Helen’s face crinkled in puzzlement.
A tiny smile broke through on Alberta’s sullen beautiful face. “I know. There aren’t too many of us. I can sing well enough, but … no. I play sax in a cabaret band called
“I have,” said Helen, though admittedly the “heard of” amounted to Alistair grinching about the terrible modern music that was becoming popular for no discernible reason that he, Alistair, could see. She looked at Alberta with new respect. “But then why.…”
Alberta looked wary. “Frye mentioned you. You’re Jane’s sister, aren’t you? You’re wasting your time.”
“To convince you to do the facelift? It really is safer.”
Alberta rolled her eyes. “Spare me. I’m not like all of you rich ladies who just wanted to be prettier.”
Helen tried not to be offended by the venom in her tone. Or at least, reminded herself that it didn’t matter if she was offended. “Why then?” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.
Alberta looked at her coldly. “Abusive husband,” she said. The words were sharp and blunt. “Wouldn’t grant me a divorce. Thought he could beat me and I wouldn’t mind.” She showed teeth. “Turns out I did.” At Helen’s horrified expression her face relaxed and she laughed again. “I didn’t smash his face in with a frying pan or anything, don’t worry. Just ran away. A … friend … helped me scrape up the money to change my face.”
Helen could tell from her pursed lips she was not going to say any more about the friend, so instead she asked, “So you’re not just a more beautiful version of before?”
“No,” said Alberta. “It’s nice to be beautiful; I don’t mind that. As long as I was getting it done, why not go all the way, you know? But the point is that I’m not the same. And he can’t recognize me.”
Helen thought of all the folks she’d met, that this woman was the hardest to want to convince. Who was she to tell this woman to go back in living in fear for her life?
And yet, Alberta was in danger now, too, and the facelifts needed to be done. The wistfulness in Alberta’s voice when she said “I’m not the same” was Helen’s necessary clue. “You miss your old face?” she said.
“Sure, who wouldn’t?” said Alberta, but her tone was brash over loss.
Helen touched her arm. “I won’t try to convince you to change back,” she said, “because honestly, I’m not sure you should.”
“Oh. Good,” said Alberta with surprise.
“I miss my old face, and it was pretty much the same,” Helen said. “Although it had freckles, and this one doesn’t. Turns out for all my time spent trying to get rid of freckles … I miss them once they’re gone. Silly, I suppose. Well, Alistair never liked them.”
Alberta nodded. “So you changed for your husband, too.”
It was true, though Helen hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Alistair had said it would erase the freckles—fix the imperceptible bump on her nose—et cetera. That she needed to be as beautiful as the Prime Minister’s wife to make all those people who laughed at her when she used the wrong fork respect her.
“And it’s not right, is it?” Helen said. “It’s as if they took something that was yours. You can leave … but you’re still changed by them. They still have power over that piece of you. You’re never really free.”
“True,” said Alberta. She looked thoughtful and Helen judged the moment right to excuse herself for another martini. She had started out just exercising her wits to find arguments to work, but the conversation had dredged up things she hadn’t really thought about, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. A little shaken, she looked at herself for a long time in the window into the night, running pale fingers over the missing freckles, and thinking.
After Alberta, the third one was a piece of cake. Fortified with another gin from the winsome bartender, Helen met with Desiree, and armed with Frye’s information about the iron allergy, had no trouble extracting a promise to meet with Jane as soon as she was found. Indeed, Desiree sounded eager, and she pulled back the locks of her hair to show Helen where her cheek was blistered around the edge of the iron mask. It reminded Helen of the bloodred line around Millicent’s face, and she shuddered.
At last some rather languid-looking actors vacated one of Frye’s striped divans, and Helen seized it gladly. Her legs were protesting yesterday’s exercise, and she was starting to get tired. Also, it had just occurred to her that she had come here on the trolley, and just like last night, the trolley was certainly done running for the day. Zero foresight. Zip. She drained the last of her gin, postponing the problem of getting home for a bit longer. She could flag down a cab … if she had her purse … if she begged Frye for a loan.… Of course, Frye might try to get Helen to stay, and attempt that facelift all by herself.…
Helen crossed her ankles on a carved elephant that was doubling as a coffee table and tried to imagine following through on Frye’s demand that she take over Jane’s line of work. Perhaps Frye thought through consequences even less than she, Helen did. She wondered how that worked out for Frye. It seemed to, but then Frye seemed to be all alone in the world. Maybe if your muddles only muddled you, you could make your way better. You wouldn’t be always trying to atone for past muddles, and muddling more.
As if summoned by Helen’s thoughts, the purple caftan ballooned into her sight and Frye stood in front of her and the carved elephant. “I don’t want this face,” Frye said. She had a martini in each hand and a peculiarly desperate expression on her face.
“I know,” said Helen, with a twinge of exasperation and a good deal of sympathy. “But even if I
Frye’s fingers tensed on the martini glasses. Up close Helen could see that her fingernails were jade green. “You don’t know, do you?” said Frye. “You can do things with it.”
Helen’s heart beat faster. Jane had hinted at something like this. Something more than the natural fey glamour that simply made people want to please her. “What things?”
Frye slumped next to Helen on the striped divan in a cloud of jasmine. Her eyes were feverish and Helen thought that although Frye seemed to hold her liquor quite well, she was also possibly at the point where she was not going to remember any of this tomorrow.
“You have to be focused,” Frye said. “Remember that.”
“I will,” said Helen, humoring her.
“Did you have a good time? Did you take the trolley again and need a ride? I bet you did, since it sounds like you have to sneak away from some dreary old husband.”
“Focused,” pointed out Helen, for Frye seemed to be evading her own story.
“I met this … artist,” said Frye at last. She cradled the two martini glasses in one hand so she could gesture with the other. “I was desperately in love. It didn’t matter how many other folks brought me flowers, you know? There was only one person I wanted. But even with all my fey glamour … No. Just not interested in someone like me. Heart of stone.”
“It’s the worst,” agreed Helen.
Frye looked up and into Helen’s face. “I changed all that,” she whispered. “I changed it. With the fey power in the mask.” Misery glittered in her eyes. “Where there was indifference I made love. I
Helen didn’t know what to say, and Frye seemed to interpret her silence as disgust, for she looked away, shoulders crumpling. “Don’t worry, I undid the changes. We’ve stopped speaking—they think it was a temporary lapse in judgment, I’m sure.” Her free hand traced the stripes on the divan. “So you see I can’t be trusted. I need the mask gone before I do it again.”
Compassion riddled Helen’s heart in response. “Love is not the worst thing in the world,” she said gently, and put a warm hand on Frye’s own.
Frye pressed Helen’s fingers, then let them go. “Love is perhaps the best thing,” she said, and she laced her fingers tightly around her martini glasses. “But forcing someone into it is perhaps the worst. Those Copperhead people have a term for it, what the fey did to the ones they took over. Brainwiping.”
The party was thinning out at this hour of the night as actors slumped to divans or left for home. Frye’s confession thinned out and died away, and Helen thought what a slippery slope this fey power was. Even before the power, she had employed her beauty and charm as tools; how could you not? They were her own, and she had sharpened them like razors. It seemed like all one could do, in this world where others had wealth and status at their disposal, and all she had were a couple of pretty little knives that would crack with age.
Across the room Helen saw her mysterious dance partner, chatting animatedly to a brunette woman with a
