In Need of a Good Wife (17 page)

“Miss Connolly,” she said to the ginger-haired girl who wore a cheap lace collar under her shawl. There was no refinement whatever in the Irish, Rowena thought. Both the men and women were all bluster and utility, no grace. “Have you seen Cynthia Ruley and Bethany Mint? They were with us at the restaurant.”

Miss Connolly shook her head. “They got on another train.”

“What do you mean?” Rowena watched the lines in Miss Bixby’s forehead deepen as she replied. “There
is
no other westbound train.”

“Detroit-bound, back to New York. They said those soup tureens at the dining hall convinced them. They didn’t want to live anywhere they wouldn’t have fine china.”

“Are you having a lark with me, Miss Connolly?” Miss Bixby asked. She seemed to be making an enormous effort not to glance at Rowena.

“No, I am not. I’d have liked to box their ears. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.”

Deep lines of worry marked Miss Bixby’s forehead. “I don’t believe it. Did they leave a note for me? A message?
Anything?
”

Miss Connolly shook her head again. “They said they weren’t cut out for it.”

“Obviously not,” Clara said, wringing her hands. “But what am I going to tell their gentlemen?”

That was two more gone. The seven remaining travelers—Kathleen, promised to the homesteader Amos Riddle; Anna Ludlow, who was meant to marry the reverend; Molly Zalinski and Deborah Peale, bound for matrimony with a farmhand and the depot porter; plus Elsa and Clara and Rowena herself—settled back into their seats and the train lurched to a start. Two rows up a duet of giggling cut through the peace of the car. Deborah and Molly were hunched over a magazine they had bought from a newsstand outside the train station in Chicago. From their frequent gasps and the shrill sound of their laughter, Rowena supposed the magazine contained pictures of women in various states of undress. One of them, Deborah or Molly, had come down with a cold and her laughter broke down each time into a fit of dry coughing. It only seemed to make them laugh harder.
Really
, Rowena muttered under her breath. They had no composure, took no pride in the visage they presented to the world, and they seemed an awful lot more like girls than women.

Rowena glanced at her umbrella leaning up against the seat and felt a tiny bit of relief. She knew she wasn’t above taking matters into her own hands.

The next morning, Clara finally lost her fight against the hypnotic rhythm of the train as it neared Rock Island, Illinois, and fell into her first deep sleep in days, perhaps weeks. After waiting so long for this opportunity, her mind wasted no time in springing the latch on its trunk full of dreams. The images cascaded out like a collection of costumes backstage at a theater: fur and peacock feathers and masks, silks of black and red, boots and slippers and shawls. Benign things that would lull her into believing this dream would be a pleasant one. All of these fluttered before her eyes, and then the set shifted and Clara was climbing the stairs at Mrs. Ferguson’s. Each soft thud of her boots on the threadbare carpeted stair echoed within her chest. The sleeping Clara ached to cry out to the walking version of herself in the dream, to tell her to stop, but it was no use. The long trip down the upstairs hall was agony.

Clara watched herself open the door. Inside, a third Clara lay on the bed. She was yellow and gaunt with childbed fever, restless and, herself, dreaming of another place and time. She looked at the walking Clara, and the dreaming Clara watched them both. There was a strange unreality about everything in the room, the way one feels standing between two mirrors that reproduce an imagine into infinity. The Clara in the bed turned her face to the wall, so that only the other two—the walker, who was unprepared, and the dreamer, who knew with deepening horror what was to come—saw George approaching the bed with the inert bundle blanketed in his arms.

His mouth was wrenched wide in panic. “Clara,” he moaned, falling to his knees. A corner of the blanket fell away, and the tiny foot broke free. One imagines that a newly born infant’s features will be indistinct somehow, as unformed as raw clay, but in fact the wrinkled arch of the lip, each knee and finger, contain all the complexity they ever will, only in miniature, and a baby comes into the world weary, as if he has already lived one long, tiring existence somewhere else. The bottom of this foot was pale, the white flesh giving way to blue. George touched his palm to the toes and hung his head.

“Clara. I think he’s gone.”

Clara’s long, low keen silenced the train car. But what woke her was the sensation of air rushing into her lungs just after she let the sound loose. She opened her eyes and leaned forward in the seat, panting. Molly and Deborah crossed the aisle and kneeled at her feet.

