The Moon by Night (36 page)

He opened the door and stepped into the tiny foyer, noting that the dark was even more impenetrable than usual. He went upstairs to the parlor. “Manon? It's like a dungeon in here. Why are you sitting in the dark?” He didn't enter the parlor, just stood at the door, his hands on his hips.

“Marcus? What are you doing home so early?” Manon said, slurring her words heavily. “Is that you? All I can see is a white blur.”

Angrily he went to the window and yanked open the drapes. The cheerless winter sun lit Manon's recamier, and though the light was dim, she weakly threw one hand across her eyes. Back by the dark fireplace, Solange cowered by Lisette's cradle. There was no fire, and the room was freezing. Solange was wrapped in Manon's mantle, with the shawl tied over it. One of the flannel squares that Marcus had brought home to make blankets for Lisette was wrapped around her feet. She had folded and piled the other three flannels on top of and around Lisette so snugly that all that could be seen of the baby was a round little face.

As Marcus stood there, anger rising hot in his breast, he took in all the squalid details of the room. Manon stank. The dirty diapers were even worse than the sewer rot that he always choked on when riding the train home. The sour reek of raw whiskey hung like a pall on the air. Solange looked terrified. Why should she be so tiny, so frightened, so cowed? Neither he nor Manon had ever raised a hand to her! All he had ever done was try to make a better life for them all!

He looked down at Manon, his eyes blazing. With her hands shaking, she grabbed the smaller bottle of absinthe and turned it up. The bottle clattered against her teeth, and the staccato chatter angered Marcus even more.

“Why is there no fire, Manon?” He kept his voice low and even, but it dripped with such venomous disgust that Manon flinched as if he had struck her.

“I-I was unwell. I just…must have dropped off to sleep, and the fire died,” she stammered.

He made a cutting motion with one stiff hand, and her mouth clamped shut. “No,” he said between gritted teeth. “The hearth is as cold as a snowbank. Your children are going to freeze to death, Manon, while you drowse here in your little land of laudanum dreams.”

“No…no…Solange—”

“No. Not Solange. You get up, if you still can, you fat stinking cow, and get downstairs to the coal cellar right now. You bring up the coal, and you build the fire, and you fill up that coal box. Do you understand?”

She started to get up, but her legs were so unsteady that they gave way, and she sprawled, heavily and awkwardly, back on the couch. After a sharp indrawn breath of fear, she covered her face in her hands and began to cry. Harsh gasping sobs tore from her.

Marcus's effeminate features were twisted with loathing and anger. Unbuttoning his coverall and throwing it on the console table, he marched out the door and stamped down the hallway.

Solange heard him go down to the cellar. Hurriedly she unwrapped her feet and ran to her mother. “Maman, Maman, you must stop crying,” she whispered desperately. “Please, Maman, try. Try to stop crying. You have to ask him about the rent, Maman. You have to tell him that Grimes came and shouted and we had to hide. Please, Maman, please….”

Maman cried a little while longer, but finally Solange's desperate pleas filtered into her drug-addled consciousness. “Oh, however shall I ask?” she moaned. “He's so angry. He…he…he said I w-was a fat…fat—”

Solange took Manon's hand. Somehow she managed to speak quietly and calmly, though her eyes were stretched wide with panic and she kept swallowing convulsively, almost gulping, with fear. “Maman, you're lovely. You're the most beautiful woman that he has ever seen. Remember? He said that to everyone. He's…he's just angry. But today is Friday. He gets money on Fridays, didn't you say? Money for Mr. Grimes?”

Sniffling, her nose and eyes a glaring red, Manon nodded. With effort she heaved herself up into a more graceful position and dabbed at her streaming eyes and nose. “Yes, my baby, today is Friday. And he did come home to us, didn't he? Perhaps he'll give us the money.”

“Maman, if he doesn't, you must ask him. You must!”

“All right, I will if I have to…. Solange, is there anything left in that blue bottle? The small one? No? Is there another one? I think it's blue bottles….” With her fat hand she pawed helplessly through the litter on the table.

“There are four more down on the floor underneath the table,” Solange answered. “But wouldn't you like to wait until—”

“No! Give it to me! Right now, Solange, you wicked little girl!” Manon shrieked, her voice rising to a cracked high-pitched ruin.

