The Pursuit of Lucy Banning,A Novel (Avenue of Dreams) Page 19

  “Does he scream all the time?” Henry was an easy-natured baby who never had been sick before. He fussed very little when his needs were attended to. Charlotte trembled as she held him.

  “He screams some of the time and then the coughing sets in and I’m afraid he’s going to stop breathing.”

  Charlotte turned Henry in her arms to look at his face, purplish and distended. “Has he actually stopped breathing?” She put her ear to his tiny chest to listen to his rasping breath.

  “Only for a few seconds at a time,” Mary answered quickly, “but I can’t seem to comfort him, and of course I have the twins to look after. I knew you would want to come, but I had no way to get word to you. No one in this neighborhood has a telephone, and I don’t have any spare coins to send a driver with a message.”

  Charlotte’s heart pounded. She had seen babies sick before—she had three younger brothers, after all, and one of them had nearly died when he was not much older than Henry. But the thought of her own child in such distress without her knowledge was almost more than she could make sense of. It was one thing to leave him in the care of another woman when he was well and happy, and quite another to be so far away that she did not even know he was ill.

  “I’m not leaving,” she declared, plopping onto the sofa and arranging Henry in her arms. “I can’t leave him like this.”

  “What about your position?” Mary asked.

  “I can’t think about that now. Henry is the only thing that matters. Can I have a cool cloth, please? I have to get his temperature down.”

  “Mar-mar,” a little voice whined.

  Charlotte looked over at both the bedraggled twins as one of them tugged on Mary’s skirts.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “They’re hungry and tired. I couldn’t keep the baby quiet last night, so no one slept. It’s long past lunchtime, and they haven’t had a proper nap, either. I didn’t dare leave the baby in case—”

  “Don’t say it,” Charlotte said. “I’m here now. I’m going to take care of my son and he’s going to get better. Feed the twins.”

  The week had been protracted torture. On Monday, Lucy attended the meeting on the women’s exhibit and pressed through the papers she brought home from the gathering to review again the list of countries that would be represented in the exhibit. She attended her class on Tuesday and Thursday and completed the assigned reading on the nature of philosophical arguments. She spent Friday at St. Andrew’s, updating records and overseeing the rearrangement of classrooms. The dining hall was half painted because Will had not come back to supervise the continuing endeavor. At church Pamela Troutman sat beside Oliver in the Banning pew, prompting speculation about their future. Over Sunday luncheon, Aunt Violet promised to stir up the ladies auxiliary to make quilts for the orphanage. Throughout the week, Lucy cocked her head, listening for Leo’s step, his voice, his accounting of what he had discovered about Will. But the accounting never came, because Leo did not turn up any new information, despite diligent effort.

  No one knew where Will was. By now he had been missing for a week. Lucy could hardly think straight.

  Archie served the soup at dinner, and Bessie cleared dishes between courses, the routine of the Banning house undisturbed. Penard stood as always in the corner of the dining room, his watchful eye vigilant of every detail of the table service.

  “I hear a good report of the Board of Lady Managers,” Samuel remarked over the duck. “Yours may be the only building fully ready for opening day.”

  “Mrs. Palmer refuses to take no for an answer,” Lucy joked. “Once she makes up her mind that something might be possible, she insists we bring it to reality.”

  “It’s a shame about the lady architect,” Leo said. “Imagine being the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, being chosen to design a building for the world’s fair, and then have such a bout of melancholy that she must withdraw from the preparations.”

  “Sophia Hayden did a wonderful job with the designs,” Lucy said. “The building is a breath of Grecian beauty.”

  “Bertha Palmer can be a bit of a pill,” Aunt Violet said in her usual get-to-the-point manner. “It would not surprise me one bit to find that she drove that poor girl to distraction.”

  “Violet, you are exaggerating as usual,” Flora said.

  “Just telling the truth. If you’ve ever met the woman, you know I am. I hear that the Board of Lady Managers is objecting to half the plans for the fair on moral grounds, and it’s all Mrs. Palmer’s doing.”

  Lucy controlled a smile as she glanced at Leo.

