Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) Read online

  Margot touched the unopened envelope with her fingers. Ten days had passed since they had said good-bye, a painful and poignant farewell neither of them wanted to make. It had left a sore spot in her heart, one she knew she should stop probing, but which she couldn’t help revisiting, over and over.

  She had walked with Frank to King Street Station that misty November morning. She was due at the hospital, but she had just time to see him onto his train, then hurry back up the hill. The car would have made the whole thing much easier, but she was used to its absence now. She knew the streetcar schedule, knew which taxicabs were best and which should be avoided. On this day she had walked, meaning to savor the crispness of the end of autumn. She met Frank at his boardinghouse, and they strolled down Cherry together, turning toward the campanile that towered above the train yard. The giant clock warned them they had only a quarter of an hour. Frank, handsome in his Stetson and his camel’s hair coat, carried his valise in his left hand and a bulging briefcase in his right. Margot carried her medical bag. The breeze from the Sound had a bite to it, but her coat was buttoned up the front, the fur collar pulled high under her chin. She glanced up from beneath the brim of her hat and saw that Frank’s mouth was as set as her own must be.

  She stopped when they reached the entrance to the station. Automobiles rattled up in a continuous stream, their passengers disembarking with cries of farewell, calls to the porters, a great fuss of trunks and suitcases and hatboxes. Frank paused with her, and the two of them stood facing each other just under the awning, a little island of tense silence amid the flood of activity.

  “Frank.” Margot spoke through a throat aching with the pain of approaching separation. “I wish we could talk about what’s happened between us. I still don’t quite understand.”

  He looked down at her, his blue eyes flinty with distress. “I think you do, Margot,” he said. The pain in his voice matched her own. “You should. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “It’s no less a matter of principle for me.”

  A porter approached them, touching the brim of his flat cap. “Luggage, sir?”

  Frank shook his head without taking his eyes from Margot’s face. A woman in a long fur coat, just being helped out of a touring car, called to the porter, and he wheeled away toward her. Frank set his valise down and switched his briefcase to his left hand so he could put out his right to Margot. “Nothing more to say just now,” he said, a little roughly.

  “I suppose not,” she whispered. She put out her own right hand. Their fingers met, intertwined, and held. She felt the warmth of his skin through her glove, the pressure of his fingers gripping hers, pressing them more tightly than was necessary, and she understood he loathed this public farewell as much as she did. She wanted to lean forward, to press against him, to kiss the lines around his mouth that had become so dear to her, to feel his firm lips on hers, but of course she couldn’t. Not here. And, perhaps, not now. “Frank, I—” she stammered, with an uncharacteristic loss of composure.

  “We’ll think about it,” he said tightly. “We’ll both think about it.”

  The whistle of the train, a blast of steam-powered noise that made Margot’s ears ache, reminded them of the time. Frank released her hand, his fingers sliding away, parting from hers with reluctance. She wanted to seize them back, but of course she couldn’t do that, either.

  He bent to pick up his valise again. “Watch the glazier,” he said unexpectedly. “The seals.”

  She could only nod. At that moment she didn’t give a damn about the clinic’s new windows.

  “I’ll write,” he said, and then, swiftly, he turned, the hem of his coat flaring, and strode away. She watched his back, following the tilt of his hat, the set of his shoulders, until he disappeared through the glass doors of the station. There she lost him in the crowd, too many other hats and coats and raised arms for her to follow his progress. Her hand felt cold where it had just moments before been warmed by his. Her eyes stung embarrassingly as she turned away from the station and started up toward Fifth Avenue and Seattle General Hospital.

  Margot Benedict had not expected to fall in love. She was, and had been since she was only fourteen, consumed by her ambition to be a physician, and once she achieved that goal, by the drive to establish herself, to earn the respect of older doctors, to resist the prejudice and ritual exclusion women physicians faced, more intense now than in a hundred years of medical practice. Part of what was wrong between her and Frank was that drive, that need to fight for equality for herself and for other, less privileged women. Romance had never entered into her plan, and now, with her heart aching over Frank’s absence, she almost—but not quite—wished her life had followed its expected path.

