A Summer Affair

by Susan Wiggs

  So he was fighting back. She felt each word like a physical blow. “How dare you?”

  “How dare you? Without my permission, you handed my son a shotgun and tutored him in shooting. You let him enter a bloody contest—”

  “And who is the worse for the wear?” she demanded, fighting back tears. “Not Lucas, at least not until you humiliated him by keeping him from finishing his first match.”

  He glanced down at the gun in his hand and then at Isabel. He no longer looked angry, but resigned, and that look of resignation was a death knell. Whatever it was they were building between them was gone; she knew it even before he spoke. “In a perverse way, I suppose I’m grateful for what happened here today.”

  She was having trouble breathing. Her throat and chest hurt with an ache she had never felt before. Even though she knew the answer, she wanted to hear him say it. “Why is that?”

  “Because I was about to…do something foolish,” he said.

  “Do you never do foolish things?”

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  Thirty-Six

  On her way home from the market, June Li went to the joss house she and her mother had attended ever since she could remember. Located in the Street of the Serpent in Chinatown, the building had a plain facade, unremarkable to the casual passerby. The rich interior always made June feel as though she was in the parlor car of a train. Not that she’d ever been on a train, but it was what she’d imagined it would be.

  She had always liked the joss house with its paper-shaded lanterns, statuettes of bronze and gold, painted pots and brass gongs. The smell of sandalwood incense hung in the air, clinging to the fringed silk curtains that separated the rooms. June shut her eyes and sent out the same silent plea she always did. She and Lucas wanted to be together forever. It seemed such a simple notion. Why was it so complicated?

  Someone stirred in the next partition. “There you are,” said a voice June recognized. Mrs. Clarice Hatcher. “Simon told me it was safe to meet here.”

  June was about to make her presence known when a man’s voice asked, “Can we speak freely?”

  “Indeed we can, dear.” Then Mrs. Hatcher murmured something June couldn’t hear, because the blood was pounding so hard in her ears.

  “…name is Isabel Fish-Wooten,” said the man called “dear.” “She brazenly introduced herself to me at the match.”

  At the sound of Miss Isabel’s name, June’s heart beat even louder. She didn’t move a muscle, though her knees ached on the thin cushion. Her mind whirled with indecision. Should she make a dash for the exit? Walk past and pray they didn’t recognize her? Wait until they left?

  They were whispering again. June willed her heart to stop thundering.

  “…name is Isabel?” Mrs. Hatcher asked, her voice like a knife. “So that’s her given name, is it? I knew she was slippery the first moment I saw her.”

  “We should never have left her that night,” the man said. “None of this would have happened.”

  “No matter.” There was a rustling sound. “She left this behind. I imagine she’d do anything to keep her secrets. Even disappear.”

  “What if she doesn’t?”

  “Then we’ll have to finish what we started that night. This transaction is too important. If it goes smoothly, we’ll never have to worry again.”

  “…act tonight. I’ve a meeting at my club and then I’ll join you.”

  June thought she might explode from holding her breath. Her heart hammered so loudly she was sure they could hear. There was no way to leave without being seen. Or perhaps there was. These people didn’t know her. To Anglos, the Chinese all looked alike. They even had stupid pidgin names for them like China-girl.

  She made plenty of noise gathering up her parcels. Then she walked past them, pretending she didn’t understand English. In the dim hallway, she passed a Chinese man who glanced at her, then looked again, harder.

  June recognized him from the charity ball; he’d been with the Irish giant. But maybe she’d be lucky. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her at all. She kept walking, a girl on a routine chore. She’d been doing it for years.

  She started breathing again, certain she’d escaped. Then she felt someone jostle her from behind. She opened her mouth to scream, but it was too late. A hand holding a cloth was clapped over her nose and mouth. She recognized the sharp reek of chloroform on the cloth, for it was a substance Dr. Blue used in his practice. She tried not to breathe it in, but the dizzying effects of the heavy, toxic liquid overpowered June. Her legs seemed to melt into her feet. A strong arm choked her throat and she was sucked into a doorway. She didn’t even feel herself hitting the brickwork floor.

