Bachelor Girl

by Kim van Alkemade

  “Are you okay, Victor?” It was a stupid question for me to ask. Of course he wasn’t okay. I wondered what family tragedy had landed him here. Despite being surrounded by so many children, he seemed completely alone. I imagined scooping him up and carrying him home, his arms tight around my neck.

  But I couldn’t take Victor home, and clearly the boy was wilting in the glare of our attention. It was time to go. Glancing up at Albert, I noticed that his hand was still clamped around the older boy’s wrist. I stood and lifted his fingers one by one. As the boy yanked his arm away, I saw a cluster of bruises bright as crushed berries on his skin.

  A bell rang, breaking the spell and bringing the children back to life. Mr. Stern, putting a hand on each of our shoulders, steered us toward the building. “You shouldn’t have bothered, Miss Winthrope. It’s how the monitors maintain discipline. I know it seems harsh, but they do keep order.”

  “What will happen to him?” I asked, meaning what punishment awaited the boy who’d done the slapping.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine. He must be new. They learn soon enough.” I realized he was referring to the one who’d been slapped. I caught Albert’s eye and saw he shared my distress.

  On our way out, Mr. Stern picked up two loaves of rye bread to offer us as souvenirs. Their baker was such a genius, he said, that the trustees took home loaves every Sunday. At the main entrance, our tour concluded, Mr. Stern asked, “So, what did you think of the Orphaned Hebrews Home?”

  I thought it was an inhuman factory for the manufacture of obedient children, but I knew the alternatives for orphans in the city were even more bleak. I remembered reading about the charities that sent street children out west on trains to live with farm families. It seemed better than being raised in an institution, but I supposed there weren’t many Jewish farmers.

  “The elevation is fairly steep, but the location is ideal,” Albert said. He, too, must not have wanted to reveal his true thoughts about the orphanage. “I’m sure Colonel Ruppert will be impressed.”

  “It is impressive what we do here, but even so, institutions like ours are falling out of favor. Too big, too impersonal, is what they say nowadays. That’s why we need to relocate.” He turned to Albert, pointedly excluding me. “I was wondering if you’d let me take you out to Westchester to show you the land. Tomorrow, in the morning? I need to be back for our trustees meeting in the afternoon. I know you want Colonel Ruppert to have the entire picture.”

  Albert looked at him for a long moment. I assumed he was thinking of a polite way to turn the man down—he’d already worked one day of the weekend—but instead he said, “I might as well see how far along you are with your building plans.”

  They agreed to meet at nine o’clock in Grand Central Station. Outside, Albert and I found Schultz instructing a group of neighborhood boys on the inner workings of the Packard. He shooed them away as we approached. I looked back to watch the castle recede as we drove away. “Wasn’t it terrible to see that little boy slapped? I wished I could have rescued him, poor thing.”

  Albert looked as though he might begin to cry. “I hate to see a child bullied. Boys can be so cruel.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about the cruelty of boys.” I thought of Harrison and all he had cost me. Free love, it seemed, was only free for the man. It was the woman who was left to pay the price.

  “We have that in common, then.” Albert pulled his knee up on the seat to face me. “You might have saved me from breaking that boy’s wrist.”

  I shifted in my seat, too. “I guess you don’t know your own strength.”

  “I doubt that, but it was a good thing you came with me today.”

  I offered him a weak smile. “At least it was more eventful than spending another day in bed.” He listened sympathetically as I told him about my battle with pneumonia.

  “I know how you feel, Helen. I had rheumatic fever as a child. It weakened my heart, but even after I recovered my mother would hardly let me outside. If my uncle hadn’t sent me to boarding school, I might still be in that shuttered mansion with my widowed mother and grandmother.”

  “But that sounds like a Dickens novel,” I teased.

  “Funny you should say that. When I read Bleak House, it reminded me of home.”

  We were surprised by the cessation of motion as the limousine pulled up to the curb in front of my building. Reluctant as I was to leave him, there seemed nothing left to say. I picked up my loaf of rye bread, sad to think I might never have occasion to see Colonel Ruppert’s secretary again.

