All Other Nights Page 7

  “Oh, fine, I shall meet him outside,” Lottie groaned, and turned to look out the window. Jacob leaned forward in his seat and caught a glimpse of the person coming up the front path—a man in a smart suit and hat, about ten years older than he, strutting impatiently along the flagstones.

  At that moment, as Jacob and everyone else turned toward the windows, the room resounded with a loud bodily crack, like a bone being broken.

  Jacob spun back toward the table and saw the most ghastly sight. Jeannie was slouched in her chair, almost collapsed onto Rose’s little shoulder. But what was horrifying was her face: the entire lower half of it—her lower lip, teeth, cheeks and chin—was grotesquely shifted, as if her jaw had been dislocated by a sudden blow. Her eyes were rolling toward the back of her head. He had never seen anything like it except once in a circus sideshow, and the circus lady had been a freak.

  “Miss Levy!” Jacob shouted, and instinctively jumped out of his seat. “Are you all right?” He reached across the table toward her, and then glanced at the others. No one else at the table had even moved. Even Philip continued chewing his potatoes.

  The grotesque gargoyle that was Jeannie’s face lay limp for another terrible instant against the back of her chair. Then the eyes in the face suddenly rolled back into view, and looked at Jacob. Jacob watched in astonishment as Jeannie raised her arms and somehow, repulsively, snapped her jaw back into place.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she replied. Her sisters laughed.

  This mission, Jacob realized, was going to be much harder than he had expected.

  3.

  THERE WAS NO QUESTION THAT JEANNIE WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT WAS simply her personality that was utterly repellent. Jacob never felt free to say anything to her, or even near her, without fearing that it might lead to some absurdly embarrassing exchange. And after the incident with his wallet, he guarded his personal belongings ferociously, burning any messages from the command immediately after reading them. His contact in town was the local baker, through whom he and the officers—via a chain of intermediaries—exchanged messages baked into rolls. The coded messages that he sent back through the bakery were simple, optimistic. ESTABLISHED IN HOUSEHOLD. WILL REPORT AS MATTERS DEVELOP; SITUATION PROMISING. But it was during the second week of his stay with the Levys that he saw just how difficult his task might become, for entirely different reasons.

  That early summer evening, not long after supper but still before dusk, the doorbell rang. Jacob was sitting in the front room at the time, pretending to read a gleeful article in the New Babylon Intelligencer about how the Army of the Potomac was sure to be routed within the month, but really watching Lottie, who was sitting quietly opposite him, working on a needlepoint in her lap, and Phoebe, who was whittling something out of a dowel of wood. Their father had gone out right after supper, and Jacob was hoping to get to know the sisters, or at least to make them accustomed to his presence in their home. He had tried to think of some way to speak to them, but neither of them would even glance up from her work. Jeannie, unfortunately, had escaped to her bedroom immediately after supper. Rose had also disappeared. The doorbell rang again, this time twice. Phoebe, groaning, rose and answered the door.

  “I’ve come to call on Miss Eugenia,” Jacob heard a man’s voice say. The voice was unctuous, presuming, like an actor’s in the theater. “Is she home at present?”

  “JEANNIE! IT’S MR. WILLIAMS!” Phoebe screamed toward the stairs. Screaming, Jacob had noticed, was the normal procedure for announcing callers at the house. The room froze for a moment, a tableau vivant, everyone awaiting some sound from upstairs. When none came, Phoebe once again groaned aloud. “I’ll fetch her,” she said. Lottie didn’t even look up from her needlepoint as Phoebe bounded up the stairs.

  Jacob had stood when the door opened, out of habit, and now he had a clear view of the visitor standing across the room. The man was perhaps five years older than Jacob, and he wore an impeccably clean and stylish suit and hat. He was taller than Jacob too, with a pushed-up nose and a sandy blond mustache. He seemed to be making a deliberate effort to look past Jacob, surely searching for Jeannie coming down the stairs over Jacob’s shoulder.

  Jacob knew that he ought to sit back down and return to his Rebel newspaper. But he was curious, and anxious. He glanced at Lottie, who hadn’t looked up from her needlepoint, and then at the visitor, who was still eyeing the stairs behind him, and decided to speak.

