The Girls with No Names Read online

  Luella fled the room before he had the chance. The door slammed. Footsteps banged up the stairs. There was an awful silence as Daddy sat down and picked his napkin up off the floor.

  “Good gracious,” Mama breathed. “What’s gotten into that girl?” No one answered. I quickly looked into my lap as tears sprang into my eyes. Mama reached across the table. “It’s all right, dear. It’s a phase. Ring Neala for dessert, won’t you?”

  I nodded, reaching for the bell on the sideboard.

  Lemon tarts went down in silence, my jaw clenching with each sour bite. I ate all of it, noticing how my parents were carefully not looking at each other.

  After dinner, I found Luella’s door flung open and knew she was waiting for me. She’d kicked her shoes off and was pacing the rug in her stockings. Her room was north-facing and always had a chill. I sat on her canopy bed, the carved cherry posts like stately trees holding a maroon cloud of fabric that dipped over me like a soft, wide belly. The room was darkly furnished in a crimson theme that was not my sister. A hot, lurid red might have suited her, not this restrained, masculine rust color.

  Back and forth Luella went at the foot of the bed, her skirt sweeping the floor. “How can Daddy be such a hypocrite? Holding to his morals, pretending to be old-fashioned and provincial enough to send me away when he’s the one going to hell for his sins.”

  “Luella! You shouldn’t say such things.” I was glad I’d shut her door behind me.

  “I’ll say whatever I want.”

  I paused, working an idea I’d been convincing myself of. “Maybe it wasn’t what we thought. Maybe we misunderstood. Or didn’t see properly what was going on.”

  My sister shot her hands on her hips and reeled toward me. “I know a kiss when I see one.”

  “You’ve never kissed anyone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You have?” This was a revelation almost as shocking as Daddy’s indiscretion.

  “So, what if I have.”

  “Who? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t tell you everything, Effie.”

  This fell like a stone in my chest. “Well, maybe Daddy was just whispering something to her.”

  “Stop protecting him.” Her face was flushed, her eyes huge.

  I wanted to ask who she’d kissed. “I’m not protecting him, I’m just saying we don’t know. The woman came over to us. She’s the one who asked Daddy to go outside. It would have been rude to refuse. Maybe she kissed him. We didn’t stay to see if he pushed her away.” It could be true. Maybe she’d lifted herself from the seat and forced herself against him.

  Luella made a throaty sound of disgust. “You’re so ignorant.” She pivoted, hauling open the window and dropping her hands on the sill. Outside, dusk had turned the hillside purple.

  I stared into the advancing darkness with a feeling of shame.

  Luella turned suddenly. “I’m sorry.” She came to the bed and flung an arm around me. “I’m a wicked sister. I haven’t kissed anyone. I just said it to prove you wrong. Do you know what I hate more than anything? I hate that Daddy used us. That we were his excuse to run into her every day.”

  “You noticed her before too?”

  “How could I miss her? Those lips? I thought she was beautiful. Now, I think her a wicked witch in disguise. You should put her in one of your stories. You know,” she faced me, slapping her hands on my knees, “I feel like that sometimes, like a wicked person in disguise. I tell people what they want to hear. Everyone thinks I’m good at ballet, but I’m not. I just pretend and everyone believes me.” She stood up, energized. “Do you know the place where I’m real, where I don’t have to pretend at all? With the gypsies. They don’t care who I am or what I say. Everyone dances and sings whether they’re good at it or not.” She gave a hysterical laugh and flung her arms out. “It’s positively freeing.”

  I felt like a cloud was settling over me, isolating me in a grainy mist that put everything out of place. Luella was someone who did and said exactly what she wanted. If that was a lie, everything was.

  For a few days I repeated Mama’s words in my head, telling myself that Luella was just acting out, going through a phase. I held on to the idea that Daddy’s kiss was a mistake, that he’d leaned in to tell Inez something and I hadn’t seen properly.

  Then Saturday came.

  The Friday before I’d forgotten two of the history dates Miss Chapin required, but Luella had forgotten all of them. Worried her transgressions would multiply beyond what our parents would tolerate, I tried to convince her to stay home and study. She refused.

