The wicked redhead, p.29
The Wicked Redhead, page 29
“Ugh. I mean, no thanks. Just peanut butter and bread. And go easy on the peanut butter.”
Aunt Julie clattered the plate before her. “There you go. The water here tastes like a swimming pool. How about club soda?”
“You know what, soda sounds good.”
Aunt Julie poured her a club soda and opened a bottle of Beefeater. “I only keep vodka for you young people,” she said, sitting down carefully in the chair next to Ella. “The trouble is, you can’t find good gin anymore. Tanqueray is all right. The English, now, they know their gin. Cheers.”
They clinked glasses. Ella sipped her club soda, nibbled her sandwich. “You didn’t seem surprised about the news.”
“That you were pregnant? Darling girl, I realized last weekend, when you came to visit. Your chest was out to here.” Julie gestured. “And I didn’t think you were the type for that awful surgery the girls are doing, these days.”
“Well, you figured it out before I did. Congratulations.”
“Darling, I’m ninety-six years old. I know when a girl’s got herself up the stick. I assume That Bastard is the father?”
“If you mean Patrick, yes.”
“Who else would I mean?”
“Nobody.” Ella fingered her sandwich and set it down. Drank a little soda and said, “So about the Redhead—”
“Christ. I forgot. That’s why you’re here. Speaking of gin.”
“Speaking of gin?”
“The Redhead. Gin. That’s what we called her. Gin, short for Ginger. Because of her hair.” Julie motioned to her own bouffant mess of pale gold. “Also, and this will interest you not at all, gin—the liquor, I mean—is short for genièvre, which is French or something for juniper, which is what flavors the gin. Genièvre, Geneva. Same thing.”
“Really? That’s fascinating.”
“No, it isn’t. You start to get old and your head’s crammed with useless information, and you can’t remember anything important. Anyway, the Redhead. You were saying?”
Ella swallowed down a sticky bite. “I went to see this dealer.”
“I know. The fellow rang me up, so impertinent. That’s another thing, darling. There’s a trust between us, darling, a family trust. We don’t talk to outsiders. You want to know something about anything, you come to me. God knows I have the keys to all the closets.”
“What does Geneva Kelly have to do with the family?”
Aunt Julie fiddled with her gin. “As I said, I’m starting to get a little old.”
“Um, starting?”
“I am old. I’m dreadfully old, and I ought to have died years ago. God knows I’ve sinned enough. But you know what they say about sinners. We live forever. It’s you angels who die young.”
“I’m no angel.”
Julie snorted and threw back her gin. “My God, darling, you have no idea what we used to get up to. No idea. Your generation thinks it invented sex. Every generation does, I guess. We certainly did. Threw off that musty old Victorian shroud and lived. Oh, how we lived. But as I said, you start to feel your age a bit, and it occurred to me, you moving into that house, the strangest coincidence . . .” Her voice drifted, her claws grew soft around her empty glass. “Or maybe it’s not a coincidence at all.”
Ella set aside her sandwich and leaned forward. “Tell me something. What happened to her?”
“Happened to whom, darling?”
“Geneva Kelly! The Redhead. We were just talking about her?”
“What do you mean, what happened to her?”
“The guy at the art dealer said that she disappeared in 1924, and nobody heard of her afterward.”
Julie laughed. “Well, that’s nonsense. She didn’t disappear in 1924.”
“She didn’t?”
“Of course not. Gin didn’t disappear until at least 1928. Or was it 1930? I can’t remember. The point is, she was alive and kicking and up to no good. It’s the pictures that stopped in 1924. The Redhead photographs.”
“But why did they stop?”
“Because she didn’t need the money. She had the house by then. She had her father’s dough. Of course, she ended up throwing it all away. On a man, of course. They always do. But there was a time—there was a moment—” Aunt Julie pushed back her chair and rose. “Come with me. There’s something you need to see.”
THERE WERE TWENTY-TWO OF them, each one silvery in the light of the closet bulb. “Photographic plates,” said Aunt Julie. “I got Anatole to hand them all over to me. Don’t ask how.”
“Who’s Anatole? Oh, wait! The photographer! The one who took all the Redhead pictures! You knew him?”
