Bachelor Girl

by Kim van Alkemade

  “Are you really going to keep it, Helen?”

  “Yes I am. I want us to live here, me and you.”

  “But what do we need with a fifteen-bedroom mansion?”

  “We could start a school, or an orphanage, or turn it into a hotel. We can do whatever we want, Albert. There’s no one and nothing to stop us anymore.”

  I ate another lackluster meal alone. The caretaker may have been happy enough to subsist on his wife’s cooking, but I didn’t want to. When my mother called, I had to stop myself from asking what she’d made for dinner that night. Again, she apologized. Again, she explained. “I would have told you, believe me, Helen, but there was so much at stake.”

  “But why was Jake’s reputation more important than telling me the truth? You could have trusted me to keep quiet.”

  “Of course I trusted you. But he insisted. Everything was conditional on me never telling a soul.”

  “What everything? Do you mean the hospital bill he paid?”

  “Not just that. What do you think we’ve been living on all these years?”

  I thought we’d been living on Daddy’s life insurance because that’s what my mother had told me. But no, she said, there’d never been any life insurance. “Jake supported us, all three of us, even though Rex wasn’t his responsibility. He set it up through his lawyer. Every month I got a check, and once a year he’d give me a call. Until he talked to you, Helen. That’s when he took an interest.”

  It was exhausting, this constant rewriting of my life’s story. “I’m hanging up now, Mom.”

  “Helen, wait. You’ll have to forgive me eventually, you know. The checks are bound to stop now, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m evicted.”

  “Evicted? Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Do I have to spell everything out for you, Helen? Ruppert Realty owns this building. We’ve never paid rent since the day we moved in.”

  • • •

  The relief agency was thrilled, the next day, to accept my donation of Jake’s clothing. While I sorted through it all, I sent the caretaker to the station to pick up Mr. Nakamura. He’d asked Albert if he might come up to get some personal things and offered to bring the accounts for Eagle’s Rest. The Bankers Box he set on the table in Jake’s bedroom would keep me busy for a week. It would be a welcome distraction, having this problem to keep me occupied.

  “There was also some correspondence.” Mr. Nakamura handed me an envelope addressed to Albert, care of Colonel Ruppert. It had been delivered to Jake’s apartment, he said.

  I saw that the stamp had been canceled in Bradenton, Florida. “Why not give it to Albert, why bring it to me?”

  “I noticed the name of the sender. It was my impression that this was a person of particular interest to Colonel Ruppert and yourself.”

  I turned the envelope over, read the name written on the flap. What could Mr. Nakamura possibly know about King Arthur? I put the letter in my pocket, unopened. “You knew Jake very well, didn’t you?”

  He bowed his head. “You’d be surprised what a man reveals about himself when he forgets the servant in his room is a person, too.”

  It was getting late. Already the sun had set, the moon a black dot casting no light on the dark river. “The caretaker’s wife made a mushroom soup. After you pack up your things, would you have supper with me?”

  “Thank you, Miss Winthrope.” Mr. Nakamura was grateful enough for the invitation, but when we sat down to eat I saw his nose wrinkle as he brought the soup to his mouth.

  “Tell me how you came to work for Jake.”

  He seemed glad for an excuse to put down his spoon. Removing his spectacles, he polished the lenses as he spoke. He’d come from Japan to attend an American university, he told me. His father was in business and wanted his son to have an international education. “But Oregon only tolerated Japanese as migrant laborers. It was no place for a respectable hi-imin like me. After one year of college, I came to New York to work and save money. I got a job at a Rolling Ball booth at Coney Island.” I knew the kind of place he meant. It was a simple game, but for some reason the workers were all Japanese, their foreignness adding an exotic flavor to the simple fun of knocking down pins to win a prize.

