Darting past Loretta, she raced to her room. She didn’t get the door closed in time, and Loretta followed her. She must have foisted Oliver off on someone in the kitchen because both of her arms were free when she threw them around Marjorie.
“Oh, Marjorie, whatever is the matter?”
“I’m an addle-pated gudgeon, is what’s the matter,” Marjorie said, her voice thick with tears. “And a nyaff, and an ass!”
“Good heavens.”
Wrenching away from Loretta, Marjorie flung herself onto her bed, sobbing. “I’m such a fool!”
She didn’t see what Loretta did, because her face was buried in her pillow, but she heard the door close softly. “What happened, Marjorie?”
The bed dipped as Loretta sat beside her. Marjorie rolled over and tried to wipe her eyes, but tears kept leaking out. And now she was going to have swollen red eyes to go with her fat cheek and broken nose. Life was perfectly hateful, and she wished she were dead. She said as much to Loretta.
“Oh, you poor dear.” Loretta hugged Marjorie in an effort to comfort her. “You’re such a wonderful person, and you have so much to offer the world. I’m so sorry you were attacked last night. It’s probably all my fault for allowing that poor girl to stay here.”
“Nae, it isna,” snuffled Marjorie. “It’s just . . . everything.” She couldn’t admit to having been seduced into an indiscreet kiss by Jason Abernathy. Or that she’d enjoyed it and wished it had gone on and on. That would be too pathetic an admission.
She heard the door open quietly and her heart fell. Oh, good. Just what she needed were more witnesses to her pitiful condition. She wiped her cheeks and eyed the door malevolently. She wasn’t surprised by what she saw. It was as if God had decided to heap coals of fire upon her head this morning for some reason beyond her ken, unless God just hated her for no particular reason.
Jason Abernathy stood there, in her bedroom, an expression of concern upon his face. She didn’t believe that concerned expression for a second and fell back onto her pillows with a groan.
Turning to see who had entered, Loretta said, “Oh, hello there, Jason. I think Marjorie needs to be examined. Her cheek is horribly bruised, and her nose is swollen.”
As were her eyes, although her self-respect had shrunk to about nothing. “Nae,” she muttered. “He needn’t bother. I’ll be fine.”
“Pooh,” said Loretta briskly. She would. A wail from the kitchen made her pop up from the bed. “I think the babies want to be fed. I’ll just leave the two of you here for a few minutes. Check her nose, Jason. I hope it’s not broken.” With a pat to Marjorie’s shoulder, Loretta trotted out of the room.
Abandoned again, Marjorie thought bitterly. She frowned at Jason. “Ye needna bother examining me. I iced my cheek last night and can do as much for my own nose, thank you.”
“Nonsense. Let me have a look.”
As if she had a choice, with the entire household parked right outside her bedroom door waiting to pounce if she should scream or shout at Jason or slap his arrogant face. With an aggrieved sigh, she sat up. “Do your worst.”
He sat next to her on the bed—a shocking thing to do, even for a doctor, in Marjorie’s considered opinion, not that Jason or Loretta would think so—and took her hands. “Please, Marjorie, what’s the matter? I hope you’re not holding last night against me.”
Through her swollen eyelids, she glared at him, thinking as you held me against you? But of course, he wasn’t thinking about the kiss. The kiss that had meant nothing to him and everything to her. He was talking about the attack upon her person by the two brutes, Bart and Frank. “Nae. I’m’na.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. Now, let me take a look at that cheek.”
So, her humiliation complete, Marjorie submitted to forces more powerful than she, and allowed the man she’d come to love—
Good Lord, she didn’t mean that!
With a sinking feeling in her heart, she feared she did.
Well, whatever her state of emotion regarding Jason, she allowed him to probe the bruise on her cheek, then stick his finger and a tongue depressor into her mouth and observe the cut on the inside of said cheek. How utterly and completely embarrassing.
“Hmm,” Jason noised. “I’d better dab some iodine on that cut.”
Marjorie said, “Uhk.” It was all she could say under the circumstances. Then she submitted docilely while Jason dabbed iodine on the inside of her cheek. It stung like fire, but she bore it without a whimper.
