The House of Closed Doors Read online

  At least, to no place frequented by the affluent merchants, professional men, and minor gentlefolk who formed my own social class. The neat row of houses, flanked by roses and zinnias that were still displaying the occasional bright bloom, gave way eventually to some plainer abodes whose yards were rank with every flower that grew in our hot summers. Beyond them stretched open prairie dotted with patches of woodland and then endless miles of crops.

  But it was not toward the fields that I stared that bright, cold October morning. I felt my lips curve upward into a smile as I spotted a flash of hair so blond as to be almost white, about ten houses along in the opposite direction.

  Martin Rutherford had removed his hat to two women, both young‌—‌or trying to be young‌—‌if their ruffles and bows were anything to go by. He was listening to their chatter, bending his tall frame to catch their words. I could see the movement of his head as he threw it back in laughter and surmised that some degree of flirtation was proceeding. My smile grew broader. It would not work; Martin was just as averse to marriage as I was but for different reasons.

  I flew to the bell-pull. Within ten minutes Marie had twisted and pushed my hair into some semblance of decency, and another glance from the window had shown that the conversation had ended and Martin, with less heaviness in his step than I had seen recently, was walking toward our house.

  I snatched one of my prettier shawls from my armoire and hurried downstairs as noiselessly as possible. I might not see Martin for months; I could not resist the opportunity to tease him one last time.

  He saw me slip out of the front door and close it cautiously behind me. Bet, I hoped, was still in the kitchen at the rear of the house. Heaven knows what she would have done if she’d seen me outside, now that she knew of my condition. I hitched my shawl into a position where it both warmed me and concealed my torso and smiled at Martin as he slipped the latch on our gate. It was an action I had seen him perform thousands of times since I was a little girl. He had grown from the slender boy of my earliest memories to resemble an ascetic Viking warrior who had abandoned his beard and pagan ways for the monastery. The impression was reinforced by his height, the squareness of his face‌—‌clean-shaven in disdain of the fashion for whiskers‌—‌and his beaky nose.

  “Well, and how is the youth of Victory today?” Martin tipped his hat to me and bowed his white-blond head in mock tribute. “You are blooming, Nell, positively blooming.”

  I glanced instinctively downward, aware that my appearance of radiant good health was due to the extra pounds on my normally skinny frame. The shawl was nicely in place. “Keep your voice down, please, Martin,” was my reply. “I‌—‌well, I have had a bit of a falling out with Bet, and she’s sure to make trouble if she finds me talking with you.”

  “Flirting with the boys again?” The ironic accuracy of his remark was enough to make my cheeks grow hot; Martin saw it, and laughed. “You are a terrible infant, Nellie. Always were. You will strew the streets of Victory with the corpses of your admirers, all having committed self-destruction for the want of your love.”

  “And you?” I wished fervently to steer the conversation away from the matter of my admirers. “Was that not Amabel Rudd? She has been setting her cap at you for years.”

  “Ah yes, Amabel. And Augusta. Delightful ladies both, but Augusta has already crossed the threshold into permanent spinsterhood and knows it. And Amabel is close to the line and also knows it. Desperation never adds to a woman’s allure, Nell. Remember that.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be so nice to them and encourage false hopes.”

  Martin smirked and adjusted his beautifully clean shirt-cuffs. “My dear child, the ladies of Victory are my customers. I must always be nice to them.”

  “So marry one of them, and then people will stop saying‌—‌”

  The dark core of pain, and something like fear, that lived in Martin’s gray eyes deepened for a second and then masked itself. I believe I was the only one, apart from his mother, who ever saw that expression‌—‌the privilege of having known Martin since I was small enough for him to carry me around and feed me excessive amounts of candy.

  “Saying what, Nell? That I am not the kind of man who marries? You know that’s not true.”

  I did know it. I had teased Martin too many times over his crushes on women‌—‌hidden perhaps from the object of his desires but painfully obvious to those who knew him well‌—‌to imagine otherwise. The plain fact was, Martin adored women: the way they walked, the way they dressed, their shapes, the smell of their hair.

