Extract taken from Rebecca Rand Kirshner's story The War Between the States.
New York City, 1922.
Through the window of the train, a transformation had been taking place. The lazy flats of Carolina marsh had dried away and swollen into rolling green hills, then stretched long into great gapes of land rooted with unfamiliar, proud-looking trees, and now had metamorphosed into ancient towns made of brick and shutters and copper steeples gone green with time and weather. Now she was only a few hours away from New York City. Time passed as the trained chugged forward, and she watched as the sky began to color, brightening into pinks and yellows like fireworks set off in slow motion, and then without ever seeming to reach its apex began to fade away into shades of gray and then blacks, until Sally Jean was left with nothing to watch but her own reflection.
She was a very pretty girl, eighteen last February, with soft brown eyes and soft blond hair that she wore piled on her head like cotton. In fact being soft was as integral to Sally Jean as her family name or their home on the Battery. It was the adjective most likely to be spoken, in conjunction with some feature of hers or another, when castaway beaux remembered their days in Sally Jean's favor, or when admiring friends sat with her at her dressing table. Sally Jean knew how people thought of her; she knew how the boys brushed their fingers against the skin on her shoulders as if she were made of clouds and spun sugar, things that would melt away if you touched them with your mouth. She knew how the girls admired her, just to the brink of envy, but not beyond. They couldn't really envy her after all, not in a jealous way, because she was so kind, so generous, so pliable... so soft. Sally Jean knew all of this and yet she held all their compliments at arms' length, at the length of one pretty, soft, white arm, because she knew that being soft, just like being young and beautiful, was part of her arsenal. A weapon that she could call upon later, when life really began.
Sally Jean sat alone. Her small hand rested proprietarily on the pink-papered hatbox that occupied the seat beside her, making clear to the boarding passengers that she had no interest in company. Ordinarily Sally Jean would have generously made conversation with any sort of seatmate. But this trip was different. It wasn't that she was afraid of being accosted by an unsavory character with hooch on his breath and bad intentions up his sleeve. And it wasn't because she had hoped to lie down for a bit during her journey; she was as awake and as happy as she'd ever been. She needed to sit alone because she herself was undergoing a transformation.
Sally Jean felt a certain anxiety that if she didn't change along with the world, along with the air that was being ripped through with aeroplanes, along with the oceans that were being swum by women covered with grease, along with the country itself that was getting smaller and faster and full of cars, she would be left behind like a moldy tombstone in St. Phillips cemetery. When she was a girl, she used to walk through the cool quiet graveyards, reading the epitaphs until tears would spill down her soft cheeks. Her face would be wet, but she wouldn't feel sad, just full and proud, as if she understood something. But in the last few years, things had changed. Women could vote now for goodness sake, not that she was twenty-one or had any intention of doing so, but the fact remained that she could do so many things. She was tired of sweet tea, tired of grits, tired of religion, and tired of the past. Maybe if the Confederacy had won its ancient war she could have stayed in Charleston, but it hadn't, and she was up to her ears with the melancholy of it all. The same languorous, long-rooted world in which she had grown up now seemed hopelessly at the periphery of life.
There were external manifestations of Sally Jean's transformation as well. With each stop of the train, she compared herself to the new passengers and made adjustments to her attire accordingly. Only a couple of hours into the journey she had realized that her hat, just purchased last week at Berlin's, was not going to make it to New York atop her head. A clever-looking girl with sleek red hair had boarded in Baltimore, and Sally Jean had immediately felt the frothy thing burning against her scalp. As quickly as she could, she had removed it and pushed it unceremoniously into the hatbox. Soon after, she had unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, and at the next stop, casually removed her white gloves and stuffed them into the hatbox as well. About her hobble skirt and thick cotton stockings, she couldn't do a thing. She needed a short dress and, if she could somehow manage it, silk stockings.
Silk stockings seemed absolutely necessary, the more she thought about it. She couldn't hardly exist without them! Her legs began to itch under the girlish, old-fashioned cotton, and she wished that despite the hour the stores would be open when she arrived. How could she afford them though? Half a thought flashed into her mind: Brett. Brett would surely understand and take her to Saks Fifth Avenue.
