A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald

by Natasha Lester

  Charlie’s mirth had caught his father’s attention.

  ‘And I would prefer Charles to think more about his studies than the women who attend Harvard,’ Mr Whitman said. ‘Then he would spend less time on enforced breaks from university.’ Mr Whitman frowned at his son and Evelyn could see that Thomas really did look just like him, although less grave and also more open, warmer.

  ‘Oh, Charles can’t help that he has a mischievous side.’ Mrs Lockhart reached across and patted Charlie’s hand.

  Charlie cleared his throat. ‘I’ll give my full attention to my studies when I return.’

  ‘I’ve heard that many times before, Charles.’ Mr Whitman turned to Evelyn and said, affectionately, ‘You know why he’s here, don’t you? Too busy pranking to study. Perhaps if I hand him over to your care this evening I can hope to find him improved by the end of the night.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that –’ Evelyn began, but broke off when she saw Charlie’s face. He looked mortified to have his lack of studiousness brought to everyone’s attention, just as Evelyn had been humiliated when her mother launched her veiled attack earlier. She felt her heart soften a little. Perhaps Charlie hadn’t been himself today. His father had most likely upbraided him when he’d arrived back from Harvard, and he’d probably still been upset when they’d encountered Rose and the baby. That must have been what had made him seem so unfeeling.

  Before main course was served, Mr Whitman stood up and tapped on his glass. Evelyn expected the announcement of Thomas and Alberta’s engagement. Mr Whitman began to talk about Thomas, praising his hard work and Midas touch, which she didn’t think was all that relevant to marriage, and she only understood where the speech was going when Mr Whitman finally said, ‘I’d like you all to congratulate the bank’s new vice-president.’

  Thomas smiled at his father and received the combined congratulations of almost everyone at the table. But not his brother’s. Charlie stared at his wine glass with the same expression he’d worn when his father had admonished him. The evening hadn’t gone the way Charlie had planned; he’d been well and truly trumped by Thomas, in a way he clearly hadn’t anticipated, and now Evelyn felt sorry for him. She reached out her hand to touch his, to say, I understand, but he brushed it away and looked past her.

  ‘Richie!’ he called down the table to one of the men Evelyn had heard talking about her earlier. ‘Have I introduced you to Evelyn yet?’

  ‘You haven’t.’ Richie smiled, and Evelyn nodded at him uncomfortably.

  ‘She’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’ Charlie added.

  ‘She is,’ Richie agreed.

  This time, Charlie reached out for Evelyn’s hand. She let him take it, because Richie was watching and because she understood that Charlie didn’t want her pity, that he was trying to regain the dignity he’d lost in the conversation with his father and in Thomas’s promotion. She said no more at dinner. She smiled at Charlie. She received approving looks from her mother for her compliance. And she kept the restlessness that had been building inside her since the walk by the river and her conversation with Thomas tightly reined in.

  Once the plates were cleared away, Mrs Lockhart grasped the opportunity to show Evelyn off to her best advantage. ‘Why don’t you play for us? Charles, you always like to hear Evelyn play, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s one of my greatest pleasures,’ Charlie said, leading the way into the drawing room and taking Evelyn over to the piano. He took out the music for ‘I Love You Truly’. ‘My favourite,’ he said. ‘Especially when you sing it.’ Then he leaned on the piano and waited for her to begin the serenade.

  People gathered to watch the performance, and Evelyn heard someone whisper, ‘It seems that both brothers have found their match.’

  Evelyn started to play and she could see both her mother and Charlie basking in the reflected glory of her voice singing that the rest of life faded in the face of love. But it didn’t. No, as of tonight, life had suddenly become more vivid, a beautiful fan unfurling fold after fold of brightly coloured possibilities that she could pursue, if only she dared.

