As before, this work is a collaborative roleplay effort between Behold and Confrazzled. Our little romp through the 1920's was intended first and foremost as an enjoyable experience for the two writers involved, trading paragraphs back and forth. Whether Fitzgerald would be proud or would roll over in his grave is as yet up for debate. As such, it does not read quite like a traditional short story, though we thought that, now that it is completed, some of you might enjoy the fruits of our labour as well . . .
Felicity tucked a tendrilous auburn hair behind her ear, escaped as it did from her combed uptwixt. She did not lament that the croquet mallets were laid aside, against the stonework bench, handles at attention. Neither, too, did their pair of chaperones, no less jovial where they sipped lemonade upon the ivy-trellised verandah. "Leave the heat for the young things," Aunt Rose had declared, withdrawing her fan to cool herself as she talked a little more with the Ingram fellow. As for Felicity Fitzworth and her groom-to-be? Well, a little more time passed with him, and him alone, would not fall amiss. And here, where they had slipped between the hedges of her grandfather's prized hedgemaze, why, there was scarcely a more private place in the whole of her grounds. Not where they two would be able to wander, at the least. How many times had the young woman hoped for just such an opportunity? Countless, though it never would have done to voice it so. But now that she found herself here, alone, with her fianc?, she had fallen quite bashful, seeming to have run out entirely run out of things to say. She raised her ice-blue eyes to study his face, take in the planes of it. There had to be something she could say to engage him, to
draw the interest of this man that she knew so little about, that she was to marry. ". . . The garden is lovely, no?" she began, at last, settling for the mundane and blinking up towards his face.
G. Harald Ingram had to agree, but felt it offered little distraction from the strange idea that had sprung up in his mind two weeks ago. An utterly mad, yet strangely compelling idea that could--might be the crowning piece of two years of hard work. The only thing he had to do was to convince Felicity. And in this matter, he wouldn't only be confronting her natural hesitance, but the social pressure exerted by three generations of Fitzworths. It was a gamble, for sure. If he didn't gain her complete confidence, she might well call off the wedding, something which would greatly displease the very man he was trying to prove himself to.
Harald had never been able to live up to his father's expectations, but managing to attract the attention of Henry Fitzworth, father of the delectable and very eligible Felicity Fitzworth--how he did it was something he didn't really understand himself--was one of the things that had put a smile on the old man's face. By asking Felicity
Fitzworth to take a leap of faith like this, he was risking a lot.
But risk only strengthened his convictions. No fortune had ever been made by playing it safe. Still, he felt unsure how he could possibly bring up the subject.
"I'm thinking I should've worn one of my linen suits." he said, pulling off the heavy, worsted charcoal stroller and gently folding it over his left arm. "I find the New York climate a bit too humid for my taste." An opening occurred to him then. A way to get some more privacy. "Say, let's go for a drive in my car. The wind blowing through our hair will be very refreshing."
She turned about a corner of the maze, confronting another wall of the little rounded emerald leaves. "Whatever climate did you belong to before New York?" she joked, her thoughts only after seizing on this latter suggestion. "Though your remedy . . . a drive?" her eyes widened, and locked on his in earnest, as she almost stumbled over the ruffled hem of her seafoam daydress. But she managed to catch herself, lest she look the fool. She had rather looked forward to exploring this maze with her fiancé; as yet it already added another dimension to this scene of her childhood. A certain aura of romance now seemed to surround that a sweet little fountain and marble bench at its heart. But a drive . . . her heart raced a little at the prospect. "I suppose I . . . I am not sure Aunt Rose would approve," she added, a little flustered.
"Oh, I'm sure she would." Harald replied. It was not at all uncommon for engaged couples to disappear from view for a few hours, with the tacit approval of their mutual chaperones, and Rose Hawthorp (nee Fitzworth), physically an older, stockier version of her niece, did not strike him as having Felicity's youthful naiveté. Certainly not judging from the way old Wallace Meyer, a long-time employee and friend of his father now tasked with far lighter and menial duties, complained about the attention she gave him. "Why can't you two hurry up a little and get married already? The woman is driving me crazy. Won't give me more than a minute at a time to read the newspaper inbetween her constant questioning and flirting." Harald had always thought Wallace to be very lucky to attract the attention of a younger, fantastically rich woman--at least as lucky as he was to have wound up with Felicity--but kept that opinion to himself. Still, maybe they just needed some time alone. He'd be happy to grant them some.
Felicity appraised him, weighing the options carefully, and unknowingly screwing up her face into some semblance of painstakingly-garnered courage in the process. This could be her chance, her only chance, to get to know her husband-to-be in the manner that she so craved before their nuptials. Aunt Rose, for her part, did not seem to mind too terribly, not with the way the lilting lightness of her laugher rang out in cadences from the vine-festooned verandah. Why, she would barely be missed. "Err, so long as we do not tarry," Felicity replied, ducking her chin shyly towards her chest. Her hand she slipped forwards, out towards his.
"Isn't this wonderful?" Harald shouted over the roaring noise, as the Packard roadster zoomed across the straight, narrow country roads of New York at a ludicrous number of miles per hour. The driving was a pleasant distraction from thinking of the difficult task ahead of him, pitching a proposal to Felicity that she might perceive as far, far more indecent than any she or her chaperone might have conceived. How could he convince her? How could he make it seem attractive? What could this stiff, wealthy bundle of carefully rehearsed virtues and family loyalty possibly want that he could offer her as an incentive?
And suddenly it occurred to him, and the internal logic of his plan formed into a course ahead as straight as the road that seemed to extend out from the bonnet of his car. "Would you like to drive?" he asked her, her incomprehensive glance telling him that the wind had drowned out his words at first. "Would you like to drive the car for a while?" he repeated himself.
"What, from the passenger seat?" Felicity replied, clutching the silk scarf he'd retrieved from the glovebox tightly to her crown, though like as not her hair would be well-rumbled beneath it. Not that she had much experience in such matters—the tails of the ivory scarf tatted out behind her, flailing wildly as any banner. A victory banner or a white flag? The girl couldn't help but wonder. "I could hardly!" she replied, flashing him a demure smile, somehow underscored with a hint of his recklessness.
"Yes, you could." Harald replied, the tires scorching against the gravel as he brought the car to a relatively sudden stop. "There's nothing to it, and I've read that even famous actresses from the pictures drive their own cars nowadays. If they can do it, certainly you can." He stepped out, beckoning the still blinkered-looking Felicity to slide over to his seat behind the wheel. "You don't have to go fast, or drive recklessly. You're the one in control."
Her china-blue eyes widened, round as those of any herbivore caught in the twinned headlights, watching as he rounded the hood, crossing the frame of the windshield to prop open the passenger door. Now that he moved beyond the pane of glass, Harald seemed to resurge into reality once more, and Felicity's breath fluttered all the quicker. Should she? Should she really? Something about his fixated gaze seemed to urge her to it. Perhaps the hint that . . . that this was the sort of woman he wanted. "I would . . . be the one in control," Felicity echoed, sliding over the rippling patent leather of the upholstery, her tone sliding into wonderment to vacate room for her fiancé. She reached her gloved hands—again, the matched ivory borrowed from the glovebox, so they fitted her a looser than they ought—to clasp the steering wheel, flexing about the foreign handlery. Her worried glance and wan smile flicked towards him again. "If you are sure . . ." she ventured, but there was a new shade of firmness in her tone.
Harald couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at the girl's baffled response. Honestly, she was a very pretty woman, but she had so little zest to her. Veronica, his sixteen year-old sister, had pretty much demanded he teach her to drive two years ago, when he'd returned home from University for the summer. Of course, Felicity was the product of generations of upper-class upbringing, trapped in a corset of good manners and appropriate, feminine behaviour. He was banking on the assumption that she just might resent that corset a little.
"Just pop the clutch--left pedal." he said, planting himself firmly on the passenger seat. Her clumsy, ineffective twist of the stick caused him to grab her hand and help her guide it into the right position. "That's it. Now lightly--lightly push the pedal on the right."
