The Whipping Boy (29 page)

 

He sat down on a bench, holding it in his hand. He was relieved to hear from Jake, relieved to know for sure that he was coming. It was the first message from afar, from anybody, that Tom had ever gotten in his life—except for the yearly Christmas letter from the Presbyterian Mission sent to everybody at Bokchito—and the mere fact of it, addressed to him alone, made him feel good. He understood what the old fisherman had meant today about the soldiers yearning for mail. He looked up the hill above the station, where lights burned in several windows of the Dekker building, lights even from the top floor. He thought of the old man, dead in the chair beside his bed.

He thought of Sam.

She'd invited him to come to her room tonight. He had grown uneasy about Sam, although his urge to see her outweighed it. The more he was with her, the more uncomfortably unlike her he felt. She was so far beyond him—older, a woman from the city, a woman of experience—why would she care about him?

Lightheaded from hunger, he walked through the streets into the lobby of the Main Hotel, with its legion of empty wooden chairs all lined up like soldiers, past the hard gaze of the clerk at the front desk, up the wide staircase to the third floor. He tapped on her door. No answer. He tapped again. Finally he tried the door and it was open. The room was lighted by a single lamp sitting on a dressing table in front of a mirror. Sam was sitting there, completely still, in front of it.

***

As he approached her, she remained sitting at the straight-backed chair in front of the mirror. She glanced at him without turning around. “The boy made it back.” Something was stuck into the mirror's frame with the lamp just in front of it. She was wearing an ivory-colored dressing gown.

Tom walked up to her and could see that it was the photograph from Mr. Dekker's album.

“Is it you?” he asked.

Sam stared at the picture. She seemed to imitate the child's expression unconsciously, and her face looked eerily the same. Her eyes were shiny in the immediate glow of the lamp.

She continued to look at it. “What do you know about your mother, Tom?” she asked.

Tom didn't particularly like talking about mothers and fathers. It was like talking about how old he was. He knew nothing about it, and it made him feel stupid.

She waited. “Can't you answer me?”

“Well, I have a mother. Or had one. I wasn't born in the orphanage . . .”

“I didn't think you were born from a pumpkin. But then this
mother
of yours was gone forever, and your father was probably gone before forever.” Her eyes narrowed. “And you became a little Christian Indian. After fifteen years of never seeing her, never knowing her name, never knowing if she's an Indian or a white woman, is she still your mother? Was she ever your mother, really?”

“I don't think my mother's alive.”

“She might be. And would you protect her? Let's say she walked in that door and I threatened her, would you protect her from me?”

“I shouldn't have to protect her from you.”

She snorted at him. “You talk like a lawyer.”

Her mood was quickly spreading over him like a bruise. She seemed careless and angry.

“You don't get knocked off course, do you, Tommy? You're all worked up inside, but you act so stiff and straight and young. At least you do now. And look at you. Look at yourself! That was one thing your mother gave you. She must have been a beautiful woman, Tommy. Everything's new. You're excited. You're free, you're out, like a child in springtime. But life starts getting to you. One of these days, Mr. Whipping Boy, you might just throw the account book out the door, like our storekeeper did.”

Her eyes had wandered from him back to the photograph stuck in the mirror frame. “There's such a lot of tears and sentiment about children. People cry and moan about them. They worry about if they're with their mothers, or if their fathers are alive, or whether they have a nice Christian orphanage to live in, and when they die, they worry about whether their little souls have flitted up to heaven where they belong. Did you ever think, Tommy, that the children would be better off without our sentiment and tears?” Her eyes played across the photograph. She took a deep breath. “Forget it. Don't listen to me. I feel Irish when I drink a little. I begin to sound like my mother. I saw her drunk. A couple of times. She was like a different person. All her proper English accent forgotten. As Irish as the day is long. It was her best-kept secret.”

