Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) (7 page)

They were lunching at the diner on Post Street, having spent the morning with the workmen putting up the walls of the clinic, measuring for the roof. It wasn’t lost on Margot that Frank was avoiding her eyes, gazing down at his fish fry as if the remnants of it were fascinating. She had convinced herself that meant he had doubts about his own argument.

She plunged ahead with her explanation, eager for him to grasp what was so clear to her. “Of course, Frank,” she said. “That’s exactly the problem. We’re working to change the law, Mrs. Sanger, and I, and others in the movement.”

At that, his eyes snapped up to hers, and she saw the glint of real anger in them. “Movement!” he said. “Suffrage for women, that was a
movement
. This—this is just—indecent!”

They both knew the word wasn’t adequate for his meaning. Margot gazed into his eyes for a long moment, searching for encouragement or, at the least, for understanding. She didn’t find it. In its absence, she felt a wave of exhaustion that made her turn away from him, gather her things from the chair next to her, and rise to go.

He said, “Margot, please. Margaret Sanger was sentenced to
jail
. Her husband actually went, and served thirty days!”

There was pain in his voice, pain mixed with anger, and with frustration that matched her own. She paused, looking down at him. “You went to war, Frank. You did it because you believed it was necessary.”

“It was.”

“I don’t disagree with you, though the price you paid—which we all paid—was staggering. This is a war, too. It’s my war. There’s a price to be paid for it, and I don’t see a way to avoid that.”

They were interrupted at that moment by the aproned proprietor, a familiar face to both of them after months of work on the clinic. He said, “You going off to the hospital, Doc Benedict? No time for coffee?” He rubbed his thick hands over his grease-spotted apron. “Got some nice cobbler in the back. Last of the blackberries, and some fresh cream from the Valley.”

She picked up her gloves and pulled them on. “Thank you, Arnie. I wish I had time. I have patients to see.”

“How ’bout you, Major? Coffee?”

Frank only shook his head, reached into his pocket for money to pay for lunch, then held Margot’s elbow in the most impersonal manner possible as they stepped past the cast iron rooster doorstop at the diner’s entrance.

When they stood in Post Street, Frank said, “I don’t want you to do it, Margot. I don’t want your name attached to it.”

She had said, in a tone as icy as his own, “I have to do it, Frank. It’s impossible for me to think of
not
doing it.”

And it was. Even now, alone in the dim apartment above the garage, where every corner seemed invested with Blake’s generous spirit, she couldn’t think of not doing it. The faces of women and girls who had sought her help, who were desperately searching for some way to take control of their lives and build better futures for their children, paraded through her mind as they had paraded through the charity wards of the hospital and the tiny waiting room of her original clinic. Some had burned themselves with the Lysol douche that was marketed as hygiene but which everyone knew was meant as a spermicide. Others had borne too many babies at too young an age and were in danger of not surviving another pregnancy. One had a husband who said if she didn’t get rid of the baby she was carrying he would kill them both. Many wept that they couldn’t afford more children, that the ones they had already were going hungry. How could she
not
do everything possible to give these women some power?

She wasn’t even advocating for legitimizing abortion, although she fought hard for her patients who needed therapeutic terminations. It was the Comstock laws. Sanger and her allies struggled against them, those blind, shortsighted laws that made any mention of contraception an obscenity and therefore illegal. Margot understood this conflict very well by the time she left medical school, and the experiences of her hospital work and her private practice had made her a soldier in an irrational war.

She refolded Frank’s letter and put it back in the envelope. She would answer it, of course. She would tell him how much better Blake was feeling, describe the approaching winter weather, tell him that Cousin Allison had arrived. There was no point in describing her mother’s ongoing frailty, because he had seen it for himself. She wouldn’t mention her worry about Allison’s painful thinness, nor the girl’s rather odd behavior, because she didn’t know what it all meant yet. She would ask him if he might be back for Christmas, surely a happier Christmas than the last one.

She would omit any mention of Margaret Sanger’s impending visit. She hadn’t met Mrs. Sanger yet, but through the mail they had made their plans to create a chapter of the American Birth Control League in Seattle. As a physician, it was legal for Margot to prescribe—and teach women how to use—contraception. But without garnering some public attention, women couldn’t know it was available to them. Sanger always attracted attention. She would be useful.

