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  “All right. But don’t worry about me. Just be grateful I’m finally going to get my chance at happiness. Someday you’ll get yours too, only it won’t be like this—clandestine meetings, running away without letting people know where you’re going. You’ll meet some lovely young girl who just might be deserving of someone as dear as you, and you’ll have a huge wedding attended by everyone in town, and live happily ever after in a cottage up on a hill somewhere.”

  “I don’t know. I may not ever marry. I might be something else, might sail the seas or something, like Cousin Charles’s brother. Claire is always talking about him, and how exciting his life was.”

  “Oh, I can’t really see … Is that what you want to do, really?”

  “I guess I don’t know yet. I’ve had several ideas, but always change my mind.”

  “You’ll probably do that many times before deciding.”

  “Will you ever come back?”

  “I don’t know. Roman hasn’t yet explained all the arrangements for leaving, and I haven’t thought far enough ahead to consider whether we’ll come back. Someday … perhaps not right away … he’ll help me get into a ballet school in New York, the one his sister attended.”

  “You’d let me know, wouldn’t you, if you were ever stranded or needed me, or anything?”

  “Certainly. Tell you something else. If you were about five years older, I should be very tempted to set my catch for you, if you’d have me.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  It was the last conversation we had. Yesterday morning James came by and brought a slip of paper, but didn’t stay as Tommy Driscoll awaited him for their morning crabbing trip. When I opened the paper I read his full name at the top, James Randolph Byron. Underneath in bold lettering was first his Galveston address, 707 Avenue L, then his former Grady address, Number 2 Blackburn Place. I doubt seriously I’ll ever have need of either of them, except perhaps to write to him someday. I am touched by his concern for my welfare, however, and have slipped the paper down into the pocket of my carpetbag, alongside the other things there.

  It is seven o’clock. The dawn is creeping upward, bathing the sky in new light. Surely nothing can happen in the last five hours, yet why does this uneasiness loom above me like a sword of Damocles?

  Minutes from now, Dad will arise and Mother will awaken, and soon after Mrs. McCambridge will come into the hall, take off her hat in front of the mirror, fluff her hair, and see to Mother’s breakfast. I shall go down to the beach at the usual time, so that no one will suspect anything. There I will meet Roman in the Pavilion tower room, where we will wait until almost noon, then go to Union Depot in the rented rig and join the other band members, who’ve come straight from their downtown hotel.

  Tomorrow a group of men I’ve never met will board up the windows of the Seaside Pavilion, making it safe for the coming storm season. Even our tower window will be denied its patch of sunlight, and the place that was ours will be vacant till a year passes and a new season of summer entertainment begins. Will our room be used by two lovers, who will take joy in their secret hiding place as we did? I hope so, and wish them happiness that will last far beyond the brief interlude of summer.…

  Once in New York, Roman and I will be married, and I will go wherever he goes for as long as I live. And today as our train speeds along, I will voice to him my conviction that I am carrying his child. I’m no longer frightened of doing this because, knowing he loves me, I cannot believe the news would not delight him as much as it now does me.

  Last night I sat with Mother for a long time. I wanted so much to tell her everything, to say I loved her and was sorry to desert her; yet, instead, I held her hands in mine and looked silently into her eyes. When I rose to leave she gripped my hands tightly, and as I gently tugged away I saw a tear escape from her right eye and trace a path down her cheek.

  The only thing left to consider now is the box of her poems. They are still unsolved riddles that only provoke questions with no answers, and I believe I’ll burn them in the hope that destroying them might help me forget that my mother and father ever did anything to cause them shame, foolish as those feelings probably are in the face of what I’m about to do …

  After this task is done, I’ll go down to the kitchen and put the coffee on, and it will be, for a while, just like any other morning.

  Willa

  December 20, 1920–December 26, 1920

  Chapter 1

  Sundown.

