Page 11 of A Mind of Her Own
The biggest news item of 1920 was the announcement in January of Prohibition, banning the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. It created a whole new culture overnight of the pursuit of illegal booze. Prices skyrocketed. Whole networks were created for the clandestine sale of alcohol. Speakeasies sprang up and became glamorous spots to eat, drink, and dance. The Mafia families created a new underworld that brought them a fortune. If anything, people bought and drank more alcohol than ever before.
Oliver wasn’t quite as elusive after he saw Alex in December as he had been when she had left in August. He didn’t call her often, but he called her every few weeks or sent her a telegram, which he preferred. Neither of their phone situations was ideal, since she had to use the common one in the dorm, and he had to call from a room full of reporters who heard every word he said. In a telegram, he could tell her that he missed her, and couldn’t wait to see her in June. But he made no effort to see her before that. He was reinforcing his walls so he could resume their chaste friendship in the summer. Saying that he missed her was a major admission from him, which touched her. And he hadn’t completely shut down again. She had gotten under his skin again in December, and reawakened his feelings for her, although he didn’t admit it to her, and was still waging war with himself to maintain the distance he needed to feel safe with her.
The time passed quickly with her schoolwork, and she signed up for an accelerated program to begin in September. Starting in the fall, after her internship in New York, she would attend classes for a solid year, without a summer vacation, and she would get her diploma the following fall, and cut the time it took to get it by eight months. It sounded ideal to her.
She had her internship all lined up for that summer, working in the Society office again, with Sylvia as her boss. She promised to give Alex more responsibility and better projects and Alex was looking forward to it. All the same people were working there. It felt like home. And she was getting course credit for the two internships to help her get her diploma faster too. They gave credit to the male students for their internships, and Alex had requested it too. It would be the first time that they had offered the same privilege to a female student. She had negotiated that for herself with the literature professor who liked her, and he could see her point when she asked for what was easily accessible to her male counterparts.
Oliver was filling his time well too. He was working on the novel that had been his dream for years. He worked on it at night, and on his days off. He spent every spare hour on his book, and promised to let Alex read what he had when she got back to New York.
She spent three weeks in June in Beardstown, at the Courier. She had meetings with Josiah Webster, so he could explain some improvements he’d made. He was staying abreast of the times, and prided himself on being as modern and efficient as any paper in New York and Chicago. They had won another prize, which would have delighted her grandfather. Paul Peterson had loved his newspaper so much that Josiah and Alex felt it a duty to keep it running the way he would have wanted. He had been far ahead of his time, and Josiah was keeping the Courier that way, to honor his old friend.
—
Oliver was working when Alex arrived in New York. She brought fewer bags and only one trunk, and got to the hotel in the morning. Oliver called her at the hotel after covering a lengthy court appearance of the Bonanno family, over the speakeasies they were running with enormous profits. There had been a shooting at one of them recently and three members of the family had to appear before the grand jury. Oliver knew all of them, and they greeted him like a friend when they saw him in court. The family maintained good relations with members of the press. It was only within the four rival families that violence erupted regularly and bodies in gunny sacks, with blocks of cement tied to them, would turn up in the East and Hudson rivers shortly after. The Bonannos were being charged with violations of the Prohibition laws, not murder this time. They almost always managed to get their family members exonerated and released. They had more attorneys on their payroll than the newspaper did, but they needed them more. They paid off the police at the highest level, as well as all the politicians they could seduce. It was a corrupt world with rich profits that they reaped.
Oliver called Alex from the Martha Washington’s lobby afterward and she flew down the stairs to meet him. She hadn’t seen him in six months, since December, and she had turned twenty in the meantime. She still seemed like a little girl to him, and he picked her up and spun her around in the lobby, and they went for a long walk over to the East River and sat down on a bench to talk.
She was so happy to see him, she was beaming. She was wearing a pink gingham summer dress, which made her look even younger. He was wearing a suit and tie from work, and looked very handsome and grown-up, sitting next to her on the bench with an arm around her shoulders, enjoying a breeze from the river. She was prettier than ever. Sam and Tommy still referred to her as the Princess.
“How’s the book coming?” she asked him.
“Slowly,” he said with a sigh. “I keep running into roadblocks with the plot. I don’t know why I thought a crime novel was a good idea.”