  Lucas sat ramrod straight on the bench seat of the buggy. Beside him sat Miss Isabel. Father was on her other side. His saddled horse plodded along, tethered behind as they all headed home.

  The Shooting Club members and guests would celebrate late into the night. This was the final tournament of the season, and according to Lucas’s friends, honors would be bestowed, toasts drunk and challenges made for the coming year. That, of course, was the least of Lucas’s present worries. In truth, he didn’t care about the celebration.

  A cool wind swept up from the bay, stirring the first autumn leaves from the tree branches that arched over the roadway. Lucas considered remarking upon the weather, but decided against it. If he knew what was good for him, he’d never speak again. He’d never even breathe again.

  His father didn’t storm in anger or yell. He simmered quietly, a steam engine on the verge of overheating. This would not be a good time to tell his father what he’d bought at the trading fair at Russ Gardens. Revealing his new acquisition—a short barreled Angleton pistol and loop of bullets—would most assuredly not improve his father’s mood.

  He kept the gun concealed inside his coat, but honor compelled him to speak up. “It was all my idea. I wanted to go shooting.”

  “I have no doubt of that.”

  “He couldn’t have done it without me,” Isabel said with a loyalty Lucas didn’t feel he deserved. “He’s gifted at the sport. Had he been permitted to finish the contest, he might have taken home a prize.”

  “My son has better ways to spend his time.” There was not one shred of pride in Father’s voice. Instead, there was the promise of a lengthy lecture on trust and responsibility, and no doubt a litany of corrective activities that would make the work at St. Mary’s look like a holiday.

  “The members of the Shooting Club invited me to a party at the Grove Street house tonight,” Miss Isabel said with determined cheerfulness. “There’s quite a celebration planned.”

  “You’re free to go,” Father said in a flat voice. He stared straight ahead at the road.

  Miss Isabel tossed her head and laughed. The ribbons of her bonnet fluttered in the wind. “I just might do that to celebrate my victory.”

  Despite Father’s fury, she’d insisted on finishing her match and indeed, she’d come from behind to win the ladies’ division. Lucas admired her determination. He knew Father had upset her, but somehow she managed to focus solely on her performance and had outscored Mrs. Hatcher, the local favorite.

  She patted the reticule tied at her waist. The garment used to belong to Lucas’s mother, but he couldn’t imagine anyone but Miss Isabel wearing it. “Money is so very useful, isn’t it?” she said with a grin.

  “What will you use it for?” Lucas asked, hoping to deflect the topic from the shooting match.

  The long pause made him nervous. Father still kept his gaze glued to the view between the team’s bobbing heads. The narrow hill leading home stretched endlessly to the sky.

  “I suppose,” she said after a while, “that I could buy a ticket to my next destination.”

  More silence, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Lucas forced himself to ask the next question. “Where will you go?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been mad to see the Sandwich Islands, way out in the Pacific, but perhaps I
’ll simply go down to the wharves one day and see which way the wind blows.” As if to underscore the comment, leaves from the pollarded birch trees along the roadway drifted down, early casualties of summer’s end.

  “When will you be back?” Lucas asked, then wished he hadn’t. He sounded like such a child. But in the short time he’d known Miss Isabel, he’d come to like and admire her intensely.

  “I never return to places I’ve already been.”

  “Never?” he couldn’t help asking.

  “Never.”

  He cast an almost desperate look at his father. Stop her, he wanted to yell. She’ll stay if you ask her to.

  He knew it was true. Something had happened to his father since Isabel had come into their lives, something Lucas had never seen before. His father liked her. Perhaps he even loved her. If he spoke up now, she’d stay. The special spell she cast over the entire household would last a lifetime. He was sorry he’d told her earlier that his father would never remarry.

