by Laura McNeal
6
For the first six months in Brooklyn, Leenie was sympathetic to Aldine’s dismissals of Mormon men who wanted to date her and convert her at the same time. “Too ancient,” she agreed about Anton Buchreiter, who was at least fifty. “A bit dim,” she admitted about Harold Coombs. But Floyd Gerg, to Leenie’s mind, was perfect: young, good-looking, solid, kind. Floyd Gerg was, in fact, handsome in a stiff, Nordic way, though he seemed about as animated as a tree. He’d called Aldine Sister McKenna until she made him stop, reminding him that she was not strictly a sister, not yet (nor ever, she added in her mind). Leenie had several times pointed out that Brother Gerg had a good job at the Steinway factory and would soon have his own flat. Aldine pointed out that she had never heard him laugh.
“He wants to marry you,” Leenie said.
“How could you possibly know that? He never speaks!”
“He told Will.”
“I can’t marry him.”
“He’s going to ask you. He’s working up the courage.”
“Tell Will to tell him I haven’t made up my mind to be baptized.”
“You’re too picky, Deen. He’d be a good father.”
No, she couldn’t picture it. They were stiff as dead plants with one another. And yet Leenie had invited him to Sunday dinner again, probably after telling Will that Floyd needed to talk more and draw Aldine out.
By this point it was August and sweltering. Aldine sat on a bench in Fort Greene Park craving a cup of Fortnum’s and a lick of Silver Shred on toast. Maybe she should quit boxes and try for a job in a shop, where at least she could look outside now and then. She stared crossly down at a newspaper someone had left on the bench. It was folded to the part that listed jobs and opportunities.
Culturally-inclined Country School in beautiful Loam County, Kansas, seeks forward-looking primary teacher with musical skills. Fair salary, room and board included. Apply to Ansel Price, Dorland, Kansas.
She was as forward-looking as the next girl. She could sing, play the piano, and fiddle. She had memorized every poem her father knew, and every poem in the eighth reader. She knew her times tables and wrote with what examiners (and Dr. O’Malley, too) called a “beautiful hand.” Perhaps Kansas was not too far by train, and she could visit Leenie and the baby on weekends.
She folded the newspaper section until it would fit in her pocketbook and went looking for a stamp.
7
In a car parked on a side street of Dorland, Kansas, the wife and three children of Ansel Price sat waiting in heavy silence. The street was oiled; the town was hot and still. The car had been parked in the shade, but that was before shopping and banking and visiting with Mrs. Odekirk and Mrs. Eichely and Reverend Bakely’s wife, and now the afternoon sun glared down on the old Ford. The heat was stifling and when Mrs. Price touched the edge of her finger to her upper lip, it came away moist. “Wait here,” her husband had said. “I won’t be ten seconds.” And then had hurried across the deserted street for the post office.
She’d known it wouldn’t be ten seconds, but she didn’t expect it to be ten minutes, either. Ten minutes and counting. She turned to the backseat, where her three children sat squeezed sullenly together. Clare, fingering a recent outcropping of acne at his chin, seemed to anticipate her thoughts and said quietly, “He told us to wait here.”
“I’ll go!” Neva said. She was out the door before more could be said about it. She disappeared into the post office, a small brick cube featuring a sidewall of glass blocks near the entrance. Clare watched the liquid blur of Neva’s small body as she dashed behind them. Once he’d seen a woman passing behind these glass blocks and for an enlivening second or two had imagined this woman would emerge naked, but she had not, of course. It was just Mrs. Rackham, wearing beige.
Another minute or two passed without anyone coming out. That man, Mrs. Price thought. Then, after looking up and down the street, she thought, This town. She closed her eyes, then opened them again and said, “Clare, go fetch Neva.”
As he went, Charlotte called after him. “And tell His Highness that we’re about to combust out here!”
