Beacon Street Mourning Read online

  I know that when I left Boston and came to San Francisco without Father’s prior knowledge or consent four years ago, it may have looked as if I were deliberately disowning myself. But such was not my intention, as Father eventually understood. He and I are not estranged. Last April he came here to San Francisco for my twenty-fifth birthday, and I was on my way to Boston to visit him in October when a rather nasty incident interrupted my trip. As I explained in those two ill-fated telegrams, I am still recovering from injuries suffered at that time. Father would never fail to reply to a letter telling him I had been hurt, as I am sure you will agree.

  William, if you would be so kind as to go to the Pembroke Jones house, I know Augusta could not refuse to admit you. You could say you had come on bank business, could you not? Would you please go and tell him that I am alive and well, and longing to see him again? That I will come to Boston at the earliest possible opportunity? And would you then write and let me know how he seems to you, if he be well or ill or at any stage in between?

  I await most eagerly your reply.

  Your friend always,

  Caroline Fremont Jones

  There, it was done. I read it over a second time and was satisfied. The letter could go out today—if Edna were willing to take care of it on her way home.

  Yes, asking Edna to mail the letter was a good idea. That way Michael would not have to know I’d written it. He would not approve; he would say I was not yet well enough to be thinking about these things. His protectiveness could so easily cross an invisible line and become stifling to me.

  MY TOO PROTECTIVE LOVE came bounding up the stairs shortly before five o’clock. Edna had already left on my letter-mailing errand, and Wish was not yet back from wherever he was working; I’d been hoping to get downstairs before Michael’s return, but no such luck.

  “Fremont,” he called out when he was only perhaps halfway up, “are you alone? And if you are, why was the door unlocked? I’ve told Edna and Wish never to leave you in the house alone with the door unlocked.”

  By the time he reached the last part of this complaint he had burst into my sitting room, where I stood in the middle of the handsome Chinese rug that had been my first purchase of furnishing for this place—back when money had been hard to come by.

  “I am glad to see you too,” I said, “and how nice of you to knock before entering my part of the house.”

  “Oh, piffle.” Michael kissed my cheek. His own cheek, which he laid against mine for a moment, was cool, his hair felt damp, he smelled of Pears soap and something else, something slightly smoky—I supposed just of having been out in the City.

  “Piffle, my foot. And you wonder why I don’t want to marry. Perhaps it is because I would like to have a little privacy now and then.”

  “Married people can have privacy. Married people can live just the way we live—each in half a house. And in fact plenty do live that way, with far less intimacy than you and I have achieved in spite of the ridiculous lines you draw, Fremont.”

  I smiled. This was an old argument, its permutations as familiar as the forms of a dance. The only new addition to our established pattern was Hiram the cat, who twined himself in and out of Michael’s legs, purring loudly.

  “Edna needed to leave early,” I said, resuming my stately pace across the floor, “and Wish is not back yet, so I told her to leave the door unlocked because I’d be downstairs directly. I’m surprised you didn’t pass her on the sidewalk.”

  “I was driving the Maxwell—I expect I came up the hill from the opposite direction.”

  “I see.”

  Since giving up the familiar crutches for the unfamiliar canes, it was hard for me to walk and talk at the same time, so I said no more, although I did wonder where Michael had been.

  In the opposite direction lay the Presidio. I did not want Michael going there because it meant the likelihood of the Army pressing him into more intelligence work. Intelligence—a fancy name for pure and simple spying. Well, not so simple: Michael wanted out but they would not let him go. They’d say he was free but then they would call him back, again and again, always with the same lie: “Just one more time.”

  I felt Michael’s eyes boring into me as I approached the top of the stairs. More than once we’d fought over this, how he wanted to help me on the stairs, and how strongly I felt I must do it alone; how nervous I became, how much more likely to lose my balance, when he was watching.

  I hooked the cane that had been in my right hand over the top of the stair rail—I kept another cane at the bottom—and then grasped the banister with that hand.

  Michael cleared his throat. “You’re going right on down, then.”

  “Obviously,” I said, looking back over my shoulder, trying to keep a note of exasperation out of my voice and facial expression. “Why?”

  “I, um, took the liberty of looking into something we won’t want to discuss in front of either of the Stephensons. I thought perhaps there’d be time to tell you before we went downstairs.”

  “Will it take long to tell me this, whatever it is?”

  “No.” Michael ruffled his hair, a nervous mannerism that was not a particularly good sign. “No, it won’t. You go on down. I’ll wash my hands in your bathroom, if you don’t mind. See you in the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” I said gratefully, “I’ll see you there shortly.” Then I tightened my grip on the banister, got my balance, and started down.

  One step at a time, one leg and then the other. The descent required every ounce of my concentration. For the minutes that it took, there was nothing else in the world but me and those damn stairs.

  “YOU HAVE ROSES in your cheeks,” Michael said later on joining me. “Physical exertion becomes you.”

  “Hmm,” I said, cocking my head to one side and studying his handsome, bearded face, “I will admit some kinds of physical exertion are more fun than others. The stairs would not be my first choice.”

