RUNAWAY ROSE
Chapter Eighteen
Rose’s rise as an actress was phenomenal.
During the final week of the vaudeville show, she appeared in all the numbers that
Nancy had once appeared in. Her skill as a dancer and a singer impressed even
Norman, who had originally considered her only as a temporary replacement, and
she soon proved herself a good actress, too.
When Norman held auditions for the role in Othello
that Nancy had vacated, Rose was first in line. Her hard-eyed look and acted
implications that she knew what prostitution was like won her the part,
although an understudy was also hired. Norman was sufficiently impressed with
Rose’s acting skill that he also made her the understudy for the role of
Desdemona, a move which Alice at first resented and later accepted, under the
assumption that since Rose was her friend, she wouldn’t try to steal the role
from her.
Rose had no intention of trying to take over
Alice’s part. She learned it, but assured Alice that she would only take over
if Alice was unable to go on.
Alice’s disposition had improved considerably
since she had found a new beau. Oddly enough, however, she refused to discuss
him with Rose, though she had often spoken of her relationships with other men
in the past. Rose suspected that Alice was involved in a relationship that
required discretion, especially after her new beau began presenting her with
expensive clothes and jewelry. Rose was familiar enough with the mores of some
members of the upper class to understand that Alice had found herself a wealthy
protector, possibly a married, wealthy protector. Such relationships did
require discretion, although a man of the upper class could keep a mistress and
not be looked down upon as long as he was relatively discreet. Rose knew that
Cal had had other women while they had been engaged, though he had tried to
hide it from her. Rose hadn’t minded. When he was with the other women, he wasn’t
bothering her.
A woman of the upper class, on the other
hand, was usually looked down upon if she took a lover. Some did, particularly
widows or women whose husbands were gone a great deal of the time, but it was
frowned upon, and a woman whose indiscretions were discovered was often
ostracized. It struck Rose as hypocritical that Cal could run around with other
women and not be looked down upon, but that her own relationship with Jack had
been criticized and regarded as a sin. Some of her former acquaintances had
shunned her after the Titanic, but had viewed Cal as a true gentleman because
he was still willing to marry her even after she had betrayed him. They were
probably even more sympathetic now, because the little slut, as Cal had called
her, had left him at the altar. Still, as Rose had told Cal, she would rather
have been Jack’s whore than Cal’s wife, because at least Jack had treated her
with love and respect, while Cal had viewed her as a possession.
Throughout September, as the company rehearsed
Othello, Rose’s mind was occupied with thoughts of the past. Her role as
a prostitute brought back memories of her time with Cal, of the day that her
mother had announced to her that an arrangement had been reached with the
Hockleys, and of her mother’s explanation of why it was so important for Rose
to marry Cal. Looking back, Rose realized that she had been as much a
prostitute then as any of the women she had seen on the streets or in the rundown
hotel she had stayed in the first night in New York. A respectable prostitute,
but a prostitute nonetheless. She had sold herself to keep her mother—and
herself, she finally admitted—solvent. Either one of them could have gone to
work for a living, or entered into a happy marriage, but Rose had allowed herself
to be exchanged for the fortune so important to high society.
Her character in the play was supposed to be
happy, but Rose couldn’t help injecting a little angst into her portrayal, with
a perpetual hard-eyed look and seemingly forced happiness. Norman had been
surprised at first by the way that Rose portrayed this character—it would have
been more appropriate for Desdemona—but he soon instructed one of the
stagehands to get her a beer stein as a prop so that she could believably play
the character as slightly drunk. An unconventional portrayal, to be sure, but
one which worked.
Rose was a nervous mess on opening night. She
had never spoken before an audience before, and was afraid she would forget her
lines, trip, or otherwise make a fool of herself. Her nervousness was so great
that her stomach hurt and her hands shook, but Alice had assured her that stage
fright was perfectly normal, and that if she messed up, she could always ad lib
her way back to where she was supposed to be. Rose still wasn’t completely sure
that she could go through with it, but, as it turned out, she didn’t have any
choice. Her understudy, who Rose had been tempted to turn the part over to, had
unexpectedly become pregnant and had had a back alley abortion, and was, on
opening night, sick and miserable, totally incapable of going on stage.