  “Pardon my prying,” he announced, “but what is your relation to the Levys, Mr. Williams?”

  Williams took off his hat and twirled it in one hand, revealing a tall forehead and closely cropped blond hair. He looked Jacob up and down, with ill-disguised disdain. Something in his gaze reminded Jacob of the panel of officers, the painful knowledge that what they were seeing was nothing like what he thought he saw when he looked in the mirror. He winced as Williams watched him.

  “And who might you be?” Williams asked, without even pretending to answer Jacob’s question.

  If he were as coy as Williams was, he would get nothing out of him. He stepped toward the visitor until he was at arm’s length. “Jacob Rappaport,” he announced, and offered his hand. “An old business associate of Mr. Levy’s, though now merely a boarder.”

  “A pleasure, Mr. Rappaport,” Williams said, in a voice rich with displeasure. He took Jacob’s hand limply in his, as though he were appalled to have to touch him.

  Jacob dropped his hand quickly. There was something about the visitor’s presumptuous tone that made him want to imitate it. Partly for his own amusement, he did. “Please, call me Jacob,” he cooed.

  “In that case, please call me William,” said Williams.

  Jacob knew he shouldn’t say anything, but the visitor’s condescension had made him bold. “Your name is William Williams?” he asked, trying to keep his face in a serious frown.

  “Indeed,” said William Williams. “The Third, in fact.” His face radiated contempt.

  The idea that there was not merely one person in the world named William Williams, but three, pushed Jacob to the brink of hilarity. He struggled to keep himself from laughing out loud. “I don’t suppose you have a middle name,” Jacob said.

  “Wilhelm,” William replied.

  Jacob tried very, very hard not to laugh, and did not quite succeed. Perhaps the Levy sisters were affecting him; he had abandoned completely any notion of decorum. He pretended to cough, and pursed his lips until he managed to compose himself. “You never did answer my question, William, about your connection to the Levys,” he finally said.

  William Wilhelm Williams the Third smiled, but said nothing. The silence itself struck Jacob as patronizing, as though the visitor were above answering questions from the likes of him. The pause lasted a long time before a voice emerged from the other side of the room.

  “He’s Jeannie’s beau,” Lottie said, dryly.

  William Wilhelm Williams the Third looked at Jacob and Lottie with an enormous smile spread across his face, proud as could be. Then they heard the inelegant thumping behind them as a newly powdered and curled Jeannie galloped down the stairs.

  “William, how perfectly lovely,” Jeannie sang. Her arrival at the foot of the stairs was dramatic, as her childlike galloping dissolved, in an instant, into a lady’s remarkable poise. She crossed from the stairs to the doorway in controlled, graceful motions, as though she were stepping onto a stage, her plain dark dress transformed into an elegant gown as she flowed across the room. Jacob watched her as she offered William her hand, which William loudly kissed. He glanced away for a moment, listening to the sound of William’s lips against Jeannie’s fingers.

  William turned and bowed to Lottie, and then to Jacob. “My friends, please excuse us,” he bellowed, his voice ridiculously grand. The two of them exited through the front door.

  Jacob tried to listen to them heading toward the street, but that soon became unnecessary. They turned just outside the door and stood chatting on the veranda, clearly
visible through the window. Jacob couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he saw Jeannie tossing her dark curls. Then he watched as they took their seats. He had hoped, unrealistically, to see them sitting face to face, on separate chairs, but to his dismay they were cuddled together on the wicker bench. He saw the back of Jeannie’s curly-haired head as she rested it on William’s shoulder, then saw William’s lips moving as he whispered in her ear.

  Jacob looked across the room and saw Lottie still sitting like a mechanical doll, putting stitch after stitch into her needlepoint. Phoebe hadn’t returned. He cleared his throat, but Lottie didn’t look up.

  “Miss Levy, I wondered if you might entertain a young man with a personal question,” Jacob said, lowering his voice.

  Lottie still didn’t look at him, but he could see that she was making a special effort not to do so. She made a stitch in her needlepoint, and immediately took it out.