  “Fremont, you are wicked. I can read your mind.”

  I smiled. “Yes, I expect you can.”

  Michael busied himself with pouring the coffee Edna had made earlier into the pottery mugs he and I both prefer to china teacups. “Maybe later?” he inquired, raising his eyebrows a couple of times in a comical way that was anything but seductive.

  I laughed. “Maybe.”

  He placed a mug on the table before me, then sat in the chair nearest mine.

  I said, “Now, tell me this bad news.”

  He blew across the top of his mug. “How do you know it’s bad?”

  “I have powers of mystic divination. Now, tell.”

  Michael’s blowing became a heavy sigh. “It’s about whether or not your legs are healing properly. I saw a doctor today who works with the X-ray.”

  My breath caught in my throat. The X-ray was an experimental procedure sometimes exploited for sensationalism, as if it were a form of entertainment. But I knew it had been used on people for serious medical reasons. I had read about these medical uses in a newspaper not long ago and had become quite excited. With X-rays, which were discovered about ten years ago, it is possible to see the bones beneath the skin and muscles and everything. Supposedly it is like looking at your own skeleton—hence the macabre attraction, X-rays as entertainment. Yet the medical information such a procedure might give me seemed of such obvious value that I craved it.

  “And—?” I urged.

  “And it is too dangerous. Doctors do not know how to control the X-ray. Sometimes people are horribly burned. The doctors who have been working with it the longest have suffered most. Their skin reddens, then blisters, and erupts with sores. I don’t imagine you want to hear any more than that, do you?”

  I didn’t, yet I did. “I still have questions. If it’s so harmful, then why are they still doing it?”

  “Because they—well, this doctor I talked to anyway—believe the medical benefits of X-ray will eventually be great enough that they must learn to control it. Just think, Fremont, to be
able to see inside a person without cutting through the skin!”

  “That is precisely what I had hoped might be done with my legs,” I said rather bitterly, “yet you tell me this doctor will not do it.”

  “I know you’re disappointed.” Michael reached over and covered my hand with his on top of the table.

  I nodded, not looking at him.

  “Perhaps it will be of some consolation to you that this doctor said the same as the other two.”

  “You mean,” I said into my lap, as this subject to me was unpleasant in the extreme, “that my bones may have been broken in more than one place, even though no bone protruded through the skin. And that is why the healing process is taking so long.”

  “Yes. Fremont, he also said that ten to twelve weeks is not an abnormally long time for such an injury to heal—even though it undoubtedly seems so to you.”

  I raised my head and looked into Michael’s eyes. His eyes are blue but changeable, like sea and sky in different weather; now they were deep and dark, like a pool in a forest clearing. “My fear is that I walked too soon, made my legs bear my weight before they were ready.

  So by my own actions I may have disrupted whatever goes on when bones grow back together, and now my legs will never be right again.”

  “Fremont, my dearest”—Michael stroked my face with the back of his hand—“be patient with yourself.”

  “I just thought, if I could see …” I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. What was the point? Yet it was so hard to give up. “He, this X-ray doctor, he wouldn’t do it for me once, just once? I would pay—”

  “No.” Michael shook his head. “I did say we would gladly pay any cost, but he still declined. He asked me if your legs were misshapen, and I said no, only somewhat wasted. He said muscles grow weak and thin from lack of exercise. If you don’t have too much pain, he suggested you should walk with your canes, increasing the time and the distance a little each day.”

  I sighed. That at least was something. One of the two doctors I’d seen since my return had told me the exact opposite—he had wanted me in a wheeled chair, like an invalid, until I felt no pain whatever on standing.

  I said, “Michael, I do not believe the doctors really know very much at all about what goes on in the human body.”

  “My dear Fremont, you are quite, quite right.” He put one hand behind my neck and drew my face close, until he could kiss me. We were still kissing when we heard the front door open and Wish’s voice sing out. Then we pulled apart, blushing like guilty children.

  TWO

  Great Centennial Bank

  Boston, Massachusetts

  January 23, 1909

  Miss Caroline Fremont Jones

  Divisadero Street

  San Francisco, California

  Dear Caroline,

  Although I gather you go by your middle name now, it will always be difficult for me to call you anything but Caroline. I cannot tell you how happy I was at first to have your letter, and then how shocked as I read its contents. It seems that last year was not a good one for the Pembroke Joneses, if you and Leonard are any example. I am so very sorry, and I hope that you are well now. I do not think we will be able to say the same for your father, at least not any time soon.

  Here is the situation: Having been alerted by your letter, I put together a portfolio of material that I could legitimately discuss with Leonard and went calling at Pembroke Jones House on Beacon Street. At first Augusta Simmons Jones—who does know me on sight, by the way—insisted on calling the bank to verify my errand, as if I were some underling. I gathered from the redness of her face that she was soon set straight. Next she claimed your father was too ill to receive visitors.