“Because it’s what you know and what you love,” she said sensibly. It made perfect sense to her. “You can do whatever you want to do,” she said, quoting her grandfather, and Oliver smiled.
“Maybe that’s why I love you. You always make me feel as though I can do anything. When I’m working on the book, I’m not so sure.”
“It’ll come.” When she said it, he believed her. Her faith in him was tangible and gave him wings.
They never talked about their future. Alex lived in the present, which suited him. It was the future he was afraid of and didn’t trust, based on the past. And Alex was more certain of his future than her own. He believed in her too.
They had dinner at a Chinese restaurant that night, to celebrate her return. She loved being back in New York, although she had come to love Chicago too. It was a small, sophisticated city, with lots of cultural opportunities, beautiful museums, great restaurants, and excellent academic institutions. She wanted Oliver to come and visit her there, but he always said he was too busy, especially now with the book. And the newspaper was full of the increased activities of the five major Mafia families in New York. Prohibition was making them even richer than they already were. They had beautiful estates on Long Island and in New Jersey, and the wives were well dressed and looked more respectable than some of the socialites in the city.
Alex and Oliver walked back to her hotel after dinner, and she loved seeing him again, and being able to talk to him anytime and see him every day.
Alex rapidly discovered that their relationship was no longer a secret when she went back to work the next day. There had been whispers before, and rumors among the Crime team, but now it was common knowledge that Oliver was seeing her. He didn’t seem to mind, which was new.
“Should I be planning a layout for a wedding?” Sylvia asked her when she saw Alex in her office, and she blushed and shook her head.
“It’s not that serious, and Oliver doesn’t believe in marriage, for himself.”
“Where does that leave you?” Sylvia looked concerned, although she’d never married and had had the same married lover for twenty-four years. His wife knew and didn’t care—his wife just didn’t want the embarrassment and inconvenience of a divorce. And Sylvia had accepted it long since. Sylvia took vacations with him, and he spent two nights a week with her. They had a routine that worked for them, but she would have preferred to be a wife and not the mistress.
“It leaves me happy and free,” Alex said, smiling.
“At your age, you should have a wedding ring and babies,” Sylvia said seriously. She had grown very fond of Alex when she worked for her before.
“I don’t need that now,” Alex said. “I’m only twenty, and I’ve never wanted babies. The world is such an uncertain place, I’m not sure I want to bring a child into it.” She had lived through a war not so long ago, and a pandemic, and was still marked by them. The world still seemed like a dangerous place to her. She was only just beginning to feel safe again, especially when she was with Oliver. “I don’t want to spoil what we have,” she said to her boss. Their relationship was easy and light, although Oliver still had his dark moments, and didn’t like to talk about it, but she could sense when he was troubled and turned inward. She was certain it was because of his mother’s death when he was twelve. She had her own burdens to carry, and her own ghosts from the past. They had that in common. And marriage frightened both of them, and she felt too young to marry.
The time Alex and Oliver shared during her second summer internship brought them even closer than before. They could talk about any subject, enjoyed doing the same things. They loved exploring old junk shops to find treasures, going to art shows, wandering in museums. They both liked to read for hours when he wasn’t working. And he let her read the first five chapters of his novel, which was all he had so far, and she thought it was brilliant. He shone like a star when she said it to him. He had faith in her judgment, and her taste in literature was eclectic and profound.
“When are you going to start yours?” he asked her from time to time, just to remind her.
“I don’t know. When I’m ready…maybe never. I can’t get anything on paper whenever I try. I have some ideas, but they’re stuck inside me and I can’t get them out.”
“They’ll come out eventually, if you let them,” he said gently.
“I’m not sure I can write a book. Maybe all I can do are short stories and my journal. And copy describing weddings.” He smiled at that. Sylvia had given her bigger projects this time, but Alex still thought that their society coverage was meaningless, superficial work, and Oliver agreed with her. She was capable of so much more.
“Remember what your grandfather said. You can do anything you want. Maybe you’ll write a book about a bride.” She threw an apricot at him when he said it, and he opened it and shared it with her.
“We have wonderful fruit in my grandfather’s orchards,” she said nostalgically, suddenly thinking of Beardstown in the summer and how lush everything was. “Do you think you’ll ever come to see it?” It was her fondest wish, but she knew it was unlikely to happen, and Oliver wouldn’t come.
