The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  Porter was not tall, but Lina was shorter and she had to move forward and up to reach him. He did not step away as their lips touched and Lina began to press against him, but he pulled back, removed his hands from her shoulders.

  “Lina, you are a wonderful young woman. I could think of nothing worse than having you hate me tomorrow morning,” Porter said, and slowly he brought her close again and kissed her on the forehead. “Please, let’s be friends. Call me anytime. Let me know how it goes with your case.” And then he turned and walked away.

  LINA ARRIVED HOME AND BEGAN immediately to pack for the trip to Richmond. Two trouser suits, two button-downs, a pair of jeans, pajamas, pens, her notebook, her laptop. She moved in a hurried, automatic haze that banished any thought of Porter or Oscar or Grace.

  Lina grabbed her coat, her suitcase, and her handbag and left the house; she did not want to be home when Oscar returned fresh from the success and catharsis of his show. The dead bolt slid into place and she stepped down onto the sidewalk. Streetlights towered above her, their glare throwing wide circles of yellow into her path. She advanced through one and then into shadow again, light and shadow, light and shadow. It became almost a cinematic flickering as she walked faster, faster, faster, the suitcase on wheels bumping behind her over the uneven pavement.

  It was twelve thirty on a Monday night. Her flight departed at seven A.M., giving her roughly five hours to fill before she had to leave for the airport. A couple strolled past Lina, holding hands. A man pulled at a small dog on a red leather lead. A woman spoke breathlessly into a cell phone cupped against her chin.

  Lina paused at the intersection. She did not know where to go. She did not want to eat or drink or talk or smoke. She headed to the office.

  LINA SWITCHED ON THE OVERHEAD light and her office flickered into view: her cluttered desk, hulking computer, the chair for visitors, the shelves filled with client files and old law school textbooks. For a moment it all looked one-dimensional, like a future museum exhibit of early twenty-first-century office life: Look at how those people lived! Why did they do it? Wasn’t it funny, what they believed?

  Perched in Lina’s in-tray was a bulky package. She opened it to find some of the books she’d ordered last week for her research into the Underground Railroad and the Rounds family. She flipped through the titles and back-cover blurbs; most of the books were out of print, the product of academic scholarship from decades past. One cover caught Lina’s eye: a black-and-white photo of a plain-faced white woman with kind eyes and a small smile, middle-aged, curly gray hair. The Forgotten Feminist: A Biography of Kate Rounds Sterrett, the title read. Kate was the older of the Rounds daughters, recipient of the letters Lina had found online last week. Lina had ordered the book thinking that perhaps Kate had written about the family’s activities on the Underground Railroad. It was worth a shot; Lina’s leads were few.

  The back of the book read:

  Kate Rounds Sterrett, the once-famous abolitionist, feminist, and writer, was committed to an insane asylum in 1855 after she threatened to divorce her husband. She divorced him anyway, managed to convince those who needed convincing of her sanity, and spent the rest of her life in determined agitation for the rights of women and African Americans. She was prominent in the earliest days of both the suffrage and abolitionist movements and saw the America into which she was born change profoundly over the course of her life. After decades of activism, Kate Rounds Sterrett died at the age of 102. Today, her name is largely forgotten. This biography seeks to restore her to the pantheon of America’s earliest feminists alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

  Lina kicked off her shoes, opened the book, and skimmed through the first chapters on Kate’s early life, looking for information on the Underground Railroad. Anything that told of individual fugitives who had been helped, or the onward routes they traveled, anything that might suggest Josephine.

  But there was nothing.

  Lina flipped through the chapters on Kate’s later life in New York, the racism prevalent there, women’s inability to vote or serve on juries, Kate’s work as suffragette and abolitionist, the advances won, the setbacks suffered, why Kate’s reputation should be restored, her writings studied once more.

  At the back of the book was an appendix consisting of letters to Kate written by her younger sister, Dorothea. The introduction to the letters read:

  In 1848, Kate left her family in Virginia to marry Gareth Sterrett, a clerk with the Bank of New York, and take up domestic life in New York City. Her younger sister, Dorothea, began a regular correspondence with Kate to keep her apprised of family and community news and, particularly, of the family’s activities in the Underground Railroad. Sadly, Kate’s letters to Dorothea have been lost to time but the flavor that Dorothea’s missives impart—of life in a small Virginia town and of the family’s commitment to the abolitionist cause—is worth examining. A detailed analysis lies beyond the scope of this book, but I include them here in their entirety as a fitting postscript to Kate Rounds Sterrett’s life, a sideways view into the roots of her youthful idealism, the familial foundation of her later beliefs, and hints of the marital discord that later propelled her away from a traditional wifely role and toward the liberal causes and beliefs that are her enduring, though often overlooked, legacy.

  Lina glanced at the first lines:

  My Dearest Darling Kate,

  The wedding flowers have only just begun to wilt & here I sit down to write. How I miss you already!

  With a jolt of recognition, Lina looked up from the book and her eyes settled on the photo of Lu Anne and Josephine on the porch at Bell Creek. Here was the full correspondence between Dorothea and Kate Rounds, Lina realized, the same letters she had read on the Virginia Historical Society’s website, the same letters that were housed at the Society’s center in Richmond. And here they were, in her hands, in New York.

