He blinked as though she had clapped her hands in front of his face, waking him from a hypnotized state. “What do you mean I didn’t want you?”
“You’ve been doing a good deed. You didn’t choose to live this way.”
“But it’s not true. Marian, you are wanted.”
“You didn’t want the responsibility.”
He gazed around at his unfinished paintings, his mess of brushes and paint tubes. Unconsciously, he checked his watch as though in hopes of remembering a conflicting appointment. “And what do you imagine doing without an education? Driving Stanley’s truck forever?”
She’d told him a thousand times already. “I’m going to be a pilot.”
He drooped. “Still this?”
“I have to save up for flying lessons, but I’ll pay you five dollars a week for room and board. If I don’t, if I come up short even once, I’ll go back to school.” She didn’t tell him she’d already asked all the pilots in town if they would give her lessons and none would. There was a real airfield now, out by the fairgrounds, with a few small hangars and offices and a fuel pump.
Her teacher had not arrived yet, but he would. She knew he would.
She could see the promise of five dollars a week had snagged Wallace’s interest, but he only echoed, “A pilot.” He thought for a minute, his paint-flecked hands resting on his knees. “I know you like planes, but, Marian—I don’t mean to be unkind, but even if you learn to fly…to what end? You want to be like that Brayfogle woman, living hand to mouth? Getting old with no house, no children, nothing settled? That swell of a husband of hers—if they were even married, and I doubt it—will run off at some point, and then where will she be? What do you think becomes of a woman like that?”
“I have to be a pilot. I’ll do it whether I go to school or not.”
“Then go to school.”
“You ran away to be an artist even though it wasn’t practical.”
“It was different for me.”
“Why should it be?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Marian. Because I’m a man.”
“Don’t worry about me. You never have. Why start now?”
He was looking at one of his canvases: a hillside of flaxen grass, a band of cloud. “If you and Jamie hadn’t come…” He trailed off, started again. “Maybe sometimes I wished I were completely unencumbered, but I would have been worse off if I were. I’m trying to say I think it was a good thing you came, that I had to be responsible for someone, even if I wasn’t always…attentive.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “Marian, the truth is, I’m ashamed, but I don’t have it in me to make you go to school next year if you’re set against it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
She jumped up, bent to embrace him, kiss his cheek. “Thank you, Wallace. Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me, child. I’m failing you.”
In Stanley’s truck she was on her way to Miss Dolly’s parlor house. The first few lazy snowflakes sifted through the headlights.
Miss Dolly, a glum, melted candle of a woman, had dug in and kept her bordello running on West Front Street after the cleanup of 1916 shut down almost all the others, her soiled dovecote cooing discreetly for some years on a block otherwise gone dark and quiet. Girls from the other houses, houses that closed, had to work out of sooty, lightless basement cribs, poking their heads up into the alleys like lascivious gophers. Miss Dolly’s girls would have done anything to avoid going to cribs and worked hard, though they resented the debt Dolly kept them in for rent and meals, even for laundry and bathwater and heating their curling irons on the stove and every other thing she could think of.
Miss Dolly held on downtown even after the Chinese left and took with them their noodle shops and laundries and the herbalists who kept buns out of the girls’ ovens. She held on after mechanics and upholsterers and the Salvation Army moved in down the block, after the once-fine parlor house next door was bought by a sausage maker. She kept her girls out of the front windows where they’d been accustomed to sit and rap on the glass at passersby with knitting needles or thimbles. （In the good old days, what a marvelous rattle went up on payday nights, as loud as miners’ hammers and even more profitable. Miss Dolly could get misty-eyed just at the sound of glasses clinking or dice in a cup.） A fire, for which she at times darkly blamed the police and at times a bankrupted rival and at times the anti-liquor, anti-vice women, finally brought about her relocation to an unobtrusive brick house on the north side of the tracks. There was no sign out front to advertise female boarding, let alone female companionship. Customers knew to come in the back.