They applauded again, and he beamed at me, and it was like sunshine.
The next morning, we decided to look at the garden, and when the cousin whose garden it was realized she needed to post a letter instead, it transpired that the two of us were alone together. He held my hand lightly as we walked until we were out of sight of the house. Once we were safely alone with no one in earshot, I turned to him and flashed my newly ringed finger and said, grinning, “I can’t believe you did this.”
“I can’t either. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you beforehand, but I didn’t really plan it—the idea just came to me, and I knew it would be perfect. I’m so glad you went along. That money will be all we need to get the rest of the way.”
It dawned on me, slowly and powerfully like a poison in my blood, what he was saying.
“Ada?” he probed.
I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know the answer. But I had to. “Went along? So you don’t—”
“Oh,” was all he said.
I watched the realization dawn on his face, and I was ashamed. He thought I’d know it wasn’t real. He started to stammer an explanation, an apology, something. I didn’t need to hear it. The look on his face, the single word Oh, told the whole story. He reached for my shoulder, and I stepped aside. I didn’t want to be comforted. Not by the person who’d hurt me, not that way.
“I understand,” I said. “For the money.”
“For the money.”
We didn’t talk any more about it. Not one word.
I hated myself those two weeks in Baltimore. We were both trying on a life that wasn’t ours, but he seemed at peace with it, and I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d been duped. How wholeheartedly amazed I’d been when he spoke those words, and how quickly I’d agreed to yoke myself for life to someone who was such a mystery to me that I hadn’t realized how deep his layers of untruth went.
But what I hated myself for wasn’t just the initial foolishness. It was the ongoing lie, and that even as I knew it was all unreal, how I delighted deep down in the untrue things we said. He addressed me as “dear” and gazed upon me with a fond expression. Every time, my heart nearly exploded in my chest. He committed himself so wholly to the lie that it was too easy to believe he meant every word. And when I responded with “thank you, love,” or “see you tomorrow, my darling,” on some level, I wasn’t pretending. He didn’t love me. He wasn’t my darling. And yet I lay in bed every night a wakeful and aching creature, seeing what I wanted so close by, pretending I had it, but knowing it wasn’t really mine.
When at last it was time to keep moving north, I saw the slim envelope pass from the cousin’s hand to my false fiancé’s, and I pasted on an empty smile. I gave her back her ring. I felt bad that we had deceived them—they all seemed so kind—but things were working out exactly as we needed them to. With the dollars in that envelope, we wouldn’t starve. It was enough to get us to New York within the week, and it would house, clothe, and feed us once we were there. We didn’t discuss the fact that we’d lied in order to get it. In a way, things that weren’t said out loud didn’t happen. If we didn’t acknowledge things we didn’t want to be true, we could keep them hidden in the dark. I’d learned that at my mother’s knee, after all.
***
New York City, our destination, had only been a distant, hazy image in my mind. As we rode down Houston Street on a horse cart, it became utterly, astoundingly real.
The city was immense. The buildings were so tall and the streets so wide that I couldn’t take them in. And the people. So many people, everywhere, beyond counting. Like grains of salt in a shaker or the blades of grass on the Biltmore lawn.
“How do you like it?” Clyde asked me, sitting stiffly only inches away. Since we’d left Baltimore, each day had been like a summer storm—one minute warm, the next cold. He would crack jokes and then fall silent for hours. He smiled too much for no reason. I would hold my body apart from his deliberately but then, when we were close together like this, find myself staring at his lower lip, fighting with all I had not to lean over and press my lips there. If his skin brushed mine by accident, I jumped like a flea. There was no peace with him.
But now, the city demanded my full attention. There were too many sights and sounds flooding my senses. So many people, such tall buildings, the smoke and the rails and the hats and skirts and horses. So much black silk. So much marble and stone. So much of everything.
“It’s too much,” I blurted. “It’s too big.”
“It’s not. You haven’t even seen a fraction.”
“There’s more?”
“There’s always more,” he said. “It’s New York.”
“How much do you know of New York? I thought you lived in North Carolina all your life.”