The pedal gave quicker than she expected, and the car jumped forwards in response, engine's purr stoking to a roar. The answering squeal that Felicity emitted was far from ladylike, but after that burbled a giddy, champagned laugh. "Ooh! Oop!" A blur of movement churned at the edges of her periphery, and a quick glance in that direction told her that the hedges lining the laneway drifted onwards. Apparently she had left her toe tamped on the gas pedal. She moved the patent toe of her other pump to the brake and the car jolted to a stop, something that caught the both of them unawares, and set their heads bobbing forwards like clockwork pendulums. "Golly!" she gasped, toe already removing itself from the pedal so that the car puttered forwards, veering gradually towards the hedges . . . 'The wheel,' she reminded herself, trying to correct it in the way that she saw the chauffeur do. Twixting it round like that could not be so hard, could it? She nibbled on her lip determinedly. One gloved hand passed over the other, slipping a little on the slick wheel, but with a slightly serpentine trail left behind she managed to get it in line, motoring along on the dusty road.
"Keep your eyes on the road," Harald remarked anxiously, but she was doing fine so far, really, eyes wide to take in the new impressions, feet seemingly already able to keep the pace steady and even. "Try to make a right turn there" he said, pointing at the crossing in the distance. "Slow down a little before turning, otherwise we'll tumble into a ditch, even at this speed." Slightly worrying though this perspective might be to him, Felicity certainly heeded his warning, slowing down immediately, roughly a quarter of a mile early. Her embarrassed glance met his caustic gaze, and she sped up again, the car now assuming a brisk, pleasant pace.
There was a reason he'd brought her here. His father's New York estate began just around the corner. The dark, wooden shack where he'd spent most of the last months working was the first thing they would pass by.
And there he'd have to show her. He'd have to ask her to do it. Best not to think about that for now. "How do you like it so far?" he bellowed over the sound of the engine. "I told you there was nothing to it!"
She glanced towards him rather anxiously, barely daring to tear her eyes away from the road. Oop! Her hands seemed to follow her eyes, so she fixated them far forwards, on the path. Jangling nerves jostled her tone. "I, ah, know that I am approaching nothing even remotely near to the speeds my chauffeur whizzes along at." In fact, she estimated it to be less than half, thrilling as even this pace felt to her. She veritably crawled about the corner, fearing as she did that she would wrap the coupe's elegant front about the trunk of a tree. What would he do if she wrecked his lovely car? Certainly he would not call off the engagement, but it would be . . . uncomfortable, nonetheless. But driving a car, like this? It felt marvelous, daring in a way that she had not expected, and her elusive little smile took firmer root. She risked another glance in Harold's direction—this time wavering only a little upon the road—to try to catch his expression. "Your family's estate is about here, is it not?"
"Yes, it is. In fact, I do have something to show you there," he replied, swallowing a little before adding the cincher "Something I've been working on for a long time. I want you to be the first to see it." And indeed he did. He'd never felt that he could confide in her, had never been certain that she'd understand his hopes and dreams. But on the other hand, she was his future wife. And he needed her support and cooperation.
"Well, I would certainly love to see it," she replied, licking her lips distractedly. A little shiver of a thrill rippled through her, causing her very hairs to stand up on end, even as she followed his patient directions to pull the car far enough over so that it was not quite resting in the ditch, but that another car could pass abreast it, on the road. Her hands moved more confidently, if a little aquiver with the excitement of the entire scenario. "Should I, or . . . ?" She fumbled with the keys, not quite managing to extract them from the car, before leaving them dangling where they were and opening the door of her own accord rather than waiting for the chivalrous gesture Harald would surely have extended. Gracious, where were her manners?
"First, before I show you, a question." he said, standing before the shack. She wouldn't understand the contraption without context, without understanding why he built it. "How do you see our future together? What do you see yourself doing, what do you think I'll be doing?"
She rocked from one foot to another on the carefully-tended turf. The words came out slowly, after some time, unsure as she was as to what she could say. But, if he were willing to extend himself on such tenuous footing, as well . . . "I know what I would like but I suppose . . . I suppose that would largely depend on you." She pursed her lips, before continuing. "I have dreams, like any girl, though . . . I would like to be friends, at the least. I suspect that I have read a little too much Keats and Byron for my health," she added, with the shade of a joke. The pause spanned pregnant and awkward before her stilted words shattered it again. "I do feel honoured that this is
something that you are willing to share with me, and I hope that . . . in the manner of companions, we are able to share more such secrets."
The reply gave him pause. Of course she had dreams of her own. Who didn't? And considering the way he was playing this, and what he was asking her to do, maybe he should listen to them first. Maybe it would give him a handle that would help him convince her to do it. Or maybe it'd give him a warning that he shouldn't even bring it up. And besides, considering the risks he would ask her to take for him, she deserved to be taken seriously.
He walked over to where she stood, leaned against the door of the car beside her. "Tell me a little about your dreams." he began.
"Dreams about, well, us?" she blushed, suddenly unable to meet his gaze, the toe of her shoe invisibly tracing figure eights beneath the hem of her pale green dress. "Nothing marvelously unique, really. Schoolgirl's flights of fancy." Her heart beat faster. But he had asked her . . . Like as not there would be no better time. "I had hoped for . . . a husband with whom I could share a language of secret jokes and frequent smiles, an easy company and camaraderie. Someone who could not hesitate to confide in be about any matters and . . . one for whom I was a central figure in the life of, rather than an addendum. A man for whom I could spend my life beside, rather than behind. While I know well enough that Tennyson's knights no longer gallivant about on their white chargers, well, perhaps the knights of the Twenties prefer white coupes?" She smiled up towards him, to share in the little joke. "As for dreams for myself, I am to be married, and, well . . . I am to be married." She shrugged. The remainder of her words were superfluous, for surely he knew the ins and outs of the unspoken rules for 'their calibre' of folk just as well as she did. She was to be married and Felicity well knew that as a dutiful daughter and bride she would lay aside her own lumpishly-formed dreams and take her husband's into her heart.
G. Harald Ingram stifled a sarcastic smirk, chided himself. This was his future wife!--not by choice for either of them, no, but Tennyson or or any other folly, it would not do to make light of her feelings, even to himself. Besides, were his own feelings any less childish than those of a five year-old boy dreaming of gaining his father's respect? What was he, other than a child playing at being a man?
"I think that's very noble," he began. "And I'm honored to be given the chance to live up to your expectations. But let me tell you of my dream, and you may think it no less of a fancy." He licked his lips, trying to think of a proper way to phrase things. "You see, my father raised me to believe that a man should be in charge of his own fortune, and earn his own place in life." A wry smile crept into his expression. "Of course, he also made sure that neither I nor my sister would have to work a single day of our lives, nor want for anything.
"So there's a reason I went halfway across the country to study Mechanical Engineering. I do think that the progressing mechanization of menial labour will be the main source of new fortunes in this century, and I do intend to be a part of it." A long sentence. He paused for breath. "I've even made an invention of my own. It's in that shed. And if--if it works out, it'll play no small part in our future together.
"You think that husband and wife should confide in each other, and I agree." he said, walking towards the shed's door. "I've not yet shown this to anyone."
"At twenty years of age this is hardly a new century," Felicity replied conversationally before she weighed on her tongue's words. Such frivolity in response to a revelation of his spirit, she chided herself inwardly. "But . . . an invention of your own? I would be honoured to see it." A little flutter rippled through Felicity's gullet. Perhaps Mallory's knights fought gallant jousts and Shakespeare's fellows wrote the objects of their affection flourished sonnets. Perhaps this was the romantic gift of the modern man. As the creaking door swung wide, at lest wide enough to let a little of the daylight enter the dusty shed, Felicity's eyes grew round with wonder. "Wh-what is it?"
"This", he said, giving the wooden seat of the contraption a slight pat, "is the Ingram Mark II haircutting machine. Don't ask what happened to the Mark I, it's a long story." Motioning towards the gearbox behind the headrest, he continued his pitch. "It combs, cuts, trims, even styles hair to any specific style entered into it on standard Hollerith cards. It is quick, careful, and gets the same result every time." He paused for a moment. "If I can convince the right people will buy it, I'm sure it will take the world by storm."
Her calves seemed to seize up just outside of the little shed, and she could not force her feet forwards, by jove or by thunder. Strange, how those attractively-shining brass knobbles and the leather straplets. "The . . . right people?" Felicity replied, suddenly very, very conscious of the carefully-arranged heap of auburn curls crowning her head, and too shocked to say much else.
"The right people, the ones who bought the first cars, and the first Audiffrens. Our kind of people, Felicity." His lips were dry again. "And I've given it some thought, and I would very much like you to be the first to receive a haircut from this machine."