This bit of news brought back more memories
for Rose—memories she had tried hard to suppress. Three weeks after the
Carpathia had docked, Rose had begun to find herself getting sick in the mornings.
Not every morning, but often enough that she had wondered what was wrong. No
one had ever explained the symptoms of pregnancy to her, so she hadn’t realized
what was going on. She had thought about going to a doctor, but the morning
sickness had been sporadic enough that she hadn’t paid that much attention
until several weeks had passed. More time might have passed before she realized
what was going on had Cal not one day, in a fit of temper, punched her in the
stomach.
Rose had at first attributed her aching
stomach to the blow, but by evening the dull ache had progressed into painful
cramps, and she had taken to her bed, refusing dinner. Unwilling to admit that
Cal had hit her, she had told her mother that she an upset stomach, and had
spent the evening in bed, curled up into a fetal position. By eleven o’clock
that night, the cramps had grown so painful that Rose had had to bite her lip
to keep from crying out. Forcing herself to get out of bed, she had stumbled
into her bathroom, hoping that some aspirin would dull the pain, and had
discovered that she was bleeding, far more heavily than she would have during a
normal monthly.
At that discovery, Rose had suddenly
remembered the odds and ends of things she had heard about pregnancy, and, looking
back, had realized that her last monthly had been two weeks before she had
boarded the Titanic—and it was now early June. It was only then that Rose had
known that she was having a miscarriage. She had known that she needed a
doctor, but Ruth would have been shocked and ashamed if she had realized what
was going on, and Rose had been afraid that if she had awakened one of the
servants, they would have told her mother what had happened. So Rose had spent
the night in her bathtub, biting down on a washcloth when the pain got too
great, letting the blood—and the tissue that would have been her baby—wash down
the drain. She had lain there for hours, half-afraid that she would bleed to
death, half-afraid that she wouldn’t. She was miserable in the life she was
living, and dreading her wedding to Cal in just a few weeks. Bleeding to death
from a miscarriage had seemed an easy way out.
The bleeding had finally slowed around four
AM, and the cramps had stopped. Shakily, Rose had gotten out of the bathtub,
scrubbed away the bloodstains, and cleaned herself up before slipping back into
bed, where she had fallen into an exhausted, restless sleep, her dreams plagued
by visions of gushing blood and crying babies. She couldn’t even be sure of who
the father of her baby had been—it could have been either Cal or Jack. She had
tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that it was most likely Cal’s baby—a
man she hated—but it hadn’t helped. Regardless of who the father had been, it
had been her child, and it was gone before she had even realized that it was
there. She had even tried to convince herself that if it was Jack’s baby, it
was better to lose it early than to have Cal come up with some way to get rid
of it after it was born and she had grown attached to it. So many babies died
in their first year that it would have been easy for Cal to dispose of an
illegitimate child, making it look like a natural occurrence. But she had still
mourned.
Rose had been weak and shaky for a week
afterward as her body recuperated from her loss. She had finally begun to feel
better physically, but she had been unable to forgive Cal for hitting her, for
causing her to lose her baby. The last of the bleeding had stopped two days
before the wedding, but Rose had been dreading her wedding night. Her body
still hadn’t been sufficiently recovered to engage in intercourse, and she had
suspected that if she told Cal what had happened, he would have beaten her, and
then taken her anyway. He would have delighted in the pain he caused her; it
was just the way he was.
Rose had tried hard to suppress the memory of
her loss, but it still haunted her dreams, and, while she sympathized with her
understudy’s plight, she was unable to understand why anyone would want to give
up something so precious as their own child. She would have given anything to
have her baby back, even if it meant living with Cal and giving up her freedom.
It was better, she thought, to prevent a child in the first place, as Alice
did, than to lose one later, even if it was by choice, as her understudy had
done.
Rose went on stage that night, her
performance heightened by her anxiety and her struggle against her memories,
and the audience cheered her at the curtain call, despite the fact that her
role was very small. Rose put aside her fears of going on stage after that
night and managed to enjoy her budding career as an actress, but the memories
that had surfaced that night refused to be suppressed, and always lingered in a
corner of her mind.