“Miss Bixby,” Molly said, her hand on Clara’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Clara waited a moment before sitting up, then opened her eyes and blinked at them. All the horrors went back into the trunk and she slid the lock into place. She nodded. “Yes. It was just a dream,” she said.
A dream of a memory.
But how real could a thing be if no one else in the world, besides George and Dr. Calumet, of course, knew that it had happened? Clara had kept the pregnancy a secret, had kept the baby’s death a secret too, for so long that she sometimes wondered whether she had conjured him solely in her mind and not out of her body. Clara felt thankful she had awoken on the train before the part where George went away and came back, drunk as she had ever seen him, with a tiny casket under his arm. “It’s all right, girls,” she said. Clara smoothed her skirt and focused on her breath.

She turned to look out the window. Up ahead what looked like a low fog obscured the trees and sky.
How odd
, she thought, for in Chicago it had seemed too cool for fog. Then she heard the hissing of something making contact with the exterior of the train, like a box of straight pins tipped over on the floor.

The train slowed. A man in a navy blue uniform entered the car and clapped his hands.

“Attention, please. We have crossed paths with a hailstorm, as you probably can hear.” The man had to raise his voice above the din, and the train continued to slow as he spoke. “It is very dangerous for us if the rails become icy, so we will be delayed for a while as we assess the strength of the storm.”

A few woman groaned with frustration and others began whispering speculation.

“Ladies,” the man said, holding up his hands. “There is nothing to fear. You are in good hands.” He seemed to take a little too much pleasure, Clara thought, in imagining himself to be their rescuer. She began to calculate how much the delay would cost her.

On the fourth night of the trip, they stopped in Rock Island, arriving late because of the hailstorm. Clara found a farmer’s wife willing to host them for less than what the town’s only boardinghouse charged. If there was any benefit to the group’s diminished size, it was that accommodations were easier to come by.

The woman had a large pot of soup waiting for them, along with a plate of hard biscuits and a stack of tin bowls. Unlike the disinterested innkeepers in the cities, she was eager to know everything about the reason for their journey.

“So, you’re
all
to be married, then?” the farmer’s wife said.

She wore a simple yellow kerchief over her hair and glanced around her table at them, astonished. The brides nodded as they dug hungrily into the soup. The trip was beginning to wear on everyone. The white cuffs on Kathleen’s dress were dirty and frayed. Molly’s eyes were ringed with dark circles, and Deborah had hardly giggled at all for an entire day.

“What a trusting bunch!” she said.

“Not all of us,” Elsa said. Clara realized she and Elsa had barely spoken since leaving New York. She seemed even more coiled in on herself than usual, contemplating everything but saying little. The journey must have been hardest on Elsa, given her age, but Clara hadn’t once heard her complain. “I’ll be working in a man’s house.”

“And I’m responsible for this whole endeavor, come what may,” Clara said.

The farmer’s wife shook her head. “My, my, my. Well, the least I can do to help is to see that you get a good night’s sleep. I don’t have many extra rooms, but there is a sofa in the parlor, and I’ve laid out some blankets in the pantry. I do have my daughter’s room upstairs, with her off on her honeymoon.”

“Miss Bixby should take that,” Kathleen spoke up, shoving the last spoonful of her soup into her mouth and reaching for another biscuit. She glanced around the table and dared anyone to disagree with her.

Clara smiled at her. “No, it’s all right.”

“After the day you’ve had? You need sleep, Miss Bixby.” The others nodded.

“Well, I’ll take the room if Molly stays with me.” Molly glanced up at Clara, her eyes glassy, and coughed in response. “I don’t think her cold is getting any better.”

At dusk they scattered throughout the small house. In the morning they would take a ferry across the river to Davenport and then the Mississippi and Missouri rail to Des Moines. As big as any of them had ever pictured this country, it had turned out to be bigger. The traveling felt numbing, endless. Clara’s exhaustion was made worse by anxiety about what would happen when they finally arrived in Destination. In her mind, she tried to rehearse what she might say to the men whose brides had backed out, but the words wouldn’t come. She knew she needed sleep.

