In Need of a Good Wife (16 page)

Eliza faced her friend, her jaw slack. “Rowena,” she whispered. “What’s happened?”

“Whatever do you mean?” Rowena asked, stalling for time.

Eliza wrung her hands. “What do I
mean
? Your house is empty! Oh, I had heard rumors, but never in my wildest imagination could I have thought things were this dire for you.”

“You make too much of it. I’ve only sold a few things to settle some matters related to Richard’s passing.”

“A
few
things?”

Rowena gave her a warning look and Eliza glanced away, changing the subject. “How is your father’s health?”

“Improving,” Rowena lied. “He has gone to live with a relative of my mother’s. I wanted to take him in here, of course, but she insisted.”

Elisa nodded, the awkwardness hanging between them. “Well, that’s very kind of her and surely a comfort to you.”

“Indeed, it is.” Rowena straightened her skirt, folded her hands together in her lap.

A look of relief washed over Eliza’s face. “Did you hear about the tea for Mrs. Wellington? The
frock
that atrocious Hannah Wallace chose to wear? A true horror of chartreuse lace. I tell you, it was the color of a small child’s vomit.”

This was what they had done together, Rowena realized. The basis of their entire friendship. Talking over the details the following day had always been more delicious to them than the party itself—how the soup was wrong, the glassware incorrect. Rowena and Eliza both believed in rules and their unbending application. Eliza was trying, Rowena could see, to reclaim their old common ground. But the truth was that Hannah’s dress, however ugly, was finer than anything Rowena owned, than anything she might ever own again. She looked down at her lap.

Eliza responded with a tragic sigh. “Oh, Rowena, this is madness! I can’t keep quiet on it. Why didn’t you tell me you needed money? John and I would be happy to help you with—”

“I don’t need money.” Rowena felt her neck and ears grow pink. To be shamed this way, in her own parlor, was more than she could bear. She felt the beast rising in her chest.

But Eliza was not bright enough to heed the signs of imminent explosion. “Why, John was saying
just
this morning that it’s time we found a governess for the children. My garden society meetings keep me away from home quite a bit these days, and, of course, things are going
very
well for John at the bank. You would be simply
perfect
—my Amelia could learn such fine manners with a real lady as her teacher.”

Heaven help me
, Rowena thought, as she felt the first wave of rage crash to the shore. “Your children,” she said slowly, standing up to signal the end of the visit, “are
fat
and
dim
little creatures, just like their mother. Even the best governess could do nothing about that.”

“Rowena!” Eliza screeched, leaping from her chair. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“Get out of my house.” She pointed at the door, stomping her feet like a toy soldier.
“Get. Out. Of. My. House.”

Eliza stared at her a moment, stunned into silence, then shook her head into action. “Gladly,” Eliza spit as she headed toward the door. She yanked it open and stepped outside, turning back to yell, “Mrs. Channing will be distressed a great deal to hear about your appalling behavior.”

“Mrs. Channing can go to the dogs,” Rowena shouted. “Right along with you.”

Indeed
, Rowena thought.
What
is
wrong with
me
? There was once a time when she had been a model of composure and refinement; she could host a party of twelve guests or more and, with careful seating arrangements based on this one’s love of music or that one’s love of wicked gossip, keep the pairs and trios happily tucked in for hours. Rowena delighted and charmed every man who crossed the Moore threshold, but never so much that he should mistake her for a flirt. All of it only increased the collective opinion of Richard Moore, that he should be so dignified and clever a gentleman as to have secured the affections of this woman. They had envied him.
How far one can fall
, Rowena thought. Now, scarcely a day passed without one of her fits. The only hope for her was to leave this place, to start anew in Nebraska.

She had awoken long before dawn on the day of departure, determined to lock up the row house for the last time before the sun came up and illuminated the heart-wrenching task. She had found a tenant through the university, a man coming from England to study in New York. He would pay a modest rent in exchange for promising to keep up the place while she was gone. Of course, she could stay in New York and sell the house to generate some money for her father’s care, but then where would she live? The money from a sale would last for a time, but not long enough. Marriage was the only permanent solution to her troubles, and marriage
outside
Manhattan the only tolerable arrangement. Rowena knew the truth, that she probably never would come back to New York, but saving the row house
just in case
offered a slight bit of reassurance.

She wasn’t sentimental about belongings. After all, she had sold nearly everything of value in the house. Certainly every gift Richard had given her in their brief time together—a cameo necklace, a beaded shawl, an inkwell engraved with her initials—had been dispensed with long ago, turned into salt pork and graham flour.

But she had indulged in bringing along the one letter Richard had ever sent her, written in haste in a makeshift tent on some battlefield about three months before he died. Rowena had waited a long time to hear from him, worried constantly that he had been shot or come down with the flux or a fever. There were so many more ways a man could die than ways he could survive. Thinking on the litany was enough to drive her to the next bed over from her father in the asylum.

But despite all her disciplined effort to keep the ugly fantasies at bay, to focus on the image of Richard walking up the path and opening the front door, he’d died
anyway
. No prayer, no thought she held on his behalf, had made a lick of difference.
My own little wife
, the letter began, the words burned so clearly in her mind she didn’t even have to unfold the letter to recall them.

As you know, I am no man of letters. Expounding on the
sorrows and glories of this world is better left to the poets
for I can do neither justice. But will you think me unmanly
to say, Rowena, that when my heart thinks on you it pretends
to be something a little like a poet, with
a poet’s wistful
sighs?

Now that we are separated, everything on which I gaze
has a vacancy. I try to boil my blood to do the work a soldier
must and though I do hate my enemy I pity him too, just
another man, wrongheaded in every way of course, but
separated from his beloved as I am separated from mine. So
much death
as I have seen here seems to me utterly senseless
when all of us at the last only want to get back home.