She seemed very, very hesitant. "It's perfectly safe." he said, "I've had my own hair trimmed by it for the last two months. And I've perfected the other hairstyle on a wigged dummy. The machine won't nick you, it's a mechanical impossibility."
"The . . . other hairstyle," Felicity echoed, a little more incredulousness seeping into her tone, slightly firmer where she had been merely wary. "I, ah, no," she took a step or two backwards, towards the car. "No thank you. It does not simply trim the ends,
does it?" she floundered, attempting to divert the conversation.
"It can." Harald answered his fiancée. "But it's instructed to cut a `bob'-hairstyle. A very nice one, I've even consulted one of the best hairdressers in New York about it."
She gaped. "A bob. A Castle cut. You want me to cut my hair into a bob."
"It's one of the most fashionable styles for women." Harald replied, putting special emphasis on the word 'the'. "All the actresses from the pictures wear their hair like in that style. And as I said, I've given it some thought."
"You have given it some thought. What precisely did that mean?" Her mouth was moving but the wooden words seemed disconnected from her, somehow. It was all that she could do to keep herself from raising her hands to clutch her uptwist defensively. As it was, they fumbled about her collar, as if they twined through the phantom of her nightly sleep-braid. "You have given thought as to the success of the machine, or the appearance of your wife with just such a, well . . ." she released her invisible braid to gesture vaguely towards the sinister-looking contraption.
"To be honest, I think you'd look perfectly lovely, and there's no need for cold feet. But do you know how many girls and women are just waiting to get a bob cut?" he replied, more feverishly now. "My own sister has been moping about it for months, but she's still unsure whether to do it. Now, if a woman of undisputable virtue and taste were to endorse such a haircut, I'm sure it'd clear away all her doubts. She looks up to you, Felicity, and many women older than you do as well. If you were to do get your hair bobbed, you'd be an instant role model to many of them."
"I love my hair," Felicity replied curtly, reflexively, lips drawing into a little closed bow.
"And you'll love it even more when all the guests at the wedding look at it in envy, and your bridesmaids ask you where you got your hair cut like that. You'll love it even more when, in two months, you'll go on a drive towards town, and people treat you like a movie star." Harald soothed, his mind working feverishly to try to make the prospect attractive to her. He had a suspicion that she'd probably willingly submit to the machine's care if he asked her to do it for him, but he wanted more than that, right now. He wanted her to tell him he was right, to confirm his crazy plan.
"No. I love MY hair. Not Irene Castle's or Clara Bow's, but mine. And not for the attention that garners. Had you ever given a thought to how I had pictured my own wedding? Bobbed hair did not feature, you can bet your bottom dollar." She licked her lips, hands curling to fists at her sides. How dare he? How dare he ask something like this of her? And then, to offer such . . . patronizing platitudes!
The fierce response startled Harald. It seemed this soft, pliable girl had some unsuspected fire to her. Part of him worried. If he went too far, she would call off the wedding, and that would be bad. But part of him felt he'd hit a nerve. Part of him enjoyed seeing her flare up, the revelation that this little porcelain doll had red blood after all. Part of him, the self-destructive part, pressed on. "You don't love your hair, you love your little cocoon of rules and manners. You're afraid, and not just of this haircut."
"It . . . it is not your place to judge. I am not a rebellious gir—daughter," she corrected herself rapidly, not wanting to give him this point to seize hold of, for she certainly was not playing the part of the complacent bride. "It is I who shall be fielding the glances, the snide remarks from the ladies at the country club. You may wish me to play the sheep in wolf's clothing, but I have no such desire. I do not want to appear as such." A point that was mostly true, but she quickly squelched any trace of indecision in her tone. This—this was not her long-cherished dream. "I love my hair." Wholly true.
All caution thrown into the wind now. Harald felt he was on to something, even though his chances of convincing her to cut her hair seemed to have dropped to nil. "I am your fiancé, and it is my place to judge. You said you wanted camraderie, friendship. I don't think you ever wanted anything more than to marry a rich, disinterested heir, so that you could continue to live your blissful, innocent life in peace. Now it turns out your husband-to-be is an entrepreneur who might actually demand more from you, you chicken out."
Her jaw snapped shut with a sharp click, hands braced on her lips in a rather unladylike fashion. "How can you presume to know what I desire? Mere moments ago you were regaling me with tales of how much I wanted to look like the starlets in the pictures. I don't think YOU want anything more than to be married to a fag-dragging, gam-waggling flapper."
Having his own argument thrown back at him made him realise how unfair he'd been to her. For a moment he stood speechless, unable to dispute the accusation, however misguided it was. And then he spoke, less hurriedly, less emotionally. "I want to be married to a wife who will support me, who will help me run the business, who likes the idea of having money of her own rather than having to tip-toe so not as to lose the family inheritance." he sighed. She didn't understand. "Felicity, it's not about the bob, or about rebelling against our families. I'm a loyal son, but I also don't want to spend the rest of my life being bound by my father's wishes because I live on his dime. If you don't understand that, then, maybe . . ."
Felicity drew her own series of deep breaths, feeling her temper cool somewhat as her fear—for that is what it truly was, little as she wanted to admit it—abated somewhat. "I can understand that, I think. I believe," she corrected with words measured and soft. "I just . . . there shall be plenty of time for that after the wedding. At least give me this." When had her mind changed? Perhaps for him to cool his heels. In any event, somehow through the course of her turmoil and dialogue Felicity's own muscles had slackened, arms losing their tense posture and feet, somehow, finding their ways forwards. Closer to her husband-to-be.
"After the wedding? What would be the point?" Harald replied indignantly. "Your haircut would receive a passing mention in Broadway Brevities, perhaps, certainly not the any respectable newspaper. You'd have sacrificed your locks for nothing. But a Fitzworth appearing like a flapper on her own wedding, yes, that'd be scandal enough to reach the real news. And I have an arrangement to present my machine three days after, on the National Convention for Machinery for the Twentieth Century. Journalists would be fighting with each other to interview you, and to see the machine that bobbed a Fitzworth."
Regarding him quite agape, she had passed through so many shades of emotion in such a short while. It seemed she changed gears as swiftly as the coupe. Now, Felicity fought to keep herself from trembling. It was some moments before she could speak again. "Well, this is a fine position to put me in," she said at last. "And just when had you planned on telling me this?"
Harald looked at her with puzzlement "I'm telling you now." he said, but it'd begun to dawn on him that he was presenting her rather unfairly with a fait accompli. In his imagination, she'd been either a willing accomplice, overawed with his work and eager to bob her hair, or porcelain all the way through, cold, hard and unforgiving.
He hadn't really expected this.
"I," she gulped, "I need time to think about it," she responded, lifting her chin to exercise her dignity, and unknowingly causing the sunlight to scintillate especially from the wavecrests of her auburn locks. She picked a few steps towards the gleaming coupe, tossing a few more rather cold words over her shoulder. "Take me home, please."
"Of course," Harald answered, although he suspected that he would've been more relieved to hear an outright refusal. "I'm sure our chaperones are waiting for us." That's what they'd say, at least, rather than admit annoyance at having their time alone cut short. He didn't ask her to remain discrete about his dishonerable proposal.
Partly because he trusted Felicity never to bring up something so inappropriate of her own accord, and partly because he felt he wasn't entitled to it.
As the roadster flew over the gravelly country road, his mind was in turmoil, filled with the large words about marriage and obligation that had spilled out of his own mouth just minutes earlier. He'd asked her to sacrifice; what, in turn, could she ask of him? What was as important to him as her hair was to her? A heavy, undefinable obligation seemed to hang over him, a dark storm cloud on this sunny day.
As the furlongs flew behind them, Felicity had expected the turmoil to abate. However, as her gloved hands seethed in the seafoam expanse of her lap, rising occasionally to fidget with the securely-wrapped folds of the headscarf and ensure the ends were tucked in appropriately, she realized more and more that the compounded physical distance from the machine did not equate to emotional distance. It wasn't fair for him to ask this of her. Not on any plane, planet, or . . . it just wasn't! This was HER wedding, the day she had dreamed of since she was a little girl! But then, logic told her, this was his wedding too. He possessed his own dreams that surrounded the date. "I . . . I'm sorry to disappoint," she said at last, not even raising her eyes to the road, fixated as they were on the fingertips of her gloves. She certainly dared not look to him. "I . . . had not expected that you might have such firm ideas about our wedding. Dreams," she corrected.