A moment later, sleep, too, became impossible. As Clara helped Molly up the stairs, the fatigued girl stopped and glanced at a framed portrait on the wall. It was of the farmer’s daughter in a gingham dress, standing next to her horse. “Oh, how pretty,” Molly exclaimed. She stiffened suddenly, then lifted her hand to touch her shoulder. “Oh, my neck,” she said, swaying on the step. “It’s so stiff.” She winced, trying to turn her head, then collapsed and fell down the stairs.

Clara’s cry roused the house, and Kathleen and Deborah rushed to help Molly back through the parlor to the sofa. The farmer’s wife touched Molly’s brow.

“This child is burning up,” she said.

Deborah began to wail. “Oh, Miss Bixby, she’s had a fever for days and days. Since before she left. She made me swear not to tell anyone. She
made
me swear.”

Clara’s mouth hung open. How could she not have noticed? She felt frozen in place. “Oh, Deborah.”

“She needs a doctor,” Kathleen said.

Elsa appeared at Molly’s shoulder with a bowl of water and a cloth. “Get her shoes off ,” she said quietly to Anna, and they went to work. Molly came to and asked what all the fuss was about. She tried to sit up but Elsa pressed her shoulders firmly into the cushion. The farmer’s wife recruited Kathleen to come with her to call on the doctor, but he lived a mile away and there was no telling whether he would be in. “And he works mainly with horses,” she said, “so I don’t know what good he will be.”

After they left, the women fell asleep one by one clustered around the sofa, some sitting up, some lying on the floor. Clara sat in a chair by Molly’s head, stroking her hair as she slept. A clock on the mantel ticked loudly in the silent room and Clara prayed. When Kathleen and the farmer’s wife came back an hour later, alone, Clara’s face fell. There was nothing they could do but wait.

In the morning, though, Molly seemed better. She barely remembered her fall the night before, though she had bright purple bruises on her knee and shoulder. Elsa brought her a mug of cold water and she drank it down, then ate a biscuit spread with jam. Clara sat back in her chair watching her.

“Miss Bixby, I feel fine now,” Molly said. “Really. I’m so sorry to have given you all such a scare.”

Clara shook her head. “You may feel fine, but I don’t think we can go ahead until you’ve had another day of rest and we can get the doctor here to see you.”

“Oh, please,” Molly said, her eyes filling with tears. “We’ve come so far. We have to keep going.”

“Don’t be foolish, Molly.” Deborah sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. “You need to get well first.”

“I’m well. I really am! What do I have to do to prove it to you? Do you want me to eat something more? Do you want me to dance a jig?” Molly stood up and twirled, giggling.

“If she says she’s well, she’s well.” Rowena stood next to the table, with her hands on her hips. “I think the rest of us should go on, at least. The ferry leaves in an hour.”

Molly clasped her hands under her chin. “Please. Please let me take the ferry with you. It’s only an hour across the river. If I feel badly when we get to the other side, I’ll come back here, and you all can go on. Don’t let me be the reason you miss your train.”

Clara looked at Elsa. She shrugged. “She
is
eating.”

Clara shook her head. She was too tired to fight anymore. “All right.”

The ferry left the dock twenty minutes late, and once it reached the Davenport riverbank the women had to run to make their train. Molly clutched Deborah’s arm, her face sweaty and pale, and they rushed into the car.

“I’m fi
ne
,” she hissed at Clara.

Iowa stretched on either side of the train like a vast sea, and meadowlarks hopped from one patch of purple prairie phlox to the next. The train chugged over the yellow land. Across the aisle, Elsa stared out the window.

“What do you think of it?” Clara asked. “It’s so … empty.”

“I was just thinking that,” Elsa said, a kind of wonder in her voice. “If you got lost out there, how would you find your way back? How would you even know you were
lost
? Every mile looks just the same as every other.”

“Are you nervous about meeting Mr. Schreier?”

Elsa shook her head. “I don’t have to like him, only work for him. My lot is far easier than what the rest of these young women have to do.”

None of the risk, and none of the reward, Clara thought. But none of the suffering either. It seemed like a wise trade.

Halfway through the trip, Clara handed out the sandwiches the farmer’s wife had packed for them, ham steaks and salty cheese on thick slices of bread. Deborah unwrapped her own and held Molly’s on her lap while Molly slept, her forehead resting against the glass, a shawl draped across her shoulders and tucked under her chin.