In Need of a Good Wife (15 page)

All the while Elsa pondered this, she continued to sweep her fingertips over Miss Bixby’s brow, then dunked the cloth back in the hot water and renewed the compress.

“You have worked a miracle—the pain is subsiding,” Miss Bixby said with astonishment in her voice. “You must have been told this before. You have a calming presence.”

Elsa shook her head, feeling a swell of satisfaction. “No, miss. No one has told me that. But I haven’t nursed very many folks. In fact, not even one, really, except for my aunt. And that was a long time ago.”

Miss Bixby moved to sit up but Elsa put her hand on her shoulder. “Please—keep still a while longer. Your body needs rest.” Miss Bixby sighed but submitted to the warning. “I should like to quote some Scripture to you, with your permission. I think it applies well in the matter of your husband.”

Miss Bixby pursed her lips. “Let’s get on with it. Shall I be stoned for my ingratitude? Compelled to worship at his feet?”

Elsa sat very still. “
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden
,” she said.
“And I will give you rest.”

Elsa did not believe, as she had been told Papists and pagans did, that the word of God held mystical power, as sorcery or the words of a spell, to transform one thing into another, an afflicted spirit into a spirit at peace. The power of these words to stun and humble grew from two simple things: their
existence
, that they had been recorded in history and passed from parents to children through so many generations and made plain, so that even one so lowly as a washing woman could read them; and their unadorned
truth
.

Miss Bixby lay very still as the words washed over her. After a moment, she lifted her arm from the quilt and felt in the dark for Elsa’s hand, then pressed it into her own.

Later, Clara would reflect that she should have viewed the weather as a sign that this would be the first of several very bad days. The rain began around midnight, falling in sheets against the windows and flooding the gutters. The roof at Mrs. Ferguson’s leaked; in Clara’s room alone, five pots of various sizes caught the drips and
plinked
musically through the night, keeping her awake.

But Clara would have been lying awake anyway. It was May eighteenth, the day the brides would depart for Nebraska. The trip was nearly seven months in the making.

She dressed slowly in the gray gabardine dress, smoothing her thick hair into braids and coiling them at the back of her head. With her small trunk packed and waiting by the door, Clara swept her room for the last time and cast the gathered dust into the fire, now almost gone out. It felt impossible that she wouldn’t be coming back here, but if this venture in Nebraska went as she hoped, then it was true. The room seemed too small to contain both the great joy and the great sorrow she had known in the last few years. George had carried her over this very threshold on the evening of their wedding. They were both drunk on champagne, and late in the night after spending hours in bed, he tied Clara’s apron over his naked form and fixed them both a cup of tea. She had laughed so hard at the sight of the apron strings trailing down his bare behind, she had cried, wiping the tears with the back of her hand. A few months later in this bed she had birthed her son; in this bed, her heart went out of her body when he died.

Clara shook off the memories. Today was about the future, the massive, unbesmirched expanse of time that stretched out before her, the chance to start again and leave all her sorrow behind. Clara wouldn’t let herself forget it. She shut the door and said her good-byes to Mrs. Ferguson, arranging for her trunk to follow her to the train station.

When she got there, she found the platform busy with travelers coming and going to points up and down the East Coast as well as the western cities. The first leg of the journey would take the women by train from Manhattan City to Buffalo, up the line of the Hudson River and then west along the path of the Erie Canal. The following morning, a ferry would take them to Detroit, and they would navigate a series of trains farther west, to Chicago, Rock Island, Des Moines, and beyond. It would be six days before they arrived in Destination.

Rowena Moore appeared first, dressed in the blackberry silk gown and a new bonnet, her ribbons pressed, her boots gleaming. She had followed the letter but not the spirit of Clara’s edict regarding luggage. Her single trunk was enormous, more than half as tall as she was. Rowena stood next to it, likely waiting for someone to carry her onto the train atop a goose-down pillow.

If I have to kill her somewhere around Chicago
, Clara found herself thinking as she glared at the trunk,
at least I’ll have a
place to stash the body
.

“Good morning, Miss Bixby,” Rowena chirped with false sweetness. “I trust the train is on schedule.”

Clara nodded. “As far as I know. We should arrive tonight in Buffalo near midnight.”

