by Joanna Scott
“You what!” Sir Maxwell rises from his chair, unable to resist the challenge, hearing in his head his own voice chant, Not mine a race of craven blood, for when pushed to the wall he’s a proud old dog. “Do you know who I am?” He picks up the newspaper and smacks it back down on the table. “Can you even guess?”
By now the scene Sir Maxwell had wanted to avoid is drawing wondering and disapproving glances from around the room; the waitresses have stopped serving, the customers have stopped talking, and Sir Maxwell stands at the center of attention, pathetic in his rage.
“Good God,” he says, blotting sweat away with a napkin, “I’m mistaken,” for in a flash he has understood. “The boy, you see, your boy Johnson, he must have misheard my question. I was asking about...about...” He searches the room and points: “Her! The little beauty!”
All eyes follow the line of his forefinger a few yards to Gabriella Brown, who alone among his audience is smiling knowingly, her satisfaction prompting Sir Maxwell to see her for a passing instant as the perpetrator of a successful dupe.
With somewhat forced laughter, he and the maître d’ put the pieces back into proper order while Gabriella watches from a distance. Sir Maxwell learns her name and repeats it quietly to himself while the maître d’ whispers, “She’s a dandy server, but what an oddball!” touching his forehead to indicate the source of her strangeness. “The owner took a fancy to her when she came in to apply for the job,” the maître d’ explains. “He didn’t much care that she kept her thoughts to herself. Hired her anyway.” As in most such cases of doomed love, her mysteriousness only makes her more intriguing to her infatuated customer, and over a refreshed drink, compliments of the house, Sir Maxwell lets himself begin to hope that when he finally leaves the restaurant, he’ll leave with her.
BY THE TIME THE TWO AUNTS ARRIVE at the restaurant, Gabriella, finished with her shift for the day, is on her third martini and looking more beatific than ever, a captive audience, apparently, to Sir Maxwell, who is boasting about the bottle of port he brought to General Franco—put down in 1853. Sir Maxwell has been sipping whiskey sours since lunch, and now the tip of his nose is the same blush red as the candied cherry in his drink. “Ho, ho,” he laughs, oblivious to the similarity between himself and that old charmer Saint Nick. The aunts watch quietly for a few minutes. When they see that he’s casting his spell with Bombay gin and that the twinkle in his eye has an avaricious gleam, they decide to interrupt.
“Precious Gabriella,” they sing, taking turns squeezing her chin in their plump hands and kissing her cheeks. “Are you well?” the elder asks, and the younger chirps, “Are you done for the day?” and then they tell her about their luck at the track, clearly expecting no reply from the girl, happy just to have her listening intently, that look of calm interest on her face enough to make the most tedious subject seem marvelous. And without pausing in their account, they each take an arm and lift Gabriella right out of her chair, for they intend to catch the 6:05 from Pennsylvania Station.
“Hello there, not so quickly!” Sir Maxwell cries, placing his bulky self in front of the women.
“Pardon me, Santa,” says the elder sister.
“We have to go,” says the younger.
“But we’ve been having a jolly time,” he persists. “Don’t take her away.”
“We have to catch a train.”
“So if you’ll excuse us.”
“Why don’t we let the lovely girl decide?” Sir Maxwell suggests.
“Ah, that will be one day!” retorts the elder.
“The day,” corrects the younger, attempting to nudge Father Christmas out of the way with her elbow. But he won’t be budged; neither will Gabriella, who is useless when it becomes necessary to direct a situation toward an appropriate conclusion. The aunts will have to reckon with this opponent themselves—they’d better make quick work of him or they’ll miss their train.
Gabriella slips back into her seat while the old women contemplate Sir Maxwell. “Shall we...” begins the elder.
“Play?” fills in the younger.
The elder huffs; the younger shrugs. Then they grin the grin of familial conspiracy, and their faces suddenly seem flooded with light, as though a window shade has been raised nearby.
“I suppose there’s time,” says the younger.
“There is always time,” replies the elder.
“For cards,” explains the younger.
“We do like cards.”
“A freeze-out game of five-card stud”
Sir Maxwell looks perplexed.
