Storyville by Lois Battle

Author:Lois Battle [Battle, Lois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101640227
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1997-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

XIII

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

Samuel Butler

It was after seven, the light was fading, and Julia, dressed in the claret gown that Charles said flattered her coloring, sat at her dressing table putting the finishing touches on her hair and trying to calm her anxiety because Charles and Lawrence had not come home. Hearing voices on the stairs, she stopped, hands in midair, and listened. Charles was going into his room. Now he must be sitting on his bed and caking off his boots. Now he was going into the bathroom and turning on the faucets.

How humiliating it was to sit, ears cocked, playing the spy in her own room. Though it had been going on less than a week, it already had the force of habit, so if a week, why not a month, or a lifetime? There were couples, Abraham and Alcesta, for example, who continued to live together in hopeless misery. Love and trust were forever gone, like a limb that had been chopped off. Surely it was better to forget about guilt and blame, surely it was better to forgive. But could she will herself to forgive? If she went to him now … Yet she knew it would only be minutes before she lost control. She’d demand to know where he’d been the other night, she’d insist that he sell the District properties, and then they’d be swept into another hurricane of anger and accusation. But this listening to him through the wall was insupportable. She got up abruptly, knocking a book onto the floor, and without bothering to pick it up, left the room. She would wait in the garden until the rest of the family was ready to go to the Dewitts’ for dinner.

Passing through the dining room, she saw Marie carrying a pitcher of hot water into Carlotta’s room. Since Carlotta had arranged the dinner at the Dewitts’, she was obliged to go, but if she was just beginning her sponge bath (she believed that anything more than occasional immersion in a tub was bad for her skin), it would be another forty minutes before she was ready. Julia bit her lip and went to the French doors. Hearing the front door open and close, she moved back into the hallway and saw Lawrence bounding up the stairs. She had assumed that he’d come in with Charles. If he hadn’t been with Charles, where had he been? That question went unasked in the flurry of their tardy departure.

As the servant put down the soup plates, Mrs. Dewitt toyed with one of her ruby earrings and smiled around the table, her glance settling on Julia. “I do hope the meal isn’t entirely ruined.”

“I’m sorry we…” Julia let the apology die. She had already apologized when they’d arrived, though their lateness was none of her doing.

She took a sip of soup but found she couldn’t swallow.

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