Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) (2 page)

“I believe I do. She and her mother—Mrs. Adelaide, I recall—visited once when Miss Allison was only two or three. I’m not quite clear on how she’s related, though.”

Margot laughed. “It’s not easy! Cousin Allison is related to Mother and Father both. Adelaide is Mother’s cousin on her mother’s side, and she married Father’s cousin Henry.”

“So that makes her your third cousin, I believe—or is it fourth? Or,” he said, lifting his thick white eyebrows, “both?”

“Oh, Lord, Blake, who knows? Mother’s the only one who could keep those things straight, and right now, she doesn’t really . . .” Her voice trailed off. It was painful to feel her mother’s accusatory glances on her, or worse, to know her mother was doing her best not to see her at all. Sometimes it seemed as if Edith had found a way to look right
through
her, as if Margot had become transparent since Preston’s death. It was a difficult situation, one she had solved, in part, by moving into Blake’s apartment above the garage so she wouldn’t have to meet her mother in the hallway. She hadn’t told Blake that, because she knew he would say it wasn’t proper, but it was exhausting to have to confront her mother’s pain every time they met.

Margot understood that her mother was protecting herself. Whether for good or ill, the family had a sort of unspoken agreement that allowed her to do it. Edith had concocted her own explanation for the death of her youngest son, and though it bore no resemblance to the truth, no one argued with her. No one troubled her with the exact account of what Preston had done or how he had brought about the disaster. Even Margot felt it would serve no purpose, and she was the one Edith blamed.

Hattie believed what Edith believed, of course, but Hattie’s conviction didn’t include making Margot responsible. She treated Margot with the same affection she always had. She fussed over her laundry, worried over the late hours she kept at the hospital, and insisted on carrying food out to the garage apartment when she missed dinner.

Margot gave a dismissive flick of her fingers. A year had passed, and there was no point in dwelling on things she couldn’t fix. She said, “In any case, Allison is nineteen now. She’s just completed her Grand Tour, and apparently something happened on the crossing. Uncle Henry is furious. Wants her out of San Francisco until the gossip dies down.”

“I don’t believe I’ve met Mr. Henry.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“He’s a Benedict, though.”

“Yes. From the ‘poor’ Benedicts, as Mother used to say!” She couldn’t help chuckling. “I understand Uncle Henry didn’t have a pin when Aunt Adelaide married him, but he’s built up quite a successful import business. Father is impressed, although he thinks Uncle Henry should diversify. We’re coming out of the recent depression, but Father sees trouble ahead.”

“Mr. Henry should listen, then. No one excels at business more than Mr. Dickson.”

“Very true. In any case, Uncle Henry wrote to Father, claiming that Allison has been diagnosed as a hysteric, which makes a convenient cover for whatever it is she’s supposed to have done. As nearly as I can tell, it’s Aunt Adelaide who suffered a nervous attack, but they’ll never say so.”

Blake laughed, his old deep rumble. “Nervous attack. Is that the medical term?”

Margot grinned. “I doubt Aunt Adelaide’s trouble is medical.” She pushed her fingers through her hair, which she could never remember not to do. It mussed her bob into a bird’s nest. “Adelaide’s a brittle sort of woman. The way she spoke to her daughter, when they were here last fall, set my nerves on edge, though I don’t know if anyone else noticed.”

“It will be beneficial to Miss Allison, then, to spend some time at Benedict Hall.” He sounded so much like his old self that Margot felt weak with relief. She had been terribly worried about him. He was, of course, a servant, a colored man, the child of slaves, but that didn’t matter. He had always been like a third parent, and she couldn’t imagine life without him.

He said, “Mrs. Edith should be a good influence. She always speaks kindly to everyone.”

Margot said, “Blake, Mother’s really not herself. You’ll understand when you come home.”

“I did see her, you know. She came to visit once, with Mr. Dickson.”

“She did?” Margot couldn’t picture her prim, polished mother visiting this nursing home in the Negro neighborhood. She hoped Edith had not sniffed or kept a handkerchief pressed to her nose. No doubt her father would have put his foot down if she had. Dickson was sensitive in the matter of Blake. It was one of many ways in which he had surprised Margot during this difficult year.

The smile faded from Blake’s face. “Poor Mrs. Edith. It’s been terribly hard on her.”

“Hattie doted on Preston nearly as much as Mother, but Mother needed her, and that kept her going, I think. Mother, though—” Margot brushed her hair back again. “She’s terribly thin, though Hattie does her best. Her hair has gone gray, and she seems . . . I don’t know, Blake. As if she’s not quite
there
.” Margot made a small, helpless gesture.

