“And so shall I,” Louisa said with just as much pride.
“I shall say I am carrying his child,” Mae whispered, then opened her eyes. “All right. Just one kiss.”
“You are such good, dear friends, and someday Nellie will appreciate what you’re doing for her.”
“We are Nellie’s friends, too, and we’ll do anything we can to help, but Terel, I was wondering—just because we might need to know, in case Nellie should ask—what was Mr. Montgomery’s kiss like?” Charlene asked.
“Yes, purely for the sake of research, perhaps you should tell us,” Louisa said.
“Well,” Terel began, “just for research, I’d say it was divine. He is a very strong man, and he pulled me quite close to him, and—oh, heavens! I think Mae has fainted.”
J
ace didn’t come to visit her the day after the ball, and Nellie tried not to be disappointed. She told herself she was expecting too much, and that perhaps he had business elsewhere. By the second day, when she still hadn’t seen him, she decided to make a trip to Randolph’s Grocery and perhaps stop by her father’s offices to see if Jace was there. She baked six dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies to take to her father’s employees.
After what Terel had said about Nellie’s conduct the night of the ball, Nellie hadn’t ventured out of the house. She was afraid people might look at her oddly, might question her behavior of that night. She knew that seeking out Jace was probably the worst thing she could do for her reputation, but it had been so long since she’d seen him. Also, she wanted to stop by her dressmaker’s and see about having a new dress made. For some reason her old dresses didn’t seem to fit.
The moment she stepped onto the boardwalk she knew her worst fears had come true. A couple of young men passed her, tipped their hats, then leered at her. Nellie turned away. She waved to three young women across the street, but they pointedly looked away, refusing to acknowledge Nellie’s existence.
It is worse than Terel said, Nellie thought. I made a fool of myself before the whole town. And now I’m once again flinging myself at him, she thought. She told herself that under no circumstances should she go to visit Jace, but she kept walking toward her father’s office.
As soon as she entered she saw that no one was sitting at Jace’s desk. She tried not to look at the empty space, tried not to watch every doorway. She smiled and passed out cookies and asked pleasant questions of each of her father’s employees. She was aware of the cautious way they looked at her. Even though they hadn’t been at the ball they had obviously heard about her conduct.
She stayed at the freight office for as long as she politely could, then left. No one had even mentioned Jace. She started for the grocery, but Miss Emily saw her from a distance and came running.
“Nellie,” Miss Emily said, “I want to talk to you.”
Nellie blushed. “I apologize for my behavior,” she whispered. “I never meant to embarrass people.”
“I just want you to know that I don’t believe any of it. That young man really cares for you.”
“Yes, I think he does, but that doesn’t excuse my conduct.”
“We all make mistakes. Now,” Miss Emily said, “we have to be practical. What are you going to do about the child?”
“What child?”
“You don’t have to pretend with me. Everyone in town knows you’re carrying his child. You just have to decide what to do now.”
Nellie had to get her mouth closed. “I’m not carrying a child.”
“But I heard—” Miss Emily stopped. “Don’t tell me this is all gossip! Everyone is saying that that Montgomery fellow was told you were expecting his child and that’s why he left town.”
Nellie blinked. “Left town? Who left town?”
Miss Emily took a deep breath. “You poor child. What in the world are the gossipmongers of this town doing to you? You’d better come to my house and have a talk.”
It was an hour later when Nellie left Miss Emily’s house. She didn’t feel anything at the moment; her pain was too deep for feeling. Miss Emily had repeated what she had been told by the young ladies who came to her shop. It seemed that while Jace had been visiting Nellie he had also been visiting other women on a regular basis. At least five women told lurid stories of Jace Montgomery’s kissing them. Mae Sullivan went into such detail about Mr. Montgomery’s touching her that three young ladies had nearly swooned.
“If just one girl had said these things I wouldn’t believe her, but it seems that your Mr. Montgomery cut a wide swath through this town. Oh, Nellie, I am so sorry. I usually consider myself a good judge of character, and I thought this man was a gentleman, but it seems that he was not. I’ve been told he only wanted your father’s freight office, and when he couldn’t have it he left town.” That wasn’t the only reason she’d heard he’d left town, Miss Emily thought. If he was as bad as the town was saying and he had had his way with Nellie, time would tell if she carried his child. It was no use making Nellie feel worse than she already did.
