Page 114 of If Looks Could Kill
Mike.
Pearl—Vanity(Monday, December 3, 1888)
Pearl unlocks the door to her apartment for the last time and lets herself in.
No one is home. Tabitha’s bed is a mess, as always.
To Pearl’s surprise, her clothing is gone. And Tabitha’s. So are their suitcases. Has someone moved them out? She disappears for a day and already her existence here is erased?
So why does that bother you, Pearl? she asks herself. This isn’t your life anymore.
Yes, well, she needs clothes, and she would at least like her own things.
Pearl searches in the back of a drawer and finds something her ransacker left behind: the drab-green traveling suit she’d worn here. She unbuttons the bodice of her uniform. She had been so proud of it. As one of the first sets of factory-sewn clothing she had ever owned, the even regularity of its seams felt luxurious to her then. Its blue, she secretly felt, complemented her eyes. Vanity, of course. She lays the bodice upon her bed and buttons it back up. She unhooks her skirt, then tucks its waistband into the bodice, as if a Hallelujah Lassie made of air is resting up on the bed before bringing more of Jesus to the poor.
She strokes the uniform one last time. Was it vanity, how she had loved it so? Pearl feels a lifetime older than that girl. She can almost smile with affection for the young, innocent thing, fresh off the farm, so excited about her pretty blue suit matching her pretty blue eyes. Not so sinful, not really. Just human, and hopeful, and young.
She puts on her green suit. It’s tighter. Harder to button. She hasn’t known hunger since coming to New York. The Army has fed her three meals a day. Most of them soup.
She looks at herself in the small mirror they’d shared, dangling from the wall by a nail. No snakes. Only the blond hair people constantly comment upon.
She takes a last look at the rumpled copies ofThe War Cryon Tabitha’s bedside table. At the little placard painting of Jesus poking out from under the armoire. At the children’s primer used for lessons at the Mission School. At the Salvation Army suit stretched out like a corpse on her bed.
She leaves the apartment, locks the door behind her, and slides her key under the door. It’s time to go. It’s time to face the Devil on Tenth.
On her way around the corner, she glances, out of habit, through the foggy window of Reggie’s Bakery. There sits Tabitha, alone. She closes her eyes and interlaces her fingers together under her chin. She’s praying, Pearl can tell. For her. She can’t prove it, but she knows it’s true.
Where’s my luggage, you barkeeper-chasing menace?
Yet it’s hard to stay vexed, even with the world’s most aggravating, nattering roommate, who’s never done a hard day’s labor, who’s had everything handed to her on a platter, whose father and aunt stand ready to fund and fix whatever woes may befall her, when she sits in a bakeshop, praying for you.
I will never see her again, Pearl realizes.
That’s best for Tabitha. Safer. Wiser.
Be happy, Tabitha. Have a long, useful, happy life.
Pearl smiles and turns away before Tabitha can open her eyes and discover her. There’s no point in another meeting. She will hold on to this memory and call it forth whenever Tabitha comes to mind, for the rest of her life.
However brief that life might be.
Jack’s Very Present Help(Monday, December 3, 1888)
A boardinghouse with no servants provides no coal. A boardinghouse with no cook provides no meals. A landlady with a suspected killer in the upstairs front bedroom develops a sudden deafness to the ringing of the service bell.
Around three p.m., the reporters start queueing. The doorbell starts ringing. From his cold and hungry room, Jack carefully pulls the curtain to one side for a covert glance.
The curtain’s movement does not go unnoticed. There they are, pointing upward. A knot of reporters clusters on the curb. They have the ink-smeared, jackal-like look of the men of the press the world over. A woman, even, scribbles in her notebook. Good God, is no place safe?
Not in this city, it seems. If he can give them the slip and make it to the train station, however, he can make his way upstate to his sister’s house in Waterloo, where he can rest up in secret until he’s ready. A planet awaits him, and he needs just such a broad canvas for his next project. The tantalizing idea reverberated through his dreams last night. A live donor extraction.They should’ve let him serve as a surgeon during the war. Finally, he will get his chance.
His recipe for the elixir can be modified so that those phases requiring heat can be performed in advance, and the human tissues can be added afterward without cooking them. It might, he thinks, offer even more potency this way.
He is giddy with expectation. This will work. And the time is now.
Any action taken here could hang him, with the glaring eye of suspicion trained on him. Americans are even less understanding of the cost high causes require. So petty, so stubbornly democratic in clinging to their favorite delusion, that one life is worth as much as another—and, what’s more, the delusion that they actually believe it, when their daily deeds in the streets and in their courts prove anything but. Give them a sensational killing, however, and suddenly the precious life of Miss Nothing will be blazoned across the headlines from coast to coast.
Even so, time is not on his side. He needs a cure now.