  It had been fate, in the shape of his father’s illness, that had confined him to a life spent shadowing his mother and ensured that the business of a draper would be his only choice. But in truth, it suited him well. He had learned to supplement his natural eye for beauty with an extensive knowledge of color and form and seemed quite content to spend his days discussing the intimate details of dress with Victory’s women while avoiding their attempts to capture his masculine attention.

  Add to that the fact that he was five times better dressed than any other man in Victory, and it was not surprising there was gossip. After Martin had broken the jaw of the one man who ever made a remark to his face, though, any such talk was strictly behind his back.

  Impulsively I reached out a hand to my friend, cursing myself inwardly as my shawl slipped and only my fast reflexes prevented the second revelation of the day. “I know,” I said. For a moment I wished I could confide in Martin about the baby and about how I had let such a thing happen. But his sharp mind would immediately have worked out who the father was, and I did not think he would let the matter rest. No, this was a road I needed to walk alone.

  “How is your mother?” I asked.

  “Resting quite easily, for now. Looking forward to Aunt Amelia’s visit.” Martin always referred to my mother as “aunt,” out of affection. “In fact, I came here to tell her how much she eased Mother’s pain yesterday with her cold compresses. She is a wonderful friend, your mama, especially as she is not in good health herself.”

  A blast of cold air made me shiver; the sky was clouding over, and the wind blew from the north. I could hear the sounds of Main Street and catch a whiff of its characteristic odor of dust, lumber, and horse droppings.

  “Are you unwell?” Martin had seen me shiver and looked anxious.

  I was about to reply that I was in the very best of health but thought better of it. Mama was soon to announce to the world that I was stricken by a contagious illness; better act the part.

  “I feel a little feverish,” I lied.

  Martin immediately whisked off a fine kid glove and laid a large, long-fingered hand on my forehead. “I feel nothing,” he said. “But it is cold out here. You should go inside; come, I’ll go with you.”

  I backed toward the door. “No, I‌—‌I told you, Bet is cross with me. Just give me time to go to my room before you pull the bell. If I am ill, I will ring for Marie. And don’t tell anyone I’ve been out here talking to you.”

  Martin grinned and touched the tip of my nose lightly with his forefinger, as if I were still his little playfellow of bygone days. I felt a slight prickling in my throat at the thought that he could soon have reason to entertain quite a different view of me. “Go inside, Nellie, and be sure not to become ill. Such feminine beauty should be carefully preserved for the lucky man who marries you.”

  I felt a pang of guilt, and fear, and knew that this was indeed the last time I would want to venture outside for a while. Truly, the situation was becoming much too complicated. In a second impulsive gesture, I stood on tiptoe and kissed Martin on the cheek. “Goodbye, Martin,” I said softly to my oldest friend. “Give your mother my love.”

  “You will see her yourself soon,” he said, a slightly puzzled look on his face.

  I held my smile as I closed the door, but as I crept up the stairs, I felt the corners of my mouth pull down, and a burning pain glowed in my chest. I had thought about
many things those past few weeks but had never realized until then how much it would hurt to separate myself from the only world I knew. And it was entirely my fault.

  THREE

  I was spoiled, I’ll admit it. I remember my mother holding me in her arms at the joint funeral of my father and baby brother‌—‌which could not take place till the snow melted and the ground thawed‌—‌with my face pressed into the dampness of her black dress where it had become soaked with my tears. I remember my mother’s face, blotched and bloated from crying, as she assured me in unsteady whispers that she would be everything to me now, her fatherless child‌—‌her only child. I closed my eyes and half-dozed to the sound of those whispers, accompanied as they were by the muted thud of shovelfuls of wet dirt landing on the large coffin and the tiny one, side by side in the sodden clay.

  Mama was as good as her word. Her interpretation of being everything to me involved indulging nearly every one of my little whims. She was aided and abetted by Bet, who loved me dearly, despite the constant stream of sarcastic correction that she kept up for my own good. Mama’s lady friends made a pet of me, bought me bonnets and dolls, and laughed at my stubbornness and my willful caprices.