“Give it to her, Solange,” Marcus said as he came into the room. “Who could bear to listen to that harpy's screech? And to think that men and women alike wept when they heard you sing.” He was carrying a crate piled high with coal. He banged it down on the floor by the fireplace and began to build a fire.

Manon took another long drink, shuddered, and cleared her throat. “Marcus, dearest—” she began in a weak whisper.

“Shut up.” He said it so coldly that it frightened Manon more than anything. He hadn't even sounded like he was alive when he spat out those two small words.

Solange, too, was unnerved. Slowly her small, icy, grimy hand clutched her mother's. Manon's was limp and clammy and hot, but Solange clung to it as if it were keeping her alive. They watched Marcus's stiff back as he built up a sizable fire. He never turned around or spoke until he had watched the flames for several minutes. Neither Solange nor Manon moved nor spoke.

Finally he straightened and turned, clasping his hands behind his back as if he were on a social call. His face was set in chiseled lines. His blue eyes might have been stone marbles for all of the life in them. When he spoke, his voice was uninflected and frozen as before. “I'm changing and leaving. There is food here, there is coal here, there are matches here. You even have your beloved medicine, my dear. So if anything happens, Manon, it will be on your head, not mine.”

He went toward the door in an odd wooden march, his back stiff and unyielding.

Manon's heavy-lidded eyes could barely follow him as he walked away. Solange yanked on her mother's sleeve in alarm, mouthing the words “Ask him!” But it was as if Solange wasn't even there. Her mother blinked slowly once, twice, and closed her eyes.

Solange's heart hammered in her thin chest, but she managed to say, “Sir? Dr. Pettijohn?”

He kept walking.

Panicked, Solange ran to his side. She dared not touch him—she had never touched him—but she came as close as she dared and looked up at his face. It was so distant and closed that she wondered if he could hear her. “Sir, please,” she whispered. “What about the rent?”

He stopped and his head swiveled down and to the side.

Solange was so frightened she took two stumbling steps back.

With slow deliberate movements, his blank eyes set unblinking on the little girl at his side, Marcus reached inside his shirt. He drew out two bills, five-dollars each. “Here,” he said, handing them to Solange. She stepped forward and took them with shaking fingers. “Maybe I owe you,” he intoned. “Don't forget this, Solange.”

“I-I won't, sir,” she gulped.

“Good. Go on back to your mother and don't bother me now.”

She turned and fled back into the parlor.

Her mother slept—or was passed out—but Lisette woke up and started crying. Almost paralyzed with fear, Solange tried to shush the baby but realized that Lisette would cry until Solange could get her bottle ready. She jumped up and pulled the parlor door closed, praying that the doctor wouldn't hear Lisette's shrieks.

Sometime after that Solange heard Marcus's measured tread on the stairs and then the front door squeak open and close quietly.

She wondered if she would ever see her stepfather again.

****

If Solange had seen Marcus's face as he took the last step out of the flat and the first step onto the stoop, she might have been even more frightened than she was. Perhaps even a grown man passing by might have been unnerved. For Marcus's face was so set, his gaze so blank, his eyes so unmoving and expressionless as he stepped outside that he hardly looked human anymore. He looked like some animated machine encased in human skin.

But as soon as he had closed the door behind him in a slow measured movement, he looked up, his eyes came alive, and he grinned. He even chuckled. The metamorphosis was more unsettling than his earlier appearance had been.

However, no one witnessed this step from shadows into darkness, and Marcus Pettijohn himself had no idea of the enormity of the step he had taken.

He made his way blithely to Lord and Taylor department store.

He bought the cheapest tailed coat and tried to tell himself that his own black breeches would do. But as he slipped the coat on and looked into the full-length mirror and saw the attendant behind him with a disdainful look on his face, Marcus thought savagely,
I know what you're thinking, and who do you think you are, anyway, you little nobody? It's not like you're a Saville Row tailor. You're just a shop clerk!

“Different shades of black,” he said, sniffing.

“Beg your pardon, sir?” asked the clerk, who actually was thinking only of how he might satisfy this demanding customer and had no inkling of looking down on him.

