The Bridegrooms: A Novel

by Allison K. Pittman

  The conversation was little more than a ripple as heads throughout the room bent low over their tables. The occasional trill of laughter escaped but soon seemed to be swallowed up in the muffled bubble created by so many ladies’ feathered hats.

  More distinct was the sound of silver against china—tiny clinks of forks and knives. Through all of this, waiters dressed in crisp white coats wove their way around, arms draped with clean white towels, carrying glass pitchers of clear water or expertly balancing trays on up-turned hands.

  Beside her, Hazel took a deep breath. “Smells delicious, doesn’t it?”

  Vada hadn’t even thought about the food.

  Garrison gave her sleeve a tiny, almost imperceptible tug, prompting her to follow, and soon they too were making their way through the sea of tables. For a man of such girth, the maître d’ navigated the dining room with surprising agility while Vada, slim as she was, walked with her arms tight to her sides lest she send somebody’s wine glass crashing to the glossy wood floor.

  They came to a stop near the back of the room, three tables away from the swinging kitchen door. “Mr. Triplehorn?” The maître d’ spoke with an accent he hadn’t bothered affecting earlier. “Your luncheon party has arrived.”

  He stood at such an angle that the man seated at the table was blocked from view, and it wasn’t until a set of broad shoulders rose above their host that Vada got a good look at the man they’d come to meet.

  He was tall, yes, but his height alone couldn’t begin to comprise his stature. His broad chest and long arms perfectly filled the expensive-looking suit jacket that might have been tailored for a giant.

  He brought up massive hands to straighten his blue silk tie, drawing Vada’s gaze to his face. Deeply tanned skin contrasted the stark white collar of his shirt, and his hair was the blackest she’d ever seen. It was short and brushed forward in tiny dry fans across the breadth of his smooth forehead.

  Beneath it, dark brown eyes studied her face, then Hazel’s, then back to her. One black brow lifted in curiosity.

  “Mr. Triplehorn?” Garrison thrust out his hand in introduction. Mr. Triplehorn’s grip swallowed it down to one pale, struggling thumb. His bemused expression remained.

  “I am Garrison Walker. This is Miss Vada Allenhouse and, of course, Miss Hazel Allenhouse.” Garrison said Hazel’s name with a meaningful nod that seemed only to increase Mr. Triplehorn’s confusion.

  “I believe there’s been some kind of mistake.” His voice was low, his words clipped.

  “I do realize that Miss Vada’s and my presence might come as a surprise”—Garrison successfully regained his hand after a brief tug—“but under the circumstances, it hardly seemed proper to send Miss Hazel here without a proper chaperone.”

  “Miss…Hazel?” He spoke, as if mastering the English language.

  With each passing second, another diner dropped his fork and turned to stare at the scene unfolding at Alex Triplehorn’s table. If, indeed, this was the right table. Vada felt a flush rise to her cheeks. They were at the wrong table, talking to the wrong man. It had all been a hoax, a mistake. She was just about to grab her sister’s hand and run back through the heavy double doors when Hazel spoke.

  “Your confusion is understandable, sir.” Her voice rose an unnatural octave, making her sound like one of the actresses in the touring companies that played at the Dresden Street Theater. “You see,” she looked directly at Vada, “I thought it wiser not to use my Christian name in my correspondence.”

  This seemed to put all but the still-bemused Mr. Triplehorn at ease. Nonetheless, moving with considerable grace for a man his size, he stepped away from his place and pulled out a chair for Hazel. Garrison promptly followed suit for Vada, and soon the four were seated, each staring at the little bowl of pansies in the middle of the table.

  “You must understand,” Mr. Triplehorn said after what seemed an eternity of silence, “how difficult this is for me. I know I have no right—”

  “Nonsense.” The trill in Hazel’s voice made Vada wince. “After all, it was I who placed the advertisement.”

  “Perhaps it was unscrupulous to take advantage. But I saw it as a sign.” Mr. Triplehorn spoke slowly, almost a full pause after every two or three words, and listening to him gave Vada the chance to study him more closely.

