“Barely, and not dressed up. At that age they don’t look like anything till they’ve put on their best. Then you can begin to tell how they’ll look when they’re grown. He’s going to be a ladies’ man. Imagine wearing a buttonhole at his age.”
“Why not?”
“No reason why not, but Sterling never would have thought to. George looks fully twenty years old. Sterling looks sixteen.”
“I don’t want him to grow up too fast.”
“You can’t stop it,” she said. “We have all day to ourselves, but we can’t go just anywhere. Would you like to meet a cousin of mine?”
“It’s pretty hard not to, in Philadelphia.”
“This one is very unusual. An odd bird called Alice Sterling. She has a salon. She’s getting along in years, but she’s still one of the most interesting women I know. She likes me because I’m almost as independent as she is.”
“I’ve heard of her. She’s the queen bee of a bunch of artists and bohemians, isn’t she? I don’t want to meet her.”
“Very well, you won’t have to, but take me to her house, please. That’s my headquarters for the day. You’re coming out tonight, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Well, take me to Alice’s now. I have some things to talk about that I don’t want to put off.”
They took a hansom to Alice Sterling’s house near Rittenhouse Square. The sitting-room in this house that seemed so dark from the outside was made bright by the floor-to-ceiling windows, washed to a sparkle, and by dozens of small objects—statuettes, figurines, china, pictures and frames—that picked up the light and relayed it from one shiny thing to another. “A cheerful room,” said Abraham Lockwood.
“She needs it. She’s an unhappy woman.”
“Where is she now?”
“In her room. She stays in bed all morning. The rest of the day she just steadily imbibes her whiskey, sip by sip.”
“Why is she unhappy?”
“Too long a story. I’ll go up and say hello to her and be right down. You don’t want to stay for lunch? We can have it alone. She won’t be coming down.”
“No, I have a lot of things to attend to.”
She was back in five minutes. “My cousin wants to know if you ever knew someone named Robert Millhouser, lives in your part of the world.”
“It’s a Lyons name. Nesquehela County. No, I don’t know the party.”
“Just as well. She didn’t try to hide her distaste for Mr. Millhouser. Sit down, my dear, and don’t kiss me. This is a sinful house, but not our kind. Here women kiss women and men kiss men.”
“Do you know, I remember hearing that a long time ago. And this is such a cheerful room. Do you know where I heard it? In Washington, when I was a young army officer. That was one of the first times I heard of Mrs. Sterling. Is she your cousin, or her husband?”
“She’s a double cousin, by blood and by marriage to another cousin.”
“It won’t be long before brothers and sisters marry in this town.”
She laughed. “I don’t know if they’ll ever marry, but that explains why some of them never marry anyone else. Please sit down now and let’s have our talk.”
“Very well.”
“We’ve avoided this, but I can’t put it off any longer. Are you going to settle some money on me? Is that what you intend to do, or are you planning to give it to me quarterly? I really have to know.”
“I didn’t realize you were in difficulty. How much do you want?”
“That isn’t answering my question, and I know you must have thought about it.”
“I’d rather do it quarterly.”
“How much can I count on?”
“Well—fifteen hundred a quarter? That’s five hundred a month.”
“Five hundred a month? Is that everything?”
“Don’t you think that’s a lot of money?”
“No. I wouldn’t think so if it was over and above the upkeep of my house, the servants. Five hundred a month, my dear! I have children to educate, all sorts of expenses to meet. I could do it on a thousand a month.”
“I thought you had a buyer for your house.”
“I have, but that money doesn’t come from you.”
“Oddly enough, I consider that it does,” he said. “But I won’t go into that now.”
“Do go into it,” she said. “Let’s be brutally frank.”
“Well, I might have been able to take the house away from you. It was bought with money stolen from me.”
“You know better than that. I’ve owned the house for years. How could you ever prove it was bought with your money?”
“I think it could be done, but since I don’t intend to try, the question needn’t come up.”
“But it has come up.” She paused. “I see. You consider the house a sort of a settlement. Well, I don’t. Harry gave me the house, but on the other hand, I turned my money over to him to invest. Your claim would surely never take precedence over mine.”
“It’s a point of law that neither of us know much about. My impression is that if Harry had lived he’d have had to make restitution, and that if I could show that he had transferred title to you after he’d committed a crime, the transfer wouldn’t be valid in court. But there’s a question of ethics that should concern you.”
“Ethics? What about your ethics toward your mistress? Whatever’s gone before, my dear, I’m your mistress.”
“Yes, but you could end that any time you felt like it.”
“I can, and now I do. I warned you, my dear. I asked you if you could afford me. I said to you, in these exact words: ‘Locky, are you that rich?’ And you said you weren’t going to court me with greenbacks. Woo me, I think you said. And you said you couldn’t buy what you wanted from me. What did you mean by that? I was never certain.”
“I don’t know.”
“I took it as a great compliment.”
“That was how I meant it.”
“Then what has changed? Your greenbacks couldn’t woo me, but did you expect to have me as your mistress for nothing? What was your idea of a mistress? A woman that you hid away somewhere and went to bed with when you wanted to? There are those. Harry had one. But who will ever know how much money he spent on her? A lot more than five hundred a month. If I had your money and you were my fancy man, I’d give you more than five hundred a month. Oh, it’s a good thing we had this conversation now.”
“Yes, it is. I thought we loved each other.”
“Of course we do, Locky my dear. And I thought I would never give myself to another man. But you’re so frugal. Just because I’m a lady is no reason why I must live in Manayunk and do my own housework, send my children to the public schools. You don’t seem to understand any of this. I didn’t even marry Harry for love-in-a-cottage, you know, and I’m much too old and wise for that now. I’d rather give pleasure to some old man, and I know a few. Can’t you give me a million dollars?”
“No.”
“Oh, I thought you could. I always thought you could. I was so happy that day, that first time. A man who could make me want to give myself to him, and who was going to make me safe and secure. You misled me, Locky—but I forgive you. Fortunately I’m at an age when no one man can ruin my life, at least not because we’ve shared certain pleasures. I’ve always had a great curiosity about men, and they’ve always been attracted to me. Yes, it was a very good thing we had this conversation.”
“You must be careful.”
“Why?”
“Well, your curiosity. It could get you into trouble.”
“My dear, I’m in mourning.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“A widow can see as many men as she pleases, until she starts seeing one too often. That’s when the gossip starts . . . Oh, my friend is back from his trip around the world. I had a note from him.”