I nodded, feeling perfidious relief that, unlike Brill, at least I did have employment. Then I acknowledged, “I would have traded every museum in the world for Lill Martine if she would only have had me. You’re a luckier man than I.”
He walked me back to the train and shook my hand. “We’ll be in touch.”
I stared out the window or slept fitfully from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, waking with a start at the call, “New Haven!” I staggered from my cramped train compartment, bag in hand, and felt the impact of return like a hammer. With that first step off the train, the specter of my misplaced life thickened to meat.
When I’d visited New Haven six years ago, I was also on my way to the Peabody. Mother and I had taken the train from Cornwall, though Grandmother objected to my exposure to the unwashed public. A carriage with a matched team met us at the station and drove us to the museum. Though I was ill at the time, I was also moneyed; I was cosseted; I was Edward Turrentine Bayard III.
This time there was no one to meet me, to open my door. No Professor Quillan, and no one acting for him. Worst of all, there was really no Edward. Only Ned, and I most suddenly and certainly felt my ability to regrow my lost name and fortune was as likely as sprouting diamond teeth.
I waited some time, growing discomfited at the looks thrown up and down my dusty western garb. I’d looked fine in Nebraska, dressed like every other fellow in loose-legged California pants and a sack coat with a blanket liner over a gray shirt Avelina’d cut down for me. I straightened my vest, arranging my father’s watch to peep from one of the pockets, removed Tilfert’s hat and used it to swat my trousers free of dirt and ash, and shined my boots on the calves of my pants. The oak pegs that held the boot’s soles to the uppers were working their way out, and I stamped hard to force them back in. Finally I reknotted the blue kerchief around my neck. Feeling a little more presentable, I asked one of the hansom drivers for directions to the Peabody Museum.
“Two bits a ride,” he replied. I shook my head. The driver considered, decided I couldn’t pay if I’d wanted to, and gave me directions. “Closed at this time of day, son.”
I headed that way anyway, not knowing what else to do. I hoped there might be some clue at the museum to tell me what next. It wasn’t far, a mile perhaps, before I came to the two-story building fashioned from great red-stone blocks, tarnished to black with the city’s ubiquitous soot. I remembered my mother walking slowly up the flagstone walk beside me in a rustling gown, a wide hat with a stuffed bird on top, wings and bill open. I told her she looked like she was being attacked, and she laughed behind a hand. “Attacked by fashion, Edward. I am assured this is all the rage.”
Was my mother still fashionable? What was the costume for a pickle merchant’s wife?
I rattled the museum door and walked around the circumference of the stone building, hoping to see a lighted window or Professor Quillan walking along the well-kept lawns, raising his hand in greeting. However, after I’d taken three circumlocutions, reprimanding myself for not getting a personal address for the paleontologist, I gave up. The museum opened at 9 A.M. I would return in the morning.
I hefted my bag and journeyed past the rows of Georgian buildings that made up the Yale campus, their rows of equally spaced dormers, windows, shutters, and chimneys giving the buildings the look of a well-pressed army, soldiers intensely disciplined, eternally alert. They each had a name, Timothy Dwight, Pierson, Davenport, and Farnam. I stopped and stared at Connecticut Hall. Nathan Hale, Noah Webster, and Eli Whitney had all resided here. I had once thought that the only impediment to my sharing that residence as well was my poor health.
Several Elis strode by and gave me hostile looks. Another told me point-blank to move on.
Move on I did, walking onto the green: a nine-square lea, three churches at the perimeters staring one another down. To the east I could see Grove Cemetery with its curious Egyptian Gate. Looking north, elm-shaded streets reached toward the mansions of Orange Street and Whitney Avenue. I headed south to where smoke rose from factory stacks and lamps were being lit in the streets.
Wooster Square appeared the true city center. A bustling manufacturing area, the cramped neighborhood was bounded by Winchester Repeating Arms, Toledo Printing, and Harris Brothers Sailworks. Within their arms was a collection of congested tenement buildings and businesses that were run by grocers, butchers, barkeeps, chemists, fishmongers, bakers, stonecutters, milliners, cobblers, and weavers, who looked as diverse as the planet itself.