  “It was a terrible job, late hours and so hot all summer. The others spent every dollar they earned, as if they were men of leisure in the pleasure district of Tokyo. I saved, but when the time came to return to school I found I’d lost my ambition. Instead I found work in a tailor’s shop. He had a little room where I could sleep, so my expenses were few. I learned to sew—women’s work, my father would have said. I was ashamed of my failure at college and gave up on the idea of returning home. When Colonel Ruppert came in to have his suits fitted, he noticed me. He’d had a Japanese valet at the hotel where he lived in Washington while he served in Congress. He thought it would be fashionable to have one for his own household, so I moved into the Ruppert mansion. I started as his valet in 1909, then became his butler. He was a good employer, and I became complacent.”

  Mr. Nakamura kept his face clean-shaven and his hair was still black; how could he be old enough to have worked for Jake for thirty years? I was ashamed to realize that, in all the time I’d known him, I’d never so much as wondered where he’d been born. Osaka, he told me when I asked.

  “What will you do now?” In addition to Jake’s five-thousand-dollar bequest, it sounded like he had quite a nest egg built up somewhere.

  “I might return to Japan for a visit. I have a bride there I’ve never seen.”

  I didn’t know what was more surprising—that he was married, or that he’d never seen his wife.

  “She was a picture bride,” he explained. “I made my selection and sent a dowry and money for her travel, but before she could embark, the new immigration law was passed, and she was no longer welcome in America. She waited, hoping the situation would change, until it was too late for her to marry anyone else. I’ve supported her, modestly, of course, but she has lived with dignity. She brought my mother great comfort in her later years.” He stood and cleared our plates. “I’ll bring these down to the kitchen. Thank you for inviting me to supper, Miss Winthrope. I have to go now, if I’m to catch the last train.”

  I’d allowed his story to distract me from King’s letter. I took it out of my pocket, pushed it across the table, pulled it back toward me again. It wasn’t addressed to me. I had no business opening it. But Mr. Nakamura had seen King’s name and known it should be placed in my hands, not Albert’s.

  It had been years since I thought about how I’d conspired with Jake to get King traded out to that team in San Francisco. I’d felt cruel at the time, but Albert couldn’t have minded so very much. I didn’t remember him ever mentioning King in all these years. I picked up the letter and sliced it open.

  Dear Albert,

  First of all let me say I’m sorry about not writing more. I’m not exactly a man of letters as you know. But I just saw in the paper about the Colonel dying and figured you must have taken it hard. I always admired how loyal you were to the man. But now that he’s gone I wonder if you might be planning to travel and see something of the world for yourself? I got released from the Seals a while back. I’m coaching in the Grapefruit League now. Florida is nice this time of year. What would you think about coming down to Bradenton?

  I know we’ve spent less than a week together if you add it all up, but it also feels as if I’ve known you my whole life. Do you know what I mean? Maybe you do. I hope so. Maybe you feel that way, too. So now you know where to find me if you ever wanted to. Find me, I mean.

  Yours, King

  Chapter 44

  I’d concluded Helen’s business by St. Valentine’s Day, but then George Ruppert asked me to help him settle the Colonel’s personal accounts as well. St. Patrick’s Day was around the corner by the time I walked through his empty apartment for the last time. Mr. Nakamura, who’d overseen the packing of the Colonel’s possessions, was also leaving. He
handed over the keys to the real estate agent who’d be representing the sale and picked up the two suitcases that held the entirety of his possessions. As we took the elevator down together, I asked him about his planned trip to Japan.

  “That was my intention in January, Mr. Kramer, but things have changed since then.”

  “But Helen said you had a wife to go home to.”

  “A bride, not a wife. But Japan hasn’t been my home in so long, I’m afraid I’d be a stranger there. Even so, it’s my American wife who’s causing the problem.”

  “You have another wife?” I’d spent decades in Mr. Nakamura’s company without ever suspecting him of such a complicated personal life.

  “Not legally. The judge we stood in front of wouldn’t marry a white woman to a Japanese man. We should have tried again, but somehow we never did. I thought she’d be willing to let me go for a visit, but she worried I might never come home. We’re leaving the city, though. Colonel Ruppert left me enough to purchase a small house in Maryland, near our son.”

  “Your son?”