He shrugged. “I may have been here once or twice.”
“When?”
“A while ago,” he said. “That’s not important.”
It was then that I started to wonder if any of the stories he’d told me were real. I’d been in his sight every single day for a month and he in mine. I’d met his family. I’d pretended to be his betrothed. When he lied, I shared his lies, and we had made up our own untrue story together. But he’d betrayed me, shocking me with the fake betrothal, and the fact that I’d shared his lies didn’t make them more forgivable. He couldn’t be trusted. I would need to act accordingly.
We edged down a noisy, tight street. Carriages whizzed past us, all too near, and I shrank away from them at first. I made myself get used to it. I tried to focus on specific, small things. The man with the fruit cart and his pile of oranges. The storefront with the striped awning advertising NOTIONS. When we turned the corner onto a narrower street, the pattern of the cobblestones changed, and the sound of the horses’ hooves changed into a different rhythm, each clop-clop ringing out more clearly, which I could hear above all the voices and noise if I concentrated my attention.
The hooves slowed and stopped. I looked at the house ahead of us. Red brick, three stories, with five steps up to a solid front door. The whole block of houses was identical except for the color of the brick. They were neither grand nor miserable, but they were town houses, linked one to the next like paper dolls with no space between. The only sky was up; the only green was a single, sad tree on the other side of the street, halfway down. So many doors and so many windows, but the feeling was still one of being closed in.
“My boardinghouse,” he said, pointing to it, and then, “and yours,” pointing two doors down.
That settled it. He’d be too near. I couldn’t trust myself. I wanted to feel unmitigated hate for him, but it wasn’t that simple. There was only one way to make sure he wouldn’t charm me again, against all my judgment. I made my plan and acted. “I’m going to need some of the money.”
“What?”
Holding out my hand, forcing myself to smile lightly, I said, “I should really get half, you know. Of the betrothal money. I’ll take less though. I just want to secure my rent.”
“Your first month is already paid. You don’t need any money.”
“You’d leave me in the city without a nickel?”
“I’ll take care of you. We’ll meet up tomorrow, and I’ll give you some then.”
“Now,” I said. “What if I want some supper?”
“I can’t just hand you money out in the street.”
I kept my hand stubbornly extended. “You can so. I have faith in you.”
Grumbling, he reached into his pocket and struggled to peel off a couple of bills without exposing the money to the air. I saw his point—the street teemed with strangers, and it was unwise to wave money around in front of others who might want it—but I knew the danger if I didn’t secure my part now. Perhaps he intended to meet me the next day and share the money as he said he did, but he couldn’t be trusted. He had said he wouldn’t keep his sentiments a secret, but that was exactly what he’d done with his false proposal, and he was guilty of it even now. I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling. And because of that, I was hiding my true feelings and plans from him as well. Either way, I had to take advantage of the moment, since we might never share another one.
He leaned close to me and said, “Put your arms around me then.”
“Why?”
“Do you want it or not?” I belatedly realized he meant the money, not the embrace. I edged forward into his arms. His body was warm and his scent flooded my nostrils, and for a moment, I wanted desperately to sink into him and give myself up. But I felt his fingers discreetly searching for my hand and pressing the money into it, and the gesture brought me back to consciousness.
“Thank you,” I said softly.
“Come meet me tomorrow. Right here. Nine in the morning. All right?”
“All right.”
“We made it.”
“We did.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. And we’ll find our way.”
“All right,” I repeated.
“All right.” He smiled a soft smile at me. How could he think everything was okay? Everything was not okay.
I watched him mount the steps into the boardinghouse and turned right toward my own destination.
I only stopped at the boardinghouse two doors down long enough to ask after the deposit. One had been placed, and when I explained my situation, the woman was happy to give me back three weeks’ rent as long as I forfeited one. She gave me the location of her cousin’s boardinghouse in the next ward over and swore not to tell my dangerous husband where I’d gone. Before leaving the house, I secured both wads of money deep in my undergarments. I couldn’t afford to lose my stake to pickpockets.
Then I hoisted my valise and off I went, down the teeming street into the unknown.