Margot stood up, carried her cup to the sink, and poured out the cold tea. She rinsed the cup and saucer and placed them on the drainboard. She pulled aside the curtains above the sink and looked across the lawn at Benedict Hall, dim and drowsy in the thick darkness. Just so had Blake always finished his long days, one last glance to be certain all was well.

Margot saw a single faint light in the house, a candle perhaps, in the bedroom now occupied by Allison. She wondered what was keeping the girl up so late.

She let the curtain drop and turned toward the bedroom. She was assisting at a surgery in the morning, and she needed to rest. As she passed the table, she picked up Frank’s letter one more time, tempted to reread the last passage, but she laid it down again. She didn’t need to read it. She had it memorized.

She clung to those final words, drew comfort and reassurance from them. Frank never said anything he didn’t mean. She knew that. She had to trust they would work it all out, somehow.

She wished she had some idea how.

C
HAPTER
6

Frank peered into the brilliant sunshine glinting on the buildings of the airfield below him. Nelson shouted through the speaking tube, “Pull her left a bit, Parrish. Bit more. Bit more—there you go! Now, level out. Adjust the trim, so you don’t—right, right. Line her up careful now, and start your descent.”

Frank’s cheeks stung with the wind blowing through the open cockpit. It was a thrilling sensation, a reminder that he was not tied to the earth, but sailing the skies. The sense of power and freedom was like nothing he had ever experienced. Flying made him feel like a mythological hero, a conqueror of worlds.

The double wings vibrated to his left and right. The stick felt easy under his hand, and the rudder bar was surprisingly sensitive beneath his foot. It amazed him how much flying the Jenny was like riding a horse, the airplane reacting almost the way a horse would to hands and heels, flexing, turning, speeding up or slowing down. He couldn’t help grinning, and the air whistled against his teeth, making him laugh aloud.

He heard Nelson’s chuckle through the speaking tube. “Yeah, Major, it’s fun, all right. Just don’t get carried away.”

“I won’t,” Frank said. “Ready to go in now?”

“Ready. Be sure you listen!”

The aspect of the Jenny that still impressed Frank deeply, after several flights, was the lift of the double wings. The airplane could fly so slowly it was as if it had stopped in the air, and it made landing seem deceptively simple. He had learned that it wasn’t, though, both by studying the manual and by listening to Nelson. Nelson was reminding him now about the sound the bracing wires made under the pressure of speed and wind. The joke was that if the pilot slowed down too much, the wires would hum a descending melody, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and he’d better adjust the throttle and the altitude before he found himself at the pearly gates!

Frank listened, satisfied at hearing a steady hiss. He lined up, adjusted the trim, and pulled back gently on the stick to modify his angle of attack. He let the Jenny drift toward the ground, knowing if anything changed—an obstruction appeared, a gust of crosswind jostled him—he could ascend again in a heartbeat. His wheels touched down in a respectable three-point landing, the plane barely shivering on contact with the packed earth of the runway. It felt so natural, so instinctive, that Frank heard himself murmur, “Whoa,” as he taxied to a stop.

Later, in the mess hall, he tried to explain the comparison to horsemanship to Nelson. The lieutenant shook his head. “I can’t grasp it,” he confessed. “I’m from Brooklyn. The closest I ever got to a horse was when the iceman came once a week. At least, till I went to France.”

Frank said, “I didn’t know you were in France.”

“Battle of Saint-Mihiel,” Nelson said. “I saw the horses hauling the artillery back, but I was in the Army Air Service, thank God.”

“Brutal on the ground.”

“Yeah. A hell of a lot better to be in the air than in the trenches.” Nelson jumped up to bring the coffeepot to the table and refilled both their cups. The remains of lunch were spread before them, meat sandwiches and bowls of oranges from a nearby orchard.

Frank took an orange and began, with self-conscious dexterity, to peel it, using both hands. He felt Nelson’s eyes on this process and glanced up. “Works pretty well,” he said.

“Works damned well, seems like,” Nelson said. Frank nodded. “Where’d you lose it, Parrish?”

It was the first personal question anyone at March had asked him. There was friendship among the pilots and technicians at the base, a camaraderie based on common experience, but the men who had been in the war kept quiet about it. That felt right to Frank, mirroring his own reluctance to revisit the war and its aftermath. He appreciated Nelson waiting until they had spent some time together, on the ground and in the air, waiting for mutual respect to build, for understanding to grow between them at its own pace.