“Don’t call your father that,” Mrs. Price said but Charlotte noticed she didn’t put any starch into it. Charlotte stretched her legs onto the vacated backseat and hitched her skirt a few inches, not that it helped much. Another minute or two passed but it felt longer to Charlotte. Her father did not appear, nor did Neva or Clare. “God!” she said. “Is there a troll in there picking them off one by one?”
Her mother said nothing. But she was thinking things. Charlotte knew that much. In her journal she’d written of her mother: She thought it all and said not a thing.
Beyond the train station, Mr. Tanner’s wagon turned onto Main Street pulled by two mules. Whenever her father saw Mr. Tanner in his wagon, he said, “He likes two good mules.” That’s what Mr. Tanner always said when neighbors advised him to invest in something motor driven. I like two good mules. As the wagon slowly approached, Mr. Tanner kept his gaze cast forward. Charlotte stared at him hard, willing him to turn his eyes toward her, but he didn’t. He passed by looking like a statue of himself.
“Okay, that’s it. I’m going in,” she said, and waited for her mother to say something, almost daring it, but her mother stared straight ahead.
When she got inside the post office, Charlotte found Neva sitting on the counter with her toothpick legs dangling, Clare standing close to the opposite wall studying the wanted posters, and her father, pencil in hand, bent over the counter staring at a sheet of paper in front of him so intently that he didn’t notice her approach. When she said, “What’re you writing?” he jumped in a way that interested her. It almost seemed that she’d just glimpsed her father as he might be when his family was not around, as a grown man without wife and son and daughters attached.
“Oh,” he said. “Just an advertisement. Terence Tidball said he’d put in a notice for us free of charge if I’d send him the text.”
Terence Tidball, who worked worlds away at the Herald Tribune in New York City. A lunatic idea if ever there was one. But, still, she leaned forward to see what her father had written. He’d made a number of false starts and erasures; what remained was this: Country School in Loam County, Kansas, seeks primary teacher. Salary, room and board included. Apply to Ansel Price, Dorland, Kansas.
“Oh, that’s sure to work,” Charlotte said. “We’ll probably need a wheelbarrow to carry all the responses.”
Her father was a tall, stately man who could often see the funny side of things, but he didn’t see the funny side of this.
“Huh,” Clare murmured from his position some feet away, but only to himself, evidently in response to one of the posters he was reading. Neva, who had been tenderly but intently working her front teeth between thumb and forefinger—both teeth were loosening—withdrew her hand to say, “What, Clare?” but Clare was too intent on his poster reading to reply.
Charlotte felt peevish without knowing quite why. “What’s so important about this teacher?” she asked her father and when he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s always just been one big crab apple after another in that pitiful little schoolhouse, anyway.” Which wasn’t exactly true. There had been Mrs. Groe for a while. But after her, it was crab apples, and nothing but.
Abruptly her father pulled out his wallet and slid from it a scrap of paper that he passed to her along with an envelope. “That’s Terence Tidball’s box number and that’s an envelope. If you’re through plaguing me, maybe you could address it.”
Though it was on a scrap of paper, her father had written the address in his beautiful cursive, the one he used when he took care with things. While she worked on the envelope, she couldn’t help but notice that he was quickly scribbling additions to his advertisement before folding the paper in two.
“Want me to proofread?” she said, extending an open hand, but he took the envelope from her without a word, slipped the folded advertisement inside, sealed it, and wi
th—this much she saw—just the barest moment of hesitation, dropped it into the slot for outgoing mail.
“Did you change it?” she asked, but whatever other man she’d glimpsed when she’d walked into the post office had now slipped away. What was left was her everyday father, who swept up Neva with one arm and said, “C’mon now, all of you, or we’ll have the bride stewing in her juices.”
The bride was what he called their mother, and Charlotte thought that if her own husband ever tried, eighteen years into the marriage, to refer to her as the bride, she would have to kill him.
In the car, moving down the highway, the air was streaming again but as soon as her father turned onto the country road, the dust fell on Charlotte’s skin and mouth and tongue. Her underclothes stuck and clung and the heat seemed first to have rubberized the cups of her brassiere and then molded them to her breasts. When she slipped her hand inside her blouse to adjust the whole nightmarish apparatus, Clare stared at her openly until she said, “What are you looking at?”
