Mrs. Glenn gave me another long look. “You’d be more comfortable on your own, I’m sure, but if you’d rather have our company it’s fine by me.”
“Next.” The ticket agent called Mrs. Glenn forward. I glanced up and realized we were at the COLORED window. I’d been about to offer them the empty place in my compartment. I’d forgotten that, down south, Horace and his mother wouldn’t be allowed aboard the first class sleeping car.
“You two traveling together?” Apparently, standing in the wrong line was all it took for the white agent to see me as black. My ticket was in my pocketbook. If I bought a new one here, I’d be giving up a comfortable bed, drinks in the lounge, restaurant service—but at least I wouldn’t be alone. “Yes we are,” I said.
We boarded the car immediately behind the diesel engine, picking our way past luggage racks to sit beside one another on a hard bench. I felt like an imposter as the other passengers all gave me a second glance. None gave me a third, though, and I began to relax. For the first hour or so, Horace was content to kneel on the bench and stare out the window, but as the views became familiar he took a pad of paper and a box of crayons from his mother’s basket and settled himself cross-legged on the floor, contentedly drawing colorful scenes. When he said he was hungry, my stomach growled in sympathy. There was only one table on this side of the kitchen to serve the entire colored compartment, and it was booked solid. I hadn’t thought to purchase anything on the platform when we’d stopped in Gainesville, and it would be another two hours before we arrived at the next station.
“I brought along plenty, Mrs. Weldon, we’ll be happy to share, won’t we, Horace?” I agreed, but only after she promised to let me treat the two of them to a late supper during our layover in Jacksonville.
Once his stomach was full, Horace fell asleep, stretched across our two laps. Mrs. Glenn twirled locks of his hair with her fingers. Whispering, she said, “Horace’s daddy is bright like you. Didn’t his parents throw a fit when he brought me home! After two generations of careful marriages, they were counting on passing their grandchildren off for white. No chance of that with me for a daughter-in-law.”
“Mrs. Glenn, I hope you won’t be offended, but I have to be honest, I’m not black. I just didn’t want to travel by myself.”
She gave me a sharp look. “Well, it hardly matters what you started out as, Mrs. Weldon. If you’re married to a black man, the white world won’t want anything to do with you, am I right? Why don’t you tell me how you met this husband of yours.”
Since I’d claimed Jimmy as my son and stolen Clarence’s name, it seemed easiest to use a true story from my childhood. Telling it was like traveling back in time. Our last names both starting with the same letter meant that Clarence and I were always seated near each other in school. In sixth grade, he was in front of me and a Polish boy named Wronski was seated behind me. “On the very first day of school,” I told Mrs. Glenn, “that horrid Wronski boy took one of my braids and dipped it in his inkwell. When I bent over my desk, my braid rolled right around my shoulder and ruined my new school blouse. I was too afraid of the teacher to raise my hand so I just sat there, crying. Well, Clarence saw what happened. He didn’t say anything to me, but when we were walking home he pulled that Wronski boy into an alley and gave him a punch to the gut. No one ever bothered me again, I can tell you.”
Mrs. Glenn smiled, satisfied with my fairy tale. “And you’ve been in love ever since. You two were lucky to be living up north. Even so, I can’t imagine it’s been an easy life.”
It wouldn’t have been an easy life, she was right about that, but for the first time I realized it wasn’t inconceivable. There were no laws against it, not in New York anyway. I’d always assumed my mother’s horror at catching me and Clarence kissing had been because of his race, but it occurred to me now it was my parentage she was thinking of, not his. Even then she must have hoped Jake would one day recognize me as his daughter. No wonder she’d sacrificed her life savings to bribe that surgeon. She’d calculated Jake would never be so generous to a girl who’d had an abortion—let alone a girl in love with a Negro. She must have been thinking of my inheritance more than the color of Clarence’s skin when she forced that bar of soap between my teeth. Sweat chilled my palms as I realized how the course of my entire life had been scripted to prepare me for the role of heiress.
My hands were shaking as I picked up one of the magazines the porters had given out. It was the most recent issue of The Crisis. Idly flipping through the pages, I looked for an article to occupy my thoughts. I started reading about the new Harlem Community Art Center. It sounded like a wonderful place, an interracial effort to bring all kinds of arts to the neighborhood. I should have volunteered to teach there instead of the settlement house. It was too late now. When I’d called from Florida to say I was returning without Albert, my mother told me the eviction notice she’d predicted had finally arrived. I was only stopping in Manhattan long enough to help her pack. She’d be moving up to Eagle’s Rest with me. We’d make a sad pair: a scheming widow and a bitter spinster in a dead bachelor’s mansion. Now there’s a Dickens novel, I thought.
But maybe I could write a different story. I’d told Albert we could do whatever we wanted with Eagle’s Rest. Why not start an art school of my own? The barn was big enough for a theater, and the parlor could be a classroom. The view of the Hudson would make a fine landscape for painting. Goodness knows there were enough bedrooms. If the children bunked together in groups of four or five, I could enroll fifty students and still have rooms for staff. I shifted Horace off my lap so I could take some paper and a pencil from my pocketbook. I’d need supplies—I started a list that quickly grew to be two pages long—and teachers, too, for academic subjects as well as the expressive ones. I’d need someone to supervise the cooking and cleaning and ordering. My mother, I thought, would be perfect for the job. It occurred to me I’d never wondered before what career she might have pursued if she’d been given a choice and a chance.
