Page 16 of The Scarlet Ball

I held up the newest issue of Town Topics. Colonel Mann must not have gotten his bribe that month; on page three there was a lovely article about Mr. Horne’s efforts with wounded veterans, and directly behind it on page four was a full six inches of type about a mysterious gentleman who was paying for the keep and schooling of a half-dozen children in Boston.

“And this then is where the gospel truth is found?”

“It tells you the truth of who is too slow or too poor to pay to stop the presses that month, anyway.”

To my surprise, Mrs. Howard and I spent hours reading together, Mrs. Howard with a cloth drape over her skirts to protect them from the newsprint. She pointed out the Schultes, old German New York whose fleets sailed the northern seas, and the Thomases, new money who were bound to send a boy back to Ireland and strand him in the hills every fifty years.

“Of course it needn’t be one of their own sons,” she said meditatively, “but the fact that it has often been is a thing to consider.”

The houses I’d worked in Paris had papers coming in from all over the Continent, keeping us bright and informed about whatever hobby horse a client might be riding, and at the end of it, the gossip was always the same. It was who had left suddenly under a cloud, who had arrived back home in triumph, who was caught with whose spouse, whose spouse turned into a grove of trees to escape them, it was all the same.

The only difference now was that the woman beside me knew these people, and I was expected to know them as well. Mrs. Howard called out a name, and I’d have to respond with husband, wife, children, industry, and pertinent scandals of the last twenty years. It was enough to make me dizzy sometimes—even if Ginny Marshall wasn’t expected to know all of them, there were still considerably more than four hundred of the bastards—and for the most part, they were all alike in their virtues and their sins.

It was better when Mrs. Howard became distracted and began talking to herself as much as to me. She’d tap a four-inch column of type, all about one of the Lyons girls marrying a marquis in Venice and how they’d dropped wedding rings into the sea, making it always their lover.

“That’s Mary,” she said. “She and Iphigenia shared an art tutor for a year. He took them both to the Met to sketch after the great masters and Mary was lost in the Thomas Coles for almost seven months. She’d be seen from time to time, peering around the trees, a spot in the distant water, and Edith Lyons had to hire a woman catcher from some Balkan place to lure her out. I don’t believe she and Iphigenia spoke afterward, but they were close before. Edith and I work on the literacy campaign together.”

Or she’d frown at something in a much less prestigious paper, a short snippet about a nameless girl whose brother had gambled with and lost half her memories at the tables in Saratoga.

“That would be Tilly Manchester. I hear they spent May teaching her her letters again, but at least she kept her dancing and her table manners. You met her, she was the girl seated across from you and to the right at Mrs. de Lange’s dinner. Iphigenia was cool with her, if I recall, said Tilly was too loud for her liking.”

I met Tilly Manchester again not long after. As far as the rest of society knew, Ginny had fallen ill the day after that first unfortunate dinner and had to regretfully decline any number of invitations since, but after two weeks Mrs. Howard had deemed me ready to venture out in public. Mielle dressed me in a burgundy walking dress trimmed in sober black and then she stitched the Howard face over mine with painstakingly small stitches. Mrs. Howard looked me over carefully, said that I would do, and brought me along with her for a series of talks on the construction of bathhouses in the poorer neighborhoods.

It was the sort of thing she did quite often, I would soon come to learn: bathhouses for Forty-Eighth Street, hampers of food delivered to the nurses’ school on Blackwell’s Island, a whole wing funded at New Bethlehem Hospital. I realized with wry amusement that I had passed under her painted gaze at New Beth last year when I had a cough that would not go away. Her fingerprints were all over the city, and they would be there, heavy and light, long after she was gone.

When we walked out into the early October afternoon, I paused on the step, feeling suddenly naked as an opened oyster. I was bare and unprotected, so little between me and the world. I could be seen, and I could spoken about—I could be found, and there was a moment where I was going to dodge back into the house in stupid fright.

