Parlor Games A Novel

PROPOSALS AND PROPOSITIONS



CHICAGO—NOVEMBER 1887-JUNE 1888



Being anxious to leave Carrie Watson’s and step out on my own, I hoped my new friends, Melody and Melissa, might afford some such avenue. I had told them I was staying at the Palmer House while I attended to my deceased uncle’s will; they believed I seldom saw them in the evenings because I needed to look after my grief-stricken aunt. But this pretense created certain problems: I feared the excuse would sooner or later wear thin, and my engagement at Carrie Watson’s prevented me from mingling with their circle of fascinating friends. These cumbersome circumstances, as well as the deteriorating condition of my relations at Miss Watson’s, thus forced some action.

After the Jastrow lecture, Melody, Melissa, and I retired to the Palmer House for drinks. We settled on red velvet seats in the lobby and ordered cordials. All around the thick-carpeted lounge, couples and foursomes bent their heads together in hushed conversation. Candle lights flickered across their faces, revealing expressions animated by good humor or, at the least, by wine and spirits.

“Wouldn’t you just love one of those new Gramophones so you could listen to music whenever you wanted?” I asked them, taking in the piano player’s even-tempered rendition of a Chopin piece.

“Oh, my,” said Melody, the elder and more practical of the two, “we just asked Father to buy us a new dining-room set.”

Melissa, who was always keen to acquire new playthings or contraptions, rolled her eyes. “You’re such a spoilsport.”

“Well, I’m thinking of buying one,” I said. “But it seems a shame to keep it in a little hotel room that’s hardly fit for entertaining.”

“You could keep it at our house,” said Melissa.

Melody clapped her hands together. “And you could visit and even stay over whenever you wanted.”

And that is how I found my way out of Carrie Watson’s and into their home. After I gave Melody and Melissa a new Gramophone for Christmas, they made me a bona fide member of their household. Such gay parties and receptions the sisters held in those days. Their lovely home, not far north of the river, on Chestnut Street, attracted socialites, businessmen, and general rounders—a most eclectic mix of Chicago’s young people. At the sisters’ New Year’s Eve reception, I met a promising young man, Charles Dale Andrews, Jr. Dale, as everyone called him, worked as a teller in his father’s bank, First Chicago National.

By March, Dale and I had become enamored to the point of serious involvement. One Friday he sent a hansom to bring me to the bank before our planned evening of dinner and a performance of Richard III at the Haymarket Theatre.

It was my first visit to his place of employment, and I arrived bearing the mink muff he had purchased for me only two weeks earlier, on the occasion of our still-secret betrothal. My boot heels clicked on the polished marble floor as I made my way toward the stately tellers’ booths lining the high-ceilinged room. Dale spotted me before I saw him and hurried out to greet me, his posture more erect than usual, his brilliantined russet hair combed to a tidy swoop.

Dale’s appeal lay more in his generous and carefree nature than in his appearance. His arms and legs were too lanky for his compact torso, and his nose was so narrow and delicate it resembled a piece of porcelain. Eyeglasses lent him a studious look and also a certain self-consciousness. You see, he fancied himself the dashing and debonair type: Upon first being introduced to anyone, he would yank off his glasses before offering his customary hail-fellow handshake.

Dale helped me off with my coat and cupped his hand under my elbow. “Darling, I’m so glad you could come around.”

Directing me to the bank of tellers’ windows, Dale introduced me to the other tellers, who showed the deference due to the bank president’s son.

“Come,” he said, “we must say hello to Father.”

Dale escorted me up the wide spiral staircase to the sanctuary of offices on the second floor. He paused in the hallway and whispered, “Soon, I’ll have an office on this floor, too.”

I circled my hand around his arm. “I have every confidence in you. Your fellow employees obviously hold you in high esteem.”

He smiled and showed me to the solid wooden door with his father’s brass nameplate. Rapping gently at the door, he called, “Father, may I come in?”

Dale opened the door and opened his hand, directing me to enter first.

I greeted Dale’s father, whom I had met only three weeks earlier, at a reception in their home, with a smile. “Hello, Mr. Andrews. I hope you are well.”

