Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  “John’s wife never says ‘boo,’” said Beatrice. “I always wonder,” she added in a saucy manner, “if a wife looks and behaves like a rabbit, is the husband behaving like a wolf?”

  Robert laughed.

  Margaret said, “Where’s the berry basket?”

  “In the summer kitchen.”

  She went out. Robert left soon after, mounted on one of the pretty Morgans.

  At the poker party, in the absence of Mrs. Early, all the ladies talked about the captain (So tall! So good-looking! No, not good-looking at all, rather glowering! He was coming inside of a week! No, he was going to New York City!), but none of them really knew anything. Margaret didn’t relate her own experience, since she thought that the most appealing thing about Captain Early was his mother. The ladies went on. Was Mrs. Early embarrassed? Of course she was, given the transgression. Certainly she was not, given her nature. She should be embarrassed, though, they agreed on that. All Margaret said was “I can’t imagine Mrs. Early being embarrassed about things.”

  “Isn’t that true!” exclaimed Mrs. Landon, but Margaret had meant her remark as a compliment, and Mrs. Landon did not.

  Four days later, Margaret left on the train for Kirkwood, and didn’t hear another thing about Andrew Early for six months.

  All the talk in St. Louis was of the coming fair, Olympic Games, and Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was to begin on April 1, 1903, a hundred years to the day from the Louisiana Purchase (and wasn’t it amazing that the city had been required to raise fifteen million dollars to put on the fair, the exact sum President Jefferson had spent on the whole of the Louisiana Purchase? If nothing else showed the progress humankind had made during the nineteenth century, that surely did). Among the Bells, on Kingshighway, near Forest Park, there was a blaze of chatter and news. There was absolutely no doubt there that St. Louis, Missouri, was the center of the universe, the coming city of the twentieth century, and certain to eclipse New York and Chicago, if not London, Paris, and Rome, as the greatest city the world had ever known. And why not? All the best Frenchmen, Italians, Englishmen, and Germans had decamped from those moldy old spots and set out for right where the Mighty Mississippi and the Big Muddy met and married. The twentieth century in St. Louis, Margaret was given to understand, was already vastly improved over the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, St. Louis was all cholera and typhoid fever, smallpox, and tornadoes and heat and damp air, a place where dead dogs and cats lay in the streets for weeks. Now St. Louis was shoes and shipping and flowers and ladies’ dresses and coats and magazines and beer, not to mention plug tobacco and people from around the world meeting up in Forest Park to display their wealth. Would the capital of the United States be moved to St. Louis? It made perfect sense, even if it wasn’t likely to happen. At least you could point out what a good idea it would be, the whole nation gathering right here in the natural middle of the country. And then, as if to ratify what everyone was saying, the imminent exhibition was put off for a year—until 1904—because so many nations wanted to come and display themselves that the facilities could not be built in time.

  After Thanksgiving, Elizabeth had a baby—the child was named Lucy May, after Mercer Hart’s mother (whose maiden name was Wilder—“not Jewish at all,” said Mrs. Bell. “Very prominent out West somewhere. Where would that be, Mr. Bell? Where is it that the Wilders are prominent?”

  “Big family,” said Mr. Bell, “prominent everywhere,” without looking up from his paper.

  “Not here,” said Mrs. Bell.)

  Elizabeth and Mercer exuded the gravity of genuine parents from the first day of Lucy May’s existence. Margaret got none of the feeling that she got with Robert and Beatrice, that the youth of the child was a mistake time would eventually correct. Although Elizabeth had little experience of children or infants, the nanny (actually a woman from southern Missouri named Agatha) had to show her how to do something just once for Elizabeth to understand and master it—bathing, dressing, nursing, changing, rocking, singing, carrying from room to room. Agatha said to Margaret, “Good Lord, I’ve seen some babies, you do exactly what is right to do, and it doesn’t have any effect at all, they just go their own way as if you hadn’t done a thing! This child is the kindest. Whatever you do for her makes her happy. Your sister is going to be spoiled, and go on and have another and then another, and then, one day, she’ll get one of those unrewarding ones, and then she’ll know how spoiled she is.” She shook her head sadly at this thought.