  His eyes almost had an almond shape, and though his hair was raven black, the series of tiny lines at the corners of those eyes meant he had to be forty—at least. Possibly older. What in the world could Hazel be thinking?

  “A sign?” Vada said. Certainly such a statement deserved to be scrutinized.

  Before Mr. Triplehorn could answer, a waiter in a crisp white jacket appeared with a cut-glass pitcher of water and proceeded to fill each glass. He’d no sooner left the table when a second waiter in a white shirt and black vest came bearing crisp, gilt-edged menus. He delivered a well-rehearsed speech about the chef’s lamb stew and ambrosia salad, to which Vada only half listened.

  Instead, she looked about the table—openly—as nobody was bothering to look at her. Hazel kept her head down, staring at her hands. It was an unfortunate posture, as it brought forth a rather jowly appearance and caused a furrow between her brows.

  Mr. Triplehorn seemed equally uncomfortable as he spent the entire time trying to find a place to land his gaze, ultimately turning his head to the side, watching the party at the next table.

  All in all it was hardly what Vada expected, given the passionate tone of Mr. Triplehorn’s letter and Hazel’s eagerness to meet the man behind it. But from the moment they approached the table, there had been such an obvious air of disappointment emanating from the man, Vada couldn’t help but join her sister in what she was sure was a desire for the floor to open up and swallow them whole.

  She turned to Garrison, hoping his sweet, gentle nature would be able to find some way to bring ease to this moment, but he was lost in the menu, his eyes growing wider and wider as he took in the prices. Vada bored her gaze into him, willing him to look up at her, and when he did, he merely held up his menu to block his face from the view of Mr. Triplehorn and mouthed, “Just get the soup.”

  As the waiter came to the end of his speech, he brought forth a little notepad on which he poised a short, elegant pencil. “Are we ready to make our luncheon order?”

  “We are not,” Mr. Triplehorn said with such an air of finality, Vada began to think Garrison could put his mind at ease about the soup.

  Their waiter gave an offended sniff at his dismissal, and his mustache barely moved when he announced his imminent return.

  Left alone, an uncomfortable silence returned to the table. Vada cleared her throat. “You were saying,” she reached for her water glass, “that you took Hazel’s post as some sort of a sign?”

  “I must have been mistaken.” His voice was low, his words measured.

  “Mistaken?” She allowed her fingers to rest on the elegant stem of the glass, too afraid to lift it lest her intense grip cause it to snap in her hand.

  “Vada, darling, please.” Garrison’s gentle touch on her arm invited her to relinquish her grip, and she wanted so badly to entwine her fingers in his, grab her wounded sister, and leave.

  “I was working in Cheyenne when I saw the advertisement and read the name Allenhouse. It is such an unusual name, I thought certainly…” He seemed to finally have the good grace to feel uncomfortable. “You are not—” He spoke toward Hazel, who still refused to look up, before switching his gaze directly to Vada. “She is not the young woman I expected to meet.”

  Vada bristled at the implication. “The young woman?”

  “The woman in the advertisement clearly said that she was eighteen.”

  Beside her, Hazel winced at his words.

  “Now see here,” Garrison said, after a false start in which his voice got tangled at the top of his throat. “I find it insufferably rude of you to comment on the young lady’s age in her presence.”

  “I only meant�
�”

  “And furthermore,” he straightened in his chair, “I think it’s a fair enough assessment to say that, even with her misrepresentation—”

  “Garrison!” Vada clutched at his sleeve.

  He covered her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Darling, we must concede that Hazel’s true age has been, let’s say, altered.”

  “Oh, dear Lord.” Hazel planted her elbows on the table with such force that the pansies quivered in their vase, and she buried her head in her hands.

  “As I was saying,” Garrison continued, “even given that distortion, the lady is clearly not much more than half your own age—”

  “Garrison!” Both sisters pleaded in concert.

  “—so if it was the bloom of youth that so enticed you to pursue this introduction, I submit that you have not yet been presented with any reason to disavow the acquaintance of Miss Hazel Allenhouse.” By the end of his speech, Garrison had taken off his glasses and used them to emphatically point to the mortified woman across the table. In the awkward aftermath, he used the edge of the tablecloth to clean the lenses.

