“It’s really quite relaxing,” the girl offered, smiling.
Madeleine did not go so far as to release her hair, but she did strip all the way down—dress, underdress, corset, linen combinations, shoes and garters and silk stockings; the attendant had to step in to help—emerging from the curtained room in her towels, both embarrassed and curious at what would come next.
The attendant lifted her hand. “Will you sit for the weighing machine chair, ma’am?”
A canvas-covered chair set inside a gilded bench had been placed near one of the walls, strange and mysterious.
“What does it do?”
“It will print out a ticket with your weight, ma’am. So that afterwards, if you like, you may see the results of your bath.”
Madeleine took a step back, thinking of her thickening figure. “No, thank you.”
Carrie declined, as well.
“This way, then, if you please. It’s best to start in the temperate room.”
The temperate room was hot. At least it felt so to Madeleine. They settled together on one of the empty couches and looked at each other. Madeleine began to smile, and then to giggle, eventually cupping both hands over her mouth to hold in the sound. A loop of hair coming free from her pins lay plastered against her temple, limp with the heat. Carrie wiped away the perspiration beading along her forehead.
“Isn’t it like the desert?” Madeleine asked when she could, lowering her hands.
“But more,” replied Carrie, fanning herself with one end of her towel.
*
After the temperate room, they were to go to the hot room. Carrie opened the door, winced, and shut it again.
“No,” she said, emphatic, and turned to the attendant. “What is the temperature in that chamber?”
“Around ninety-three degrees Celsius,” the woman said.
Carrie drew in a breath.
“It’s very healthful,” the attendant added, earnest. “For invigorating the circulation and improving the complexion, ma’am. All the finest physicians will tell you so. You need only hop in and out.”
Carrie crossed her arms. “What else is left?”
*
What was left was the swimming bath or the shampooing room, and Madeleine chose the shampooing room, because the bath—while pleasant enough in its own way, with its high, bright walls and ceiling, filled with warmed saltwater from a storage tank on the boat deck far above—was empty and unexciting and nothing like the serene marble pool back in Cairo, where she had floated with her husband beneath the open night sky.
In the shampooing room, she endured a shower from a series of nozzles attached to tubing, their spray lukewarm and hard. She emerged dripping but cleaner than she’d likely been in months, swathed in more towels. The shampoo left her wreathed in the strong, unmistakable aroma of freesias, which clung to her for hours afterwards, sweet and soapy, a phantom scent trailing her wherever she went.
*
Back in the suite, Rosalie took in the state of her hair with astonishment.
That evening before dinner, the brush and comb raked extra hard against Madeleine’s scalp.
Saturday, April 13th
The liner steamed along the North Atlantic, and the weather was rapidly cooling. Not enough to tempt Madeleine to return to the Turkish baths, but enough so that when she accompanied Jack outside for their twice-daily walks, she donned a woolen tailor-made suit and a fur coat and muff, and worried that Kitty might soon need a coat of her own. They were well and truly grasped inside the fist of an arctic spring.
The child inside her was growing into a heavy weight, far heavier than her body had before conceded. As they ambled along the boat deck, the dog tugging at her leash, Madeleine felt her baby move for the first time, the barest shifting of her center, just enough to steal her balance. She staggered two steps; by the third, Jack had her by the arm.
“Madeleine?”
She laughed and clutched her hands over his. “Dear me! I’m sorry I’m so clumsy but, oh, Jack! I think she moved!”
His face lit up with a sudden quick delight. She slid his hand down her body over her sable, over her thick Parisian coat and dress, uncaring of who noticed or why, pressing his palm against her. One of the emerald buttons from the fur dug into her stomach.
“She moved,” she repeated quietly into the curve of his ear, just for him.
They waited but it didn’t happen again, and he dropped his hand. Kitty nudged between them, raising her nose to be petted.
“Next time,” Madeleine said. “You’ll feel her then.”
“Yes,” he said. “Next time.”