  “I’m going with or without you,” she said. “And this time, I’m going for the whole day. Bother with athletics. I’ll forge a note to Miss Chapin from Mama saying I’m sick.”

  Frustration boiled in me. “You’re being careless and selfish and Daddy’s bound to find out.”

  “Daddy won’t find out, as long as you don’t go and tell him just to spite me,” she glowered.

  Her words stung. I’d never done anything to spite her. “Fine. Go,” I said.

  In the early morning sunshine, I sat at my desk with my botany textbook trying to concentrate on the photosynthetic function of fronds, but my mind kept wandering to my sister. What began as listening to music and getting our fortunes told—a single lie for a day or two—was turning into a string of lies stretching over the summer horizon. I wasn’t sure it was even about the gypsies anymore. There was something prowling in the depths of my sister’s being, something longing to be set free.

  * * *

  The girl slips out the front door and up the hill, glancing back, hoping her father is watching from a window and will witness her defiance firsthand. He isn’t, this time. The girl keeps going, her eyes fixed ahead as the fires and wagons come into view. Her breath quickens, her skin tingles with excitement as she slips into the camp. This is where she becomes herself, inevitable and powerful. It is not something she will give up, not for anyone.

  * * *

  I was shaken from my imaginings with a shout out the window. Mama had left to visit a great-aunt in Kensington and Daddy was playing tennis. I pulled the lace curtain aside, leaning into a warm square of sunlight to see where the voice had come from. The smell of lilacs wafted from below where the sweeping form of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat stood on our stone walkway. She wore a tan coat, open, a string of dark beads dangling between the richly embroidered lapels.

  And there stood my father next to her. He’d traded his winter felt for a straw hat, which suddenly flew from his head as a man in tennis flannels knocked him to the ground. I slapped a hand to my mouth as Daddy leapt up and threw a punch, sending his attacker reeling into our rosebushes. The woman screamed and backed away. The man scrambled to his feet, his face flaming, yanked a thorny branch from the sleeve of his coat, threw it at Daddy’s feet and stalked off. The rosebush looked defiled. I felt stunned. I’d never seen anyone punched before. Daddy plucked his hat from the ground, gave a decorous bow and beckoned the woman through the front door as if he’d given her a grand show and it was time for tea. She entered, glancing over her shoulder. Her unmistakable bright red mouth winked at me from under her hat like a taunting third eye.

  My pulse raced as if I was the one about to be caught at something. I held my breath as their laughter echoed up the stairs. Margot and Mama were out, and I was supposed to be with Luella in Westchester. Saturday was Neala’s day off and Velma kept strictly to the kitchen. Was this why Daddy kept so few servants? Their shoes clipped past my door, the lingering reverence I held for my father shattering with each step. This could not be mistaken for anything but what it was.

  Bold, female laughter reached me through the walls. I slid to the floor with my legs stretched straight out over the beige rug. Eventually the laughter stopped and the house fell silent. I yanked off my gloves and bit the skin
around my deformed nails. After a while my bottom grew numb and I began to worry Mama would come home early. A few minutes after the clock struck two, I heard my father’s low voice in the hallway, then quick, light footsteps down the stairs and the front door open. I peeked over the windowsill to see Miss Milholland, hat in hand, rest her arm over my father’s as he guided her into a car. He shut the door, rapped the frame and tipped his hat to the driver as if she was any old guest on any old afternoon. The car pulled away and I watched him saunter off down the street.

  I crawled to my bed and lay staring at the pale blue wallpaper of my nursery days. Mama had never seen fit to change it. I wondered about this, and how Mama was the only one in the family who never made plans for me to grow up. Luella talked to me about college and Daddy said I’d be a great writer one day. Mama stayed quiet. Maybe she was blind to Daddy’s indiscretions, but knew things about me that hadn’t even come to pass.