  Vada studied him—so rare was it to see him without his spectacles, rarer still to see him in the throes of such passion. Suddenly the familiar placid blue of his eyes took on the glint of pure steel, and the impressive Mr. Triplehorn seemed to have been wounded indeed.

  “I have no objections to her age,” he said once Garrison’s glasses were safely perched on his nose. “She is simply not the woman I came here to meet.”

  “Oh, enough,” Hazel groaned, scooting her chair away from the table. “I cannot take more of this.”

  “No, wait.” Vada put a restraining hand on her sister’s. “My sister is a lovely young person. And she may seem like some bold, modern woman ready to strike out and begin a new life in the middle of nowhere, but inside—” Tears welled in Vada’s eyes, and the quivering in her chin wouldn’t allow her to continue.

  “After all,” Garrison picked up the argument, “there is a reason they are referred to as the weaker sex. A certain gentleness is required.”

  “Please.” Mr. Triplehorn waved away the approaching waiter, whose face was now twisted into sour disdain. “I will say only that I have made a mistake and I apologize. Now, if the three of you would like to stay, I’ll leave instructions that the bill be charged to me.”

  “You owe us an explanation,” Vada seethed.

  “I owe you nothing besides the lunch to which I invited you.”

  “Under false pretenses and with malicious, dare I say, salacious intent,” Garrison added.

  “I assure you I meant no harm.”

  “Then what did you mean?” Hazel’s voice was reed thin—so far from its usual breezy boldness that Vada felt the last of her reserve begin to crack. “Why bring me here? Why not just write to me? Perhaps if we’d become more familiar, I wouldn’t seem so, so…wrong.”

  “All right. If you must know, I came here today hoping to meet a young woman who might be your younger sister.”

  “Althea?” Hazel said, her mouth hanging open on the final syllable.

  Again, Mr. Triplehorn looked confused. “Marguerite told me she named the child Lisette.”

  Marguerite. Mama. She named the child…

  Suddenly the innocuous noise of the diners around them—the clinks of the forks, the mild laughter, the rattle of the carted dishes—all melted to one oppressive roar inside Vada’s head. The burning sensation at the back of her throat spread throughout her body, and it seemed the next breath would incinerate her, so she didn’t take it. She held it in, fearful of bursting, as snippets of long-ago conversations bored their way through the mass of noise. And when the realization hit, horrible in its entirety, all that heat and fire turned to ice.

  “Vada, dear, are you all right? You’ve gone white as a ghost.” Garrison’s voice sounded far away, as if coming through a storm. “Now see here, Triplehorn. Just who do you think you are?”

  “He knows…” Vada fought the sudden dryness of her mouth. “He knew our mother.”

  “It was foolish of me.” Whatever arrogance Mr. Triplehorn had possessed was gone, but Vada wasn’t moved anywhere near to pity. “I loved her very much, and even though she told me the child wasn’t mine—”

  “The child? Our Lisette? You think she’s—she’s yours?”

  “I’ve always wondered—”

  “Well, stop.” Vada clutched her napkin in both hands, twisting it like rope. “Stop wondering and go home.”

  “I have to see her.”

  “You’ve no right to see her.” Garrison’s calm voice offered Vada some measure of warmth.

  “I need to know.”

  “I know,” Hazel said, a shadow of her old self. “You couldn’t possibly be her father. She’s beautiful and funny and—”

  “Nearly eighteen.” Although he didn’t state it outright, he was obviously implying a calculation.

  “Now see here.” Vada stood, clutching the table lest her legs give way. “You have already caused enough heartache for our family. You took away our mother. If not for you, she would be here—would have been here for all of us, all our lives. She might even still be alive.”

