The Chosen and the Beautiful Page 5

  As far as I was concerned, careless when it led to a love bite and some mussed hair was fine. It was another kind of carelessness entirely that sent Daisy around to my house one crystal March day in 1919.

  Daisy debuted straight after Armistice in a grand and lovely event that Louisville sorely needed. There were six other girls along with her, and everyone had sighed with relief that things were getting back to normal after all of their sons had been taken away. It would be another few months before their sons came back, missing limbs or carrying a kind of gnawing weight that would eat at them unchecked for the rest of their lives, so the relief was a kind that some of them would never find again.

  I was too young to debut with Daisy, and the suspicion had set in, meanwhile, that I never would.

  Doors were closing against me that year. Walter Finley was still to come, but I could see patterns developing, growing up around me like the vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were things I could do and things I couldn’t, and girls who had been my friends the year before cut me loose. Slowly but surely, I was being left off lists, pruned away as the girls of my class grew up and became gracious ladies.

  It was becoming obvious to me and to them that I couldn’t follow them into marriage and luncheons and good works. They wouldn’t introduce me formally to their brothers and their cousins, and while I had been a delightful pet and mascot, I simply had no place beyond their girlhood days. They knew it instinctively, their mothers knew it definitively, and eventually, I had no choice but to recognize it as well. I existed in a kind of borderland of acceptable and not, sometimes more on one side, sometimes more on another.

  During the last year the United States spent in the war, I stopped sleeping at home almost entirely, spending the night with whatever girl I was in love with that week. It was Mrs. Christiansen, Mary Lou Christiansen’s mother, who had to take me aside discreetly and tell me that that wasn’t something I could do, that I was overstaying my welcome and making people talk.

  I was lucky that they were not talking about what I was actually doing, but it was enough to send Daisy to my house the March after her debut. She showed up on my doorstep in her white roadster, with a bright brittle smile and an offer to take me to school.

  “I just thought that it’s been a while since I saw your dear face,” she said, a brown paper bag clutched tight in her hands. “Look, I bought us breakfast!”

  She had, from a pastry shop far from where either of us lived. Her usually sleek dark hair looked greasy, and her dress was rumpled and slightly stained. She had been out all night, and I knew the signs well enough to be both concerned and curious.

  For the sake of Judge Baker, who was indifferently peering out the window at us, we set off towards the high school, but quickly veered north instead. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, Daisy lit a cigarette and held it between her two long fingers, taking a distracted puff as she drove. When she didn’t offer me one, I took it for myself, lighting it with her silver heart-shaped lighter. The pastries were forgotten in the foot well, but their scent, sugary raspberry jam, rose up to mingle with the dried rose petals in Daisy’s pale pink cigarettes.

  We drove along the river before pulling off in the woods across from Twelve Mile Island.

  It was March in Louisville. The clouds hung like swagged sails low over our heads, and I was wishing that I had worn a thicker coat before I let Daisy steal me away.

  She parked us on a high bluff above the gray winter water. As if in response to our arrival, it grew choppy and agitated, yellow-white foam topping the waves, the water going darker and less translucent. It didn’t stop until Daisy finally smoothed down her hair, taking several deep breaths.

  “Jordan, you know people.”

  “All right,” I said more calmly than I felt. “Tell me.”

  She did. Her mother was in Mobile for the month. There was no one else who would help her. She woke up two days ago to realize that her monthlies hadn’t come for two months now, when she had been regular as a clock since she was fourteen.

  “And Jean Bisset?” I asked, pronouncing it properly. We had all learned to do so when he came up from New Orleans with his father’s business connections and his wide and charming grin. Daisy had claimed him almost by accident. They were mad about each other until they weren’t, and right up until a few days ago, it had seemed as if they must be altar-bound.

  She shook her head, a narrow little gesture that closed the door on that. It didn’t matter if he knew or not, what he felt or not. In these matters, girls were almost always on their own.

  “I won’t be able to look my father in the eye,” Daisy muttered, pressing her hands against her eyes. “This will destroy him.”

  It wouldn’t. She would be fine, in the end. She could go off somewhere, send back postcards of what a delightful time she was having in Waukegan or Columbus or Hartford, and come back with her head mostly held high. However, she might not be Daisy Fay of Louisville again, and she couldn’t bear that.

  “Help me,” she said, and I nodded.

  This was no time for me to play with her. I thought that if I had told her no, she might have driven us both straight into the water. The Ohio River ran a full thousand miles before it fed its secrets into the Mississippi, and among them, every year, I thought, was a sacrifice of young girls lost and betrayed. Some of those girls had babies inside them, and others had broken hearts or broken heads, but they fed the Mississippi all the same, and I had no interest in being one of them.

  “All right,” I said. “I know where to go.”

  The place we were going sold fried fish, taken, the sign insisted, daily from the Ohio River. In summer, the sign would be lit up with charmed fireflies, the large kind that turned the river breaks into a dancing field of stars. Now, though, it was March and all of the fireflies were dead. The charm kept a few still crawling around the edges of the sign, and a few more had kept a trace of their green-gold light, pulsing faintly over the restaurant’s name: Fulbright’s.