“I’d like to,” he said gently, knowing what it meant to her. But to him, visiting her home seemed like a deep symbolic commitment, even if her family wasn’t there. It was also why he had never pressed for a physical relationship with her. Because he wasn’t willing to marry her if they did and he was an honorable man and respected her. And he knew that if they had sex, she’d be even more attached to him, and expect even more of him, and he couldn’t live up to it. He was surprised that she still had her grandfather’s house to go to, and that they hadn’t sold it when he died. He never questioned her about it. And he knew she still visited the paper where he had worked whenever she was in town. There were still parts of their histories that they kept to themselves.
“Will you come to Chicago this winter?” she asked him, two weeks before she was scheduled to go back. She never pressed him about it, or marriage. He knew she wasn’t anxious for it either. She wanted to complete her education first, and have a career. But he could sense that she wanted some kind of commitment from him. He knew he couldn’t give it to her and wasn’t sure he ever could. He knew what was stopping him, but he had never said it to her.
They were walking down a beach the following weekend, and they sat on the sand side-by-side, looking out to sea.
“I used to think there were mermaids in the sea,” she said, snuggling next to him, and he smiled. “My mother said there were and I believed her. She was so beautiful.” There were tears in her eyes when he glanced at her, and he pulled her closer. He wanted to protect her from anything that could hurt her, but he couldn’t change the past, just as she couldn’t change his for him or the scars it had left. They were sitting there quietly with no one else around, far down the beach, when he turned to her and surprised her.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Oliver said to her, and she had never seen him look as serious. It frightened her for a moment.
“You’re married, and have a wife and ten children?” She tried to lighten the moment and he shook his head.
“I told you that I’ve never been in love, and that’s true. I’ve never loved anyone as I love you. But I was in love once when I was very young. We were children really. She was seventeen and I was nineteen. We had in common that her father had abandoned her and her mother too. Her father ran off with some young girl. Peggy wasn’t a happy person. She didn’t get along with her mother. And we didn’t get along the way you and I do. She wanted us to run away and get married. I was in college. We had no money. She had a job in the coffee shop where her mother was a waitress. I met her while I was in college, and I wanted to finish school and make something of myself. I told her I couldn’t get married yet. It meant everything to her. We fought a lot over it. I knew I wasn’t ready. She wanted a baby right away too, which scared me even more. She didn’t have a family, so she wanted to make one of her own, and not wait.
“I would have lost my scholarship if I got married. I guess it was selfish of me. I put my needs first, but I knew we could never make a decent life if I gave up college and married and had babies with her, working as a waiter or a gas station attendant. It would have been a disaster.” That was obvious to Alex too as he told her the story. “She gave me an ultimatum—run away to Maryland with her and get married, or leave. So I left. Her mother was away for a few days, and she was alone in their apartment. They slept in one bed, it was so small, and I would have had to live with them if we got married. We couldn’t have afforded our own place. We fought about it on Saturday morning, and I felt guilty on Sunday. I went back to tell her I’d give up school and we could get married. I thought if she loved me that much, I owed it to her.” There were tears rolling down his cheeks as he told her, and Alex listened closely while he did, and held his hand. “When I went back, the door was unlocked and I found her. Peggy had committed suicide. She hanged herself.” Alex felt sick as he told her, thinking of what he must have felt like. “She didn’t leave a note. She didn’t have to. It was my fault because I wouldn’t marry her.
“I probably should have ended it with her then, but she was so sweet and young and pretty, although so sad and desperate inside. Her mother never blamed me. She had tried it once, before I knew her.” He turned to look at Alex then with a ravaged look. “Do you realize, I’ve killed two women in my life. I couldn’t save my mother under the ice, and I caused Peggy to commit suicide because I wouldn’t marry her. I’ve never loved anyone since and I’m not sure I loved her, not enough to marry her. I’ve never made a commitment to anyone since, and I probably never will. I never want to drive someone to that point, or disappoint them, or be unable to give them what they need from me. I can’t do that to anyone again. It’s why I’ve never talked to you about the future. What if I promise to marry you and then I can’t, or don’t want to, and something like that happens again?” She could still see easily how traumatized he was by both deaths, and how guilty he felt. He was convinced that he had killed them. Alex put her hands gently on his face and looked into his eyes.