“A matchstick game,” the elder declares and then rattles off the rules: two players, bets no higher than twenty, outside dealer, and the winner wins the right to accompany Gabriella for the evening.
Sir Maxwell is muddled by the proposal. “You are...are you serious?”
“Of course we are,” says the elder sister with a snort while the younger announces, “Certainly.”
Sir Maxwell needs to think. With the stakes so high, he can’t refuse. Unless this is a joke, at his expense. The whole country seems privy to the joke. Sir Maxwell, the foreigner, is trapped. But if he plays and wins...? All right, then—he accepts the challenge, though he insists on using a deck supplied by the restaurant and appointing the dealer himself: who else but Gabriella! She tucks her face against her shoulder for a moment as if to hide her smile.
“Are you able?” Sir Maxwell asks her. She nods.
The aunts see nothing wrong with these terms, so they pull chairs up to the table. The busboy appears with a deck of cards. Once the glasses have been cleared, the game begins, with the younger aunt opposite Sir Maxwell and the elder aunt sitting to her sister’s right. Gabriella treats the cards with a tenderness an ordinary girl would save for an arrangement of flowers. Sir Maxwell lifts the card she lays facedown in front of him, sniffs it with dreamy pleasure, and puts it back on the table. The younger aunt examines her card while the elder looks on, then she returns it to its place, and together they let out an enigmatic sigh when their first upturned card is the king of diamonds.
“You did say two players, ladies,” Sir Maxwell reminds them, and the elder aunt leans back and folds her arms beneath the precipice of her bosom. The younger counts out six matchsticks; Sir Maxwell sees her and, upon being dealt the ace of hearts for his third card, raises her ten. She sees him and, to Sir Maxwell’s obvious delight, folds when she’s dealt the five of clubs.
He collects the pot and blows a kiss to the dealer. She lays out the round of hole cards and gives Sir Maxwell the advantage, the ten of hearts, on the next round. He bets twelve matchsticks. The elder aunt fans herself with a menu; the younger ponders her new card, the eight of spades, as though it were a chess piece. “I’ll see you and raise you five,” she says. Sir Maxwell counts out five matchsticks and pushes them toward the center. The elder aunt lights a cigarette and passes it to the younger, who inhales deeply as Gabriella deals her a second eight, the eight of clubs. The younger aunt counts out fifteen sticks. Sir Maxwell raises her five. Her fourth card up is a jack, and she raises him ten, then calls. He turns over a pair of aces, but the aunt wins with a pair of eights and a pair of jacks.
By now the busboy, the maître d’, the bartender, an assortment of waitresses, and even a few customers have gathered to watch the game. Gabriella lightly taps the cut deck of cards against the table and deals the hole card to each player. Sir Maxwell’s second card is the king of hearts, giving him the advantage again, but this time he checks the bet and passes to the aunt, who bets a cautious five matchsticks on her seven of clubs. Gabriella deals Sir Maxwell another king, and he counts out twenty matches. The aunt receives the ten of clubs and sees him. Sir Maxwell’s fourth card is the five of diamonds, the aunt’s the jack of clubs. Sir Maxwell bets another bold twenty matchsticks to make up for his losses. The aunt receives a fourth club and raises him five. Sir Maxwell raises her with the rest of his matchsticks and calls. At the very least, she has a four-card flush,
which will beat a pair of any rank, if that’s all the gentleman has. But the gentleman has three grand kings, God save them! And the lady? She turns over a mere deuce—but a deuce of clubs!—and with a definitive humph gathers the matchsticks into a tidy pyramid in the ashtray, strikes one against the flint of her empty matchbox, and lights the pile. The flame flares, sizzles, and collapses into a compact ball of fire.
“A fair-and-square freeze-out,” she declares. “You understand, yes? In this game when you lose, you lose, Mr....Mr....”
“Smedley-Bark.” His despondency works like a noxious smell upon the crowd, dispersing it.
“Well, Mr. Bark, hats on to you.” And out go the two merry ladies clutching their beautiful grand-niece between them and loving her more than ever.
