with her own mother and father when she wasn’t touring the Continent or praying for orphans. Evelina planned to pass the summer with the Plank family. Wouldn’t that be nice?
As for the color of Bernice Plank’s skin, Evelina didn’t see any reason for mentioning it.
“She marched into my apartment, set her case down, and threw her arms around my neck,” Blossom says with a faint smile that speaks more than any brighter expression. “I’d met her once on a public street, once, but we’d written so much that it was like she was mine, and I admired to know what that felt like. I didn’t say no. I could have, but. I loved her.”
The pair lived together for two months. Evy experienced one nervous attack, but since she had already described the condition, no one was surprised. The rest passed in a sort of frenzied tranquillity. Blossom smuggled Evelina some dozens of times into the Pied Piper disguised as a mute Englishman aesthete who wore his remarkable hair in a long queue (which in San Francisco apparently passes without comment). They could also go anywhere Blossom might be assumed to be Evy’s hired companion—so they explored galleries and museums, attended female rights lectures, walked through the parks arm in arm.
They were fiercely, quietly happy. Evelina cooked elaborate suppers while Blossom strummed the guitar. When the fall term approached, however, the inevitable happened.
“We’d been drinking champagne at home, and she kissed me,” Blossom says quietly. “It broke my heart. I’d thought we could last out the summer, at least I would have that one summer. Of course, I had to tell her. I thought just saying it would be the death of me.”
“What did she answer?”
Blossom sets the ice down and regards me full in the face. “She said she already knew my late mother’s shoe size, my favorite color, which operas I detest, and that taking my arm made me happier than any small gesture ought to do. She was relieved there were more things to know about me.”
“I like your Evy,” I manage to say after this pronouncement. “She seems to actually deserve you.”
Evelina Starr never went back to college. She invented incapacitating but harmless illnesses, both her own and in the ever-widening Plank family. Her parents, who’d been mystified over this college notion in the first place, were as lax as they’d ever been. They sent her plentiful money and occasionally cured venison. Then Evy discovered that, despite all the couple’s precautions, accidents could happen.
“I was out of my mind when she told me,” Blossom groans. “Can you conceive a less suitable couple? But Evelina said she wanted to know whether it looked like me, and that was more important than anything.”
“He does a bit, but what was confounding after I worked out who his mother was is how much he looks like her.” When Blossom’s head droops, I swiftly continue, “So you whisked Evy off to Seattle and waited for your son and heir to be born—where, exactly?”
“Well, we knew what it would look like when it arrived, didn’t we, so we chose the route absolutely every pair fantasizes over when expecting their first child, and said she was raped.”
Blossom resided in their apartment as Evelina’s personal maid for most of her pregnancy. The latter was still baking cookies up till the day she packed her valise. During the final few weeks, Evy lived in a home for abused women. And when Davy arrived healthy and squirming like anything, the nuns tried to take him away.
“Evy was absolutely brilliant,” Blossom gushes, eyes alight again. “You could have put a live bear between her and Davy and she still wouldn’t have left that ghastly antiseptic-smelling hell without him. She staged a screaming fit, told them she had powerful parents, the entire circus. She’s phenomenal.”
Remembering a slight woman agreeing to walk toward a burning cross, I say, “She’s top-drawer on a very tall bureau.”
“Yes. The fact that she also happens to love me is . . . perennially astonishing. So to wrap up the saga of our exodus, we moved here within weeks of each other, as soon as Davy was old enough, and the first person Evelina looked up was Tom,” Blossom concludes without a trace of spite. “That was my notion. I needed to know she was loved even if it wasn’t by me, and he’s marvelous. We do . . . respect that commitment, by the way. It was enough for me to see her so