  Unexpectedly, Albert caught my arm. “Listen, Helen, I have an extra ticket to the ballet tomorrow night. A friend of mine is one of the dancers. I wonder, would you like to go with me?”

  Chapter 10

  It was impulsive of me to offer Helen the ticket that, only yesterday, I’d been scheming to give that man on the train, but my night with King had drawn my emotions close to the surface, making me receptive to the sympathetic vibration I felt between myself and Helen. Perhaps we half-orphans shared a sixth sense that enabled us to recognize one another as comrades in an uncertain world.

  Schultz pulled the limousine away from Helen’s apartment building and headed downtown. Though her residence was decidedly middle-class, I imagined her family and mine lived on much the same level. Despite my mother’s girlhood memories of regattas on Lake Conemaugh with the Fisks and the Carnegies, we’d been existing on a meager income since the Panic of 1893 brought my father’s fortunes crashing down as suddenly as the floodwaters into Johnstown. Bankrupt and depressed, he capsized his sailboat in Lake Erie when I was just a baby. (Years later, my uncle told me what it had cost to get his suicide reported as a boating accident.) My widowed mother had taken on the role of Grandmother’s companion in exchange for a fashionable address she could no longer afford.

  Schultz rolled down his window to argue with a traffic cop who was holding us up. Glancing around, I saw we’d advanced no farther than Times Square. I closed my eyes, settling in for a lengthy drive.

  When was the last time I’d asked a girl out? I wondered. Back in Pittsburgh, that summer before going down to Princeton. Someone was hosting a dance and they needed young men for the cotillion, my mother said. Normally I would have resisted her efforts to push me into society, but it was so gloomy at Grandmother’s that I jumped at the chance to get out for the night. I was outfitted in an old tuxedo of my father’s that had been cleaned and altered for the occasion. “Thank goodness these things never go out of style,” my mother said as she poked a white rose through the buttonhole. I set off on foot for a grand mansion at the top of the hill that dominated our neighborhood. The hostess, a steel heiress, had been sent to Europe as a teenager to marry an aristocrat. Returning a baroness, she’d made a career of impressing Pittsburgh society with her purchased nobility. Uniformed footmen were arrayed around the drive to escort the young ladies from their carriages. Young men arrived in automobiles, their engines annoying the horses. Though my mother had assured me I’d know everyone, I found that my years away at boarding school had turned me into a ghost among my peers, who all seemed to have spent the past decade playing together on some team or other. I felt easier around the girls, who were smart and spirited and desperate for a partner. Before long my name had been penciled in on a dozen dance cards (it was a very old-fashioned affair) and I enjoyed myself immensely. When the music stopped and we all went in for supper, I escorted a lively young woman who turned out to be the baroness’s daughter. She was a wonderful conversationalist and not at all snobbish; we talked so much we both forgot to eat. After supper, she suggested a walk. We wandered through the empty streets of Shadyside, glowing porch lights dotting the velvet darkness. It was midnight by the time we strolled back up her drive, emptying now of cars and carriages. When she turned her face up, I kissed her cheek. “Aren’t you a proper gentleman,” she said. I invited her to picnic with me the next afternoon and she happily accepted. I walked home delighted at the prospect, as
was my mother when I told her over breakfast. Privately, I dared to believe that horrible boy at boarding school might have been wrong about me. Perhaps I still had a chance at a normal life. At least I’d have the summer to find out, and this lovely girl to help me do it.

  Then a note arrived from the baroness’s daughter, saying she wasn’t feeling well and was sorry she wouldn’t be able to picnic with me after all. “I hope she recovers soon, I quite like her,” I told my mother. “She won’t get well, because she isn’t ill,” my mother said, her voice thick with disappointment. “She found out you have no money and she’s decided not to waste her time on you.” I said she must be mistaken, the girl wasn’t like that at all, but she just shook her head and patted my cheek with a sad hand. “Believe me, I know these people. I was one of them, remember?” I went down to Princeton wondering if things might have turned out differently for me—if I might have turned out differently—if I’d been worthy of that girl. College was certainly no place to change my ways. I was pegged for a pansy while I was still a freshman. When an upperclassman introduced me to Greenwich Village, I fit in so well that I wrote myself off as a lost cause. It hadn’t occurred to me in years to question if the act of being a normal man I performed at work could carry over into my private life as well.