  The whiskey, combined with the champagne from dinner, had made her head spin and her vision blur. Suddenly, everything she’d been holding in, all the fears about Charlie and the ridiculous idea she’d discussed with Thomas, threatened to spill over. She stopped singing, recklessly shifted her hands and tried to pick out the tune to ‘Hot Lips’, a jazz recording she’d covertly purchased and only listened to at low volume when her mother was out of the house. It took her a couple of bars to get it right, and then she started to play it louder, the rhythm completely unlike anything usually played in a Concord drawing room. Her mother rushed over, as the guests stared at Evelyn’s musical outburst, and hissed, ‘What are you doing?’

  Charlie had stopped smiling too. His friends were laughing, probably at her, the provincial girl who didn’t know how to give a decorous after-dinner recital. Evelyn remembered what Viola had read to her that morning from the Ladies’ Home Journal, about the sensuous stimulation of the abominable jazz orchestra. Everyone in the room could do with a bit of sensuous stimulation. But Charlie’s hand was moving down to close the lid of the piano and cut off Evelyn’s song.

  ‘You’re right. We could do with something livelier now that dinner’s over. Would you help me choose something for the phonograph?’ It was Thomas. He’d stepped in front of Charlie and her mother and was offering to sweep her away from their censure.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered as she joined him at the phonograph. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I’m upsetting everyone, having conversations I shouldn’t, drinking whiskey, playing jazz.’

  ‘Is that really so bad?’ Thomas asked, but before she could reply he left her speechless by saying, ‘Besides, your voice is beautiful, Evie.’

  Chapter Three

  Her parents castigated her as soon as they arrived home. Her performance had been a disgrace – a rebuke that made Evelyn giggle although she knew she shouldn’t.

  ‘What’s so disgraceful about music with a bit of tempo?’ she asked.

  ‘If you put as much effort into securing Charles as you do into behaving inappropriately, then we’d all be celebrating an engagement right now,’ her mother said.

  ‘Papa?’ Evelyn looked across at her father, who could sometimes be more understanding than her mother. ‘Couldn’t I try university first? I could still marry later.’

  ‘Men with the pedigree of Charles Whitman don’t grow on trees,’ her father replied. ‘Your mother’s right.’ With that he left the room, taking the easy path, as he so often did, of not crossing her mother, whose strained silence if she didn’t get her own way was more uncomfortable than the loudest quarrelling.

  Her mother followed him out, and Evelyn understood that no further arguments would be permitted. She was to marry Charlie. Unless she took matters into her own hands. But, in the meantime, there was something else she had to do.

  Evelyn waited in her room until she was sure everyone was asleep. Then she crept down the stairs and out the back door, took her bicycle and cycled to the hospital. As she entered the building, she worried for a moment that someone from her father’s time as a doctor might be working and would recognise her, but then realised it would be unlikely – he’d given up his career soon after Evelyn was born, when he’d come into an expected inheritance from a childless uncle and thus become the gentleman her mother had always intended him to be.

  The corridors inside the hospital were quiet. Evelyn tiptoed along like a girl on her way to a secret meeting with a lover.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Oh!’ Evelyn clapped a hand to her mouth in shock, turning to see a figure standing in a doorway.

  The speaker was a young nurse. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We don’t normally find people walking the halls at night. Unless it’s the mad patients trying to escape.’

  ‘I’m definitely not one of those.’

  ‘I can see tha
t.’

  Evelyn laughed and relaxed. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  The nurse studied her. ‘You don’t look like the sort to have a very bad secret, so I’ll say yes. Come and have a cup of tea. I’m Anne.’

  ‘Evelyn.’

  Anne took her to a large kitchen and made two cups of tea that were as strong and bracing as a winter storm. They sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m looking for a baby.’ Evelyn hesitated, not sure how to say it. ‘A woman gave birth this morning. By the river.’

  Anne sipped her tea. ‘I heard about that. A tragedy. Poor little thing, to lose its mother before it knew her. Most likely the mother is better off, though. She could move as far away as the moon and the shame would still follow her.’

  ‘I wonder if I could see the baby?’

