Luke went back to his ham. The magazine’s editor wouldn’t give him away. Cornelius Newman was a living legend who had been fighting for causes since before the Civil War. He’d stood up to anarchist threats, rowdy labor unions, and the Ku Klux Klan. A firmly worded letter from Dr. Wiley wasn’t going to frighten him.
After dinner a bunch of the men planned to head out to a vaudeville show, but Luke had translation work to complete. His final revision of the Don Quixote manuscript was due to his editor at the end of the week. The project had taken longer than expected because during the long nights of February, he started losing heart. Anxiety about the book’s reception plagued him. Literary critics were going to savage him for it, and he didn’t want to see his translation ripped to shreds in the press.
Wasn’t that odd? He didn’t mind subjecting his own body to these risky trials or undergoing extreme deprivation in Cuba, but he’d been overly protective of that translation to the point that he set it aside rather than see it blasted apart by the critics.
And then he received a letter from Marianne.
It wasn’t even a letter. It was simply an article clipped from a magazine about the growing acceptance of non-literal translations for foreign works of fiction. There was no note and no return address, but he knew in the marrow of his bones that she had sent it to him.
After that day, she became his muse. He stopped caring what college professors and critics would think, and he wrote the translation for Marianne. She fired his imagination to capture the spirit behind the prose and translate it for modern sensibilities.
Luke had the bedroom to himself after dinner. He flung himself on his bunk and reached for the small passel of letters Marianne had sent him over the past few months. None of them contained a single word from her, but he knew she had sent them. One was a photograph of her young nephew playing with the dog he’d rescued from the ice. It must be a recent photograph, since the boy was squatting beside some crocuses. It was good to see the dog was none the worse for his dip in the frozen river. Another was an announcement from the Surgeon General about some recent laboratory studies of food preservatives.
He had been sending Marianne things too. He sent everything to the Department of the Interior, and like her, he used no words. After the forget-me-not pendant necklace, he sent her an etching of Don Quixote kneeling down to offer a flower to Dulcinea, the object of his unrequited love.
Then Marianne sent him a postcard depicting the harbor of San Francisco. She wrote three words on the back: The Promised Land.
He carried that postcard everywhere. Would he and Marianne ever run off to San Francisco? He didn’t know if he could go the rest of his life without seeing her again. She was a jeweled memory that flashed and glinted in the darkness, keeping him awake at night and fueling his days. He would probably never see her again, but the fire she inspired drove him to keep dreaming, keep trying, keep enduring.
She made him want to become a better man, and for now, that was enough.
Marianne sat beside her mother in the dressmaker’s shop, poring over a design book in search of the perfect gown for an upcoming charity gala. The theme of the gala was the Golden Age of Art, and guests were invited to come costumed like any character from seventeenth-century masterpieces.
“What about this one?” Marianne asked as she pushed an open book toward Vera.
Vera clasped a hand to her throat. “My, that would be lovely! So much nicer than all those frumpy Dutch puritan ladies dressed in black.”
Vera marked the page and continued looking. It was Marianne’s goal today to keep her mother calm. These high-society events always set Vera on edge, and the selection of a costume only added to the stress.
“Why did they have to choose such a silly theme?” Vera asked for the tenth time. “I have a dozen ball gowns designed by Charles Worth himself, but they are useless at a costume party.”
“I understand these costume parties are well-known in Washington,” Marianne replied, and the Stepanovic gala promised to be the social event of the season. In theory it was a charity gala to raise money for a girls’ school, but in reality it was an excuse for the cream of Washington society to dress up in extravagant costumes, mingle beneath the stars, laugh, dine, and enjoy moonlit boat rides on the river.
Marianne had already selected her own gown. She showed the dressmaker a painting by Rembrandt of a simple milkmaid dressed in a robin’s-egg-blue skirt with a white peasant’s blouse and a lace-up vest.
She couldn’t help wondering if Luke would be there, but she doubted it. He was still a member of the Poison Squad, and it would be cruel to attend a banquet and not be allowed a crumb to eat. Still, she missed him and wondered what he was doing at that very moment. It had been four months since she’d seen him, but he was never far from her thoughts.
Vera finally chose a dress based on a painting of Nell Gwynn, the lovely mistress of King Charles II who had been immortalized in dozens of portraits. After their labors at the dressmaker Vera insisted they treat themselves to lunch at an elegant café.
It was warm enough to sit outside, and Vera wanted to show off her smart new hat artfully perched on the side of her head. It featured an enormous brim with a spray of silk roses nestled on one side. She positioned herself at a table that was easily seen by people strolling by. Whenever Vera nodded a greeting to someone, the entire hat dipped at a fetching angle and demanded attention. She looked like a work of art and was loving the admiring glances.
Among the passersby came an oddly dressed man sporting a blue-and-yellow-striped suit with a daffodil pinned to the lapel. He casually swung a gold-tipped walking cane as he ambled toward them. Like every other man with a pulse, he was admiring Vera, but instead of strolling by, he initiated a conversation.
“Mrs. Magruder, am I correct?” he asked.
Vera managed a thin smile but no warmth. “You are indeed.”
“Dickie Shuster of The Washington Post,” the man introduced himself, and Vera’s reaction immediately morphed into delighted enthusiasm.
“Why, of course! We met last year at my husband’s swearing-in ceremony. Won’t you join us?”
“Delighted.”
Vera performed the introductions, and Marianne gathered that Dickie had published several favorable stories about her father in the past. While Marianne was proud of her father, she rarely paid much attention to what was written about him in the press.
Not so her mother. The first thing Vera did every morning was scan both of Washington’s daily newspapers in search of any mention of herself or Clyde. No doubt she was hoping her amazing hat might garner some commentary in the social pages. Perhaps she was hoping Dickie Shuster might mention it, because in addition to politics, he wrote a weekly column covering Washington gossip and scandal.
Dickie proceeded to compliment Vera on her hat, and she regaled him with the trauma of spending an entire morning searching for an appropriate costume for the Stepanovic gala.
“The theme is seventeenth-century masterpieces.” Vera pouted. “That leaves me only two choices. I can look like a sober Dutch puritan with an itchy ruff around my neck, or go as a half-naked strumpet.”
Dickie’s laugh sounded like a purr. “My dear, count yourself fortunate you weren’t here for the costume party Senator Redford threw to celebrate American agriculture. It looked like a barnyard. Women actually pinned feathers and shafts of wheat to their gowns. It was the talk of the town for ages, and not in a good way.”