“Nasty cut,” Jason murmured, frowning. “I hope it heals quickly. It should.”
“Mmm.”
“Now let me take a look at your nose. How’d you do this?”
“Ran into the door.” Because she’d locked it against him the night before and had forgotten about it when Mrs. Brandeis screeched and woke her up this morning. Because of him. She didn’t add that part.
“How strange,” he muttered, reaching for said protuberance. When he wiggled her nose gently, it didn’t hurt much. “Do you often run into doors?”
“No.” She didn’t like having him this close to her. As he probed her nose, she had to stare straight into his sparkling, sapphire-blue eyes, and that made the impulse to throw her arms around him rise up in her like a persistent ache.
“Wonder why you did this morning.” His voice had gone softer. “Does this hurt?” He tweaked a little harder.
“No.”
“Good.” His hand moved sideways from her nose and caressed her cheek.
Marjorie repressed an urge to purr. She couldn’t account for why his amazing blue eyes seemed to be getting larger. Blinking because the sensation was so odd, she opened her mouth to say something—she didn’t know what—when suddenly she understood everything, because he kissed her. Sweetly and deeply and thoroughly. With a sigh, she sank back onto her pillows again, this time taking Jason Abernathy with her.
She’d completely lost track of time—and space and everything else—and could never afterward say what might have happened if a knock hadn’t peremptorily sounded at her bedroom door. Jason leaped to his feet as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Marjorie, dazed but noticing that her bosom was peeking out from her nightgown for all the world to see, snatched a pillow and covered herself with it.
“Aha,” said Loretta, grinning from ear to ear. “I see the examination is over.”
Marjorie was perhaps more shocked than she’d ever been in her life when Loretta deliberately glanced at Jason’s crotch. When she looked herself, she saw an enormous bulge, and felt herself go hot with embarrassment.
Chapter Eleven
“Marjorie’s going to take a bath now,” Loretta announced, coming back into the kitchen, whence Jason had fled as soon as he could. He heard the bath water running even as she spoke, in the bathroom between Jia Lee and Marjorie’s bedrooms. She added, “You sly dog, you.”
Acutely uncomfortable, he resented Loretta’s knowing grin. “It was a momentary aberration,” he muttered under his breath. “I need to examine Jia Lee now.”
“Momentary aberration, my hind leg.” Loretta added a snort to her caustic comment. “You’re in love with the woman, Jason Abernathy. Why don’t you just admit it and marry her.”
“Nonsense. Who said anything about marriage?” He shuffled around in his black bag irritably. Who’d said anything about love, for that matter. Love. Huh. “Where’s my stethoscope?” If he’d left it in Marjorie’s room, he might just have to buy another one. He’d be damned if he’d risk going back in there again. Not that Marjorie would let him.
Damn, he was a fool! How could he have been such an ass? And the worst part was that if Loretta hadn’t interrupted them, Marjorie would no longer be a virgin at this moment—and Jason would be staring matrimony square in the face with no way out.
Ah, there it was. “I have to examine Jia Lee.” Stethoscope dangling, he frowned at Loretta. “Shall I just knock on the door?”
Mrs. Brandeis and the maids had left the
kitchen, and Loretta was at present occupied in feeding the twins. Although Jason had never once, in all the years he’d known her, thought about Loretta as a particularly maternal woman, she certainly seemed to have taken to motherhood with élan. He was happy for her. Even though he was also angry with her at the moment for having seen him in a compromising situation with Marjorie. Damn it! How could he have done such a damned fool thing?
“Go ahead. Just be sure to shut the door after you. I’ll keep anyone busy who comes to the kitchen until you’re through.”
Marjorie had fled the house by the time he was finished examining Jia Lee. So had Loretta. It was Mrs. Brandeis who told him so, when he found her in the front parlor arranging a bouquet of fall flowers from Loretta’s garden.
“They trotted out together as happy as you please, to take a walk, she said, as if the missus hadn’t just born twins not a month ago.” The older woman shook her gray head in disapproval. “It’s scandalous.”
