Recently, I received a PM about my latest story, “Fathers, Sons, and Growing Up.” The sender asked about a “mystery” which had intrigued her involving a few brief references to things that were or were not said. I was delighted that someone actually thought that much about those bits, and it occurred to me that other people might be interested in the answers. My thanks to Susan for allowing me to publish these excerpts from our exchange! (Caveat: if you haven’t read the story, what follows isn’t going to make much sense. You can read the story by clicking on the link at the left entitled “My Bonanza stories.”)
Q: There’s a little mystery in your newest story that is still tantalizing me. I wonder what it was that passed between Glory and Adam and Hoss, when they took her home after she and Joe were discovered. Adam told Joe that there wasn’t much to say, and when Joe asked her later, Glory told him his brothers were “gentlemen” and seemed about to add something else, but apparently thought better of it.
A: There truly wasn’t much conversation among them on the way back into VC that night. Poor Glory was understandably embarrassed, and so were Adam and Hoss. Also, Adam was worried about who she was (i.e., had Joe gotten himself involved with a girl who had a houseful of gun-totin’ brothers and a big, mean pa who would demand that Joe protect her honor by marrying her, or was the girl some manipulative wench who would try to hold them up for money by claiming that she’d been an innocent maiden and Joe had seduced her, etc.). Once he found out that none of these were the case, he could relax on the latter score, especially since he knew the madam of her house. (Yes, that way. Pa doesn’t know everything about his boys.)
Glory referred to them as “gentlemen” in large part because of the way they behaved that night–they treated her the way they would any other girl they were driving home, and there was no comment, “off” look or anything else when she told them where to take her.
As far as what she was about to say and didn’t–that night, she did tell Lucia all about Joe and what had happened, which was why Lucia knew who he was when he showed up the next night. Lucia, in turn, reassured her that, in her experience as both the madam of the house and from seeing them around town, Adam and Hoss were indeed kind, decent men who would always treat a woman well and would not judge her for being “of this profession.” So, Glory was discreet in not revealing to Joe that his brothers were known to Lucia, as that would have raised questions about whether and to what extent they frequented the Gilded Rose; one of the things she had learned early was that discretion was necessary in this business and you never disclosed who had come to the house, regardless of the circumstances.
Q: Thanks! This makes a lot of sense. It’s characteristic for Adam to be thinking ahead to the next potential problem to try to defuse it before it happens, and both Adam and Hoss are too kind and decent to make Glory feel badly about where she works. And Glory, however young, would have learned quickly not to volunteer information that might diminish a person in someone else’s eyes.
A: Glory had also learned from Lucia that, as a business matter, you simply didn’t disclose who your clients were, because it was quite likely your clients didn’t want that information publicized. Thus, if word got out that you would reveal their identities, people would be less likely to frequent your establishment, and it would be bad for your business.
I agree that Adam would have been the one to think ahead–Pa was too angry at Joe to be looking at the bigger picture, and Hoss was worried about Joe and was also too innocent to be thinking about such things right away. Joe, of course, was most concerned about “catching up”–one second, he’s making love to this girl, and the next second, the world is crashing down around him in the form of coitus interruptus and an irate father, and he needed to get from the first part to the second and try to deal with Pa’s fury. (And that, by the way, is why it took Joe until the next day to ask about what his brothers had said to Glory. When they came home that night, he was still focused on his own experiences–his time with her and then his time with Pa.)