Of course, he didn't really. He'd never given his wedding much thought, certainly not to the extent Felicity would have. "I uh . . . I'm sorry to ask this of you. Whatever you decide, I'm in your debt for hearing me out." he replied, awkwardly shouting the words over the sound of the engine. "If you do choose to go along, you have but to name the way in which I can make it up to you."
Perhaps it would have been fitting to demand that he sculpt HIS hair into that of some ludicrous male equivalent of a topiary, or to garb himself in the attire of some shady bootlegger or torpedo. Something to offset the ridiculousness of HER proposed appearance at this momentous event. However, Felicity considered no such thing. Instead she chewed on her lip, thoughtfully. Could this be the opening that she had not even dared to hope for? And there was still the question of the cost to her, which was still perhaps too dear. No, there was no way that Harald, well . . . no. She couldn't. Yet the words rushed from her mouth before she could halt them. "What I would ask—what I dare not ask—would take far longer than a bobbing, and would require far more than the sacrifice of a day." Felicity could hardly believe that she waxed so bold, and she still could not meet her fiancé's gaze. As he yet navigated the laneways, perhaps that was for the best.
At last, the dark cloud seemed to be taking shape. But she did seem to be willing to do it, at least. The question remaining was what it was worth to him. "That, in itself does not discourage me," Harald replied. "Tell me more."
Her hands writhed in time with her syntax. "As you know, I graduated from Saint Angela's Academy a few weeks ago." Common enough knowledge. Even her mother and her father knew. "With a job offer. Whichmostcertainlyyouwerenotawareof," she gushed, blushing fiercely. Take a deep breath, she urged herself, then resumed. "A seat in an orchestra. The orchestra of the New York Metropolitan Opera. The Met.
So it would not be terribly far from home. Our home," she corrected herself again, flushing an even deeper scarlet, before risking a glance at her fiancé. There. She had said it, and she could hardly believe it. And her mouth still ran on. "Mr. Bernoulli—that is, my music teacher—always said that I had promise, and, well, I suppose the director came to one of our school recitals, and, well . . . heard my clarinet solo. I dared not . . ." But then, she had dared, hadn't she? And rambled, too. Somehow she managed to catch her breath, and her tongue, once more.
The tires scorched the gravelly road once more, as the car ground to a halt. "A job offer?" he said. "Does your father know?" He tried to get a handle on the idea as he slowly began to grasp the implications. "Your clarinet playing is quite lovely" he admitted, although he'd never had an ear for such matters. "But you'd miss out on a lot of parties in the evenings. Not to mention the rehearsals." he began, only vaguely aware of the amount of time those would take. A wife unable to accompany him on social functions, returning home on evenings long after her husband would've gone to bed. It'd be scandalous, even when looking past the prejudices held even against musicians of good repute. He smirked. About as scandalous as turning up bobbed on a wedding, perhaps, or maybe a little more. And she did love music, with a depth that he couldn't really fathom.
"Oh, I wouldn't DARE to miss out on rehearsals," she replied unthinkingly, lapsing into the alternate realm of her dream surprisingly swiftly. "And no, my father does not know." Reality resurged once more and Felicity hung her head. This dream really was the stuff of fancy. "I . . . uh . . . sorry. I recognize the preposterousness of it," she mumbled, clasping her hands, still at last, in the confines of her lap. Good girl's hands.
"So this would be a trade, then? Your embarrassment for mine, an eye for an eye, a dream for a dream?" Harald suggested, his voice suddenly quite loud with the roar of the engine gone. "Preposterous. I will not have it."
"It was not intended . . . quite like . . . sorry," she murmured.
"I won't have it because it'd never have occurred to me to object to it," Harald said, enjoying the false footing he'd put her on. "I can't trade you a favour that was yours even before you asked it."
"You are certain? You are really certain?" eyes fixated on him, shimmering feverishly like the surface of some icy lake.
"I absolutely am," Harald lied. Why was he throwing away his bargaining chips like this? On some level, he could sympathise with Felicity's situation, of course, so similar, yet so different to his own. And maybe a show of generosity would make her more amenable to go along with his plans. But a more subtle truth, unspoken, unthought even, lay at the back of his mind. In the half an hour Felicity and he had argued, he'd started to derive a simple, but honest satisfaction from seeing her grateful smile.
A lump formed at the back of her throat, and she found some difficulty in forcing her voice out around it. "Then I suppose we had best turn the car around." To head towards her shearing. That part, she could not find the voice for. It seemed too brutal, too surreal as yet.
"You know, your aunts, your uncles, the people at the country club, they're going to speak ill of you, being a musician. The bob will be forgotten in a month or two, by comparison." He picked up a lock that had fallen in front of her eyes, brushed it out of her face. She looked at him expectantly, but he didn't quite know how to finish the sentence he started. Finally, he stammered a muted "Thank you", and brought the Packard's engine back to roaring life.
"The bob shall be the cincher, I expect," Felicity replied in a quiet, tightly-reined voice, for she did not trust herself else. "Your hopefulness is touching." Her eyes were fixated straight ahead, but they barely noted as the fence posts, trees and bushes arced from one side of the windshield's frame to the other. And then, approaching her and flying past, even less noted. And her tongue stilled silent under the weight of the mantle of this new responsibility. Never had her hair felt so heavy. Felicity remained
mute as the car's motor halted, leaving a yawning silence as Harald came about to her side of the car, swinging the door wide for her. Mute as she followed him meekly into the shed, and he flicked on the incandescent electric bulb. Mute until he spoke, at last.
"Take a seat" he said, pointing towards the simple wooden stool in front of the machine. "I'm afraid there's little comfort for the posterior in this version, but I assure you the cutting itself should be quite smooth." he said, pride in his creation overtaking the doubts still lingering in the back of his head. "Try to sit up straight, dear, and try to hold your head still while I fasten the strap.
"This is just to make sure you don't move your head too much while the cutting is taking place", he explained, while he loosely clasped the single leather band around Felicity's neck. "It won't ever nick you, or cut you, but it might not cut an even style if you do. Now all we need is a towel, and I coincidentally happened to bring a few in the car. I'll be back in a moment . . ." And with those words, he left Felicity alone in the harsh, long shadows of the electric light.
It was something akin to trepidation that plunked her upon that bench, though its hard planes did not, perhaps, feel hard enough. The entire experience felt rather surreal and her head was awhirl, spinning with it all. Not even to mention the frantic racing of her heart. It was like . . . it was like the dreams that some performers complained of. Her own dear friend Margy had been plagued with them—envisioning an upcoming concert, of great acclaim, and taking the stage only to discover that she knew her music perfectly, but she had overlooked one essential detail—her clothing! And poor dream-Margy took the stage, stark naked, greeted by riotous laughter where there should be applause. Only in Felicity's dream-blurred reality, she would not be naked of garments, but hair. "Wait I—"
Felicity shattered her silence, incredibly conscious of the piled coils and pinned curls still atop her head, but mustered her words too late. "Do we need to unpin it?" she asked when she heard the first cue of his first returning footsteps.
"Yes, we do," Harald replied "but it's easier to wrap the towel around your neck while it's still up." His hands unfurled the great white towel, drawing it around and up her upper body, folding it to close around Felicity's slender neck, already clasped as it was in a high, sea-green lace collar. "I'm not sure how to fold this into your collar, I've really only done to myself so far, and I wore an old sweater to make it easier. On the other hand, it would be a shame to get hair onto that lovely dress of yours."
She gulped, meeting his eyes again, hands already fidgeting below the terrycloth of the towel. "I, ah . . . I am not sure that I am too familiar with the mechanics of your machine, but perhaps . . . perhaps if you undo the top few buttons, we might fold it down and tuck it in?" She paused, blinking up at him in hopes of signs of recognition in his intensely intent face. "I do have one other sort-of request. Do you think that you might . . . unpin it for me?" she asked, again staining to a florid hue. "Perhaps running your hands through it? It is something that I rather looked forward to." On our wedding night. The words hung unspoken in the air, as Felicity's stomach continued to somersault.
Harald raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as he carefully unbuttoned the lace collar of Felicity's dress, carefully folding the filigreed cotton flat to create an wider, more forgiving collar. He hastily tried to suppress the idea of unbuttoning more than his fiancée had suggested, the image of a sea-green dress unwrapped to reveal slender, white shoulders suddenly popping into his mind with amazing clarity. Instead, he decently covered the area of his sudden interest with the white towel, wrapping the coarse-but-soft cloth tightly around Felicity's neck.