“I do believe he cared for you,” Miss Emily said, pressing Nellie’s hand. “Even if he has turned out to be a base fellow, I am sure he cared for you. He—”
“I must go,” Nellie had said, and without another word she left. Once on the street she started toward home. If people snubbed her, she didn’t notice.
But she didn’t make it home. Instead, she stopped in the bakery and bought doughnuts, fried pies, cookies, cupcakes, cream-filled pastries, and a large chocolate cake. She ignored the look of the woman behind the counter, took the two large bags, and left the store. She didn’t think about what she was doing or where she was going; she just started walking.
When at last she stopped walking she was in Fenton Park, in the exact spot where she and Jace had sat and he’d put his head in her lap. She sat on the ground, opened the bags, and began to eat. She tasted nothing, chewed very little, but slowly and systematically ate her way through the first bag.
The tears began when the first bag was emptied. She wasn’t really crying; it was just that tears were streaming down her face.
By the middle of the second bag she was so stuffed with food that she had to stretch out on the grass in order to be able to continue eating.
Carrying his child, she thought. No, she wasn’t carrying his child. He hadn’t quite been able to force himself to go that far to get her father’s business. He’d only been able to bring himself to kiss her, to touch her now and then, and to lie to her.
No, she wasn’t carrying a child, but Nellie knew she was a woman. She was a woman who had been used by a man, had been used and discarded. She thought of the way she’d believed in him, trusted him, the way she’d given him her love, and again hunger overwhelmed her.
She remembered the night of the Harvest Ball. Miss Emily had said that Jace kissed Terel that night, and he’d kissed Mae and Louisa that night also. Nellie pictured herself with Jace. “Twice as wide,” Terel had said. Everyone in town must have been laughing at her as she waltzed with him, he so tall and handsome, she so fat and dumpy. Everyone must have enjoyed the joke greatly. They all must have known why Jace had been courting her. Everyone except Nellie knew. Her father and Terel had tried to warn her, but Nellie hadn’t listened. Instead of listening she’d been defiant, believing she knew more about the man than anyone else did.
It was nearly sunset when she picked up her empty bags and started home. On the way she stopped in Randolph’s and placed a grocery order for enough food to feed six families for four months.
“Having company?” Mr. Randolph asked, but Nellie didn’t answer. She didn’t feel like talking or thinking or even living. The only thing she was aware of was a deep, insatiable hunger.
At home her father complained about dinner being late, and Terel wanted to know where Nellie had been, but Nellie didn’t answer. She went to the kitchen and began to cook, and for every one thing she cooked and served she cooked two others and ate them. Perhaps her father and Terel talked to her, but she didn’t hear them. Her thoughts were completely, totally, absolutely concerned with feeding the hunger that engulfed her.
Nellie ate for three weeks. She didn’t care what she ate, when she ate, or how much she ate. Her only concern was in trying to fill up the hunger that ravaged her. Yet no matter how much she ate she still felt empty. It was as though no amount of food in the world could make the hunger go away.
If she stepped into the pantry, where Jace had kissed her and held her, her stomach contracted with hunger. If she looked outside, where the season’s first snow now covered her garden, she remembered Jace saying he liked her flowers and she felt ravenous with hunger. If she heard a man laugh, a man speak, if she even saw a man, she was overcome with hunger.
It was Terel who first noticed Nellie’s weight loss.
“It can’t be because she isn’t eating me into bankruptcy,” Charles said. “Nellie, this month’s grocery bill was enough to break me.”
Nellie didn’t comment, and her next grocery order was even larger.
“I can’t have you looking like this,” Charles said after Jace had been gone for four weeks. “You look like a scarecrow. Go get a new dress.”
Nellie hadn’t bothered to look at herself in a mirror for a long time, but now she did, and she saw that her body was a shadow of its former self. She could hold handfuls of her dress bodice away from her. Reluctantly, not caring what she wore, she went to her dressmaker’s.
The dressmaker took one look at Nellie’s ravaged face and said not a word. She’d heard all the gossip, of course, and Terel had said that Nellie did nothing but stay home and eat, that she refused to step out of the house, and that her long face was very annoying.