  The place was closing as we came in, and a thin girl a few years younger than us stared, hands still on her broom. There was an old man reading a paper in the corner, gumming slowly at a piece of fried fish wrapped in a scrap of paper. Otherwise, the place was empty.

  “Are you sure?” hissed Daisy, and I shrugged.

  The beaded curtain clacked, and a skinny woman with a blue cloth tied over her hair came out. She took us both in with a cold gaze, so I felt free to study her in turn. She wasn’t white, but that was all I could say for sure. Her face was darker than mine, though not by much, and it seemed as if she had not smiled for years. Her mouth was as set as limestone, and there was nothing, she seemed to say, that could erode it away.

  “Buy some food,” she said to us tersely, and then to the girl with the broom, “Turn over that sign, and get along home before your mama starts to worry.”

  The old man she left alone, as if he were just another part of the restaurant, like the crackling leather on the stools to the vat of oil that hissed balefully behind the counter. Daisy asked for some pickles, and famished, I ordered a sandwich, the bread oversweet and the fried fish slathered with a lemony egg yolk sauce. The woman busied herself for a moment, wiping needlessly at the counter so she had a moment to watch us. Daisy kept her eyes morosely on her plate, but I watched insolently back. I had a bad habit of staring from the time I was a little girl, but it was fair, I thought, to stare back.

  “We didn’t come here to eat,” Daisy finally said, her hands clenching and unclenching on countertop.

  “I know,” the woman said scornfully. “But you might take up my time and run all the way home without buying nothing. You can sit for a little.”

  “You don’t want us here any longer than you have to have us,” I said, my voice shaking just a little. The food helped, but I was exhausted. I wanted this over with, and she glared at me.

  “It’s not you with the problem, is it? You look like the Toy girls, and they’re t
oo smart for that. Too good too.”

  I gave her a stony look. I knew of the Toy girls, even if I had never met them. They were the daughters of the laundry owners on Nineteenth Street. I saw them once years ago when Mrs. Baker had some business with their parents. They were as neat as pins, a few years older than me, and as our parents talked about the cleaning job, they elbowed each other and whispered back and forth while staring at me with open curiosity. Then their father left a scorch mark on some Irish linen curtains, and we had no further business with them. Some of the other girls at school would call me Jordan Toy sometimes, but it was a vague sort of insult.

  “So you then,” she said to Daisy.

  “Yes, me,” Daisy said in the smallest voice I had ever heard from her. “Please, my father will just die…”

  The woman shrugged.

  “Thirty-five dollars,” she said, and Daisy flinched.

  “I don’t have that much, but—”

  “How much do you have now?” she asked in irritation. “You didn’t come with nothing, did you?”

  “No! No, I didn’t…”

  Flustered, Daisy pulled out her pocketbook, spilling ticket stubs and receipts and dried flower petals everywhere. Her fingers were shaking so much that I finally took it from her, pulling out the crisp bills. It was thirty dollars not thirty-five, and the woman shrugged philosophically. She tucked the bills into the same pocket where our food money had gone and nodded.

  “All right. Go home. Come back Thursday.”

  “Oh, but I can’t,” Daisy protested, and as clearly as looking into a crystal ball, I could see her claiming that she had some party or excursion she simply could not miss. Honestly, the fact that she had spared a full day for this was somewhat exceptional.

  “We’ll come back for it,” I said. “Come on, Daisy.”

  We went back to the car, Daisy fretting the whole time about whether the woman was trustworthy or if anyone had seen us or if it was some kind of fraud, the way so many curatives were. I stifled the urge to smack her, and instead said her name. She turned to me with big scared eyes, and I sighed.

  “Daisy, be quiet.”

  For a miracle, she was, all the way back to the house on Willow Street. I could see the single yellow rectangle of the judge’s study; otherwise the house was dark and silent. I started to get out of Daisy’s roadster, feeling somehow far more grown-up and more worldly than I had getting into it that morning.

  Daisy surprised me by grabbing me from behind in a hug. She was always an affectionate girl, but there was a distance to her little peckish kisses, her embraces. There was no space at all between us in this hug, and for a second, I leaned my head back against hers.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.

  I went upstairs where the ghost of Anabeth Baker stood in the hallway, staring at me balefully as I came up the dim stairs. She no longer terrified me as she had when I was little, watching from darkened doorways, snatching at my ankles from under the bed so that I had to leap to get under the covers every night. She did not like me, but the dislike had turned at least a little more cordial. The air around her was chilly, and I knew not to look too long into her eyes because it could leave me with a queasy feeling that wouldn’t fade for hours.

  Instead of walking past her this time, however, I stopped to look at her, taking in her old-fashioned dark dress, the smooth pompadour of her hair, and the ring of dark bruises around her neck.

  “What was it like for you?” I asked. “Were you careless too?”

