One old lady whose name was Jessamine Willoughby, and who lived alone in a vine-covered brick house sadly in need of repair, received her warmly.
“I knew your mother well,” she told Roxanne. "A lovely child, and you are just like her, my dear. I hope you have made a good marriage.”
Roxanne told her that she had married a glover, and that they hoped to open a little shop here in Augusta. The old lady gave her an understanding nod, but Roxanne could not tell whether she approved or not. She served Roxanne tea in delicate Spode cups in a room with cool slanted light, where beautifully made interior shutters kept out the direct sunlight. Roxanne listened to Miss Willoughby’s soft Southern voice and smiled into those faded eyes. Sitting here so correctly in a parlor in the town of her birth, she felt she had indeed come home.
Although Roxanne knew she had been exploring a city with a storied past, Miss Willoughby made Augusta come alive for her. ‘‘Lord Oglethorpe,” Miss Willoughby explained, “established the town as a fort and named it for Princess Augusta—mother of England’s George III. An Irishman had first settled it; In 1763, a treaty between five great Indian nations and four Southern governors was signed.” She went on enthusiastically, “George Walton, who signed the Declaration of Independence, lived here, and on Rocky Creek is a dam built by Eli Whitney, who so transformed the life of the South.”
The elderly woman was pleased with her verbal tour of the city and Roxanne encouraged her to talk. And so they spent a most enjoyable afternoon together.
When Roxanne left, promising to come again soon, her hostess made one remark that puzzled her.
“You will need help here,” she said. “Let me think about it and we will talk about it when you come again.”
Roxanne refrained from asking what Miss Willoughby meant, thinking it might be just an old lady’s eccentricity. In any event, she could clear it up when next she visited her.
But she had no chance, for when she called again the following Thursday there was black crepe on the door, and a weeping servant informed her that “poor old Miss Jessamine” had died of a stroke. He added that her body was being sent back to Atlanta to be buried in the family burying ground.
Miss Willoughby’s death saddened Roxanne. She had honestly liked the old lady, and knew her to be one of the town’s social old guard. It would be harder for her and Denby to get established here socially without the sponsorship of someone like Miss Jessamine Willoughby.
She had no idea then just how hard it would be.
But in the meantime, she was hopeful, and things seemed to be going as planned. Denby found a vacant shop. The price was a little high, but the location justified it, he assured her, for it was on a small street just off the main artery. On the first floor a spacious show room fronted the street, and behind it were two large well-lighted workrooms. Best of all, there were rooms above the shop suitable for their living quarters. This would allow them to keep the shop open longer hours, locking the door in the evening but coming down if a customer rang the bell. Roxanne was a little daunted at that; she had not really anticipated interrupting dinner to hurry down and sell a pair of gloves. But Denby insisted they must make every sale they could. Every sale worked twofold, he assured her earnestly—it enriched them, and it kept their competitors from flourishing.
When they went from their hotel to inspect Denby’s find, and Denby saw Roxanne wistfully eyeing a white-pillared mansion on the way, he squeezed her hand. “Never mind, we’ll have one of those too one day,” he said.
As she turned to him, her blue gaze softened. Maybe she could never love Denby as a wife should, but help him she certainly would. Together they would make this glove shop a success!
Roxanne climbed the wooden stairs that opened from the shop’s back entrance and studied the rooms above the shop: a large front room, a kitchen and bedroom behind. Plain and hard-used, but she would make them livable. With determination, she took off her hat and donned an apron. After a couple of days of scouring, the floors gleamed and the windows sparkled. She resisted Denby’s eager desire to rush out and buy fine furniture, realizing it would take time for the shop to succeed and they would need the money for other things. A kitchen table and chairs, a stove and an icebox, a bed and bureau, a branching hatrack and small pine wardrobe, a sofa and two chairs in case of callers: that was enough, Roxanne insisted firmly. Later on would come thick rugs and silver tea sets and rosewood tables and antimacassars and dainty loveseats and delicate china. Later, when they could afford them.
