City for Ransom

that . . . I am guilty of this, my sweet.” “Guilty how? What’re you talking about, Mother?”

“Tewes.”

“My father? But you have told me all about him. How handsome he was, how romantic, how courageously he died for his country in the war.”

“I-I’ve lied.”

“Lied?”

“All save that he was devilishly handsome.”

“But—”

“Let me now tell you the truth about your father, and I do this not to hurt you but to strengthen you. If I’m exposed CITY FOR RANSOM

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here in Chicago as a fraud . . . well, within that exposure all manner of things will come to light.”

“But how would you be exposed? By whom?”

“Promise to be patient. I will tell you all. In the end, we will regain who we are.”

“Then you plan to expose yourself? Before this other party can?”

“Yes.”

“Inspector Ransom finally onto you, isn’t he?”

“No . . . wish it were so. It’s Chief Kohler. Payback, I suppose, for rejecting him.”

“You broke Nathan Kohler’s heart?”

“If he ever had one.” Jane finally sat.

“What you said about my father . . .”

“I started running away from myself a long time ago . . .

when your father left me alone with . . . when I was pregnant with you. Felt like damaged goods. So much hurt and misunderstanding. Not toward you, my child, but toward myself.”

“So you came back to America to stop the pain?”

“No, to confront it, don’t you see? By setting up a practice in New York, but it proved disastrous.”

“So now we’re here, and talk about hiding from your feelings. You’ve become a master at it, Mother, right along with having become Dr. Tewes.”

“Only an expediency . . . to keep us in—”

“In the money, in the level of comfort to which we’ve become accustomed? Come on, Mother, out with it. To hide. To hide in plain sight is what you proposed from the beginning.”

Gabby grabbed her mother up from her chair and held her. The hug was long and heartfelt. “It’s OK, Mother.”

“But it’s not. In New York, I ran into Nathan, there studying some sort of new identification process he wanted in Chicago, this new fingerprinting thing.”

“It is a miracle of discovery this fingerprint business, Mother, and it is all true.”

“I’ve learned from Inspector Drimmer that Ransom is the 242

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one who pushed Kohler to adopt it, he and Dr. Fenger.

Christian’s known of it for years from his travels to the Orient, but officials ignored his counsel.”

Gabby nodded. “Always the way with new ideas. Look at the resistance to the Crapper, the telephone, electricity.”

“I so desperately need to calm myself,” said Jane.

“Tea. I’ll make us some fresh,” suggested Gabby.

“Would you? Tea will help.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” And Gabby was away.

An unpleasant shrill symphony of terror played out in Jane’s head, and she feared. She feared what would happen to Gabby should something happen to her. She consciously willed a respite to the panic attack. Poor Gabby. This is no way to live for either of us. “Jane Francis,” she spoke to herself, “you’ve got to reclaim your true self.” She repeated it until the mantra staved off the attack.

Once the tea had brewed, they went into the parlor where the windows overlooked the boulevard. For some time, they people-watched. They spoke of enjoying the house they’d rented. They spoke of the fair. Gabrielle felt that her mother needed time before broaching a larger, distressing matter.

“When you were just a little girl, I was befriended in New York by another woman very like myself she was . . . her name was Alicia.”

“Alicia . . . what a lovely name.”

“A lovely soul, and like me, she lived so much inside herself, in her inner world, until . . . well, she was murdered.”

“Murdered? No . . .”

“I had hired her in my practice to help keep things in place, to help look after you, to generally take my place when with patients, which, as it happened, was not often, so we spent a lot of time together, and we spoke of ourselves as problematic women.” “Problematic?”

“She drowned in the park, but there was more to it. I pointed CITY FOR RANSOM

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out the bruises on her neck, her legs, her forearms. Whoever did it knocked her down. I found blood on a stone nearby. I tell you this so you know I understand your pain now.”

“Was she . . . garroted?”

“No . . . at the very least all her parts were together when they laid her to rest. But the authorities were not going to be led by some woman—even if I did hold a medical degree.

They resented my bullying them, and they wanted it to be an accidental drowning, and so it was labeled. But child, that is not the point of my story.” “What then?”

“Gabby, this poor woman condemned herself for a sense of weakness drilled into her. In fact, we both shared the myth of feminine weakness”—she held up a hand to stop Gabby’s protest—“and, and shared I daresay with half the female population, even those young women who fall into the abyss of prostitution.” “Now you’re speaking of Ransom’s Polly Pete?”

“Yes, I suppose her too. Polly, and my dear friend to whom I so often give a prayer, and myself. . . . None of us ever saw that how we lived—inside our feelings—was power. A positive rather than a negative.” “Women are constantly told this. It’s one reason we’re uniting. What else are we to do?” Gabby replied, hands flailing like a pair of diving birds.

“We . . . all of us . . . are told feelings are a weakness, something we must struggle to combat . . . to contain if we’re to fit into the world—and for how long were we wrong? How horribly wrong in our perceptions?” “And the other two, dead now, took it into eternity with them.”

“So sad . . . only one of three learning the lesson of it.”

“I see . . . I think.”

“Think how in our day, our generation, child, women were taught to believe every step taken, every dream held was foolish, weak, silly, a woman’s ranting, a woman’s lot, a woman’s hysterics.”

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“It has not changed so much. I get the same attitude at university!”

“The weaker of the sexes, the highly emotional and volcanic of the sexes, making us out as given more to the animal nature of our evolutionary ancestors. Should we voice an opinion, medical men call it hysteria femalia. And only now am I finally getting it—” “Getting what, Mother?”

“That I live with foreign, strange, unfamiliar people around me, like some creature out of one of those mad outer space stories of Jules Verne’s, simple as that!”

“You mean as Byron felt . . . not of this world, born into the wrong place and time perhaps?”

“No, this euphoric epiphany is just the opposite.”

“But how do you mean, Mother?”