by Tom Murphy
“It’s quite a hoard, isn’t it, Lily? The spoils of war, you might say.”
Jack Wallingford had come up behind her, unseen. Lily started, and turned to him, frightened. She vividly recalled the incident of Tess Reilley and the stolen knives, and prayed young Mr. Jack had no such ideas about her.
“Oh! Forgive me, sir. You startled me.”
“I’m sorry, then, Lily, for I didn’t mean to.” He looked at her, and smiled a small but friendly smile. His dark eyes seemed to look right through her, and beyond her, but maybe that was just a trick of the light.
“Well,” he continued, “it seems the sweet young newlyweds will not have to face the cruel world empty-handed, doesn’t it? Have you ever seen so much junk?”
Lily frowned. The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. She had never sensed any enmity between Mr. Jack and his sister, nor had she heard of any in the backstairs gossip. But the bitterness was there; it, surely, was no trick of the light. Something was bothering Mr. Jack. Lily felt helpless, for whatever might be his trouble, sure and there was no way in all the world for her to help him out of it.
“It makes a fine show, though, doesn’t it, sir?”
“That’s just what it does. It makes a show. At any given moment, Lily, half of New York is giving a performance for the other half, which pretends not to notice, because it, in its turn, is also performing. They just never take their masks off even for a moment.”
“If you say so, sir. And if you’ll excuse me, it’s too long I’ve tarried, admiring Miss Marianne’s presents.”
“Lily?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You’re getting to be a very pretty girl.”
No man ever said that before, and sure I am that Jack doesn’t mean it. “Oh! Thank you, sir, I’m sure.” Still, Lily blushed, and cast down her eyes from his. She turned then and walked out of the enormous ballroom as fast as her feet could carry her. Mr. Jack was a devil with the girls, there was no secret about that! But what had made him say she was pretty? Lily never thought of herself as ugly or pretty or anything but Lily Malone. Susie was pretty. You could see that in the way men looked after her, even the fickle Patrick. Well, and hadn’t Pat tried to kiss her, kiss Lily, just a few weeks ago? Still, that signified nothing, for Pat would kiss a horse if there was nothing better at hand.
Lily’s head was whirling as she made her way back to Mrs. Wallingford’s rooms, trying to sort out what might be disturbing young Jack, trying to forget that he’d called her pretty. And an unfamiliar sensation went tingling through her: the lovely, dangerous possibility that it might be true. It would be a fine thing, she decided, to be pretty. Lily thought that beauty must be a gift from the gods, a thing you were born with or not, like being born rich or poor, Irish or Dutch, a baron or a beggar. You could not, surely, go and buy beauty in a shop, or learn it the way you might learn to cook, or to speak French, or to sew. I’ll ask Susie, she thought. Susie will know what I truly look like, whether Mr. Jack was making a joke of me.
Lily did ask her friend, and that very night. Susie McGlynn regarded her gravely.
“Stand up.”
Lily stood, trembling a little in her nightdress, for the drafts of January found their way through the pretty round window, mansion or no. Susie walked slowly around the younger girl, one finger thoughtfully in her mouth, frowning, angling her head, poking here, pulling there. For a moment Susie said nothing. Lily’s worst fears were coming true: she wasn’t pretty, not at all, and her friend was too kind to tell her. At last Susie spoke.
“I think there is hope, Lil.” Then she burst out laughing, scooped up a feather pillow, and gave Lily a great whack over the head.
“By all the saints in heaven, you silly goose, can’t you see it, Lil? Pretty? Sure as the Lord made angels you’re pretty, my girl. And more than that, maybe much more. Most women would kill for hair like yours, Lily Malone, and don’t you forget it. Why, just the other day Patrick was saying how you’re fair to blooming just like your name says, into our own lovely Lily, says he, rogue that he is, and were I you, girl, I’d stay away from his stables, for he’d be glad to work his lustful will on you, that he would.”
Lily shuddered: whether from fear or from pleasure, she could not tell. “Do you mean it, Sue?”
“About Pat? I know it!”