  Caroline, I was harsh with her. If I had not been, I do not believe she would ever have allowed me to climb the stairs. I said if Leonard were too ill to sign his signature to some bank business that required it, I would have to hear as much from his doctor. I mentioned Searles Cosgrove by name, as I assumed he would still be the family’s physician; I had recalled Searles being in attendance at the time of your mother’s death.

  Upon my uttering Searles Cosgrove’s name, your stepmother went quite pale in the face, for a reason I can now surmise, although it baffled me then. She did, however, take me upstairs a short while later, after leaving me alone for a time, during which I suppose she did her best to make poor Leonard presentable.

  I will not write out the details here for you, but will say only that they are shocking, and it is a good thing your letter to me arrived when it did. I cannot say for certain that Augusta has neglected your father; it may be that she is telling the truth when she says she believed there was no medical hope for him, and that the best she could do was to keep him comfortable until the end came. She says she did not give him your telegrams for the same reason, that is, their contents would have upset him, and as he was too ill to do anything himself, it was best for his peace of mind that he not know.

  I can say, however, that I felt most strongly Searles Cosgrove should be called in immediately. I was able to bully Augusta into calling him without threatening her outright—but I want you to know, Caroline, I would have threatened her if I’d had to.

  Leonard is now in Boston Priory Hospital under Cosgrove’s care, more comfortable than he was at home, and of course he is in a private room. He wants to see you, and has asked that I tell you so. I hope you will be able to come as soon as possible. Meanwhile any correspondence you wish to have with your father, if you will send it to me, I will put it in his hands myself.

  In closing, I see upon reading again what I have written above that I have not mentioned the prognosis for your father’s condition. If you are still of as inquisitive and insistent a nature as I remember you (and if I may be so bold, I hope you have not changed!), then you will wonder. Cosgrove says Leonard’s condition is “guarded”—that is to say, he may regain some of his former strength or he may not, we must wait and see. He is gravely ill, of a wasting disease that has attacked his gastrointestinal system, so that his appetite is affected along with his ability to draw nourishment from food. That is the extent of my knowledge.

  Hoping to see you again in the near future, while distressed that our reacquaintance must occur in such a sad situation, I remain—

  Your obedient servant,

  William Barrett

  Upon reading William’s letter I felt a wave of anger like nothing I had known before. This was primal fury, such as I expect a creature feels when its offspring are threatened; that I should feel the same for a father now rendered helpless and childlike by illness was not hard to understand. If Augusta had been in the same room with me at that moment, I expect I would have physically attacked her. Luckily for her, she was a whole continent away.

  But not for long.

  I TOLD THEM all together the same afternoon I received William’s letter, as the four of us—Michael, Edna and Wish Stephenson, and I—were sitting at the round kitchen table for our end-of-day discussion. This was a ploy on my part, I admit; and it played out much as I had thought it would.

  I read the letter to them in its entirety; they heard me out in complete silence, even Edna, who would ordinarily have been given to little gasps of indignation and flurries of fidgeting in response to such news. When I was done I refolded the letter and said, with my eyes cast down, seemingly intent on getting the paper folded just right:

  “Of course I must go immediately. I think it best I should go alone.”

  Edna drew in her breath sharply, but no words came out. Not a word from Michael or Wish either, at least not immediately. Then:

  “You can’t—”

  “Do you really think—”

  Michael and Wish both spoke at the same time. I raised my eyes and looked at them in turn, but in the meantime Edna had gotten herself together. She leaned over and touched me lightly on the arm.

  “Of course you gotta go, dearie,” she said.

  I turned my head quickly to look a
t her and saw that her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Such a capacity for empathy was, I admit, something I had not expected in her and it touched me deeply.

  “Thank you, Edna.” I placed my hand over hers. “I should have known you would be the first to understand.”

  “Mama,” Wish said urgently, “just think what you’re saying!” He glanced at me, saw how I frowned at his remark (but hopefully did not realize how calculated that frown was), then returned his attention to his mother. “If this was, well, in the usual way of things, then maybe, all right, I could agree and all.”

  “But what we have here is far from the usual way of things”—predictably, Michael took up the argument—“because Fremont is a long way yet from regaining her full strength and physical ability.”

  “He’s her daddy,” Edna insisted stoutly, sitting as tall as she could in her chair, her small chin thrust out, curls wobbling with the vigorousness of her defense of my position, “so she’s gotta go. ’Specially on account of Fremont’s got no brothers nor sisters. I’n’t that right, dearie, you’re the only one?”

  “That’s right, Edna. I’m my father’s only child. He has no one else but me.”

  “He has a wife of his own choosing,” Michael said darkly. This utterance was followed by a moment of silence in which one might have heard a pin drop.

  I had known, of course, that Michael would fight me on this. Not that he didn’t want me to go to Boston to be with Father, but that he would not want me to go at this particular time. He and I had become lost from each other during the incident when my legs were broken, and though Michael would deny it to this day, in some deep part of himself he’d believed me dead. Michael is of Russian ancestry, and he has that passionate temperament that on its dark side is brooding and fatalistic. Sometimes that dark side takes him over; I was watching that happen now, I could see it in his eyes.