“What a long journey we have ahead of us. No doubt we’ll be ragged by the end.”

“Let’s just pray we make it there in one piece.”

“Indeed.” Rowena stood with her hands clutched behind her back, her pert nose in the air. It irritated Clara to have her hovering around as the other brides arrived. Kathleen Connolly nodded good morning and stepped up onto the train when Clara pointed to the car they would all be sharing. The soon-to-be minister’s wife, Anna Ludlow, and Elsa Traugott came next, each with a solemn look on her face that hinted at a mind full of pious thoughts.

Clara glanced at the large clock on the platform. Only fifteen minutes left until departure, and she had yet to find a seat for herself. Intimate friends Deborah Peale and Molly Zalinski arrived then, walking arm in arm as they had each time Clara had seen them since the fall. They wore matching red gloves and giggled as they waved in unison. Once inside the car, they pressed up against the windows, waving at the people walking by, without a bit of embarrassment that all of them were strangers. They were little more than girls, although they claimed to be twenty-one. Clearly, they had no idea of what lay ahead of them.

The train’s engine started to huff, and noise on the platform increased. Clara glanced at her list. Three brides had yet to arrive. Just then, Cynthia Ruley and Bethany Mint came running, clutching their bonnets to their heads, the cases bouncing against their hips. Clara checked their names off the list; each was set to marry a man from the brewery. Porters began loading the trunks, and the crowd on the platform thinned. One more, Clara thought, and where could she be? She looked to the clock once more.

“Miss Bixby!” a voice called from behind her.

Clara spun around. “Miss Bernard, thank goodness. The train is about to leave.” Pauline Bernard was the fifth woman to correspond with Jeremiah Drake, and it had taken a letter from Dr. Calumet certifying her hair color to convince the man that she was a true blonde. When Clara saw Pauline’s face, she closed her eyes. “Why are you crying?”

Pauline shook her head and pressed several dollars into Clara’s hand. “I just can’t do it.”

Clara stared down at the coins and sighed. “Couldn’t you have told me this a month ago? A week ago?”

“I tried to make myself go through with it. I really did. It all seemed like such a good idea until I really thought about the distance. You’ll explain to Mr. Drake, won’t you? I fear he is going to be very disappointed. He seemed so pleased with me.”

Clara shook her head. “I’ll try, Pauline, but you have to promise me you’ll write to him yourself. Explain your situation.”

Pauline nodded. “I promise. I wish I could pay you all the money back, but that’s all I could scrape together.” It wouldn’t even cover the fare to Buffalo, much less the rest of the tickets Clara had purchased on Pauline’s behalf.

“All aboard!” a porter shouted. The noise from the engine was deafening.

Clara stared at Pauline a moment longer, then shook her head and shoved the money into her pocket. She could cover this loss, but she dreaded having to deliver the news to the mayor and Mr. Drake. After all that extra work trying to find a woman to satisfy him.
I should have charged him double
, Clara thought. The porter yelled again.

“Pauline,” Clara said as she patted the whimpering girl’s shoulder. “It’s all right. I understand. It was good of you to come and tell me yourself. But I have to go.”

Sixteen long hours later, the train pulled in at Buffalo. The women filed sleepily down onto the platform and gathered in front of the depot while Clara paid a man to take the trunks to the dock where they would board the ferry first thing in the morning.

At the inn across the street, a long white building with black shutters, a lamp burned in the window and, mercifully, the innkeeper was expecting them. It was a mark of their exhaustion that no one, not even Rowena Moore, made a fuss about which room she should have. They doubled up based on who was standing nearby and climbed the stairs, barely pausing to say good night.

Only Molly, who ended up in a room with Clara, felt in the mood for a conversation.

“My, it’s warm in here,” Molly said, unbuttoning the back of her dress. She cracked the small window and the cool night air flooded the room.

“I think it’s chilly,” Clara said. She slipped out of her boots and dress, then got quickly under the covers. Her head throbbed. “Could you turn down the lamp?”

Molly sat down on the bed. Her cheeks were flushed. “It must be this wool dress.” She hummed as she stepped out of it and hung it over the back of a chair. “Miss Bixby, would you believe Deborah is no longer speaking to me?”

“Molly, I’m very tired.”

