The Last Days of Night, page 22
“I asked your mother if I might take you walking,” he confessed. “She informed me of the time you’ve spent in the company of Mr. Jayne.”
“That sounds like the kind of thing I’d expect from my mother.”
“I’m sorry for insulting him,” said Paul. “It wasn’t fair of me.”
“I’m sorry that my mother embarrassed you,” said Agnes in turn. “She is…complicated. As is the situation.”
Paul looked at her curiously. He wasn’t sure what she meant.
She appeared to be in the midst of making a very difficult decision. Paul stayed quiet. If she was going to say something to him, something difficult, he would let her make that decision on her own.
“Look,” she said at last. “There’s a lot about all of this—my mother, Henry Jayne—that you don’t know. And…well, I want to tell you.”
“All right,” said Paul.
“But I’m afraid to.”
Of all the emotions she’d expressed to him, fear had never been among them. Edison had not frightened her, nor had Stanford White, nor had the danger of keeping Tesla in her home. What was scaring her?
“You can trust me,” said Paul. “If nothing else…I’m your lawyer.”
She smiled for a moment. “I lied to you.”
“About what?” He watched her struggle to find the words. “Miss Huntington?”
“That’s just the thing,” she said at last. “My name isn’t Agnes Huntington.”
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams.
—KARL POPPER
SHE HAD BEEN born Agnes Gouge in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her mother, Fannie, was not then the high-society maven Paul had met; she was a maid. Agnes’s father had sailed deep-water. Once, when she was eight, she’d received a letter from him. The postmark was Oslo. He’d sketched the serene harbor for her, and inquired as to her health. He’d left no address at which to reach him. And she’d never heard from him again.
She’d always loved to sing. The upstairs neighbors would bang their boots against the ceiling, but she didn’t care. Neither did her mother.
When Agnes was fourteen, Fannie moved them to Boston, where she scrubbed floors and polished china plates for the Endicotts while Agnes auditioned for the Bijou. The parts went to local girls whose parents knew the manager. Agnes got a job sweeping stages at the Howard Athenaeum, but it wasn’t what she’d imagined. She did not find herself amid a tight-knit group of artists. There was no creative camaraderie in which to conspire. She was the sweeping girl, the singers were the singers, and the stagehands were sauced. It was as much a bordello as a theater. Though a bordello might at least have been profitable.
Boston wasn’t working. Fannie had seen her daughter’s tears, had felt the pain of her unrealized ambitions from the moment they left Michigan. She knew how much Agnes wanted this, and she also knew that the daughters of housemaids didn’t become prime donne. Fannie had to watch her precocious, inquisitive, curious daughter learn cynicism. That was what she could not stand.
Agnes had no idea how long her mother had been planning it when it happened. Whether it was a spur-of-the-moment decision or whether her mother had set the whole affair up months before.
One day, when she was seventeen, Agnes came home to find a dress lying across her bed. The dress was of a color that Agnes had never before seen. It was green, bright but somehow still subtle. The shade of orchid leaves, lady’s mantle, saxifrage. The shade of a faraway ocean. She gasped when she saw it, when her eyes caught the glimmer of afternoon light from the dirty, square window. At the top of the dress, resting delicately over the silk, was a string of diamonds.
Agnes stepped closer. She reached out to touch the fabric, but pulled her hand back. She was afraid to press her grease-stained fingertips against such a cloth. This dress, these jewels, did not belong to anyone she knew. Or anyone she might know. They were a princess’s evening wear.
“Do you like it?” Agnes turned to see Fannie in the doorway, smoking a thin cigarette.
“What is it?”
“It’s a dress,” said Fannie. “And it’s yours.”
“You…” Agnes couldn’t believe what she was going to say. “You…stole it?”
“It comes from the dressing room of Miss Endicott. So do the jewels. The girl is about your age—a little younger. It might be a little wide around the bust, but we can take it in.”
“You stole a dress from Mary Endicott?” Agnes was dumbfounded, terrified. The family would discover the loss, and her mother had been polishing their silver for just long enough to be the first likely suspect. The police would be at their door within days.
That’s when her mother explained. They were going to leave Boston and they were going to do it that very night. They would take a coach steamer to Paris, packing the dress in their valise. Agnes would board the steamer in her normal clothes, and she would disembark in green silk. She would leave Boston Harbor as a sweeping girl…and she would arrive in Paris the daughter of new California money.
“Miss Agnes Huntington,” her mother had said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Agnes had protested.
“Exactly. No one does. But soon enough, everyone will.”
With only an impossibly expensive dress and a string of gems, the teenage Agnes would be reborn in Paris. There, she could be anyone she wanted. There were enough moneyed Huntingtons roaming the world that no one would be sure from which line she’d descended, and if she worked her manners, no one would be rude enough to ask. Agnes was beautiful, her mother had explained. She was radiant. She was funny. She was both smart and clever, which were never quite the same thing, and she was enormously talented. The only thing holding her back in America was her family.
“But what about you?”
