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The thing you need to understand about me and Alexander Armsworth is, we’re like magnets someone keeps flipping the poles around on. One moment we have nothing to do with each other, then flip, snap, we’re stuck tight. Sharing our deepest secrets, dragging each other into mischief, getting maybe a bit romantically entangled, having psychic connections, the usual. Then flip, mutual repulsion (I’m inclined to say that’s mostly his fault, but I need the “mutual” bit to make the metaphor work). Back and forth, over and over, since we were at the oldest ten years of age. And with every flip the magnets get stronger, pulling us closer and closer and then pushing us further and further away.
The summer we were seventeen a particularly strong attraction phase collided with our adolescent mating instincts and we got up to a great deal of mischief in the Armsworths’ not-haunted old barn (thanks to me and Alexander during an earlier, much more innocent attraction phase). Honestly it was the sort of mischief any sensible, respectable girl would have demanded at least the promise of a betrothal over. I ain’t never been respectable, but I do pride myself on being sensible. But that summer the magnetic pull was just too strong and it had my brain befuddled.
Then, flip. The school year started up and I was no longer worthy of even being seen with High Lord Most-Likely-to-Marry-a-Debutante of Bluff City Class of 1918. When he had the nerve to share a soda with Most-Likely-to-BE-a-Debutante-for-some-gosh-forsaken-reason Letty Shambaugh down at the druggist’s right in front of me with nary a word in my direction, I dumped my hard-won cherry cola right over his head and vowed never to speak to him again. And look, that was a five cent soda. Part of me wants to say that not a penny of it was wasted, but the other part knows that if someone had been less of a double-dealer in the first place I would have gotten to drink it instead.
Anyhow, next thing we know President Wilson declares we’re now at war with half of Europe, and Alexander, all-American Boy that he is, immediately takes the opportunity of his 18th birthday to do his manly duty, and ships off to shoot some krauts. But not before granting that Most Likely betrothal to Letty Shambaugh. And that’s the last I hear of him.
Not unless you count the…but no, I’m only counting real, material interactions here.
I had enough on my plate to be casting any mind to what might be up with that traitorous doughboy I’d magnetically repelled across the ocean. Mama had never been all that hale to begin with, but when the Spanish Influenza hit, it hit her harder, and she passed that summer. I had no way of contacting my Paw, so I was alone in the world, but fully a high-school graduated woman and a self-reliant one at that, so I set off (with the much-appreciated help of a full scholarship) to the St. Louis Women’s College to get me a degree in journalism.
Truth-telling to the unenlightened public, that had been my passion for a few years now, and I was a model student of the art, over the course of my four years working my way up to editor of the Women’s College Gazette. I was highly aware during that last pivotal year that editors of proper professional newspapers had a habit of scouring the college rags for potential new talents. And that’s probably how my byline caught the eye of the St. Louis Tribune’s Lowell Seaforth. Nothing for or against the Tribune, but this was not regarding a potential post-graduate hire. Lowell primarily noticed my name because I happened to share it with a childhood friend of his brother-in-law, Alexander Armsworth.
Which, I assume, is how Alexander then got hold of a copy of the Women’s College Gazette and tracked down the Gazette’s headquarters, right in the middle of a work session on a Tuesday afternoon. I have no idea what I actually expected when Ginny came to me in the back and giggled, “Blossom, you have a gentleman caller.” Certainly I had no one in mind. But HIM?
He was sitting just outside the workroom, staring pensively off, a bouquet of hothouse flowers in his lap. He'd gotten a bit taller, a bit more chiseled, a bit more like Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik but blond. Not that I was looking that hard.
“Ginny, there appears to be some kind of mistake. You said there was a gentleman here, but I see no such animal.”
His eyes went all wide and he reached toward me. “Blossom, just…wait. Can we talk? Can you just give me a minute of your time?” He pushed himself up from the chair he sat in, catching his balance on a crutch as he hobbled a few steps toward the desk between us. I squinted. Huh. He had a bad leg now. And was it— it was definitely the same leg that had been— but that wasn’t real, and it wasn’t worth thinking about.