  Margaret found Agatha to be such a sympathetic person that she even told her about Lawrence and Ben and that hanging she couldn’t remember she’d been taken to on the very day of Elizabeth’s birth, so long ago now. Agatha shook her head again. She said, “Those days are gone, and it’s a good thing. Down there, where I come from, near Sedalia, you were afraid to answer the door in case it might be someone bringing home a body, either dead or half alive—and which was worse, I want to know. If it wasn’t snakebite, then it was gunshot, and if it wasn’t gunshot, then it was a drowning or a tree falling or a horse that run off with the wagon and it tipped over. My own mother had herself fourteen babies, and toward the end of her life, she wouldn’t answer the door at all.” Agatha was forty-five, not twice as old as Margaret, but she looked seventy. She had no teeth, and she walked with a limp. Margaret was a little sad when, having taught Elizabeth everything she knew, the woman left.

  Dora was now twenty, though no taller and no prettier. She wore mannish boots and coats. She never wore gloves or any kind of a hat that other women were wearing. “The only reason to wear a hat,” she told Margaret, “is to keep your hair from falling in your face.” And though her parents were wealthy and prominent, and Dora herself would have a considerable inheritance, everyone seemed to have given up utterly on the idea of getting her married. No one spoke to Margaret about her own future as an old maid, but if Dora didn’t perennially hear about hers, it was simply because she was never present when everyone was talking about it. Mr. Bell’s attitude was one of resignation. Mrs. Bell’s attitude was one of grievance against Dora for, in the first place, having no feminine assets and, in the second place, making nothing of those she had. Elizabeth was more philosophical—maybe Dora would enjoy her condition, or else convert to Catholicism and become a nun. St. Louis had any number of convents, including one “where the nun takes a French name and lives in a tiny cell for her entire life, sometimes seventy years, and never sees a soul and gets her tray of food once a day through the wall and prays eternally.” You could see this convent from the streetcar, when it went from Kirkwood north and then east into St. Louis. Dora was writing things, but no one knew what they were. She was sending them to magazines such as McClure’s, but nothing, as far as anyone knew, had seen print yet.

  Dora’s behavior was attributed, by Mrs. Bell, to how famous St. Louis was. Even Lincoln Steffens, that terrifying man, was in St. Louis to report on the arrest of Boss Butler. Lincoln Steffens, said Mr. Bell, was trying to see to it that all the best people would have their money taken away from them and be sent in rags upon the streets to beg. That Dora would consort, even in the privacy of her own mind, with such an unprincipled man indicated to Mrs. Bell that Dora was some kind of changeling. The sum of all of this was that St. Louis was the world’s most exciting and modern city, and such a thing could be either good or bad, morally, but there was no denying that the city was better to live in than it had been when Mrs. Bell was growing up as Miss Branscomb down near Tower Grove Park: you couldn’t get really good silk foulard to save your life, and everyone ate catfish right out of the river. “And it’s not so hot as it was, either. Is it, Mr. Bell?”

  “Of course it is” (not looking up from his paper).

  “He doesn’t remember. Truly, Margaret, the weather has moderated in a very nice way. There hasn’t been a typhoid epidemic in twenty-five years.”

  “Twenty-four,” said Mr. Bell.

  Shortly after this, Margaret happened to overhear M
ercer and Elizabeth chatting. Elizabeth said, “It makes no sense. I think she’s pretty.” (This was where she divined that she was the subject.) “Prettier than Beatrice. And nice, too. But she’s never had even a beau. She would have told me.” Margaret smiled to herself even as she stilled her movements, instantly curious to hear her brother-in-law’s reply. He said, “Pretty enough. But forbidding. You’ll allow that, won’t you, Lizzie?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “That’s silly.”

  “But she never looks at a fellow, and if she makes a mistake and lets him catch her eye, she glares like fury. I don’t know anyone who can stand up to that sort of thing, at least at the beginning. I love her now, as your sister, and she’s sweet as a peach with Lucy May. It’s like she’s a different person when you know her. But the average fellow doesn’t get a chance to know her unless he happens to marry her sister.”