  My mother’s mother, Lillian, my darling grandmama, taught me to be an excellent seamstress and needlewoman‌—‌the only kind of study for which I had an aptitude. Mama’s friend Ruth, Martin’s mother, was a daily visitor, along with a group of doting old ladies, Grandmama’s friends. These lovely creatures, not one of whom had an original thought in her head, exclaimed over my talent with the needle and the pencil and went into raptures about my huge blue eyes and “strength of character.” About my bushy red hair and stick-thin, knob-jointed figure they were graciously silent.

  I attended Miss Clinton’s Academy in Victory’s only brick house until I was thirteen, although my attendance during the last year was patchy as the Civil War spread its disruptions into our daily lives. Since my thirteenth year, apart from the piano lessons given to me sporadically by my mother and Mr. Layforth’s summer dancing and deportment classes in the cavernous barn behind my stepfather’s store, I had had little to do except amuse myself. I was never fond of books, preferring to roam the nearby woods and fields and then return home to my latest sewing project.

  Naturally, as I grew older, flirtation became one of my amusements. I soon tired of the callow, pimply boys that Victory had to offer in my own age group, and the War had thinned the ranks of the more interesting older men. Still, visits and parties with young people from other towns offered opportunities to try out the effects of the aforesaid blue eyes and my figure, which, although still too tall and angular to be fashionable, had developed curves in all the right places. I learned the power of a demure glance, an apparent confusion at the touch of a sweaty hand, those delightful games of almost letting a boy kiss you and then retreating behind a veil of propriety.

  I was quite pure, of course. Chaperones were surprisingly easy to evade, but none of us young people had any idea what we were doing and thought a kiss quite daring enough. And as I have said, older men who were whole of body were in short supply. The only older man I knew well was Martin, and although I amused him mightily and we were the best of friends, Mama had never looked at Martin with that calculating eye so peculiar to mothers of daughters.

  Once I turned sixteen and we were out of mourning for Grandmama, Mama began inviting potential husbands to drink tea in our parlor and make awkward conversation while I sat there, outwardly polite but inwardly resolved to have nothing to do with marriage. Flirting with youths at parties was fine, but the idea of tying myself to any of them for life‌—‌having babies for them‌—‌disgusted me. Especially the babies. They had forgotten all about me the day that my little brother took his first and only breath, but I had not forgotten the sound of my mother’s whimpers and finally screams of pain that had penetrated to my retreat under my bed and through the fingers that plugged my ears.

  My intention had been to exasperate my mother’s plans for marriage for as long as possible in the hope that she would eventually take me East to continue the hunt on fresh ground. In the old society of the Colonial states, I had heard, were women who‌—‌by choice!‌—‌did not marry and devoted their lives to useful activity, free from the taint of eccentric spinsterhood that would fall on me if I remained in Victory. It would be easy enough to elude Mother’s ineffective chaperonage and find out how these ladies had achieved their state of unwedded bliss.

  It had been a good plan. So why was I now reduced to hiding in my room and concealing my swollen belly? The answer lay in my own stupidity and ignorance‌—‌and John Harvey Venton. Cousin Jack.

  “How delightful!” my mother had exclaimed six months before, as she looked up from the letter she was reading. We had been trapped in the house for days, the combination of the spring rains and melting snow having turned every road into an impassable quagmire, and as a consequence, Mama had been spending time improving her correspondence with friends and relations.

  “What’s delightful, Mama?” I inquired politely, looking past her at the April rain beating against the parlor window.

  “We are to receive a visit from your Venton cousins. All of them‌—‌just imagine!” She read on a little farther and giggled. “How shocking; all three girls are leaving their husbands and children at home and absconding on a visit to their acquaintance in the Middle West.” She shifted in her chair to peer anxiously at the rain sheeting the window. “I do hope the roads will be dry by then. The passenger train will only bring them as far as Chicago.”