  Behind Lina’s closed office door, the Clifton landscape stretched empty and still. The alcohol buzz had left her, though the memory of Porter beneath the neon light was still fresh. Why had she tried to kiss him? It now seemed a silly, impetuous thing to do. Porter was good-looking, true, in the way of an older man who is successful and just a touch vain, and kind. He had been very kind to her. But here, surrounded by sterility, the instinct that had led her to lean forward, to seek him out, seemed all but erased.

  What remained from that encounter was Grace. The Grace described by Porter flitted in the far corners of Lina’s vision like a shadow or hallucination or some sort of presence. A woman drawn in new particulars that Lina could understand: eggs Benedict, a hand-knitted scarf, Patsy Cline, a need for escape. With a curtain of dark hair, a quiet laugh, a smell of pepper and sugar. Lina felt closer to her mother now, in the silent gray lull of her office, than she ever had before.

  Lina turned back to the book and began to read.

  April 11, 1848

  Dearest Kate,

  I was so pleased to receive your letter this morning! I opened it with trembling fingers & read it through in one sitting. Mother & Father are both out—Father visiting again with Pastor Shaw & Mother to the cobbler in town with Samuel, as the poor boy’s shoes were cracked & the seams split. I am so glad that Gareth’s work progresses well, although his long hours spent at the bank can surely not be easy for you. I trust that over time his load will lessen, once he has proven to his employers that he is a clever & honorable clerk. You have a lifetime together, do not forget it, my impatient Kate!

  I hesitate to start in on the sorry tale of our poor Samuel’s mother. The father’s disappearance was not as blithely innocent as it appeared. Sheriff Roy came here to examine the woman’s body, laid out in the barn by Father. She indeed did not lie peacefully but it would appear was strangled around the neck until dead. I shudder even to write such a thing, it is so horrible. Poor Samuel did not hear the worst of it, I hurried him out of the room once the Sheriff entered & kept him busy upstairs playing with the toy steam engine�
�remember that one, Kate?—as Sheriff Roy downstairs told of his sorry conclusion.

  It seems an impossibility—that a woman is so beloved by a man, who together bore & raised a child, & yet that same man would deliver upon that same woman such cruelty & pain. Perhaps you think me naïve. But what God could allow such a thing to transpire? The weight of the things I do not understand would crush an ox.

  I know Father hates me to question in any way his Faith, but ever since Percy’s death I cannot abide by such childish fairy tales. The idea that all is ordained, that everything good shall come to the virtuous & only evil come for the wicked—this is no more true than the woodland fairy Mother had us chase in the forest when we were children. Do you remember that, Kate? How I did believe in her, that fairy with gossamer green wings & skin of palest blue. I believed that she watched over me on winter nights, when the wind howled round the eaves. With time I outgrew the woodland fairy & with Percy’s dying I outgrew too those other fairy tales.

  I remember so well Percy’s small feet on the riverbank. He skipped after a dragonfly, I heard him call to me, his small voice breathless as he ran. I turned my head away but for an instant—Kate, an instant—& then the splash. In my dreams I am still searching in the dark water for him. My hands grasp only lily roots & swarms of tadpoles, their bloated bodies floating strange between my fingers. I am not to blame myself, you & Mother & Father have told me a thousand times if once. I hear the words, but at night, when I wake from those dreams, it is with a pain so deep I can scarcely breathe. The weight I feel, the sorrow. That I was not quick enough, that I left him in that cold place. I could not find him. It was I alone who could have saved him & I alone who did not. Where was God that day, I ask you, where was He?

  Yours,

  Dot

  April 12, 1848

  Dearest Kate,

  There is some news from town. Widow Price’s field hand has not yet been caught, though it seems the whole county rides every night in pursuit, a whole cavalry of our landholders on the moonlit roads. They relish in the frolic of it, the shouting of glad voices came in through my open window last night & woke me. Perhaps the fugitive is long gone, perhaps he walks even along the streets of your city as I write this. In truth I hope that it is so. Widow Price grows graver by the week, her frown sinking deeper into the lines of her face as though fixed in stone, never to turn upwards again.

  Mother says that Widow Price has lost four slaves in the past month to flight, & isn’t it perilous, a woman farming alone, her only son gone out west & never heard from again? But still, her pallor, the black robes she persists in wearing so long after her husband’s passing, her eyes black as her skirts, her voice shrill & sharp at the children running after Sunday sermon—all this provokes in me a great unease. She seems one for whom mercy is a weakness, not a virtue, one for whom human suffering & pain are unremarkable & simply to be endured as they are, with no attempt to aid the afflicted. Would that all her field hands might flee.

  Your most affectionate sister,

  Dorothea

  April 15, 1848

  Dear Kate,

  So it is decided—Samuel shall stay now with us. It brings me great joy & I can see that it does too for Father & Mother. He will sleep downstairs in the spare room, & Father has made a low bed for him & a stool. He is a lovely boy, though solemn & thoughtful, not as whimsical & cheerful as our little Percy. O, I can hear your voice now—I must not compare the two. How could any child, any person for that matter, measure to our Percy? But at times when I am watching Samuel as he is quiet, after a meal or sitting in the morning as he awaits Father’s summons to help in the barn or in the fields, I must turn my eyes away because his person is so much alike to Percy. The way he holds his boyish head, the straight line of his slender back as he sits. It nearly breaks my heart.