Luckily, she was able to find in the town a cheap set of dishes most of whose cups had been smashed in delivery. And since Augusta was a textile center, she found some inexpensive but good printed cottons for curtains. She splurged on a fine white linen tablecloth and some old silver spoons of a rose design that she fell in love with when she passed a shop window. But those were her only extravagances, and she promised herself she would make that up out of the household money by economizing. Her dish towels she made herself out of a long bolt of linen cloth; she made even her soap. She was determined not to waste Denby’s money; he was trying too hard to get started.
Her acquisition of the spoons had cost her more than the purchase money, however, although she did not know it. As she left the shop with her package of spoons, she was observed by one of the leading Augusta socialites, Mrs. Randolph Forsythe.
Thinking of Augusta only as the city of her birth, where her roots should be, Roxanne had not realized that she was returning to the stronghold of her memorable mother’s deadly enemies. Her mother’s beauty had impressed the young swains of her day, to the chagrin of their womenfolk, and her mother had chosen for herself another girl’s intended, a very wealthy and influential girl’s intended. Aunt Ada had been right: Roxanne’s father had fled the city with his bride to avoid not only the horsewhipping Aunt Ada had mentioned, but to escape the animosity of his jilted former fiancee. That jilted former fiancee was middle-aged now and twenty pounds heavier, but she was not so old she had forgotten how it felt to be left standing at the altar while her erstwhile groom fled the city with her best friend. The fact that she had since made a brilliant marriage and was no longer “that poor little Canfield girl who was jilted” but instead the wealthy Mrs. Forsythe, whose influential husband was being groomed for governor, somehow did not matter. Mrs. Forsythe turned pale on the street at the sight of Roxanne, recognizing at once the mirror image of the girl who had been the cause of her misery. At that moment all the bitterness of that long ago time came flooding back, and Mrs. Forsythe got unsteadily into her waiting carriage, returned to her magnolia-shrouded mansion, shut herself in her white and gold bedroom, and wept for two hours. At the end of that time she began to make inquiries about the girl she had seen who “looked so like ... so like. . .
When she learned that Roxanne was married to a young man from Baltimore who was seeking to establish himself in the glover’s trade in Augusta, Mrs. Forsythe’s eyes gleamed. Here at last was her chance to strike back at the woman who had caused her such heartache. Quietly, she let it be known among her numerous relatives and even more numerous friends that Roxanne would not be received at her home. Her two married sisters took up the cudgel with their friends. Mrs. Barton, the spiteful headmistress whose husband’s affections Roxanne’s mother had unwittingly captured, heard of it and joined the whispering campaign of the Forsythe connections. Amongst them, they blanketed Augusta with aspersions on Roxanne’s character and hints about her “bad blood,” and—with knowing shrugs and raised eyebrows—added the damning comment that she had “married down.” An informal boycott was agreed upon, the assumption being that if nobody patronized Denby’s shop, he would take the hint and go back to Baltimore “where he belonged.”
These ladies would see to it that Roxanne’s lot was hard.
When in late August Denby opened for business, the gentry did not stream, as expected, into his shop. Puzzled, Denby rearranged his window displays, had his new sign regilded, and waited.
On one occasion, Denby hurried out of the workroom and the male customer, realizing that Denby was Roxanne’s husband, swiftly grabbed his gloves and left. When the clerk Roxanne was allegedly supervising tittered over this, Denby gave Roxanne a sharp look. After that incident Denby started popping out of the workroom almost every time the bell over the shop door announced another customer. It was painfully obvious to him that these smiling gentlemen who bowed so low to his wife were interested in more than gloves.
Fiercely jealous, Denby pounced on this; he smoldered for a while and then one day exiled Roxanne to the rooms over the shop. Let the hired clerk take care of the customers; he would not have Roxanne flaunting herself before the public, he fumed. Roxanne reminded him that his own mother had worked in his father’s glove shop when they started. Denby would not listen. He informed her angrily that times had changed. Roxanne sighed and trudged upstairs. She had encountered his unreasoning jealousy before.