Blake said, “It hurts you.”

“I can’t make it right for her.”

“That is correct, Dr. Margot. No one can make it right for Mrs. Edith. And none of it was your fault.” Blake paused for a tactful moment while Margot blinked away the sudden sting in her eyes. “I’m surprised Mr. Dickson agreed to Miss Allison’s visit, with Mrs. Edith still so delicate.”

“It was my idea, actually. I hope I won’t be sorry I suggested it. We have an abundance of space, and when Uncle Henry wrote to ask Father’s advice, it seemed like a good idea. I hope I haven’t made a mistake. I had this notion that having a young person in the house—a girl, you know, who would want to go to parties, buy clothes—I thought it might help Mother. Give her something to think about.”

“It’s worth a try,” he answered, but she heard doubt in his voice, too.

“Well,” she said, with some briskness now. “Things can’t be any worse than they are. Uncle Henry and Aunt Adelaide wasted no time accepting our invitation. Hattie’s made up the south bedroom at the back, the one beyond the servants’ stair. The window opens onto the garden, you remember. It has a bath of its own, though it’s small. Allison can use either the kitchen staircase or the main one.”

“What’s become of Mr. Preston’s room?”

Margot gazed into Blake’s kindly face. His hair had changed, too, like her mother’s, but Blake’s had gone completely white during his long illness. Sarah had cut it for him into a curly cap that contrasted dramatically with his dark skin. Margot said, “Mother closed the door of Preston’s bedroom the day of the funeral. Everything in it is just the way it was before he died. The maids are allowed in to clean, but not to move anything. She pretends—or she believes—that he’s coming back.”

“Mrs. Edith still doesn’t understand about Mr. Preston.”

“I don’t think it would make a difference if she did. Sometimes I think she clings to her pain as a way of keeping him alive.”

“Do you and Mrs. Edith—”

“No,” Margot said, her voice a little rougher than she intended. “No, we don’t talk about it. I’m certain she wouldn’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“Such an old, old problem.” His gaze shifted away from her to the window of his room. Steady rain streaked the glass beyond the printed cotton curtains, and in the brief silence Margot could hear its rhythm on the roof. “I thought perhaps she would understand now. That she would see . . .”

“She doesn’t want to see,” Margot said. “She never did, of course, but now more than ever. . . . She imagines he was the victim. She sees him as a hero. Believes he sacrificed himself.”

“I wish I could have attended the funeral.”

“You would have hated it, Blake. I did.”

“I’m sorry about that. I believe such ceremonies are meant to be healing to those left behind.”

“This one wasn’t. It was just Gothic! The empty casket, the reception with all those society people murmuring platitudes—it was ridiculous.”

“Not to Mrs. Edith, I suppose.”

“She went through all the motions, and I thought at the time it was a good thing. She wore a black dress and a hat with a veil, black gloves, insisted on supervising all the food, the flowers, even instructed the priest what to say.”

“Hattie told me that.”

“Poor Hattie! It was awful for her. She cried for days, even while she was cooking. I was afraid she’d make herself ill, but Hattie’s like you. Made of stern stuff.”

That made Blake smile again. “Tell me about Major Parrish,” he said. “Is he well? The new arm is working?”

A quiver of tension tightened Margot’s belly, but she said with determined cheer, “The Carnes arm is the best there is, Blake. The elbow bends, the fingers flex. He uses it almost as much as he does his right arm these days. I’ll bring him to visit, and you can see for yourself.”

“I’d like that.”

“It will have to wait, though. Bill Boeing sent him to March Field, down in California, to meet with some army pilots. Something about new developments with an airplane.”

“Perhaps, when he comes back to Seattle, the two of you . . .”

Margot sighed, her tension subsiding into the more or less persistent melancholy she had felt since Frank left. “I don’t know, Blake.”

“Now, I was quite sure you and Major Parrish had an understanding.”

“We did, Blake. We do, I mean.” She shifted in her chair, trying to explain without saying too much. She said, “There are some things—it’s just that, with Mother the way she is, we’ve felt we should wait until things are—settled, I suppose. As settled as they’re going to be, in any case.”

There were other issues holding them back, but she would keep those to herself. She didn’t want to worry Blake with them, even though she really had no one else to talk to. What did it say about her, she wondered, that this old family retainer was her only confidant? Except for Frank, of course.