“Well enough,” Aunt Julie said, looking mysterious, and for a moment Ella could almost see her old beauty. Mumma said that Julie was once one of the most glamorous women in New York in her day, the most photographed. She went by the single name JULIE in the society press; everybody knew her. Now she stood in a closet with her great-grandniece, holding a box of old photographic plates in her bony hands, and the only bright thing about her was the magenta lipstick on her mouth, smeared by the gin glass, and the diamond engagement ring left on her hand in 1960 by her last husband.
“Was he one of your lovers, Aunt Julie?” Ella asked daringly.
“Oh, we were lovers, of course, but we were also business partners, which was much more satisfactory, believe me.” Aunt Julie held out the box. “For you, my dear. I think it’s time you had them.”
“Me? But these are priceless!”
“I’ve got nobody else to leave them to.”
“Other than about a hundred and twenty nieces and nephews.”
“But you’re the one she chose, darling.” Aunt Julie stuck a fingernail into Ella’s chest. “You’re the one she wants.”
“Who?”
“Why, Ginger, of course. She got you in that house of hers. I expect she’s given you a reason to stay, if I know her. So here you are. Your inheritance. Take them. God knows I can’t stand the sight of them.”
Ella stared down at the box and back at Aunt Julie. “Why not?”
“Because he loved her better than me. My God, with a pair of headlights like that, who could blame him? Now go. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. You’ll have to figure out the rest on your own.”
“But wait. You can’t just—”
“I can do anything I damned well please, Ella. It’s the privilege of age. Now scurry along, before you miss the next train.”
“I don’t understand. What else is there to figure out? Where am I going to find it? You have to give me some kind of clue.”
“My God.” Aunt Julie pulled the chain on the bulb and pushed her out of the closet. “Do I have to spell it out for you? It’s all in that damned house of hers. She wants you to find it, that’s obvious. So start looking. And get the hell out. Antonio’s coming by for my backrub in five minutes, and I need to fix my hair.”
THE TAXI TOOK AGES to arrive, and it was almost four o’clock by the time Ella reached the train station for the journey back to Manhattan. Her small elation over the Redhead had dulled back into misery. She’d rushed out of Maidstone Meadows without finishing that club soda, and she’d left her water bottle somewhere. The apartment, probably. It didn’t matter. She was hungry, she was thirsty, but the thought of water revolted her. The thought of anything.
On her lap, the Redhead plates sat in a brown Bloomingdale’s bag, wrapped in old tissue from Aunt Julie’s closet. Aunt Julie always recycled wrapping from Christmases and birthdays, and she’d grudged the loan of the tissue paper like it was made of gold foil. The weight of the box sank into Ella’s thighs. Train wouldn’t arrive for another fifteen minutes, and the platform was empty. Who went into the city from East Hampton on a Friday afternoon in April? Just Ella. She opened her pocketbook and took out the plastic bag containing Redhead Beside Herself. Six figures’ worth of vintage photograph, and she was carrying it around in her pocketbook. She opened the ziplock and unwrapped the felt. Geneva Kelly. Ginger. Gin. Had known Aunt Julie; wasn’t that funny? They’d shared a lover, the photographer Anatole, who had also painted the Redhead. Ella touched her fingertip to the portrait above the sofa, the luxurious, lugubrious Redhead.
It’s been a hell of a week, she thought.
Just tell me what to do. Tell me where to go. I’m so mixed up, I don’t even know who I am anymore. Somewhere along this chain of events—the one that started a single month ago, at the moment when Patrick stood in the stairwell of a Tribeca apartment building, unbuttoned his shorts, and had sex with a hooker—somewhere along this line of terrible dominos I have lost myself. I have lost everything I thought was real.
Nothing left to me but ghosts.
This ghost.
Gin.
Ella’s head swam, her eyes swam, and in the middle of all this sloshing around, the Redhead—the photographic image of her, not the portrait—turned her head and winked one playful eye.
It’s me, Ella. It’s going to be all right.
Ella’s vision telescoped to a single, white point: the Redhead’s light-bathed face turned toward her in a wink.
Ella, it’s me. I’m here. It’s okay.
The point disappeared, and everything went dark.