The plump Mr. Andrews, who was obviously not only well, but well indulged, rose from behind a six-foot-square desk and lumbered around. His fleshy cheeks congealed into a diffident smile. “Yes, and you, Miss Davidson?”

I offered my hand. “Fine, thank you, sir. Dale has been kind enough to show me around your very impressive establishment.”

“Ah, yes, we do our best.”

Dale stepped up beside me. “Well, Father, I’ve closed out my window for the day.”

“And where are you two young people off to this evening?” Mr. Andrews directed his gaze at Dale, and I detected the same knotting of his eyebrows I’d observed upon our last encounter. Mr. Andrews either did not approve of me or found his only son disappointing in some way.

A little later that evening, I discovered that both were true. We had just finished our dinners at the Silversmith Restaurant when Dale scratched his forehead and said, “I believe I’ll speak with Father about my promotion tomorrow.”

“And do you suppose you’ll meet with success?”

He shook his head, as if considering a weighty proposition. “I can’t hazard a guess. He probably intends to torture me a little longer, even though he’s promised me the post.”

“Oh, I doubt he means to torture you.”

Dale fingered the bowl of his Cognac glass. “You don’t know him very well.”

I gave him my kindest smile. “Perhaps you should come at it in a roundabout way. Find out his intentions before you ask outright.”

“I’m tired of waiting at his pleasure. And keeping quiet about our engagement. Once I get the promotion, we can tell Mother and Father and set the date.”

“There’s no rush, my dear. They’ve only just met me.”

“I believe they’d like to keep me in the house forever.”

“Perhaps it would be best to give them more time to get to know me.”

“The thing is, they haven’t approved of a single young lady I’ve introduced them to. I suspect Father wouldn’t be happy unless I married the mayor’s daughter.”

“All the more reason for a long engagement.”

Dale raised his eyebrows. “How long?”

I reached out and squeezed his hand. “Perhaps a year. Give me some time to win them over.”

“I don’t give a deuce about winning them over.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. There’s no pleasing them, especially Father. I don’t care what he thinks about you. Sooner or later, he needs to understand you’re the one I’m marrying.”

“Let’s at least wait until you’ve received your promotion.”

Dale swooped his cigarette close to his mouth and held it there. “I won’t wait forever.” He inhaled deeply and forced out a narrow draft of smoke.



A few weeks later, in mid-April, Dale invited me for Saturday dinner at his family’s home. He said he intended to announce our engagement that evening. I urged restraint and patience, but Dale insisted he’d burst if he tried to keep our secret one day longer. I had little choice but to acquiesce and brought out my most modest dress for the occasion, a turquoise-blue gown with a high-necked lace collar.

The Andrewses lived on the Near North Side of Chicago, a short carriage ride from Melody and Melissa’s, in a handsome two-story brick house large enough to entertain a crowd of forty. The home had a distinctively unpleasant odor, like a combination of mothballs, mold, and overused perfume.

Mrs. Andrews welcomed me in the entranceway with kisses directed at the air around my cheeks and escorted me to the parlor to join the menfolk for “a spot of sherry before dinner.” What a profile the woman made—her hefty bosoms might have toppled her, save for the solid hips that counterbalanced them. Mr. Andrews was also portly, carrying perhaps forty pounds around his midriff. I wondered if Dale would balloon to similar proportions in his advanced years, a prospect that did not please me.

“Darling, hello,” said Dale, coming up to me and kissing my forehead.

As Dale came around to my side, I turned to Mr. Andrews. “Hello, sir. Thank you for having me to your lovely home.”

The maid served our sherry, and we seated ourselves, by couples, on two separate sofas.

Mrs. Andrews addressed me. “Pauline, we’ve never had a chance for a proper visit. Tell me, where is it you’re from?”

“A small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Menominee. It’s on Lake Michigan and well known for its shipping.”

“And what is your family’s business there?”

I had told Dale all this, though I hadn’t been able to bring myself to admit that my brother worked at a lumber mill. Still, it appeared Dale hadn’t told his parents. Or perhaps they wanted to hear it directly from me. “My father is deceased, but my brother is in the mining business.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Andrews, flattening a hand over her heart. “I didn’t know about your father.”

“It’s been quite a few years now. Though I still miss him.”