  * * *

  Thursday came, and Daisy caught me on the way to school. We hadn’t talked since we had gone out to Fulbright’s a few days before, but she showed up as if we had arranged it, just a few moments before I would have been on the Blakefield grounds. She smiled to the confused students behind me as I got in, waving at them with the graciousness of a queen.

  “You look better,” I said, and she laughed.

  “Oh, darling, I am simply terrible! I haven’t slept a wink since last we spoke, and look here…”

  She lifted her right hand from the gearshift and showed me her fingertips, which were all neatly bandaged save for her thumb.

  “I was quite out of my head last night, and I wanted a cup of tea. It started out just right, but then before I knew it, I was yelping like anything and all of the hot water steaming on the floor, and Mother’s ceramic box where she keeps the loose leaf shattered. It was just awful, Jordan…”

  I stayed quiet, leaning back in my seat and helping myself to one of her cigarettes. I imagined that under her bandages, it would be the pads of her fingertips that were burned. She hadn’t just brushed her hand against the side of the copper kettle, she had done something more deliberate.

  She shook her head, telling me how her father had scolded her in the morning and given her money to go buy a new ceramic tea box before her mother came home. I let her paint whatever response on me she liked, and as we drove, I looked out over the drab March morning, where the sun was struggling to come out, where people were making their way to school or to work and completely separate from who and what Daisy and I were. We might have been angels drifting through Louisville on some kind of divine mission, invisible in our white roadster.

  We pulled up to Fulbright’s, which was crowded at this time of day. As we watched, two women in custodial uniforms walked in, still wobbly from their shifts at the nearby Grace of Mary hospital. Beyond the sign of dead fireflies, we could see that the booths were all full, and—

  “No, no, absolutely not.”

  Daisy shrank back in her seat, shaking her head and gripping the steering wheel so hard I thought her knuckles would crack straight through her thin skin.

  “Jordan! Jordan, no, I just can’t … Please, please, I can’t, I’d rather just go home, I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Won’t, you mean,” I snapped, but I slammed out of the roadster, my braids flying behind me.

  I used my irritation to propel me through the door into the restaurant, ignoring the stares that I got. I always got stared at when I went out in Louisville. I’d be common as dirt in Chicago, but we weren’t in Chicago. I stood as if someone had slid a steel shaft down my spine, and I glared at the little girl sitting at the register. The woman who had talked to us a few nights ago was nowhere to be seen.

  “I want a fish sandwich,” I said, daring her to make anything of it. I slid my quarter across the counter towards her, and she scraped it up to plunk it into the steel machine.

  “Gimme a minute,” she said, and she went around back to the kitchen.

  The seconds crept past, and I continued staring straight ahead, my face as still as stone, but aware that the back of my neck was as hot as if I had been out of doors all days.

  “Hey, which one are you, Angie or Margaret?” came a voice from behind me. Angie and Margaret were the name of the Toy girls, and I ignored it, though later I wondered if I should have claimed one of them. It would have covered my tracks a bit, but as the woman had said, the Toy girls were apparently known to be a little too smart and good to be doing anything like this.

  Finally, the girl came back with a paper bag folded neatly at the top. It was stamped with a surprisingly pretty flower design, and she handed it to me diffidently. I took it and stomped out, catching speculative looks out of the corner of my eyes.

  I shouldn’t have worn my school uniform in, I thought with disgust. I could have gone around back, but of course Daisy pulled us up around front.

  She was still waiting for me there, ducked down as if her car was at all inconspicuous in that neighborhood.

  “Well?” she asked when I got in.

  I opened up the bag to pull out my sandwich and also to spill out a jam jar filled with a green mash of herbs and a receipt for a new stove hood. On the back of the receipt were instructions written in a neat rolling hand.

  Daisy took the jam jar and the receipt and stuffed them into her bag. I ate my sandwich,
and we said no more as she drove.

  We went back to Daisy’s house, and she sent the cook out for the day with a sweet smile and a fifty-cent piece. Her bandaged fingertips made her clumsy, so I brewed half the noxious sludge at first, in four cups of water as the receipt told us. The air took on a sharp green smell, and there was an odor underneath it that made my stomach twist, an earthy smell, one that brought to mind a garden after a wet winter.

  Daisy downed it all at once, lifting her elbow like a soldier. I followed her up the stairs where she lay down in her canopied bed, and where I sat down at her desk to do my homework. I was an indifferent scholar. I got passing grades when I wanted to. School was more about simply going for me, which I had not been allowed to do until Mrs. Baker died.

  “What’s the point of it all?” Daisy wondered. “What is the point of any of it?”

  “If there weren’t any point, we wouldn’t have done any of this,” I said, and my voice was gentle enough that she laughed.

  “True.”

  I finished my math and went on to my geography. Daisy struck a match behind me, lighting a perfumed candle at her windowsill, and the room filled with the scent of lilac. Lying on her back, she drew the smoke to her hands, twisting it between her fingers like a bit of ribbon. If she were a boy, or a much more determined girl, she might have gone on to Yale or even to Oxford for instruction in the aetheric and alchemical arts, but she had been more than ready to be done with school by the time she graduated.