Sara said, again latching herself to Libbie. “It’s been days since anyone’s even seen you here.”
But Libbie pulled away from Sara and moved toward Alex. “Do you not feel well?” she asked.
“I’m only tired,” Alex said. “And I seem to have picked up a headache somewhere.”
“Probably down your glass of champagne,” Sara said.
Alex had mentioned a headache mostly as a further excuse to leave, though once the words had left her mouth, she found them to be true. Too true. Her temples pounded. She didn’t know how to explain to them—or to Libbie, really, as she felt no need to explain herself to Sara Dahlgren—what had just happened with the vendor and her awful dolls, and even before, with Libbie and her friends and the colored lights. How could she possibly explain her larger sense of foreboding? How chewing gum and children’s toys had so disturbed her?
There was no explanation.
“Of course you’re tired,” Libbie said. “Of course you are. How inconsiderate I’ve been. After your trip, you must be exhausted. Let me take you home.”
“We could send her—” Sara began.
“I’m taking her now, Sara.”
Alex did not wear her triumph on the face she showed Sara Dahlgren as they parted, but this required real effort on her part.
In the back of the hansom, Libbie took Alex’s hand and held it the length of the way to her parents’ house, her body curled toward Alex. They kissed, the first time they’d done so in more than a year. Alex felt some of her worry ease. She did have a headache and she was tired from her trip. Perhaps that was enough to explain it. If she slept well, maybe in the morning . . .
But then, when they were climbing the stairs to the bedroom wing—the Packards’ grand house empty save for staff, everyone else still back at the fair—Libbie said, “I won’t do it tonight. God knows you need your sleep. But I do need to tell you something. First thing tomorrow. I was hoping we could have one night together before you knew, that you could, before I said it out loud, but now I don’t think that was right, either.”
Libbie was a stair or two ahead, and Alex touched the back of her dress to slow her, then said, “I knew there was something. You’ll have to tell me now or I won’t sleep at all. Not after that.”
“I haven’t been, either,” Libbie said. “Sleeping.”
“What is it, Libbie?” Alex expected to hear something about Sara Dahlgren in response.
She did not expect to hear what Libbie did say, which was, “I’m pregnant.”
Alex was glad she didn’t tumble back down the stairs, she felt so unsteady. She gripped the railing as she said, “Oh, Libbie. You’re certain?”
“I am.”
“Tell me how,” Alex said, even though she didn’t want to hear.
* * *
Later, much later, once she was the principal at the Brookhants School for Girls and Libbie Packard Brookhants would remember how she’d gotten there, she wouldn’t start her story with her impressive family in Chicago, or with her time at Wellesley, or even with her marriage to Harold Brookhants. Not when she was telling her own story to herself, anyway.
Instead, she returned again and again to the decisions of a single summer night at the Columbian Exposition. What amounted to a few moments, really, spent by a fence on a man-made island so lush with fragrant plantings that Mary MacLane would have thrilled to describe it.
She’d had too much champagne. Sara Dahlgren saw to that. The only excuse anyone needed to pour more was that it was finally feeling like spring and the fair, their fair, was here at last.
The spectacle of the fair, its very life and vibrancy, seemed to grant permission for all manner of excesses and eccentricities. And Libbie Packard, now a college grad with a Wellesley degree and at least a few months to herself—she hoped, oh she hoped—before her mother would start in again, in her committed and tireless way, about marriage prospects, well: she was determined to use that permission any way she saw fit. After all, if one couldn’t be a sensualist (or even a hedonist) in the White City, where could one?
Our Libbie Packard put this question to the test on the last night of June. She’d been home from commencement activities at Wellesley for only a handful of days, and thus far she’d spent more time at the fair than anywhere else. In the nearly two months since it had first opened,