“Are you certain?” Jack was asking gravely, as if she were sacrificing her arm or her heart’s blood.
“Positively. I would never be able to enjoy the music knowing you were stuck back there with the hoi polloi. You’ll be wonderful company for Madeleine. She’s mentioned she missed you very much, you know, even though it’s been only days.”
Madeleine closed her eyes. Her face felt on fire. “Mother, please.”
“Well, you did. And now you don’t have to.” Mrs. Force came to her feet.
Jack said, “At least allow me to escort you to your friend.”
“I wouldn’t want to bother you . . .”
“It’s no bother at all. Now I insist.”
Mother brushed past and Madeleine stood to let her by, and then she and Jack were looking at each other straight on. He was smiling, really smiling, but in a way that looked like a secret: his lips pressed closed, the corners tipped. There was merriment behind his eyes, but she couldn’t tell if he was amused at her, or at her mother, or at the whole scheme, so clumsy and obvious.
Sorry, she mouthed.
And his smile grew. He looked back at her mother, offered his arm. “Mrs. Force? Shall we, before the musicians file in?”
They slipped away, Jack a full head and a half taller than Mother, who always walked with the straight dignity of a ballerina, no matter how transparent her intrigues.
Madeleine resumed her seat. After a moment, she summoned enough pluck to lift her chin, finding the thick card of her program again and using it as a fan, casually, easily, as if she had not a single care.
From the edges of her vision, she felt their stares, all the people seated around her appraising her, whispering behind their hands. She felt their curiosity, their disdain and titillation shivering along her skin.
*
He returned just as the lights were dimming, once, twice, thrice, to let the audience know it was nearly time to stop gossiping and preening and at least imagine, for the next hour or so, that they had gathered together as one to be uplifted by the magnificence of the performance, by the hard work and mastery of the musicians and conductor and composers.
She made herself look up at him as he settled against the velveteen cushions. She’d abandoned the program as a fan but couldn’t stop herself from twisting the slim bangle on her left wrist around and around, a band of silver firm as a manacle against her glove and bones.
“I’m afraid she’s not very subtle,” she said.
Jack tugged his waistcoat straight. “I’m quite accustomed to ambitious mamas. Yours was obliging enough to read my mind, at least.”
“Did she?”
That secret smile returned; he gave her a sideward look. “She did. And I thanked her kindly for it, too.”
Madeleine sat back, relieved and yet still mortified. The burning bulbs in the chandeliers above them sank away into cherry, into cinders, into ash.
She hesitated, then whispered, “If you encourage her, though, she’ll never stop trying to throw us together.”
“Madeleine,” he replied quietly, leaning his head toward hers, “what on earth makes you think I want her to stop?”
*
This was why she would not remember the music played that night by the accomplished musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, nothing beyond the first few dramatic notes of Bach’s Fantasia in G minor: because in the newly fallen darkness, Jack reached over and took her hand—deliberate this time, nothing absent-minded about it—and he held it the entire while, the entire performance, while Madeleine’s cheeks went warm again and her heart bloomed like a savage flower inside her chest.
*
It was the habit of the audience of the Building of Arts to wend slowly outside again once the affair was done, the play or music or lecture, where they would discover vendors in rolling wooden carts parked in the grass, selling sarsaparilla tonics or hot frankfurters or oysters or roasted corn by lanternlight. Any children in attendance would immediately begin tugging on their parents’ arms, pleading for pennies, only to run amok once they’d claimed their prize, darting from cart to cart to decide which treat looked best. And although most of the ladies, in their fine gowns and gemstones, declined to handle the mess of a shucked oyster or a buttery ear of dripping corn, a small slice of cake might be acceptable, as well as a glass of lemonade.
As a child, Madeleine would have been delighted with the corn, with the sweet tonic or a sharp mustardy frankfurter. But, as she’d said to Jack before, she wasn’t a child any longer; she was a young woman wearing white satin gloves and a dress of jade silk, and so when Jack Astor turned to her beneath the evening sky and asked if she would like anything, anything at all, she glanced around the carts until she found the one selling cider doughnuts, because they were easy to eat and always came with a thick paper napkin to hold the crumbs.