Then Mrs. Howard took my arm, and she would never take a shopgirl’s arm or a courtesan’s either. I was safe behind a disguise that no amount of money could buy, safer than I had been in years. As Ginny Marshall, I was maybe safer than I had been my entire life, and a stunned laugh caught in my throat.

On our way over to the meeting hall, I pulled open the curtain over the carriage window, absorbed in the city rolling under the carriage wheels. It was one of those bright cold fall days, transparent as glass, and it gave everything from the pickle sellers with their barrels to the pack of men with sticks over their shoulders to the girl dangling her stockinged legs out an upper-story flat the dignity of a painting.

“You needn’t gawk, it is all the same city.”

“It’s different from in here,” I murmured absently.

New York seen from above, through the eyes of the penny-witches who sell fifteen minutes behind the eyes of their pet pigeons, through the maps the papers use to tell you where the best murders happened, is a place of right angles, the streets running east to west and the avenues running from north to south as if they were afraid to do otherwise. You could get very lost in New York—I’d seen it happen—but you would always know where you were when you did it. When you got lost in Paris, you went around in circles until you might meet yourself first setting out, and neither of you would have any idea where you were.

Paris curved in on itself like a sleeping serpent, and no matter how many great renovators appeared at the helm, the medieval haunts and courts of miracles persisted in the poorer districts, in the bones they were built over and the sly stray places that could never be pinned on any map. New York would get there someday. It had the potential for it, the love for lurid beauty, the bloodshed, and of course the money. For now it took wild pride in its new rationalism while coldly furious with anyone who would consider it unsophisticated.

From the carriage window, I could see New York as I had once seen Paris. In Paris, I took luxuriously anonymous carriages, or I tumbled into coaches with packs of other girls. One 14 July, we took over an entire tram, showing our tits out the windows and throwing fistfuls of candy at the crowd. In Paris I never walked anywhere, and until now in New York, I had done nothing but. I glared at a shopgirl running past, her arms full of packages and a scowl on her face. Soon she’d be back under some mistress who told her to show some gratitude for the work and the place she had, there were plenty without. Couldn’t she smile at least?

I’m never going to be you again, I thought, and as if she heard me, she glanced up to meet my gaze.

Of course you could, she seemed to reply. You could be me or worse. Be grateful for how warm and pretty you are right now. Couldn’t you smile at least?

The meeting hall was low and snug, not as imposing as some but warm, with an eagle-eyed host who recognized Mrs. Howard and me immediately. In a matter of moments, we were seated at a delicately appointed table with a plate of small fruit tarts before us, and a uniformed waitress came by with tea.

“We voted on funds for the war here,” Mrs. Howard remarked. “I still remember. It was eight thousand dollars sent to the war fund. Mr. Chase sent us a plaque, and how Hannah crowed over that, because Mrs. Clarke said that they would not send one for less than ten thousand.”

Looking across the room, I realized who Tilly must be as soon as I saw her. It was a curiously electric moment, our eyes locking while a woman in a shabby green coat stuttered her way through how nice it would be to take her children to the baths and get them clean. Her mother was with her. Mrs. Manchester was a fat woman with the proportions of a grand city hall, and she moved like a shark in water, cutting through the crowd to have a word with Mrs. Howard.

If Ginny had disliked Tilly for her noise, she was silent now, her face possessed of a saintlike stillness. As poised as she was, a kind of vibration came off of her, the frayed tension of a cat in hiding. Of course a daughter of the illustrious Manchesters (father: William, mother: Hester, one daughter, fortune made on South American emeralds, paternal grandfather turned religious hermit in the mountains of West Virginia) couldn’t hide.

Tilly stood as straight as a spear by her mother’s side, all sharp shoulders and dreadfully bony hands, her gaze roaming restlessly over the crowd until she saw me. She inclined her head slightly. As if we had arranged it, we stepped away from our guardians to speak with our heads together and voices low. It reminded me of girls at the convent.

“Do I know you?” she asked me without preamble, and I swallowed a surprised laugh.

There was no insult there, only a kind of desperation that hid poorly behind her polite smile.