The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 38

Joe slunk away. When I turned back, Lem Brand’s face was flushed and wore a stern expression I imagined he gave the miners and valets and maids and countless others in his employ. And me, too, his eyes said, I shouldn’t forget I was on the payroll as well. “My wife is away,” he said. “In Boston, visiting our son at boarding school.”

“Perhaps she could join us next time,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said, the word nearly choking him.

His anger roiling, I saw the moment to turn things. “In that case, a private dinner sounds divine. Just the two of us. Perhaps you’re thinking we might even become friends and dine regularly. Is that what you had in mind, Mr. Brand?”

He was clearly confused by my change in tone. “Yes,” he said. “I . . . Yes.”

“Good,” I said, and smiled softly. “Then, as your friend, I hope you don’t mind if I ask for the smallest favor before we meet again.”

“Favor?”

“Yes,” I said. I reached out and took his arm. “After which I will be all yours.”

He swallowed.

Then I brought up the telegrams First Ursula had sent from Reno and how there must have been some mix-up at the Western Union office, because surely if her cables had been properly delivered, he would have answered them.

“Yes, a mix-up,” he said.

“I thought so,” I said. “You must be so eager to find her.”

“Find her—”

“To fulfill your agreement! It must be disheartening to know a friend is out there with the misconception that you have cast her aside. You must be so eager to remedy it by making good on your promise.”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes on my pale hand on his hairy wrist.

“Then it is decided! Once you’ve tracked down Ursula, you and I will have the most splendid dinner, Mr. Brand.”

“Lem,” he said.

“Lem,” I said, “indeed.” I nodded. “I greatly look forward to it.” And with that, I bowed, turned, and began walking to my dressing room.

“Wait,” he said, “do you know where she is?”

I looked back over my shoulder. “I don’t. I believe her family is from Philadelphia. But I should think a man of your stature would have a private detective you could engage on this question, perhaps even one on staff?”

“Yes,” he said. “How about a name, at least. A name would help.”

Christ. He didn’t even know her name.

“Her name is Ursula the Great,” I said.

We killed in Spokane. The cat roared. The house roared. I belted. The lights, the opening acts—from the first performance we were a hit. And when one of the city’s five newspapers called me “a spectacle of indecency,” Joe raised ticket prices thirty percent.

Of course, there is always a catch, and the one in Spokane was called Gregory. I found him wandering the theater one day, delivering boards to a carpenter, and I played at mistaking him for an actor and we bantered and I asked if he might bring a bit of that lumber to my dressing room.

He turned out to be a union man, a budding socialist, an adventurer, or, by clearer light, a day laborer and train vagrant. If memories are an unwise investment, this was burning money.

But what can I say? He was beautiful. And I have always been weak for physical beauty in men. My sister always said I was born with a man’s lecherous eye and made stupid by my base attractions. She said it would lead to my ruin. “Well,” I told her, “then let’s get on with it.”

He was a man of broad marbled shoulders, deep-set blue eyes, thick black hair, roping arms, and a full chest that tapered to a waist nearly as slender as mine. His skin was cooked a golden crisp beneath the shirt I coaxed from him and tossed on my dressing room chair. At times I have found the beguiling ones to be less energetic at play, perhaps too used to getting their way. But this Gregory was my equal in hands and hunger, and my goodness, the carnal afternoons we shared, the first I’d had since the grifting playwright left me.

He was a conversationalist after, which I also liked. Our legs tangled in my hotel bedding, he presented himself an avid reader, a socialist and intellectual, although I suspected he was somewhat vagrant in that department, too, limited by the six or seven books he’d happened upon while tramping.

But it was his talking about his brother that really got to me. He was raising the boy since their parents had died, and when he described the house he wanted to build them someday, it was all I could do not to have another go at him. I could imagine First Ursula shaking her head at my sentimentality. To be made stupid by a man’s beauty was foolish enough.

One night I told Gregory to bring his little brother by the show. I was a nervous schoolgirl all that day, but afterward, I returned to my dressing room to find a different man waiting there for me—that overripe squash Lem Brand, thin hair slicked across pale forehead, a rich bouquet of fresh flowers in his hand.

He smiled. “I must say, you surprised me the other day.”

“Must you?”

“I’m not used to such wit in a woman, nor such impertinence.”

“Thank you,” I said, as if this were a compliment.

He looked around my dressing room, then back at me. “You said that when I found her, you would have dinner with me.”

I felt a tug. “You found Ursula?”

He nodded.

“Will you give me a moment to change?”

“Of course,” he said. “Meet me in front of the theater.”

After he was gone, I hurried down the hall to the stage door to get rid of poor Gregory and his brother. A man like Brand could cause terrible trouble for them, so I intended to chase him off mercilessly, like a stray, for his own good. But in his eyes I lost my nerve, and the shadow of his little brother at the end