“We’re in the middle of our regularly scheduled work period, sir. I don’t have any minutes to spare until two o’clock.”
“Fine. I’ll wait.” He plopped back into his chair.
"Wouldn't want to keep you from your other business." I nodded toward the door.
"I'm in no hurry." He crossed his arms and stared at me.
I crossed my arms but did not stare back. Instead I returned to the workroom and traversed to the far side between a pair of filing cabinets so I could let out a muted screech in peace.
The rest of the staff did not pick up on my intentions. They surrounded me, all full of shrieks and giggles. "He's waiting for you!" “He brought you flowers.” “He’s real handsome.”
“He’s a two-faced cad, and I am going on five years now of not acknowledging his existence, so stop trying to break my streak.” For some reason this made them all suddenly even more infatuated, but I did not feel like getting into it.
But time marches onward, and though I did my best to delay the inevitable, it soon came time to lock the workroom and head out to our various late-afternoon appointments. I waved off the other girls who waited to walk with me, hoping just a few minutes more would dissuade anyone still lurking in the foyer enough to give up and go home.
Alas, undissuaded, he lurched up from the same chair upon the sight of me, juggling flowers and crutch and the locomotive of words that shot out of his mouth before I could slip past.
“Look, Blossom, I know I did you wrong, but I’m here to say I’m sorry.”
As there were no longer any witnesses, I gave in. I turned to him and hissed, “It took you five years to figure that out?”
“No, just a year! I would have said it sooner but I didn’t know how to find you…but I’m here now so let me explain!”
“There is nothing to explain, you’re a stuck up fraud and a youthful indiscretion, have a good day, sir.”
“Gosh darn, Blossom!” He slammed the flowers into a wastepaper basket. I, with great dignity, picked them out again. If they were for me, I wasn’t going to let them go to waste. He grimaced at me. “You really are incorrigible.”
"And you're a slow learner, apparently." I resumed my departure.
“I’m not asking you to take me back, I just want to talk.” I kept walking, out the door. He followed, calling now, “Can I at least walk you home. Or wherever you’re going.”
“Can you?” It came out of my mouth before I realized how it might sound to a man with a bad leg.
And it did. “That was a low-blow.”
“I didn’t mean— that wasn’t a dig at your— okay, I suppose we can walk together for awhile.”
So we did: I with my jaw set and eyes straight ahead, he shooting nervous glances my way and occasionally clearing his throat. He clearly wanted to speak, but each attempt turned into a quickly cut-off exhale and occasional throat-clearing. It wore on my patience, and just as I was about to order him to please cough up that poor frog before it suffocated, one throat-clearing finally turned into words.
“You’re looking well. You’ve really grown up nicely.” He said it in a most gentlemanly way, leaving me no choice but to respond in turn.
“That’s kind of you,” I said, all cool politeness. “You, also, are looking quite hearty, leg excepting. Letty must be feeding you well. Does she know you’re buying flowers for other women?”
“Blossom?” He stopped walking for a beat and looked at me funny. “I never married Letty. I guess you didn’t hear.”
Guess I didn’t. I shook off the temptation to react, and continued my nonchalant walk. “Can’t say I was following your life story all that closely.”
“No. But that’s what I’ve been tryna tell you. The war— it changed me. I don’t mean just the leg. Knocked some perspective into my brain. Just,” he sighed, “I’d been trying to live up to what other people thought I should be, instead of who I really am. When I got home everything seemed so shallow. So fake. Letty treated me like her poor wounded pet war hero, babying me and showing me off to all her friends like she was singlehandedly rehabilitating me. The wedding planning felt like such a farce. And I couldn’t help wishing— so anyway I called it off.”
I wasn’t sure how I was meant to feel about all that. “Oh.”
“Letty ran crying into the arms of Les Dawson and they ended up married six months later.”
I let out such a guffaw I’m sure they could have heard it back at the Gazette if anyone had been there. “What? You’re pulling my leg.” I had always hated both of them but I could have sworn they hated each other more.