There was a certain intimacy to touching her like this. It occurred to Harald that they were husband and wife to be, that they were even expected (certainly by their chaperones) to do some elementary exploration of each other, an open secret that was never spoken of. Yet unfastening the first tortoiseshell clasp felt positively indecent, maybe even more so than his previous urge to unbutton her dress. Auburn locks unravelled slightly, the first time he'd seen the perfect crown of hair she always wore in less than perfect state. The second, then the third clasp was pulled out, both making a soft landing on the sandy floor of the shed, and suddenly her hair fell free, turbulent ruddy waters of whirlpools and eddies now supported by nothing other than inertia. He'd have ran his hands through it even if she hadn't asked him to, using his fingers as course combs to straighten out the mass of curls. It was, of course, necessary before he could feed it to the machine, but there was also a certain mesmerising intimacy to the act. Had he ever touched her before today, beyond the gentle handholding custom had expected of them? He couldn't think of a single moment when he had.
She couldn't help cooing softly as she turned her head up into the caress of her fianc?'s fingers, raking furrows through her locks clear to the moon-pale canvas of her scalp. Releasing a little shiver as he dropped the still-unbroken coil to thwack against her back, the weight of it startling a little. It dawned on her as a great shame, to know that this potential implement of intimacy, with all its myriad options, would be stripped from her before it could ever serve its purpose. That is, beyond these few sweet strokes. "I suspect," she fumbled rather awkwardly, "that you had best bid it goodbye." Felicity herself was already sort of carrying out that motion, fiddling with the tassel of a single curl that had flopped into her lap. Felicity's hair most certainly would not be worming itself into her lap after this point, not unless its ends had been deliberately snipped off, and landed there. The thought saddened her, and spurred more digestive acrobatics.
"I'm becoming more and more reluctant to," Harald said, not pausing the now barely-functional stroking for a single moment "I'd love to be able to do this after our wedding." Maybe it was a little clumsy, but the kiss his lips suddenly made against his future wife's forehead seemed so very appropriate now. "Just say the word, and we forget about this." he whispered.
"I . . ." she blushed, "I had been thinking the same thing." Too fresh? Perhaps entirely too forward, but from the expression on his face, Harald did not seem to mind. Insomuch as the strappery would allow, Felicity tipped her head upwards, managing to brush the cusp of his chin with her lips. She could reach no higher. 'But--' the word hung in the air, and Felicity could not bear to be the one to voice it.
"But nothing." he replied, silencing her with a soft kiss on the mouth she seemed to offer to him. "Although I'm sure I'd enjoy running my hands through your short hair just as much."
She melted into the kiss, and it whipped her beating heart into a wilder frenzy. It was . . . everything she had hoped, in a lot of ways, and seemed, could it be, almost sweeter for its forbidden nature? Though when they parted, she was no more ready, or sure. The only thing sure for Felicity is that she would not likely be ready or sure. "Do you like short hair?" she asked, meekly.
"I do find it visually appealing, I suppose," Harald said. "I'm trained to think in streamlines, and efficiency. Bobs have a certain elegance to them, like clipper planes and sports cars." his own explanation surprised him. "When I was designing this machine, it just seemed to fitting to make it cut bobs, as if the style itself had been the product of careful engineering. I think it'd suit you excellently."
"I, ah, oh. I guess for this machine, it does seem fitting," she fidgeted further, beneath the creamy cloth of the towel.
"But, some other time, perhaps", he said, unfastening the leather strap that constrained her neck movements, stealing another kiss in the process. "Our chaperones' patience is unlikely to be limitless." He paused for a moment, giving the outward impression of thinking when nothing really flowed through him at all. And then he undid his recent work, reclasping the leather choker around his fiancée's elegant neck. And then he backed off, the sudden space in between them cold compared to her radiant presence. His hand found the red-knobbed lever, the one he'd operated so often trying to work out the kinks, and with a simple pull, the machine sprung to life, the combustion engine powering it puffing like a car, almost, while the mechanical arms unfolded from the gearbox at the contraption's headrest.
The roller extended from underneath, a fast-spinning coil covered with vacuum-formed rubber knobs, soft, pliable fingers combing out Felicity's hair with swift and uncaring efficiency. Two similar rollers, the heaviest and most complex parts of his work, extended at each side of her head, each working hard to feed the bulk of Felicity's hair to the sharp blades inside. "Last chance to say no!" he bellowed, although he very much doubted that she could hear him over the infernal racket produced by the poorly vibration-insulated contraption.
No, their patience would not be limitless, which made the timing all the more urgent. Felicity could respect that there was a window to be had, and a very narrow one and a very narrow one, and this she could handle very well logically. However, logic did nothing to assuage the roiling of fear within her, churning her belly as surely as the strangely-knobbled bars—the ones she could only barely glimpse from her periphery—stroked through her hair, from her scalp to ends. So had Harald's fingers, echoed a distant part of herself. Now Harald was saying something, for his lips were moving, and some other variation to the raucous vibrations reached her ears. She couldn't tell what it was, so it was all that Felicity could do to nod mutely. Yes, she understood that this was necessary, for his career. She would proceed.
He twisted the red knob, the safety that constrained the twenty-seven mechanised blades mounted at various places in the machine, the cutting began, the carpets of hair already funneled into steel pipes now swiftly severed by the in-mounted knives, a careless, preliminary severing that removed the bulk of Felicity's long, auburn tresses in two seconds flat. That part, so far, had been simple, the engineering principles applied hardly more complex than those found in a mid-19th century harvesting machine. Now, three more cutting arms unfolded: small, handle-less scissors mounted on three-jointed steel arms as thick as pencils. The rubber rollers, too, changed, folding themselves closely against his fiancées head, cold, rubber tips flopping against her scalp as they sent the bulk of her now-severed hair flying upwards.
Lengths of ruddy hair rose to half-mast, reaching out to the side of the machine, and so too did the teensy hairs on the nape of her neck, which prickled with apprehension moreso than the generated breeze. For a moment that seemed to span into a reckless, dizzying infinity, the familiar cape of silk hovered about, brushing part her face, her arms like a flock of butterflies, rather mirroring the flock that seemed to be flurriously alit within her abdomen. Felicity felt her hair tugged about her, somehow partitioned into a slew of streamers now, outflying from her head at all angles into the narrow mouths. Two she could glimpse if she turned her head slightly, catching them from the corner of her eye. And then, a sharp SHIIIINCK!
A ruthless sound. No turning back, and she knew precisely what it signaled before she felt the dizzying lightness to her head, saw a few newly-severed locks swing before her face before some other portion of the machine teased them up and away from view once more. "Perhaps we might halt here?!" Felicity petitioned, a note of desperateness creeping into her tone. She called out very loudly, so to be heard over the cantankerous clanking and feverish whirring of the greedy machine. "Surely this is a suitable demonstration?! . . ." she gulped. "We can implement the half-bob as a trendy style!"
The machine, however, had its own ideas as the prehensile mechanical scissor hands assumed fixed positions at about five inches from Felicity's scalp. And they began to cut. Not like ordinary scissors, but at a tempo dictated by the pistons and gears of the machine they were attached to. Chunks of auburn hair flew across the room, suddenly free to obey the centripetal force the rubber comb-rollers had imparted on them. Harald, who had already taken a step back, mused that this process was still quite messy.
The rollers moved downwards, and the scissors moved along with them, their blades moved slightly closer Felicity's head, its rate of descent described, Harald knew, by the derivative of a Taylor series he had used to model one of the sleek curves of the bob cut. There was something elegantly mathematical to the style. Modelling Felicity's now almost unimaginable mass of twisting curls would at the very least have required a sixth degree series.
The series of swift slices felt like nothing more so than Homer's flock of sirens tearing at her hair, or perhaps Wagner's harpies. Shinkshinkshinkshinkshinkshinkshink . . . The steel slice-chimings seemed to croon a cruelly discordant cadence, whicker-whispering none too far from Felicity's ear. 'And they are thusly eating my hair . . .' Felicity couldn't bear but also couldn't help but think, the thought settling a more paralyzing fear over her, for those silver whirring blades where approaching at an alarming rate, gobbling. Her eyes caught on a scintillating lock of hair, gleaming as it refracted the incandescent light and sailed through the air, and Felicity's eyes followed it, to where it landed on the Harald's very shoulder.
