In Need of a Good Wife (14 page)

Don’t be stupid, girl!
she shouted in her mind. And yet when George reached for her gloved hand she let him take it, let him bring it to his cheek. She had felt the rub of his jaw on parts of her body she was too shy to name, even in silence, and she would be lying if she denied that she longed to feel it once again.

“What about your little Papist?”

“Lucia? How could you even think of her? She never meant a thing to me, my little filly.” This nickname had proved an effective tool in the past, a loving reference to Clara’s long thin legs and knobby knees, over which she had lamented as a young girl. She would never have the curving womanly shape of a cello, but George had praised her limbs so well she had come to believe in their beauty. For a time. In truth, she knew she looked less like a filly and more like a well-dressed scarecrow.

Clara formed the hard lump in her throat into words. “I’m not taking you back, George.” She felt she was one compliment away from total collapse, and she realized her only hope was to get back to Mrs. Ferguson’s and shut herself in the room with a chair propped under the doorknob. She turned east and started walking, the leather of the new boots still stiff around her ankles.

George followed at her heels. “Clara, you know I love you. I’ll never stray again—I give you my word.”

This made Clara laugh, and the laugh seemed to shift the conversation in her favor. George’s flirtation had soured into a kind of pleading. He doubled his steps and caught up to her, walking swiftly at her side, but she refused to turn her head and look at him.

“I have no use for your word, George. Let me be. You wanted your freedom and now you have it. What I do with my time is none of your concern.” At the entrance to the rooming house, Clara stopped and steadied herself for the words she’d never had the chance to say when her husband had vanished the previous summer. “Good-bye, George.”

His arm shot out and he grabbed her wrist. “Clara. Maybe you misunderstand me. I am not asking your permission to come home. I am telling you that’s what I’m going to do. Perhaps you have forgotten that we are still married in the eyes of the law, not to mention the eyes of God.”

Clara scoffed. “Fancy
you
, worrying about God.”

“What’s thine is mine, my little filly. We swore it.”

Of course he wants the money
, she thought.
Of course.
Clara felt her hands clenching into fists. “George, if you try to come through this door, I will holler like the dickens.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, look what a little money will do to make a woman uppity!” He seemed to consider his options and chose, as he usually did, strategy over temper. “Very well, wife. I have no desire to cause a scene. You’ll see—I’ll convince you in time. I hear,” George said, “that you will soon be departing for the West. When do you go?”

Clara hesitated. “We have been delayed by a few weeks, at least,” she said. “I can’t imagine that we would go before the end of June.” He would uncover the lie soon enough, but it might buy her enough time to shirk him, at least for a while.

“All right, then,” George said. “Plenty of time for you to have a change of heart.” He tipped his hat and turned, swaggering away. This swagger had undone Clara many times, and it threatened to do so again if she let down her guard for even a moment.

Why the cursed, blinding plague of love was let loose on this
world
,
I’ll never know
, Clara thought as she watched him walk away.

Elsa pressed closed the door to her chamber, then pulled off her mud-caked boots and set them on the mat of tied rags next to the door. She could almost feel her ankles swelling without the tight laces there to constrict them. Elsa exhaled a long sigh of relief. Miss Bixby seemed to have convinced the other laundresses that she had come seeking her by mistake. As far as Elsa knew, no one had gone to Mrs. Channing with the gossip. Only a few more days now and she would finally be free of this place.

Elsa appraised the room. Miss Bixby had told the brides they were permitted to bring a single trunk of belongings. This was more than enough for Elsa, who could fit nearly her entire life in the tattered linen-covered chest that sat at the foot of her bed. She knelt down on the floor and opened the hinged lid. Removing the contents to two large piles, she began to rearrange the articles in order of necessity. The boiled-wool blanket would certainly come in handy, as would the warming silk underclothes she wore beneath her work uniform all winter long, soaking them once a week in a small tub of boiling vinegar water. Elsa owned three dresses and two shawls but only the one pair of boots, so she didn’t expect the clothing to take up much space. She would leave room for her Bible, of course, and a tablet of paper and a fountain pen—for writing letters, she told herself, though of course she had no one to whom she could imagine writing.