“No, goose. About me. I’m not ugly, then?”
The answer was laughter, but Susie’s laughter held no mockery and no hurt. “I wouldn’t lie, Lil, you know that.”
“I never thought of it before. About being pretty.”
“And you’re better for that, make no mistake. Who wants a woman who’s forever fussing and regarding herself in mirrors, and primping and all? No real man, I’m sure of that.”
“Not even Pat?”
“Especially not Pat. You should hear him carrying on about Miss Marianne and her pals, especially now that she’s about to become a baroness and all that. But aren’t you the sly one, Lil? Who’s the lucky gentleman who put you up to all this thinking about how pretty you are or aren’t? For don’t try to tell old Sue there ain’t one. Is it that Chaffee lad, now? Sure and he’s a fine one!”
Lily’s heart froze. No one, not even Sue, will learn my secret, not if I die. “No. It isn’t that. I just wondered.”
“Ah, you’re no fun, then, Lil. Keep your secret if you will. You’ll never fool me that there isn’t some fine Irish root sproutin’ all hot and passionate for you, to make you go on so.”
“And what may that be, an Irish root?”
More laughter. “Get on with you, Lil, there’s no use pretending. I’ll make it a riddle, then: it don’t grow in the ground, but it do grow, and mightily, and whenever you see it, there’s surely a man not far behind!” And Susie laughed more at her cleverness, and left her friend to blush.
Lily sighed and turned off the lamp, for her very innocence embarrassed her. And as she climbed into the narrow bed, her mind was churning with many conflicting emotions, with doubts and with fears. Maybe Sue’s right, maybe I should be having a fling with some lad. Am I not almost eighteen, and a young woman already, and aren’t plenty of girls younger than me married already, and with kids? But Lily’s memories of her own mother and her terrible losing battles with poverty and sickness were too recent and too bitter for the idea of marrying some boy of her own class to be an appealing one. Yet what else lay in store for her? To be the maid for some rich lady all her life, or to end up like Mrs. Groome? You’d eat, it wouldn’t rain on you, but what was there besides that? No freedom, surely, all but a slave you were, if the truth was told. A shop! That would be an answer. Her old dream might not be such a bad one, after all. And weren’t the Wallingfords themselves shopkeepers, when it came to that?
Thinking of a shop made Lily think of her little nest egg, carefully saved through all these years at the Wallingford house, nearly fifty dollars it was now. Maybe her dream of a little shop could come true after all! Lily had never confided this dream to Susie, or to anyone since Fran had up and gone to work in Brooklyn Heights. Fran! How long ago that seemed. Well, sure and it was long ago. Three years now, come June, she’d been in the Wallingfords’ employ.
Lily drifted off to sleep in a haze of doubts and hopes that seemed to advance and recede, shimmering, all silvery, as if reflected in that old French mirror that someone had given Miss Marianne as a wedding present. And her last thought before sleeping was a warm and happy one: Master Jack thinks I’m pretty!
Mrs. Wallingford smiled the smile of a tired but victorious general.
“My dear,” she said to Lily, who knelt pinning the train of the mauve satin gown her mistress would wear at the reception, “if we survive this wedding, we can survive anything.”
“Surely, madame, it will be a grand day for the Wallingfords.”
“I hope so, Lily. I surely hope so.”
The great day was only a week away now, and it seemed to Lily that no anthill or hive of bees could have been busier than t
he Wallingford mansion, both above and below stairs. For months the plans had fluctuated on a wild scale that ranged from merely lavish to downright imperial. Finally the guest list had been frozen at one hundred, the maximum number that Louise calculated could be fed a truly deluxe eleven-course supper following the reception. The limited number appealed to Mrs. Wallingford’s newly heightened sense of exclusivity. Let all of New York wonder who’d be asked! Let them dream of invitations to the most celebrated wedding of the year! Mrs. W. frankly gloried in it, drank it like some nectar of the gods. How little had she dreamed, waiting upon some of the very dowagers who now sought her company, helping John Wallingford build the Emporium to its present state of physical and financial splendor, that her wildest dreams of social achievement would be realized and—yes!—even surpassed. For this day, this wedding was her achievement, solid and real as any marble building a man might erect, negotiable as gold and diamonds, a landmark clear as anything printed on a map.