Harald. What was he thinking? And Harald—her eyes traced up his neck, settled on his face and tried to divine the expression there. Pity? Joy? Assessment of his machine? Simple impassivity? Why had he not reacted the barest fraction to her previous request? No time for guesswork, not really, as she cried out again, this time in a much louder voice, for she did not want to be misheard. "Can we halt it now?!"
The clearly-articulated request awoke him from his mathematical musings, made him remember that attached those emergant second-order curves was a person of flesh and blood. And she clearly was in some degree of discomfort.
He rushed towards a smaller, black lever, an emergency break that immediately decoupled the cutting machine from the engine driving it, the latter contraption's roaring sound seeming to rise in pitch as the gears and arms of the machine fell silent.
"Why, what's wrong?" he asked, hurrying towards her. Had one of the rubber rollers become stuck in her hair? Had the scissors cut her? He thought he'd solved that problem a week ago.
The young woman tried to lean forwards, to draw nearer to her fiancé so that she could hear him over the keening whine of the machine and also near to something human, something warm, something entirely other to the cold impersonality of metalwork and sparse wood. However, the straps confining her, as well as the firm grasps of the rubber-nubbed rollers. Though she struggled, Felicity was effectively immobilized. Escape also featured quite prominently in mind, escape from further chomps by the greedy blades, insomuch as she could preserve what little hair she retained. And, judging from the strands strewn across Harald's chest and haphazardly hung from the perceptible frame of the machine, that was quite little hair indeed. "It is done, yes?" Felicity asked, somewhat breathlessly, pleadingly. "It is short enough?" Surely. It had to be.
"No, it's not quite done yet," Harald replied, unable to suppress some annoyance in his voice at what he expected to be the cause for her alarm. "I thought you said there was something wrong?"
Felicity's bottom lip trembled slightly. "Th-there was," she replied, though initially surged relief had washed over her, now only slightly less nervous for the lack of flocked pointy implements descending upon her, for something in his tone indicated that there was little sympathy to be gleaned at this point. "I . . . it seems to be incredibly short and I had thought . . ."
"It's almost done." Harald smiled, trying to soothe his fiancée's distress. "Most of the bulk has been removed." That much was true, although it occurred to him that his choice of words was less than comforting "It's just a few more tiny snips, and then it will be over with." That, however, was a little white lie.
Most. The thought chilled her core so that her limb, her torso felt more wooden. Even her jaw seemed to creak as she formulated her unthinking reply. "I." What could she do? She couldn't very well ask him to reattach it, to knot it hair by severed hair to her head with firm little fairy-knots. Though she suspected, like as not, that her mother would attempt the same tack, or something of its close like. "I'm scared." Of what? Or her mother? Of her own reflection? Of the hush before the peas-and-carrots murmuring that would sweep through the church in a stark crescendo when everyone saw? Of her naked earlobes and even barer neck, and the uselessness of the three tortoiseshell clasps that Harald had taken and put . . . somewhere? Felicity wasn't entirely sure. But such an argument would likely find little purchase with Harald's cool logic. "Can we not simply halt here?" Felicity implored repetitively. "Your machine has cut enough to be, well, quite noticeable . . ."
"Noticeable!" the word echoed out of his mouth, carried by a laughter-like exhalation. "Yes, that it is," he agreed. "Honestly, if we were to stop now, you'd get all of the stares, but none of the envy. The cut simply isn't done yet." Harold said. Not to mention that the strange, uneven angles of the half-shortened hairstyle would do little credit to his machine's superb cutting abilities. "Just sit tight for a while longer." he said, cutting off any protests she might have, his hand almost wrapped around the breaking lever before he'd finished the sentence. The rubber rollers sped up again, and the scissors resumed their snipping, their pace quickening as the engine got back to speed. Only a few more seconds now, and the final stage would commence. He hurried back towards Felicity, aware as he was that the outcome of the haircut was somewhat dependant on this last fine-tuning measure. One that, so far, he'd found no mechanical alternative for.
"Hold perfectly still" he said, seizing her delicate chin between thumb and index finger. Slowly, gently he pushed it up, bringing her head into position for the final stage.
The steel-edged whirlwind about her resumed, quite suddenly, with herself once again at its eye. Why could one ever conceive of the eye of a storm as a safe, surrealistically calm place to be? Felicity herself could testify to no such thing. She began to stammer a reply, more a stuttered jumble of incongruous, mismatched vowels and consonants than anything coherent, but found herself silenced as her husband-to-be pressed his thumb firmly to her chin, and guided her head into position. Position for what, exactly? 'Husband-to-be for a flapper-to-be,' surged a thought, innocuous enough in its quaint rhythm but quite frightening once the young woman began to explore its implications. Unthinkingly, she tried to open her mouth once more, but found she could not, for he still held her jaw. And fidgeting, like as not, would be injudicious at this point. Felicity did not desire to find out just HOW injudicious. She tried, quite without effect, to soothe her panting breath and frantic heart, but her anxieties flared afresh as the new pitch as the contraption shifted into a novel gear.
The rollers on the side now retracted, and a fourth cutting arm swooped out of the gearbox behind Felicity's head, coming to a sudden halt before her Eyebrows. Again, the cutting started, razor-sharp blades moving ever closer to Felicity's forehead, snipping the ruddy tangles hanging in front of her face at an ever-faster pace. The other three scissors worked hard too, efficiently severing the remaining tendrils of hair that dared to hang to her chin, all of them propelled by the same chisel-profile pattern stored somewhere in Harald's iron creation. Locks didn't fly away, but they fell, one after another, a great mass of them, onto the white towel around Felicity's upper torso, her neck surrounded by a ring of tiny red sniplets in less than a minute.
Approvingly, Harald watched how his fiancée's locks now fell to a single straight line at lip-length, a line that seemed to meet the slight curve of her jaw at a perfect thirty degree angle. A thirty-degree angle that was present too in the gentle chisel-tapering tracing upwards. A perfect geometry that distracted him for long enough to miss the expression on his fiancée's face.
Were those? Oh, dear Lord, those were earnestly aiming right for her eyes, those sharp blades? Was his machine malfunctioning? Would those vicious fingers take her eyes as well as her locks?! No, no, Harald had tested this, he had . . . Oh, sweet Jesus—
And then, a black veil fell over those greedy snatchers as Felicity winced her eyes shut, and the slash-skimming of them as they swooped and stormed about her forehead became all the more terrifying for its mystery.
Trust. She had to trust him. Her lips were muttering the little mantra to herself before she knew what she did but the muffled mumbling was lost in the cacophony. Harald was there. He was right there. He would protect her person, even if that same sentiment did not extend to her crowning glory.
Her former crowning glory. Terror peaked again.
And at the back! Now that she had naught to go on but sound and touch, the skimmings of the blades there, tracing the odd horizontal furrow in her scalp, brushing occasionally at her neck ironically incited more hairs to stand on their ends there, ironically rushing their innocent selves to the slaughter. The genocide wreaked on her locks.
And then it was over, the three-jointed cutting arms following the footsteps of the rubber rolling wheels back into the opaque insides of the machine, well-oiled gears making a silent retreat as the engine powered down. And suddenly, there was nothing before Harald but a chair with a frightened little girl on it. A girl who looked very beautiful with her new short hair, save for the trembling lower lip that indicated she was on the verge of crying, if nothing else. It felt entirely natural to him to steady that lip by pushing his own mouth against it, as if he were balancing out the harmonic vibrations of a machine. A warm, salty tear rolled against his cheek, only a single one. "Don't cry now" he whispered, when he'd broken the kiss "You've been so brave. And you look beautiful".
Crying? Why, she hadn't been crying, had she?
But she had no chance to wonder on it, to reply even if she could have translated thoughts to speech. The press of lips-on-lips—a kiss, she recognized belatedly—gentle. Healing. Felicity was unexperienced in such matters but its palate spiced with the whiff of something further, something more meaningful, something spanning beyond the identifiable. It did not quite soothe her, could not, and as Harald pulled away he certainly could recognize that Felicity's eyes were stark-raving, roving wild. The china-blue saucers had been eclipsed, replaced with dinner plates set above that wilted rosebud mouth, and her skin had blanched to a pallor paler than alabaster. Yet she sat woodenly, perfectly still. "Yes, well, I am a bride, am I not?" She replied mechanically, as if he'd pressed another button, on his invention, and the skittish Felicity peering out from those dewy portals felt an inner jolt as none was more surprised than she at her own words and the bitterness she had not managed to squeeze from her tone.
