Asaro, Catherine - SS - Standing Room Only.pdf

(25 KB) Pobierz
Karen Joy Fowler: Standing Room Only
First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction
August 1997. Nominated for Best Short
Story
------------------------------------------
On Good Friday 1865, Washington, DC, was
crowded with tourists and revelers. Even
Willard’s, which claimed to be the largest
hotel in the country, with room for 1200
guests, had been booked to capacity. Its
lobbies and sitting rooms were hot with
bodies. Gaslight hissed from golden
chandeliers, spilled over the doormen’s
uniforms of black and maroon. Many of the
revelers were women. In 1865, women were
admired for their stoutness and went
anywhere they could fit their hoop skirts.
The women at Willard’s wore garishly
colored dresses with enormous skirts and
resembled great inverted tulips. The men
were in swallowtail coats.
Outside it was almost spring. The
forsythia bloomed, dusting the city with
yellow. Weeds leapt up in the public
parks; the roads melted to mud. Pigs
roamed like dogs about the city, and dead
cats by the dozens floated in the sewers
and perfumed the rooms of the White House
itself.
The Metropolitan Hotel contained an
especially rowdy group of celebrants from
Baltimore, who passed the night of April
13 toasting everything under the sun. They
resurrected on the morning of the 14th,
pale and spent, surrounded by broken glass
and sporting bruises they couldn’t
remember getting.
It was the last day of Lent. The war was
officially over, except for Joseph
Johnston’s Confederate army and some
action out west. The citizens of
Washington, DC, still began each morning
reading the daily death list. If anything,
this task had taken on an added urgency.
To lose someone you loved now, with the
rest of the city madly, if grimly,
celebrating, would be unendurable.
The guests in Mary Surratt’s boarding
house began the day with a breakfast of
steak, eggs and ham, oysters, grits and
whiskey. Mary’s seventeen-year old
 
daughter, Anna, was in love with John
Wilkes Booth. She had a picture of him
hidden in the sitting room, behind a
lithograph entitled "Morning, Noon, and
Night." She helped her mother clear the
table and she noticed with a sharp and
unreasonable disapproval that one of the
two new boarders, one of the men who only
last night had been given a room, was
staring at her mother.
Mary Surratt was neither a pretty women,
nor a clever one, nor was she young. Anna
was too much of a romantic, too star- and
stage-struck, to approve. It was one thing
to lie awake at night in her attic
bedroom, thinking of JW. It was another to
imagine her mother playing any part in
such feelings.
Anna’s brother John once told her that
five years ago a woman named Henrietta
Irving had tried to stab Booth with a
knife. Failing, she’d thrust the blade
into her own chest instead. He seemed to
be under the impression that this story
would bring Anna to her senses. It had, as
anyone could have predicted, the opposite
effect. Anna had also heard rumors that
Booth kept a woman in a house of
prostitution near the White House. And
once she had seen a piece of paper on
which Booth had been composing a poem. You
could make out the final version:
Now in this hour that we part,
I will ask to be forgotten never
But, in thy pure and guileless heart,
Consider me thy friend dear Eva.
Anna would sit in the parlor while her
mother dozed and pretend she was the first
of these women, and if she tired of that,
she would sometimes dare to pretend she
was the second, but most often she liked
to imagine herself the third.
Flirtations were common and serious, and
the women in Washington worked hard at
them. A war in the distance always
provides a rich context of desperation,
while at the same time granting women a
bit of extra freedom. They might quite
enjoy it, if the price they paid were
anything but their sons.
The new men had hardly touched their food,
 
cutting away the fatty parts of the meat
and leaving them in a glistening greasy
wasteful pile. They’d finished the
whiskey, but made faces while they drank.
Anna had resented the compliment of their
eyes and, paradoxically, now resented the
insult of their plates. Her mother set a
good table.
In fact, Anna did not like them and hoped
they would not be staying. She had often
seen men outside the Surratt boarding
house lately, men who busied themselves in
unpersuasive activities when she passed
them. She connected these new men to
those, and she was perspicacious enough to
blame their boarder Louis Wiechman for the
lot of them, without ever knowing the
extent to which she was right. She had
lived for the past year in a Confederate
household in the heart of Washington.
Everyone around her had secrets. She had
grown quite used to this.
Wiechman was a permanent guest at the
Surratt boarding house. He was a fat,
friendly man who worked in the office of
the Commissary General of Prisons and
shared John Surratt’s bedroom. Secrets
were what Wiechman traded in. He provided
John, who was a courier for the
Confederacy, with substance for his covert
messages south. But then Wiechman had
also, on a whim, sometime in March, told
the clerks in the office that a Secesh
plot was being hatched against the
president in the very house where he
roomed.
It created more interest than he had
anticipated. He was called into the office
of Captain McDavitt and interviewed at
length. As a result, the Surratt boarding
house was under surveillance from March
through April, although it is an odd fact
that no records of the surveillance or the
interview could be found later.
Anna would surely have enjoyed knowing
this. She liked attention as much as most
young girls. And this was the backdrop of
a romance. Instead, all she could see was
that something was up and that her pious,
simple mother was part of it.
The new guest, the one who talked the
most, spoke with a strange lisp and Anna
didn’t like this either. She stepped
smoothly between the men to pick up their
plates. She used the excuse of a letter
 