“I swear to high heaven, it’s true, and they’re apparently happy.” He seemed to be laughing, himself, now.
“That’s so— oh they de—”
“—deserve each other, yes.”
“I thought he was a friend of yours?”
“Eh. He was. Doesn’t mean he’s not a dolt.”
Then a memory hit me and I guffawed all over again. “Oh sweet pickles, I saw it! Back when we were kids, I had a vision, the Second Sight, old woman Letty mourning her dear sweet Les. It was so ridiculous I brushed it off but here it’s gone come to pass anyway! Well, ostensibly it will, once she’s old.” He was watching me suddenly kind of sadly. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot you don’t like talking about The Sight.”
Now, you might be asking yourself, what the heck am I doing apologizing to a fella I wanted to stab five minutes ago? That’s just the problem with Alexander. He’s so easy to talk to. We fall into a rhythm and then we’re off. The magnet was already starting to flip.
“No, actually,” he said. “That’s the thing, the main thing, I wanted to talk to you about. The Second Sight. Visions, psychic connections, all that mumbo-jumbo I used to wish you’d just shut up about.”
“It is? What made you change your mind?”
“The war.”
I nodded sagely. “Of course.”
“You never asked me what happened to my leg.”
“I assumed it was a war wound. Didn’t want to push you about it.”
He took a deep breath, indicating I’d been right not to push, but he was going to push himself now, anyway. “Shell. Hit the trench. Incinerated my whole squad. There I was, bleeding out, couldn’t move, just watched everyone around me get pulverized. I knew I was a goner, I just started crying, crying out for somebody, anybody, but I knew in my heart of hearts there was one person I needed to see most.”
My whole darn self went cold, and it wasn’t just the horror of his story. “Oh?”
“You. So I called for you. And you came.”
“And I came,” I breathed. The horrific visions came flooding back into my mind before I could stop them.
“I was probably hallucinating, but it felt like the Sight. It felt like a connection. You knelt beside me and held my hand and begged me to hold on, you would find me help.”
“I was so terrified.” The words fell out of me, hollowly, like I was channeling them. But I’ve done that before, and this was something else. This was me not wanting to believe what I was saying. “I was only a ghost. What if I couldn’t do anything to get anyone’s attention? What if I was just cursed to watch you bleed to death? But I caught the eye of a poor fellow who was teetering right on that cusp of the beyond. He shouted and pointed my way and his friends glanced over and thank heaven they noticed you. I don’t think they saw me.”
He looked at me, all knowing-like, and squeezed my hand. “They didn’t. They thought I was delirious. Maybe I was. But I did see you. You stayed with me for— for I don’t even know how long, I was in and out of consciousness, but you… stayed.”
“As long as I could. When I felt the connection starting to slip, I told you to hang on, that I couldn’t stay but that didn’t mean you were allowed to slip away, too, and then I…” I broke off.
“And then you kissed me,” he finished.
“I thought it was a dream.” That wasn’t true, though. I knew all along I’d been astrally projecting. It was just so horrific, and… that last part so against my vow of repulsion… I'd told myself it was a dream. I wanted to believe so hard it was a dream. Just a strange, random nightmare I could shake off the next day.
“And I thought it was a hallucination, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that’s when it all came clear to me. You are the only person I can even discuss these things with. You’re the only person, I mean aside from the guys who were there… I mean even if you were just a hallucination this time, I know you’ve Seen other things, horrible things, and I know we can talk about them. And— be quiet together, through them. And…you are the only friend I’ve ever had, male or female, who’s had any sort of depth that way and, you know, a broken ol’ war vet needs someone to come home to who’s a little less frivolous than Letty Shambaugh." He stopped walking so as to lean on his crutch with his arm, leaving both hands free to grab both of mine. "Listen. Jilting you was the stupidest decision I ever made, and that includes volunteering to go into a war zone when I already know very well I'm sensitive to haunts.” Despite myself, I felt a tiny smile slip out. That had been a stupid decision. He smiled ever so slightly himself before continuing, “And, on the off-chance I hadn’t been hallucinating, well, you’d kissed me, so maybe the real you would forgive me for not figuring this out sooner.”