But where would I get the students? I picked up The Crisis again, leafing through the back pages. There were advertisements for all kinds of courses and degrees—sewing, teaching, agriculture, bookkeeping, secretarial—but there wasn’t one for a school of the arts. I looked at Horace’s drawings. They were wonderful. Perhaps he’d be my first student.
When we disembarked in Washington, I asked Mrs. Glenn for her address so we could correspond. Horace presented me with one of his drawings and I said I’d treasure it. There was a layover at Union Station while the train reconfigured, the colored car uncoupled and sent back south, the remaining black passengers integrated according to their class. I got back on board using my original ticket. It was strange, but I felt more like an imposter being fussed over by the porter in my private compartment than I had riding in that segregated baggage car. I spent the three hours to New York writing Albert a long letter detailing my plans for turning Eagle’s Rest into an art school, determined to show him he wasn’t the only one with a vision of the future.
James was in the lobby when I walked into my apartment building. I’d so recently been remembering him as a little boy it disoriented me to see how close he was to becoming a man. He surprised me by throwing his arms around me. “Dad told me you’re going to pay for my college. I don’t know how to thank you, Aunt Helen.”
“Just do your best and make us proud, that’s all I ask.”
“I hope I can make him proud. He’s already gotten the books for some of my courses from the library so he can study along with me, in case I need his help.”
I’d been seeing Clarence with a mop in his hands for so many years, I’d almost forgotten he held a teaching degree. “I bet you won’t have a single professor who’s smarter than your father, Jimmy.”
“That’s the truth. It’s too bad he ended up wasting his life as a custodian.”
But it wasn’t a waste, I told him, and anyway, his father was only forty-two years old, the same as me. His life wasn’t
over yet. Neither was mine, I thought, as Clarence came walking toward us. There was a dusting of gray in his hair now, a certain sag of skin beneath his chin, but he still moved with the posture and purpose of a soldier. It had never been possible, before, for me to imagine a world in which he and I might be together. But I was an heiress now. Three hundred thousand dollars, an estate on the Hudson, a third of the Yankees: it straightens a woman’s spine, having all that to call her own.
“Has Jimmy told you he’s set his sights on Howard University instead of City College? I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind, Helen, him going away to school.”
“You go anyplace you like, Jimmy, and don’t worry about the cost. We’ll call it the Colonel Ruppert Scholarship, how about that?”
He hugged me again then ran off to tell his grandmother. Clarence and I were suddenly awkward together. I didn’t understand why until he took my hand, pinching the ring Albert had given me. “You’ve finally done it, then? You’ve married him?”
Across the lobby, the elevator opened. My mother stepped out, saw us together, stopped. I read the disapproval in her eyes, but I was done letting her stage-manage my life. I’d be doing my own directing from now on.
“No. Albert’s staying in Florida, actually. He gave it to me as a keepsake, is all. It was his grandmother’s.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Helen.” He twisted the circle of gold until my finger was free of it, then placed it in my palm, closing my hand around it. “I was afraid it might be too late.”
But it wasn’t too late, not for any of us. Stepping closer, I rested my forehead against his rib cage. Inside my heart, a new room opened, folding back the shutters from its windows.
Author’s Note
On January 21,1939, the front page of the New York Times proclaimed the surprising news that an unknown ex-actress had inherited a fortune from the millionaire owner of the New York Yankees. While this true historical circumstance was the inspiration for Bachelor Girl, and while Colonel Jacob Ruppert was a real person, this book is a work of fiction. The novel does not pretend to reveal the truth behind the mystery of why the real Jacob Ruppert left a fortune to a woman who was known as, and only ever claimed to be, his friend. The mystery was, to me, not a puzzle to be solved but an enigma that sparked my imagination.
Many of the historical details related to the character of Jacob Ruppert in the novel are true—for example, the real Colonel Ruppert, a lifelong bachelor and president of his family’s brewery, had an estate on the Hudson River called Eagle’s Rest, built Yankee Stadium, and signed Babe Ruth. He really did live in a mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 93rd Street in Manhattan, employed a Japanese valet, owned a stable of racing horses, showed prize-winning Saint Bernard dogs at Madison Square Garden, kept a zoo of exotic animals, and sponsored an Antarctic expedition. His sister Cornelia really was shunned by her parents for marrying Nahan Franko, a divorced Jewish musician; after she died of appendicitis, her parents took possession of the coffin containing her body without her husband’s knowledge or consent. And on January 30, 1921, the New York Times really did report that Jacob Ruppert had picked the Harlem site of the actual Hebrew Orphan Asylum to build Yankee Stadium.
I have used these historical details fictitiously to invent the character of Jacob Ruppert you meet in the novel, whose thoughts, words, actions, and motivations were all invented by me. While I conducted extensive research as part of my process for writing this novel, I had no access to (nor any knowledge of) any diaries or letters or personal papers related to Jacob Ruppert or the Ruppert family. I often left out or rearranged biographical details related to the real Jacob Ruppert to better serve the fictional story I am telling.