  “The wheel Mr. Ferris is building looks more enticing every time I see it,” Leo said, changing the subject. “It’s sure to be an attraction.”

  “I’m not at all sure I can bring myself to get on it,” Flora said.

  “I will, without reservation,” Violet said.

  Lucy laughed now. “I’ll go with you, Aunt Violet.” You are so refreshing!

  “It won’t be operating on opening day,” Samuel advised. “I suppose the board of directors waited too long to approve the exhibit, and now it won’t be finished by May 1, like a lot of other things. But it should be working for most of the summer.”

  Lucy couldn’t help but remember the first time Will came to dinner and said he’d love to see the drawings for Mr. Ferris’s wheel. She didn’t recall he ever got that chance.

  Dinner conversation drifted into other dimensions of fair preparation. Samuel was looking after fair business on an almost daily basis and reported that arrangements for the opening ceremonies in the Court of Honor were nearly final. At last dessert was served—Mrs. Fletcher’s lemon raspberry pie was incomparable—and Flora and Samuel decided to take their coffee in the parlor. Lucy moseyed with them through the foyer. Just as they arrived at the parlor’s arched doorway, she realized she must have dropped her embroidered handkerchief in the dining room and turned around to retrieve it.

  She did not mean to overhear Penard’s conversation with Mrs. Fletcher. Lucy was not in the habit of listening in on such exchanges. However, their voices seemed slightly raised, and in a room without the family present, words easily rang across the empty space.

  “That girl knows she is to be back in the house by nine o’clock on Sunday evenings,” Penard insisted. “It’s well past nine-thirty, and she’s not here to help with clearing and washing.”

  “She’s never been late getting back before,” Mrs. Fletcher responded. “Perhaps she was delayed, or the streetcar broke down.”

  “We don’t even know where she goes. We never hear a report of her friends or excursions. She’s keeping a secret, I tell you. We have no way to tell what kind of shenanigans a girl her age is getting into.”

  Lucy cleared her throat and made her presence known. “I seem to have dropped my handkerchief.”

  Penard glanced at Lucy’s chair at the table. “Yes, miss, here it is.” He stepped over and picked it up and handed it to her. “Will there be anything else, miss?”

  Lucy said evenly, “Please tell Charlotte I’d like to see her as soon as she comes in.”

  “Yes, miss. We expect her at any moment.”

  “I’ll be in my suite. Please send her right up.”

  Lucy turned and ambled back across the foyer. She stuck her head in the parlor. “I’ve changed my mind about coffee,” she told her parents. “I think I’ll turn in early tonight.”

  “Are you feeling unwell?” Flora asked.

  “I’m fine. I’d just like to do some reading before I go to sleep.”

  “I’ll be on my way as well.” Aunt Violet set down her coffee cup. “I’ve already been here far longer than I intended to stay.”

  Lucy kissed her aunt’s cheek.

  “Come for tea this week,” Violet urged. “We’ll have a catch-up.”

  “I’d love that,” Lucy said.

  Violet leaned in to kiss Lucy’s cheek. “He’ll be all right,” she whispered.

  Lucy lef
t her parents in the parlor and went upstairs to her suite. It was not like Charlotte to do anything to put her position at risk. Lucy sat in the armchair with a book in her lap, but she did not read a word. Instead, she watched the clock. Nine-forty-five. Nine-fifty. At ten she heard the gong of the grandfather clock in the foyer. Ten-fifteen. Ten-twenty-five. She got up and went to her vanity table to push the annunciator button.

  “Yes, miss?”

  “Has Charlotte come in yet?”

  “No, miss.”

  She snapped the button off. Something was wrong. Lucy knew exactly where Charlotte was.

  Ten-thirty. Ten-forty.

  Lucy opened her door and stepped out into the hall. Richard and Leo’s doors were closed, and she saw no light creeping out. Oliver’s door was open, but his room was dark. He was still out with Pamela. Stilling the rustle of her skirt as best as she could, Lucy walked softly down the hall to the top of the stairs. A dim light was on in the foyer, probably for Oliver’s sake, but the parlor appeared vacant.