  I’ve traveled almost a thousand miles in the past week, yet this fifteen-minute drive between Union Station and Heights Boulevard seems the longest journey of all. There may be nothing at its end except an empty house with a For Sale sign posted out front. And what would the buyer find? A rambling house with fresh paint job, maybe even some furniture for sale inside? An undercroft that once frightened a girl so as she descended into it, she almost tripped over her own feet, scurrying up to the entrance door at the top?

  Lord, it sounds like a haunted house in a mystery story.

  Yet the biggest mystery now is the question of whether I can get it to work this time, whether I can sell myself to Rodney Younger again, whether he’ll believe that I am finally telling the truth, whether he cares what I’m telling anymore.

  He shouldn’t care, of course. By all rights, if he is there in the house and answers my knocking, he ought to slam the door when he sees who is on the porch. And I wouldn’t blame him. I’d be like a puppy who just wet on the carpet and had the paper taken to him, his head hung low because he knew he’d gotten what was coming to him.

  But I would probably knock again, and keep knocking …

  Now see here, Rodney (I would tell him), you’re at least going to hear me out, if I have to stand out here on the porch and shout the whole story to you, and tell all the neighbors in the bargain.

  What would you have done in my place?

  There I am, about to sign away the rest of my life to a man I’m not even sure I love when I happen to find this Godforsaken-looking carpetbag that I’ve an odd feeling I have seen before. And when I look inside and touch the material of the nightgown lying on top, my memory is like an arrow hitting target: within the space of a few moments, I relive the catastrophe which followed my first discovery of the bag, years before, and I know then there must have been some reason why it was so important I not see the bag that first time or ever again.

  I pull out the gown, and discover next a pair of dancing shoes, and finally, as though hidden away all these years just for me, a picture of two people I assume to be my real parents, two entertainment programs, brittle with age, and two addresses written in childish scrawl on a slip of paper, for a boy I never heard of. I know at once to whom the bag belonged, and that I have been the victim of an elaborate charade about my real beginnings, and the long suppressed hope rises in me again: my mother may yet be alive and missing me.

  Now, I ask you again, what would you have done if you were suddenly possessed of at least a set of clues which may lead you to the answers of questions that have consumed you all your life, questions that have time and again been made to seem unreasonable—almost evil—when voiced?

  What if your first acquaintance with the word “prostitute” had been in a snide reference to your real mother?

  You’d have set out for the truth like a hound on a fox hunt, and don’t deny it. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. But it’s what I had to do regardless of wedding plans or anything else, and if you’ve ever loved me you’ll just have to try and understand.

  Please?

  Oh, God, it’s snowing again.

  It hardly ever snows in Houston, but there it is, no denying it, settling on the windows of this taxicab and forcing the driver to slow down, making the arduous journey to 1204 Heights Boulevard still longer. I shall take my handkerchief and wipe the clamminess from my hands, then try to sit back and relax, think of other things besides Rodney Younger …

  Wonder if he�
��s thinking about Rosemarie? Heaven knows, she never did anything to him like what I’ve done. And even if he is kind, patient to a fault, he’ll have his breaking point like everyone else. He might have already decided he’d have been wiser to go on living with her ghost, rather than to become tangled up with me.

  Will he have gotten hold of some more of that horrible bootleg wine, and be sitting before a roaring fire in the Heights house, sipping from a paper cup and thinking of her? Surely he would be there, doing something, rather than be out in his old Ford somewhere, in this weather.

  Of course he may have moved, taken an apartment. But I wasn’t going to let myself …

  His old Ford with the Stewart Starter was a real paradox to the society wedding planned for us by my mother and Velma Crosthwaite, her best friend, and I’ve a feeling Mother had coaxed Dad into a more suitable automobile for us as a wedding present—a Daimler or Duesenberg maybe—being unable to countenance the thought of our leaving Christ Church in an old Ford. It is heated by now, at least, which is more than I can say for it last winter. Rodney always wanted to make a showing in the real estate business before he spent money on a heater for the car. It was a matter of principle with him. Poor practical, sensible man.