  “Here you are, Mr. Kramer.” Schultz’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. I roused myself to exit the limousine. “Don’t forget your bread.”

  I encountered Mrs. Santalucia mopping the hallway and offered her the loaf of rye, saying I owed it to her. “So you’re the thief who was in my kitchen last night.” She dried her hands and took it, appreciating its size and weight. “Thank you, Mr. Kramer, this’ll more than make up for the one you took.”

  Was it only last night King had been waiting on my stoop? The hours we’d spent together seemed cut from a different cloth than the fabric of my day-to-day existence. For a moment my daydreams in the limousine and my memories from last night collided. I imagined King leading me around a dance floor, dashing in his uniform. He was the kind of man a baroness’s daughter would marry even without a fortune. Except King didn’t want a damsel, did he? He’d wanted me. The thought weakened my knees in a way no woman ever had. I supposed I was a lost cause after all.

  “Oh, your friend stopped by. He left you a note.” Mrs. Santalucia handed me a slip of paper. For a ridiculous second I imagined it was from King—though how could it have been, unless he’d jumped ship? I read the scribbled words, from Paul, scolding me for missing Jack’s debut and insisting I come to Antonio’s that night.

  I went up to my room in need of a nap. I noticed, on my dresser, a brass button stamped with an eagle. King must have torn it from his uniform and left it there for me to remember him by. Silly boy. I dropped the button into a drawer and shut it tight. Getting into bed, I fell back on my pillow, inhaling an unfamiliar scent. Even before I could put King’s name to the smell, it gave me a pang in my chest like those nights at boarding school when I had lain despondent in my bed, wishing my mother would come to whisk me home. But how could I be homesick for a man I’d known for only a few hours? It didn’t make sense. Still, I clutched the sheets to my face and breathed him in.

  • • •

  Those angled streets around Bedford and Commerce were so confusing I ended up wandering the cobblestones until Antonio’s appeared, a brightly lit window on the garden floor of a nondescript town house, its name painted discreetly on the glass. The front door was propped open, laughter and smoke and piano music carried out on streaks of warm light.

  Once I pushed through the people clotting the entry, I saw the place was only half full. Later it would be shoulder to shoulder—Antonio’s was featured on those maps of the Village for tourists who wanted to go slumming—but it was still early. Along one side of the narrow room were snug booths with wood benches. On the other side was a monstrous bar decorated with carved gargoyles, the counter in front of it barely wide enough to prop an elbow. I squeezed through the space between the counter and the booths to reach Toni (only strangers called the proprietor Antonio), who was in conversation with Edith at the far end of the bar.

  “Hello Toni, Edith.” I shook Toni’s hand and kissed Edith on the cheek. They were a lovely couple, Edith always stylish from her bobbed hair to her satin shoes, Toni invariably wearing a striped vest and pleated trousers, sleeves rolled up and short hair slicked back. I doubted if any of the tourists who wandered in realized they were both women.

  “Where were you last night, Albert?” Toni asked. “Paul was looking for you.”

  “I was detained by a soldier.” My face grew warm as I said it. Edith laughed, and Toni cuffed me on the arm. I caught sight of myself in the beveled mirror behind the bar but couldn’t tell if my cheeks were mottled from blushing or the rouge I’d dusted on at home. I’d touched my lashes with mascara, too, and toweled the pomade out of my hair so it hung loose over my forehead. I pointed my pinkies to the ceiling as I adjusted the red bow tie around my neck. Though it still looked brown to me, I’d stitched a thread into it so I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Aren’t you a proper pansy.” I turned at the sound of Paul’s voice (he never had to doll himself up to attract attention; his beauty was its own billboard) and saw Jack was with him. “What happened to you last night? We were in tears.” Jack leaned over his shoulder, mouth turned down and fists to his eyes like a mime weeping.