  Lucy returned to her room. Ten-fifty. Eleven. Eleven-ten.

  Lucy’s mind was made up. She rose from her chair, crossed to her closet, and retrieved her hooded cloak and a small pouch of coins. She couldn’t risk calling for a carriage. The whole household would be up in arms at the suggestion that she should go out unaccompanied at that hour of the night, and she could not risk leading anyone to Charlotte. Yet she had to go.

  Wrapped in her cloak, Lucy skulked down the stairs, slowly, alert for any sound of movement in the lower rooms. Satisfied there was none, she crossed the foyer and unlatched the front door. Even at this hour she would be able to find a cab on Michigan Avenue.

  28

  Daniel stepped out of the carriage that had brought him from the train station to Prairie Avenue, after catching the last Sunday evening train from Riverside. An early Monday breakfast meeting compelled him to sleep at the Bannings’ that night, regardless of the late arrival. He would let himself in with his key and go directly to his bedroom, requiring no assistance from the household staff tonight. As he reached into his pocket for coins to pay the cab driver, a flickering shadow caught his eye, and he turned his head to follow its streak.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he told the driver. “Go around the corner over to Michigan Avenue, but take your time.”

  The driver shrugged as Daniel reentered the carriage. Daniel’s eyes fixed on a shrouded figure he was sure was Lucy. On Michigan Avenue, the driver pulled to the roadside, and Daniel waited in darkness. She could not claim to be going to the orphanage at this hour, nor a class at the university, and he was quite sure she was not on her way to see Will Edwards. Audaciously leaving the house alone at this hour of the night meant she did not intend to be discovered.

  He intended to discover her.

  She got in a cab herself, one of the few still straggling along the avenue. Daniel saw her lean forward and slide the glass open to give an address, and he made the same motion.

  “Follow that carriage,” he instructed his driver, “but stay back.”

  His cab once again began to rock with forward motion. He watched out the windows as Michigan Avenue transformed along the southern route, shops and offices giving way to neighborhoods and businesses with less and less similarity to Prairie Avenue and transecting properties of factories and manufacturing plants. The stillness of the street, inhabited at this hour only by shadowed silhouettes, magnified the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves.

  The forward cab turned a corner to the west and slowed. Daniel’s driver did the same.

  “Stop here,” Daniel said. Lucy’s cab had come to a stop half a block ahead of him.

  The driver descended to open the door for his customer and offer her a hand exiting the carriage, then waited humbly while she fished for the fare in her bag.

  Lucy knew exactly where she was going, Daniel observed. Clearly she had been here before and did not hesitate to approach a less-than-modest narrow dwelling. She knocked on the door, and a curtain moved enough to fleetingly spill a yellow shaft of light onto the street. A moment later a figure allowed entrance. Daniel chided himself for not telling the driver to pull closer. Something was familiar about the form that greeted Lucy in the moonlight, but Daniel could not see the face.

  “Are you getting out, sir?” the driver asked.

  Daniel greeted the question with silence, then finally said, “No. Take me back to Prairie Avenue.”

  “Miss Lucy, you shouldn’t be here!” Charlotte exclaimed. “What will Mr. and Mrs. Banning think?”

  “It’s Henry, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “That’s why you haven’t come home.”

  Charlotte gestured to the sofa, where Lucy recognized the quilt. Rather than being wrapped in its comfort, however, Henry lay on top of it, awake but listless and pale. On a nearby table sat a ceramic bowl filled with water, a small cloth hanging over its rim.

  “Where’s Mrs. Given?” Lucy asked.

  “I told her to go to bed,” Charlotte answered, her own face haggard. “She was up all night last night with him, and the twins too.”

  Lucy undid the button at the neck of her cloak and flung the garment over a chair. Without it, she noticed that the fire in the grate barely warded off the outside chill. “How bad is the fever?”

  “Very bad, since Saturday. If I don’t put water on him constantly, it fires up again. He screams and pulls at his ear, or he lies there like this. I don’t know which scares me more.”

  “An ear infection perhaps,” Lucy suggested. “I’ve seen them at St. Andrew’s.”