  “That can’t be …”

  “And then you don’t know what she means half the time. I ask myself once a day, is she making a joke? The fellows can’t take that. It makes them feel thick.”

  “She is making a joke,” said Elizabeth. “I laugh all the time at what she says.”

  “But you know her. A fellow doesn’t want to feel as though a girl is running rings around him, at least not till he marries her.” Now they fell silent. This was, indeed, the first Margaret had ever heard about her demeanor. She had thought she was too old to have her feelings hurt, and now they were.

  BY Margaret’s January return to the little house, Lavinia, Mrs. Early, and Mrs. Hitchens had become friends, almost a regular threesome. According to Lavinia, Mrs. Early had come up to her in Macomb’s general store and spoken to her in a very friendly way about both Beatrice and Margaret, and then Mrs. Early had invited her to tea. The three of them turned out to have many interests in common, though none of those she listed was poker. When the two elegant ladies came visiting, they sat in the front room and knitted or crocheted. Or they trimmed hats. Or they talked about the exposition, and made plans to go to St. Louis and see everything, “even if it takes three or four trips to do it.” Mrs. Early chatted genially about places she had been—yes, that spa in Germany (Baden—the word itself meant “baths”), where you could see the excavations of the very spots where the Romans had taken their hot baths. She had also been to Paris and to London, of course, and taken hikes in the Lake District (“I love Wordsworth, don’t you?”) and the Scottish Highlands (“I grew up reading Scott, didn’t everyone? I do believe it ruined me”), and she had been to Menton in France, and Amalfi and Rome in Italy (where, in fact, she had met Mrs. Hitchens and invited her to come to Missouri). And then she had been planning to go to Texas, to visit her son there, but when Captain Early returned to town, she didn’t want to leave while he was here. She sprinkled references to Captain Early into her conversation—exactly enough so that they would know she had no worries about him. When Margaret asked about the scandal, Lavinia said, “Scandal?” and Margaret decided that Robert had not known what he was talking about. Margaret got used to hearing Mrs. Early talk about her son—he had installed a very nice telescope in one of the upstairs bedrooms, he was particular about his coffee, Mrs. Early was knitting him fingerless gloves because he wouldn’t have a fire in the upstairs. All of these matters came up very naturally.

  Mrs. Early made a point of conversing with Margaret about books. If she had read something Margaret liked, she would compliment her taste, and if she hadn’t read it, she would frankly state that she wished she might someday. At last, after telling her for weeks about her extensive library, Mrs. Early invited her to come and choose a few things to read.

  But by that time it was February, and there was no walking out, because of a tremendous cold snap. Lavinia kept a big fire in the kitchen stove, and they sat there most days and tended the fire. The cats sat with them. It was said that it was twenty or thirty or forty below, but Margaret didn’t know. Supposedly, at forty below, if you threw a bucket of water into the air, the drops would freeze before hitting the ground. Old Paul, the hired man, shoveled a path between the house and the barn, and she went out, bundled up, several times during the day and made sure that Aurelius had plenty of hay to keep him warm, and that his blanket was properly adjusted. The cold made Lavinia feel old and lonely—she started talking a bit about Margaret’s father. It was the death of Lawrence that “did him in,” she said. What had happened to Ben hurt him, but that was the dangers of boys, dangers he well knew. He had had no chance to save Ben when the boys brought him home from the railyard. Lawrence lingered for weeks, though, and Dr. Mayfield had thought that if he were only better educated, or more experienced, or more inventive, he might somehow preserve him. Afterward, he went to his patients as he always had, but with new self-doubts. “When someone died, he knew he had done something wrong, and when someone lived, he felt that nature had prevailed. Nature, I told him, is what kills them, but that’s how it got to be. I dreaded that something would happen, and then it did.” Lavinia sighed. Margaret listened and made her own sympathetic sighs, but her memories of her father were dim, and entirely overlaid by the cacophony of subsequent events. She remembered him more as a doctor than as a father, a tall, respected man who looked at her in a judicious, discerning way, to be sure that she was healthy and clean. When Lavinia chatted and reminisced about her childhood, and the boys, and her first years in town with Dr. Mayfield, how appealing Lawrence and Ben were, so healthy and active, and how she used to sit in the parlor and laugh at their antics when the doctor roughhoused with them, rolling them over and tickling them, turning them upside down in gales of laughter, making them run about and pretending to jump out and catch them, carrying them on his shoulders, it seemed to Margaret that she was peering through windows into bright, appealing rooms where everyone was merry and full of life. The people in the rooms of Lavinia’s reminiscences were strangers to her, and Margaret could not get in. Anyway, it was painful to think of Lawrence, of her hand moving upward into his grasp, of herself sitting on his shoulders with her fingers twined in his hair, of his saying, “You hungry, baby?” Had he said that? She seemed to hear his voice, boyish but kind, saying that.

