The head of the family reacted to this news by summarily dismissing them both. Madame Renée’s reaction was angry but philosophical; she had held no fewer than eight such jobs in the twelve years between the death of the Breton farmer and her marriage to the watchmaker. Her new husband, however, had been in the family’s employ in one position or another since arriving from Liverpool more than twenty years earlier, and his first instinct was to abandon his new bride and beg for his position back; upon being refused he drowned himself in Boston Harbor. She shook her head as she described her trip to the morgue and the haranguing she’d given her waterlogged bridegroom, for she’d already found work with a family that was in need of a butler. That was the end of marriage for her but not, she said with a wink of her good eye, the end of love. I was not unmoved in her presence—her speech alone brought pleasantly to mind another youngish French widow of my early acquaintance, and a murmured “prends-moi” would have been enough to rouse me to the task—but she was employed in the household of the woman I loved, and I resisted the temptation to respond to her coquetry. When she asked me, then, why my wife never accompanied me to dinner I thought it best to change the subject; I complimented her effusively on the elaborate meal I had shared with the Levals two nights previous, and she replied with justifiable pride that her employers ate that well and elegantly always, whether in the presence of guests or not.
But guests there were, that night and nearly every other: primarily bankers and railroad men anxious to court Marc’s favor, though the prominent citizens of Cottonwood also joined them at table with some frequency. With my own exception, though, I don’t believe the Levals counted any of Cottonwood’s own as friends. Katie had not been replaced in Maggie’s affections by any of the local women, though by and large these women seemed to think kindly of her, particularly those who had been her dinner guests.
After the meal had been served we would retire to the parlor where Maggie would play the violin and I the piano, together and separately. I was an indifferent accompanist at best. When first invited to play I had not laid my fingers upon a keyboard in five years or more; my former facility might have returned to me with an hour or so’s daily practice, but pending the arrival of the piano we’d ordered for the saloon this was impossible, and so I served her mostly as timekeeper for sentimental Irish tunes and bits of Italian opera. On one occasion we were joined by an officer of the KCI&N, who sang an adaptation of Bach for solo baritone with great skill and sensitivity. Afterward he explained gleefully over Leval’s brandy how the railroad was going to chisel a bunch of farmers out of some land for its right-of-way to our west.
When we played Marc sat back and beamed at his wife with great pride, and it was plain how much he adored her; even at those times, though, I felt no shame regarding my powerful yearning for Maggie, which claimed much of my attention during those months. It was in fact at those times that I desired her the most ardently, listening to her crystalline tone over my leaden hammering, seeing her bosom rise and fall to the beat that my left hand clumsily beat out of the keyboard, watching her face flush over certain difficult passages. Often as not I remained seated at the piano after finishing so as to avoid embarrassment upon standing. I suspected that she received a similarly erotic excitement from our duets, though the only evidence I could have offered then was the fact that she steadfastly refused to meet my gaze while I played for her, and for several minutes thereafter, as though such an exchange would reveal more than she dared.
A crowd the like of which the town had not yet seen gathered in the rain to see Marc off to Chicago. A private railcar had been assigned to him, aboard which he carried a bottle of French wine and a basket of cold foods prepared by Madame Renée. She could be seen in the throng flirting with Herbert Braunschweig, about whom she had asked me the previous week before dinner; her left eye was bad and his right was gone, and the fact that their good eyes met when they faced each other made things seem preordained, at least to Madame Renée.
Maggie managed to develop what appeared to be a bad head cold two days before the trip was to begin. The more forcefully her husband argued that she should come along anyway, the worse her symptoms became, and by the time of his departure she was too ill even to come to the depot, and he grudgingly left her behind in the care of Madame Renée and Rose, the new housemaid. She was an Irish girl of sixteen or so who blushed in Marc’s presence and seemed to wish his wife didn’t exist. Waving to the cheering crowd outside as he stepped aboard, he took me into the private car with him, ostensibly to give me a few last-minute instructions but actually, I think, to show it off. There he put me in charge of his various and sundry construction projects, which in practice meant only that their foremen were to report to me any difficulties that might arise. Stanley Eaton would take over his role at the bank, and Tiny Rector still officially held the mayoralty. Any grave problems were to be reported to him at his hotel in Chicago via telegraph.