That night when Denby came to bed, he stood in the lamplight looking down at her alluring body in its delicate white nightgown.
“Take it off,” he said shortly.
Roxanne stared up at him, puzzled. Slowly she drew the nightgown up over her head, so that she lay naked before him.
“That’s better,” said Denby and seized her roughly, almost pummeling her as he thrashed around the bed. Roxanne was still gasping from that bout when, bruisingly, he took her again. And afterward thrust her away from him almost contemptuously. His manner said plainly, That's good enough for you.
Roxanne was hurt and bewildered.
When she woke the next morning, her whole body ached, and she winced when her shoulder moved on the pillow.
After Denby had gone downstairs, whistling, to work in the shop, she took off her dress and studied the bruises he had given her the night before.
Then she sank down on the bed in despair.
He wants to hurt me, she decided. He desires me but he cannot forgive me for being as attractive to other men as I am to him.
She found it a disquieting thought.
Roxanne was also puzzled by the conspicuous absence of the carriage trade from their shop—and by the coolness of her reception in general. People she thought should have welcomed her with open arms as her mother’s daughter returned, did not. In fact, they did not welcome her at all. At first she wondered if by living above their little shop they had transgressed the aristocratic code of the South. But no—others were doing it.
Then one morning as she strolled in the park, it all became blindingly clear.
It was early, and as she strolled along, a gentleman in a morning coat, much the worse for drink, tipped his hat to her familiarly and said in a befuddled voice, “Well, if it isn’t the young lady all the hubbub’s about!”
Under normal conditions, Roxanne would have ignored him and swept on. Now she turned and said sharply, “What hubbub?”
He waved his gloved hand vaguely. Obviously, he had slipped and fallen somewhere on the damp ground, for his glove was muddy. “That’s right,” he murmured. “Wasn’t to tell. All hush-hush.”
“What is hush-hush?” cried Roxanne.
“All that about you . . . the glover’s pretty wife who’s come back looking just like her mother—and set all our good wives buzzing. Out to ruin the poor glover, they are!” He leaned dizzily against a tree. “Do you think you could tell me the way to Bacon Street?” he mumbled in a plaintive tone. “I live there.”
“I will take you to Bacon Street,” announced Roxanne angrily.
She seized the arm of the gentleman in the morning coat and marched him the short distance to Bacon Street, where she leaned him against his own doorbell. A well-dressed woman in her thirties—obviously his wife—threw the door open and gave ground in surprise as her husband lurched past her. Then she stood and glared at Roxanne.
“I have brought your husband home to you,” said Roxanne in a cold voice. “He is in sad need of a new pair of gloves. I suggest you buy them from Denby Barrington.”
She whirled on her heel and was gone, leaving the woman staring after her venomously.
If any further push had been needed to insure her social downfall, that did it. The woman was Mrs. Amalie Stone-Fellowes, and her wandering husband was a scandal in the town. Her curious neighbors, peeking through their lace curtains, had seen Roxanne’s arrival with the errant Mr. Stone-Fellowes and promptly assumed the worst. The story spread like wildfire through aristocratic Augusta—further proof, it was said, of the type of woman Roxanne was. Mrs. Stone-Fellowes seethed.
Now Roxanne had acquired a third bitter enemy who wished the new glover to take his store to some other town.
Two had been enough.
But at least Roxanne finally understood the nature of her problem. If only Denby would let her work in the shop! There she could perhaps charm wealthy gentlemen into buying gloves surreptitiously for their wives. Women used stacks of gloves. It was not unusual for a lady of pretensions to take forty pair at a time to be cleaned.