The briny smell of oysters rose from wooden carts pushed by ragtag vendors, making my stomach growl. I fingered the change in my pocket, worrying over my meager worth and my need of shelter. At least the weather was fine for September. Trees were arrayed in fiery raiment of crimson and orange, cheering me somewhat. I was sure to find a cheap room for the night and a light meal, and if Quillan had forgotten me or hired someone else—or perhaps, as people seemed to do these days, had died—there was no help in anticipating it now.
I happened on a lively block. The factories had just closed for the evening and workers teemed through the streets, stopping at saloons and eating roasted ears from the corn vendors on the street. Dance halls prepared to open and lines formed in anticipation. I eyed the would-be dancers curiously. They were my age but seemed so lighthearted as to make me feel an old man. Eager joes leaned on the walls of the nickel dump, calling to ladies, shouting invitations to dance even before the doors opened. Young women peeled off their work dusters to reveal dance dresses underneath. One man was already drunk, pressing his luck, picking a fight with someone twice his weight, while a girl begged him to lay off. Another practiced a jig while several girls giggled.
Every so often a bright dress made me think of Lill. How she would love to be in a gay line waiting for an evening of luminescent fun. But she was nailed into brown linsey-woolsey, growing distended and tired, swirling potatoes in a pan of buffalo tallow to feed the immotile Ry and his slack-faced brethren.
I bumped into a soft-looking girl with a pleasant round face and brown hair pulled back into a tail. I apologized and she smiled, her eyes trimmed to crescents. She wore a dirt-smudged duster unbuttoned to show a dress with blue flowers underneath. I walked on but turned back to look, for though she was rather nondescript, hardly standing out among other mouse-colored factory girls, she held a large cigar between two fingers. The cigar was unlit; I thought perhaps she held it for a gentleman friend.
She stared back at me as I stared at her and the cigar. She pointed the cigar and left her place in line. “You’re not university.” She grinned. “Are you a cowboy? You look like a cowboy.”
I was flabbergasted as she, waiting for a response, bit off the tip of the cigar and spat the nose in the street, unsure if I wanted to draw the attention of such a girl.
“Why do you think I’m a cowboy?”
“Dressed like one. Brown as a Indian too.” She walked around me. “I like it. Most boys bore me to death.”
I looked down, reevaluating my canvas pants and scuffed leather boots. The newspaper I’d stuffed into Tilfert’s hatband to keep it from sliding onto my ears was jabbing from the inside. I shifted the big hat, pushing the newspaper away from my temple, put down my valise, and rubbed the sweat from my hand.
She reached down and took my hand, smoothed my fingers open, and looked at my palm. She ran a finger across my hand. “I read palms. You want me to tell your future?”
I pulled my hand back. “I don’t think I could handle it.”
“Hand-le it. Ha! I’ll have to use that one.” She extended the cigar. “You got a match?”
I shook my head no.
She stuck the cigar in her mouth, extended her hand to me, palm out, and spoke out the side of her mouth. “Can you read my future?” I shook my head again. She wriggled her fingers. “Guess what I do.” The tips of her fingers were stained sienna. She looked critically at her hand, then burnished her fingers on her duster and waggled the cigar again. “Tobacco.
” She pulled two cigars from her pocket. “You want to buy a couple, two bits a roll?”
“I don’t smoke.”
She looked at me impatiently. “If you buy them, we can go dancing. I’m Phaegin.”
“Ned.”
She was a pretty girl, even with the brown fingers, but I didn’t know how to dance and told her so.
She puffed on the unlit cigar. “Where have you been that you don’t know how to dance?”
“Fort McPherson, Nebraska.” I drew up a little. “Buffalo hunting.”
She looked appreciative. “What about the cigars?”
“I’m kind of hungry, actually.” I shrugged and then, in spite of my dire financial situation, asked, “Would you like to join me for dinner?” As soon as I’d said it, I was sorry, overcome with a feeling of having done Lill wrong with the offer.