The real me was certainly leaning that way, but I wasn’t sure I could admit to it quite yet. I laid his story out in front of me, mentally, pondering the implications. “So it’s been a few years, you’ve been thinking on this. A few years later and you still had to track me down at the Gazette just to tell me. Even if you didn’t know, for sure, if that really had been me on the battlefield…”
“No. But now that I do, it’s all the more obvious, isn’t it?” His voice got all breathy, hopeful again. “We’re connected.”
I touched each finger of one hand to each of the one of his that had been holding mine, watching how our hands mirrored each other, feeling the— okay, I’ll say it. The electricity that arced between us. “Like magnets,” I said softly. “Pull us apart—”
“We’ll inevitably come back together,” he finished.
What followed were some communications that can best be described as “blubbering,” which I will not attempt to transcribe here, both because I am not sure how, exactly, to transcribe them, and also to protect my pride. The blubbering was, I will have you know, coming from both parties in question, generally pertained to the extent of which we’d missed each other and promised never to leave each other again, and was punctuated and interrupted by a great deal of kissing. Which proved to be overenthusiastic on my part, as I’d forgotten Alexander wasn’t quite as well-balanced as he’d used to be, and we nearly toppled.
That faux pas snapped us out of it, and reminded us that the middle of the sidewalk was probably not the best place for a tearful reunion and/or confession of love, and that we were indeed attracting stares, so we found a nearby park and settled on a bench.
“So,” he said, reaching into a pocket, “I brought this, just in case, but I don’t know if you want this one, seeing as it’s used.” The size and telltale velor coating of the tiny box in his hand finished his explanation before I even opened it. The question he wasn’t asking in words had already been effectively answered, though also not technically in words, during our mutual blubbering session, so I skipped ahead to the words he was saying.
“So this was Letty’s?” I smirked a bit. The diamonds were ridiculously large to my eyes. She’d probably thought them quaint.
“She wore it, for awhile,” he corrected peevishly. “I wouldn’t say it was truly hers, looking back on it. But look, we can trade it for something new, your choice—”
I’d already slipped it onto my finger, held it up to twinkle in the light. “I don’t know, I’m kind of tickled by this. Forever a sign to the world that Letty lost it, now it’s mine. Is that petty of me?”
“A bit.” He chuckled. “But I kind of like it.” We gave in to a joyful pettiness that can only properly be appreciated by or allowed to people who’d just relived a war trauma together ten minutes before.
“But listen, seriously, though. You know my mother, so this shouldn’t be a surprise, but—my parents are not going to give us their blessing. And I need you to understand that I don’t give a” here he used a particularly colorful phrase involving the improbable acrobatics of a rat’s hindquarters that is not appropriate for me to relate in a family publication such as this. “I am done needing other folks’ approval! This is what I want, not what I think I should want!”
I watched his proclamation wryly. “I’m not sure that’s exactly what you meant to say, but I get the meaning.”
He let out his breath. “Right. I just want to be clear, though, what we’re dealing with. My mother clearly wanted a Letty type to join her family in a grand pageant, and she’s so— look, they will not be happy, and there’s even a good chance they might disown me. None of the Armsworth fortune is coming our way. Just me and whatever I can scrounge up with my own two hands. I just need to lay this all out in case it—” he stared at his folded hands “—in case it makes you change your mind.”
That was his mama’s influence, still coming out. She’d long ago planted the idea that any socially-nothing girl with any interest in Alexander must by rights be a gold-digger. And look, I admit that when you ain’t got nothing you do wanna take advantage of whatever you can get, but to be honest the money’d always been more of an obstacle between us than incentive. I might have felt even a bit relieved at this news. Not to mention we’d also have my sure-to-be top-notch salary as a cracker-jack reporter to live on. “Shoot, Alexander, I’ve been penniless all my life. Penniless with such a fine strapping specimen of a man by my side is definitely a step up for me.”
