The Way of Beauty

by Camille Di Maio

“Will you take my picture?”

  “You want a picture?”

  “Yes.” Alice had never felt more radiant than in this moment. And she might never again. But if Emmett took her picture, she would always remember how she looked and felt here in this room, in this train station that was so dear to her. When she was old—when she was ashes—even as these walls stood above and around her, this photograph would be a testament to the woman who was emerging from her girlish shell.

  “Of course.” He did not use his own, though, the one that was always slung around his neck as if it were an additional limb. He opened the silver case of Marion’s—Catherine’s—long-forgotten camera and wound the film to its starting point. Ensuring that she would take the camera rather than leave it here for someone else to find.

  She leaned against a shelf, placing herself in a position that concealed the parts that allowed her to pretend some shred of modesty.

  “Put your chin down and then look up at me. No, the other way.” He directed her with words, never touching her, and standing back when she was just right. “Like that. Stay exactly like that.” He took several pictures—she lost count as he moved around her and told her to shift just a bit. It became more and more comfortable as he repeatedly told her that she was lovely—a vision—stunning.

  At the end, he made one more request. This one in a tone that made it sound as if she would be doing him a favor.

  “My darling,” he breathed. “Uncross your arms. Let me take just one picture like that. But only if you are comfortable.”

  She nodded. She put her hands at her sides, still leaning, but she knew that the light from the distant bulbs and the tiny flame of the lighter exposed a great deal. He bent at the knees and focused the lens on her. “Look up, my dreamer. Like you were when I first saw you.” She posed as she remembered how she’d looked in that photograph.

  Click.

  “Perfect. You are perfection.”

  He set the camera down on the trunk, never taking his eyes off her. He shut the Zippo lid and set that down as well. She saw only the outline of him in this light until he came closer. But this time he approached without the confidence that had emboldened him in his own apartment. She saw him tremble—perhaps not as much as her—but it was there. No swagger. No telltale sign of this being something he did on an everyday basis.

  He stood at last in front of her, and every nerve in her body ached to throw her arms around him and recapture the fire of their kiss. He ran a finger down her bare arm and followed it with his eyes. “Perfect,” he said again.

  Then he looked at her. “Nothing more needs to happen, Alice,” he said. “I did not bring you down here with this in mind.”

  But he corrected himself before she could respond. He smiled and looked away from her. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve had this on my mind ever since I first saw you. I’ve wondered what it would be like to take you in my arms and have you as mine. But I am not a cad. I did not invite you here for this purpose. Just to see if you found this strange little place as intriguing as I did.”

  Alice put a finger on his lips, and he stopped talking. He placed his hands on either side of her face and pulled her into him. He set a featherlight kiss on her mouth, and she gasped at the sensation of the simple gesture. This created an invitation to a kiss that grew from kindle to blaze before she knew it. Then his hands, hers, were everywhere. She felt the gown slip from her shoulders and pool around her feet, but she barely noticed as what she felt for this man overtook all reasonable thought. She sank down with him onto the cold cement floor, where he pulled a tweedy overcoat from a shelf and laid it underneath her.

  Once again, in his arms, she lost all sense of time, and as they emerged from their hideaway much later, she was surprised that the clock in the grand concourse indicated that it was four o’clock and she was an hour late in returning to the newsstand.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Alice was on Opa duty. Vera and Angelo were both at work, but her grandfather had been going through a bad spell again. Every few months the effects of the bends would overtake him, even after he’d made so much progress under her mother’s gentle care. This was one of those times when he could not be left alone in the apartment.

  She’d led him to the bathtub. Helped him undress. His wrinkly old buttocks displayed a sprinkling of liver spots, and he sprouted white hair from his ears that she would need to trim—if he’d let her near him with scissors. She ran her hand under the water until it was the right temperature and added the bubbles that she knew he liked.

  “Danke,” he said as he sank into the water.

  “Bitte, Opa.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned back. She kissed him on the forehead and ran her fingers through his thinning hair.

  Vera was afraid that he might not be with them for much longer. But she’d been saying that for as long as Alice could remember.

  When he seemed content, Alice left and returned to the sofa that served as her bed. She lay down on it and closed her eyes, drumming her fingers against the skin of her stomach. She’d loved when Emmett kissed that spot—the hollow right above her belly. And the one behind her neck.

  When she wasn’t working or in class, they explored the city as if it were brand-new to them both. They delighted in an unspoken competition of who could find the best place to uncover a new piece of New York history.

  Alice took him to the alley by the opera house where, in just the right spot, you could hear the sopranos hit their high notes. He made her laugh when he mimicked their buxom chests and exaggerated trilling.

  Emmett brought her to the City Hall subway station, where the stained-glass domes looked into the sky from below the ground. Leaves would flutter onto their tops, casting shadows on the concrete platform.

  Alice showed him the spot in Grand Central Terminal, under the bricked archways, where you could face the corners on opposite ends of the room and whisper things that could be heard by the other.

