“She never did anything to me,” Amanda half blurted. “She never hurt anyone in her life, but she used to…to dance!” She glared at Dr. Montgomery in defiance. Now he knew.
“Oh,” he said after a long pause. “Professionally? With or without clothes?”
Amanda could only gape at him. She had told him this deep, dark secret about herself, a secret that Taylor said tainted her blood and made Amanda not quite “good,” and yet Dr. Montgomery paid no attention to it. He was a dense man! “With her clothes, of course,” Amanda snapped. “Don’t you understand? She was on the stage.”
“Was she any good?”
Amanda made a sound that was half anger, half frustration and got up and started toward the car. The man had the sensibilities of a rock!
He caught her arm and turned her toward him. “No, I don’t understand. Maybe you could explain it to me. All I hear is that your mother loved you and you loved her, then somebody told you she used to dance and suddenly you hate her.”
“I don’t hate her, I—” She jerked her arms from his grasp. He confused her so much. He made her question things she knew to be true.
Hank saw the pain and anguish on her face and he calmed. “You know, you never did eat. Why don’t you come over here and eat and explain to me about your mother? I can be a good listener and sometimes it helps to talk about things.”
Obediently, Amanda followed him to where the cloth was spread on the ground and where the food was waiting. Suddenly, she did want to explain things to him. He kept condemning her, but if he heard the whole story maybe he’d understand—and if he understood, perhaps he’d stop making her angry with his sly innuendos.
He poured her a glass of still-cool lemonade and heaped a plate full of food and handed it to her. “Eat and talk,” he commanded.
“My mother was good to me as a child,” she began, her mouth half full, “but I didn’t know that the reason she spent so much time with me was because the other women of Kingman would have noth
ing to do with her.”
“Because she was a dancer?”
“Yes. You see, my father had no idea of her past when he married her. My mother comes from an illustrious family. They came over on the Mayflower and he was introduced to her in good faith.”
“Meaning that he thought she was pure and innocent and had been kept secreted away until he met her?”
Amanda frowned. “Something of the sort. It was only later, after they were married, that someone recognized Mother. It was a man who’d been forward with her, I believe, a man who she had repulsed. He told everyone in Kingman.” Amanda looked away. “He had a photograph of Mother in…in tights.” She almost whispered the last.
“So then what?” Hank asked. “The whole town ostracized her?”
“Yes,” Amanda said softly, and looked back at her food. “When I was in the third grade a girl said I thought I was so good because my mother rode on the Mayflower but she was just a cheap dancer.”
Hank was beginning to understand a great deal. “Who had told the townspeople of your mother’s background?”
“My father was very proud of his wife.”
Hank watched her eat silently, her head bowed. So, J. Harker had married a woman who he thought was pure, innocent and blueblooded and he’d later found out she had spirit and personality—and probably legs as good as her daughter’s, he thought with a smile.
“Dr. Montgomery, I do not believe this is a matter for amusement.”
“So your father had bragged to everyone about his wife being better than anybody else, then he finds out she had been on the stage where, I might add, she had turned away the advances of too-forward young men. So the town turned on her, did they? I’ll bet they were glad to snub someone they were afraid would snub them first. What did your mother do?”
Amanda hadn’t thought of the town being wrong, only of her mother’s scandalous behavior. She had run away from her family when she was eighteen, just after she’d become engaged to a man fifteen years older than she, and her father hadn’t been able to find her for two whole years, during which time Grace had supported herself by dancing in a chorus with seven other young women on stage in San Francisco. Grace’s father had forcibly returned her to his home, and six months later she was married to J. Harker Caulden—a man who wasn’t at all of the same social background as Grace, but Grace’s father believed that only the bottom of the barrel was good enough for a fallen woman such as Grace was.
“My mother stayed home with me,” Amanda answered. “We dressed dolls together and she read stories to me and she let me try on her jewelry and—” She stopped because her words were causing an ache inside her. She remembered the soft, powdery smell of her mother, the goodnight kisses of her mother, the times she woke from a bad dream and her mother came to her and held her.
“So Taylor Driscoll came into your life and told you your mother was a bad influence and you’ve stayed away from her ever since. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Amanda said softly, still thinking of her mother.
“I guess your mother encouraged you to go on the stage,” Hank said. “Did she let you try on her tights? What about her stories about life on the stage? Were they glamorous?”
“She never mentioned her time on the stage to me. And she certainly didn’t try to entice me to run away from home as she did.”
“Then tell me, Miss Caulden,” Hank said softly, “just how was she a bad influence on you?”