  “Too late for such thoughts,” she told herself. She was learning that the heart, once engaged, was impervious to logic. It was hard to recall what her life had been like before Frank Parrish came into it. He had protected her, sustained her, supported her when her old supporter was laid low. No, there could be no regrets, and no turning back. Whatever was to be between them, she couldn’t, and she wouldn’t, wish they had never met.

  Now, alone in the small apartment that still felt as if it belonged to Blake, she turned Frank’s letter over and slid her thumb beneath the flap.

  There was only one sheet, closely written. She hadn’t seen Frank’s handwriting often. The tightness of the script, the rather cramped style of it, surprised her. Her own handwriting was large, almost careless, and she had to take care not to scrawl. Frank’s looked, she supposed, like the handwriting of an engineer. It was orderly, controlled, every word calculated to fit on its line, every line planned to fit on the page. She wondered if he had written the letter on another sheet, then copied it onto this stationery, with the March Field letterhead at the top. It read:

  My dearest Margot,

  You will find my address at the top of this letter. You can add “Bachelor Officers’ Quarters” to be certain it reaches me. I hope to hear from you by return post. I want to hear how the clinic is coming. Are the floors finished? The glazier should be done by now, and Hattie can get on with her curtain project.

  I hope you won’t be too disappointed to learn I am staying on here longer than I expected. There is much to learn, and Mr. Boeing has asked me to look into several details we hadn’t previously thought of. The airplanes are marvelous, quite light and easily maneuverable. Study of them should be a great help in the development of new designs. Mr. Boeing is going to join me here in a couple of weeks to see for himself.

  The weather in California is remarkable for November. The sun shines, and a dry wind blows up the valley. It’s the perfect spot for flying, and I’ve been privileged to go up almost every day with one of the army pilots.

  Dearest, I hardly know how to address the other matter. I suppose separations never come at a good time, but this one has to be one of the worst. Are you going ahead with your plans? I long to know the answer, and yet I dread to hear it.

  What I am certain of is how much I miss you. Nothing has changed in my feelings for you. I send you my deepest affection,

  Frank

  Margot read the letter twice, while her tea, forgotten, cooled in its cup. She wanted to cry out to him, remind him of her warning that she wasn’t like other women. She wanted to argue, persuade, point out how he was wrong, but they had already done all of that. He was beyond any doubt a man of honor and principle. His war experience had only deepened those attributes, and she loved and admired him for it.

  What he couldn’t see, and what their bitter argument had failed to persuade him of, was that her position came from the same beliefs. Honor. Principle.

  It wasn’t that she and Frank didn’t agree on the underlying necessity for women to have access to birth control. All women, as she had stressed to him, not just wealthy ones. He had no objection in principle, or even in practice. It was her association with Sanger that so offended him. The public and controversial nature of that association
embarrassed him, even angered him. When she first understood the depth of his feelings, she was shocked. When she tried to point out that poor women were being imprisoned by continuous pregnancy, he had said he understood.

  “But,” he said stiffly, “it’s a personal matter. It should be managed privately.”

  “Frank!” she protested. “If it’s always private, most women will never know their options. I see poor women and girls all the time who have never heard of condoms or sponges. All they know is Lysol, and that can be lethal—to say nothing of useless.”

  She saw his slight shudder of distaste at her bluntness, but he said only, “It’s against the law.”

  They were lunching at the diner on Post Street, having spent the morning with the workmen putting up the walls of the clinic, measuring for the roof. It wasn’t lost on Margot that Frank was avoiding her eyes, gazing down at his fish fry as if the remnants of it were fascinating. She had convinced herself that meant he had doubts about his own argument.