  Unexpectedly, the place she liked the most was the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Its pink stone Gothic arches seemed from another era, and its tiny mausoleums were ornate houses for the dead. It was not macabre, as she’d expected when he was describing what they were going to see. But more like a fairy village and very ripe for sketching pictures.

  They packed a picnic lunch and sat underneath what Emmett called a camperdown elm tree. Its branches sagged all the way to the ground in a circle around the trunk, creating a tentlike hideaway, unseen by any passersby. Emmett kissed her deeply in that place, not with the fervor of their lovemaking but in a way that conveyed things they hadn’t dared to speak. When he pulled back, he traced his hand along her cheek.

  “This place has a sense of eternity about it. Do you feel that, too? I want to be with you forever, Alice.”

  He used words like forever, but they never accompanied the word marriage, and it remained a notion rather than a proposal.

  When she was with Emmett, it felt like there was no one else in the world.

  But as she lay next to him under the tree, nearly all sunlight blocked by the dense leaves, she thought about this word.

  What would it look like with Emmett?

  Forever with Emmett would bring new adventures every day. Maybe they would not have children at all—they might exhaust all that they could do in the city and stretch their pennies to go past its borders. He would photograph and she would sketch every old building and every kind of scene and paper their apartment walls a thousand times over in an ever-changing gallery created just for them. They would find new places, new ways to reveal their love to each other.

  But she could not forget William.

  He’d been in Chicago with his grandfather for a while, and she smiled at the thought of him sitting in his private railroad car secretly wishing to trade places with the ones punching the tickets. He’d sent flowers, each arrangement more magnificent than the last.

  They were not all for Alice. Sometimes they came ad
dressed to Zia Vera. Even Angelo didn’t escape William’s generous attention—a mahogany box with red velvet lining arrived, containing shaving cream in a glass bottle and a brush made of boar hair.

  Her parents appreciated the gifts, of course, but she knew that having William back in their lives provided more happiness than anything money could be spent on.

  William even sent three tickets to This Is the Army by Irving Berlin along with a caretaker for Opa for the evening. A Broadway show! It was more than she could have ever imagined.

  Alice felt like she was living two lives. Hot dogs at the ballpark in cheap seats and apple pie from the Automat with Emmett. Delmonico’s and Barbetta with William.

  Vera had already started making comments about how lovely it would be to make their family whole again.

  Emmett started breathing deeply. Alice turned over onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. She pulled an apple from her bag and bit into it. Like Eve in the garden.

  It was tough on the outside, tender on the inside. Two distinct goods making up one whole.

  Alice could relate to the apple. Like its skin, she wanted to be tough. Resilient. But like its inside, she also valued sweetness. Softness.

  As a woman, it was hard to discover what you wanted to be when the world told you what you were supposed to be.

  And was it so impossible to want both? Couldn’t she crave adventure but also appreciate the idea of a Sunday dinner surrounded by family, and gathering around the fireplace afterward to listen to a radio program?

  These thoughts stayed with Alice while she worked the next day. William was due back from his trip tomorrow, and she needed to figure things out.

  She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked south to Emmett’s apartment. Last week they’d taken a boat to Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Queens to photograph the smallpox hospital that looked like a castle. Its turrets and pointed windows seemed like something they might find if they could afford to go all the way to England, but the East River was the only body of water they had to cross. He wanted to develop the pictures today and send them out for submission to a medical journal that was doing an article on it. He’d given her a key in case he was late getting there. With a reminder not to look into that one forbidden drawer.

  She jiggled the key into the lock, and while it unlatched, the door was still blocked by a chain. That was new. Not that he’d never used it—he’d never had one to begin with that she could recall.

  “Emmett?” she said through the bit she could open. She heard a muffled voice, and then it went quiet. Footsteps came closer, and she saw a sliver of Emmett as he approached.

  “Sorry about that, darling. Let me get that for you.” He closed the door, jostled the chain, and then opened the way fully.

  “Why did you get a chain?”

  “One can never be too careful.”

  “Have there been any robberies in the neighborhood?”

  “Why the questions?” His voice said he was agitated, but his eyes said he was—afraid?

  “I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just new. I suppose I was curious.”

  “Of course you are, darling. I was a brute.” He pulled her close to him and kissed her forehead. “Don’t mind me. I just had a difficult day.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” She set her pocketbook on the tiny counter and made her way over to the couch.

  He joined her and began to nuzzle her neck. She felt the familiar tingle that shot up and down her body, but she had the impression that he was trying to distract her.

  She pushed him away.

  “I heard you talking to someone. Like you were on the telephone. But you don’t have a telephone, do you?”

  “It was the radio. That’s all. I turned it down so that we don’t have to hear it.”

  “Hmm. I suppose I didn’t recognize the program.”

  He leaned in to the other side of her neck, and all she wanted to do was to let him keep going. Because next he would unbutton her blouse and unpin her hair and begin the routine that always felt new.

  “No. Wait.” She pushed him back once again.

  “What’s wrong, Alice? You’re acting different today.”