She sighed and stood up and put on a tired smile. “You must be hungry. I have plenty of dinner left—I didn't eat much. You don't mind eating after me, do you?” A small table on wheels with a white tablecloth and several dishes stood against the wall. When he hesitated, she turned and looked at him directly, her back illumined in the lamp, her front dark. “Go on and eat,” she said. “Don't start looking at me.”

She took him by his arm, guided him over, and sat him down. There was a whole baked chicken, potatoes, stuffing, green beans, pie, a fresh loaf of bread. She brought over the other chair and sat down opposite him, served him food, and poured both of them some wine. He ate hungrily but self-consciously. He was grateful to her for the dinner, but as she sat there drinking and watching him, he felt like a boy who had accidentally blundered into an adult occasion.

She offered him a glass. “Would you like wine?”

He tasted it—another first—and shuddered. It was intriguingly terrible, and he sipped again.

“Why'd you turn against your mother?” he asked her.

“She was a madam, Tom. Her hotel was a casino and whorehouse. Some of them were younger than me, you know. Her girls. When I was fifteen, I was in St. Louis and visited the hotel without her knowing about it. I met a girl and started talking to her. She thought I wanted to work there. She was thirteen years old and already a veteran.” Sam looked tired. “I was almost never in St. Louis. She kept me away. I was supposed to stay in Chicago, where people didn't know about my mother. I was supposed to become a perfect lady.”

She drank the rest of the wine in her glass and stared toward the soft gaslight coming through the window. “I grew up in Chicago. The young ladies I knew in Chicago got married or they quickly became old maids, hiding in their fathers' houses: the sheep and goats got separated, but as far as I was concerned they were all headed for the slaughter. My acquaintances became less respectable. I didn't want to get married. I didn't want to sit in parlors with my finger crooked around a teacup handle, talking about the weather. I didn't want to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to be out in the world—with a business of some kind, but that didn't seem possible. I became what they call a sporting woman.”

She gave him a pale smile. “After my mother died, I'd seen enough of that life to understand why she kept me away. I started thinking that maybe I'd been unfair to her, but it was too late to do anything about it. Anyway, she left me what remained of her estate. I was her only child. She had no one else.”

Another wince went across her face when she looked at him. “So. There you have the long life of Samantha King up to 1894. But the past is a bucket of ashes, Tommy. Now I can do something in the world, and I will, whether I'm a woman or not. Whether I have a past or not. I will.”

“What's a ‘sporting woman'?”

“Oh Tommy, I took money from men. I wasn't a whore exactly, but I did.”

He felt a little dizzy, from her strange vehemence and from the wine. “Why?”

Sam's jaw tightened, her eyes flashed on him with jade intensity. “Don't act stupid, Tommy. Be ignorant, but don't act stupid.”

Abashed by her fierceness, he didn't respond.

For a moment she looked into her own thoughts, then her eyes focused on him again. “Why do you put down your fork when you talk?”

“We were taught to,” he said.

“Well, for heaven's sake,” she said irritably, “you'll starve to death.” She rose and began pacing. She seemed restless and preoccupied. But after a while she turned, and with a purposeful smile said, “Enough of that. Do you want to take a bath?”

She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

He walked to the window and looked out on the neat row of gaslights down the avenue. He continued to explore the glass of wine with sips, waiting for her to come out. In the novel Tom had read that week, a sophisticated, evil man was always standing by fireplaces and windows with a glass of wine, but Tom wasn't a sophisticated anything. His feeling of how much older Sam was, how much more experience she'd had, was deepened by her story. The more he knew of her, the more formidable she became. The door opened and she swooped back in, her dark hair down around her shoulders. “Do you want to take a bath? There's plenty of hot water.”

The tiled bathroom was huge, the tub was the largest he'd ever seen. Tom was awed by the hot water gushing out of the spigot. He'd heard of “running hot water” but could not believe the profusion of it. Hurriedly, he took off his clothes and got into the tub after it was filled. She washed his shoulders and back with sweetsmelling soap.