And then the second half of the thought joined the first with a clap, startling her like thunder: Brett. Tall, handsome Brett with his neatly cut uniform and steel gray eyes. Brett whose neck smelled like limes and in whose arms she had danced, night after night, during all the summer dances, two years in a row. Faithful Brett, who had written her nearly daily all through the war. Sweet Brett, who had known her when she was just a girl and had waited for her, who had let her grow up while he fought his wars and earned his money. Dearest Brett, as she had called him when she wrote her perfumed letters back, filling pink pages with vague ideas about love and life that she meant more as musings than as professions. Brett, whose lips had kissed hers on the veranda of her parent's house late one June evening.
When the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, the good people of Charlestown had sat on their porches and verandas, juleps in hand, and watched as the battle began. And then, some sixty years later, Sally Jean had sat in the very same place and watched with perhaps a similar interested detachment as a young man from Asheville declared that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Whatever she had said that night was true when she said it, but it had felt unreal, as if what she said could go nowhere in that heavy, unmoving air. But now, in the brightly-lit train car, with the city buildings growing sharply outside her window, the whole thing seemed horribly lucid. She was traveling to New York because she was engaged to marry Brett Blakely.
And before Sally Jean could reconcile that solid fact with the new self that was tentatively blossoming inside her mind, she was at Grand Central Station. She had arrived. She made her way through the crowd, hatbox in one hand, suitcase in the other, and though she held her head up proudly, she felt like everyone was snickering. Sally Jean bristled and walked as fast as her long tight skirt would allow. And then again she remembered Brett. She stopped, looked around, scanning the bustling figures for a tall gray eyed soldier. He was nowhere to be seen. Her indignation was tempered with hope. Maybe this was going to be easier than she had thought. As impossible as it was for her to understand how a gentleman would be willing to throw her over, it sure would simplify matters. She did hate scenes.
She heard thunderous footsteps and turned just in time to see a hulking young man in an ill-fitting green suit and a feathered hat running up behind her.
"Sally Jean!" the young man bellowed.
"Why, who on earth - Brett!"
The whites of her eyes grew at the sight of him, and it was only with conscientious effort that she softened them into a look befitting the occasion.
"Darling!" he said as he pulled her close to his sweaty cheek.
"Oh, honey," she said as she pushed him away. "Not here!" This with a smile and a look toward the oblivious crowd around them. "Oh! Let me just look at that extraordinary suit you have on. Somehow I thought you'd be in a uniform forever."
He spun for her, tipped his feathered hat and picked up her bag and her hatbox, and they began to walk toward the exit.
"Pretty sharp, huh? And you wouldn't believe the deal I got."
She hummed noncommittally. No deal could have been too good; the suit was dreadful. Thick, green, out of fashion, and it concealed quite effectively his fine figure. Sally Jean felt a flash of outrage at this costume, as if he had wooed her under false pretences, in disguise. She had kissed a soldier and awoke to find herself with a man who wore a feathered hat and a clumsy old suit. His face was flushed with excitement, the creases around his eyes and at his mouth white in contrast. He leaned in close and she could see tiny droplets of sweat clinging to his upper lip.
"You must be exhausted, darling."
And suddenly she was. Sally Jean feigned sleep as they rode to the hotel in Brett's creaky old Model T and didn't look out the window once; she wanted to leave it fresh for when the city was hers alone. Brett had arranged for separate but connecting rooms, and it wasn't until she was in her single bed with the door to the other room safely bolted, that she allowed herself to open her eyes fully. This wasn't going to do. She wasn't going to be the same girl who sat passively on that veranda. She wanted to feel things, to be things. She wanted to be a modern woman, and getting married at eighteen to a man in a feathered hat wasn't part of her agenda. Having confirmed this with herself, she closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
The polite knocking at the bolted door awoke her from a deep dark sleep.
She called through the door, "Just a minute, honey. I seem to have accidentally locked this silly thing."
"Take your time. I'm going to go down and have a cup of coffee. I'll come back in twenty minutes and take you to dinner and a show. I know this really fantastic place."
He parked carefully along a curb, hemming and hawing the car into position while Sally Jean regarded him with barely concealed irritation. He seemed a little nervous, and she worried that he was taking her to a party to which they hadn't been invited.
"This is it," he said as they stopped in front of an unremarkable brownstone marked 333 with bronze numbers.
"You do know these people, don't you, honey?"
"Well, not exactly, but you'll see. I came here with a fellow from the office."