"You certainly are." Harald replied cheerfully, quite unable to place the shell-shocked expression in his fiancée's eyes, the Great War having passed him by at a hair's length due to his age. There was a certain wild beauty to her now, strangely accentuated by the harsh, angular lines of the bob, something feral and almost dangerous, like a panicked cat cornered. "You just need to see it, that's all. Honestly, it's fine" Harald said uneasily, hoping to himself that her own visage would, indeed, break this scary state of mind she seemed to be in. "I brought one in the car," he said, already halfway through the door, again, forgetting to unclasp the restraining band around Felicity's neck.
"Well . . . uhh . . . I . . . wait . . ." Felicity stammered softly, but even though there was no longer any clanking of the haircutting device to drown it out, the whoosh of the shed door verily carried her whisper and one coherent word away. She did not want to see. She did not want to feel, she did not want to reach her fingers up and examine for themselves the sharp line of ends tapping insistently at her cheeks with the added breeze, the ones that she was fervently trying to convince herself were not real. Just an illusion, or the plume draping from a hat, or . . . No. It could not possibly be her hair. She could not, would not allow this to be real.
Hurriedly, Harald searched for the small hand mirror he'd put beneath the towels, finally retrieving it, leaving a jumble of terrycloth behind while he rushed back into the shed. Felicity would like it when she saw it. She should, right? For the first time, it occurred to him that she genuinely might not, that there might be more to her resistance than simply cold feet. An alternate future appeared before him, completely different from the one he'd pictured. A ruined wedding. A family in shock. His wife apathetic and disappointed rather than cheerful and happy, not able to answer questions from the press. And throughout everything, a strong sense of guilt at having coaxed her into chopping off her locks. She had to like it.
Felicity pursed her lips, eyes skimming away from that narrow, flashing pane of glass as she fought to prolong her dreamlike denial. No. She would not look.
He hadn't expected that. Or maybe he had. "You know, you can't run from it forever," he said. "Or maybe you can. You could run to your father, convince him to call off the wedding. I'll happily admit to forcing you to cut your hair." Harald spoke "I'll be disgraced, and when you're twenty-four, you'll have a chance to marry again, your hair grown out, to a true gentleman who'd never dream of asking you to cut your hair. Or allowing his wife to be a musician." He didn't really like the sneering tone in his voice, but nevertheless, he continued. "You're not a coward. You're a brave woman. If you want to play in the Met, you'll still have to deal with your father's disapproval. How can you do that if you can't even face your own reflection?"
"That is not what I meant. That is not what I want," she replied more surely, trying to shake her head but finding that the neck restraint still held her near-muzzled, kept her harnessed from anything other than the slightest head-shake which sent a fan of prismatic auburn hair whapping across her cheek, blurring a little before her eyes before it resettled perfectly in its former position. She tried to raise her eyes, for though she could not quite face herself (though that steady tap-tap-taping grated on her, eroding her barricades), Harald, certainly, she could. However, when she raised her eyes to meet his, they arrested themselves on something else entirely.
The face that peered back at her was beyond alien, and it took a moment to take in that the flapper shifted as she did. Startled eyebrows shooting upwards, chin tilting slightly left, restraint yanking it back to the right, and of course the selfsame spooked leap. A geometric frame for an elfin face, the usual soft curves carved harsh by the stark geometry of the fresh-cut frame of fringe and lip-length locks. Emboldened. Despoiled. Not the sweet rosepetal portrait of femininity she had striven so long to cultivate, but an insolent, boyish, brash flapper.
The mirror swerved for a moment in his hand, and flashed an image of her hair-strewn breast, criss-crossed with strewn ribbons of hair, before returning to show her sullen, solemn face once more, and Felicity felt her heart sink further. She had opened Pandora's box. Winched open a can of worms, and, well, as much as she hated it—yes, hated it, that word had not come to mind without just cause—it could not very well be stoppered up again. No use crying over spilt milk, or strewn hair. At least, not until the snide remarks came afly. "It is very precise," she managed in a measured tone. "Your machine is very effective." She paused, swallowed a throat lump. "I am sure that it will be a great success."
"I-I'm sorry" he stammered, the words of her restrained, carefully weighed assessment feeling like lashings against his eardrums. "So sorry. I thought you would like it once you saw it, I really did." The leather collar already unclasped, he pressed her close against himself, hugged her as if he would a small child that had hurt itself falling. His sister, once, when they both were very young. It was the only thing he could do, the only thing he could say. "I'll never put you through this again, I promise." he whispered, giving her a small peck on a forehead now stripped of the curtain that had hung before it. She felt strangely detached, eerily dried-out, even wrapped as she was in his arms. Warm arms? She knew not, though she reasoned so. Perhaps this, Felicity reflected, was rather what it felt like to sit in the eye of the storm. Violent mechanical winds on the side past, swells of disapproval and jeers on the one to come, and this . . . this moment seemed surrealistically unruffleable. "As you say, it would take until I am twenty four to grow out again. And, well, you still require your spokeswoman. Though I suppose . . . next time it shall not be so drastic," she tried to reason, disjointedly. Mostly succeeded. "You've got such lovely strong hair" he said, running his hand through it in much the way he'd done before the cut "I'm sure it'll look quite respectable again next year." his fingers touched her scalp again, ploughed trails through hair now far sleeker and responsive to his ministrations. "I don't know, before today, I was never really sure I wanted to marry. Now the idea of not marrying you seems indecent, unbelievable . . ." He kissed her again, "and you do look beautiful, even with a bob".
"Even with a bob?" she echoed somewhat meekly, the words bursting out of her, through the last vestiges of the lingering kiss before she could check them. But something curious was happening; something unexpected. "Ooh!" Felicity shivered deliciously as his hand skimmed over her scalp, playing her nerves as one might some musical instrument, and strumming her to tingle with a vibrato hum. Clearly more adeptly than she seemed to be with her prized clarinet. Every hair on her head stood on end, keen to find itself underneath or even parted away by one of his calloused fingers.
"Hmm, and see, it doesn't feel much different", Harald said, letting his other hand join in, happy to get a positive response out of her. Kisses seemed to follow each other naturally, like discharges between two charged metal spheres. His hands curved in and out of Felicity's locks, spiralling around her scalp. They could have fun with this. But their wedding night hadn't arrived quite yet.
"On the contrary," she veritably sighed, "it feels quite, QUITE different." But, strangely, not in a detrimental way. Those foreign locks that seemed to perpetually spring back to play at her cheeks teased at her like another set of fingers.
Harald gave her a curious look, but said nothing, grateful as he was that somehow, she'd found a source of contentment in these sensations. With a single swoop, he removed the white terrycloth cape, flinging the auburn curls on top of it in all directions. Uncaped, and arisen from her seat, Felicity seemed tall, almost willowy, her neck bare and slender without a stage of red curtains behind it. Buttoning up the high collar of her sea-green dress did not change this perception at all. She didn't look quite like a flapper, not with those clothes, not with her understated, lady-like make-up. But whatever she said, whatever she herself thought about it, she would turn heads, would have to brave stares of envy and admiration from now on. But first of all, of course, it was her father's ire she would have to brave. And in the mean time, she could--both of them could--use a pleasant distraction from the thought of facing the older Fitzworth. "You know, if you are going to be away from home all the time, for rehearsals and whatnot," Harald began "there's really no alternative to teaching you how to drive, I think. And there's no time like the present." Demonstratively, he jumped into the Roadster's passenger seat, giving her no chance to sit anywhere else than behind the wheel. "Wallace and Rose can wait. And, when they see your haircut, I doubt they'll even think of complaining about our being late as well."
Treading through the carpet formed by the hair she had so long found so precious, Felicity followed her fiancé into the sunlight. She smiled a lukewarm smile, but one that was thawing quite rapidly as yet. "What's the dalliance of another hour when compounded with, well . . . ?" she grinned a little broader, in earnest. "I shall not likely be punished any more for it." But thoughts of punishment slipped swiftly from her mind. So too did thoughts of the scarf standing by in the glovebox. She certainly need not worry about tangles with hair of such a length, not as she slid across the patent leather seats and grasped the wheel firmly once again. It felt right, not unlike certain things, and a certain fianc?. . "Now, you never did show me how to start this contraption . . ." she began to fiddle with the key, coaxing the coupe to a purr.