  She plunged ahead with her explanation, eager for him to grasp what was so clear to her. “Of course, Frank,” she said. “That’s exactly the problem. We’re working to change the law, Mrs. Sanger, and I, and others in the movement.”

  At that, his eyes snapped up to hers, and she saw the glint of real anger in them. “Movement!” he said. “Suffrage for women, that was a movement. This—this is just—indecent!”

  They both knew the word wasn’t adequate for his meaning. Margot gazed into his eyes for a long moment, searching for encouragement or, at the least, for understanding. She didn’t find it. In its absence, she felt a wave of exhaustion that made her turn away from him, gather her things from the chair next to her, and rise to go.

  He said, “Margot, please. Margaret Sanger was sentenced to jail. Her husband actually went, and served thirty days!”

  There was pain in his voice, pain mixed with anger, and with frustration that matched her own. She paused, looking down at him. “You went to war, Frank. You did it because you believed it was necessary.”

  “It was.”

  “I don’t disagree with you, though the price you paid—which we all paid—was staggering. This is a war, too. It’s my war. There’s a price to be paid for it, and I don’t see a way to avoid that.”

  They were interrupted at that moment by the aproned proprietor, a familiar face to both of them after months of work on the clinic. He said, “You going off to the hospital, Doc Benedict? No time for coffee?” He rubbed his thick hands over his grease-spotted apron. “Got some nice cobbler in the back. Last of the blackberries, and some fresh cream from the Valley.”

  She picked up her gloves and pulled them on. “Thank you, Arnie. I wish I had time. I have patients to see.”

  “How ’bout you, Major? Coffee?”

  Frank only shook his head, reached into his pocket for money to pay for lunch, then held Margot’s elbow in the most impersonal manner possible as they stepped past the cast iron rooster doorstop at the diner’s entrance.

  When they stood in Post Street, Frank said, “I don’t want you to do it, Margot. I don’t want your name attached to it.”

  She had said, in a tone as icy as his own, “I have to do it, Frank. It’s impossible for me to think of not doing it.”

  And it was. Even now, alone in the dim apartment above the garage, where every corner seemed invested with Blake’s generous spirit, she couldn’t think of not doing it. The faces of women and girls who had sought her help, who were desperately searching for some way to take control of their lives and build better futures for their children, paraded through her mind as they had paraded through the charity wards of the hospital and the tiny waiting room of her original clinic. Some had burned themselves with the Lysol douche that was marketed as hygiene but which everyone knew was meant as a spermicide. Others had borne too many babies at too young an age and were in danger of not surviving another pregnancy. One had a husband who said if she didn’t get rid of the baby she was carrying he would kill them both. Many wept that they couldn’t afford more children, that the ones they had already were going hungry. How could she not do everything possible to give these women some power?

  She wasn’t even advocating for legitimizing abortion, although she fought hard for her patients who needed therapeutic terminations. It was the Comstock laws. Sanger and her allies struggled against them, those blind, shortsighted laws that made any mention of contraception an obscenity and therefore illegal. Margot understood this conflict very well by the time she left medical school, and the experiences of her hospital work and her private practice had made her a soldier in an irrational war.

  She refolded Frank’s letter and put it back in the envelope. She would answer it, of course. She would tell him how much better Blake was feeling, describe the approaching winter weather, tell him that Cousin Allison had arrived. There was no point in describing her mother’s ongoing frailty, because he had seen it for himself. She wouldn’t mention her worry about Allison’s painful thinness, nor the girl’s rather odd behavior, because she didn’t know what it all meant yet. She would ask him if he might be back for Christmas, surely a happier Christmas than the last one.

  She would omit any mention of Margaret Sanger’s impending visit. She hadn’t met Mrs. Sanger yet, but through the mail they had made their plans to create a chapter of the American Birth Control League in Seattle. As a physician, it was legal for Margot to prescribe—and teach women how to use—contraception. But without garnering some public attention, women couldn’t know it was available to them. Sanger always attracted attention. She would be useful.