“I was just remarking how odd it is that even black, which is actually the
lack
of color, comes in different shades,” Marcus said in a lecturing tone. “One doesn't notice until two shades of it are together, as when one tries on a suit coat with the black trousers he's wearing, or as when one replaces the breeches of a suit later, after the original has worn out, as you, I believe, have done. The new pair never completely matches the old, does it? Now show me the breeches again.”

“Yes, sir,” the meek clerk said, his cheeks flaming.

Marcus had both the suit coat and the breeches altered to fit him perfectly, staying in the store and nagging the seamstresses mercilessly until the alterations were done to his satisfaction. He did splurge and buy a silk top hat. He had one, but it was worn and shiny. He bought kid gloves instead of the finer chamois. It was difficult to tell the difference at a glance, although the feel of them was wildly different; kid was stiff, much less supple than chamois.

He thought, with a peculiar hot-cold chill,
Besides, when one takes a lady's hand to kiss it…Certainly Mrs. Buchanan—Victoria—would understand the continental manner of greeting. She's so elegant, so sophisticated, so unbelievably gorgeous and desirable—

What was I thinking?

Oh yes, the gloves. A gentleman always removes his gloves to take a lady's hand, so she probably won't even see them, much less touch them
.

His mind rocketed off again, but with an effort he concentrated on the task at hand.

He bought a pair of the finest black silk socks that Lord and Taylor had, for he believed that they must feel absolutely luxurious. When he saw how much the leather pumps he wanted cost, however, his almost manic exuberance diminished a little. But then he told himself that he would collect his hospital pay again in only one week, so spending so much money for one suit strictly for formal evenings was so pivotal to his plan that it was completely justified. He bought the shoes.

When the alterations were done and Marcus was paying the clerk, he said with elaborate carelessness, “I live downtown, but I have several more errands to do uptown. I'd like you to hold everything—don't wrap it up—until I return to pick it up. I may not have enough time to return home to change for the opera this evening, so I might be obliged to do it here to be on time.”

“That will be fine, sir,” the clerk said carefully. He'd heard such stories before, usually from men sneaking around spending money, going places, and doing things they didn't want their wives to know about. It was none of his concern, and his face gave no hint of his thoughts, but now he felt the disdain that Marcus had only imagined before.

Marcus had no idea, however. He thought he had presented the very ideal of a successful, busy gentleman with a demanding social schedule. As he rode the train to Wharton Street, to Star's flat, he rehearsed what he would say. Unlike his wife, Star was a cunning, demanding woman, and Marcus had a hard time deceiving her. He decided to give her ten dollars, and he knew she would be so happy that she wouldn't question him when he told her that he had to return to the hospital to work late.

It did work. Star, whose real name was Elsie Broderick, snatched the bills out of his hand and started gloating over the hat and dress she was going to buy that would “do Clemmie right in the eye.” Marcus didn't know who Clemmie was, nor did he care. He only wanted Star, first because she was in love with him and let him stay in her flat, and second because she helped him forget his wife and daughter.

The situation at 23 Morton Row had gotten unmanageable, the problems insurmountable, the pressure unbearable, so Marcus simply decided to purge them from his mind. He had done this very successfully while he was in Paris. He had managed to completely forget his father, a humble little uneducated apothecary. As Marcus had fallen in love with and pursued the much-sought-after opera star Manon Fortier, he had convinced himself that he was a dashing cosmopolitan young blood whose antecedents were, with compelling mystery, somewhat cloudy. This self-constructed fable had worked very well for Marcus, who was intelligent enough, but who was able to evict uncomfortable realities from his brain while establishing the desirable fables as truth. Accordingly, because his father did not fit into his life and history construct, Marcus evicted old Mr. Pettijohn, the humble apothecary. This had worked very well until his father had died and Marcus had been obliged to at least admit to himself that he had a father and that he had died. But still Marcus created a little bubble world to encompass him and Manon. When they had come to New York after old Mr. Pettijohn's death, they had moved into a five-room suite in the luxurious Corinthian Hotel. The fact that neither Marcus nor Manon had an income at the moment didn't bother Marcus at all, for he simply refused to acknowledge the fact. He only saw that he would—he must—be a wealthy, much-sought-after physician, since he had been trained in Paris, which was obviously much superior to anything American. His plan was to be a successful physician to the wealthy American arriviste boors, so therefore it must be so.