The characters of Helen Winthrope and Albert Kramer are creations of my imagination who occupy the historical spots once held by real people about whom I know very little. The only connection the characters of Helen and Albert have to any real person is their first name and their position relative to Jacob Ruppert: one as his heiress, the other as his personal secretary. Like Helen and Albert, Felix Stern, Teresa Winthrope, Clarence Weldon, Bernice Johnson, and many other characters you meet in the novel are fictional.
The historical characters you encounter in the novel, including Babe Ruth, Claire Hodgson, Miller Huggins, Charles Gilpin, George Ruppert, Eugene O’Neill, and Lou Gehrig, are all used fictitiously. The story of Babe Ruth’s adopted daughter, Dorothy, is based on Dorothy Ruth Pirone’s own 1988 memoir My Dad, the Babe: Growing Up with an American Hero. Yankees fans will know that the baseball game depicted in chapters five and six is a fictional one; I have attempted to depict subsequent games accurately.
The novelist’s job is to create a world that the reader can experience as real, whether that world is in the future on another planet or in the historical past here on Earth. The verisimilitude of the novel’s world allows the reader to believe in the characters who live there, to care about what they do and what happens to them. In turn, caring about fictional characters allows readers to practice a powerful kind of empathy by making friends of strangers and inviting them to inhabit our minds and hearts. Thank you for inviting the characters in Bachelor Girl into yours.
Acknowledgments
Infinite gratitude to Mitchell Waters for believing in this story since it was a mere paragraph, and to Steven Salpeter and everyone at Curtis Brown, Ltd., for making me feel so at home. Abundant thanks to Tara Parsons for seeing the potential in these pages, and to the entire team at Touchstone for supporting the novel in such spectacular fashion.
I am indebted to the many friends and family members who read and gave feedback on the novel in progress, including Anna Drallios, Jennifer Glenn, Marie Hathaway, Alex Hovet, Mariel Martin, Nancy Middleton, Rita van Alkemade, and Petra Wirth. Particular thanks to my colleague Neil Connelly for his keen eye and generosity of spirit.
Thanks also to Saint Basil Academy in Garrison, New York, for giving me an extensive tour of Eagle’s Rest; to Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck, New York, for allowing me to wander the grounds; to William Krattinger, Historic Program Analyst at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Preservation; to the archivists at the New York Public Library and the National Baseball Hall of Fame; and to the librarians at Shippensburg University for supporting my research.
I gladly acknowledge the profound influence of historian George Chauncey’s groundbreaking book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 on my conceptualization of this novel. The short story that inspires the play Helen produces in the novel is “A Chance to Make Good” by John L. Harrison, which was published in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in August 1918.
If you’d like to know more about the many historical sources that informed and inspired this novel, I invite you to explore my “Footnotes” blog at www.kimvanalkemade.com.
A Touchstone Reading Group Guide
Bachelor Girl
Kim Van Alkemade
This reading group guide for Bachelor Girl includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Kim van Alkemade. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
A mysterious bequest made headlines in 1939 when Jacob Ruppert, a wealthy brewer and owner of the New York Yankees baseball team, left much of his fortune to an unknown former actress named Helen. Inspired by this true-life event, Bachelor Girl imagines Helen’s story along with that of Albert Kramer, Ruppert’s personal secretary, and their unconventional relationship. Set against the dynamic backdrop of New York City during the Jazz Age, this intimate and intriguing novel explores the destructive consequences of secrets and the redemptive power of love in all its shapes and colors.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. For years Helen h
arbored animosity toward Colonel Ruppert because of his part in her father’s death. Why do her feelings toward him begin to change during the afternoon she spends with him and her family at the ballpark? Ultimately, how does Helen come to view Ruppert?
2. Even as a child, Helen rebelled against the traditional gender roles expected of women during her day. In what ways does the term “bachelor girl” apply to Helen? How successful is she in charting her own path?
3. Helen is devastated to learn that she was given a hysterectomy while undergoing emergency surgery. How much of an impact does her inability to bear children have on her life and the decisions she makes?
4. Share your thoughts on Helen and Albert’s relationship. Are they both equally invested in the relationship? How much of their connection is based on the fact that they each see themselves as “damaged”?
5. How significant are the various secrets kept by the characters in the novel? Do you agree with Teresa Winthrope’s decision not to tell Helen about her true parentage? Why do you suppose Colonel Ruppert never revealed his identity to Helen despite their close relationship?
6. Discuss the different views the various characters have about being gay, including Albert, Felix, King, and Jack. Albert believes there are two types of gay men—“dolled-up pansies” like himself and “the rough men our rouged faces were meant to attract” (page 122)—and that each plays his role. How does his relationship with King make him rethink this belief?
7. When Albert reveals to Helen that he is an “invert,” she infers that he is incapable of sexual passion. Does he mislead her, or does she misinterpret the situation? How does the medical opinion at the time that homosexuality is “abnormal” influence Albert’s concept of himself?
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