I was taken aback several days later to receive at the hotel an envelope with my name on it in Maggie’s elegantly swooping hand. Inside was an invitation card, again in her hand:
Mrs. Marc Leval requests the honor of your presence for dinner Tuesday evening at six P.M.
I was delighted to receive it, as I had nowhere but the saloon to go that evening, and I didn’t want to risk losing my new barman by cutting two of his three working shifts pending Marc’s return. The thought of three weeks passing without Maggie’s company had been weighing upon my mind as well, and it was with a light heart that I bounded onto the front veranda of the Leval residence that evening at six. I was met at the door by young Rose, who looked indifferently at me and directed me to the drawing room, where Tiny and Mrs. Rector sat waiting. His face was covered with tiny beads of sweat, which he mopped with a handkerchief upon my taking a seat across from him. Mrs. Rector, whose first name of Lillian I never presumed to use, greeted me in a friendly manner but was scarcely able to tear her attention from the room’s furnishings.
“Bill, do you suppose that’s silk there?”
“What, the curtains? Sure,” I said, having no idea what else they might be.
“It’s a hell of a place, all right,” Tiny said, and his wife was so enraptured she didn’t scold him for cursing. It was a measure of Marc’s cocksureness that the mayor’s office ought rightfully to be his own that he had never bothered to include the incumbent and his wife among the fair number of other local notables who had dined in his home.
“How many rooms you figure there are, Bill?” Tiny asked in a near whisper.
“I believe there are four bedrooms upstairs. There’s a parlor and a dining room, kitchen downstairs.”
“And all furnished like this?” Mrs. Rector asked me, a look of utter astonishment on her face. She had a squarish, sharp-angled head, softened by large, heavy-lidded green eyes, and looking at you in just the right way she was nearly a beauty.
“I haven’t seen them all,” I said.
Maggie chose that moment to make her appearance, and having welcomed us, led us out of the drawing room and into the dining room. There at the long table a fifth place had mysteriously been set. In the candlelight Tiny’s squinting face looked like a dried-up apple as we sat. Rose poured us each a glass of red wine from a crystal decanter.
“Bill, I’m so sorry Ninna couldn’t be with us after all,” Maggie said as we took our places, as though it were something she and I had previously discussed. I was interested to note no sign that she had recently been ill. “Rose, will you remove Mrs. Ogden’s place setting please?”
I looked over at the Rectors as Rose complied. Tiny was still overwhelmed by the place, but Maggie’s pretense was so transparent that it elicited a little involuntary mou of disapproval from Mrs. Rector, who was normally happy to overlook my marital irregularities. I could understand her discomfort, because there was no avoiding the fact that this felt for all the world like one married couple dining with another.
The first course was vichyssoise
, and Maggie presumed to explain that it was intentionally served cold.
“Just because I live on the prairie doesn’t make me an idiot,” Mrs. Rector snapped. “I went to one of the finest girls’ schools in all of New England, I speak French perfectly and I know all about vichyssoise.” She pronounced it “vichyswah,” and I thought it best not to correct her.
“I do wish I spoke French, Lillian,” Maggie said, placing her own hand appeasingly upon Mrs. Rector’s. “Having a French name would be so much more splendid if I could pronounce it properly.”