Tonight, Lily knew, was a grand ball given by young Mrs. Astor for the betrothed couple. A ball given in Marianne Wallingford’s honor, and by an Astor! They’d all be there, and in their newest and most impressive finery. Miss Marianne would wear her new gown of emerald-green silk moiré with its breathtakingly low-cut bodice specially designed to set off the ancestral emerald-and-diamond necklace Baron West had presented, as an engagement gift, eighteen flawless round-cut emeralds drowning in diamonds, and the green stones big as robins’ eggs, priceless, as Mrs. W. herself said, who surely had reason to know about such things. There’d be diamonds in Miss Marianne’s hair, too, for Lily herself would arrange it, and more diamonds upon her wrists and fingers. And her mother would glitter only slightly less, for Marianne was to be the star attraction of the ball, even though the triumph was rightly accorded to Mrs. John Wallingford, barons being prized only a whisper less than dukes of the realm. All the family would be out, then, and in an extra burst of generosity Mrs. W. had decreed it would be a servants’ holiday too, they’d all been working so hard lately. For three weeks now, special guards had been engaged to protect the wedding gifts. The event had gotten so much publicity the Wallingfords feared for robbers. So the guards would remain, and the footmen, and all the rest of the staff were free to do as they liked.
Lily found herself with nothing to do, and nothing she wanted to do. Susie had a new lover, a footman who worked three blocks away. She took advantage of this unexpected holiday to go sparking and larking with Freddie, for that was the boy’s name. Lily had never met the estimable Freddie, but from the sound of him, he was Patrick all over again, a dashing lad with a roving eye and a gift for useful promises. Still, he lit a glow in Susie’s eye that Lily hadn’t seen there for almost a year now, and who was to begrudge the girl her fling? Surely not Lily Malone. But the novelty of the event had worn off now, and for Lily the wedding was but another great chore to get over and done with as best she could.
Lily fixed herself a cold supper from Louise’s amply stocked larder, read Mr. Groome’s newspaper, and decided to finish up a gown she was letting out for Mrs. Wallingford, who seemed to grow ever more plump as her social horizons expanded. The kitchen clock read nine. The gown was in Mrs. W.’s room. Lily climbed the back stairs and opened the door in the paneling that led to the great marble hallway.
The hall was silent, dimly lit, an occasional gas light flickering off the highly polished marble, dancing on the gilt of the railings. For an instant Lily thought the dark figure standing at the railing was one of the statues. But no! There was no statue there. The figure moved. He was coming toward her. Lily froze, all set to scream. A robber. Just as they’d feared. Knowing the house would be empty. They’d kill her for sure! She stood stiff and quiet as the marble statues themselves, praying to all the saints he wouldn’t see her, trying with every atom of her being to make herself invisible. The words came at her out of the darkness.
“It’s only me, Lily. Don’t be frightened.” Jack Wallingford walked up to her, silent in his carpet slippers. He was wearing everyday clothes, an open shirt with no tie, and a heavily embroidered smoking jacket of wine-colored silk with red and blue Chinese dragons chasing each other across his chest and right around his back.
“Thank goodness, sir!” Lily almost fainted with relief, for truly she had thought her time had come. “I thought it was robbers.”
He laughed. “Well, God knows there’s enough to rob, isn’t there?”
“Sure and there is, sir. Are ye not going to the ball, then?”
He looked at her across the shadows with a look of bottomless despair. When his voice came, it was more like a gasp, like something ripped out of him by force.
“No, Lily, I didn’t feel up to it.”
“Are you not well, sir? Can I be getting anything for you?”
“Ah, that’s kind of you. No…yes! There is something. Come with me, Lily.”