  “When are they to arrive, Mama?” My attention was on the handkerchief I was embroidering‌—‌one of my favorite occupations at that time was to design and sew exquisite ladies’ handkerchiefs‌—‌and my replies must have sounded bored and perfunctory. But my mother did not notice. She squinted at the letter, which caused her difficulty due to Cousin Elizabeth’s cramped handwriting.

  “Sometime at the end of May. Elizabeth will write when she knows exactly.”

  “Well then, Mama. The roads will be perfectly dry by then. You know very well that May is often a beautiful month, and there are no indications that spring will be late‌—‌why, the snow is nearly gone already.”

  “I am sure you are right, my darling. Oh, Nell, that handkerchief is going to be perfectly adorable! For whom do you intend it?”

  “Maybe I will make one each for my cousins; what do you think of that?”

  My mother’s face lit up in one of her radiant, sweet smiles. “I cannot think of a better gift. But you must also make something for Cousin Jack; perhaps some plain gentleman’s handkerchiefs?”

  “Jack will be there too?”

  “Of course; and since we last saw him he has quite grown up and been a soldier, so we will not recognize him.”

  “Do soldiers need fine handkerchiefs, Mama?” I asked absently, making minute snips at the cutwork border of the piece I was fashioning.

  Mama laughed, a merry sound against the dull beat of the rain. “Now, Nell, you are being a goose. The War has been over for four years, after all. Ah, those terrible years… I am grateful that Chicago was so little affected.”

  “So Jack is out of uniform?” I hid a yawn behind my hand. As usual, Mama’s train of thought was beginning to drift, and I was tiring of the subject of Cousin Jack.

  “Oh, for some time, my dear. Apprenticed at a legal office, Elizabeth tells me, and soon to begin his career as an attorney.”

  “Doesn’t he have enough money to live on already?”

  Mama screwed up her face in consternation. “A man must do something in life, I suppose. He will be quite the gentleman by now, and, yes, of course he will carry at least two handkerchiefs.” Miraculously, Mama had come back to the point. So the matter was settled, and I spent one blustery week in late April embroidering “JHV” on six large squares of soft white lawn.

  Elizabeth, Florence, and Henrietta were true first cousins to me. My mother�
�s sister Caroline had disturbed the family’s equilibrium by marrying Barnabus Venton when he owned only three carts and was therefore beneath her. After Caroline’s death from influenza, Uncle Barney, by now a rich merchant, had married Aunt May, who had given birth to Jack before succumbing to childbed fever.

  My mother had been fond of Barney, whose puckish features and wild sense of humor hid a deeply loving heart and a fierce intelligence in all business matters. He had died during the War. I last saw Uncle Barney at my father’s and brother’s funeral, surrounded by his three grown daughters and Jack, a self-assured, twelve-year-old princeling who could not quite hide his embarrassment at his father’s rustic manners. I had been six, and tearful, and Jack had ignored me.

  FOUR

  Cousin Jack did not ignore me this time. In retrospect, I might have wished he had. I didn’t even see him at first when my cousins arrived, because his sisters‌—‌all fair, all rather fat, and all complaining bitterly about the state of the roads‌—‌burst from the carriage they’d hired in Chicago like a flight of exotic birds. I was submitting to perfumed hugs and surreptitiously studying their expensive traveling dresses for details I could adapt to my own when my hand was suddenly grasped by a strong masculine one, and I felt warm breath and the tickle of a silky mustache on my knuckles.

  “Little Cousin Nellie,” said a pleasant, deep voice in a tone of ironic amusement, and I looked up‌—‌not too far up, as I am tall and Jack was not quite six feet‌—‌into a pair of jade-colored eyes with strange black flecks in them.

  As a little girl, I had found Jack impressive, if supercilious. His sisters adored him and waited on him as if he were the President himself, and he had that facile cleverness and athletic strength that gives a boy of twelve an aura of youthful glory. With the addition of eleven years, eighty pounds of muscle, and a respectable, if short, battlefield career as an infantry officer, Jack’s impressiveness had soared to new heights.