Blake, his eyes still on the rain-soaked darkness beyond his window, took a long, slow breath, and let his head drop back against his chair. Margot clicked her tongue. “Blake, I’m tiring you. You need to rest. I should get home to change for dinner, in any case. Mother hates me coming to dinner in my work clothes.”

He turned his head without lifting it and gave her a weary smile. “I don’t have all my strength back yet. But you tell Mr. Dickson I’ll be back as soon as I can. As soon as my very fine doctor gives her permission.”

She stood, and because they were alone, she bent to touch his hand. Hers was pale and narrow, and his was thick with age. She liked the way it looked, her young white hand on his aged black one. All her life, this strong dark hand had been her protection. She wished she could impart some of her own vigor to him now, through her touch.

“Don’t you worry, Dr. Margot,” he rumbled. “After all you and Mr. Dickson have done for me, I couldn’t help but get better.”

“Good, Blake,” she said. “I’ll hold you to that.” Her throat tightened, and she turned away to pull on her coat and gloves and pick up the umbrella drying by the radiator. She coughed a little and fixed a smile on her face as she turned back to say good night. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

“No, no,” he said. “You don’t need to come all the way out here every day. Sarah takes fine care of me.”

“I know she does. I’ll come this weekend, then. Perhaps I can bring Hattie for a visit.”

“That would be very nice, Dr. Margot.” His eyelids drooped, and she saw that he truly was tired. He said in a softer tone, his vowels broader than ever, “Very nice. I will look forward to that treat.”

C
HAPTER
2

Raindrops skittered from the ribs of Margot’s umbrella as she hurried through the squall toward her streetcar stop. Several people nodded to her, and two said, “Good evening, Doctor.” She smiled and responded, cheered by their acceptance.

She had been uncomfortable in this neighborhood at first. The residents had been startled, even suspicious, at the sight of a tall white woman walking along East Madison. They whispered to one another as she passed, and some stared openly in ways that made her neck burn. There had been no respectful greetings in those early weeks.

One evening, just as darkness was closing in, a lanky young man in coveralls and a porkpie work hat had stepped right up to her and said, “Slummin’, are ya?”

Margot had tried to walk on, but he stood in her way, leaning insultingly close, treating her to a sour gust of bootleg whisky and cheap tobacco. His eyes were red, and his dark face distorted with drunken resentment. He reached a grimy hand toward her medical bag. “Whatcha got there, missy?”

Margot instinctively pulled the bag away, out of his reach. Her hospital experience had rendered her reckless with her own safety, but in that bag—a gift from her father to replace the one lost in the fire—was a necessary supply of drugs. She carried morphine and laudanum, atropine and adrenaline chloride, none of which were safe in the wrong hands. There was no alcohol, but she knew that for some, any drug would do. She tried to sidestep the young man. He laughed and mimicked her steps, reaching around her toward the handle of her bag.

It could have been a bad moment. It would have validated everyone’s worries about Margot’s trips on the Madison streetcar. Blake, in particular, once he was able to speak, worried over her visits. Her father, Hattie, even Sarah Church had tried to dissuade her from coming so often, and so late in the day.

But that night, an elderly woman in a shapeless housedress and an assortment of shawls resolved the situation by bursting from a nearby house with an attention-arresting bang of her front door. She stood on the stoop, hands on her skinny hips, and called, “William Lee Jackson, you get on in this house right this very minute!”

The hapless William started as if someone had struck him. His shoulders slumped, and despite his adult height, he seemed to shrink to little-boy size. He dropped his head and backed away from Margot. As he turned and started up the cracked cement walk of the house, the old woman glared at him as if daring him to disobey. She was half his size, but that seemed to make no difference. Under her gaze, he slunk into the house without a word. The woman followed, but not without casting Margot a hard glance. She didn’t scold her, but that glance told Margot she was in a place where she didn’t belong.

That had been months ago. Now that Blake had been in the East Jefferson Convalescent Home for more than a year, her regular visits had made her a familiar sight. Sarah had been a great help, informing the families who lived around the Convalescent Home that one of its residents had a white doctor. A young lady doctor.

As the word spread, it became common for Margot to find someone waiting on the steps of the Convalescent Home after one of her visits. Occasionally, one of the workingmen of the neighborhood had an injury or an ailment, and no time during the day to visit the office of one of the Negro physicians. Often it was a worried mother with a baby on her hip or a gaggle of toddlers clinging to her skirt. Margot followed these people to their homes, single-story houses built like little boxes, divided into three or four sparsely furnished rooms by the thinnest of partitions. In these modest places she treated earaches, burns, sprains, fevers. Once she attended a case of food poisoning that kept her at a bedside all night, administering saline and a mixture of bismuth carbonate and salicylate until she was certain her patient, who was the sole support of an alarmingly large family, was going to recover.

