Legacy of Secrets (51 page)

The Shakespeare tour was a huge success, elevating Ned to the stature of serious actor instead of just the good-looking light comedy player producers had cast him as previously. After a triumphant opening on Broadway they had become a hot ticket, even at three dollars a performance, an unheard-of amount at the time. And they played to full houses until the theater closed for the summer.

Lucky moved into the new apartment Ned bought and gave up her own acting ambitions to play the role of his mistress. She was shy but everyone around Broadway knew her, and knew she was Ned’s mistress. He had not asked her to marry him, though he half expected he would at some point in the future; but whenever he was tempted, he always told himself, “Not now, you might find Lily again one day.”

He had often met Lily’s son, a dark-haired sullen lad who did not look anything like her and who never put himself out to be nice to anyone. But he had never found Lily, even though he had employed a private detective for over a year after she first left. Lily had disappeared without a trace; she had been gone eight years and the only contact with her now was a bank draft his mother received every year, for one thousand dollars to pay for the boy. It was mailed from a different city every time, from places as far apart as St. Louis and Chicago.

He and Lucky had been living together for four years now and tonight he had another big opening in a brand-new play. The tryouts on the road had not been without
trouble. The leading lady had quit and been replaced only a week ago by a temperamental and fiery unknown, Juliet Scott, and Ned was wondering gloomily whether his luck had run out, as he made his way to the final dress rehearsal. For the first time in his life he was not looking forward to an opening night, and no matter what Harrison said, a feeling of foreboding clouded his entire day.

E
VEN THOUGH IT FELT LIKE SPRING,
with fat furry buds on the chestnut trees and the scent of lilacs in the air, Lily Adams wore her golden sable coat when she took her afternoon carriage ride around the charming streets of Back Bay and Beacon Hill. Her expensive barouche was lacquered her favorite shade of violet and upholstered in pale gray suede, and her coachman wore the same silvery gray, matching the pair of beautiful high-stepping carriage horses.

Lily went for the same drive every afternoon, rain, snow, or shine. Each afternoon before she left she tucked a fresh posy of violets behind her horses’ ears, and into her coachman’s hat, and she wore the same flowers pinned to her furs with a diamond crescent moon. They would drive for an hour past all the great Boston houses where she was never invited. A charming little half smile lit her face, but her blue eyes blazed with unquenchable anger as she glanced from left to right, looking for all the world as if she were a woman on her way to keep an appointment, when the truth was she had nowhere at all to go.

The fall and winter months were the hardest, when her husband was busy with his lectures and his meetings with his colleagues. Even when he was home, he was always immersed in his books. Occasionally he would invite visiting foreign academics to dinner. They did not know that Lily was “socially unacceptable,” and for an evening she would play the gracious young hostess, wearing an expensive gown and good jewels. But there were never any other women at the party and afterward she would leave them in the library with their port and cigars and the stimulating conversation she would so loved to have shared.

Every winter she almost went crazy from boredom. Gloom would settle over her in October and it would not lift until June, when they would leave to spend the whole summer in Europe.

She had been in Boston eight years and she had been Mrs. John Porter Adams for six, and each year had been lonelier than the last. She was married to a cultured man, preoccupied with his own affairs, who assumed she enjoyed her own company the way he did, and that she was perfectly happy sitting by the winter hearth, leafing restlessly through a book or embroidering yet another tapestry cushion for the dining room, exactly the way her own mother used to.
Only her mother and Pa had been in love.

During those long winters she lived for the letters from her sister, and she wrote reams back to her, carefully describing a life filled with entertaining and gaiety, friends and acquaintances. It was a life that did not exist. The only truths in her letters to Ciel were that she was married to a rich, kind, older man; that they had a fine house in the smartest area of Boston and that she was related by marriage to some of the country’s best old families. “Though of course, dear Ciel,” she wrote snobbishly, “what the Americans mean by ‘old’ is not the way we understand the word. They are speaking of three or four generations and we are speaking of several hundred years.” But she did not write that the good old families did not speak to her.