  “I don’t think he’s breathing right, either.” A sob caught in Charlotte’s throat. “I didn’t think what would happen if he got sick and I wasn’t with him.”

  Lucy stooped and laid her fingers against the baby’s face. “Probably some sort of general respiratory malady.” She stuck her hand in the bowl of water. “This is lukewarm. Doesn’t Mrs. Given have any ice to cool him? She said she had ice when we first brought him here.”

  “It’s gone. The iceman will be here before dawn.” Charlotte picked up her baby and sat on the sofa with Henry on her lap, and Lucy leaned over them both. “I try to spoon some water into him, but he spits out most of it. He won’t eat, he won’t drink.”

  “We’ll keep trying.” Lucy picked up the bowl. “I’ll get some fresh water from the kitchen pump. It’s sure to be cooler than this.”

  The kitchen was small and sparse, and an odd experience for Lucy. If not for the handful of times she had helped in the kitchen at the orphanage, it would have been an entirely foreign setting. But thanks to St. Andrew’s, she knew a small bit about a kitchen. She knew iceboxes had catch pans, for instance, for the water that drained off the melting ice. Lucy found the catch pan of Mrs. Given’s icebox and transferred the water it held into the bowl before returning to the sitting room, triumphant.

  “I’ve brought the water in the catch pan under the icebox,” Lucy said. “It’s still quite cold.”

  Charlotte held Henry upright in her arms, supporting his bobbing head against her chest, while Lucy put the spoon to his lips. When he opened his mouth to moan, she dropped the water in.

  “He swallowed it!” Charlotte said.

  “We’ll do this all night if we have to.” Lucy offered another spoonful of water. “You look exhausted. Are you sure you don’t want to rest? I can look after Henry.”

  Charlotte shook her head emphatically. “I couldn’t close my eyes for a second knowing he was like this.”

  “Come on, Henry,” Lucy coaxed, “another sip.”

  “I can’t believe you came,” Charlotte said hoarsely, “to this neighborhood, at this time of night.”

  “Of course I came.”

  “Mr. Penard and Mrs. Fletcher must be furious. I was supposed to be home hours ago.”

  “Don’t worry about them right now. You made the right decision to stay with your baby.”

  “They wouldn’t see it that way. And I can’t tell them I have
a baby.”

  “No, of course not. We’ll figure something out.”

  Henry took a deep breath and began to scream and cough. Charlotte sprang to her feet, holding him upright against her shoulder and patting his back firmly while she paced. Lucy dipped the cloth in the cool water, wrung the drips out, and placed it on Henry’s head, then moved it gently over his face as she followed Charlotte’s movements around the room. Henry drew air again and bellowed, and a second cry came from the children’s bedroom.

  “He’s woken one of the twins again.” Charlotte sighed. “Mrs. Given has been up and down with them three times already tonight.”

  “She can look after them,” Lucy said. “There will be time to sleep later. They’re not ill. For that we can be grateful.”

  Henry’s face flushed red, and he writhed in his mother’s arms. Charlotte paced more quickly, patted his back more firmly.

  For another three hours, the baby alternated between screaming spells and quiet times, but he did not sleep. Lucy spooned water in his mouth and kept the damp cloth fresh. Finally, deep into the night, his eyelids grew heavy and his breathing smoother.

  Lucy put her hand on the baby’s face again. “I think the fever is breaking. He’s cooler.”

  Henry slept at last. With her baby quiet in her arms, Charlotte sat in an armchair and put her head back, daring to close her own eyes. Lucy never closed hers. She laid the baby’s quilt over sleeping mother and child and watched an hour’s respite, praying with every breath.

  Around four in the morning, Charlotte roused. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Lucy asked.

  “I heard a sound, a horse in the alley, I think. It must be the iceman. He’ll come to the back.”

  “I’ll see to him.” Lucy met the iceman at the alley door and made sure the new block of ice was installed in the icebox, a procedure she had never observed before. As she watched him leave, she knew she must soon follow. It would not help Charlotte for the Banning household to find Lucy missing as well.