  ‘Well, you could except the baby’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘It was strange.’ Anne leaned closer and lowered her voice. ‘We don’t get many cases of that kind but ordinarily it takes a few days to organise and then the baby is sent to an orphanage in Boston. But this baby didn’t go to Boston.’

  ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘To an orphanage in New York. Probably the Foundling. It went by private car with a hired nurse and a chauffeur. Imagine that. It’s a funny thing to do when there’s an orphanage only thirty miles away. Someone didn’t want the baby close by, I expect.’

  Evelyn wondered if the nurse had read too many novels while working the night shift. ‘You think someone took the baby to New York so it would be far away from Concord?’

  ‘Yes. Someone’s done something they shouldn’t have and they don’t want anyone to find the evidence of their mischief.’ Anne stood up and motioned for Evelyn to follow her.

  ‘I found something of the baby’s on the path outside. I was going to get it washed and give it to the church. But you can have it if you like.’ Anne led the way in to a room stacked with linen. She opened a drawer and produced a white knitted bonnet. ‘I expect it fell off the baby’s head when it was taken out to the car. It’s not one of ours – whoever took the baby must have given it to the little mite.’

  Evelyn reached out her hand. The bonnet was soft and had one or two yellowing age spots. The ribbons were coming away from the wool and were frayed at the ends. Evelyn had the strangest feeling that she’d seen this bonnet before, but that was probably just the effect of Anne making a mystery out of everything. Most likely every baby in Concord had been given a similar bonnet when they were born, knitted for them by a doting mother or grandmother. Someone had wanted to give the baby a small piece of homespun love. But they’d also sent the baby to New York. Why?

  Anne was insistent, so Evelyn took the bonnet. She collected her bike outside the hospital. As she rode through the quiet streets, the bonnet in her coat pocket, she thought over the day. Her first instinct on seeing Rose had been to help. Not to run away. Her second instinct had been for the baby. Surely that told her something about herself? Didn’t Evelyn have an obligation to Rose and her child? An obligation to help desperate mothers before they died alone and in secret shame by silent rivers? But Evelyn knew of no woman doctors, let alone one who delivered babies. It was unheard of. Shocking. Not something Evelyn Lockhart would ever do.

  ‘Damn!’ Evelyn shouted into the night. If only she lived in a Fitzgerald novel, in a world where girls rode around in cars with boys, necking and drinking and breaking all the rules, and there wasn’t a damn thing their parents could do to stop them.

  The maid knocked on Evelyn’s door the next morning and passed her a note. ‘He said I shouldn’t give this to you at the table. He said it was private.’

  The envelope bore the Whitman seal. Evelyn took it with a feeling of dread. It most likely contained the proposal that hadn’t been forthcoming from Charlie last night after her jazz impromptu.

  The breakfast bell rang and Evelyn had never been so glad to hear the sound. It meant she had no time to read the note. She tucked it into her pocket and went downstairs. She listened as her mother and Viola discussed Alberta’s delightful manners and lovely hairdo, feeling every crackle of the letter when she moved. For once she wanted breakfast to last forever so she didn’t have to open the letter, but all too soon the dishes were cleared and Viola had left the table.

  ‘Do you think Charles’s proposal will come today, Evelyn?’ her mother asked.

  Evelyn touched her pocket. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sit beside me for a moment.’ Mrs Lockhart tapped the chair next to her own. She looked at Evelyn knowingly. ‘You’re concerned because you think you don’t love Charles.’

  Evelyn hadn’t expected her mother to be so perceptive. So she replied honestly, ‘I’m not sure if I do.’

  ‘You’ve always been a romantic. But love isn’t a requirement for happiness.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ Evelyn asked. She had to know if anyone else shared the same apprehensions when thinking of marriage, or if it was just her.

  ‘As happy as most people are. And if you’re worried about having to … entertain your husband, don’t be. After the first child …’ Mrs Lockhart stopped.

  ‘What? Tell me. If marriage isn’t so wonderful, why does everybody do it?’