  His face flashed with pride. “He completed the education I never finished. He works in Washington as a translator for the Japanese embassy.”

  He only had Sundays free; how had Mr. Nakamura managed to live an entire secret life in just twenty-four hours a week? For years I’d believed we were three celibate bachelors, the Colonel and his butler and his secretary. Now it seemed every man but me had a wife or children, or both. I asked if the Colonel knew about his family. He shook his head. “Colonel Ruppert preferred to imagine I only existed during the hours I was in his presence.”

  Out on the curb, I helped him load his suitcases into a waiting taxi. “Good luck to you, Albert.” He’d never before called me by my Christian name.

  “Same to you, Osamu,” I said, realizing I had no idea of his religion.

  I couldn’t leave the city without saying good-bye to Jack. Across Manhattan, police now patrolled the docks and infiltrated the movie houses, luring men like us into arrest and ruin. But Jack was safe in the little eyrie he’d created for himself, the four walls of his studio apartment papered in chinoiserie and objets d’art perched on every windowsill. A pair of pretty parakeets chirped in a silver cage as he poured us jasmine tea. When I’d asked for a drink, Jack told me he’d given up alcohol completely on the advice of his doctor. Though he hid it well, I wondered if there wasn’t a touch of jaundice beneath his makeup.

  “The Colonel lied to me, Jack. At least, he let me believe a lie. I thought we had an understanding, the two of us. I thought we were alike. Now I don’t know what to believe.”

  Jack lit a cigarette and placed it in an ivory holder. “It seems to me you’ve got nothing to complain about, Albert. He knew you were a pansy and kept you on all these years regardless. And he did leave you a tidy sum. Nothing compared to Helen, though.”

  “The reporters all assume she was his mistress, no matter how much she denies it.” I shifted a pillow, trying to get comfortable on his Victorian divan. “Anyway, the family didn’t want any of it coming out in probate court. They still haven’t forgotten the scandal of Cornelia’s elopement.”

  “But that was last century.” Jack crossed his ankles, Turkish slippers peeking out from the velvet folds of his dressing gown.

  “It’s all about appearances with them. The Astors can get away with anything, they’re old money, Protestants, real Americans. For all their wealth, the Rupperts were strivers, foreigners, Catholic beer brewers for God’s sake. They never felt American enough to live down a scandal.”

  “But it’s a new world nowadays, Albert. No one cares about that kind of thing anymore. When you thought he was queer, well, that was a secret worth keeping. But a baby with a housemaid? That’s a story as old as Abraham.”

  I let our visit linger as we caught each other up on our mutual friends. Toni and Edith had sold Antonio’s to some mobsters and moved out to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Paul’s benefactor had signed over the deed on Waverly Place before he and his wife decamped for France, where they lived modestly on the small income they had left after the Crash. We both agreed it had been good of the man to set Paul up like that, but even though he had the deed free and clear, a dancer couldn’t afford property taxes on a Manhattan town house any more than he could afford rent. Needing to find a way to make the house pay for itself, Paul had partnered with Geneviève to open the Greenwich Village Academy of Dance. Their marriage, though, had been a shock.

  “I’ll tell you, Albert, of all our friends, Paul’s the last one I’d have picked to marry a woman. It was sweet of them to invite Jacqueline to sing at the wedding.”

  I finished my tea. “Do you miss being her?”

  “I can’t say that I do, really. She had a good run. She paid for all this.” He waved the cigarette holder around the room, as lovely as the inside of a jewel box.

  When Paul proposed to Geneviève it was just business, but that business now bound them together more closely than most married couples. They slept in separate bedrooms, of course, and they each had romantic affairs with other men (even, occasionally, the same man), but the town house was their home, the Academy of Dance the fruit of their partnership. It made me think of Helen. She’d already given me her power of attorney and invited me to live with her. It was a small step from there to the legal bonds of matrimony. Maybe that was why, when I called my mother to tell her I was canceling my telephone number, I asked her to send me my grandmother’s wedding ring, a gold band set with diamonds and rubies. I had it in my pocket when I finally closed my apartment and headed up to Eagle’s Rest.