  I pressed a finger to the inside of my wrist, something Daddy used to do when I was little, after I was in bed. “Still ticking,” he’d say. Luella would already be asleep beside me. Sometimes, and I never told anyone this, I’d tell him I was scared I was going die in the night. “We can’t let that happen,” he’d say, pulling a chair up to the bed. “I’ll sit here until death comes and tell him he’s got the wrong gal. ‘This is my peanut,’ I’ll tell him. And if that doesn’t work I’ll give him a licking he’ll never forget. I’ll beat death, literally.” He’d wink, then take my hand and hold it in his until I fell asleep. When I woke, I believed he’d done exactly as he promised.

  I was no longer scared I’d die in the night. Despite the flutter in my chest, no one believed my survival was exceptional anymore, least of all me. I wasn’t expected to live this long, and yet I wasn’t expected to die either. I was thirteen, in limbo between girlhood and womanhood, between life and death, between Mama and Daddy, between Daddy and Luella. I didn’t fit anywhere.

  Indirect sunlight brightened the room. Through the window white clouds swept the sky. The lace curtains rippled. And then the tiny pulse under my finger became erratic, speeding up, pausing, slowing down, until suddenly it stopped. There was no fit, no breathlessness, just a freeze in my chest as the windows fell out of their casing and the walls expanded and the room rippled outward with a luminous translucence. I was aware that I was still here, on my bed, but the margins had fallen away.

  It was all back in an instant, the crisp edges of things, my solid universe. I sat up with a gasp. The windows were in place. The walls upright. I felt the inside of my wrist. The steady little beat was back. Maybe it hadn’t stopped? No, it had. I hadn’t imagined it. I went to my desk and forced myself to read from my tedious, wordy textbook, hoping the boringness of it would help ground me in my concrete reality. I didn’t want my extremities melting. It was hard enough to hold onto my surroundings as they were.

  That night, I dreamt Miss Milholland was dancing in a grove of fir trees, naked, wands in her hands. A winged lion circled her, each graceful, prowling step taken in time with the woman’s feet, his veined wings rising like a dragon’s from the sides of his body. There was no music. Round and round they went in silence until an eagle joined them, emerging from the trees with a winged ox and a winged man. They were the creatures I’d seen on the tarot card, but as they circled the woman their wings multiplied and their bodies became covered with eyes like the apocalyptic creatures from the bible. The man moved in closer and I saw that he had my father’s face, and that his lips were painted the red of the woman’s. I felt a sense of panic that he was going to kiss her, but then the woman was gone and her white horse lay dead on the ground where she’d stood. The apocalyptic creatures danced around it, their mouths dripping red saliva as they chanted, holy, holy, holy, The Lord God almighty.

  Chapter Six

  Jeanne

  I’d forgotten to bring a book to read on the train ride home from Kensington. Frustrated, I stared out the window and tried to enjoy the budding forest flying past, the trees a bright new green. Visits to Emory’s aunt Sylvia were tedious, to say the least, and my one consolation was the quiet hour I had to read on the train. Sylvia was my mother-in-law, Etta Tildon’s, sister, and they were identical in every abusive, provoking, miserable way. I visited Sylvia solely to please my mother-in-law, a woman who found fault with every aspect of me despite my efforts. At one point we’d been on amicable terms, but since her husband’s death the old woman’s bitterness hung about her like a noxious cloud. As far as I could tell she wasn’t on good terms with a single soul.

  Removing my hat, I placed it on the empty seat next to me and rummaged through my purse for something to eat. The truth was, a book kept my mind from cycling through tragic scenarios that might have befallen my family while I was away. I was never a worrier before Effie’s birth, but the fear that bore its way into me when she was a baby, wondering each day if I’d lose her, had persisted for years. It had contorted into new fears, but persisted nonetheless. The girls believed they were wonderfully independent when I let them take the elevated to school alone, or wander into the hills behind our home, but I was never more than a walk or a quick car ride away. Except for these monthly excursions to Kensington, which, after being berated by Aunt Sylvia for “refusing to adopt an American accent,” as she so ridiculously put it, and in my bookless, anxious state of mind, I was seriously considering giving up.

  There was nothing to eat in my bag, not even a stale mint, and I snapped the clasp shut with vigor.

  “What’s your poor bag done wrong?”