A few items of sentimental value had been lurking at the bottom of the trunk, and Elsa hadn’t touched them since boarding the ship in Bremen thirty-three years before, so afraid was she as a girl of the power they held over her emotions. Later, in the storm and stress of life, she forgot about their existence. Now was the time, Elsa supposed, to face them and decide what to do with them once and for all.

As a child, Elsa had been fond of sketching, a fact she had all but forgotten until she saw the little bound book nestled on the floor of the trunk. Inside were the rough and wavering likenesses of her parents: first there was a drawing of her mother sitting in an armchair, her cheekbone resting on her knuckles and a long wisp of hair swaying in front of her eye. Next Elsa had drawn her portly father, grim with his pipe clamped between his molars, his attention on a stack of papers on his desk. Elsa remembered the day she drew him this way. She had been such a quiet mouse of a girl that he hadn’t even known she was there in the room. If she could have turned the sketchbook page to reveal what took place after the image of the man working quietly at his desk discovered his observer, the next drawing would have revealed a man in motion, flying to his feet and the gruff words:
Raus hier!
Get out of here.

When she ran, it was to her grandfather’s cottage, into the kitchen where her grandmother spent each morning kneading bread. The fine hair at her temples curled, damp from the heat of the oven, and she hummed old hymns no one else seemed to remember. Methodically, she taught Elsa to crack an egg with one soft blow that broke the shell into two intact pieces, never complaining that a dozen were wasted until Elsa mastered the technique. Currents could be soaked in rum to plump and sweeten them. Sugar and butter would turn to caramel, as if by magic, with the right amount of heat and time and patience. You could know a cake was done baking if you paid attention for the moment when its sweet-butter scent crested, then eased. Elsa took all this in with the carelessness of a child who couldn’t understand that someday soon all she would have left of her grandmother would be the recipes.

At the bottom of the pile of linens in the trunk was the Traugott family’s christening gown, used by Elsa’s father and his siblings, as well as Elsa’s brother Johan, who died in it, and Elsa herself. Despite her Lutheran convictions against imbuing objects with divinity, the garment seemed to Elsa a holy relic, imbued with all the memory and hope and sorrow it had clothed and endured over the years. In the throes of fever, Elsa’s mother, knowing she would soon die and that when she did Elsa would depart for America with Gretchen, urged her daughter to keep the white lace gown among her most precious things. To save it for the day when she would have a child of her own.

Elsa lifted the delicate garment by the shoulders. The linen was so fine she could see the outline of her fingers through the fabric. The collar tied with a narrow silk ribbon and the skirt was edged with torchon lace, her great-grandmother’s specialty, it was said among the family.

On most matters, Elsa put her trust in the wisdom of the Lord, but on this, the absence of a child from her life, her heart lingered, plucking at the wound, refusing to let it heal.
Hope deferred maketh
the heart sick.
She would have been a good mother, she thought, risking pride. A patient, careful mother who took solace in the simple routine of bathing and feeding a child, rocking her to sleep, teaching her about the promise of the risen Lord. Elsa would have felt it was her sworn duty to prevent all harm coming to that baby. Each day she saw so many women in the streets of Manhattan City who did not heed the duties of this calling, who were careless and hard to their children, and it pained Elsa to see it. Why had she been overlooked?

Elsa stood up, one of her many strategies for clearing an infecting thought from her mind, and nodded once.
Enough.
There was plenty to do in the here and now to keep her from worrying over such unanswerable questions. She folded the gown and placed it back in the trunk. It was merely an object with some use left in it. It could be cut up for handkerchiefs; the lace could be used to trim a window dressing. If she was seeking a trial with her foolish reverie, she had found it, for now Elsa had to coax her boots back on over her swollen ankles so that she could call on Miss Bixby.

Elsa crossed Mrs. Ferguson’s parlor to the stairs, where order had long been restored since the meeting the previous fall. Then it had been full of ladies, but now it was full of men, some holding their hats on their laps, others smoking thick cigars and laughing over a deck of cards. Elsa kept her eyes on the carpet, willing her body as she often did to remain invisible. At the top of the stairs she turned left, then knocked on the door with an embroidered sign that read
Bixby
in crossstitched letters.

For a moment there was no reply. Then Elsa heard a shifting of furniture and a croaking voice call out, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Elsa Traugott, miss. I’ve come as you asked.”