She handed me the cigar, removed the duster, and folded it, revealing the dress she must have been guarding all day. “Sorry. Just got off work. I have two hours”—she thumbed toward the dance hall—“to have some fun before I collapse.”
I grinned in relief. She gave me a sharp look, put her hand out for the cigar, and I handed it back. “Maybe I’ll see you again, cowboy.”
She waved to two young ladies in muslin dresses who waited in the entry line, gave a mock curtsy goodbye, and then turned with advice. “If you’re hungry, try Paddy’s one street over. The food’s not as bad as it is cheap.”
“Do you know of a boardinghouse?”
“Men’s rooms on Third and Fenton. All the cowboys bunk there.”
* * *
As I walked I noticed two men, middle height, both with reddish-brown hair and caps pulled low over their brows, utilitarian jackets, and work boots, leaning against a lamppost some ways down the street. As I set out, they came to attention and began walking behind me. I looked behind twice. The first time, the two slowed and examined another lamppost. The second time, they were gone.
The house on Third and Fenton was a two-story clapboard dormitory with a muddy front yard bereft of shrubs, flowers, or anything green. An obese woman whose tiny features were in peril of being swallowed by her cheeks answered the bell. She blossomed from waist to shoulders with starched ruffles, waist down with a voluminous petticoated skirt, under which spit two tiny feet.
“Hello, hon,” she chirruped, “I’m Mother Fenton.” She bit the speckled apple in her girlish hand with white button teeth. She must at one time have been an extraordinarily petite girl. She swallowed. “What can we do you for?”
The first week’s rent on a six-by-eight first-floor room took most of my remaining funds, and I was doubly relieved the girl at the nickel dump hadn’t taken me up on my offer of dinner. Mother pointed to my room up the stairs and to the left. It was just big enough for a bed and boxy bureau, with a lamp set on top. I put my extra pants, shirt, and underwear in the drawer with my pistol, the medal, and my watch, set Lill’s photograph on top, and hung my coat and Tilfert’s hat on the hook on the door. I sat on the bed, the rope supports creaking, and gazed at the wallpaper.
Mother Fenton knocked and stuck her head in. “Evening meal’s down and digesting, but I made you a sandwich.” She put a plate and a glass of buttermilk on the little table beside the bed and tapped the wallpaper with a pointed finger. “Chinese newspaper. Mercantile got some dishware wrapped in the stuff. A real curiosity, isn’t it?” She stared at it and shook her head. “I wonder and wonder what it says. I had a Chink over who cooked for one of the Orange Street families. He told me it was about a fella who made some new kind of writing machine and a piece on some theater hoo-rah. Of course I couldn’t believe him. I’ve seen those people. Figured the fellow couldn’t read at all, just put on like he did to save face. They’re all about that.”
She clapped her hands together. “No mind if it’s Sunday, breakfast’s at six. Porridge every day; if you don’t like it, don’t bother to say so. You want pancakes, go down the street where the university fellers lie abed till nine.”
Mother Fenton’s was an establishment for workingmen, and I came to understand there was no little animosity traveling back and forth between it and the gingerbreaded Beulah Inn, known at Mother Fenton’s as the Boola Inn. Every year there was a game of bladder ball between the two houses, after which Mother Fenton tenderly cared for cuts, scrapes, and bruises and even paid to have a broken arm set one particularly contentious season. I decided I would not tell Mother the stratum to which I had been born and where I so fervently hoped to return.
“It’s Sunday tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Every week, far as I know. It comes up right after Saturday, son.”
After she left, I reclined on the straw-tick mattress and tried not to mind the feel of the ropes supporting the thin pad. I was suddenly stultifyingly tired, and after eating half of Mother Fenton’s lard and tomato sandwich, I wrapped the rest in my handkerchief and fell deeply to sleep.
In the morning I had Mother’s porridge then wrote a long letter to Lill. I was careful to be careful. Lill had made it clear that both she and Ry would read our correspondence, and I couldn’t risk raising his suspicions or his ire.