  Samuel I think is happy here, as happy as an orphaned boy can be. Mother tends to him morning & night & Father too has taken him under his tutelage, showing him the lathe & spinner & how to sand the wood in the direction of the grain. Neither Father nor Mother speak of it to me, but I can see a lightness now in their ways that has been missing these two long years since Percy’s passing. I came upon Mother humming at her work in the kitchen yesterday—can you imagine! I wanted to hug her & clap my hands but I did not. I crept away & left her with her hands in flour & her tune echoing off the baking tins. Yes, Samuel has given new hope to us all, & for this I am very grateful.

  Jack Harper called today to speak with Father about some carpentry work. His mother is very poorly, Father said. Jack nodded to me but Mother & I were busy with the early canning & Mother bade me not tarry.

  Your affectionate & dutiful sister,

  Dorothea

  April 17, 1848

  Dearest Kate,

  The heat is unbearable today, the air heavy to breathe. It is early yet for such oppression, it bodes ill for the coming summer. We buried Samuel’s dear mother this morning, all of us with tears of sweat on our faces as we stood grave-side. It was a meager group, only ourselves, poor Samuel, & the Pastor. Pastor Shaw spoke few words & his voice was low though his face appeared troubled, he seemed occupied by some other worry. Samuel remained brave, he did not weep. I held his hand tightly throughout, & together we threw handfuls upon her coffin. I do hate that sound, the dull thud of dirt falling against the wood.

  Father has been busy in the barn all day & now even as night has fallen I can see his lantern still burning in the workshop window. He works too hard. His health remains good but he works as though wishing to hasten along its decline. Mother does not comment but she looks to the windows at night as I do, hoping to see his form approaching the house, ready to quit for the night, ready for rest. But he toils on. The newly made coffins now seem almost to outnumber the living of our congregation, as though Father were preparing for a great plague.

  My eyes begin to close even as I write this. Sleep comes; good night, dear Kate.

  Your sister,

  Dot

  April 25, 1848

  Dear Kate,

  Our small chapel still echoes with the tones of Pastor Shaw’s sermon delivered this Sunday last. It was a deeply affecting lecture, Kate, one that I continue to ponder even now three days gone. He spoke on the universal sanctity of life, how the taking of life regardless of the station of the person will always be viewed as a sin before God, that all men yearn for life & its natural corollary, freedom. His words flowed from him as I had never seen before. Jesus died for us all, the Pastor said, & it is not the privilege of men to pick & choose whose life may be considered sacred before the Lord.

  Throughout the sermon I heard murmurs & coughs from the congregation, but the noise grew louder as the Pastor spoke on. And then suddenly Widow Price stood & departed from the church, even as Pastor Shaw still preached. I thought at first she suffered some sudden sickness, but her face bore a look of grim resolve & clear-eyed health. She very well stomped down the central aisle & slammed the church door behind her. Pastor Shaw continued without interruption but did not mingle with the congregation outside in his usual way.

  Nor did we linger outside the church. Father hurried us into the carriage & sped the horses onwards. Mother had a queer look on her face, but shook me away when I questioned her. Samuel & I sat close on the back bench, my arm around his slender shoulders as we rode in silence towards home. And I realized then that the pain of Percy’s leaving, the weight of my guilt, is lifting. Not always. Not every day. It is Samuel that brings it on. Growing to know him &, yes, to love him, not as I loved Percy, never like that, but a different sort of love. It feels redemptive, if I may use a word from Pastor Shaw’s sermon. It feels like redemption. Like perhaps I will not fall into the earth & be swallowed whole by my sorrow. It feels like the dawn.

  Your most loving & devoted sister,

  Dorothea

  May 2, 1848

  Dearest Kate,

  There is some shocking news. Pastor Shaw is gone, run out in the night. When firs
t I heard, I could not help but connect his departure to the last sermon he delivered with such passion. Yesterday I questioned Father about it & he seemed most discomfited. Father told me that three field hands have been whipped to death in recent weeks, two by the Price foreman & one by Mr. Stanmore himself, & it was these events that had so aggrieved Pastor Shaw. Father believes the Pastor spoke of equality of life as pertaining to slaves & that others in the congregation saw this as blasphemous. It is a debasement to a man’s character to behave so brutally, Father said. Long have I known Father’s views on the institution, but I had not heard him speak so openly before. Slavery breeds nothing but sloth & degradation among the landowners, he told me, & it is the greatest hypocrisy that extends it still within our national borders.

  Father said that many of the slave holders amongst our neighbors had long believed the Pastor’s views too liberal for our congregation, that he should have followed the Presbyterian New School to the North. Eventually Father broke off speaking & apologized, saying that such topics are outside a woman’s sphere. But Kate, I wanted most desperately for him to continue. Such questions affect us all, do you not think?