladies swept into the room in messaline tea gowns. A baker’s dozen, Ernest thought, counting Maisie, who looked her tomboyish best in a porkpie hat too big for her head. Miss Amber followed behind, now elegantly dressed and sporting long auburn tresses.

  “You know the rules, girl. No toppers in the house,” Miss Amber snapped. “Now take that ugly thing back to the lost and found. Someone just might want it back.”

  Ernest noticed Fahn rolling her eyes as she sighed wearily at Maisie, Miss Amber, or perhaps both—he didn’t know for sure. He looked away, suppressing a laugh.

  Meanwhile Madam Flora introduced Ernest to the ladies of the manor: Ruth, Pearl, Lillian, Emma, Josephine, Beatrice, Hilda, Cora, Hattie, Mary Alice—many of whom he’d already met casually when he arrived. Madam Flora beamed as each young lady bowed slightly with a polite smile. “My Gibson girls: these are the finest women in all of Seattle. Have you ever seen such grace, poise, beauty, and refinement? They are elegance personified, perfection in thought and deed…”

  Ernest smiled and waved, thinking that they did look like the Gibson girls he’d seen rendered in magazines and on advertisements—fragile but voluptuous, empowered with confidence and high-spirited, yet joyful—the opposite of a traditional suffragist.

  “Ah, don’t be fooled, boy,” Miss Amber interrupted, laughing. “They’re mutton dressed as lamb, every one of ’em.”

  And with that Violet and Fahn took their leave as the ladies set to their breakfast, laughing about the parade and the scene in the street that morning. They giggled and cursed and told jokes Ernest didn’t understand. They deliberately slurped their tea, elbowing each other, some of them e
ating with their hands, stirring their coffee with their butter knives, just to tease Madam Flora, who shook her head and sighed, drumming her painted fingernails on the table.

  “I’m afraid the girls are just letting their hair down a bit, so to speak. The ones not wearing wigs.” Madam Flora winked at Miss Amber as she spoke. “But I assure you, these girls have the most class—literally and figuratively. Now, ladies, eat up—you have elocution lessons in the salon in one hour. Then classwork, then music.”

  One older girl tucked her spoon into a soft-boiled egg. “Aye, aye, Captain Flora. Hear that, girls? Our standing orders from the captain and her first mate—by day we’re expanding our minds. And by night we’re spreading our—”

  “That’s quite enough, dear,” Madam Flora interrupted with a wan smile.

  “Always the button burster, that one,” Miss Amber grumbled.

  Ernest blushed again as the ladies twittered and finished their breakfast.

  “And you, young man, I have something important for you to do today.” Madam Flora pursed her lips as she produced a small stack of elegantly addressed letters. “These are special invitations for this month’s festivities. See to it that they’re all delivered today. My little Mayflower will show you around, won’t you, dear?”

  “Thank you, madam, but there’s no need to trouble her,” Ernest said. “Perhaps there’s a fellow servant who could show me.”

  “Nonsense,” Madam Flora said. “Maisie can do it one last time.”

  Maisie took an enormous bite of bread and then shoved her plate away.

  “Go on, girl,” Miss Amber huffed. “Do as Flora says. You can’t be a gamine runabout forever, you know?”

  Maisie stared at Miss Amber as she chewed slowly and then swallowed. Then she smiled and said, “I’d be absolutely delighted to show him around.” Her expression suggested she’d rather pluck a live chicken with her teeth.

  —

  MAISIE WALKED SO fast down Second Avenue that Ernest almost had to run to keep up with her. He tagged along as she led him through traffic, around parked carriages and swerving, honking automobiles. The slower drivers were accompanied by footmen, who ran ahead of their owners’ motorcars with red flags of warning.

  Maisie marched through business districts cluttered with knots of power lines, telephone cables, and crowded residential streets that smelled like soap and lye from the clotheslines and hanging laundry. She took strange alleyways, skirting houses with warning signs, quarantined by whooping cough, and backtracked so much he was certain she was trying to confuse him at best and lose him at worst. She ignored the gentlemen on the street who occasionally tipped their hats or nodded as she tromped by, and she seemed annoyed with the little boys on crate scooters who noisily raced past them on the sidewalk.

  “Where are we going?” Ernest finally asked, out of breath as they passed the Great Northern Tunnel for a second time and headed back toward Pioneer Square.

  “Anywhere and everywhere.” Maisie handed him half of the envelopes. There must have been fifty in all. The white lace invitations had been sealed with scented beeswax, each stamped with an ornate T. “You met Jewel in the motorcar yesterday. She’s turning sixteen and having a coming-out party—all the Tenderloin’s best patrons are invited. No traveling businessmen, no good-time Charlies or cellar smellers, and certainly no soldiers or sailors. Madam Flora says we’re not that kind of place.”

  “Coming out?” Ernest had visions of Seattle’s elegant Grand Cotillion, of horse-drawn surreys and string quartets. He remembered how the little girls at the children’s home would carefully clip out photographs of young women in fancy gowns from the society page of the Sunday paper. They’d play with them like paper dolls. “Like a debutante ball?” he asked.