  I wonder what they did with all the cake and punch, and flowers, and what they told Velma and Carter Crosthwaite and all their other friends? Perhaps the news showed up on the Social Page of the Houston Post: “Willa Katherine Frazier, daughter of wealthy oilman Bernard P. Frazier and wife Edwynna, has fled on the eve of her wedding. Plans for nuptial ceremony at the Episcopal Christ Church and reception following at the Rice Hotel Grand Ballroom have been canceled by the bewildered parents of the bride.”

  It won’t have been the first time Willa bewildered her parents.

  I can’t remember a time when I felt I pleased them both by just being around. It seems there was never a moment of unqualified joy when the three of us were together, never a time when I did not feel like a poor substitute no matter how many times they assured me they’d picked me to be theirs, and loved me just as much as a child born to them.

  And other people—friends and relatives—seemed always to be reminding me how “lucky” I was to have been adopted by the Fraziers. I’d grow up wanting for nothing, in a world full of limitless opportunities for happiness. I was asked more than once, “Where would you be if the Fraziers had not come along?”

  “I’d give anything to know,” I’d reply, and would be looked at sternly and told, “You’re downright ungrateful, Willa Frazier, that’s what’s the matter with you. You ought to straighten up and count your blessings.”

  What blessings, I wondered? My father stayed away from home working. My mother wouldn’t have me on her lap. Didn’t I know she suffered from a bad back, and spent many of her days wearing a confining corset? I should be more considerate of her feelings. Of course she loved me, why couldn’t I understand? What an absurd question to be always asking anyway. Little girls should go off and play and remember the closet full of beautiful clothes, the expensive toys, the food on the table, the warm bed, and be thankful.

  Well, I was unconvinced they loved me, and thus distrustful when they told me (time and again) the truth was my real parents were dead and they didn’t know anything about them. Somewhere, I thought, there must be somebody who loves me, someone I really belong to.

  As early as I can remember I stopped trying to please the Fraziers. I threw kicking tantrums to get my way, and they usually worked splendidly. By the time I was fourteen I’d begun cigarette smoking on the sly, and in the following three years I was expelled three times from Central High and wrecked my father’s new black Pierce-Arrow. I wonder now how they managed to put up with me. (Could there be such a thing as “un-adopting” a child?)

  What a relief Mother and Dad must have felt when Rodney Younger showed up and fell in love with me. Not that I’d caused much trouble recently—the last time I totally dismayed my mother was two years ago, when I refused to go to Galveston as a debutante at the Artillery Ball, or to come out among the society princesses of Houston either—but I had remained damned independent and aloof toward them right up to the night before the wedding a week ago.

  Yet to think I would actually wind up with someone Dad termed “good stock,” as though Rodney were a cow grazing in a field, and someone even Mother believed had good intentions … well, there’s no doubt their minds were put at ease. It was Mother who always looked crosswise at my suitors, afraid they were after the money. This question never seemed to cross Dad’s mind, although he’s the one who struggled to make us rich. As likely as not, the only reason Mother thought money was the motive for courting her daughter was because her daughter was so uncommonly difficult to get along with. Surely no one could be interested in Willa as a person. She would have shaken her head and said, “Utter nonsense.”

  Poor Mother. Whenever she looks at me, her face works into a mask of resignation. How long has it been this way between us? Forever, surely. Of course, much of this is her fault. She always prided herself on being “modern,” telling me at an early age that I was adopted, assuring me then that she and Dad loved me just as much as if I were their own blood kin—maybe more.

  Not that I wouldn’t have soon guessed I was not really theirs. Mother is small and roundish, with plump face, and Dad is short and fat, with pale skin made especially so by working inside all the time, and a jet black moustache and fringe of hair to match. I am taller than either of them and in no way resemble the Fraziers. I have long feet, hands and fingers, an olive complexion no matter how much sun I get, and light brown, almost auburn hair.