Another spate of silence passed and the woman called, “Come in.”

Elsa opened the door and found that the room was cloaked in almost complete darkness, despite the efforts of the afternoon sun. Miss Bixby lay in the narrow bed with the blankets pulled up to her chin, her bent arm cast over her face.

“Miss Bixby,” Elsa said. “Are you ill?”

“Please … whisper,” she said. “If you must talk at all.”

A quilt had been tacked over the window with a nail and hammer, Elsa saw, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room.

“Miss Traugott, I’m sorry you came all this way. I only wanted to confirm that you are prepared for our departure on Saturday.”

“What ails you, miss?”

Miss Bixby waved her hand without uncovering her eyes. “Oh, it is one of my headaches. They have never been so dreadfully bad as this. But it is only because I am trying to thwart my miserable destiny.” She opened one eye as if to test her endurance, then squeezed it shut. “Well, I shall not be deterred, whatever the pain.”

“May I try to help you?” When the patient didn’t reply, Elsa pulled a chair up to Miss Bixby’s bedside, carefully straightened the woman’s arm, and put it down at her side.

Then Elsa placed her fingertips on Miss Bixby’s brow. At first the woman stiffened, but as Elsa moved her fingers in slow circles over the skin, following the arches of Miss Bixby’s eyebrows, then spiraling out to the temples, where her hair was matted and damp, Elsa felt her relax.

It was the lot of hired women to be intimate with strangers. Elsa never balked at any of it; she simply began, in her measured way, the task at hand. When Mrs. Channing was still a young woman, Elsa had washed the blood from the cotton batting she used each month. When Mrs. Channing labored far too early and birthed a tiny, lifeless child, it was Elsa who had scrubbed the fluid-caked blankets as the woman’s sobs echoed through the house.

“What do you mean by your ‘miserable destiny’?” Elsa whispered. She rose and stepped to the hearth, where a kettle of water steamed, then dipped a towel in it and wrung it out. She moved quietly, folding the cloth, and placing it on Miss Bixby’s head. The woman sighed, tension falling away from her mouth.

“That would be another name for my husband, George.”

“Forgive me, Miss—
Mrs.
Bixby,” Elsa said. “I did not know that you were married.”

“I’m not sure that I am, or I wish that I weren’t. I am happy to be called
Miss
, if you don’t mind. He ran off with another woman—well, he ran
around
with a henhouse full but ran
off
with just one. But now that I have made something good come into my life, some way of providing for myself that gets me out of that tavern, he has turned up once again to plague me.”

“I am so sorry to hear it, Miss Bixby,” Elsa said, her heart aching for the woman. There was no perfect life, married or not, mothering a child or nursing a child’s absence. In wealth or poverty, there was no stretch of time in life that passed without trial.

“We just have to get on that train before George figures out that I’ve gone.” Miss Bixby peered at her nurse with suspicion. “I suppose you think now that he has come back I ought to thank the Lord and take him in. I suppose you think that I should submit, or
cleave
to him, or whatever it is the Scripture decrees.”

Elsa contemplated this question, for she wanted to give an honest answer. It was true that in marriage a wife
was
meant to submit to her husband’s will, for the children were under her, she was under her husband, and he was under God. Such was the order of things established when Eve was conjured out of the rib. And, yet, to whom did a woman submit when she was
unmarried
, as Elsa was unmarried, fatherless, basically alone in the world? Elsa understood the answer to be that the woman should submit directly to the Lord.

“Well?” Miss Bixby said, annoyed. “Have out with it. Tell me how I have sinned.”

“Just a moment,” Elsa replied. “I am thinking.”

If an unmarried woman submitted to the Lord, with no man to intervene between them, then all of God’s commandments and comforts that seemed, in the Scripture, to apply solely to men might apply to her too. But what of Miss Bixby,
un
happily married—not only that, but
deserted
by a man who disregarded the duties of his position as a husband? Did this not mean that Miss Bixby too was, in a way, unmarried? If Mr. Bixby had returned, not to take responsibility for his obligation but to claim money that he had not earned by the work of his own hand, was that not a greater sin than Miss Bixby’s refusal to take him back?
If the unbelieving depart, let
him depart.
There was nothing in the verse about taking him back.