Mr. Andrews pulled his vest down over his belly. “Yes, well, it seems everyone from the U.P. is either in mining or lumber. Do you know that it was lumber from the U.P. that rebuilt this city after the Great Fire?”

“Oh, yes, it’s quite a booming industry there. I have some relatives in lumber, too,” I said. After all, Maman’s cousin did supervise at Spies Lumber.

We soon retired to the dining room and took our places around a well-appointed oak table with carved claw feet. Imagining the three of them seated around that vast table for breakfasts, luncheons, and suppers, I sympathized with Dale’s desire to make a separate life for himself as soon as possible. Everything about this room—its fat-legged furniture, the burgundy velvet wallpaper, the sour odor of old carpets—set my teeth to aching.

The maid served a spring-vegetable soup from a tureen on the sideboard and exited through the swinging door off the dining room. The door had barely ceased its whooshing when Dale picked up his spoon and said, “Mother, Father, Pauline and I are to be married.”

Mrs. Andrews cocked her head at Dale. “Really? Well, this is a pleasant surprise.” But of course what she meant was that it was an unpleasant surprise. She turned and stretched her hand across the center of the table toward me, though we could never have touched across the expanse. “I’m so pleased, Pauline. We really must become better acquainted.”

Which meant that she didn’t like me one bit and didn’t judge the prospects for liking me in the future to be very good. I put my spoon down and imitated the stretch of her hand. “I shall look forward to that.”

Mr. Andrews’s face had lost a few shades of pink, but he managed to suck his belly in enough to reach his wineglass and raise it toward Dale and then me. “Congratulations, son. May you two be very happy.”

I believe Dale was the only happy member of our foursome that evening. The prospect of relinquishing their only child to me obviously did not thrill Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. And, to my chagrin, Dale had not yet secured his promotion. The only blemish on Dale’s happiness that evening was my announcement that we’d decided on an engagement of at least a year.



Two months later, with summer’s warmth settling on Chicago, Claude Montcrief, the piano player from Carrie Watson’s house, contacted me out of the blue with a business proposition. It seemed Claude had been approached by a mining engineer with a plan for making thousands in copper-mine stocks. Claude explained that they needed someone who was familiar with the Upper Peninsula and he’d thought of me. I will admit I was skeptical about the prospect of a lucrative business deal involving Upper Michigan’s mines, but out of loyalty to Claude I agreed to explore the matter with him and the engineer.

We arranged to gather on a Tuesday evening at Fitzgerald and Moy’s, one of Chicago’s most opulent saloons. Claude met me at the door and escorted me across the tavern’s multicolored tile floor to a back room that was no doubt typically occupied by poker players. The translucent plates of leaded glass lining the upper panels of the fifteen-square-foot room were interrupted only by the door we had entered and another door on the opposite wall. The tinkle of cutlery and glassware and the din of conversation sounded from the main room, and the closed-in space smelled of tobacco and cigar smoke.

“Pauline,” Claude said after closing the door, “allow me to introduce Mr. Reed Dougherty.”

Dougherty rose from his seat and bowed. “Miss Davidson, a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise, Mr. Dougherty,” I said.

Dougherty, a man of thirty to thirty-five with an angular frame, spoke in a silky baritone. He looked familiar, and it occurred to me I might have seen him at Carrie Watson’s.

As I seated myself opposite him at the round, felt-covered table, Dougherty locked his penetrating dark-brown eyes on me—in the manner of an admirer first taking in my God-given beauty. He wore a navy-blue suit, an unadorned white shirt, and a slightly askew blue cravat, the sort of plain but respectable attire one might find on a country storekeeper. His large hands, as well groomed as a surgeon’s but as muscular as those of a farmer, were quite at odds with his fine-featured cheekbones and straight-lined nose—all in all, a handsome face in a not-quite-classic but understated way. In fact, I found him an odd jumble of traits: savvy but not terribly refined in manner, as if he had accustomed himself to relying solely on intellect and grit; and light-handed in gesture but melancholy of expression, with his blade of a mustache waxed to a forlorn downturn.

“May I offer you a glass of port?” Dougherty asked, lifting a bottle and tipping it over a glass.