Although he didn’t feel the least bit jolly, Jason managed a laugh. “You ought to be used to Loretta by this time, Mrs. B. Anyhow, the twins are almost four weeks old. I don’t suppose a walk will hurt her. The exercise will do her good.”
The housekeeper sniffed.
And another thing about brisk walking was that it helped a person release pent-up frustrations. Jason feared it would take more than a walk or two to release his own frustrations, but he didn’t have the option anyway. He’d driven his Hudson to Loretta’s last night, and he supposed he had better drive it home again.
So, his breast seething with confusion, anger, and perturbation, trying to decide what the devil Marjorie meant to him, he cranked his Hudson, stomped on the low-speed pedal, flooded his engine, and swore. That didn’t help, either.
Nevertheless, and because the Chinatown situation was almost as much of a worry to him as the Marjorie situation, he decided to stop by his office before going upstairs to his living quarters above the clinic to change into clean, unwrinkled-by-sleeping-at-a-kitchen-table clothes.
As the Hudson approached the Chinatown district, Jason began to feel better. As little as he had been or ever would be accepted into the Chinese community in San Francisco as a member, he still understood it better than he did his feelings regarding Marjorie.
And, also unlike Marjorie, he could admit freely and openly that he loved it. He loved the food, the music, the colors, and the art. He loved the faint scent of incense that always and forever permeated the air in the neighborhood of his clinic. He loved the click of mah-jongg tiles and the chatter of men gambling in upstairs rooms that floated down into the streets.
He had loved Mai with his whole being. No matter what that damned little voice in his head kept implying, he had adored her with all the ardor within him. He’d redirected that ardor to his medical practice with some success. Marjorie had no place in his real life. Not in Chinatown. Not in his clinic. Not in his work. She’d be completely out of place there.
She did pretty well that night when the tongs battled, his pesky little voice reminded him. He told it to shut up. Everyone was allowed a deviation or two in his or her lifetime. That evening at his clinic had been Marjorie’s one and only deviation from a life of absolute conformity.
His heart sank when he started down Grant and he saw what was going on. Clustered here and there were groups of people. To a man—since there were no women on overt display—they were talking and pointing at something stuck on a lamp post or a wall or the side of a building. Without even being able to discern the object of interest, a tell-tale flash of red every once in a while told him what it was: a red sheet.
“Damn.” He supposed it would be too much of a coincidence for this particular red sheet, or murder-for-hire notice, to be unrelated to the Jia Lee incident of the prior night. What in the name of God was this going to mean for Marjorie? For Loretta’s entire household, for that matter?
He told himself that no one, as yet, knew for certain that Jia Lee was in Loretta’s house. If Marjorie was to be believed, and Jason told himself she was, she hadn’t let on by so much as a blink of her eye that she knew what the men were talking about when they asked for the “Chinese gal.”
Why in the world were they looking at Loretta’s house anyway? It didn’t make any sense. Loretta had for years agitated for her causes, but the Chinese problem hadn’t figured large among those causes. Sure, she wrote letters to the Chronicle and the Call decrying the Chinese Exclusion Act and demanding that it be repealed, but she was more apt to be vocal about women’s suffrage and unionization than that. So what spark of inspiration had led someone to direct his hatchet men to Loretta’s house?
The question was a vexing one, and Jason hadn’t solved it by the time he pulled the Hudson to a stop in front of his clinic, where another small crowd of Chinese men had gathered. As soon as they saw him, they hurried to surround his automobile, all asking him questions and waving red sheets at him.
With a sigh, he climbed out of the Hudson and greeted the men, all of whom were either patients or neighbors of his clinic. One of the men handed him a red sheet that had been torn off a wall. Jason read it with interest, his brows beetling.
“Who is this?” he asked, pointing to the Chinese characters that meant “Great Boss.” He’d never heard of this person before, and he’d believed himself to be familiar with all the tong leaders and their names and associates. Anyhow, no self-respecting Chinese would call himself Great Boss, for God’s sake. He’d use his family name. That was the purpose of the tongs in the first place: to provide social clubs for the various extended families.