Tiny was lapping up his own soup contentedly, to all appearances blind to the discord between his wife and Maggie. “Oh, boy, now, that’s a good bowl of soup,” he said, wiping a goodly portion of it from his beard with his linen napkin. The second course consisted of terrine of duck’s liver in aspic, which Maggie had the good grace not to explain. I spread a bit of mine on a chunk of Madame Renée’s bread and elicited a curl of Mrs. Rector’s lip; she cut hers daintily with knife and fork and ate it as though it were a cutlet, and her husband and Maggie did the same. It was a lovely concoction regardless of how it was eaten, and I offered the opinion that Madame Renée might do well to open a restaurant.
“She sure would, Bill,” Tiny said, his beard below his lip now smeared with duck’s liver. “That new one on Seward’s sure no good. Took my lunch there yesterday and it was godawful. Meat was tough as pine bark and gamy, too. Don’t know where they got it.”
“Not easy to get supplies in a place like this,” I said.
“This was meat, Bill. So much damned meat around these parts you’d really have to make an effort to find a bad cut.” He leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach. “Anyway, in a month or so you’ll be able to get anything you want, via the railroad, and a good thing, too. My inventory’s had to double of late. It’s all moving, too, right out the door.”
“Don’t talk business at the table.”
“I’m not talking business,” he said. “This is politics. I was by the land office this afternoon and that Sullivan told me the best thing I ever did as mayor was laying out the town in a grid with regular rectangular parcels, ’cause he’s doing thirty transactions a day sometimes and it sure makes it simpler. ’Course when I did that I never thought we’d get so big so fast. Almost makes your head swim.”
“Well, it’s not all good,” Mrs. Rector sniffed. “Some of those changes a town could do without. The fallen women, for example.”
“All those men need to be entertained,” I said.
“Entertainment needn’t entail debasement.”
“Indeed it needn’t,” Maggie agreed. “I believe that a theatre or an opera house is what we’ll be needing next.”
Again Mrs. Rector sniffed. “Just as bad as the brothels.”
“I beg your pardon?” Maggie asked.
“Show people,” she said.
Maggie’s face flushed, but her response was pre-empted by the return of Rose, who refilled my and Tiny’s glasses, took up the plates and scuttled quickly out of the room.
Tiny leaned back again, taking the front legs of his chair off the ground. “Well, it sure makes all those men easier to control.” Upon receiving a sharp look from his wife he felt it necessary to clarify. “All’s I’m saying is, when you get a whole lot of single men together in one place, you get problems. When they can go get themselves a little . . .” He stopped himself and backtracked. “When they can do a little courting, they comport themselves in a more civilized manner.”
“That’s enough, Henry.”
“All’s I’m saying . . .”
“That’s enough.”
He started to open his mouth, but the door opened and Rose brought in the main course, a pair of canards à l’orange, and he set his chair back firmly on the floor in preparation for it.
We were mostly silent during the consumption of the ducks, but Tiny was thinking still; once, his mouth half-full, he said, “Whores ain’t all bad for a town, anyway.” I honestly don’t think he knew he’d spoken it aloud, so wounded and innocent was the expression on his face following the jab he received from his wife’s elbow.
After dinner we retired as per usual to the parlor for music, but tonight’s recital was briefer than most. The Rectors both lacked musical training, and so in place of Marc’s blatant adoration we had Tiny looking on in sweaty consternation at my attempt at a mazurka by Louis Gottschalk, and Mrs. Rector next to him, her contemptuous scowl growing thinner and thinner with each measure I played. Upon finishing I stood regretfully to offer my thanks to the hostess, since the Rectors were plainly anxious to leave, and I suspected that for propriety’s sake Mrs. Rector would delay their leavetaking until I took my own.
And so, bundled properly against the chill of the night and after some chatter between the women, the Rectors and I made our way out into the evening.
“Say, Bill, why don’t we drop Lillian off and you and I’ll go get a drink. I got a couple of things I wanted to discuss with you. City business.”