  Toni smiled. “He says he was detained by a soldier.”

  “Well, well, Prince Albert. We better have a drink so you can tell us all about it. Gin and lemonade?”

  “I’ll bring them over,” Edith said as Toni went to mix the drinks. Past the bar, the room opened up to accommodate a smattering of small tables covered in checked cloth. Paul and Jack led the way and we dropped onto wobbly bentwood chairs.

  “How was ballet rehearsal?” I asked Paul.

  “A disaster, but that only means opening night will be perfect. Don’t try to change the subject. What’s this about a soldier?”

  Edith deposited our drinks. “I’ve still got your tab from last night, Paul.”

  “Don’t you worry, Edith.” He winked, and she smiled (no one, it seemed, was immune to Paul’s charms). “I’ll pay for everything before the night is over.”

  “Did you strike it rich?” Jack asked as she walked away. He hadn’t dolled himself up yet, and with his barrel chest and meaty biceps he looked like a lumberjack who’d accidentally wandered into a pansy bar. Though his gestures were fluid and his voice naturally melodious, he saved the swishing and lisping for his act. With his friends, Jack didn’t need these affectations for us to recognize his feminine nature.

  “I’ll explain later,” Paul said, “but first, our little prince here has a soldier to tell us about.”

  So I told them about King, from the ballpark to the stoop to my bed—but only what we’d done there, not what we’d said. Usually it was Paul or Jack who regaled us with scandalous tales of their liaisons. I’d never had them so captivated by one of my adventures. When the gorgeous young waiter came to refill our glasses, we ordered dinner (Antonio’s wasn’t known for its kitchen, but they could throw together a plate of lasagna) then watched as he walked away. “Where does Toni find them,” I wondered.

  “I think he imports them from Italy along with the wine,” Jack said, turning to Paul. “You’re up next, sweetie. Tell us how you struck it rich.”

  “I met someone.” It was Paul’s admirers who typically got a sheepish look when he paid them the compliment of his attention, but now it was Paul, grinning like a schoolgirl.

  “Here, last night, during my show? How did I miss it?”

  “No, earlier, at that reception for the ballet company. I caught the eye of one of our benefactors.” The name Paul whispered was so famous he made us promise never to utter it aloud. “I was talking to his wife—she was positively dripping with diamonds—when I saw him staring at me. You know the look. I peeled Geneviève off my arm an
d we met up in the men’s room. Nothing much happened, we just exchanged a few words, but I mentioned I’d be at Antonio’s tonight and he said he’d meet me here.”

  Jack and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. “You’d better be careful,” he said. “That’s some very blue blood to be dragging down to a dump like this.”

  “I’ve never heard his name mentioned in our world,” I said. “Have you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jack said, “and I thought I knew everyone.”

  Paul gave us an impish smile. “Maybe I’m his first.” It was entirely possible. If anyone could expand a married man’s horizons, it was Paul.

  Our plates arrived. “Now, tell me what I missed last night,” I said. “How was the show?” Across the back wall of the restaurant, between the upright piano and the kitchen door, a tiny stage was raised a few inches above the floor.

  Jack didn’t wear a dress for his act (that would have been illegal), but by making up his face and tossing a feather boa across his shoulders, he stepped so far from the narrow rut of normal masculinity that his alter ego required a new name. His transformation into Jacqueline came not from his clothes but from the extravagance of his gestures, the inflection of his voice, the bawdy jokes with which he parried any insult. His singing was almost beside the point. The audience hardly noticed he could hold a note to break your heart.

  “She was wonderful,” Paul said. Jack bowed his head. “She absolutely slayed the crowd. There were some rowdies, but Jacqueline put them in their place.”

  Antonio’s began to get crowded. We capped off our dinner with another round. By the time Jack had to go upstairs to Edith and Toni’s apartment to get ready, my head was spinning. “You’re staying for the show, aren’t you?” he asked me.