from her brother to go out directly after
breakfast. "Mama," she said. "I’ll just
take John’s letter to poor Miss Ward."
Just as her brother enjoyed discouraging
her own romantic inclinations, she made it
her business to discourage the affections
of Miss Ward with regard to him. Calling
on Miss Ward with the letter would look
like a kindness, but it would make the
point that Miss Ward had not gotten a
letter herself.
Besides, Booth was in town. If Anna was
outside, she might see him again.
The thirteenth had been beautiful, but the
weather on the fourteenth was equal parts
mud and wind. The wind blew bits of Anna’s
hair loose and tangled them up with the
fringe of her shawl. Around the Treasury
Building she stopped to watch a carriage
sunk in the mud all the way up to the
axle. The horses, a matched pair of
blacks, were rescued first. Then planks
were laid across the top of the mud for
the occupants. They debarked, a man and a
woman, the woman unfashionably thin and
laughing giddily as with every unsteady
step her hoop swung and unbalanced her,
first this way and then that. She clutched
the man’s arm and screamed when a pig
burrowed past her, then laughed again at
even higher pitch. The man stumbled into
the mire when she grabbed him, and this
made her laugh, too. The man’s clothing
was very fine, although now quite speckled
with mud. A crowd gathered to watch the
woman–the attention made her helpless with
laughter.
The war had ended, Anna thought, and
everyone had gone simultaneously mad. She
was not the only one to think so. It was
the subject of newspaper editorials, of
barroom speeches. "The city is disorderly
with men who are celebrating too
hilariously," the president’s day guard,
William Crook, had written just yesterday.
The sun came out, but only in a
perfunctory, pale fashion.
Her visit to Miss Ward was spoiled by the
fact that John had sent a letter there as
well. Miss Ward obviously enjoyed telling
Anna so. She was very near-sighted and she
held the letter right up to her eyes to
read it. John had recently fled to Canada.
With the war over, there was every reason
to expect he would come home, even if
 
neither letter said so.
There was more news, and Miss Ward preened
while she delivered it. "Bessie Hale is
being taken to Spain. Much against her
will," Miss Ward said. Bessie was the
daughter of ex-senator John P. Hale. Her
father hoped that a change of scenery
would help pretty Miss Bessie conquer her
infatuation for John Wilkes Booth. Miss
Ward, whom no one including Anna’s brother
thought was pretty, was laughing at her.
"Mr. Hale does not want an actor in the
family," Miss Ward said, and Anna
regretted the generous impulse that had
sent her all the way across town on such a
gloomy day.
"Wilkes Booth is back in Washington," Miss
Ward finished, and Anna was at least able
to say that she knew this, he had called
on them only yesterday. She left the Wards
with the barest of good-byes.
Louis Wiechman passed her on the street,
stopping for a courteous greeting,
although they had just seen each other at
breakfast. It was now about ten a.m.
Wiechman was on his way to church. Among
the many secrets he knew was Anna’s. "I
saw John Wilkes Booth in the barbershop
this morning," he told her. "With a crowd
watching his every move."
Anna raised her head. "Mr. Booth is a
famous thespian. Naturally people admire
him."
She flattered herself that she knew JW a
little better than these idolaters did.
The last time her brother had brought
Booth home, he’d followed Anna out to the
kitchen. She’d had her back to the door,
washing the plates. Suddenly she could
feel that he was there. How could she have
known that? The back of her neck grew hot,
and when she turned, sure enough, there he
was, leaning against the doorjamb,
studying his nails.
"Do you believe our fates are already
written?" Booth asked her. He stepped into
the kitchen. "I had my palm read once by a
gypsy. She said I would come to a bad end.
She said it was the worst palm she had
ever seen." He held his hand out for her
to take. "She said she wished she hadn’t
even seen it," he whispered, and then he
drew back quickly as her mother entered,
before she could bend over the hand
 

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin