A LADY NAMED ROSE
Chapter Nineteen
At the sound of his name, Rose's hand shook,
and the hairbrush clattered to the floor.
She ducked down to retrieve it, hoping her
roommate couldn't see her face. "Oh, just some boy I knew back home,"
she said, trying to make her voice sound breezy and indifferent. She located
the brush and began to furiously attack her hair with it.
Angelica wasn't satisfied. "Must have
been special, to make you call out his name in your sleep." When Rose
didn't respond, she asked, cautiously, "Rose, did I say something wrong?
This Jack, he's not the cause of those nightmares you have, is he?"
"No."
"Well, he's in them," Angelica
persisted. "Last night, you were calling for him, then you said something
about ice and you sounded absolutely--"
Suddenly there was a knock at the door, and
before the girls could ask who the visitor was, it swung open and their
next-door neighbors barged in, both already dressed for breakfast. One, a short
and attractive blonde whose sharp eyes never missed a thing, bore several texts
in a satchel that looked too heavy for her. The other was a mousy sort, pale
with auburn hair fashioned in a neat chignon at the nape of her neck. She was
painfully thin; Rose and Angelica seldom saw her eat everything on her plate at
meals and often speculated about it in the privacy of their room.
The smaller girl snorted. "I heard you
two were awake, and I actually assumed you'd be ready to go to breakfast with
me."
"Remind me to keep the door locked from
now on," Angelica said to Rose. To their neighbor she said, "You may
as well wait, Vera."
"Were you up all night studying?"
Rose inquired, grateful for the intrusion.
"No," Vera responded, helping
herself to a seat on Rose's bed. Her roommate, following her lead, sat at
Rose's desk, squeezed in a corner where she could listen but not have to
participate in the conversation. "Well...perhaps you could say I was. I
have a physics exam this morning. Hmm, what time did I get out of bed?"
Before she could remember, a whisper came
from the corner. "It was three-thirty." Rose was taken aback at the
resentment in the girl's voice. Vera went on talking as if she hadn't heard.
Vera Peterson was part of a rapidly growing
breed of students at the university: fiercely independent and determined, she
was an avowed suffragist and often spent hours lecturing her classmates on how
they could best utilize their talents and education to better themselves in a
man's world. Rose's first day on campus, Vera told her that her goal was to be
an astronomer like her idol, Maria Mitchell, once a prominent professor at
Vassar. As the daughter of an extremely wealthy and politically connected
Chicago family, she had been raised to believe she could achieve just about
anything. Rose was impressed. Angelica was not.
Rose's roommate was the opposite of Vera:
tall and curvaceous, with a mane of thick black curls; flighty and
unpredictable, her grades were a near-disaster until she was placed on academic
probation. She had no desire to be in school--her heart was set on becoming an
actress. Her father, who came to the States from Germany as part of a theater
troupe and decided to stay, met her mother onstage. Their children were raised
in the world of New York theater. Rose was impressed. Vera was not.
It was hard to tell where Charlotte Reynolds
fit in with this group of headstrong, outgoing young women. Vera told Rose that
her roommate came from a prominent family in Boston, but Charlotte never spoke
of them and Rose had never seen any of them. She'd been the first in the
dormitory to return from winter hiatus and Vera confided that her parents had
sent her with two servants to help her unpack. She didn't seem to have any
solid goals and had not settled upon a course of study.
Charlotte was an enigma, but Rose's past
remained an even deeper secret safely harbored in her memory. She told people
her manufactured biography, and introduced Victoria, who'd been kind enough to
accompany her and Randolph to the campus on her first day, as her employer and
benefactor. To her surprise, no one seemed to care that she didn't have as much
money as they did, and that every weekend, as part of her arrangement with the
Scotts, she took the train to Tarrytown to care for their children (though Vera
made some comment about her not having enough time off).
So far, Rose had seen no one from her
graduating class in Philadelphia, no one to link her to her true identity. But
she couldn't control her nightmares.
And every now and then a reminder would catch
her unawares, like the newspaper Vera insisted on sneaking to the dining room
that morning. She held it open on her lap and read during morning prayers, and
Rose, seated beside her, glimpsed the headline above the fold on the front
page--something about the one-year anniversary of the Titanic sinking. She
heaved a sigh of relief when Vera folded the paper and dropped it under her
chair.
The girls returned to their rooms at 7:30,
and Angelica immediately changed back into her nightgown and crawled under the
covers. Rose feigned shock, but she was accustomed to this kind of behavior by
now.
"Will I see you at dinner?" she
teased.
"Of course," Angelica mumbled, and
yawned. "You know I never miss the important things. Oh," she added
as an afterthought, "you're still coming to the rehearsal this evening,
aren't you?"
"I certainly am," Rose replied
before heading out the door.
Angelica was part of Philaletheis, the
literary society, and their upcoming production was the only activity on campus
she seemed committed to. Rose attended every rehearsal in support of her
roommate, but when the director, a drama teacher, had asked if she wanted to
audition, she'd shyly declined.
For now she was content to focus on her art,
though today in drawing class she found her thoughts wandering. Her charcoal
pencil traced the paper, seemingly with a mind of its own, while every little
sound caused her to jump and look up. At the end of the class period, Professor
Curry, a pleasant and remarkably talented painter who encouraged free statement
in her students, peered over Rose's shoulder.
"My, he's handsome," she commented.
"You've done an excellent job capturing this man's lively spirit in his
eyes. There's a smile dancing around the edges of his lips. It's as if he's
saying, 'Come and play.'"
It was only then that Rose realized she'd
drawn a portrait of Jack's face.
Her own face crimson, she tore the sheet of
paper from her sketch pad and carried it to the trash bin, debating whether to
toss it in. But she couldn't, not in front of the class, who'd begun to file
past her to the door. And she really didn't want to throw it away. Instead she
slipped the drawing back into place and followed the others.