He blushed. I’d forgotten how prone to blushing he used to be. “Fine strapping specimen?” he asked incredulously. “Of a one-legged man?”
Gosh, he really was sensitive about that! I gave him the naughtiest look and said something I won’t repeat here as it was shockingly off-color, but I could say it to him, because he was my betrothed, and it made him laugh and kiss me again so all was well.
I came out of it thinking hard, though. “The bride’s family’s supposed to pay for a wedding, am I correct?”
“Now, Blossom, don’t let—”
“And I ain’t got a family. And you know yours ain’t gonna be chipping in either. You didn’t even like the whole wedding planning production the first time around—”
“But if you want a proper wedding, we c—”
“Who’d we even invite to a proper wedding? Miss Dabney?”
“She’d like that. We should tell her, at least.”
“She’d probably try to throw us a wedding herself. A proper English wedding.”
“What is a proper English wedding?”
“I have no idea, and I’m not sure Miss Dabney actually does, either.” See? It’s too easy to talk to Alexander. We’d gone off-topic. “My point is, my family’s all dead or lost, yours won’t come, so we don’t have to give any more thought to wedding planning.”
He frowned. “So you don’t want to get married anymore?”
“Didn’t say that. Just that there’s no point in planning a wedding. Whereas we can cross the street to that courthouse over there right now, ask them what we need to do, and get it over and done with.”
Alexander looked like he’d gone had a revelation. “I’ll be. Life is so much SIMPLER now that I don’t have to impress my mother.” Hand in hand, we approached the courthouse.
It turned out we were supposed to have at least one witness each before they’d marry us proper, so I went back to collect my roommates, who were very amused at the sudden turn of events. And Alexander actually dropped in on the office of his brother-in-law, Lowell Seaforth, who had indeed alerted him to my presence in town and had been offering him guidance on how to make up to a girl. Naturally his sister Lucille and all the kids ended up attending after all. I'd never reckoned she cared much for me in the past, but our little rebellion here seemed to divert her highly, and she promised not to say a word to their parents until we were safely on our honeymoon.
As it ultimately unfolded, Alexander's Paw wasn't even phased, and refused to let his mother disown him— us— in the end. Which is all well and good, but now my mother-in-law, having accepted that she can't be rid of me, has taken to trying to turn me into a Woman of Society instead. As I am regretfully often assigned to the Society Pages by my uptight male editors, this has served us both in ways neither of us intended: I can't help but try to make my Society articles as entertaining to myself as possible, and, to both our astonishments, all her High Society friends seem to find my writing entertaining as well. I am downright adored in some sectors of Society now (granted, there are others who can never forgive me, but they deserved it).
And we would have done just fine without them, as I'd told Alexander at the start. He had found a new manual trade— electronics— that doesn't require the use of his leg but keeps his hands and mind well diverted, that ended up a booming industry as more and more folks had their houses wired for the electrical appliances he built. And I, as I said, am a cracker-jack reporter, albeit one a little too often relegated to the Society Pages, but I do my best to wrangle a broader variety of stories to spice things up. Rarely, I even worm my way into coverage of crime and murder, which even my stodgiest editors have to admit I do have an uncanny knack for. But my favorites are the Travel pieces— I'll take any excuse to see the world. I always take Alexander with me, as he's doing well enough in his own trade to take the time off. He and I both have wandering in our blood, but, unlike my Paw, we prefer to do our wandering as a duo.
Anyhow, now that it’s all said and done, I knew all along this would happen, he and I taking on the world together. Fleeting moments of Second Sight, simple moments of Knowing, they’d teased me half my life, making all the periods of magnetic repulsion all the more frustrating. But the magnets are done changing poles, now. Oh, we most certainly quarrel, and bicker, and get on each other’s last nerves. But the pull had finally gotten strong enough that nothing can drag these magnets apart again. We are thoroughly stuck.