Oh, poor Brett, he clearly doesn't belong in the North, she thought, her pretty jaw clenching. They entered the unlocked door and instead of a parlor were greeted with a darkened staircase. She didn't want to go down; it smelled like spoiled milk and wet wood. At Brett's insistence, Sally Jean followed him down the rickety staircase and nearly ran smack in to a gigantic man with wide-legged trousers and a matchstick between his lips. The giant didn't say a word, just looked at them.
"I think we're in the wrong-"
"Texas sent me," Brett said to the giant. And to Sally Jean's surprise, the giant took one heavy step to the side and indicated the door behind him with a nod. As he did, Sally Jean thought she saw the flash of a gun beneath his dinner jacket. She was about to dash back up the rickety steps when Brett opened the door and she saw into the room beyond.
It was like looking into the peephole of a sugared Easter egg and seeing the miraculous jeweled world inside. A splendid dining room, all red velvet and chandeliers, spread out before her, filled with the most elegant people Sally Jean had ever seen. And there was a stage at the front where a tuxedoed band was playing. She couldn't have dreamed that such an opulent place could be hidden in the bowels of the world like this, behind such a door, beneath such a staircase.
They sat at a table right near the front. Brett ordered a very fine dinner for them and they were able to drink real cocktails. It wasn't moonshine or some stuff from someone's bathtub, but real liquor from real bottles. It tasted like freedom to Sally Jean. And the show! There was a comedian who made Brett laugh like Peony, her horse at home - her horse in South Carolina - and a juggler who juggled martini shakers and finished his act by pouring a drink for a bald-headed gentleman at the table next to theirs.
After that trick Brett looked over at her with a gentle, proud smile, and she felt a small part of her heart melting under his glance. She smiled at him sweetly and felt a sort of sleepy nostalgia for him. Brett was a good man, honest and true, patient and kind. The lights dimmed; a new act was coming on. Maybe she wouldn't be able to stay frozen after all; maybe she'd just soften and melt back into being his girl, being his wife. She wasn't even sad about it, just felt a kind of sweet remembrance as if she was being led into a dance that had been going on for years and years. Maybe she was going to lose the battle for secession all over again.
And then the woman came on stage: tall, all in blue, with black bobbed hair. She beckoned with one lean arm and then there was a whole crowd of them, leggy girls in sapphire-blue costumes with bands of diamonds strung round their heads like glittering crowns of thorns. Sally Jean sat straight up in her chair, forgetting for the first time that day what she looked like and what others must be thinking of her. Brett squeezed her hand, but she pulled away. There was a miracle taking place on stage. The music was deep and suggestive, full of sliding trombones and a timpani beat from a tightly pulled drum. And the dancers - they moved like mermaids, like horses at the Derby, like angels. They were made of lightning, flashing across the stage with their legs high in the air. The past seemed to dissolve around them as they set forth some sort of dancing manifesto, a vision of the future described in kicks and spins. When the act finished, Sally Jean clapped as loudly as anyone in the theater.
Brett turned to her.
"That wasn't too much for you, was it Sally Jean?"
His face reflected concern and, to her, an artificial sense of propriety. As if she hadn't seen women's legs every time she took a bath! She smiled at him in the same way she might smile at an old woman talking about the exorbitant fee for overdue library books. And then the next act began.
The women had changed their costumes, adding long gold skirts and Egyptian-inspired headdresses. Their eyes were rimmed extravagantly in kohl. Sally Jean drank her cocktail in one swift swallow without taking her eyes off the stage. The music was silky, Middle-Eastern, and the girls, the women, the dancing horses, were even silkier. Sally Jean's eyes flicked across the stage, looking for the woman with the black-bobbed hair - there she was, at the far left of the line. And though the black-bobbed woman wasn't in the center for this number, Sally Jean was sure that everyone was watching her alone. Everyone and everything was drawn to the woman, and Sally Jean felt that any second, the stage itself would tilt toward her and all the dancers would slide uncontrollably to the left, pulled by her immense gravity of being.
Unlike the others, the woman in the black bob didn't smile; her face was incredibly still, fixed in an odd expression Sally Jean couldn't name, and her eyes, which peered out into the crowd, seemed not to be looking at the enraptured audience but somewhere else, into the future or into the past, as if she could see angels and phantoms. This woman, this creature, this future-dancer, this is who Sally Jean wanted to become.
© 2002 Rebecca Rand Kirshner. Taken from Tales of the Slayer Volume Two, published in the UK by Pocket Books January 2003. Reproduced with kind permission of Pocket Books.
