“That sounds like the kind of thing I’d expect from my mother.”
“I’m sorry for insulting him,” said Paul. “It wasn’t fair of me.”
“I’m sorry that my mother embarrassed you,” said Agnes in turn. “She is…complicated. As is the situation.”
Paul looked at her curiously. He wasn’t sure what she meant.
She appeared to be in the midst of making a very difficult decision. Paul stayed quiet. If she was going to say something to him, something difficult, he would let her make that decision on her own.
“Look,” she said at last. “There’s a lot about all of this—my mother, Henry Jayne—that you don’t know. And…well, I want to tell you.”
“All right,” said Paul.
“But I’m afraid to.”
Of all the emotions she’d expressed to him, fear had never been among them. Edison had not frightened her, nor had Stanford White, nor had the danger of keeping Tesla in her home. What was scaring her?
“You can trust me,” said Paul. “If nothing else…I’m your lawyer.”
She smiled for a moment. “I lied to you.”
“About what?” He watched her struggle to find the words. “Miss Huntington?”
“That’s just the thing,” she said at last. “My name isn’t Agnes Huntington.”
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams.
—KARL POPPER
SHE HAD BEEN born Agnes Gouge in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her mother, Fannie, was not then the high-society maven Paul had met; she was a maid. Agnes’s father had sailed deep-water. Once, when she was eight, she’d received a letter from him. The postmark was Oslo. He’d sketched the serene harbor for her, and inquired as to her health. He’d left no address at which to reach him. And she’d never heard from him again.
She’d always loved to sing. The upstairs neighbors would bang their boots against the ceiling, but she didn’t care. Neither did her mother.
When Agnes was fourteen, Fannie moved them to Boston, where she scrubbed floors and polished china plates for the Endicotts while Agnes auditioned for the Bijou. The parts went to local girls whose parents knew the manager. Agnes got a job sweeping stages at the Howard Athenaeum, but it wasn’t what she’d imagined. She did not find herself amid a tight-knit group of artists. There was no creative camaraderie in which to conspire. She was the sweeping girl, the singers were the singers, and the stagehands were sauced. It was as much a bordello as a theater. Though a bordello might at least have been profitable.
Boston wasn’t working. Fannie had seen her daughter’s tears, had felt the pain of her unrealized ambitions from the moment they left Michigan. She knew how much Agnes wanted this, and she also knew that the daughters of housemaids didn’t become prime donne. Fannie had to watch her precocious, inquisitive, curious daughter learn cynicism. That was what she could not stand.
Agnes had no idea how long her mother had been planning it when it happened. Whether it was a spur-of-the-moment decision or whether her mother had set the whole affair up months before.
One day, when she was seventeen, Agnes came home to find a dress lying across her bed. The dress was of a color that Agnes had never before seen. It was green, bright but somehow still subtle. The shade of orchid leaves, lady’s mantle, saxifrage. The shade of a faraway ocean. She gasped when she saw it, when her eyes caught the glimmer of afternoon light from the dirty, square window. At the top of the dress, resting delicately over the silk, was a string of diamonds.
Agnes stepped closer. She reached out to touch the fabric, but pulled her hand back. She was afraid to press her grease-stained fingertips against such a cloth. This dress, these jewels, did not belong to anyone she knew. Or anyone she might know. They were a princess’s evening wear.
“Do you like it?” Agnes turned to see Fannie in the doorway, smoking a thin cigarette.
“What is it?”
“It’s a dress,” said Fannie. “And it’s yours.”
“You…” Agnes couldn’t believe what she was going to say. “You…stole it?”
“It comes from the dressing room of Miss Endicott. So do the jewels. The girl is about your age—a little younger. It might be a little wide around the bust, but we can take it in.”
“You stole a dress from Mary Endicott?” Agnes was dumbfounded, terrified. The family would discover the loss, and her mother had been polishing their silver for just long enough to be the first likely suspect. The police would be at their door within days.
That’s when her mother explained. They were going to leave Boston and they were going to do it that very night. They would take a coach steamer to Paris, packing the dress in their valise. Agnes would board the steamer in her normal clothes, and she would disembark in green silk. She would leave Boston Harbor as a sweeping girl…and she would arrive in Paris the daughter of new California money.
“Miss Agnes Huntington,” her mother had said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Agnes had protested.
“Exactly. No one does. But soon enough, everyone will.”
With only an impossibly expensive dress and a string of gems, the teenage Agnes would be reborn in Paris. There, she could be anyone she wanted. There were enough moneyed Huntingtons roaming the world that no one would be sure from which line she’d descended, and if she worked her manners, no one would be rude enough to ask. Agnes was beautiful, her mother had explained. She was radiant. She was funny. She was both smart and clever, which were never quite the same thing, and she was enormously talented. The only thing holding her back in America was her family.
“But what about you?”
Fannie would be there as well. Waiting in the wings. Silent and unseen, Fannie would be backstage, awaiting her daughter’s triumph.
The police wouldn’t be able to find her in Paris—they’d never look that far afield. But they would most certainly be looking. The Endicotts were not a family to be trifled with. So forever, even if their deceit were to be successful, Fannie would have to stay in her daughter’s shadow.
“I’m afraid.”
“I know,” her mother had answered. “But I love you. And that’s why we’re going to do this.”
Fannie had moved close and kissed Agnes once on her forehead. And then Fannie had packed both of their bags while Agnes puttered and paced, too shocked to argue or do anything but what she’d been asked.
They boarded the Cunard Line steamer bound for Europe that very evening.
And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Agnes or Fannie Gouge.
—
In steerage, Agnes kept the dress hidden for the duration of the trip, clutching her bag even while she slept. Only on that final morning had her mother removed the green cloth from its cover. The other women in their steerage cabin were incredulous. Agnes and Fannie said nothing.
Agnes had heard of a café from some men on the boat, gentlemen from the first-class cabin whom she passed as they smoked on the communal deck. It sounded, from the snatches of description she’d been able to overhear, like a good place for introductions. On her second day in Paris, she left the cheap women’s boardinghouse Fannie had found and asked for directions.
Agnes sat with her café au lait along the Boulevard Saint-Marcel wearing a high-society evening gown and matching necklace at eleven in the morning. But after twenty minutes, she was approached by a tall man with slick black hair and an old wool coat. He was actually quite handsome.
He addressed her in French, which of course she did not speak.
“Pardon,” she said. “Would you like to try that in English?”
“You’re a touch overdressed for the morning.”
She looked him up and down. “I should say you’d be better off with a bit of dressing up yourself.”
The man laughed at her insult and helped himself to the seat opposite.