The families rarely had any money. They paid Margot with what they had, and without apology. She had carried away jars of homemade jelly, loaves of freshly baked bread, once a vast blackberry pie that Hattie very nearly refused to admit to her kitchen, but which proved so delicious Margot had to beg Sarah to go back to its baker for the recipe.

Margot was aware now, as she strode through the rain, of protective eyes on her. Curtains were drawn over lighted windows, but they twitched occasionally as the women inside watched her pass. Men smoking on their cramped porches nodded to her, and one or two stood up politely. William Lee Jackson, that unhappy young man who couldn’t find work and who occasionally consoled himself with a jug of two-dollar whisky, materialized out of the dusk, touching his dilapidated hat brim and grinning at her. His teeth were very white in the darkness, and on this evening Margot detected no acrid smell of whisky.

“My Granny Jackson sent me,” he said. “She says she won’t give me no dinner if I don’t see you to the streetcar.”

Margot said gravely, “Please thank your grandmother for me. I hope your dinner is excellent.”

They walked side by side the remaining two blocks. William didn’t speak again, but he stood beside her as she waited in the darkness. The rain fell hard enough to splash from the sidewalk and wet her ankles. Her umbrella dripped furiously, and she began to shiver despite her woolen coat with its warm fox collar. She was relieved when the streetcar came clicking up East Madison from the lake.

She thanked William again, and swung up into the car’s lighted interior. She dropped her nickel into the fare box and sat down in the first available seat. The bench seat was hard, but the car was blessedly warm, and she shivered a little with relief. She shook the rain off her umbrella as she rode up the hill and out of the Negro district. She had to change cars at Broadway, dashing through the rain.

In the second streetcar, she propped her umbrella against her knee and gazed out the window. The houses seemed to grow, bit by bit, as the car clicked its way northward. Neat picket fences appeared, occasionally flanked by garages. The gardens expanded and the rooflines rose. This alteration of the landscape from one neighborhood to another was a phenomenon she hadn’t really noticed before this year, when she had begun taking the streetcar everywhere.

She thought wistfully of the days when Blake, rain or shine, light or dark, would wait for her outside her clinic or in front of the hospital. She loved riding in the polished Essex with its sparkling windows and cozy plush seats. Blake was inevitably attired in his driving coat, cap, and gloves. There had been something restful about the ritual, something comforting about being welcomed into the automobile’s warm interior, relinquishing her responsibilities, relaxing into Blake’s hands.

She chided herself for her nostalgia as she climbed down from the Broadway streetcar and started up the steep slope of Aloha Street. Those days were never going to return, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that Blake was healing. There had been a very real possibility, after the heart attack and its subsequent complications, that he might never wake again. She still had questions about the event, about the accident his heart attack supposedly precipitated, but he refused to speak of it. He said it made no difference now, that there was no point in dwelling on it, and perhaps he was right. Her younger brother, Preston, her tormentor since an early age, was gone. She was safe from him, and though the family was bruised and nearly broken, it would recover. Except, perhaps, for Edith.

Margot’s stockings were soaked by the time she reached home. She hurried to her apartment above the garage, stashing her umbrella at the bottom of the stairs before dashing up to get out of her wet things and change into a suitable frock for dinner. She caught sight of the blue celluloid clock on the bedside table, the one she and her brothers had given Blake for Christmas long ago. She was late again.

She shrugged out of the shirtwaist and skirt she had worn all day and into a wool crepe sheath with a dropped waist and shawl collar. As she pulled on a fresh pair of stockings and fastened them, she remembered that the last time she had worn this sheath had been a dinner date with Frank. A sudden rush of longing for him made her press one hand to her heart.

She blew out a breath and dropped her hand. There was no time to indulge her weakness. She had to gather herself to face the gantlet of dinner, her mother’s wan face, her father’s struggles to behave as if nothing were amiss. Her older brother’s genial bewilderment didn’t help. Her sister-in-law, at least, though her efforts were sometimes awkward, was doing her best to step into her mother-in-law’s place and keep the house running smoothly. Without Blake, that wasn’t easy.

All Margot could do was be present for dinner as often as she was able. She washed her hands, straightened her frock, and went down the stairs to take up her still-wet umbrella and cross the back lawn into Benedict Hall.