  “Ah, Vada.” The sound of her name on Triplehorn’s lips steeled her. “You are as strong as she said you were. She knew you would be fine—”

  “Don’t you dare!” Suddenly all the school-yard fights, all the scuffles endured defending her mother’s soiled reputation rose up within her, and it was all Vada could do not to leap across the table and knock him to the ground, no matter what his size. “Don’t you dare talk about our mother; you’re horrible, awful—”

  From somewhere behind she felt a restraining hand, but she shook it off, ready to relaunch into her tirade until she heard someone say, “Miss. Miss. I must insist—”

  It was the troll-like maître d’, looking positively justified at having been called in to moderate this fray.

  “You’ll insist nothing,” Hazel said. “Take your hands off of her this minute.” She always had been the one to come to Vada’s aid in a fight, and soon Vada’s arm was free, and the maître d’ took two steps back.

  “Come on, girls.” Garrison stood and walked to stand between the two sisters. “We’ve nothing more to say here.”

  “Yes, we do.” Vada separated herself and walked around the table, leaning closer and closer to Mr. Triplehorn. “You stay away from our home. You stay away from our sister. Do you understand?”

  The man refused to so much as flinch, and when Vada stood straight again, he said, “I will be here for the remainder of the week.” He looked around Vada to the maître d’. “I believe I’ll be luncheoning alone after all.”

  Vada landed on the sidewalk outside the hotel with all the force of having been thrown there. Nothing about the ground seemed capable of supporting her weight, and it wasn’t until Garrison’s arm steadied her that she felt confident to stand.

  “I’ll get us a cab.” He spoke low into her ear.

  She tore herself from his embrace and spun around to find Hazel and grasped her hand. “We’ll walk.” She bent low, ready to shoulder her way through the crowd. Hazel was dead weight behind her—a sullen piece of furniture to be carted across the pavement.

  “Hazel, come on!”

  “It’s twenty blocks. I’ll never make it in these shoes.”

  Vada looked at the narrow kidskin slippers peeking out beneath Hazel’s skirt. A far cry from her usual, practical flat-heeled boot, these had a dainty one-inch heel that quivered in protest beneath the foot spilling over it.

  “Those are Lisette’s shoes.”

  “I know, but they’re so much prettier than any I have, and I just wanted—”

  For the first time since that horrible afternoon began, Hazel’s eyes filled with tears, and she crumpled, sobbing into Vada’s shoulder. “How could I be so stupid?” She punctuated each word with a deep, wet gasp. “I’ve never been so…so…embarrassed. He looked at me like I was a
monster.”

  The passersby on the street slowed to gawk at the emotional scene unfolding on the sidewalk, and whatever tendrils of pity Vada felt for Hazel withered with each footstep, to be replaced with a branching stem of anger.

  “Now you just get yourself together, Hazel Allenhouse.” She shook loose and left her sister to stand alone, fumbling for her handkerchief. “You don’t have any right to cry about this now. It has nothing to do with you. Try to think about Doc for a minute, what this’ll do to him if he finds out. And Lisette…”

  “You don’t—certainly he couldn’t be—”

  “I don’t know.” Vada burned with shame at the thought of it. “I just hope he stays away.”

  “We have to tell Doc.”

  “No, we don’t. We don’t have to tell him anything. It’s best we keep it to ourselves.”

  “But what if Mr. Triplehorn—”

  “We’ve enough demons of our own to worry about, Hazel, without bothering our heads about what Mr. Triplehorn might do.”

  “Here we are, ladies.” Garrison stood holding the door open to a black horse-drawn cab. He bowed like a footman in a fairy tale.

  It was a scene that spelled escape, and suddenly Vada was more than ready to take it. She allowed Garrison to take her hand, but still she lingered on the little extended step. “Are you sure? I hate to cost you the cab fare.”

  “Trust me, darling.” He brought her fingers to his lips for a quick kiss. “It’s nothing compared to the price of our abandoned lunch.”

  Vada offered a weak smile and settled inside, scooting across the seat to make room for Hazel. Garrison folded up the steps, climbed in, and shut the door, signaling the driver to commence.

  For a while the only sound inside the cab came from the sounds outside the cab—the rhythmic clomp of the horse’s hooves, multiplied a hundred times over, accompanied by the shouts of all those drivers trying to maneuver through the streets. Sometimes the song of a street vendor rang out, and Vada’s stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten yet that day.