Clare turned his head away from his sister and stared out his own window. He was wondering when he would ever see a girl completely naked and then he was wondering whether seeing his own sister naked would put him off wanting to see other girls naked, because if that was what would happen he would need to avoid it at all costs. He began diverting himself by remembering the names of every person on the wanted lists he had been looking at. Hillary Henderson, alias Bill Henderson, alias “2 Gun” Henderson, bank robbery. J. J. Comiskey, also known as “Peanuts” and “Dirty Neck,” for stealing 478 cases of Cream of Kentucky whiskey consigned to but never reaching Chicago. Nicholas “Nick” Delmore, murder of prohibition agent. Gloria Lisa Carter, missing from home, fourteen years old but looks eighteen. Jack David Salter. Sally “Goodie” Fahrenstock. On and on, one after another, that was how good his memory was when he wanted it to be.
Neva sat between them, which she liked. She was happy again, now that they were moving. Part of the fun of going to town was in coming back home. She worked her loose teeth and wondered where she left her tin of box elder bugs. The stair closet, she decided. Or maybe the tack room. One or the other. But she would have to find them or they would perish like the last ones. That’s what Charlotte had said when she’d shown them to her and asked what was wrong with them. They have perished, Charlotte told her. The car was moving and the engine was humming and she decided to fall asleep. She laid her head against Charlotte because Charlotte was softer, but Charlotte pushed her off and said, “Too hot, Nevie,” so she laid her head against Clare’s shoulder and of course Clare didn’t mind.
Charlotte, sitting directly behind her father, was sullenly regarding his thick, wavy black hair. One night, after he had read aloud from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for everybody in the front room, Charlotte and her friend Opal had walked outside to look at the sky and Opal had said that she thought Charlotte’s father must have descended from nobility or at least somebody aristocratic. The effect of this remark on Charlotte was odd. Initially she felt a pleasant swelling of pride but that was immediately supplanted by the need to debunk the notion entirely. Soon after, therefore, she began to refer to her father as His Highness. In a way it fit him, the way he could just take himself out of the real world. She knew no one who stood taller or worked harder than he did, but he wasn’t like the other hardworking farmers who continued the worrying when they were done with the working. He could look into a book or stare out a window and leave them all behind, and who knew what he was thinking then? His thoughts were some of the very few in the world that Charlotte actually wondered about. He made such odd decisions. What was he thinking, for example, when he thought Ellie Hoffman was the woman he should marry? What was he thinking when he brought her back here to Dorland? What was he thinking when he borrowed money to buy all that land on the wrong side of the hogback? And what was he thinking in advertising in New York City for someone to come here to teach unwashed farm kids in a pitiful one-room schoolhouse? How did he imagine that anyone in her right mind would leave New York City for Dorland, Kansas? Why, in other words, couldn’t he just come down out of the clouds and stick to the here and now, and do those things a grown man was supposed to do?
Almost lazily she announced, “His Highness is putting an ad in the Herald Tribune. He thinks an office girl in New York City will want to come teach in our horrid country school.”
The stricken look on her mother’s face as she turned toward her father was a reward in itself. Her mother didn’t speak a word, but none was needed.
“And why not?” her father said, and—another reward—his tone was beyond doubt defensive. He then said something in a mumble that Charlotte couldn’t make out.
“Pardon?” she said.
He jerked his head sideways and his voice was low and defiant. “I said a man can’t catch a fish without bait in the water!”
She thought, In that metaphor the teacher is a fish, the advertisement is the bait, and the water is murky, but she said nothing. They rode on in silence, except for the tink-tinking of small rocks on the undercarriage. Neva slept. Charlotte set her finger into Neva’s open hand and felt the hand close softly and wished now that she hadn’t pushed the girl away.