Claude and I joined Dougherty in his toast: “To our business. May it be profitable.”

Dougherty eased his glass down and turned to Claude. “I trust we can speak confidentially?”

“As we agreed,” said Claude.

Dougherty smiled at me. “All three of us?”

“Certainly,” I said, studying Dougherty’s shadowy, deep-set eyes.

Claude leaned toward me, reached under the table, and patted my hand. I knew my assistance in this matter meant a great deal to him. Upon greeting me at the door, he’d whispered confidentially: “Thank you for coming, Pauline. I sorely hope this deal works. I could do with a little extra cash just now.”

Dougherty reached into a large envelope and pulled out a parchment of thick stock. He eased it across the table. “A sample certificate. For your inspection.”

Claude slid the sheet toward me and brushed his fingertips over the embossed emblem at its top.

“Certificate of Purchase, 100 shares of Hull Copper Company,” the title read. Below that a paragraph began with “The bearer of these shares …” I took in the paragraph about share ownership and surveyed the bottom of the page, which contained two signature lines, a blank one for the bearer and another signed with flourish by a Theodore X. Hull and dated that very day, June 16, 1888.

Dougherty leaned back in his chair. “All very legitimate in appearance, as you can see.”

Claude nodded. “Yes, and will we be meeting the illustrious Mr. Hull?”

“There is no Mr. Hull. Nor is there a Hull Copper Company.” Dougherty folded his hands on the table and pitched forward. His gaze slid over Claude before coming to rest on me. “It’s just the three of us.”

“Can you tell us a bit more, Mr. Dougherty,” I asked, meeting his steadfast eye, “about how you propose we proceed?” Experience had taught me that his looks demonstrated more than a mere interest in my potential as a business partner.

“First I want to know that you are both with me on this. That I can count on your discretion and cooperation.”

Claude shot me a what-do-you-say glance. I signaled him with the slightest of nods. He turned back to Dougherty. “Yes.”

Dougherty looked to me, angling his eyebrows questioningly.

“You can count on my discretion,” I said.

Dougherty drummed his fingers on the table. “You understand that what I propose is not exactly legal? But that it stands to yield handsomely?”

Claude brushed his palms together. “And can you assure us we won’t be apprehended, Mr. Dougherty?”

Dougherty concentrated his brow. “I have thought this through down to the minutest detail. If you are willing to act quickly and decisively, we will all come out the richer. I propose a three-way split, after expenses.”

Claude dipped his head and slapped his hand on the table, as heady as a poker player showing a royal flush. “Very well, then.”

Dougherty drew his torso up stiff and straight, like a cat considering a pounce. “Are you both still with me?”

I took his exacting requests for confirmation as evidence of the gravity and also the momentous opportunity of his proposal. Not wanting to tarry or disappoint Claude, I said, “Yes, Mr. Dougherty, we have both said we are with you.”

“Fine, fine. Then let me introduce our assistants.” Dougherty rose, marched to the door behind him, and opened it slightly. “Ladies, would you kindly join us?”

In waltzed Rose and Sadie from Carrie Watson’s house.

Dougherty said, “Miss Davidson, I believe you are acquainted with Miss Thomas and Miss Chesnick.”

“How nice to see you,” I said, nodding to each of them, “Rose, Sadie.” The sight of these two did not please me. After leaving Carrie Watson’s, I’d avoided any contact with the girls. Why Dougherty should bring them into this matter was beyond me.

Dougherty kept his eyes trained on me. “You know them from your employment at Carrie Watson’s, correct? You once resided there, didn’t you?”

“Mr. Dougherty,” I said, summoning my firmest voice. “Are we here to do business with you, or do you have something else in mind?”

“I only wish to understand the nature of your acquaintance with Miss Thomas and Miss Chesnick.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the matter before us.”

Dougherty turned to Rose and Sadie. “Miss Davidson was at one time a resident of Carrie Watson’s, was she not?”

Rose glanced at me and crossed her arms. “Most certainly. And the favorite of quite a few gentlemen.”

At that, Dougherty called over his shoulder, “Mr. Andrews, you may come in now.”

The rear door to the room swung open, and Dale and his father burst into the room, whereupon all hell broke loose.