“Ollie, please listen to me. You were a child—there was no way you could pull your mother up through the ice, her clothes were full of water and made her even heavier. I saw something like that happen once in Switzerland. It took three men to pull a woman out. No twelve-year-old boy could do it. And you didn’t kill Peggy. There was something wrong in her—you said she’d tried to do it before. She wanted someone else to fix her, and to give her what she didn’t have within herself. You can’t do that for anyone. You couldn’t just give up your whole life for her, and she shouldn’t have wanted you to. Some part of her was sick. You couldn’t have fixed her.” He nodded as she said it but he didn’t look sure. All he could remember was Peggy’s face when he found her hanging from a rafter. “And I understand how you feel now,” she said, desperately sad for him and the weight he was carrying, “but it wasn’t your fault.” What she said had the ring of truth and he almost believed her.
“You never ask me for anything, or any kind of commitment,” he said quietly, “but I know you want that from me, and I’m too afraid. What if I kill you too?”
“You’re not going to kill me, Ollie. You can’t unless you take a gun out and shoot me. I’m afraid of a commitment too, because if you commit yourself to me, what if it kills you ? Everyone I’ve ever loved has died. All of them. My parents, my grandparents. I had a crush on a boy when I was sixteen. He got drafted when he turned eighteen and he was killed in the war. I barely even loved him, and he died too. He was a sweet boy. I’m afraid that if you make a commitment to me, or marry me, you’ll die too and I couldn’t bear it. I’d rather stay like this forever than lose you too.” She was crying then too, and he held her tight in his arms and kissed her face drenched in tears. It felt good to be honest with each other, but their memories and their fears were so painful and such heavy burdens for both of them. They were evenly matched.
“I’m not going to die because I marry you, Alex. I won’t die because you love me. We’ve been through a war and a pandemic—millions of people died. You just had the bad luck that the people you loved were among them. That’s chance, it’s not your destiny. And maybe that’s true for me too. Will you believe me?” he asked her seriously.
“No,” she said through her tears, and he smiled. “You’re probably lying to me just to make me feel better.”
“I will not die just because we love each other,” he repeated. “I swear.”
“And there’s something I haven’t told you. It’s the only secret I have from you, and I don’t want to have any. My grandfather didn’t work for a newspaper,” she said, and he looked surprised.
“But I’ve read his editorials. Who wrote them?”
“He did. But he owned the newspaper, he didn’t work there. He loved it as much as any child. He left it to me when he died, with good people to run it, so I don’t have to be there. But maybe I’ll want to run it one day myself. I haven’t decided that yet. But I own a newspaper. I’m not an heiress or a debutante. And I’m not rich. But I have some money that he left me too. And a newspaper, and a nice house and a property. I was afraid you wouldn’t like me anymore if I told you, or you’d think I was showing off.” He looked at her in amazement.
“Why would you think that?”
“You were grumpy about rich people when I met you,” she said, and he laughed.
“I’m grumpy about lazy debutantes who don’t get an education, and just want to get married. But that’s not you. You study hard, you work hard, and if you run your grandfather’s newspaper one day, I’m sure it will be amazing. Actually, I want to see it,” he said, suddenly intrigued by everything she hadn’t told him, and she looked enormously relieved.
“So we don’t have to ever get married, and you’ll live forever, and I’ll run the newspaper?” she asked in her childlike way, and he kissed her.
“That is not what I said. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll force you to marry me, and we can run the newspaper together, between books.” She considered what he’d said and looked intrigued by it.
“That might not be so bad,” she said with a grin.
“Let’s just relax and not worry about it for now,” he said, serious again. “Let’s see what happens. I won’t kill you, and I won’t die because you love me, and we don’t need to make any decisions. Let’s enjoy ourselves for a while, and see where it goes. How does that sound?” he asked her, and she was so young she had years to figure it out.
“It sounds pretty good to me,” she said, and he held her in his arms, and then they walked down the beach together, feeling lighthearted and unburdened. He had finally set his ghosts free, and she had told him about the newspaper and her worst fears about his reaction to that. The future was looking much better than it had before. They had let their secrets go. They were free now. They ran through the surf and she splashed him, and they ran back hand in hand to where they’d left the car, and drove back to the city, free of their guilt and burdens. They had no secrets anymore.