In Need of a Good Wife (4 page)

“Miss,” a man said, approaching her carefully. “Do you need help?”

She looked at him, her big doe eyes wide and wild. The things she knew she should say—
No, thank you, sir, I’m
fine
or
Yes, sir, I need a whole lot of help indeed
—flashed through her mind like the words painted on the banners soldiers carried into battle. But instead she opened her mouth and let out a twisted wail so beastly it seemed to curl the hair at his temples. His mouth dropped open and he stood staring stupidly at her. She lifted her umbrella straight up in the air as if she intended to clobber him over the head with it, a near impossibility, since Rowena was barely five feet tall, and he shrank away and turned a corner, his eyes on the ground as he ran. Seeing how easy it was to get rid of him coaxed a rippling laugh from her chest. But the laugh turned down on the end, into a sob, and she sank down in the gutter and cried for a full ten minutes before scraping herself up and walking the rest of the way home.

Rowena now understood that there were particular sorrows one would never get over. She no longer saw her existence as an ascending march toward happiness; instead, it was a stasis to be endured, a clanging and sputtering machine that produced nothing.

Miraculously, as far as Rowena could tell, the Channings had not heard about her outburst just a block away from their home. Rowena shook her head, wondering if this was providence or a curse, since, if Mrs. Channing
had
seen the incident with the umbrella, Rowena would be saved from worry about being invited to anything ever again. She picked up her pen and pulled a leaf of paper from the desk drawer.

Dear Mrs. Channing
, she wrote.
Thank you for your kind invitation. Since our last visit I have longed many times for the opportunity to spend time with
you and Mr. Channing, as well as
your
… Rowena paused, inhaling a steadying breath through her nostrils …
charming nephew, so it is with
great disappointment that I must decline, due to a prior commitment. You will be
in my thoughts and I hope you will enjoy a jubilant evening.
Rowena signed the letter and folded it carefully, as if neatly matched corners could disguise her disdain. Next she declined the tea, for she did not have a single afternoon dress she would dare to be seen in, and the draper had refused to extend her credit until she settled last month’s bill.

Even if she had found something to wear, Rowena had lost her taste for parties. Before each one came to a close, the guests always started chattering about who would host the next one, and eventually, Rowena knew, she would have to take her turn.
Wouldn’t it be something
, she thought,
to see their
faces when I rose from the head of my own table to bring a tray in
from the kitchen and serve them myself?
A fine menu of buttered bread and the carrots Hattie put up last summer, before Rowena had had to let her go. Butter was her one luxury, and if there was a single thing on this earth those shrill and contemptible women could be sure of, it was that Rowena wasn’t going to waste one speck of it on them.

She pushed back her chair from the writing desk and placed both letters on the table next to the door, then opened it. A cold gust of wind swept the front hall and lifted the edges of the paper. Slamming the heavy door shut, she turned to the wardrobe in the front hall. Fall really was here and she’d need her wool cloak. She took it off the hook in the back and shook it out, debating over whether it needed to be brushed. Rowena shook her head. She knew she was stalling for time, putting off the task she dreaded a thousand times more than responding to Mrs. Channing’s invitation: Saturday was the day she visited her father at the asylum on Wards Island.

“Let’s get on with it,” she said aloud, her words echoing in the hall. She tied her bonnet strings and plucked up the letters she planned to post on her way. On the corner, a rough-faced Irishman stood smoking a pipe in a patched jacket. The neighborhood wasn’t what it had been.

Rowena’s father, Randolph Blair, had to her knowledge never once in his life raised his voice until the year 1863. He had a sheaf of wiry white hair that stood straight up on his head, and the same lively, round eyes as his daughter, but his voice was a soothing baritone, more vibration than sound. Mr. Blair was one of Manhattan’s finest attorneys and made a name for himself in business law. He was not by any means a wealthy man, even at the height of his career, but favors and goodwill helped him build the row house near Bond Street. He was well respected enough to have brokered a marriage between his daughter and the equally upstanding and underfunded Richard Moore, whom, to his great satisfaction, his daughter seemed genuinely to love. Mr. Blair lived life in a kind of hushed caution, carefully considering his every word and choice, no matter how small, looking for chinks in the armor. His own father had crossed the gulf to insanity in his sixties and Mr. Blair knew chances were fairly good that the same fate awaited him. He would often tell Rowena that if he lived to fifty-five with his mind intact he would count himself fortunate to be sure, and then lie down in front of the Bowery streetcar.

But he didn’t make it nearly that long. Shortly after Rowena and Richard were married, Rowena’s mother came down with the fever and died, leaving her widowed husband alone in the house. Rowena went over to check on him each day, her nerves tight as a fiddle string as she observed him for signs of mental distress. She needn’t have feared missing anything. There was no subtlety to the Blair family brand of insanity. The pans, he told Rowena, were clanking together in the cupboards all night long. So he threw them out in the snow in the front yard. Marguerite, the housekeeper who had practically raised Rowena, got on the first ferry up the Hudson on her way back to Montreal when Mr. Blair had dumped his full chamber pot on her head while screaming that her hair was on fire.

Hattie had assessed the situation in the kindest way possible when Rowena asked her to come over to see with her own eyes what was going on, to help Rowena decide what she should do. “Miz Moore,” Hattie said, putting her rough hand over Rowena’s and patting it like a small child’s head. “Your father’s still sewing, but his needle don’t got no thread.”

Rowena had no idea of the extent of her father’s financial troubles until the bank stated its intention to take back the Blair family home. She had believed her parents owned it outright, but it seemed her father had borrowed a great sum of money against it, which he proceeded to burn in a bonfire.