  “Why do we always do this, Emmett?”

  “Do what?”

  “Why do you try to change the subject when I try to ask you anything serious?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, scooting in and releasing his arms until they were holding hands. “We talk about so much. But even after all this time, I don’t know anything about who you really are. When I try to ask about parents or siblings or where you grew up, you change the subject or you overwhelm me with kisses until I forget. But that has to stop. If we are going to have a future together, I have to know these things about your past.”

  He sat up and walked over to the kitchen. He pulled a cup from the cabinet and ran the faucet. He drank it all in one swig and set it back on the counter. He didn’t approach her, though. He stayed on that side of the room and leaned on the edge.

  “What does all that matter? We have you. Me. What else does there need to be?”

  “There is a lot more, Emmett. Wouldn’t you like to get married? Have children? We don’t need to do it all exactly as everyone else, but there are some things that are in place for a reason, and what if we’re getting it all backward?”

  “What is it you want, Alice? You want the church and the dress and the ring? You want to be Alice Adler and embroider scrolled AAs across guest room towels? We don’t even have a guest room, for Christ’s sake. But is that the rosy picture you want?”

  She flinched at his belittlement of what she was trying to say.

  “Because I sure know someone else who wants to give that to you. William Pilkington.”

  “William?”

  “Yes. Do you think I can’t read between the lines when you tell me how much he does for your family?”

  They stood back, looking at each other. Emmett’s arms were folded again, and it wrecked her to be at odds with him.

  But did her regard for William show through more than she intended it to? This was exactly why she’d provoked this conversation. The tug-of-war stretched her to the point of hurting.

  “He’s like a son to them. Isn’t that natural that he would be a part of our lives?”

  “I’ll bet. I’ll bet he’d like to make that official.”

  She ran over to him and placed her hands to his chest, but he remained stiff. “I’m not going to try to read William’s mind, Emmett. And maybe you’re right. But if it came to that—if he wanted to marry me, then in saying no, that means I’m saying yes to you. To us. And I just want to know that I have your yes in return.”

  He sighed and pulled her into him. “You have my yes, darling. How do you not know that?”

  She rested against his chest and felt the rapid beat of his heart. She just wanted all the complications to go away. It would be easy to drop the conversation. But that only prolonged what had to be discussed.

  “Your yes to what?” she asked. “Marriage? Children? Shouldn’t we at least discuss more seriously what our future would look like?”

  “We’re talking in circles. Look at me.” She stepped back, and he put his hands on her arms. His eyes were as soft as she’d ever seen them. “I have not been fair to you. I see it now. In loving you the way I do while holding back a piece of myself, I have let it get this far. Selfishly. I have wanted to be with you so much that I’ve pressed on without thinking about the ramifications. Alice, if you are asking if I will love you forever, if I want to be with you forever, then you have my yes. If you are asking me for marriage and for children, I can’t—I can’t give that.”

  Alice felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. Tears welled up inside her until her shoulders shook and she could no longer keep them in. “What are you not telling me? Are you sick?” />
  “No, love, I am not sick.”

  “Is—is there some reason you cannot have children? Because I don’t really care about that, Emmett. I was not one who spent my whole life dreaming of them. I can be happy with my drawings and taking my classes so that I can get a job. But it seems that the subject should at least be talked about.”

  “No, my love, I have no reason to believe that I can’t have children.”

  “Then what is it?” She heard herself shout it, but he was not making any sense. “Are you already married?” Alice pulled away from him and asked quietly, “Is that it, Emmett? Do you have a wife somewhere and that’s why you won’t marry me or tell me anything about yourself?”

  He reached out to her. “No, please, Alice, no, it is nothing like that. I’m not married. There is no one else for me. No one. Ever. But I can’t marry you. Not because I’m attached in any way like that. It’s because I’m protecting you. Please. I’m protecting you. I can’t say anything more than that.”

  This was not any kind of answer she saw coming. Protecting her? From what? Maybe his little tale about Marion Greenwood and the mafia dons was autobiographical in some way. It seemed absurd, though.

  “I—I don’t know how to respond to that, Emmett. I don’t even know what questions to ask you.” She rubbed her temples. Why did he always speak in riddles?

  “Don’t ask me anything, sweet, sweet Alice in Wonderland.” He stepped toward her and spoke into her hair even as he ran his hands through it. She felt his chest heave as he held back his own tears, and it broke her wondering what he didn’t think he could say.

  “Can’t we just stay in Wonderland? Pretend the world out there doesn’t exist?” he asked, muffled. His kisses worked their way all around her head, down her neck, back to her ears, and like they always did, they weakened her knees, and she no longer wanted to ask any more questions. She just wanted him, all of him that she could have, even if it wasn’t everything.

  “Why do you think the world out there so terrible?” she whispered.

  He clung to her so she couldn’t see his face. “I’ve seen things, Alice, and I’ve lost people I loved. I don’t want anything to ever happen to you. For now, this needs to be enough. Not forever. But for now.”