Fannie would be there as well. Waiting in the wings. Silent and unseen, Fannie would be backstage, awaiting her daughter’s triumph.
The police wouldn’t be able to find her in Paris—they’d never look that far afield. But they would most certainly be looking. The Endicotts were not a family to be trifled with. So forever, even if their deceit were to be successful, Fannie would have to stay in her daughter’s shadow.
“I’m afraid.”
“I know,” her mother had answered. “But I love you. And that’s why we’re going to do this.”
Fannie had moved close and kissed Agnes once on her forehead. And then Fannie had packed both of their bags while Agnes puttered and paced, too shocked to argue or do anything but what she’d been asked.
They boarded the Cunard Line steamer bound for Europe that very evening.
And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Agnes or Fannie Gouge.
—
In steerage, Agnes kept the dress hidden for the duration of the trip, clutching her bag even while she slept. Only on that final morning had her mother removed the green cloth from its cover. The other women in their steerage cabin were incredulous. Agnes and Fannie said nothing.
Agnes had heard of a café from some men on the boat, gentlemen from the first-class cabin whom she passed as they smoked on the communal deck. It sounded, from the snatches of description she’d been able to overhear, like a good place for introductions. On her second day in Paris, she left the cheap women’s boardinghouse Fannie had found and asked for directions.
Agnes sat with her café au lait along the Boulevard Saint-Marcel wearing a high-society evening gown and matching necklace at eleven in the morning. But after twenty minutes, she was approached by a tall man with slick black hair and an old wool coat. He was actually quite handsome.
He addressed her in French, which of course she did not speak.
“Pardon,” she said. “Would you like to try that in English?”
“You’re a touch overdressed for the morning.”
She looked him up and down. “I should say you’d be better off with a bit of dressing up yourself.”
The man laughed at her insult and helped himself to the seat opposite.
There was a party the following night. There was always a party, she would learn. He invited her, and when she accepted, he asked where he might claim her on the evening in question.
“Why, right here, of course!” she answered. “Won’t you want a cup before a long night out? Unless,” she added, “you don’t think it’s going to be a very long night.”
He assured her that it was. And when he came to pick her up in his two-horse carriage the next evening, she found that he wasn’t wrong.
If he noticed that she was wearing the same green dress as on the day before, he made no comment about it. She would come to learn that his sort never did.
It took her only three more parties before she found someone to buy her another dress. His name was Coulter, and he was friendly with Monsieur Jacques Doucet himself. Surely she’d appreciate a little something from his shop? Her collection of gowns grew in direct proportion with her collection of gentleman admirers. A silk baron, a minor aristocrat of the old order, a German banker who found himself frequently in Paris at the House of Lazard. None needed any prompting to send her a little something.
Her mother was her only female companion in that first year. The women of Paris society were competitive, and they could smell a rat, even when their brothers and husbands and fathers could not. But what were they to do except to exclude Agnes from their teas? To gossip about her incessantly? To keep her name on their lips in snide and disparaging tones?
She returned nightly to her mother, who’d given her everything and who’d received nothing, yet, in return.
If the social intrigue stung on occasion, the pain was easily balmed by the singing. Agnes made her debut during a party at Thomas Hentsch’s mansion. The crowd was more than receptive and her name was passed around. First she sang at parties, and then an offer came to sing at the Théâtre du Châtelet. When she closed her eyes mid-song, when she felt the air in her throat and the rapt audience before her, it was everything she’d ever imagined. If she could ignore the circumstances of her arrival, she was at home.
People said that Agnes could bring even the most stoic of audiences to tears with her voice. If that was true, it was because she knew of what she sang.
After a year the Huntingtons decamped for London. Agnes used the reputation she’d built up in Paris to arrive fully formed across the Channel. And this time, her mother “arrived” to meet her from California. They had enough money, at this point, for even Fannie to acquire the accoutrements of society. The West End theater owners clamored to book Agnes before she’d even arrived. She and Fannie passed a few successful years there. The Earl of Harewood had taken a fancy to her. She’d taken a lovely sail with the Duke of Fife. And then back to Paris, where she was hailed as a returning champion.
After touring Europe, Agnes returned to Boston at the age of twenty-one as the toast of the Continent. She was welcomed with open arms into the opera houses and parlor rooms of the Back Bay, rooms that she would never have been able to enter before. And she went unrecognized. As did Fannie. Who would even remember a poor, sad sweeping girl named Agnes Gouge? Agnes Huntington was the toast of the European elite to which all American classes aspired. A certain green dress and its accompanying diamonds had long been sold off. Fannie stayed away from the parties, away from the opening nights. She stayed very far away from the Endicotts. Her face went unseen in Boston society, even as her name was mentioned frequently in connection with Agnes’s.