  ‘Because it’s the way of the world. As a woman, it’s how you get a house. Money. Children. You’re my daughter. I want you to be looked after. There is no other way.’

  As her mother spoke, Evelyn could see her hopes written in the plainest of languages on her face. Her mother had little to look forward to, beyond a shred of gossip or a new dessert recipe for the cook to try, and it seemed to Evelyn that Mrs Lockhart believed her life, in the sense of having dreams and desires, was over and she had to grasp at these infrequent joys through the lives of her daughters.

  Evelyn felt her eyes fill with tears. When she had the ability to bring her mother some contentment by marrying Charlie, how could she be so cruel as to withhold it? But she plunged on, as she always did, asking one question more than she should. ‘What if there’d been a female doctor who could have helped you, in a hospital, with your babies?’ she said. ‘All you had was a midwife and a bowl of hot water, and me, holding your hand. What if things were different in the world?’

  Her mother stiffened. ‘What on earth are you talking about? A female doctor? Such a thing doesn’t even exist.’

  Evelyn averted her eyes. It would serve no purpose to correct her mother, to say that yes, there were a very few female doctors in the world and that Evelyn was wondering what it would be like to be one of them. Thankfully, Mrs Lockhart let her go.

  Evelyn took the letter that would surely decide her fate down to the private walk between the yew hedges. The day was sunny, birds were out sky-dancing, flowers were budding and the clouds had eloped with the rain. Over the wall, she could see the Whitmans’ apple tree.

  This could be her last moment as Miss Evelyn Lockhart, she thought dramatically as she sat down on the bench. The last moment before she moved to New York – if Charlie ever finished at Harvard – and took her place in society as a banker’s wife. She tried to picture Charlie’s face but instead, inexplicably, she saw Thomas, the way he’d looked at her when they talked in the tree last night. And then she thought of Rose and her baby, and her own fledgling dream of helping women. Of doing something, being more than Mrs Charles Whitman. More than a mother to the little Charles Whitmans.

  She opened the envelope and unfolded the letter slowly. She didn’t recognise the handwriting. Her eyes skipped to the bottom of the note. There, written in a bold flourish, was the name Thomas Whitman.

  Dear Miss Lockhart,

  I hope this note is not presumptuous but I felt I had to write it after our conversation last night. I know a respectable man in New York, a former tutor of Charles’s, who has also tutored some women to ensure their education meets the standard that universities such as Columbia require. His name is William Childers. Perhaps you could work with him to find out if you
r interest in science and your idea of helping women might become something more than an idea. I will send him a letter to advise that you may call on him in the future.

  You may also be interested to know that my mother is returning to New York next week and would be delighted to have you stay with her. She will send a letter to your mother inviting you to accompany her.

  Please disregard if this information is not of interest to you.

  Sincerely,

  Thomas Whitman

  Evelyn reread the letter. She folded it up and let out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. The relief that it wasn’t a proposal from Charlie! She put the note back in the envelope. Then she took it out and read it again because perhaps she now had a plan that excited her more than the prospect of marriage to Charlie ever had.

  ‘Thank you!’ she shouted excitedly at the Whitman house, even though she knew Thomas would never hear her. She couldn’t help but blow an impulsive kiss his way.

  What if she went to New York to see what might be involved in pursuing this unlikely idea of becoming a doctor? She could test her interest and her strength. She’d say that she was going to New York to shop. No one had to know what her true plans were. Not until she knew which life she wanted to lead, and which life she was prepared to leave behind.

  Chapter Four

  ‘What are you up to, my dear?’ Mabel Whitman asked as Evie settled beside her in the rear of the car, exactly a week after she’d received Thomas’s letter.

  Evie blushed. ‘I hoped nobody thought I was up to anything.’ She looked out the window as the chauffeur picked up speed and Concord passed by in a rush of pastel, the colours of candy and cake and childhood. ‘My plans are probably very foolish.’