  But maybe he was right. His father simply drove onward, his gaze steady on the hill. Miss Isabel chattered away about the day’s festivities. Lucas sensed an edge in her voice and a suspicious brightness in her eyes. She was working so hard to seem carefree that she was betraying herself, at least to Lucas. It was a picture of hurt he recognized too well.

  Once home, he volunteered to put up the buggy and team, and his father neither protested nor thanked him. Working alone in the livery, he whistled between his teeth. Despite his father’s fury, Lucas was happy with his performance today. He loved shooting. It was hard and he was good at it. He intended to do more of it, with or without his father’s permission. And that was not the only change he intended to make.

  It was time, past time, for him to go out and find his own life. Father would forbid it, of course. But Father’s interdicts only made Lucas more eager to defy him. He was through asking permission, waiting for approval. An idea formed in his mind, abstract at first but then firming into a plan so concrete, it seemed inevitable, as though it had always been there.

  He was leaving.

  The rebellious thought buoyed him, and he didn’t want to go up to the house just yet. He decided to think up some excuse to find June. At this hour, she’d probably be in the tiny row house where she lived with her mother, across the way from the livery in the service alley. Day maids and laborers carrying tools trudged home from the big houses on the hill, and a gang of kids were playing in the roadway. Men loitered on the stoop of one of the larger houses, and some of them didn’t resemble laborers at all, but shifty characters from Barbary. Lucas ignored them as he passed, slipping through the shadows of the close-set buildings.

  Mrs. Li’s ground-floor flat was painstakingly neat and nondescript, like dozens of others along the row. Here lived the servants of people like his father. But Lucas was so used to thinking of June as someone in his world that he rarely imagined her in a world of her own, living a life entirely separate from his. Unlike his friends’ parents, his father took a casual attitude about the hired help. Others held Celestials in suspicion and contempt, and were appalled that Dr. Calhoun treated them as any other patient when they came to him for help. He approved of including June in lessons when they were small. Lucas grinned just thinking about the fun they used to have, writing messages in code on their slates and pulling pranks on the tutors. Even though Chinese children were forbidden to attend public school, Father encouraged June to expand her education and her dreams.

  When he remembered that about his father, Lucas had to work harder to keep his resentment kindled.

  He knocked tentatively at the low red door to the house. There was a shuffling sound, then Mrs. Li opened the door. When she saw him, she didn’t even give him a chance to fumble through some invented excuse for being here. He hadn’t even decided on one yet.

  “June is gone,” she said. She was dressed to go out, in her smock and head scarf and tiny shoes with carved soles. Her eyes held a world of worry.

  “Gone where?”

  “She went to the market and joss house hours ago, and she is not back yet. She is a good girl. She never fails to come home.”

  Her calm voice didn’t fool Lucas; she was worried. He knew only vague details of Mrs. Li’s background. He knew, for example, that the “Mrs.” was a courtesy and that she’d never had a husband. Once, he’d asked June about the scars on her mother’s arms, but June just shook her head and refused to speak of it. Given Mrs. Li’s un-swerving devotion to his father, Lucas guessed that life had not always been good to her, that she’d been mistreated in ways he could scarcely imagine.

  What he could imagine was the sort of trouble a girl like June Li might encounter down in the city. The waterfront was riddled with shadowy places where young girls came to harm. Chinatown was a place of mystery, where an unsuspecting victim might disappear and never come out. He was suddenly acutely aware of the gun in his inner coat pocket. It was a hard, solid, welcome weight.

  “You’re on your way out to look for her,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  She slid a glance down the block at the loitering men. “There could be trouble.”

  He squared his shoulders. “That’s exactly why she needs me.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Isabel paced her bedroom in agitation while holding her hand pressed to her chest. “Something’s the matter with me,” she said to Bernadette, who had come ostensibly to help her change out of her afternoon suit, but really to hear the gossip from the shooting match.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bernadette, folding down the coverlet. “Are you ill? Shall I fetch the doctor?”