“And all because I told her that she really shouldn’t write letters to Tom anymore, now that she’s going to be married to someone else. Tom was her beau in Manhattan City. I think he’s an absolute cad, but Deborah loves him. Even after he told her right to her face that he would never marry her.”

“Molly, aren’t
you
tired? It’s been such a long day.”

Molly turned the lamp down and slipped into the bed on the other side. “I feel strange,” she said, putting her palm to her brow.” She sighed. “It just seems awfully silly to me to go all the way to Nebraska if you aren’t willing to leave Manhattan behind. ‘This is an adventure, Deborah!’ That’s what I tried to tell her. ‘We are at the beginning of an adventure.’ But she just huffed and puffed and moved across the aisle from me.”

Clara opened one eye and glanced at Molly.

“Do you feel ill, Molly?”

“Oh, I suppose not,” she said. “I’m just worried about Deborah.”

Molly lay on her back with her eyes wide and glistening in the dim light that came from a streetlamp in front of the inn. There was so much hope and excitement in her face, and it filled Clara with dread. So far Clara’s life had been full of disappointments, but they were only her own disappointments. She had never felt responsible for another person’s happiness before. It seemed she had been terribly presumptuous about what she could do for these women and men.

“I hope Deborah isn’t still cross in the morning,” Molly whispered.

“She won’t be,” Clara said softly. “Try not to worry.”

Rowena sat in her seat and felt the gentle sway of the train on the rails as it moved west out of Detroit on the third day of their journey. After the previous day’s interminable and chilly ferry ride, it felt good to be back on solid ground. Outside the windows, the city passed away. They went through an orchard where the trees were just breaking into blossom, the temperature yet too cool to coax the bees out of their hives. Rowena’s eyes felt heavy.

The day of departure hadn’t come soon enough to save her from one last humiliation at the hands of her former social peers. Around noon on Monday a knock on the row house door called Rowena from her writing desk, where she was calculating with a pen and paper just how much money she still owed her creditors.

She dropped the pen and sat up straight, her mind galloping; she hadn’t heard a knock on that door in more than a year. Rowena stood, smoothing the wrinkles from her worn-out day dress. She had used it to teach herself how to do laundry—an unwise decision, it turned out. Too much soap made caustic wash water and damaged the fabric in places. Ironing it had been an equivalent disaster. In the front hall she opened the door just wide enough to peer out.

“Who’s there?”

“Why, Rowena, it’s Eliza Rourke.”

“Oh, Eliza,” Rowena said, allowing the door to swing open another couple of inches, but not nearly all the way. “My goodness, what a surprise. I wasn’t expecting you.” Rowena felt her heart break a little over the pale blue of Eliza’s ribboned cap.

“Forgive me for popping by unannounced, dear. But it seems the only way I could get to see you, as you’ve declined the last three of my invitations, and answered none of my letters.”

Rowena sighed. “I am sorry about that. I have had so many other engagements, you see …”
Would anyone believe such a lie?

Eliza raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

Rowena nodded.

“Well, then, I suppose you are faring better than I suspected.” Eliza glanced down at Rowena’s tattered skirt. “Still, might I come inside for a short visit?”

“Eliza, now is not really a good time.”

“Please, Rowena—just for a moment? I’ve been worried about you.”

Rowena sighed again and opened the door. “Please, do come in.”

Eliza stepped inside, the skirt of her apricot silk walking dress sweeping the door frame. Rowena held out her hands to take Eliza’s shawl. She turned to the wardrobe as Eliza took a few steps into the front hall. As Rowena turned the knob on the door, a strange impulse came over her. She glanced at Eliza, then turned to the wardrobe again. With her fingers hidden under the expensive wool, she pinched the clasp on Eliza’s diamond brooch and slipped it into her pocket.

Rowena hung the shawl on a hook and turned immediately, so that she did not have to see the look on Eliza’s face as she gazed around at the nearly empty house. Rowena led her to the parlor and gestured to one of two remaining chairs on either side of the hearth. The sofas and the grand piano that had once made the parlor a lovely place for a party were gone, along with the game table and its ivory chess pieces, the china cabinet and its contents, and the bronze birdcage. Rowena had even traded the rich velvet drapery in for fabric and fashioned simple muslin curtains for the front windows.