He lifted the artificial arm now and flexed the fingers. “Lost it near Jerusalem,” he said. “Shell caught me. I was fortunate. Ten inches to the left, and that would have been all she wrote.” It was a Montana expression, but Nelson seemed to understand.

“I know the feeling,” he said. A shadow passed over his face, darkening his usual cheerful expression. He was a Nordic type, blond, burly, with a pencil mustache so pale it barely showed against his skin. “I had a close call or two myself.”

Frank inclined his head, acknowledging this. “We’re luckier than some,” he said.

A silence fell between them for a moment. Frank could guess that Nelson, like himself, was haunted by the memories of those less fortunate, those who never came home, but he wouldn’t mention it. None of them ever did.

“So,” Nelson said after a time. “Army gave you the new arm?”

Frank said, simply, “Yes,” but his heart thudded under the immense weight of everything that simple answer left unspoken. He would never be able to forget the misery of that first year, the agony of the neuroma that made him unable to tolerate a prosthesis, a time when he was only barely able to bear the touch of a shirtsleeve or the weight of his jacket.

Or the touch of a girl’s hand. His girl, the same one who became his doctor, against his wishes, but to his great benefit. He had no way to put any of it into words, not to Margot, or even, he acknowledged, to himself. Margot had changed his life. She had salvaged it from the ruin it had become. She was unlike any woman he had ever met before, and that, he had learned, was not an easy thing for a man to deal with. He could barely think of her now without a rush of confusion that tied his tongue and made him want to bury his head in his hands.

He wasn’t going to blurt any of this out to his flight instructor, of course. He reflected, with private embarrassment, that the person he really wanted to talk it over with was his mother. She was far away in Montana, no doubt already looking out her kitchen window onto the snow filling up the home pasture and sprinkling the roof of the horse barn. He could write to her, but she had never met Margot. On paper, he feared his description of Margot could not possibly do her justice, and might make her sound unapproachable, possibly unreasonable.

He couldn’t help wondering, though, what Jenny Baker Parrish would make of Margot’s views on the public dissemination of information about what the papers called “family planning.” It was sex, pure and simple, something private made public. It was scandalous, which was why Margaret Sanger had almost gone to jail, and why there were laws to control that sort of thing. But would his mother agree with him? He wished he knew.

“Lost you there, Parrish?”

It was Nelson, half smiling, eyebrows raised. Frank said hastily, “Sorry. Got to thinking.”

“Dangerous business, thinking,” Nelson said with a chuckle.

“True,” Frank said. He smiled back. It had been a fine morning, the sun burning through his leather helmet, the wind howling through the ailerons and the struts, and Nelson encouraging him from the rear seat. “You’re right, Nelson. Better not to dwell on things we can’t change.”

“You were thinking about your arm, I guess,” the lieutenant said. “Can’t blame you for that. But you’re halfway to being a pilot, just the same. Got to take pride in that.”

“I do. Thanks.” Frank drained his coffee mug and set it down. “This is an opportunity I never expected, and I appreciate it.”

Nelson made a deprecating gesture, a sideways movement of one hand, a brief shake of his head. “Nah, the captain and your Mr. Boeing are both happy about it. Seems like you’re enjoying it.”

“Yes,” Frank said, inadequately, wishing he had a stronger word. “Yes, most certainly enjoying it.”

Flying was, in fact, the most liberating thing he had ever done. Every time his airplane rose above the scrubby grass and low-roofed buildings of March Field, his heart rose with it. Every time he soared away across the valley, with the mountains in the distance and the blue sky empty and inviting all around him, he felt as if the problems of earthbound life fell away, letting him fill himself to the brim with confidence and joy. When he was flying, he felt whole, and that was more intoxicating than the whisky he used to drink to soothe the pain of his missing arm.

He gave his head a shake and pushed back his chair. “Better go write up a report for Mr. Boeing,” he said.

“See you at dinner,” Nelson said.

Frank bent to pick up his leather helmet and goggles from the chair beside him. “Thanks again.”

Nelson reached for the coffeepot to refill his cup. He touched his sandy forelock with two fingers. “It’s a pleasure.”