  Isabel gave a despairing little laugh. “Certainly not. I believe he’s the cause of it.” Holding the bedpost with one hand and keeping the other against her breastbone, she sat down on the edge of the bed. So this is what heartbreak feels like, she thought. It was a special agony, something she’d never felt before—deep, intense, invisible. Impossible to ignore. Or to cure. No wonder it was the topic of so much story and song. No wonder it was called heartbreak. Something inside her had broken, and she had no idea how to put it back together.

  “Oh, dear.” Abandoning her task of fluffing the pillows, Bernadette sat down beside her and spoke in a soothing tone. “You’d best tell me all that happened today.”

  Isabel tried to keep control. The old Isabel would have known how to protect herself. She would have turned the entire disaster into an amusing anecdote. She was supposed to take all of life as a grand adventure. Nothing was supposed to hurt her. But the old Isabel was gone, and in her place was a new person who had discovered new ways to feel, to hurt.

  She looked into the housekeeper’s soft, kindly eyes and the dam burst. The whole story poured from her in a flood and Bernadette absorbed it into her ample bosom, all the pain and shame and confusion of the day. The excitement of the tournament. The strange encounter with Dr. and Mrs. Vickery. The tense contest with Mrs. Hatcher. Her adoring, motherly feelings for Lucas. And then Blue’s arrival, his quiet rage that penetrated to the bone.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she confessed in a damp whisper. “He scarcely spoke a word all the way home, yet he managed to make me feel two feet tall.”

  “When you love someone the way you love him, dearie, you don’t ever want to hurt him.”

  “He wasn’t hurt. I was hurt. Lucas was hurt. He was—” She stopped, and wonder and horror broke over her in equal measures. That was the special quality that gave his anger its power, she realized. It was fury borne of hurt. “Bernadette. Heavens, you’re right. I betrayed him.”

  “Ah, no.”

  “I introduced the person he loves most in the world to the sport he despises most in the world.”

  “Did you know how he felt about guns and shooting?”

  “I do now.”

  “But when you went shooting with Lucas, you didn’t know.”

  “That doesn’t mat
ter. A responsible person would have asked.”

  “Look on the bright side. It’s a sure sign he loves you.” She offered Isabel a folded white handkerchief.

  Dabbing at her cheeks, Isabel said, “That makes no sense at all.”

  “Sure it does, dearie. If he didn’t love you, he couldn’t possibly be hurt by you. Why do you think he’s gone so many years loving no one save Lucas?”

  Because he doesn’t want to feel the way I’m feeling now, Isabel realized. Her mind and heart filled with the revelation, swelled and overflowed with amazement. She finished drying her face, then stood and brushed out her skirts. “Where is my reticule?”

  “In the dressing room.” Bernadette followed her, all but clucking like a hen. “Isabel? What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  She paused in the doorway to the dressing room. Now that she had a good sum of money in her possession, she saw her path clearly before her. Really, the solution was perfectly simple. Turning to Bernadette, she said, “You know.”

  “Ah, no.” The maid tried to wedge herself into the doorway. “You’ll not be leaving us.”

  “What would you have me do? Keep hurting him? Wait until he throws me out?”

  “How about staying? When there’s enough love, anything can work.”

  It was a fairy tale. She should know better than to believe it. But in a small, hidden corner of her heart, she did. “How do you know when there’s enough?” she asked.

  “You don’t. And wouldn’t life be a sorry prospect indeed if a body always knew what was coming next?”

  Blue didn’t ordinarily drink hard liquor, but at present he craved something as strong and harsh as the anger he felt at Isabel. He headed for the San Francisco club because it was close to home, yet far enough from Isabel to give him room to sort out his feelings about her.

  It didn’t work out that way, though. The moment he arrived at the elegant club, the doorman recognized him and hustled him inside. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor,” the doorman said.