  Helen met me at the station in the caretaker’s old truck. She was wearing flannel trousers with boots and one of my old sweaters, which hung boyishly on her frame. I teased her that she looked more like a farmer than an heiress. The caretaker had been teaching her about gardening, she said, and she’d been learning to cook. “My mother calls and talks me through the recipes. I guess I’ll have to move her up here eventually, if you don’t mind, Albert. She hasn’t been evicted yet, but Clarence thinks it’s only a matter of time until someone at Ruppert Realty notices there’s no income from our apartment.”

  Turning through the gates of the estate, we passed between the two enormous eagles perched on either side of the drive, their metal wings outspread. I remembered going out to that junkyard in New Jersey with Helen to purchase the statues, salvaged from the old Grand Central Terminal. The Colonel had them hauled up here on a barge, four thousand pounds of cast iron apiece. They were more intimidating than welcoming, but I couldn’t imagine it would ever be worth the effort to have them carted away.

  We pulled up to the mansion, the lawn dotted with crocuses, the river winking and sparkling in the sun. Helen switched off the engine. “Welcome home, Albert.”

  The next day we drove into Carmel to file the papers that would give Helen title to Eagle’s Rest. The registrar of deeds was out to lunch when we arrived, so we wandered the oak-paneled hallways of the courthouse to pass the time until he returned. “You two must be looking for a marriage license,” a helpful clerk said. “Follow me.” Before we could explain, the clerk had ushered us into a room and handed us a form. “Did you bring your birth certificates?”

  “Darling, you have them in your handbag, don’t you?” I looked at Helen, my expression as serious as I could manage.

  “But, dearest, I thought I saw you put them in your pocket.”

  “Did you?” I patted my jacket. “Oh, but I changed jackets when you said it might rain. I’m so sorry, we’ll have to come back another day.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a professor from the college, aren’t you?” the clerk said. “They’re so absentminded. Come back soon, there’s a three-day wait after I issue the license before you can marry. If you get your blood tests today, you’ll have the results by then.”

  If that was all it took, I thought, why shouldn’t Helen and I get married? There was no one else in my life, and it would be
a shame for her to end up a spinster. We’d have a partnership, like Paul and Geneviève. Together at Eagle’s Rest we could carry on as before, living in the Colonel’s mansion and spending his money, but instead of serving him we’d dote on each other. We could even adopt a child, once Helen was Mrs. Kramer.

  We found the registrar returned from lunch and concluded our business. As Helen drove us back to the estate, I said, “Why don’t we?”

  “Why don’t we what?”

  “Get married.”

  She stared at me so intently she swerved into a ditch, stalling the engine. “Do you mean that, Albert?”

  I took her hand, suddenly emotional. “I can never be everything you’d want in a husband, but you know I love you, don’t you, Helen?”

  She put her hand on my cheek. “I love you, too, Albert. I can’t imagine my life without you.”

  My heart ballooned in my chest. “Is that a yes?”

  She nodded and we hugged each other. A passing truck blared its horn at us, half on and half off the road.

  That night over dinner (Helen had attempted pork chops) I patted my pocket nervously, wondering when would be the right moment to present her with the ring, which I figured could do double duty as both engagement and wedding band. I’d been thinking about the ceremony. We wouldn’t want anything fancy, not at our age or in our circumstances. I was sure a justice of the peace here at the estate would suffice. I supposed Helen would want her brother there, but Rex was a baseball scout in Cuba now and I didn’t want to wait for him to book passage from Havana. My own mother had told me, when we’d spoken on the telephone, that she didn’t want to travel, saying she’d prefer me to visit later with my bride. Just Helen’s mother, then, though that seemed a small party. Perhaps we could invite Mr. Nakamura and his American wife. It crossed my mind to ask Jacqueline to sing, but I nixed the idea. Marrying Helen meant leaving that life behind forever.

  I fingered the ring in my pocket. “Helen, darling, let’s talk about the wedding.” My voice echoed off the tiled walls of the basement kitchen.