Act V
We Are Tossed Upon the Sea
(the Lord have mercy upon us)
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
May 1924
1
THE MOON follows us all the way past Nantucket, where it disappears behind a bank of thick cloud. Mr. Marshall frowns and seeks out one of his instruments. Some round thing like a clock, except the numbers are all different and written small. A barometer, I guess.
I wrap my hands around a mug of black coffee and ask if something’s the matter.
“Just weather,” he says. “About what you might expect, this time of year.”
“I don’t happen to expect anything, Mr. Marshall. Never having sailed in these parts. Never having sailed at all, to be perfectly honest.”
He turns to me with the same old expression he’s worn since I first shook him awake at Billy’s bedside, two mornings ago. Two centuries ago. “It’s the North Atlantic, Miss Kelly. If you don’t like the weather, as they say—wait a few minutes.”
I reach out and lay my hand around his upper arm, and I consider that I am now past redemption, having dragged a father away from the bedside of his dying son in order to chase fruitless after the living one. Having engaged this weary old man in an adventure that might could kill him, and all for probably nothing. Chance in a thousand. A sure voyage to a bad end. And did I not foresee all this? Did I not learn my lesson? Yet here I am again, riding atop the mad Atlantic in some damn vessel, just as that dream of mine did warn me. I try not to think about that, but the vision rises before me with every pitch of every wave, and every moment I expect some dark-sided schooner to sail in view, some Flying Dutchman carrying my precious ghosts beneath its hatches.
And I have brought Anson’s father into all this, God forgive me.
“Call me Ginger,” I tell him.
2
AS I said, I am no sailor. I can maybe row a boat in a straight enough line, if pressed and sober, but the arrangement of sheets and spars is mystery to me, and if you’re longing for some technical description of our race from the eastern point of Long Island, where the Marshalls keep this fine yacht moored, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we are bound—some notion of wind and tack, trim of sail and direction of compass and what have you—why, you’ve come to the wrong redhead, brother.
Still I do my best. The tick of minutes makes my heart sicken. Urges the terror inside me to greater strength. We are maybe already too late, but maybe not. Maybe, if we strain every timber, we can catch Anson’s ship before the rendezvous with the Coast Guard vessel Surprise tomorrow afternoon, off the coast of Nova Scotia. I follow each order that flies my way, until my palms turn raw and my throat bare, until my arms and legs fix to fall from their trunk. Currently I’m nursing a sore head from an unexpected boom by the boom, if you know what I mean, and though Mr. Marshall tells me I can crew for him anytime, I have the feeling he’s only being kind.
Julie Schuyler, on the other hand. Can that blonde sail a boat.
3
WASN’T MY idea that the Schuylers should join us on this adventure, believe me. When I dragged Mr. Marshall from his dying son’s bedside and explained to him, in rough terms, the desperate situation before us, I emphasized that discretion was paramount, paramount, on account of the clear presence of some kind of double cross in our midst. And what did Mr. Marshall say, first thing? He scratched his tarnished head and blinked his crusted blue eyes, and he said, “I’m going to need someone to crew the boat.”
An hour later, we were roaring east along the highway in Mr. Marshall’s Buick Battistini speedster, toward the sheltered cove where fellows like Marshall keep their watercraft safe from harm. I hardly noticed when he swerved off the main road and made a series of swift turns that landed us before a pretty gray-shingled mansion much like the one we just left. Jerked myself to attention and asked where the devil we were. Mr. Marshall said, Schuyler’s place. And in that instant I realized I never did ask him about Benjamin Stone and Charles Schuyler, and where the two of them went to school together, and whether he’s heard of some third character who also moved in their circle, someone who acquired the nickname Grendel.
I seized his hand and said, “No! We’re not taking Charles Schuyler along!”
“Of course not,” he said. “Schuyler drove back to Manhattan last night. But his sister won the club sailing championship last year, and God knows we need somebody else on board who knows how to trim a sail.”
“His sister?” I asked, kind of stupidly, because it had been a hell of a forty-eight hours, you recollect, when you lined them all up end to end.
“Yes. I believe you’ve met Julie, haven’t you?” He opened up his door and came around the hood to open mine, though I was already taking care of that business myself, believe me. “At the party yesterday, remember?”