I must quit ere long for it is nearly bedtime, but if we were
together, my own, it would be to bed perhaps, but not to sleep!
Oh, Rowena, thinking of you in the blankets, your rose cheek
on the pillow, calls my whole being into action. I will get home
to you or die trying, of that you can be sure. Until then I
remain your affectionate husband,

Richard

It was a good letter. She felt proud of him and a little bit sorry that there was no good reason, ever, to show it to anyone else. To have shared a conspiracy of love with another human being, to have created between the two of you a private world, full of words with double meanings, expressions and postures indicating something only the two of you could interpret—to have shared this and then to have the only person who shared in it with you taken away was a strange thing. Suddenly, Rowena was the sole resident of that little island, with no way, no desire, to reach the mainland. And yet, given enough time, she would die there, alone. The desire to be loyal to Richard and the instinct to fight for her own survival were at war within her, even as the train rushed west, its motion a constant reminder that she had already made her choice. The hardest thing in the world, she knew, was to know you had something marvelous
while
you had it. But that had never been Rowena’s problem. She had known it very well all along.

They arrived in Chicago that evening, the train slowing to a crawl on the causeway tracks that passed beneath the brick archway of Central Depot. To the east, white-tipped waves rolled across the surface of Lake Michigan, nearly pink in the glow of the evening sky. On the other side of the train a stagnant lagoon bordered a narrow green strip of a parkland, and beyond the trees the wide stone walkways of Michigan Avenue bustled with pedestrians. Chicago possessed a fresh and deliberate order. There was an ingenuity to this growing city, a tirelessness that was missing in New York. Rowena’s mother had a cousin who had settled here about five years back with her husband. Rowena knew she should have written to tell the cousin she would be passing through, but the stop was brief, and she really didn’t want to have to explain what she was doing on a train bound for Nebraska.

The seven brides, plus Elsa and Clara, filed off the train and lined up in the anteroom of a dining hall on the upper floor of the station, sputtering and sighing and adjusting their gowns like a flight of doves on an eave. The proprietor looked up from his newspaper and grinned, then moved his eyes down the line of them, one by one, to find the prettiest face, as men could always be counted upon to do. Rowena nodded at him when his eyes lingered on hers, then glanced to either side to see whether the other woman had noticed her victory. She couldn’t say for certain.

Miss Bixby stepped forward and told the man how many were in their party, then passed a handful of notes to him when he told her the price. He held the money pinched between his fingers and used the same hand to gesture to a waiter standing on the other side of the room. The man wore a crisp white shirt and black cravat and stood as straight as a post. He nodded politely to the women and led them to a long table at the back of the room. They were serving a choice of beef ragout or quail, he explained, pea soup and milk rolls.

Rowena lingered at the back of the group, watching the proprietor. He turned back to his station near the bar, where his newspaper lay draped over his tall chair. Walking around to the back side of the table, he crouched down to remove a small box from an interior shelf and slid the money inside, then replaced the box on the shelf. Easing into the chair, he snapped the paper open. Rowena pressed her lips together, considering. Despite the optimistic tone she had taken while discussing the marriage with her father, Rowena knew chances were Daniel Gibson would be awful, and then what would she do? Little by little—Eliza’s brooch, a man’s pocket watch in Detroit, a bit of the money in that box, perhaps—Rowena was amassing insurance.

“Sir?” She worked an airiness into her voice, an admiring singsong. “Forgive the interruption.”

He lowered the paper, then cocked his head to the side when he saw to whom the voice belonged. “Why, miss, it’s my pleasure to be of service. What may I do for you?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, might I ask for a hot towel?” Rowena touched her face, miming embarrassment. “We have been traveling for so long, and the dust in Michigan was unbearable.”

He stood, adjusting his suspenders to account for his shifting belly. “Of course. Let me speak to one of the chambermaids. I will return in just a moment.”

“I appreciate your kindness, sir,” Rowena said. She tipped her chin down and looked at him through the top row of her eyelashes. She could practically see the saliva pooling in the corners of his mouth.

“Yes, just a moment,” he said again, then turned to the hallway.

Rowena moved closer to his side of the table and clutched her hands primly at the front of her dress. She glanced carefully back at her traveling companions. They had been served their soup in porcelain tureens with delicate handles. A column of steam rose under each woman’s chin. They engaged in a quiet conversation, a few giggles occasionally rising above the din. As each second passed, Rowena took an imperceptibly small step toward the back of the table, where the metal box shone on its shelf.

When they first married, Richard had said that her hands reminded him of two butterflies, with their constant fluttering motion. The buttons of her dresses astonished him as he fumbled to unfasten them in the dark of their bedroom, but Rowena needed no light to slide the pearls through the slits and back out again, to press the pins into the intricate twists of her hair arrangement, like a coil of sleek black moss. Her winged hands whispered over the bones of his pelvis as she pulled him toward her and inside. They whisked the hair from his brow, tickling down the cobblestone line of his backbone. He had clutched her fingers to stop their undulations for a moment, had brought them to his lips.

Those hands dipped now toward the nectar inside the metal box and skittered across the notes. In one smooth motion she had folded the money inside her fist, then locked the box and returned it as she pushed the banknotes up into the tightly buttoned cuff of her sleeve. Just then the proprietor returned with the hot towel perched in a bowl, and Rowena used it, smiling, to wipe the deed from her hands.

After supper they descended the stairs back to the platform and filed into their rail car. Rowena thought the group seemed sparse, and a glance at Miss Bixby confirmed she was thinking the same thing.

The woman rubbed a circle on her temple with two fingers.