  So there you are. It is not possible I could have been fooled for long into believing I belonged to them. Besides, the one who was theirs was named Sarah, and has been immortalized in a photo with gilded frame which sits upon Mother’s dresser next to her silver comb and brush set Dad gave her as a wedding gift. Julia dusts the frame and cleans the glass weekly, and Number One sits there in white christening dress, the lacy thing which reaches twice the length of her body and drapes across the chair holding her up. She died an infant, and Mother couldn’t have any more, so they got me, and all my life I had assumed this to be the whole story behind their doing so.

  I only wondered why they’d gone to the trouble, since they didn’t seem to want me once I was theirs. One day, when I was eleven or so, I spent a long time looking at that picture in the gilded frame, and when I’d finished I thought I had the answer. Perhaps when I was an infant I resembled Sarah and it made them happy to look at me and remember her. But then, as I began to grow up, I didn’t remind them of her any more so they stopped loving me and wished they’d never gotten me after all, yet it was too late to take me back.

  I realize now they could never have known the torment I suffered growing up, and if it had not been for the fact I happened to find my mother’s carpetbag a week ago, the torment would have gone on and on. I would have proceeded through the wedding, playing the role of happy bride as best I could, all the while having nothing to bring Rodney in marriage except a transfer of the unhappiness I’d doled out to Mother and Dad all my life. He is too good for that, and I knew he was then, yet I could see no other direction to take at the time …

  I met Rodney one rainy day in Clancy’s Sandwich Shoppe, where I often ate lunch because I love roast beef sandwiches and they have the best in town. It was, in fact, because of the roast beef that we met.

  There was only one sandwich left on the rack, and we both reached for it at the same time. Actually, his hand reached it before mine and I knew it, but he was too polite not to offer me the sandwich anyway, and I was too rude not to accept it as though it really should have been mine. We finished filling our trays and looked around for a place to sit.

  The shoppe was packed that day. There were only two chairs left, opposite each other at the end of a long table. We sat down and Rodney politely took my tray and struck up a conversation, which was hard to do above all the lo
ud voices and clatter of silverware and dishes, and the woman sitting an elbow’s length from him who kept blowing her nose.

  He was something of a novelty from the beginning, because I’d never dated a red-haired boy with freckles, and anyway, he was kind of cute and terribly proper, and I had no one else at the time. Right off, sitting there in Clancy’s, I displeased him by pulling out a Camel.

  “Oh, so you smoke,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes, isn’t it wicked?”

  “Don’t your parents mind, or your boyfriend?”

  “I have no boyfriend, and yes, my parents do mind, awfully.”

  “Which makes it all the more fun.”

  I took a puff and blew smoke out to the side. “Exactly.”

  “What else do you like, besides smoking and roast beef?”

  “Oh, several things. I like fast cars … I once went with a guy who had a Stutz Bearcat that would make a hundred easy. He used to let me drive it sometimes. And I like good clothes and hats … and music.”

  “What kind?”

  “All kinds. I have a phonograph at home and a hundred records or so.”

  “You play any instruments?”

  “No, only the phonograph.”

  He laughed. “I see.” He was older than I. Not that he looked it, yet I could tell by the note of indulgence in the laugh. “Your parents musical, too?”

  “Heavens, no. My father has a deaf ear, and Mother is constantly bit—griping because I play the phonograph too loud. Anyway, I’m not really theirs, so it wouldn’t matter what they thought of music. I mean, whether or not it ran in the family.”

  “I see. Any brothers or sisters?”

  “None that I know of. Adopted children don’t always know who they really have.”

  “You’re probably lucky, having a home and two people who’ve taken care of you.”

  “If you mean as opposed to growing up in an orphanage, I guess you’re right. I don’t know sometimes, though. Not that they’re not good to me. It’s just, well … I don’t know. I’ve spent my life wondering who I really am, you know?” I said, and began to wonder why I should be confiding in him.