  Looking up, I saw an unnervingly handsome man standing over me. “Excuse me?”

  “Your bag.” He pointed. “You look awfully angry with it. May I?” He indicated the seat where my hat was placed and I quickly moved it to my lap.

  The train lurched and he caught the back of the seat to steady himself as he slid in next to me. “Cigarette?” He took one from his breast pocket and held it out with a full-lipped smile.

  The cigarette was tempting. “No, thank you very much, I don’t smoke.”

  When I first met Emory, he had the old-fashioned idea that women shouldn’t smoke, and I’d given it up. At the time, I thought it was an American thing. Turned out it was a Tildon thing. His mother, the influential Mrs. Tildon, did not think it decorous in a woman.

  “That’s a shame. Wonderful stuff, cigarettes.” He lit his and leaned back, smoking in silent satisfaction, his hat tilted high on his forehead.

  I clutched my hat and looked out the window, the man’s good looks unsteadying me. I’d always been a fool for a good-looking man. I suppose most women are. My mother had warned me of that with Emory.

  He’d been courting me for three weeks before my mother met him. Despite his charm, I knew what was coming when she called me into her studio the next morning. While all the other society mothers were trying to marry their daughters off, mine was desperately trying to keep me in her clutches.

  Her studio, with its pure bright light and smells of turpentine and paint, was a place that usually filled me with comfort. But that morning it felt stuffy and oppressive. My mother stood at her canvas in her stained apron, her dark hair hanging down her back. She never bothered to tie it up anymore and it gave her an unfettered appearance. The brushstrokes on the canvas behind her had the same careless, slapdash look to them. Over the years, her paintings had become more and more undisciplined.

  “Don’t hover in the doorway, Jeanne.” She set her coffee cup on the table and picked up her paintbrush, pointing it at me like a weapon. I was a good deal taller than my mother, but this didn’t intimidate her. “That man is dangerous. You’d best put him out of your mind straightaway. His attention is flattering, no doubt, but it won’t last. It’s fine for an ugly man to take a beautiful woman. It won’t do to have it the other way around. You’ll age like a stinky cheese and he like a fine wine. Moldy cheese is an acquired taste, while everyone loves a go
od wine, and they’ll drink their fill, you take my word. It’s a tale as old as time.” Satisfied with her elaborate metaphor, and assured the subject was now closed, she turned her back to me, the light from the window catching the silver threads running through her dark hair.

  I did not heed her warning. I’d never had a single suitor, and when Emory started showing up at the theater every night with an armful of flowers telling me I was the loveliest creature he’d ever seen, the compliments went to my head like a rush of champagne. I couldn’t think straight. I could barely compose myself onstage knowing he was waiting for me afterward. For the first time, I was the envy of the other ballerinas. A proposal was more than I dared dream. Men often became struck with a dancer, but rarely did they want anything more than a mistress, something I would undoubtedly have become if Emory hadn’t wanted me for his wife, a title that still filled me with pride.

  The proposal was spontaneous. The evening he asked me, we’d attended a dinner party separately, finding our way to each other on the dance floor and dancing until midnight. When Emory offered to take me home, I didn’t hesitate. It was snowing lightly and the boulevard sparkled in a hushed, empty silence. It was just the two of us, not even a carriage rolled past. I remember thinking how perfect the moment was even before Emory stopped me under the glittering light of a lamppost, kissing me in a bold, unhesitating manner that made my legs quiver. I’d never been kissed before, and when he pulled away, I was filled with a craving I hadn’t known existed. His eyes were an intense, otherworldly blue.

  When he lifted my hand and began delicately pulling at the fingers of my glove, I panicked. “Don’t,” I whispered, but he silenced me with his finger to my lips, the leather of his glove as soft as his mouth had been.

  When my hand was exposed, he held it up, and I saw in his face that I was not hideous to him. He seemed in awe of my scars, and for the first time I recognized what Effie would, years later, show me every time she pulled off my gloves: immeasurable strength and endurance. Then, Emory bowed his head and kissed my healed wounds, snow dusting the arms of his coat and melting on the back of my hand under the warmth of his lips.