Well, you know very well that I didn’t just meet Julie Schuyler at the party yesterday, but I wasn’t so stupid that I told Mr. Marshall all about our history together. I just said I remembered the encounter very well and I didn’t realize she was such a sailor, and off we trudged across the trim gravel drive to pound on the Schuylers’ door and drag the lucky dame out of bed.
But it turned out that Charles Schuyler hadn’t returned to New York City the evening before, after all. He had changed his plans. He’d driven instead to this gray-shingled estate in East Hampton, where his wife and children were settling in for the summer, and spent the night there. And he wasn’t about to let his kid sister go off on an impromptu weeklong yachting expedition in the North Atlantic without a chaperone, oh no. He looked at me and he looked at Mr. Marshall, and he went right off to fetch his sou’wester, and here he is right now, strolling into the deckhouse like he owns the joint. (Trait seems to run in the family.)
“My watch,” he says. “Get some sleep, Marshall.”
4
THE DECKHOUSE of the Ambrosia is not a proper deckhouse, you understand. Just a bit of shelter around the wheel, open to the sides and back, so that you don’t catch so much rain and spray as you go about the tender business of steering the boat across the ocean. Mr. Schuyler places his hands at ten and two and inspects the compass heading. His sou’wester is buttoned up like he expects a storm of some kind, and his cap lies straight on his forehead. Somehow he has shaved without nicking himself, presenting an aspect of clean and almost boyish enthusiasm, and I have the uncanny feeling that he has done these things—dressed carefully, shaved carefully—for my benefit. Maybe it’s his hands, which clench the wheel a little too ferociously.
I rise from the stool and stretch my arms. “Guess I had better turn in for an hour or two.”
“If you’re going below, I could murder a cup of coffee.”
“Maybe if you ask nicely.”
He smiles faintly and glances back down at the compass. Or possibly it’s the barometer. “Might I trouble you, please, for a cup of hot coffee, Miss Kelly?”
“Cream or sugar?”
“Both.”
I turn to leave, and he adds, kind of soft, “Thank you.”
5
NATURALLY, THE sweet Ambrosia possesses a galley. How are you supposed to enjoy the pleasures of shipboard life without fresh food, prepared for you (in ideal circumstances) by a chef of the first water? Failing a chef on short notice, there’s just me, boiling water for coffee the way my step-daddy showed me, when I was but small. The smell of the beans, which I grind myself in an old-fashioned mill, awakens in me the genuine, particular desire for java that cannot be satisfied by anything else. I brew enough for two. When I’m finished, I pour the business into two enamel cups, add sugar to mine and cream plus sugar to Mr. Schuyler’s, and I carry them both up top like I am bearing the king’s own jewels.
“Ah,” says Mr. Schuyler, taking the mug in his left hand, “perfect.”
“You haven’t even tried it yet.”
“The smell’s enough.” He drinks and I drink, not looking at each other, and I sit back down on the stool and think what I might say to this man. Charles Schuyler. Brother to Julie. Friend to the Marshalls. Schoolfellow of Benjamin Stone and Grendel. He gulps his coffee like a man with no regard for the lining of his throat, and his cheeks, I believe, bear a little more pinkness than the weather demands.
Me, on the other hand. All bundled up in a sou’wester sized for a man, hair blown to pieces, face stiff and chilled by the wind. If I had a mirror handy—which I thankfully do not—I don’t suppose I’d be best pleased with my reflection. I never quite look like I imagine myself; I’m always the tiniest bit shocked to see the woman staring back at me. Her eyes are set too far apart; her mouth’s too wide; her cheekbones too sharp and her chin too narrow, like that of a witch. Photographs well, I guess, but in real life this mug is just too much. Too pale and ginger-haired and odd-featured. I can’t imagine what men seem to like about a face like that. Or maybe it’s not my face at all. Maybe it’s something else, my shapely chest that defies fashion and has earned me a pretty penny in the indecency racket. My legs, my smart mouth. Maybe these fellows can just tell I’m the kind of girl who runs at a hotter temperature than some, and what fellow doesn’t want to warm himself beside a fire like that? Especially now, when the wind’s coming on to blow across the cold salt ocean, and the moon’s slid silently behind a cloud.
