Constance rose and paced about the room, then stopped, as if to speak, shaking her head. “I thought I knew what some men could do, what they are capable of. Alice, I can’t imagine.”
Alice waited, her mind lost in her wanderings around the Chicago Board of Trade, the confusion of seeking directions, the clanking of that elevator, the slight grind of the hinges on the door to the cotton exchange, the dry feeling of her tongue as she asked that efficient woman if she might see Howard Butterworth. Howard, who did not exist.
“Would you want him back, Alice?”
The question brought Alice back into the room. For a second, she sat remembering where she was and why. Would she want him? Whoever that man was had failed her from the day she married him.
“No.” There it was. From her own lips.
“But he is the father of your child. He may not be Howard Butterworth, but he is someone. He should be accountable. To this child. To you.”
Alice had struggled with just such a conviction. And she had released it.
“I will make a life for us, Constance. I have the skills to do that.”
“Your skills do not set him free of his responsibility. You have searched for him?”
“Yes. In Chicago, at the board of trade.” Alice felt the finality, the shock and hopelessness, the disbelief with which she had closed the heavy glass door to the cotton exchange behind her; felt the disorientation with which she had made her way to the elevators, an empty space beyond recall until she sank into the chair by the window after she locked the door of the flat behind her, the flat where she had lived with an unknown man. “I also searched in Memphis. His travels took him back and forth along that route.”
Alice felt the bulge of her pregnancy as her hands tightened over her abdomen, over the hardness of the corset she loosened more day by day.
“And nothing?”
“Nothing at all. He said his mother lived there, but it wasn’t true. He was buying a skirt for his mother in Memphis when I met him, but he never took me there. When I arrived, I discovered the vague address he had given me was on a street of saloons and gambling establishments. So I got back on the train and came to New Orleans.”
“He didn’t come here to New Orleans?”
“Not that I ever knew. Not that he ever said. Only Memphis and Chicago.”
“That seems odd. New Orleans is the very hub of the cotton trade. Why wouldn’t he have come here?”
Indeed, why wouldn’t he? “He didn’t talk much about his work. Actually, he didn’t talk much about anything. But no, only the Memphis-Chicago connection.”
“If he was hiding his identity, why wouldn’t he also hide where else he might be? New Orleans is crucial to the cotton industry. It’s at the very center of things. And New York. I know New York is vying also. Have you considered New York?”
Alice shook her head. No, he had ridden the train to Memphis. Of that one thing she had no doubt. He had mentioned it too often. Complained about the train schedule, the Memphis station, the heat, the mosquitoes. Never had he mentioned New York.
“Why, he could be right here. Right now. It’s possible, Alice. Out there on the wharves. Right now, as we are talking! Have you considered that? Or at the cotton exchange downtown!” Constance’s excitement was clearly rising. “Yes, at the cotton exchange. Why not?”
Alice could not follow Constance’s rising excitement. Unclear what she would do if she should find the man who was not Howard, Alice sat quite still, waiting for Constance to return to this room. To reality. Was this energy somehow more about her own widowhood than about Alice’s abandonment? Alice leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Yes, yes! The cotton exchange. Oh, my, it is a magnificent building!”
The image of the Chicago Board of Trade flashed through Alice’s mind, all these magnificent buildings, all erected to honor the enterprises of men. With well-dressed women on their arms at their social engagements, events where women’s importance depended on finery and a man offering an elbow or pulling out a chair at the dinner table, all the rituals of etiquette that elevated women who belonged beside those men—or to them. Alice opened her eyes, gazed up at the ceiling, that high ceiling designed to keep the heat away. But the heat of the moment was entrapping her.
“Do you have a photo, Alice?”
How did Constance keep hitting her with the unexpected?
“Yes,” she said, her voice faint. Why was she reluctant? Because Constance had not one photo of her dead husband anywhere? An unfaded rectangle on the drawing room wallpaper was the only evidence Alice had noticed of where such a photo might have been. Was its absence grief? She pondered Benton’s invisibility in the house. She had imagined it to be grief.
“What sort of photo?”
“A wedding photo.” Alice felt a slice of apprehension. She had answered the question with as clear a description as she could muster. Why on earth had she kept that photo? Why had it not gone into the trash when she moved? “We eloped,” she said. “Went to a justice of the peace. No wedding. And now, the truth of it, no marriage.”
“And the photo?”
“Some poor-quality print from a fellow on the street trying to eke out a living from photos of marriage-mill couples.”
There. She had told the truth. To a woman she hardly knew, but with whom she felt such kinship Alice could begin to imagine what her life might have been had she had a sister along with those overly valued brothers.
“Well,” Alice said, rising. “I have pearls to sew.” She left the room, went up the stairs to her work, each step taking her a bit closer to the day she would need to leave this place of respite.
*
As she twisted the fine cording, her fingertips satisfied with its smooth stitching, Alice snugged it beneath the beaded bridge, transformed now into a torch, a symbolic way across impossibility and a light for the way. She dropped the sewing into her lap and stared out the window, comforted by the presence of leaves and the absence of concrete. What if Constance were right? What if Howard had concealed more than his identity? Alice was relatively certain he had not concealed his line of work. He knew too much about the cotton business and had never indicated a hint of expertise in anything else. His travel schedule seemed a verification of that. How many other lines of work had that sort of schedule? Of course, Constance had seemed to suggest something similar in Benton’s line of work, so perhaps Howard might have been engaged in something different. She dismissed that almost without hesitation. However, the information that New Orleans was a major center of the cotton trade, coupled with the fact that it was just a few hours more on the train, did strike her as at least interesting. Intriguing, in fact.
Alice picked up her handwork again. Perhaps she would inquire. She had a few months yet to stabilize her life. In truth, she would as soon never see Howard’s face again or hear his voice, but he made a fair living. Of that much she was certain. Wherever he might be, he was the father of this child she carried. If she could find him, he could be made financially accountable.