  “Judas Priest, did you just fall off a turnip wagon?” Maisie snorted as she kept walking. Then she put a hand on her hip and spoke in a deep, breathless voice, imitating the way the older girls cooed. “It’s her sweet sixteen, darlin’. She’s going to the highest bidder. Let’s just hope he’s as handsome as he is rich.”

  Ernest stopped in his tracks.

  “What’s the big deal?” Maisie asked with a shrug. “Is the carriage trade too much for your delicate sensibilities? Or is the new servant boy suddenly too good for us? I sure hope not, because that would be quite funny considering how we just won you in a cakewalk.”

  “It was a raffle.”

  Maisie shook her head and kept walking. “Honestly, I’d been hoping for a pony, but evidently that was given away last week.”

  Ernest gave up the last shreds of his denial and followed her up the street and across the Deadline, beguiled by the Tenderloin, which wasn’t a fancy hotel or a women’s social club, as he’d initially tried to convince himself. In fact, the stately-looking brick building was precisely the kind of place Mrs. Irvine had warned him about in their yearly interviews. If children didn’t protect their virtue, then their carnal nature would invariably lead them to ruin. And to Mrs. Irvine, ruin always looked a lot like the Tenderloin—a crib joint, a sporting home, a den of iniquity, a bawdy house of ill repute.

  “It’s just a coming-out party,” Maisie said. “Besides, the age of consent is ten, and half the girls in the city are married off and pregnant by sixteen anyway. Probably up to their eyeballs in dirty diapers by the time they’re twenty, living in some Sears mail-order house on the prairie, doting on their drunken, philandering husbands, who backhand their wives to keep them in line. And if they’re single, they end up as factory girls working twelve-hour days, being pawed at by some creepy boss, all for five dollars a week, which isn’t even enough to live on. Or worst of all, they wind up as old maids—schoolmarms who aren’t allowed to date or even let their hair down because they might give their students the wrong idea. The girls at the Tenderloin are the lucky ones, Ernest. They get a proper education, they get to see a doctor whenever they want, and get their teeth taken care of. And they get fifty dollars a day. Plus they get to visit their boyfriends once a week, if they care to have one.”

  Ernest wasn’t about to argue, so he read the addresses on the envelopes as they walked. He didn’t recognize the names, but he began to marvel at some of their titles and was confused all over again. There were benign trades like manager of Western Union. Powerful-sounding jobs like president of Greenwood Logging. But the most surprising—alarming even—were the names of city councilmen and politicians—Republicans, Democrats, prohibitionists, socialists, independence leaguers, and even the rarified, beatified, elected occupation known as Distinguished Mayor of Seattle.

  “Madam Flora calls them our patron saints,” Maisie said. “After the Great Fire, the Tenderloin was one of the first places to be rebuilt—better than ever. Old Madam Lou helped the neighborhood get back on its feet, though she still got run out of town. But Madam Flora knows what she’s doing, even if she has poor taste in Miss Amber.”

  Ernest noticed as Maisie frowned at the thought of Madam Flora’s partner.

  “Most of Madam Flora’s best patrons are right here, in the heart of downtown.” Maisie pointed as they walked past the McDougal and Southwick Company and the Majestic Theatre. Ernest marveled at a hand-painted poster featuring skaters atop a giant block of ice. “It’s better that we deliver the invitations to their offices than their homes, if you get my meaning?”

  Maisie led him from the waterfront up First Hill and back, from Hayes & Hayes Bank to the Rainier Brewery. Finally, curiosity got the best of him and he mustered the courage to ask, “So…is Flora really your sister? I mean, of course she’s your house sister—you know what I mean, but perhaps you were adopted like the rest, like the help downstairs?”

  Maisie slowed down and for a moment seemed lost, then stopped and looked up at the sky. Ernest almost thought he saw sadness in her pale blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Having bounced around for years as a ward of the state, he was used to nonchalantly talking about the comings and goings of parents, grandpar
ents, siblings, and guardians. “If that’s something I shouldn’t ask…”

  “It’s okay. It’s not a big secret to anyone who lives at the Tenderloin. I suppose it’s better to hear it from me than from the maids,” Maisie said as she sniffled and mentioned something about the autumn air, even though the sun was shining.

  “In the district there are crib joints and then there are parlor joints, and sometimes Madam Flora cherry-picks new girls that have potential from the bad places—the run-down sporting clubs in the neighborhood. Other girls she’s found on the street or rescued years ago. But Flora, in one way or another, has adopted almost everyone at the Tenderloin. And the girls who seem to have a certain spark, Flora puts to work upstairs. It’s a fancier life, she has them tutored, and trained, but only if they are cut out to be true Gibson girls. The rest, they end up downstairs, working as maids, and cooks, and housekeepers. No one seems to care or mind very much—we all do what we’re told. Everyone sticks together through thick and thin, everyone’s happy, and everyone minds her own business. Well, except for Fahn, who is always up to something.”

  As she kept talking a dam of silent emotion seemed to be cracking. Ernest followed along, regarding her—Margaret, Maisie May, the Mayflower, Madam Flora’s little hummingbird. With her tomboy hair, she seemed destined to work downstairs, but there was something about her blue eyes—great beauty, hiding in plain sight. And she seemed smarter than the rest. He wondered where she’d be in a few years.