Obediently, and not really thinking about it, she followed him up the marble stairs, stairs she hardly used day in and day out, to the third floor, where his rooms were, and his sister’s rooms. Lily knew the rooms, although her new duties as Mrs. Wallingford’s personal maid no longer required her to clean them. Jack had a small sitting room with a fire, a bedroom, and a dressing room that included a real bathroom, with heated running water and a genuine toilet! That was a marvel to Lily, for backstairs they all used washstands and chamber pots, and many had been the chamber pots that Lily had emptied in her first year at the Wallingfords’.
The house seemed to grow more quiet as they climbed the stairs. Jack said nothing, but merely opened the door to his rooms and stood politely aside as she entered.
There was a small coal fire glowing in the hearth. The brass fender gleamed from continuous polishing. There was a small leather Chesterfield sofa, deeply tufted and inviting, and two wing chairs covered in old green tapestry, all leaves and birds and flowers. A small mahogany table held a decanter that was cut like diamonds, and an amber fluid, and several small glasses. He motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, Lily.”
She said nothing, but only sat, primly, on the edge of the big soft wing chair, poised for flight. Jack picked up the decanter and poured two glasses full. He handed one to Lily. She looked up at him doubtfully. No member of the family had ever offered her a drink before.
“Oh, sir, I couldn’t, thank you very much.”
“Don’t be silly. You could and you shall. After all, Lily, it’s the old gent’s finest cognac.”
He grinned, and something in her responded to the deviltry in him. There was Fergy’s grin, to the life. Well, what harm was there, really? Lily didn’t like strong spirits, nor beer either. Still, she lifted the glass.
“Cheers. Tonight we celebrate a great and noble event, Lily.”
“And what would that be, sir?”
“Aha! What every New York mother dreams of. Tonight, Lily, we celebrate the grand and solemn launching of my sister’s career as a certified prostitute.”
“Sir! You can’t mean it.”
Lily looked at him, deeply shocked. He must be joking! But there was a dangerous look to him that told her he was deadly serious.
“If only I didn’t. If only and only and only.” He lifted his glass so that the firelight danced through the amber-colored brandy. Then he drank the whole glass off in one swallow.
“You know, of course, what a prostitute is, Lily?”
“Yes, sir, and more’s the pity.”
“Sells herself, that’s what. Well, that’s just what we seem to have here, a very fancy whorehouse, and Miss Marianne Wallingford the star attraction.”
“That’s not true, sir. I can’t hear you say it.”
Lily stood and put down her glass, untouched, and turned to the door. Crazy, that’s what he was, downright loony. Suddenly her hand was caught and held by his hand, and she was surprised at the strength in him.
“No, Lily. Stay. Hear me out. I’ll fair go mad if I don’t have someone to talk to. Will
you do that for me?”
It was a plea more than a command, the voice of a small boy lost without hope of finding himself, and something in that little boy’s voice struck an immediate response in Lily. Slowly she sat down again, sat a little farther back in the chair now, and picked up the glass and drank a tiny sip. The cognac first burned, then numbed her tongue, then warmed her throat, hurting and pleasing all at once. She waited.
“It’s a business arrangement, pure and simple. His title for Marianne’s money. There’s no love in it, Lily, only surface and show and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. Why, the buggering baron doesn’t even like girls, did you know that? Little boys are his style, the bastard.”
Lily sat there as if in a dream, warmed by the fire on the outside, and by the cognac inside. He truly loves his sister, she thought, or else he wouldn’t care so very much. And maybe what he says is true, after all. Maybe she is no better than a common hooker. The thought was so entirely new to Lily that it shocked her as much as it pleased her. In God’s eyes, after all, what would be the difference? Selling yourself was selling yourself, and if there was a marriage ceremony involved, did that truly make a difference? Pieces of paper changed hands between common street girls and their clients too. Maybe it was different if a fine girl like Miss Marianne had only one customer, and was married to him. Still and all, to marry without love, wasn’t that a sin? Or shouldn’t it be? She thought of Susie, generous with her love and with her body. And was Susie sinning, and who made one set of rules for fine folk and another for the rest of us?