AND HE, battered old heath cock, has given up all hope of happiness. He could come back here tomorrow; he could order the lamb chops and a whiskey sour and invite the girl named Gabriella to join him at his table when she’s through with her shift. But the effort would be useless. It doesn’t take a philosopher to understand the girl’s deception.
When he thinks upon her smile,
O Misery, his heart is liquid fire.
When he thinks upon her soul,
O Treachery, he knows her for a liar.
He can’t be sure that she cheated at the game and dealt the old woman a winning hand, but he does know that if she’d wanted him to win, if she’d wanted him, she could have made it happen. He would have won if she’d desired it. Desired him. That smile. Instead, she let him lose. He’d empty his mind of a lifetime’s worth of memories in order to forget her. He tries, stares at the mural scene on the restaurant’s wall of cowboys mauling Indians, thinks of nothing: the nothing in place of the girl. Not holding her. Not ever making love to her. His resolve slackens, and he lets himself imagine her wherever she might be: walking, no, half-skipping like a child along the sidewalk toward the steps leading down to the subway. She descends two steps at a time. Hop, her legs disappear from his view beneath the lip of the entrance; hop, her hips are out of sight; hop, she’s gone altogether, lost in that black hole where Sir Maxwell Smedley-Bark, dependent upon servants and chauffeurs, diplomats and chairmans, presidents and dictators, has never ventured.
So he can’t follow her, not even in his imagination, onto the train, through the tunnel, across the Meadows, and into New Jersey. He can’t picture her arriving at home, where she is greeted at the door by her mother, Clara, who feigns confusion: “Gabriella, we weren’t expecting you. Well, you’re here, so come on in”—her performance so convincing that the younger aunt forgets herself and says, “But Clara, you told us to bring her along,” while Gabriella walks ahead into the darkened living room, as content as ever and just a touch unsteady from the martinis.
Surprise!
Back in the restaurant, Sir Maxwell is contemplating a life that will never include the girl named Gabriella, who at that same moment is being celebrated in the house on Rogers Avenue in Marwood. The family emerges in a pack from the dining room, the children rush forward to grab Gabriella’s legs, her brothers and their wives dance across the rug, Uncle Trip trips with his intentional clumsiness over a footstool and lands on the sofa, Uncle Tony wears his cap at a tilt until Clara grabs it from his head, Gabriella’s father holds the cake lit with twenty candles, and the aunts stand with their arms around Gabriella’s waist while she shakes with soft laughter, clearly grateful for the party and yet amused, as though she thought love a comic thing, the grandest jest a person could play on the world. And while no one in the family really knows what she is thinking, they don’t care, for together they have created this serenity, nurtured it, and will go on protecting it, keeping their treasure to themselves.
ACROSS FROM THE SHANNONSO
While my aged father slept soundly in his bedroom at the back of our apartment and my husband danced to Johnny Messner’s band at the McAlpin with his mistress, her featherweight polka-dot dimity flaring smartly as she twirled, and while the Simms sisters in 3D argued in their kitchen about the volume of the radio and Therese Poulee snored her delicate French Canadian snore in 3B and the Latvian bachelor in 2A wrote a poem about foxgloves and the captain’s wife pleasured the captain in 2D and in the basement Mr. Gonzales dreamed of the sea and on the first floor the Webbers and the Peets and Glenn McDuff all settled deeper into sleep, a man and a boy stole across the lot that separates our building from the Shannonso Hotel.
I have to do some presuming in order to piece together the circumstances of that night, but I know this much without a doubt because I saw it from my window while I was brushing my hair: in the lot between our building and the Shannonso, a man dressed in a light blue Palm Beach suit led a boy by the hand. Moonlight and neon brightened the sky, but the brick bulk of the sixteen-story hotel drenched the lot in shadow. From my window I could see the two figures moving quickly, furtively, between the cars. At one point the boy stumbled and almost fell, and the man wrapped his fingers around the boy’s wrist to steady him.