She knelt down and washed around the front of his neck and chest and down around his belly, smiling at him and giving his wine-numb lips a little kiss. “You have no idea what a lady-killer you could be.”

“Lady-killer?”

“I want to keep you for my own, Tommy.” Her face came close, and the intimacy of the moment was overwhelmingly sweet to him—the closeness of her face with the steam on her glowing skin, her breath on him. “You don't know that you're beautiful, do you?” she said softly.

Tom smiled awkwardly, embarrassed and excited at once.

But as she rubbed the soap down past the water on his belly and on his penis, it was already hard. The nightgown was falling down from one shoulder, revealing the globe of her right breast. “I think I'll join you.” She stood, took it all the way off, and remained there as his eyes feasted on her, then she stepped into the tub and sat down slowly in front of him, actually between his legs. The water rose all the way to the rim. He loved her smooth back and the feel of her buttocks between his thighs. She leaned against him, pushing him against the tub, the two of them lying back, her breasts tipping up out of the water. She wiggled slightly against him. He glanced around at the huge bathroom, the gleaming brass fixtures, and his partial dizziness again made him uneasy. The wine.

She laid her head back on his chest and said softly, “You're not like other men. I hate the way most of them act, the little cocks. As if they knew everything, as if they
owned
everything—women included. Their possessiveness makes me sick . . . What's that against me?”

“Against you?”

“That thing I feel.”

“Nothing.” He scooted back.

“It feels like something to me.” She completely turned around, sloshing water over the tiles, and reached out, taking him again first in one hand, then putting both hands around it, holding it very gently and moving her hands up and down in the water. She leaned over and put her mouth down around the tip of it, at the moment protruding from the water. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them she had slid her mouth down it until her face was under water. She came up for air but kept her mouth around the tip of it before going down again. Tom shut his eyes.

In a few minutes they stepped out and quickly dried off, and she got a bottle of oil and put it all over him, neck to toes, saving his penis for last, which she liberally and slowly anointed. Finally finished, she handed him the bottle to use on her. He did as she had done, using both hands, starting at her shoulders and moving down her breasts and belly and thighs. She put the nightgown around her shoulders, leaving the front open, went in and lay down on the bed. On the way out of the bathroom, Tom passed a full-length mirror and stopped. It was the first time he had ever looked at his own erection in a mirror, and he was oddly excited by it. Yet again, the luxury and spaciousness, or something else here, made him feel edgy. Maybe it was wine: he didn't like the distanced feeling.

“Yes, you have a fine one,” she said lazily from the bed. “Did you ever use it on anybody before me?”

“No.” He almost laughed. The dark wooden headboard loomed above the bed.

“Why not? What about one of those boys at the orphanage?”

Tom did laugh now, one gawky burst.

“I'll bet they all tried to get their hands on you.”

He came over and lay beside her on the bed, propping his head on his elbow. “Another boy, you mean?”

“Why not? I loved a woman once.”

He pulled back. Women and women? He remembered a mare at Bokchito that would sometimes cover other mares when she got into a certain mood, as if she were a stallion. And of course some of the boys did do things to each other, at risk of a severe judgment.

“Who was she?”

“Oh, it wasn't for long.” She reached out and lightly touched the back of his shoulders with a languid look of concern. “What kind of people ran that crazy orphanage?”

“What?”

“Was it the teachers?”

“The Reverend was the only teacher. The other teachers who came to work there always quit after while. None of them stayed more than a few months.” Tom tried to sound dismissive, hoping she wouldn't ask too many such questions.

“Why'd they quit?”

“Maybe the place was too melancholy for them.”

“Melancholy?”

“It's so far away from everything.” Tom kept trying to signal by his tone that he didn't want to talk about it.

“Did the Reverend do funny things with the boys?”

“No.”

“But he did this,” she said, the palm of her hand still resting on his shoulder, her fingers touching his back. Her tone was almost casual. As if it was that simple, as if he could just say “yes” and that would be all there was to it.