  Margot stood up, carried her cup to the sink, and poured out the cold tea. She rinsed the cup and saucer and placed them on the drainboard. She pulled aside the curtains above the sink and looked across the lawn at Benedict Hall, dim and drowsy in the thick darkness. Just so had Blake always finished his long days, one last glance to be certain all was well.

  Margot saw a single faint light in the house, a candle perhaps, in the bedroom now occupied by Allison. She wondered what was keeping the girl up so late.

  She let the curtain drop and turned toward the bedroom. She was assisting at a surgery in the morning, and she needed to rest. As she passed the table, she picked up Frank’s letter one more time, tempted to reread the last passage, but she laid it down again. She didn’t need to read it. She had it memorized.

  What I am certain of is how much I miss you. Nothing has changed in my feelings for you. I send you my deepest affection.

  She clung to those final words, drew comfort and reassurance from them. Frank never said anything he didn’t mean. She knew that. She had to trust they would work it all out, somehow.

  She wished she had some idea how.

  CHAPTER 6

  Frank peered into the brilliant sunshine glinting on the buildings of the airfield below him. Nelson shouted through the speaking tube, “Pull her left a bit, Parrish. Bit more. Bit more—there you go! Now, level out. Adjust the trim, so you don’t—right, right. Line her up careful now, and start your descent.”

  Frank’s cheeks stung with the wind blowing through the open cockpit. It was a thrilling sensation, a reminder that he was not tied to the earth, but sailing the skies. The sense of power and freedom was like nothing he had ever experienced. Flying made him feel like a mythological hero, a conqueror of worlds.

  The double wings vibrated to his left and right. The stick felt easy under his hand, and the rudder bar was surprisingly sensitive beneath his foot. It amazed him how much flying the Jenny was like riding a horse, the airplane reacting almost the way a horse would to hands and heels, flexing, turning, speeding up or slowing down. He couldn’t help grinning, and the air whistled against his teeth, making him laugh aloud.

  He heard Nelson’s chuckle through the speaking tube. “Yeah, Major, it’s fun, all right. Just don’t get carried away.”

  “I won’t,” Frank said. “Ready to go in now?”

  “Ready. Be sure yo
u listen!”

  The aspect of the Jenny that still impressed Frank deeply, after several flights, was the lift of the double wings. The airplane could fly so slowly it was as if it had stopped in the air, and it made landing seem deceptively simple. He had learned that it wasn’t, though, both by studying the manual and by listening to Nelson. Nelson was reminding him now about the sound the bracing wires made under the pressure of speed and wind. The joke was that if the pilot slowed down too much, the wires would hum a descending melody, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and he’d better adjust the throttle and the altitude before he found himself at the pearly gates!

  Frank listened, satisfied at hearing a steady hiss. He lined up, adjusted the trim, and pulled back gently on the stick to modify his angle of attack. He let the Jenny drift toward the ground, knowing if anything changed—an obstruction appeared, a gust of crosswind jostled him—he could ascend again in a heartbeat. His wheels touched down in a respectable three-point landing, the plane barely shivering on contact with the packed earth of the runway. It felt so natural, so instinctive, that Frank heard himself murmur, “Whoa,” as he taxied to a stop.

  Later, in the mess hall, he tried to explain the comparison to horsemanship to Nelson. The lieutenant shook his head. “I can’t grasp it,” he confessed. “I’m from Brooklyn. The closest I ever got to a horse was when the iceman came once a week. At least, till I went to France.”

  Frank said, “I didn’t know you were in France.”

  “Battle of Saint-Mihiel,” Nelson said. “I saw the horses hauling the artillery back, but I was in the Army Air Service, thank God.”

  “Brutal on the ground.”

  “Yeah. A hell of a lot better to be in the air than in the trenches.” Nelson jumped up to bring the coffeepot to the table and refilled both their cups. The remains of lunch were spread before them, meat sandwiches and bowls of oranges from a nearby orchard.