  “I am always pleased to entertain young men with personal questions, Mr. Rappaport,” she finally said. Her voice was curt, unpleasant. “One could say that I am perhaps far too pleased to do so.”

  Jacob decided to be direct. “How long has that gentleman been courting Miss Eugenia?” he asked.

  He saw Lottie stiffen. “Mr. Williams? Oh, a few months or so,” she said. He could hear how she was pretending to sound uninterested, even bored. “But they’ve known each other for years. He was an actor in the theater with her. They met doing a play before the war. He was in the army, of course, but his right arm was slightly injured. No one can tell, looking at it, but he can’t aim properly anymore. Now he’s an entertainer for the troops.”

  “A rather enduring friendship,” Jacob said blandly. I can act just as bored as you, he thought. He paused before prying even more openly. “Does he intend to propose?” he asked. He worked hard to make his tone dull, temperate, as though he were asking if she thought it might rain.

  “Imminently, I’m sure,” said Lottie, with just as much studied nonchalance. She jabbed at the pattern in her lap. “It doesn’t matter, though. Jeannie would have to run off with him, and she would never do that. She’d never see us again if she did, and she’s far too attached to us. And Papa would never let her marry him.”

  This was reassuring, at least. What might he have that William Wilhelm Williams the Third lacked, Jacob wondered, besides a perfectly functional right arm? “Because he isn’t Jewish?” he asked.

  “No, not that,” Lottie said. “Papa would be appalled to have me admit it, but frankly Jeannie is so hopeless that he would probably even tolerate that. Papa has become a master of toleration.”

  One would have to be, Jacob supposed, living with these girls. He leaned forward, listening.

  “But Mr. Williams doesn’t get along with Papa very well,” Lottie continued. “He barely even speaks to Papa, even though he’s practically married to Jeannie already, and when he does, he’s unbearably rude. Most people here have the sense at least to be polite in person, no matter how vicious they are behind someone’s back. Papa’s parents came from Prussia, and he says they always just accepted that kind of treatment, but he vowed he never would. He’s a very proud man.” Lottie was a fountain of information, Jacob thought. It was as if she knew, in that vague way that women know things, what he was after. “And Papa doesn’t like how Jeannie acts around Mr. Williams, holding hands and so forth. He thinks it’s unseemly,” Lottie added as she took a new spool of thread from the basket on her lap. “Of course, Jeannie herself is rather unseemly, as you’ve noticed,” she said.

  Jacob blushed. One always tries to convince oneself that others will forget one’s most humiliating moments. They never do.

  “It’s much worse than you think, though,” Lottie said. “She’s even kissed men on stage. Papa has already given up on her. He knows that no suitable man in his right mind would marry someone like her.”

  The image of Jeannie kissing a stranger on a stage—or even, perhaps, kissing William Williams—had an electrifying effect on Jacob. He put his hands in his lap, and attempted to compose himself. “Unseemliness doesn’t bother everyone,” he said. He tried to speak confidently, like an actor reciting well-rehearsed lines. “What’s unseemly to one person may be quite attractive to another.”

  Lottie finally looked up. Jacob couldn’t help but grin. After days of being terrified of saying something wrong, he thought of Jeannie and felt ready to act.

  “What might be required, do you suppose, for one of you ladies to get married?” he asked.

  Lottie blanched, then grimaced. The pause before she answered lasted far too long, and Jacob became nervous again. “That would depend which one of us you mean,” she said at last. “Personally, I must admit that I’m not terribly interested at the moment.”

  She glanced at him with an expression of mild disdain as she returned her eyes to her lap, and he was surprised to feel slightly insulted. But he puffed up his chest, taking a deep breath of self-approval. He had other plans.

  “What about your sisters?” he asked.

  “I think you will agree, Mr. Rappaport, that Rose and Phoebe are both a bit young to entertain any proposals at present.”

  Now she was making it hard for him. “Excluding Rose and Phoebe, then,” he parried.

  Lottie looked at him. “It is my impression that Jeannie would not mind your attentions, if that is what you mean,” she said, her voice strangely cold.

  Success, he thought. Or was it? “It seems as if she wouldn’t mind anyone’s attentions,” he replied.

  “Including yours,” Lottie said.

  At that moment, Jeannie returned, with an absurdly loud goodbye to William on the doorstep. Jacob observed her gestures as she curtsied in front of William, watching the curve of her long fingers around the edges of her skirt. More hand-kissing ensued, followed by William honoring Jacob with yet another contemptuous look. Jeannie hurried upstairs, and Lottie quickly joined her. But just as she rounded the stairs out of sight, Lottie flashed Jacob the very slightest of smiles. And Jacob saw that there was hope.

  4.

  AT FIRST DURING THE DAYS JACOB WOULD DISAPPEAR FROM the house, ostensibly to his undisclosed business in supplying the camps, but usually to his contact at the local bakery and then to odd circuits around the town, which he tried to vary daily. New Babylon was a small city—large enough to have been a rather busy railroad junction before the war, which was why Philip Levy’s business was based there, but no longer large enough for Jacob to lounge in taverns for hours on end without eventually arousing suspicion. After the first two weeks, he began implying to Philip that his business had dried up and that it wasn’t safe for him to return home. Soon thereafter Philip took him on as a bookkeeper and manager. It seemed like an impossible stroke of luck, but Jacob quickly discovered that in fact Philip needed him desperately: his finances were in a shambles. His attempts to move his shipping business to other parts of the South had largely failed, since the number of railroads available was quite limited and transport by boat had become almost impossibly risky. He admitted to Jacob that he had started taking in boarders at the house out of desperation, and by now they constituted most of his income. Jacob did his best to cut Philip’s losses by rearranging certain debts and credits, and was proud of how much he managed to salvage. He refused to accept payment from Philip; the command was smuggling money to him anyway, baked into the rolls that he picked up at the bakery. In exchange, Philip let him stay at the house for free.

  In the evenings Jacob situated himself in the house’s front room, which seemed to be the best place to speak with the girls after supper. Philip usually spent his evenings going out to taverns, desperately trying to drum up business, or else buried in papers in his study a few rooms away. He seemed to avoid the girls deliberately once supper had ended, and Jacob took up the habit of sitting in the front room with them, pretending to read. Usually the older two were waiting for their gentleman callers—Major Stoughton for Lottie, and William Wilhelm Williams the Third for Je
annie. They came to the house with eerie regularity, and never at the same time—often, in fact, on alternating days, as if the sisters themselves had timed it, and after a few weeks Jacob began to suspect that they had. He watched as the couples left for an evening stroll, or took their turns sitting on the veranda, sometimes for hours on end, the men stroking the young ladies’ dark curls. Afterward, when the summer evening at last began to darken, whichever sister had been out would hurry back inside, and the other would accompany her upstairs. The younger two sometimes followed; on other nights, they remained in the front room with Jacob, absorbed in their bizarre work.

  One night during Jacob’s early weeks at the Levy house, Phoebe came into the front room after washing the dishes to continue whittling a wide wooden dowel, sitting down on a chair in the corner as she carved a design around the outside of the wood. Lottie, fresh from cleaning the boarders’ rooms upstairs, was out on the veranda with Major Stoughton. Rose was still sweeping the dining room; Jeannie was in the kitchen, where Jacob could hear her scrubbing the floor. He had noticed that in lieu of keeping actual servants, Philip Levy had judiciously employed his daughters instead.

  “Would you do me the honor of showing me what you’re making?” Jacob asked Phoebe. “I’ve seen you carving, and I am quite intrigued.”

  Phoebe smiled, slightly, and handed the piece to him. The wood was carved nearly all around with birds flying in formation, layered over a semblance of clouds in the background. Now Jacob was able to see how intricate the work on it was—and also to notice that the inside had been hollowed out almost completely, making the exterior design even more delicate, and even more impressive.

  “It’s a handle for a riding crop,” Phoebe said, before he asked. “Jeannie asked me to make it.”

  The family did not own any horses; Jacob had never seen any of them riding anywhere, even on a hired horse. “For Mr. Williams?” he asked.