They’d gotten away with it. The life that Agnes had won became so full that she believed it herself. She had not succumbed to cynicism; she had grown into the woman she’d dreamed. The talent of Agnes Huntington, the things that made her a star of the stage and a belle of the ball, were wholly real. No one else had made her who she was. And though she’d lied to get there, it was not the lies that echoed from the walls of the Metropolitan Opera House every night. It was the truth. The lie had only granted her a fair shot. She owed nothing to anyone except for one person, and that was a debt she would repay every day. Was Fannie difficult, controlling, omnipresent? Of course. Did Agnes relish the occasional night out? The infrequent tipsy moment, where she might be free of the perfect caution her mother expected of her? Well, of course. But if she resented her mother’s wrath on occasion, that did not mean that she didn’t love her. Fannie had given her everything.
—
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I haven’t told anyone else,” she said. “And I thought…I wanted you to know why this is so important. Why I have to…”
“That’s why your mother wants you married into the Jaynes. She’s worried that one day this will all catch up to you. That someone will recognize Agnes Gouge in the face of Agnes Huntington.”
She held his gaze.
“And that’s why you hired me in the first place. It wasn’t just about Foster making up stories. You could have handled that yourselves. You were worried he might start digging into your past. If your identity was exposed, all of this—everything you’ve done—would be for nothing.”
Her smile was sad.
“Unless you have some manner of protection,” concluded Paul. “Agnes Huntington is susceptible to accusation. But Agnes Jayne is not.” Paul had to admire the brilliance of their plan. “No one would dare confront you. Even if the Endicotts found you, they wouldn’t possibly suggest anything. They’d be eaten alive by the Jaynes.”
“To go up against the Jaynes,” she said, “would be like going up against Thomas Edison. Only a fool would attempt it.”
“A fool like me?”
“Or like our eccentric friend in there.”
Paul knew more than ever that he could never marry her. She deserved a peace that he could never afford. Did she care for him? Is that why she’d made her confession? He didn’t know. Could she? He hoped so. But because he knew he cared for her, he let those hopes recede into the starlit night.
Paul reached out and took her hand. He hadn’t decided to do it, it just happened. Their fingers intertwined suddenly. He wasn’t sure if he’d wrapped his fingers around hers or if it was the other way around. Her skin felt warm.
“Sometimes I hate it so much,” she said. “Always having to pretend.”
Paul gripped her fingers tighter. “This is America,” he said. “We’re all pretending.”
He looked up at the clear night sky. His eyes naturally traced the constellations among the bright stars. Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia. He’d been spotting their hidden shapes from this very place since he was a boy. Yet the irony of constellations was that their shapes were but narratives imposed by an active mind. The brightest design among the heavens was in truth only what you imagined it to be. Glance across the stars differently, and the figures they formed were suddenly different as well. Blink once and you could draw the lines between them into anything you chose.
He leaned in and kissed her.
I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
—NIKOLA TESLA
THE NEXT MORNING was a strange one. Paul woke late, having slept fitfully on the downstairs couch. When he lifted his head from the stiff pillows, he could already smell the coffee boiling in its tin pot. By the time he’d dressed and made his way to the kitchen, he found Agnes and Erastus engaged in conversation. The mood was casual, familial. Paul attempted to read Agnes. He thought of her lips, her fingers, the feeling of her body pressed against his as they held each other close. When she looked at him in the kitchen, did her mind race to such scenes too? In her smile he found no clues. She said her hello, smiled warmly, and then turned back to Erastus’s discussion of Tesla. Erastus had ideas about the peculiar nature of Tesla’s mind. Teresa of Ávila had suffered similar hallucinations. Might Tesla be blessed with a divine sight, as she had been?
They passed the morning in conversation with Paul’s parents until heading off to catch their noon train. After they had said farewell to Tesla and Ruth, Erastus took Paul and Agnes to the station in silence before offering his typically formal goodbye.
Paul spent a few cents on newspapers and a baked bun as they waited on the platform. He needed to say something about the previous night, but he didn’t know what. Or how. Should he apologize? Should he admit to having been ungentlemanly, given that she was soon to be engaged? Or should he tell her, one time, just so that the words might be loosed into the air, that he was in love with her?
“Miss Huntington,” said Paul, fumbling. “I mean Agnes—”
“He’s proud of you, you know,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Your father is terribly proud of you, whether you realize it or not.”
Clearly, his family had made some sort of impression on her. Perhaps, Paul thought, in the absence of her own family, she looked longingly to his.
Paul scoffed. “I find that hard to believe.”
“You think that he’s cold.”
“I think that when he is reminded I exist, I am a terrible disappointment to him.”
“How often has he come to see you in New York?”
Paul considered. “Once. On Fisk business.”
“Or maybe that’s how he put it to you.”
“Why wouldn’t he just tell me he wanted to see me?”
“God. You’re so…manlike. Listen. Did you ever think that perhaps he doesn’t think you’re proud of him?”
The suggestion was absurd. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“You were the one who left, Paul. Not him. Imagine how he felt about that.”
“What did he think I was going to do?”
“Teach at Fisk, preach in Nashville. He thinks you were the one who rejected him, and it’s your approval for which he is wanting.”