I took a nap after the letter, more tired than I’d thought. But when I woke, I felt more energetic than I had in weeks. Stepping out of the hodgepodge boardinghouse, I looked longingly down the street where the patrons ate pancakes and eggs every morning, sandwiches made with meat and cheese, where men had their own physicians on call, and the derision of the impoverished toward the rich was all but undetectable compared to the weight of each of their and their father’s thumbs on the little men at Mother Fenton’s. In my envious state, I wandered and was almost run over by a dappled gray. Chin, I thought, but the horse was small, blinkered, and braided and looked dull-witted to boot. I chuckled to think of Chin kicking her huge hooves here, but it made me sad and I swore not to think of her again.
Mother told me to head toward the green. The adjacent building of red stone, matching the red stone of the Peabody, was the Chittendon Library. I headed toward the esteemed depository and arrived within a quarter hour. I walked through the heavy double doors into a dim interior. The light through the stained-glass windows glowed deep burgundy, umber, and midnight blue, giving a somber cast to the place.
When my eyes adjusted to the conditions, I didn’t look again at the lambent glass; there were more amazing things to see. A trove of hundreds, of thousands, of books, leather binding after leather binding, the titles written on the spines in gold and silver inks: books along the walls and books on heavy oaken shelving, marching in columns from one side of the large room to the other.
I walked from column to column, lifting a tome here and there and taking a taste of what was inside. Geography, the anatomy of the brain, commerce of sovereign nations, pomology of the tropics. Then I saw a familiar shape in the half shadows on the east side of the library. I watched the rotund figure for some time as it hummed and grunted and turned pages; once I was sure of its identity, I hurried over and cleared my throat. “Professor Quillan?”
He turned, slamming shut the book he was perusing with a loud crack. He hurriedly replaced it on the shelves before addressing me. “What do you want?”
I was taken aback at his vehemence. I stammered, “It’s Ned.”
“Ned?” He waved me off. “I know no Ned. Leave me be.”
My heart sank. Had he forgotten? Changed his mind? What would I do? I put out my hand. When I touched him he stepped back and put up his fists, comically prepared to fight.
“Professor Quillan!” I squeaked. “Edward Turrentine Bayard from Nebraska. Fossils.”
He loosed his fist into a hand and stuck it at me. “Ned! That Ned! Good to see you. I was wondering when you would get here.”
I shook his hand with great relief, though the incident made me wonder if he was sane at all. He gave a little chuckle. “Have to say you gave me a start.” He leaned closer. “When you work on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry, eve
ryone looks to take what you’ve found, learn what you’ve learned, and if that doesn’t work”—he winked at me and watched me, one-eyed and nodding—“if that doesn’t work, they’re not against taking you out of the field altogether.”
He motioned me toward a table, and we sat down. “Surprises you, doesn’t it, Ned? I expect so. The West, now there’s a place where men fight fair. Eye for an eye, bullet for a buffalo.”
I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, but I nodded. He continued.
“Science is a corrupt business. Always watch your back. You work for me, and you will be part of”—he waved his arms in a circle—“the whorl of secrecy.” Then he laughed shortly, as if he were aware of his bizarre appearance.
“You were doing”—I inclined my head toward the stacks—“some research?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I must go now, my wife will worry. I will see you in the morning, Ned. Think about what I’ve told you. Decide if you have the backbone for it.” He eyed me closely once more, took out a pad of paper, wrote with a flourish, then handed it to me. “Get a haircut before you come. Give this to the barber.”
I read the note instructing the barber to give me a campaign cut, noted the address on it, and nodded. After the double doors closed behind the professor, I stuffed the paper in my pocket and studied the books where Quillan had stood. In his hurry to return the tome he was examining, he’d reshelved it upside down. Coal Extraction in the Coastal Ranges. Why would Quillan be reading that?
I flipped through the pages, scanning passages here and there; finding no mention of paleontology, I shrugged and left the annals of coal and mining and searched out books to my own taste: Lamarck and the study by the upstart Darwin. By the time my stomach demanded I think of it and not my head, the librarians were lighting lamps. Outside in the shadows, two men stood smoking. I thought about the redheads who had followed me earlier and about what Quillan had said. But as I strode down the street, they did not follow.
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