“Why?” Rowena screamed at him as she hurried around the side of the house and slapped his hands away from the flames. “
Why
are you doing this?”

“My dear, that money was filthy, filthy, filthy.
You
should be thanking
me
.”

“What do you mean, ‘filthy’?”

“Infested. Diseased. That money could have made all of us sick.”

She knew then,
knew
what she would have to do with him, and she felt her heart crack open and slide down the back of her sternum like an egg.

“Papa,” she’d said. “Oh, Papa.”

Clarity flashed briefly across his face as he recognized Rowena’s expression—the very same expression he had directed toward his own father many years ago—and that was when he bellowed for the first time in his life, long and low. “Nooooo.” He repeated the word three times, like a tugboat’s plaintive warning in a fog.

He was blessed, in a way, Rowena thought. A new hospital had just opened on Wards Island, a place for people like him, with nurses who combed his hair and comfortable clean beds. There was even a little stretch of beach where he could sit on a bench and watch the ocean steamers coming into the harbor, full of immigrants hoping to start anew in America.

Rowena felt something sour rising in the back of her throat.
Blessed.
That was a word she had used to make
herself
feel better. What a terrible lie. No man was blessed who couldn’t be left alone in a room without the risk that he might use his wife’s sewing shears to cut holes in all the drapery. The hospital’s existence made
Rowena
the fortunate one, she knew, for now she could rest easy, knowing her lunatic father was hidden safely away from the eyes of Mrs. Channing and her friends, whose little black hearts pumped liquid gossip instead of blood.

There was only one problem: Rowena had spent nearly every penny Richard had left her when he died, and there hadn’t been so very many pennies as she would have expected. She owed the draper money, along with the grocer and the carpenter who had fixed her front steps. But, worst of all, she owed the asylum money, a good deal of money, and she didn’t have a clue how she was going to continue to pay for her father’s care.

She was almost to the ferry dock when she saw the poster, nailed to the trunk of a tree.

Weary of the Miasmas of Manhattan City?

Miss Bixby seeks spinsters or widows with no children, of attractive appearance and good character, to consider travel and potential marriage to men of good standing in Destination, Nebraska, God’s own country. No cost to you—all travel expenses paid. Find out more at our community meeting, Friday, November 2, 6:30 p.m. in the sitting room above Rathbone’s Tavern.

The room was crowded with forty or so women by the time Elsa arrived. Women gathered in groups of three or four on chairs and sofas in the large sitting room, and Elsa recognized two of the girls from the Channing laundry. All week the girls had spoken in urgent whispers about this meeting, how it could be the beginning of their escape from a life of drudgery at the washtub. Elsa, forty-five years old with twenty-nine years of that drudgery in the Channing laundry behind her, felt she had far more reason to be here than they did. The competing conversations were so loud that they drowned out the sound of Elsa’s footsteps across the floor at the back of the room. A line of women stood along the window, their wide skirts and stiff petticoats making it impossible for them to sit down with any dignity. Most were handsome or had the rumor of something beautiful in their faces. And each and every one of them was young.

Elsa clutched her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall, then allowed one of her thick fingers—her grandmother had clucked over them, telling Elsa she would never play the
Klavier
—to trace a tiny circle on the scrolling yellow wallpaper. It was all she could do not to turn around and walk back out the door.

Just then a tall woman at the front of the room dragged a bench in front of the hearth and stepped up on it. She clapped her hands and the women’s conversations died down to a murmur.

“Ladies, ladies,” the woman said. “Good afternoon. Welcome. I thank you for coming on this blustery day.”

Elsa watched the women in the front row nod demurely as they clutched their hands in their laps. They were already auditioning for a part they knew nothing about. Relentless, always, the competition among women.

“How many of you are here because you saw one of my posters?” Several hands went up. The woman nodded. “And how many of you are here accompanying a friend?” A few others raised their hands.

“Well, let’s see—where to begin. My name is Clara Bixby, and this is my operation. That’s what you need to know, right from the start. If there’s some part of you that’s right now thinking you might like to find a way to make it
your
operation, might like to find a way to take the reins, I will tell you once and only once: There’s the door.” She pointed at the entrance, right next to where Elsa stood in the shadowed back half of the room, and forty faces turned, suddenly, in her direction.

Clara clapped her hands again. “Now then. That’s settled. So.” She took a big breath. “Why are we here? I’ll begin with a letter.” She took a paper out of the pocket of her dress, unfolded it and read:

Dear Mayor Cartwright,
Sir, we are not acquainted, but I hope to change that. It has
come to my attention through the
New York Herald
that your
fine town, made up of the best sort of God-fearing men, loyal
to our Union, so devoted to this country’s expansion and
development that they are willing to forge new paths in the
West, has fallen on hard times. If you will forgive my
presumption, I would like to propose a solution to the problems
of your town.

As you well know, Manhattan City is full at this hour
with
unmarried and widowed ladies whose lives were forever
changed by the war of rebellion and its long-term effects.
Plenty of men died on the battlefield, but plenty more have
been ruined by drink and sickness upon their return home,
leaving the women they were married to, and the women they
might have married, had they been well and strong, in the
lurch. And though the righteous side prevailed in this conflict,
sir, there is a sadness over us all here in the East when we live
each day with
the heavy price we had to pay to set things right.

In each American, whether born on this soil or fresh
off
the
boat from another land, there burns a desire for challenge and
opportunity, for new vistas and the promise of what the soil
can yield. I believe, Mayor Cartwright, that should you and
I organize our efforts, we would
find a cheerful and willing
wife for any of the men in your town who wants one. And I’m
sure I don’t have to tell you of the civilizing influence of a good
Christian wife.