Frank left the mess hall and turned toward his quarters. All this, he knew very well, was possible only because of what Margot had done for him. Without her skill—and her courage, which would make any soldier proud—he would still be suffering through long days of pain, searching for whisky every night. That, too, had been in defiance of the law of the land. Was it right for him to object to Margot resisting the law when he had broken it so thoroughly and regularly himself?

He stalked across the grounds to the barracks, suddenly angry with himself, with her, with life in general. He wished he could go straight to the airfield, untie the Jenny from its moorings, and take off, all alone. Leave the whole sorry mess behind on the mundane earth.

Margot, since installing herself in Blake’s apartment, had developed the habit of breakfasting in the kitchen with Hattie and the maids. Hattie protested that this was unseemly, but Margot reminded her that her odd hours made it difficult sometimes to sit with the family at breakfast, and that she and Blake had often shared a pot of coffee before anyone else was awake. On this morning, when she needed to be at the hospital early to scrub for the operating theater, she quietly let herself into the kitchen through the back porch door.

There was no one about, but Hattie, bless her, had left the percolator ready. Margot plugged it in, and brought down one of the big china mugs that were only allowed in the kitchen. She found cream and butter in the icebox, and took bread from the box on the counter. Hattie would scold if she didn’t eat more than coffee and toast, but she was no good with eggs. They were always either scorched or runny, and the smell of the sizzling butter and soon-to-be-spoiled eggs would only bring Hattie hurrying from her bedroom, dressed or not. Hattie would cluck, push her away from the stove, and urge her to sit down and “let old Hattie do for you.”

Hattie had been “doing for her” as long as she could remember. As Margot waited for the percolator to finish its bubbling, she wondered how old Hattie really was. She knew Blake’s age, fifty-something, because he had been born right after the Civil War. As a child, she had pestered him for his history, and he had given it to her in bits and pieces, glimpses into a life begun in the shadow of slavery, developing into one lived in the light and warmth of a family he loved.

But Hattie, as she often said, “kept herself to herself,” and believed that was the proper way for a servant to behave. When the young Margot had begged her for stories of her childhood, Hattie only gave that familiar cluck, shaking her head so her round cheeks jiggled. “Ain’t much to tell,” she would say. “Nothin’ a girl like you needs to know. You just remember,” she sometimes added, shaking a surprisingly long finger, “how lucky you are, a bitty girl with this big ol’ house and a sweet mama and daddy to take care of you.” Margot had always thought Hattie was hinting at a hard childhood, but could wring no details out of her.

She’d asked her mother about it once. Edith had been the one to hire Hattie, she knew. Her father had said once, in Margot’s hearing, that Edith should have asked her to cook a meal before she gave her the job, and her mother had heaved a sigh and spoken the line they had all used for years. “Well, Dickson. I know Hattie’s a bad cook, but she’s a good woman.”

When Margot pressed her mother to tell her something about Hattie, though, all Edith would say was that if Hattie wanted the children to know her story, she would tell them herself. Hattie took pride in the reputation of Benedict Hall, in its proper complement of a butler, two housemaids, gardeners and handymen, and her own position. Margot guessed Hattie feared her background would make her ineligible to be on the Benedict staff. It spoke to the honor of her family that despite Hattie’s shortcomings as a cook, there was never the slightest consideration of letting her go.

Margot put two slices of bread in the brand-new pop-up toaster. Toast, at least, Margot could manage. She had learned to make it by holding a wire toasting rack over Blake’s hot plate, turning and turning it while trying not to burn her fingers. The automatic toaster did all of that for her, and renewed her appreciation for modern conveniences.

The toast popped up neatly, perfectly browned on both sides. The percolator finished, and Margot filled her mug and sat down at the table to butter her toast. The sky was still dark outside, but the warmly lighted kitchen was peaceful, fragrant with the scents of newly brewed coffee and toasted bread. Margot sipped her coffee and pulled Frank’s letter out of her pocket to read one more time. After surgery this morning, and her rounds in the children’s ward, she would find a quiet corner and write back. She would be as careful with her wording as he had been. She could fill her letter with reports on the clinic’s progress, the stocking of the storeroom and the examining room, all the bits and pieces Frank had launched for her. She would tell him again how grateful she was for his help, and she would finish just as he had, with a restrained expression of her affection. The real issue that lay between them was, just as he had said, too complicated to be resolved in letters.