Page 5 of The Daring Times of Fern Adair
Humiliated tears sprang to the rims of her eyes.
“To come here and look at me?” Her voice quavered. She didn’t want it to be true.
“Listen, it isn’t money, okay? It’s not as brash as that. A pair of cuff links, a picked-up tab, maybe a round of golf at the South Shore Club.” He shrugged a shoulder.
Thank-you gifts.
She couldn’t look at him, at how blasé he was acting, so Fern stared at the clothes he’d tossed over the posts ofhis bed, his valet stand, and onto the floor. Trinkets and rewards, that’s what their parents had offered up to these men. Little nods of thanks for coming out and taking a gander at the girl they were desperate to be rid of. Fern had always known she was a black mark on her family’s reputation, something that made the Adair family less than the perfect image their mother and father tried to maintain. But she’d never felt so hollow, so insignificant, before this moment.
“Mother’s careful about who gets invited—” Buchanan began.
“Does everyone know? Are there men all over Chicago hoping for an invitation so they might replace their cuff links?”
The few times she’d read about their mother’s dinners in the gossip columns of the newspapers, she’d winced at seeing her own name in small, inky type. The reports of her reclusive tendencies weren’t exaggerated, but those of her ‘disfigurement’ from the tragic fire two decades ago were. Fern was far from disfigured. The scars had left her skin rough and waxy looking, but she still had her eyes and ears, her nose and lips, thanks to Miss Gladys’s sacrifice. The columns had made it sound as if the dinners were a way to help socialize her after all this time. If there had been any hints within the news pages as to her parents’ true methods, she’d been too naïve to pick up on them.
“Don’t be like that,” Buchanan said. “Like I just said, Mother is careful about who gets an invitation. She wouldn’t invite some schmuck who hadn’t been vetted.”
“Vetted by whom?”
“Pop, of course. Andme,” he emphasized as if his opinion was crucial.
“I suppose you think Mr. Halbert and Mr. Clifton were worthy of their invitations.” The sickening twist in Fern’s stomach started again when she thought of the conversation she’d overheard earlier. “You don’t think, even for one second, they aren’t going to go tell all their friends that they were given party favors for coming to gawk at me?”
“Oh, come off it,” he groaned and turned back to finish with his tie. He lifted his chin and watched himself in the mirror. “You knew what these evenings were all about. Mother told you that she intended to find you a husband.”
“Not like this. Not by baiting them.”
Mr. Halbert and Mr. Clifton were only two of the men who’d come to dinner. There must have been a score more out there in the city who’d gabbed about their visit and their prizes. People Fern didn’t know, and would likely never know, had cringed on her behalf and at how pathetic she must be.
“You’re looking at this all wrong, sis. This is a good thing for you.” He made a face in the mirror—widening his eyes and crinkling his forehead. “For us all.”
Buchanan’s room, with its odors of cologne and pomade, closed in on her. She backed up a step. “What is that supposed to mean?”
For them all?He met Fern’s eyes in the mirror.
“What did you think our parents were going to do? Sit back and let you live in the attic for the rest of your life? They want you out. Out in the real world, where therest of us live. Hell, Fern, you move through this house like a ghost.”
Each word was the lash of a whip.
“And I haunt you all,” she whispered.
“Yeah, if you want to put it like that,” Buchanan said. “It’s like we can’t be happy—like we don’t have therightto be happy—until you are. This whole family revolves around you, Fern. It always has. Can you blame us for getting damned tired of it?”
She couldn’t think. She needed to get away from Buchanan and everything he was saying. Fern slammed the door on his angry plea for her to not be so insensible.
His voice chased her down the hallway. “You knew. You had to have known!”
Sheshouldhave known. Not just about the bribes that had brought in their dinner guests, but about how her own family saw her. Felt about her. The fact that she hadn’t known—hadn’t even suspected—made her feel more than stupid. It made her feel ignorant.Thatwas something she’d never felt before. Ugly? Yes. Unimportant? Of course. But ignorant as to what was happening inside her own house? Her only world? Never.
Fern shut her door and crawled into bed.
She stayed there for nearly a week.
It wasn’t that Fern was afraid of the world outside her home. Growing up, her tutors stocked the library with encyclopedias and atlases. She’d devoured them all, especially books on geography and history. With notrouble at all, she could imagine the dry heat and the coarse sand of the Mojave Desert, the wet fog of London, the crash of ocean waves against the Florida coast. With every book she read, she developed a picture of what these places and things must have looked like, even felt like. A desert was a desert and held all the characteristics of one. The same went for oceans and fogs. The Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Wall of China—these things seemingly were unchanging.
People, however, were unique, and because of that, they were inconsistent. That’s what frightened her. Her parents hadn’t taken her out much as a child after the fire. They didn’t like the way people stared at her scars. It had driven Fern’s mother to tears. One time, when she’d been very young, she’d cupped Fern’s cheek and told her to never mind the looks sent her way. After one particularly upsetting outing, her mother had shouted to Fern’s father that she wouldn’t hide her; her little girl had every right to leave the house without being subjected to such scrutiny. Fern had admired her mother when she’d declared that she was no different than any other child—that she would hold her chin high and teach Fern to do the same.
She couldn’t remember going out much after that, though. Perhaps once or twice, to a department store and to the gardens at Humboldt Park. She’d watched her mother, to see if her chin was indeed held high. It hadn’t been. Slowly, Fern became accustomed to staying in her bedroom, the window seat in the turret looking out onto the street below and, a short distance away, Lake Michigan. When people would look up from thesidewalk to admire the house, one of the grander homes along South Woodlawn Avenue, she would scurry out of view.