A prompt week later, a series of photographs were taken to chronicle what was quite obviously a lavish New York society wedding. A radiant, resplendent, and quite conservatively-dressed bride smiling shyly alongside her more stoic-looking, suited groom. Several of the photographs featured the party and families of the couple in question, in expensive concoctions both tasteful and trashy, though surely the most arresting feature in each of the photographs was the sleek, angular bob sported by the young bride. Standing alongside her in several photographs was her maid of honour, a schoolchum by the name of Margy who spent the entire rehearsal utterly flabbergasted and barely able to speak more than two words to her friend. She could not possibly conceive that her Felicity—modest, sweet, pristine little Felicity—could possibly do such a thing. Surely she would not do such a thing to her own locks. However, by the wedding reception she had certainly reconsidered her permission and she spent a good portion of the limousine ride home begging her parents to permit her to do just such a thing. Not far off in many of the pictures, dressed in an airy teal dress that certainly did the sepia camera lamentably failed to capture the vibrancy of, and that not resemble her namesake in the least, stood Aunt Rose. Her initial reaction, following Wallace's, had been one of amused feigned outrage, but it had changed to a more cautious disapproval when she learned it was nothing more than a sales ploy by the enterprising young groom. Still, with the couple clearly sharing a newfound trust, she could not bring herself to speak ill of their behaviour when her furious brother summoned her to account for it. Dick had been quite taken aback when she, at the end of his furious tirade, stated flatly that bob haircuts were quite appropriate for a girl of Felicity's age and standing, and that she'd get one herself had she been of more marriageable age. She hadn't thought of it, of course, but she had been craning her neck in the mirror, noting how its skin was some years away from going slack. She couldn't, could she? Well, not before her niece's wedding, at least.
Robert H. Ingram, a man of considerably less complex sensibilities, and, furthermore, wholly ignorant of popular culture, would've barely noticed the shorter haircut of his new daughter-in-law, had the guests not continuously referred to the outrage of her "getting a Bob". Inquiring as to what specifically made this outrageous, he learned that they weren't talking about him, but instead about that hair style young girls everywhere seemed to be wearing nowadays. He'd shrugged off his son's business plan, stammeringly disclosed a day before the wedding, as frivolous and wild, but when his own daughter, sitting in the pew beside him, had squeezed his hand and asked if he would mind if she would get her hair cut "just like that", he wondered if there might not be something to it.
Mrs. Fitzworth's face, for some reason or another, seemed to blur in many of the photographs that day, but in those that crystallized crisp, her characteristically gray eyes seemed clouded with more than a little sorrow. In fact, the wedding day had been as much a carefully plotted and tended dream for herself as it had been for her only daughter. Yes, she had envisioned lavish bouquets of roses, festooned lights strung above the parquet garden dance floor, and the exquisite bridal gown could have been something from any one of her fantasies for her daughter. However, beneath the trailing veil was something she had accounted for only slightly less than the aura of controversy that charged the day. Something she knew her daughter had not dreamt of either, but once she had bawled out a considerable river of tears the bleak evening that her shorn daughter returned to the manse, and had indeed desperately attempted to knot individual strands of hair not whipped away through the car ride to her daughter's scalp, she had calmed somewhat, and refined her tactics. However, neither hook nor crook would convince her to don a respectable wig or perhaps order an overlarge Fifth Avenue hat—both very viable options, she assured. Still, Mrs. Fitzworth strove not to sully the wedding day itself any further for her Felicity or herself, remaining pleasantly congratulatory, if a little washed with melancholy.
Harald, in contrast, was happy to see the wedding transpire exactly as he'd envisioned. Well, the important bits anyway. It was not within his ability to perceive the lavish bouquets of roses, the careful handiwork on his wife's gown, the tasteful hors d'heuvres or any of the myriad other carefully-planned aspects of the event he'd so brutally trampled upon.
Geoffrey Greene, his best buddy--best man, rather--from Rensselaer, had sneered at Harald's choice to marry an "air-head flapper". A stern gaze from Harald was more than enough to point out the extent of his faux-pas, even when no-one but the two of them had heard it. He was considerably less condescending in the presence of his own fiancée, who, Harald had to admit, was anything but an air-head herself. Grace
Vandenbosch, member of the New York State Women Voters' Committee and outwardly the picture of stern, bespectacled and respectable womanhood, was nevertheless quite interested in Felicity's new hairstyle, almost grilling her about the motives she had for cutting her hair so short. His fiancée's blushing and non-committal replies about "liking the feel of it" were clearly too apolitical for her liking. Only Harald's carefully casual mention of Felicity accepting a job with the Met seemed to satisfy her, allowing her to see the haircut as an assertion of feminine independence, as she'd wanted to from the beginning of the conversation.
For all of the guests at the fete, from the first promenade through the church until the sole lingering, dance-pattering sole departed the assembled parquet dancefloor through a mire of spilled champagne and sequins, seemed atwitter about one topic and one topic only, and all conversations and eyes seemed to drift back to the magnetic force of the bride's singular bob. Except, however, for those of one soul. Mr. Fitzworth proved a rather curious case, for he glowered with a sullen look, the sort that folk feared would scorch them if he stared upon them too long. His eyes did not linger on the offending hairdo in question, his mouth uttered neither its praises or defamations. In fact, one might have suspected that news of it did not even reach his ears, for as soon as the conversation veered jarringly close to the topic he began to loudly and vehemently address the heat of the weather, the wear of the decor, the season of the Yankees, the dinner arrayed on his plate, or more frequently, a more sensitive topic pertaining to either the speaker in question or his or her relations. Mrs. Fitzworth grew wise to this after a few less-than-polite incidents, and began heading her husband off at the conversational pass so to speak, and controlling the dialogue with considerably more tact than his subtle-as-a-sledgehammer technique. For what else could he do? He approved of the action only marginally less so than his daughter's decision to pursue a career in music. Music?! However, such boiled down to her husband's choice, and as her father he had no say in the matter. After his initial eruption of flush-faced blusterings on the night that she returned, rebutted by her startlingly spirited reply, Richard Fitzworth had no commentary whatsoever on the matter, and neither, he was quite adamant, should anyone else in earshot.
But the photos of the wedding were not merely distributed among merely the families and guests as mementoes, and hung above mantles. The grainy grayscale images emblazoned papers the country over, most concentrated of course in the newsstands of New York, but the odd image cropped up even so far west as Texas and California. Cross-country mentions seemed to multiply as the Ingram Mark II Haircutting Machine debuted in National Convention for Machinery for the Twentieth Century. Journalists heralded it as a new era, particularly as lady-attendees hopped in to pilot it for themselves, willingly shedding their locks to become part of the grandsweeping movement. Unfortunately, the new era ended before the convention was over, as the machine, after nearly bobbing off one startled attendee's head, shut down with an embarrassing bang, never to work again thereafter.
And as for Felicity? Well, for her part it must be said that she did not find the look of the bob to settle kindly upon her reflection, no matter how she scrutinized, before the wedding. She could not get used to the odd, swan-like quality of her neck, nor the stark cleanness of the lines. The sprays of flowers tucked into her hair coupled with the veil did something to obscure this effect, though she could not bear to marcel it for the wedding, for fear of the appearance of losing more length yet. However, her fears of the snickering and gasping folk stuffing the chapel pews and reception, well stoked by her parents and indeed all of her close relations and which had so plagued her the night before the wedding, those all seemed to melt away as she saw her beaming groom waiting for her at the end of the aisle. Surely, only his opinion held any weight in the matter. The more direct questions of her guests brought her to more discomfort, though she endeavoured to conduct herself with confidence, keeping her chin raised high, and asserting that she liked the feel of it, carefully skirting questions to aesthetic taste. "Harald is terribly fond of it," she would reply when confronted, when possible differing to him further on the matter. However, the other, more sensational benefits merely tasted earlier were explored in earnest throughout their wedding night and less than orthodox honeymoon, and Felicity grew to quite appreciate some aspects of her bob, so much so that she was considerably more enthusiastic a spokeswoman when called to speak and model at the National Convention.
The later, less-than-fortunate incident marring the event, however, raised some question between them as to whether Felicity should continue to wear her hair in such a fashion. After some experimentation with growing it back out, however, Harald's fingers answered the question for both of them, and, using the connections her fiancé had built up with New York city hairdressers earlier, he was able to find one able to cut her hair to certain exact specifications.
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