In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [63]
37
“I didn’t shed any tears when he told me what happened that night they murdered his family,” Mamzelle Dorothea said. “Nor did I cry when he told me the story of what happened afterward. I was a selfish woman. My parents had indulged me, spoiled me rotten, y’might say. I never cared what other people thought, and I lived my life exactly the way I wanted. But that young stranger touched my heart. Or what was left of it.”
She contemplated her glass, staring into the bourbon’s amber depths as though looking for an answer to why she had found Theo Rogan’s story so heartfelt.
“He was so young,” she said finally. “So pitifully young. And so thin and starved. Oh, not like me, which was, y’might say, by choice. That is, I chose to drink rather than eat. And he was so damned gallant with it. A young gentleman.” She was silent for a moment, then she added softly, “I thought to myself, This could have been the son you never had. The boy who would have made your life worth living. And then I took another long look at him. And I thought, Y’know what, Dorothea, he still can.
“And that, my dears,” she added softly, “was the beginning of our lives together.”
Ed’s body felt like a dead weight. . . . Dead, he thought. How ironic. My body is dead but my brain is working overtime, crowding me with memories.
I lived the life of an itinerant, he remembered. Hopping freight trains, dodging the law, bumming food from other hoboes, hunching around their campfires. A thin, starved lad, looking older than my fourteen years. I lied about it, of course, always said I was sixteen, and no one questioned that. I took jobs where I could get them: picking tobacco or cotton, working in the fields. My life was worse than my father’s. He had at least succeeded in owning his own piece of land, but I was lower than a sharecropper. I was an itinerant laborer of little value to anybody, except as an extra bent back in the fields. I hated it, but I saw no way out. Until Dorothea Jefferson Duval came along and saved me.
Almost a year after he had climbed over the mountain into South Carolina, he found himself in Charleston on a night of freezing rain when the temperatures dipped into the low thirties. He had only his denims, which, true to his mother’s words, were now rising around his ankles, the worn blue-checked flannel birthday shirt, his old home-cobbled shoes, and the oilskin slicker that had belonged to his father.
It was January and the black fields lay hibernating and desolate under a coating of frost. There was no work to be had and Theo drifted, hungry and cold, with only a fifty-cent piece in his pocket, into the beautiful city of Charleston.
He had never seen such a place. Light from the tall windows of splendid houses spilled across the sidewalks into tree-filled squares. Shop windows glittered with an array of goods, the likes of which he had seen only on his rare visits to the movies in Hainsville. Well-dressed people thronged the sidewalks, streaming into restaurants whose aromas nearly drove him crazy with longing, and shiny automobiles cruised the nighttime streets, heading, he guessed wistfully, for home.
The city was everything he had ever day-dreamed about and more. Beautiful, rich, opulent, and sensual. It was, he felt sure, unmatched by Paris or London, though maybe not by Rome, with all its wonderful antiquities. Of course he had no true way of comparing because Charleston was the first real city he had ever seen, but if he were a rich man, he knew he could want for nothing more than to live here, in one of those splendid houses.
Each pastel-colored mansion was hidden behind high walls and elaborate iron gates that offered a glimpse of gardens shaded by magnolias and ancient oaks, and secret courtyards where winter-silent fountains promised to lift next summer’s humid air with their music.
Theo waited until the restaurants closed, then he scavenged in the garbage cans, fighting off the feral cats in search of the same meal, gulping down the scrapings from