That suited me fine, as I already had the intention of stopping in at the saloon for a quick drink and some jawboning before bed. Mrs. Rector said nothing until we got to the dry goods store, at the back of which sat their apartment. Tiny unlocked the front door and we marched single file through the darkened aisles, past the display cases full of leather gloves and corsets, the shelves laden with bolts of cloth and finished goods, the pickle barrels and their briny odor. The store was now twice its original width, Tiny having evicted the clothing merchant who had until recently shared the eastern half of the retail floor, and still, in the dark anyway, it appeared well-stocked. When we reached the rear apartment Mrs. Rector opened the door and hastened inside to light the lamp. In its dim light, she addressed me directly and sadly, and with her hard shell softened by emotion one saw the remnants of the beauty she must have been when Tiny married her.
“Why don’t you boys talk in here? Surely this is nicer than going out in that cold again.”
“It’s not as cold as all that,” Tiny said. “And we’re wanting a drink.”
To my astonishment Mrs. Rector opened a cabinet and extracted from it a familiar, flat green bottle. “There’s whiskey here, Hank.” I’d never heard anyone call him that before, though I knew Henry was his proper name.
“We got city business to discuss, Lil, I already told you that. Now you just get on to bed and don’t worry about where we are.”
Silently she retreated into the other room and closed the door behind her; through it a moment later I heard her say, “Good night, Bill, it was pleasant seeing you.” Her voice was dull and resigned, and Tiny jerked his thumb at the door.
“Let’s get,” he mouthed silently, and we did.
They would be moving out of the apartment soon; as he locked the front door of the dry goods store Tiny described to me the large house they were building a block away. Their grown daughter had married a dentist in Independence, and the Rectors were trying to convince them to relocate to Cottonwood, using the promise of a rent-free place in the new house and the opportunity to be the first dentist in a growing town where nearly every night occasioned a tooth-loosening brawl.
Stepping into the street I thought I spied Katie Bender in the distance, carrying a parcel. I wondered why she was in town so late and where she was staying; I knew she hadn’t alerted Maggie to her presence, because she’d remarked that very evening on the fact that she hadn’t seen Katie since the latter had returned to the family farm. She disappeared around the corner of Main and Lincoln before I could be certain it was she.
“Don’t even feel like the same town, does it?” Tiny asked as we walked slowly down the middle of Main Street in the direction of the saloon. As leisurely as our pace was, Tiny still breathed like a racehorse, his open mouth unfairly lending him the aspect of an idiot. There were sounds from all directions—a loud, angry discussion about borrowed money, hoofbeats down the newly-constructed wooden sidewalk (upon which horses, in princ
iple, were forbidden), the whinnying of another horse in the opposite direction; a drunkard’s careless laughter, his companion ordering him to shut the hole in his face, the delighted whooping and rebel-yelling of a small crowd of onlookers as the discussion erupted predictably into fisticuffs.
“Sounds like someone’s making work for your son-in-law already, Tiny,” I said as cheers rose into the night following a loud, bony cracking. The fight sounded as if it was happening on First Street, a block away, and I was tempted to go and watch.
“Two, three months ago this town would have been quiet as the tomb this time of night.”
“That’s so,” I said. “I believe I like this better.”
“Me, too. ’Course it changes everything. Shit, you know what it costs to hire a goddamn police force? A lot.”
I knew that, because half the newly hired force spent half their pay as well as a goodly portion of the workday at the saloon, which meant I was getting a large chunk of that new municipal funding.
Tiny shook his head in wonder. “Goddamn, I’ll be relieved when that friend of yours takes the mayor’s job.”
“That’s good to hear. He’s afraid you’re offended he wants it.”
“Nah. It’s not a part-time job any more, and I got enough to worry about just keeping the town supplied with boots and water pitchers.”
We crossed paths at that point with Paul Lowry, who despite my frank misgivings had been hired for the new police brigade. He was shoving a prisoner ahead of him in a jocular way, the man’s hands secured behind him via an iron cuff. The prisoner was short and slight, naturally, but he met my stare with sullen and fearless hostility.
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 8