  And then, the next day, the coldest day of all, Mrs. Early came in a sleigh she hired from the livery stable and took them off to her house for supper and to stay the night.

  There was a fire in the kitchen, a fire in the parlor, and a stove in the library made, not of metal, but of stone of some sort. The library was warm in every corner, which seemed like a miracle to Margaret and Lavinia. With the gas lit everywhere, the rooms glowed, and Margaret’s limbs seemed to warm and soften and stretch. Her very skirts lost their chill stiffness. Carpets and drapes seemed to envelop her, to give her the cozy comfort that a baby might feel when snug in his cradle. The library was two walls of books, floor to ceiling, in English, French, German, books Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens had bought, but also books the sons had brought home or sent home. It seemed to Margaret that a door had opened, and rooms she thought she would never enter were hers to walk about in.

  Mrs. Early held up a lamp, and they idled down the rows, looking at the titles: Mr. Verne in English and French (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours, Sans dessus dessous), Mrs. Gaskell (North and South), Mr. Surtees (Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities). She was just taking down this last and opening the cover when a deep voice behind her said, “Try this one, Miss Mayfield.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Early. “No telling what he’s giving you.” But she laughed.

  Margaret hadn’t realized that Captain Early had entered the room, but now he placed a tome in her hands. It was a book called The Hound of the Baskervilles, from England, and brand-new. She had heard of Mr. Conan Doyle, but never read anything by him. The book wasn’t terribly long, and when she opened it, the first thing she saw was a picture of a large dog.

  Mrs. Early said, “Is that some mathematical treatise, Andrew?”

  Andrew said, “Certai
nly not,” and went over and sat down in one of the chairs beside the stove. He at once picked up a book of his own. Margaret pretended to look at the one he had handed her, but really she looked at him. He was even taller than she remembered from that day with the bicycle, but his suit of clothes was neatly tailored and his face was attractive in its way (she thought of her own face and tried to compose it—not “glare,” as Mercer said), with pale whiskers and a large but straight nose. He conformed himself a bit to the chair, and took on a quality of lengthy grace. His hair was fair, neatly cut and combed. Only Robert Bell and the president of the bank bothered to comb their hair. Every other man took his hat off and put his hat back on ten times a day, and that was that. Captain Early read calmly, then looked up and said, “Perhaps you haven’t seen a stove like the one in this room, Miss Mayfield. It is of German design, and remarkably efficient. You may be familiar with the writings of Mr. Twain. He commented favorably on German stoves some years ago. We have had this one since I sent it home from Berlin.”

  “The door for putting in the wood is very small,” said Lavinia.

  “It uses very little wood, and it hardly has to be attended to at all,” said Mrs. Early. “It is quite an innovation.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Mrs. Early said, “My son has an eye for innovation.”

  Captain Early nodded, looked at Lavinia and Margaret in a serious way, and then went back to his book.

  He was like the person she had met bicycling, but he was unlike him, too. In her appreciation of the book, which she now opened, Margaret saw that perhaps she had taken an unreasoning dislike to the man. Even so, his presence had an odd effect on her—it was as if something around her, some field or edge, were impinged upon or dented by the same thing, but much more powerful, around him. It was a relief that he was sitting across the room.