Page 13 of The Harvey Girls

Eight

Four days passed. Maybe he hadn’t figured it out after all.

Charlotte had tried to leave Simeon several times, and he’d always done a rather miraculous job of convincing her to stay. He was like one of those magicians in the vaudeville shows, waving his charm and compliments around like a magic wand, and poof , her resolve would disappear into thin air.

But as his despair over his work prospects, involvement with radicals, and drinking worsened, the apologies and promises to love her as she deserved to be loved had disappeared. In their place rose threats of more violence—the ultimate violence, in fact, if she left.

It had been the black eye that had finally convinced her.

He’d never hit her in the face before. Breasts, stomach, back, head, yes, but not the face.

She couldn’t go to work looking like that.

And if she couldn’t make money, and he drank up all the money he made, they’d be out in the street.

What would keep him from killing her then?

She’d be dead one way or another, and it was certainly better to die free than in the cage he had so carefully built for her.

Maybe he’d found someone else to torment. She dearly hoped so, while also feeling terrible for any poor girl who might have fallen under the spell of his poetic sorcery. She’d only been gone for three weeks. Could his charm work that fast?

Maybe he was dead. Fallen down a set of stairs in a drunken stupor, stepped out in front of a trolley car, contracted measles or smallpox or that terrible flu that had killed so many people back in 1918.

Of course, it would have been better if the flu had carried him off then, before she’d ever met him.

But she would settle for it taking him now.

As disturbing as it was to know he was out there, having practically been given a map as to where she was, there was also something surprisingly calming about having told someone.

The terrible truth of her marriage had been hers alone to carry for almost two years now.

Then suddenly she’d allowed a fifteen-year-old girl—of all people!

—into the darkest corner of her life, and felt some strange relief.

Billie never said another word about it, asked no questions, offered no opinions.

Nor had she seemed to pass any kind of judgment.

Charlotte had assumed that anyone who learned such a damning secret would shun her.

To the contrary, Billie stayed close. If Charlotte served a man eating alone, it was all she could do not to trip over the girl.

“I’m all right, you know,” she told Billie. “You don’t have to keep an eye on me.”

The girl had said simply, “You don’t have sisters, do you?”

On Friday, just as the dinner crowd commenced its mass exodus toward the train, a man walked in and spoke to Mr. Gilstead, who showed him to one of Charlotte’s tables in the dining room.

At first she didn’t recognize him—or rather, she didn’t look particularly closely, intent as she generally was at getting on with the business of order taking.

“Good evening,” she said. “How may I help you?”

“Hello, Charlotte.”

Her eyes flicked to meet the gentleman’s gaze.

No. Please, no .

Without thinking, she raised her hands to her chest, in position to protect her face if he attacked her. “Not my face!” she’d begged when he’d raised his fist to give her that shiner. “Please, I can’t—” work if you hit my face , she’d meant to say, but he’d already cracked her across the cheekbone.

“You’re looking well,” he said now, without a hint of sarcasm. Surprising, given that she was wearing this ridiculous outfit and he was, well, Simeon. His freshly shaved cheeks looked thinner than she remembered, and his hair was cut short and combed.

Her pulse pounded in her throat. “What do you want?” she managed to murmur.

“I don’t want anything from you,” he said softly. “I’ve taken enough already.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Just to apologize. And to thank you for teaching me a lesson. One I certainly needed to learn.”

The kind words, the gentle delivery. It was the old Simeon, the man she’d loved with such desperation that she’d given up everything—inheritance, social status, home, and family.

“You’ve cut your hair,” she said stupidly, because nothing else came to mind amid the crashing waves of fear and longing.

He smiled. “The anarchist look wasn’t for me. Nor the drinking.”

“You’ve stopped drinking?”

“From the moment I came home and found you gone. Turns out it was a sound financial decision as well.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I was able to buy this suit so I could present a fresh version of myself.”

Something about that phrase, a fresh version of myself , struck a minor chord to her highly attuned ear.

Why would he need to present anything at all if he wanted only to apologize?

But she knew better than to question his motives; that would only set him off, and she couldn’t afford a scene.

She would accept his apology and serve him some lunch.

With any luck, that would satisfy him, and he’d be on his way.

“Please order something,” she said, keeping her tone even.

“I didn’t come here to eat, I just wanted to see you.”

“Yes, but if you don’t eat, it will appear as if you only mean to talk to me, and that’s not allowed.”

“By whom?”

“By my boss. I can’t lose my job, Simeon.” Why was he purposely being obtuse? “I know you probably don’t approve of my being a waitress, but I didn’t have many choices left.”

His eyes gleamed in a way that could be either amorous or furious, and she instinctively took a step back from the table.

“Not only do I approve, but I admire you. You truly understand the plight of the working class now. The grueling hours, unsafe conditions, low pay, disregard of those above you…”

Charlotte felt an unexpected defensiveness rise up. “This is no sweatshop. Look around. It’s clean and orderly. I’m paid well and treated well as long as I do as I was contracted to do, which is to serve customers with courtesy and efficiency. So will you please order something?”

He wanted only soup, which she brought him, and he ate slowly so as to have more time to reminisce—about his first sight of her at Wellesley, how adorably serious she was, how smart and purposeful, unlike most of her dithering, husband-hunting schoolmates.

How brave she was to agree to meet him at the Boston Public Library, far from the college.

His gratitude that such a lovely, deeply curious woman would risk her reputation to sneak off and spend time with him.

He was like a songbird, carefully crafting and performing the precise tune that would woo his chosen mate.

And little by little… wooed she was. She had fallen deeply in love in those heady times, laced as they were with the added excitement of a clandestine affair. Could it be like that again?

“Is that him?” Billie hissed, once she’d seen them talking for longer than Charlotte had talked to any customer, ever.

Charlotte felt an urge to lie. It almost wasn’t a lie. This wasn’t the husband she’d run from, the one who’d turned her life into hell’s picture book. This was the one she’d married.

“Yes, but he’s… he’s not… he seems fine now. And anyway, he just wants to talk.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

As she served other patrons, always returning to him and his slowly ebbing soup, she realized that the history of their relationship was like an impossibly complicated math problem.

How had Simeon, her Simeon, become a raging animal?

And how had she, Charlotte, a young woman with a good head on her shoulders, who’d been raised to think herself better than most, become his prey?

How had A become B, and C become D? Every logical calculation she’d ever applied to the problem had failed to solve it.

But now she saw that perhaps it needn’t be solved at all. Perhaps it could simply be reversed.