To be cleaned! She could wash and clean gloves upstairs. Surely Denby would not mind that! And it would supplement their too-meager income. When Denby came upstairs after a fruitless day, she broached the subject and Denby promptly vetoed it. He went on to criticize: the dinner, the biscuits were burned again; Roxanne’s hairstyle, too conspicuous; the color of the curtains, too bright. His mood was waspish.
It stayed waspish, for business got no better. Oh, he sold a pair of gloves now and then: to women who could only afford cheap ones, to men needing work gloves. But that didn’t meet the payroll or the rent. And the carriage trade, which he had so confidently expected, and which indeed was the proper market for his fine handmade gloves, stayed away.
Denby began to find fault with Roxanne all the time, bitterly criticizing her. Her walk was too seductive, her glance was too bold, her clothes fit her too tightly—only harlots displayed their figures in this manner.
“And society women!” shouted Roxanne, driven to rage. “These are the clothes you bought for me, Denby. You thought them perfect at the time. My hair is the same too. What has changed you?”
His young face, once so boyish, was suddenly haggard and old. He buried his head in his hands and groaned. “Oh, God, Roxanne,” he cried despairingly. “What am I to do? My gloves are the finest in town. Why don’t they sell?”
Roxanne was afraid to tell him. “Perhaps if I started working in the shop again?” she suggested tentatively.
“No!” shouted Denby, and flung out of the apartment, to return late and befuddled by bourbon.
Denby placed a large ad in the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette. Even that did not help much.
Before the winter was over Roxanne knew it had all been a mistake; she should never have married Denby. She had, she realized, left her heart in Baltimore. She had given it to a rogue. Now she would have nothing, nothing.
But that was not Denby’s fault, she told herself sternly. In his blundering way she was sure he loved her. And although she did her best to simulate ardor, to make her response to him as warm and loving as he could have wished, she felt that he sensed his own inadequacy in the bedroom and her counterfeit response, and she wondered if that could be the basis for the jealously he so recklessly displayed.
About Denby she now felt very guilty. His glove shop—never flourishing—was slowly dying. And his enthusiasm for it, once so bright, was waning too. She had brought him here to this lovely city, so staunchly aligned against her. And here he would leave his father’s fortune, dissipated for reasons he did not underst
and. He would go under, working frenziedly.
It made her cry sometimes at night, for pity.
Denby heard her crying and made wild efforts to make amends, believing her tears were due to his treatment of her. He bought her a gold locket on a little chain to wear around her neck. She knew he could not afford such expensive gifts and yearned to ask him to take it back. But so happy was he to clasp it around her neck that she choked back the words and, instead, threw her arms around his neck and wept in earnest.
Denby, touched by this display of emotion at his gift, strutted around the shop for several days.
Until a conspicuously handsome Army major dropped by. This major had formerly stopped by the shop several times and bought gloves he did not need solely to feast his eyes on Roxanne and to try somehow to win her favor. Now back in town, he inquired of Denby if she was there, and insisted he would purchase his gloves from nobody but Roxanne. Stiffnecked with jealousy of the handsome major, Denby told him Roxanne no longer worked in the shop and added loftily that the shop was flourishing and he was hiring an assistant clerk. It was such an obvious bald-faced lie that the major laughed in Denby’s face, turned on his heel and left.
That night Denby flung wild accusations at Roxanne: She had encouraged the major, she had led him on; why else would he insist on buying his gloves from nobody but her?
It was useless to reason with him. Denby stormed out of the house in a passion. Roxanne spent the hours awaiting his return staring at the ceiling in the darkness and seeing before her a bleak future. She could not find the heart to blame Denby for these outbursts, which had become more frequent. She knew he was worried almost to panic because his business was not catching on.
Denby came home very drunk, stumbled through the door and plunged at her in the bed. When she eluded him by leaping up, he bellowed at her to return. Roxanne stood trembling with indecision by the window, uncertain whether to bolt for the downstairs or return to bed—and a bruising evening of lust.
These Golden Pleasures Page 24