Each time they went to Europe she schemed and plotted how she might meet her sister, but so far without success. They always went to Italy and France, but Ciel would have already been whisked back to Ardnavarna for the summer and Lord Molyneux never allowed her to go anywhere else.

During those Italian summers Lily was a different woman. Youth bloomed again under the warm Tuscan sunshine; she drank young red wine and ate rich green olives and tomatoes picked from the fields, and bread cooked in a big oven by the village baker and fished out on a long wooden spade. She wore low-necked blouses and thin cotton skirts, tucking them up even shorter when she climbed
the green, thyme-covered hills. She walked barefoot, with her long hair streaming free, on cool marble terraces of fourteenth-century villas, and glided in a gondola under fairy-tale bridges on Venetian canals. She bathed in the cool green waters of Lake Garda and Lake Como, and sipped little cups of bitter coffee alone on awninged cafe terraces, looking coolly beautiful in simple white voile with a big shady straw hat trimmed, as usual, with her favorite violets. But she was always the outsider, longingly watching the passing parade.

On those summer trips to Europe, she became a girl again while her nice husband seemed to grow even older. He became more withdrawn, caught up in his search for rare first editions and manuscripts, while she was in search of life. Blood pulsed through her veins like the red wine of Italy itself and though she was too frightened even to flirt, every now and then her eyes would linger speculatively on some olive-skinned handsome young man, wondering who he was, what he would say if she spoke to him, what he would do if she said, “I’m lonely. Help me.”

Her husband was not a passionate man and Lily told herself she must be grateful for that, but she was young, only twenty-six. She was beautiful and men admired her, the way they always had done. And she so wanted to be
loved.

But, of course, she never spoke to the handsome young Italians, and October found her back in Boston. Once again she took her afternoon carriage rides trying to show society she did not care what they thought. And at night she lay awake, thinking endlessly of the mistakes that had brought her to this gilded prison. As dawn peeked through her window curtains she finally slept, and she always dreamed of Ardnavarna. It was the same old familiar dream, in which she was the adored, petted little princess at the center of her loving family, with her ponies and her dogs and her rides on the strand with Finn O’Keeffe. And only in her dreams was she happy again.

It was during the second year of her marriage that a
young woman had applied to her household for position as a general maid. Lily did not employ a housekeeper; she knew perfectly well how to run her own household and she interviewed the job applicant herself.

The woman had been waiting in the servants’ quarters next to the kitchen, standing nervously in a corner nearest the door as though she expected to be booted out for having the nerve to set her shabby foot in such a grand house. Her apron was clean enough, but her threadbare dress was worn to the drab no-color gray of poverty, and the thin woolen shawl she had tied around her shoulders was held together by a cobweb of careful stitching. Lily knew it would do nothing to keep out the cold and even though the woman’s boots were carefully shined, she would bet there were holes in them. Her heart melted with pity and she knew she would give her the job, even though she didn’t look strong enough to lift a heavy zinc pail filled with water.

“I’m strong, missus, and a hard worker,” the woman said anxiously, reading her thoughts. She had not expected to speak to the lady of the house. No one ever did, they always saw the housekeeper, and she kept her eyes down, staring at the toes of her worn boots.

“I understand you do not wish to live in,” Lily said gently. “Why is that?”

“I’ve seven kids to look after, missus.”

“And do you have a husband?”

“I have a husband all right.
And
he has a job. Twelve dollars a week he brings home, but it doesn’t go far with seven mouths to feed. The eldest is only ten, and he’s a newspaper boy. He doesn’t have one of the best corners though, and he only makes a couple of dollars a week. Still, he tries hard.” She added bitterly, “Of course, you wouldn’t understand such things, missus.”