If she’s eating, she isn’t eating very much, the dressmaker thought as she undressed Nellie down to her smalls. She was amazed that anyone could lose as much weight as Nellie had in such a short time. She went to her workroom to get her tape, but she halted as she looked at a finished gown hanging from a peg in the wall. It was a winter costume she’d just finished for Mrs. Kane Taggert. It was made of dark blue velvet with satin lapels of a lighter blue, and there was a lovely matching cape to the dress.
The dressmaker looked at that velvet gown, knowing that Mr. and Mrs. Taggert would be out of town until after Christmas, and she thought of the way that man had betrayed poor, sweet Nellie. With resolve, she took the dress from its peg, then snatched one of her own corsets from a drawer.
“Now, Nellie, we’re going to make you smile.”
It took an hour’s work to ready Nellie. The dressmaker arranged her hair; since it was dirty, she had to powder it twice to absorb all the oil. She put Nellie into the corset, then hauled on the cords until Nellie’s waist was a respectable twenty-one inches, leaving her bosom and hips to swell out above and below her little waist.
Through all of this Nellie stood or sat as commanded, taking very little interest in the proceedings.
The dressmaker got on the telephone and called the milliner. “I want you to bring the blue toque you made for Mrs. Taggert over here. No, she hasn’t returned yet, but someone else is here. You’d better come yourself because I don’t think you’re going to believe this.”
When the milliner arrived, indeed, she didn’t believe what she saw. She’d known Nellie since she was a pretty little girl, but at twelve, after her mother had died, Nellie had started putting on weight, and her pretty face had been lost atop her big body.
The milliner pushed up her sleeves. “The hair is wrong. Get a curling iron and call Miss Emily. She should see this.”
Thirty minutes later a new Nellie stood before them, hair softly arranged, a fat blue velvet toque jauntily on one side of her head, her hourglass figure encased in a stunning velvet dress. Her beautiful face, with its haunted eyes, looked back at the milliner and seamstress.
When Miss Emily arrived the two women stepped back. No words could describe their achievement, so they just parted and let Miss Emily see their creation. For a moment Miss Emily was speechless. She stood and stared and gaped and gawked. But then she smiled. There was a bit of revenge in that smile. The talk of the treachery of Jace Montgomery had nearly died down in town, but for weeks Miss Emily had had to listen to stories about “poor Nellie.” She’d had to hear about how stupid Nellie had been to have believed that a handsome man would like an old maid like her. Well, this vision was no old maid.
“Come with me, Nellie,” Miss Emily said firmly. “I mean to show you off.”
The seamstress caught Miss Emily’s arm. “She hasn’t said two words since she arrived. She seems to have been really hurt by that awful man. I’m not sure she realizes she’s…” She turned and smiled at Nellie. “I’m not sure she knows she’s beautiful.”
“Once the cats of this town see her they’ll let her know,” Miss Emily said, then she ushered Nellie out the door.
Nellie was unaware of the sensation she caused as she walked through Chandler. Men, young and old, stopped to stare. Women did double takes. When Miss Emily escorted Nellie into the tea shop all conversation, all movement, stopped. Miss Emily pushed Nellie forward.
“Mae, Louisa, Charlene,” Miss Emily said, “you remember Nellie, don’t you?” She got a great deal of pleasure watching the young women’s eyes widen.
“Poor
Nellie? Poor,
dear
Nellie?”
“May I have something to eat?” Nellie said softly.
Miss Emily ushered her to a table, and while Nellie had eyes only for the tea cake cart, the young women of Chandler had eyes only for her. Nellie was no longer a person to be pitied, but one to be envied.
Later, after eating a tea for six, Nellie started home, and she never once looked at the people who stopped and stared at her. At home she went straight to the kitchen, put on her apron, and began to prepare dinner. Her back was to the door so she didn’t see Terel enter.
Terel had been told by her friends that Nellie was a sight to behold, and so she’d rushed home to see for herself; but even forewarned, she was not prepared for her first sight of Nellie. She had never seen a woman more beautiful than Nellie. In all of Chandler only the twins, Houston and Blair, could hold a candle to Nellie. And the blue velvet dress emphasized her newly slim body.