Neither of them said a word as they approached our building. Their silence was as inevitable as the vaporous mist that rolls off the Hudson on warm spring nights, as our country’s declaration of war, as the pounding of my heart. A glance from a fourth-floor window would have told you this much and more: the boy down below had taken if not this exact journey then similar ones many times before. And maybe at the same time you’d have sensed, as I did, the presence of a second man; maybe you too would have caught the whiff of cigar smoke drifting from the sky and realized with a start that someone else was waiting on our rooftop.
I lost sight of the pair beneath the fire escape, but I could anticipate to the second the time it would take them to reach the platform outside my window. I pressed myself against my bedroom wall as the man climbed past. He drew in a wet suck of air and pivoted to climb the last flight. When I renewed my watch, the boy was directly in front of the window, which I’d left open a few inches to let in the cool night air, and he snapped his head around to look at me. As our eyes met, he shook his head slightly, as though to indicate that I should look away. But I would see what I could, and more.
He sprang to life then, struggled to find his footing on the metal steps, and was lifted by the man in a single motion. He rose to the top of the fire escape as though secured to a huge elastic band, disappearing over the lip of the roof.
Ordinarily, I mind my own business. I shake my head and cluck my tongue and go back to sleep. That’s easy enough to do when it’s my husband dancing at a downtown hotel with his mistress or the Simms sisters fighting over the radio. But when the problem appeared right outside my bedroom, I figured it was time for me to get involved. So that’s what I did. That’s why my tea shop, Scarooms, is no longer. That’s why you’re not sitting by the window looking out on traffic and sipping peppermint tea as you read this.
I slid each foot into a pink slipper and grabbed my father’s raincoat from the rack in the hall, draping it over my shoulders. When I stepped out of my apartment, I stupidly let the door swing shut and lock with a click behind me. That click was my first warning, a sign that I should have left destiny alone. But I just headed for the stairs, telling myself that if I couldn’t wake Daddy by pounding on the door, then I could climb down the fire escape from the roof and enter our apartment through my bedroom window.
The second sign I chose to ignore was the stairwell lightbulb, which burst with a pop when I pressed the switch. I persisted, climbed stair by stair through the pitch-black to the rooftop door.
The third sign was almost enough to dissuade me: the metal door was locked, as usual, but in the darkness I couldn’t find the key ring hanging on the wall. I poked around blindly, searching with my hands, and felt the nail where the ring usually hung but didn’t find the key ring there. I slumped onto the top stair and wondered what I’d been hoping to accomplish. Velma Dorsey in her pink cotton nightgown to the rescue?
The sound of my breathing was absorbed
by the thick air. A distant, inexplicable ping, the sound of glass against metal, rose from the floors below. I thought about my husband dancing with his mistress. I thought about the previous afternoon, when my crazy old dad had threatened my husband with a shoehorn. I thought about the look in the boy’s eyes as he stood outside my bedroom window, and I realized right then that I was sitting on the key, which must have fallen free from the ring.
After a fair amount of struggle, I managed to fit in the key and turn the lock. I eased open the door and stepped outside onto the roof.
I GREW UP in a village at the bottom of Chariot Mountain in the Alleghenies. My father worked as a handyman; my mother was best known for her tendency to daydream. Her friends resented the fact that she didn’t bother to go to church or to stanch the rumors that her husband was an atheist. My father, who insisted that people should believe whatever they want to believe, argued that anyone with any sense must recognize the world to be pitiless, disappointing, raw, without intention, and life no more than a series of mistakes and inadequate reparations. In his opinion, it was a mistake for me to marry Ted Dorsey, whom I met at a party while visiting a cousin in Philadelphia, and it was an even bigger mistake to move with Ted to New York City. But Daddy didn’t try to stop me. He just wrote me weekly letters cataloging the dangers of the big city and advising me to be careful crossing the street.
I found work as a hostess at a Broadway coffee shop, but I kept my eye on the failing delicatessen located in our apartment building, and when the deli finally went out of business I leased the space. Three months later, I opened Scarooms. In the years since then, I did just enough business to turn a small profit. My tea shop didn’t attract the guests from the Shannonso as I’d hoped it would, but between the occasional customer wandering in off the street and residents of the building stopping in, Scarooms was seldom empty, though just as seldom bustling.