After a long while, Clare turned from his window-staring and said, “What’s a common-law wife, anyhow?”
Charlotte stifled a laugh. Her mother drew a quick breath but it was her father who explained. If there was one thing that you could count on from him, it was his ready explanation of other people’s dire situations. It was his own dire circumstance that he wouldn’t put under the magnifying glass.
When her father finished his explanation of common-law marriage, Clare considered it a few seconds and said, “So they just live together like a married couple until they sort of become one?”
Her father said that was correct, more or less. They had only to hold themselves out as man and wife.
This was too much for her mother, who straightened her back. “But without solemnizing the act,” she said, “it is not a true marriage in the eyes of God.”
“What kind of solemnizing did Adam and Eve do?” Charlotte wanted to know, but no one answered.
Her father said, “Why are you asking, Clare?”
“Oh,” Clare said. “It was this man on a wanted poster named Kilian Smith. The poster said he stabbed his common-law wife. He’s wanted for murder.”
Kilian Smith wore a dapper hat and dapper bow tie. In the photograph he stared right back at Clare with eyes that seemed surprisingly mild. And yet a man with eyes that gentle had wound up stabbing to death the woman he loved, which was impossible to imagine and made you wonder about the strangeness of romance.
8
As a return address, Aldine wrote General Delivery, Post Office Next to Woolworth Building, New York City. Then she dropped her letter to Ansel Price in a post box as she might drop a bottled message into the sea. She made herself wait two weeks before checking for mail, and when she was handed a letter with a return address from Mr. Ansel Price, Loam County Schools, Dorland, Kansas, she was surprised at the wave of unease that rose within her. She felt almost ill from holding the unopened letter in her hands. She moved to a corner of the lobby. She suddenly realized just how keenly she wanted to escape Floyd’s stillness as he sat beside her in church or in Leenie’s flat, his body so inert that he seemed almost asexual, and yet his goodness was so irreproachable that she felt stifled. She had to escape the feeling she had when she watched Will and Leenie hold hands during prayer at the dinner table, their bond an electrical current that did not reach her even if Leenie took Aldine’s hand. In their presence, she was a dark window.
Aldine drew in a great draft of air. She closed her eyes and kept them closed as she fingered open the envelope and unfolded the letter. When she opened them again and read, Dear Miss McKenna, It is with pleasure that we offer you the position, she felt an excitement she’d not felt since she decided to sail to New York. That decision had not turned
out well, maybe, but it had led to this, and the job in Kansas would be all her own doing from start to finish.
Before she left the building, she had written back with her acceptance, and that night, well into dinner, she said, “I think I might go to Kansas and teach school.”
They stared, of course, so she unfolded the letter from the school and showed them.
Will, who had been carefully spooning grape jelly, looked at her in a disbelieving way. “That’s where Elder Lance is from. You remember.”
She had not and was not pleased to remember it now.
“Do you know where Kansas is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aldine lied. There had been no prior need to memorize the position of American states. Perhaps it was farther than she thought.
“I just barely got you back with me!” Leenie said. “What if you don’t like it? Besides, you can’t go that far by yourself!”
Aldine stared at the dark jelly. So it was distant, the place called Kansas. “It’s no farther than you went, Leen.”
“But it’s different. I had Wills. You had me. What’ll you have?”
“A more thrilling job,” Aldine said, wondering if it was more than a hundred miles. “My own life.” She hated it when Leenie called him Wills. She’d decided she would have to pretend a little bit in order to get their approval. “Plus, they’re Mormons,” she added.
Will was again looking at the letter. “How do you know?”
“It said in the advertisement. It warned that anyone uncomfortable living with adherents of the Church of Latter-day Saints need not apply. Though it said applicants needn’t be adherents themselves.”
Will fell silent and Aldine pressed her advantage. “And besides, with a babe coming you’ll soon need more room here. You’ve been kind not to say so, but it’s the truth all the same.”
“But the train,” Leenie said. “That’ll cost a packet because it’s so far off.”