Nine
Marianne brought two entire rolls of film to photograph Luke’s office. She had no idea what she’d find, but she planned to take a few more pictures of him. He photographed well. No matter the angle, the planes of his face seemed to reveal sharp intelligence and engagement with the world around him.
She looked about in curiosity as she stepped off the streetcar at the appointed stop, a neighborhood she’d never been to before. Most journalists worked closer to the Capitol, and this street seemed a lot shabbier. Luke worked in a four-story building of old red brick located between a tanning operation and a cigar factory. A board in the office building’s cramped entryway showed various rooms for a bookkeeper, several insurance companies, and a cabinetmaker. Luke’s nameplate looked brand new, proudly stating Modern Century, Washington Bureau.
Well, he should be proud! Maybe it was only a one-man operation now, but she liked that he had the ambition to start something important.
She hurried up the stairs, eager to see him. The building was solidly built, but cracked tiles and faded paint betrayed its age. The rattling of typewriter keys led her to the open doorway of Luke’s office.
He was bent over a typewriter, pecking at the keys with amazing speed. She took a moment simply to admire him. A lock of dark hair spilled across his forehead, and his open collar exposed the strong column of his neck. His face was tight with concentration as his fingers flew over the keys.
“You can type?”
He pulled away from the typewriter and stood, his smile wide. “Welcome to Modern Century.” He skirted the typewriter table, banging into a wastebasket in his eagerness to close the space between them. He clasped both her hands in his. The warmth was heaven on her icy fingers, and she let herself savor the fleeting intimacy before pulling away. They shouldn’t be so familiar with each other.
“What a nice office,” she said, admiring the spacious room and the two windows that flooded the area with light.
“I hope to expand soon,” he said. “Government business is too big for one man to cover, so I picked an office with plenty of room to grow. Come, sit.” He tugged a chair out from the conference table for her.
“I shouldn’t. I just came to take a few photographs.” Though she desperately wanted to know if he’d recovered from his queasiness in the jail, it was time to start stepping away from this magnetic attraction that flared to life every time they were within sight of each other. She set the camera case on the table and began unbuckling the straps. “Give me a tour so I can photograph the important things. I’ve already seen that you type your own stories. Very impressive, by the way. What else should I know?”
He nodded to the bookshelves beneath the windows. “These reference manuals cover all the committees in Congress,” he said. “Did you know Congress publishes a list of all the bills moving through the legislative process? It’s a literal blizzard of paperwork, and only a fraction of the proposals survive the winnowing process, but that’s what I’m tracking in each of these binders.”
He opened one so she could see. The form inside was about compensation for the government inspection of railways. She turned the page, and then another. Altogether there were five pages on that single topic. “You actually read all this?”
He sat on the table and propped his feet on a chair, looking ridiculously comfortable in his one-man office. “I have to. It’s the only way to track what’s going on in Congress.”
It was hard to imagine a dynamo like Luke paging through these mind-numbing binders. She wandered the perimeter of the office, noting the schedule of upcoming congressional votes tacked to a bulletin board.
Then her heart seized. Her father’s name leapt out from a list tacked on the board. “What’s this?”
He followed her gaze, but his expression didn’t change. “It’s nothing.”
“Nonsense. You have this list of men tacked up here for a reason. Who are they?”
“They’re men who are blocking a bill I am interested in,” he said. He remained sitting on the worktable, his arms casually balanced on his knees, but his mood had gone serious. He watched her like a cat stalking its prey.
“What sort of bill?” she asked.
“Let’s not talk about politics,” he said. “The reason I have those names up there is only about a bill. It’s not a personal vendetta.”
She prepared her camera and took a few photographs, but that list nagged at the edges of her mind the entire time. It was surely no coincidence that Luke had taken interest in something her father was involved in, and it probably didn’t bode well. What a shame that when she finally met a man who captured her imagination, he turned out to be a Delacroix.
“I wish you weren’t a Delacroix and I wasn’t a Magruder,” she finally said. “I wonder what things could be like between us if our names were Smith and Jones.”
A poignant smile flashed across his face. “I think it would mean afternoons basking in the sunlight together. Maybe a few moonlit strolls along the Potomac.”
“Having someone to help me in the darkroom.”
“Having a best friend,” Luke said. “A port in a storm. A person to laugh and flirt with. To hold and kiss and comfort.”
He’d said exactly what she was feeling. She wanted those things so badly it ached.
She wandered over to stand beside him at the table, laying a hand on his arm. “But our names are not Smith and Jones.”
“They could be.” He shifted to clasp both her hands. “We could run away to San Francisco and start our lives over. No past, no future, only the present.”
Now he was being silly, but it was a fun sort of silliness, and she wasn’t ready to return to reality yet. She balanced her hip on the table beside him. “What would we do in San Francisco?”
“We could start our own newspaper, and you could take the photographs. We could watch the sun set over the Pacific, eat the fish we caught ourselves, dance in the moonlight. We could live in a little garret apartment.”
“A garret?”
He grinned. “That’s where all the starving artists and lovestruck poets live. It’s an essential part of the fantasy.”
“All right, we’ve found ourselves the perfect garret,” she said. “What then?”
“We would have complete freedom to live life as we choose.”
How she would love to step into his fantasy, but it could never be. “We could live that way until you started feeling guilty about abandoning Modern Century. And I would torture myself, worrying about my mother and if she was holding her own against my father.”
He cupped the side of her face with his hand, and she leaned into it. She ought to be offended by the intimacy, but she savored it for a moment longer, since this was likely as close as they would ever be.
“Come to church with me tomorrow morning,” he said.
She pulled away from his hand in surprise. “You’re a church-goer?” If he’d told her he was a polka dancer, she could not have been more surprised.
“Every Sunday, plus prayers on my knees each evening before bed.” His eyes danced as he said it, but she sensed he was telling the truth.