 

Allison tossed her hat onto the green frieze plush of the Pullman drawing room seat. “It’s pouring out there,” she said. “We’ll be a sodden mess in five minutes!”

“I have your umbrella.” Ruby spoke plaintively, a bit defensively, as if responsibility for the weather in Seattle fell squarely on her own habitually hunched shoulders. “And we won’t be walking that far. The Benedicts are supposed to send a car . . .” She broke off in the face of Allison’s irritated glance.

Allison knew she wasn’t being fair, but she was in a ghastly mood. She had been imprisoned in this compartment with Ruby for the entire journey from San Francisco, and she was nearly rigid with boredom.

It was that silliness on
Berengaria,
when she hadn’t done a single thing wrong! Well, hardly anything, at least nothing that mattered. She protested over and over that nothing had happened, really, nothing to be upset about, but her mother had raged on and on about her ruined prospects, her compromised reputation, carrying on until she made herself ill. Ruby and Jane, between them, hadn’t been able to calm her. She had shut herself up in the stateroom for the better part of the crossing.

Allison had been humiliated. Adelaide emerged to sit at the captain’s table the next evening, but Allison had to stay in their suite. She was allowed to walk on the deck only in the company of the two maids, and forbidden to speak to anyone. Adelaide ordered her meals brought to their rooms, where the steward laid a table nearly as elaborate as the ones in the Dining Saloon, and Adelaide sat with her, glaring, ordering her to eat something.

Allison refused to touch anything but water and an occasional cup of tea. Though Adelaide raged at her over this, as well, Allison would not relent. It was the only weapon she had, and it was all the more powerful because it was one her mother had given her. She hoped Adelaide grasped the irony of that.

The moment they reached home, after the interminable train journey from New York, her mother closeted herself with Papa. Allison and Ruby, unpacking upstairs, could hear Adelaide’s shrill complaints and Henry’s loud, terse answers, their voices reverberating through the tall, narrow house. The next day a doctor showed up, ordered by Henry, admitted by Ruby, and ushered into the parlor where Allison and Adelaide waited in tense and antagonistic silence.

Dr. Kinney seemed ancient to Allison. He had white hair growing out of his ears, and his foul breath made Allison wrinkle her nose when he leaned close to look in her eyes and her mouth. He pinched the flesh under her arm and pressed on her belly with blunt, icy fingers. He didn’t speak to her at all. He directed all his questions to her parents, as if Allison were an infant, unable to answer for herself. Or a mental defective, not to be trusted.

Dr. Kinney listened gravely to Adelaide’s account of Allison’s depraved behavior aboard
Berengaria.
When Allison tried to interrupt, to tell her own version, he held up a hand to silence her. Papa joined in, growling at her to be quiet. Adelaide, with the air of a warrior winning a battle, tossed her head in triumph.

In the end, Dr. Kinney handed down his diagnosis in the manner of a great judge sharing his learned wisdom. Allison, he declared, was a hysteric. He used some sort of complicated name for her condition, repeating it several times, a little louder in each instance, as if that made it more convincing. Allison suspected he would charge Papa three times over for using Latin no one could understand.

Allison, deflated and defeated, burst into tears. She sobbed, over and over, that it was not she who had had hysterics but her mother. Her protests were worse than useless. For Dr. Kinney, her uncontrolled weeping was merely the confirmation of his diagnosis. He took a slip of paper from a pad, wrote something on it with a shaky blue-veined hand, and gave it to Papa. Henry read it, then made a great show of folding it and placing it into his breast pocket.

Later that day, Adelaide disappeared into her room with her maid in attendance while Papa called Allison into his study. He made Allison sit on a stool beside his heavy leather armchair while he took a long time fussing with his pipe, tamping the tobacco, striking a long match, puffing on the stem with his thick lips. When the pipe was drawing well, he pulled Dr. Kinney’s paper out of his pocket and brandished it between two fingers.

“You know what this is, Allison?”

She glanced up at it, then dropped her gaze to her folded hands. “No, Papa.”

“This,” Henry pronounced, in a tone of gravitas, “is the name of a sanitorium. Bella Vista Rest Home in Sacramento. It’s a place for females of fragile mental health. This is where Dr. Kinney has suggested I send you to deal with your hysteria.”

Allison gripped her hands together so hard her fingers ached. “I’m not hysterical, Papa. You know I’m not.”

“You’re out of control, Allison.”

“I am not!” She released her hands and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “It’s not true!”

“Your behavior on board ship—”