“Top down?” She pulled the blankets around us and moved close.
“What about Timmy?”
“He’s being watched.” She pressed her cheek to my shoulder.
“O’Donovan’s back?”
She squeezed my arm. “Not hardly.”
The driver lowered the cab’s top and took us through dim streets beneath a full, blood-orange moon. The night was extraordinarily clear following afternoon winds. We gazed up at a canopy of stars.
We passed Pike’s Opera House downtown. Cait told me that Junius Booth had been booed from the stage there after his younger brother had killed Lincoln. We crossed the Miami Canal, gleaming like milk in the moonlight, and ascended Mt. Adams to the observatory, where we looked down at the shining river and the boats’ lights twinkling along the landing. Then out to Spring Grove Road, a tree-lined thoroughfare where the fast set enjoyed racing their high-wheeled “suicide gigs.” Moving at medium speed, trees blurring at the edges of my vision, moon burning overhead, Cait’s hair flowing in the night wind—it was romantic beyond anything in my life. And I knew it. Even then.
Her fingers touched my cheek. I crushed her against me, my face buried in her hair. We kissed until we couldn’t breathe.
Her lips brushed my ear, the words coming as softly as night shadows. “Yes, Samuel.”
I carried her up the winding stairs at Gasthaus zur Rose. Helga’s head emerged from a doorway and swiftly withdrew. In the attic room I turned the lamp low.
“It’s lovely,” Cait said, her voice throaty.
“Come here.”
“Put the light out.”
I turned the key until only a glow remained. “Okay?”
She came slowly forward. “I want to please you.”
I knew then that I had died and was in heaven. There was no other explanation. We melted together.
Long minutes later, stymied by an impenetrable personal security system of hooks and straps and buttons and stays, I leaned back on the bed. “And I thought bras were tough.”
“What?” Cait reached behind her back.
“Never mind.”
“Here, unfasten these . . . and these . . . and this . . . now leave for a moment.”
“Leave?”
She laughed nervously. “Go outside for a moment,” she said, starting to blush. “I’m going to be wicked for you.”
Wicked? Was any of this happening?
In the hall, wearing only my pants, I heard faint sounds from the washstand, and finally a creak from the bed. I opened the door. Wearing a silk nightdress, Cait perched on the edge of the bed, bare feet tucked together, hair down over her shoulders. She looked up, green eyes luminous in the scant light.
“May I enter, your ladyship?”
“Do you notice . . . differences?” She sounded self-conscious.
“Cait, I can scarcely see you.”
“Come closer.”
“What’s that . . . scent?” I’d almost said smell.
“Hagan’s Magnolia Balm,” she said. “Is it nice?”
I’d seen the slogan, of course; it was everywhere: “Fresh as a maiden’s blush,” it would transform a “rustic country girl into a city belle.” The fragrance was flowery, faintly cloying.
I sat beside her. “Very nice.”
“But that isn’t what I meant. Look at me.”
I looked.
“My face, Samuel, my eyes.”
They seemed a bit smudgy. “What have you done?”
“Remember the magazines you brought? Well, according to Godey’s Ladies Book, mascara is a wicked influence.”
So she’d gotten some for this night. I started to tell her she didn’t need mascara or anything else, but then let it pass and kissed her. Now my hands encountered no buttons or layers of rigid fabric. Just sheer silk and the soft contours of her.
She responded eagerly to my mouth and hands, but stiffened when I tried to remove the nightdress. It occurred to me later that she’d concealed herself all her life. In society’s view only “low” women derived pleasure from sex. Husbands sated their lust—swiftly, presumably, and in missionary position in total darkness—upon nigh-comatose wives.
I wasn’t into that at all.
But I went slowly. At first. Until I found the strings securing the nightdress and pulled it away. Over her gasps I said, “I want to please you, too.”
“Samuel . . . I . . . oh . . . you mustn’t . . . SAMUEL! . . .”
I’m not sure she knew about orgasms. When hers happened it shook her violently. She clung to me, quaking, half sobbing afterward, her hair tangled, mascara smeared, feeling at first, I think, utterly debased. I wrapped the silk around her, held and kissed her, whispered to her.
“I’ve denied myself for so long.” Her voice was low, almost a groan. Then, astonishing me, “Love me again, Samuel.”
I pulled her on top of me. In the dimness her body was pale and smooth as a living statue, opalescent, beautiful in its nakedness, her full breasts and hips wonderfully curved, her skin firm and soft wherever I touched. Before long I neither knew nor cared where her body ended and mine began. On the verge of coming, I muttered, “Should we be careful? I’m about to—”
“I want you.” She braced her hands on my chest and moved her hips fiercely in an age-old rhythm, sucking me into the core of her, yearning for me, straining, demanding me, reaching, taking . . . all. . . .
The explosion blew Cincinnati off the globe.
When the fallout had settled and we lay wrapped around each other, she whispered something that sounded like “time in graw latt.”
“Huh?”
“Táim in grá leat,” she repeated softly. “In the old language it means, ‘I’m in love with you.’”
I stayed silent for a moment. It did for my soul what no amount of Hagan’s Magnolia Balm would ever do for anybody.
“Anyone particular in mind?”
She burrowed her nose in my neck. “For a certainty.”
“Could you tell me? In the new language?”
“Sure and I could.”
Only when I threatened to tickle her did she do it.
“I love you, Samuel.”
In the gray light of dawn I cut a small piece of fabric from inside the hem of her yellow dress and put it in the back of my watchcase. I wanted to see it each day on the trip. As I climbed back in bed