She glanced up at Lily and her eyes opened wide. She took a step closer, staring at her open-mouthed. “I don’t believe it,” she exclaimed. “It’s her. Yerself. The one that saved me husband on the
Hibernia”
Sinking to her knees,
she clutched at the hem of Lily’s dress and kissed it gratefully, as though she were the pope himself. “I thought you were dead,” she cried. “I was with ye at the Sheridans’. Mary O’Dwyer’s me name. ‘She won’t last the night,’ they told us when they shipped us off to Boston. And I knew that I would never have the chance to say thank you for what you did. But I lit a candle for your soul, missus, in St. Stephen’s. And I’ve kept you in my prayers ever since. And now there’s been a miracle.”

Lily stared at her, horrified. She thought at first she must know about the baby, but she quickly realized the woman could not have known that she was pregnant. No one had known, not even the Sheridans until she had told them herself. She breathed a sigh of relief. There was no danger of John finding out. But she remembered her own struggle to survive, and asking for a job just the way this woman was now, and her heart was touched.

“I don’t want you to be my kitchen maid,” she said. The woman looked disappointed and scrambled to her feet. Red-faced and clinging to her dignity, she said, “I’m sorry, missus, maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did. I didn’t mean to be impudent, I just wanted to thank you.”

“Instead, I want you to be my personal maid,” Lily said. “You will look after my suite of rooms. You will take care of my clothes and you will accompany me when I go out shopping. I shall provide a uniform and because of your special position and the fact that you will not be living in and getting the benefit of free room and board, I will pay you extra.” She hesitated, torn by a dilemma. She wanted to help her but she knew she could not pay her more than her husband earned because the man would lose face. She said, “I will pay you ten dollars a week.”

The woman stared at her, saucer-eyed. She would have thought herself lucky to earn five dollars a month scrubbing floors. She didn’t know what to say, and she twisted her chapped hands together, fighting back tears of gratitude. “The Lord will surely bless you for your brave heart
and yer charity, missus,” she said when she could finally manage to speak.

Lily shrugged. She did not think the Lord would be that kind to her. “You will call me Mrs. Adams or ma’am,” she said, giving her twenty dollars’ advance on her wages and telling her to start the next day.

Lily had as much need for a personal maid as for a banquet chef, but at least she had done something for her countrywoman, and she felt good. John was a very rich man and she was in a position to help others. And who needed help more than her own people? The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea, and she started planning how to get her husband’s support.

That night, she wore John’s favorite deep-blue velvet dress and the sapphire pendant earrings that had been his grandmother’s. She had ordered the cook to prepare his favorite dishes and after an enjoyable dinner she coaxed her husband into donating ten thousand dollars each year to help her starving countrywomen. The money was divided between the Irish wards and a check sent to each ward boss, with the request that the Adams name not be mentioned and that Mrs. Adams had specifically requested that the Irish women receive help.

That annual ten thousand had brought aid to many destitute women for four years now. And during that time Mary O’Dwyer had turned into an excellent lady’s maid. Her husband drove the delivery wagon for Daniel’s on Clarendon Street and they considered themselves fortunate people. They rented a better house on the fringes of the slums and, thanks to Lily, their children were well fed and warmly dressed in winter and all but the youngest attended school.

But time still passed slowly and even though the sap was rising in the trees on this spring afternoon, Lily felt as though the blood were drying up in her veins.

T
HE SAME MORNING
that Ned Sheridan was thinking gloomily about the prospects of his opening night, Lily read his
name in the theater column of the
Boston Herald.
N
ED
S
HERIDAN
F
ORGOES
S
HAKESPEARE FOR
M
ODERN
D
RAMA,
the headline ran. The newspaper shook in Lily’s hands, so much so that her surprised husband glanced up and asked her if she was all right, but she scarcely heard him. She was too busy reading about what a great actor Ned was, about his superlative Hamlet, and his tragic Lear. “A star among stars,” the article called him, “and a brave man to take a risk with a new play by an unknown young author.”

Lily remembered his telling her that he would be a star one day. It was when he had asked her to marry him. And she had refused, because it would have meant keeping the baby.

She thought wistfully how full and happy his life must be compared to her own lonely existence, and she knew nothing on earth was going to keep her from seeing him.