“Nobody knows,” said Lo Sing, who had come outdoors to greet Jason. “I’ve never even heard of anyone called Great Boss. It’s absurd.”
A chorus of babble rose up around the two men. Jason held up a hand to stop the confusion. “Hold on. I can’t hear any of you if you all talk at once. Does anyone know who this is?” He pointed at the name on the red sheet.
Mr. Hsiu, a bent old man who had to use a cane, nodded, and Jason, deferring to him because of his age, nodded back. “Mr. Hsiu?”
A spate of creaky Chinese informed Jason that nobody knew who the Great Boss was. They only knew for certain that the man was white and that he dealt in importing girls from China and that people in Chinatown were afraid of him.
Jason heaved a huge sigh. “I’ve heard that, too. But nobody has any clue as to who he might be?”
Apparently they did not, or they weren’t saying. In so damned many ways, Chinatown was a society closed to him, a white man, even though he’d lived there for years. Feeling stymied and hating it, he asked the man who’d handed him the red sheet, “May I keep this?”
The man nodded, and the crowd began to disperse, mumbling and still chattering among themselves. Jason and Lo Sing went into the clinic. Jason sat behind his desk, sagging and discouraged. “What the devil’s going on, Lo Sing?”
With a shrug, Lo Sing said, “You have as much information as I have.”
Jason shook the red sheet. “Is this the same guy who brought Jia Lee to the States?”
“I guess so. It makes sense that it’s the same person. Of course, he’d not the only white man importing singsong girls, so maybe it’s not. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Jason didn’t begrudge Lo Sing the taint of acrimony in his voice. Jason was pretty bitter about the situation himself. “This is only going to make things worse,” he muttered.
“For a while anyway.”
This time both men sighed in chorus.
# # #
To Marjorie, it didn’t seem right that the world should go on as if nothing had happened in it, when her own personal life had just been tipped on its ear. From her obtaining the part of Mabel in Pirates, to Jason hiding a Chinese girl in the room next door to hers, to a couple of brutal thugs breaking in to snatch the girl away again, to Jason’s impassioned kiss, Marjorie was fairly certain her own personal world would never be the same again.
Yet M
rs. Brandeis still cooked meals, Li and Molly cleaned the house, Loretta and the babies thrived, Captain Quarles managed his extensive business affairs and got richer, and Marjorie still sang in the church choir.
That being the case, and because it was Sunday morning, she set out to walk to church, feeling even more out of place in the universe than usual. She had taken special pains with her toilette that morning, hoping to make herself feel a little more human. It hadn’t worked emotionally, although she did look quite fine, thanks to Loretta. Loretta paid her much more than her duties were worth, and she was forever buying her clothes.
Today’s ensemble consisted of a pretty cotton crepe dress with woven stripes. The overall impression was of brown stripes on a cream background, and the dress had piping on the collar and turned-back cuffs made of mercerized crepe.
Her shoes and handbag matched the brown stripe in the dress, and her hat was also brown and made in a design Loretta had designated as a “Matador’s hat.” It sported a brown pheasant feather in its brim. Marjorie wore it at a jaunty angle, although it didn’t make her feel particularly jaunty, more’s the pity. Loretta had allowed the pheasant feather because, she said, she found pheasant feathers in the park all the time. Marjorie didn’t exactly connect her feather with those feathers, but she didn’t argue. She never argued with Loretta. Almost never.
As luck would have it, her costume earned her admiring glances as she walked briskly up the walkway toward the church’s front steps. In fact, Hamilton St. Claire, who stood at the top of the stairs chatting to Ginger Collins, excused himself to Ginger and trotted down the steps to join Marjorie when he spotted her. Marjorie got the impression he’d been waiting for her, although she told herself that was only her vanity speaking.
“Marjorie!” Hamilton took her hand and squeezed it tenderly. “You’re looking lovely today.”
“Thank you, Hamilton.” She bowed her head, faintly embarrassed by Hamilton’s public display of approbation—and Ginger’s equally public display of fury as she glowered at the couple, turned on her heel, and flounced into the sanctuary. Oh, dear.
Perfect Wedding Page 17
