Private Life (4 page)

wild and inaccessible coast of California. These pictures subsequently turned out to be

entirely wrong.

Alice, her grandfather's cook, taught them how to make biscuits, coffee,

doughnuts, flapjacks, and piecrust. Of farmwork, the girls did little, but they did pick

apples, pears, plums, and peaches from their grandfather's trees, and blackberries and

raspberries and gooseberries from his bushes. They were taught to make jams and

cordials, and to think of Missouri as an earthly paradise.

Lavinia got pattern books and designed their dresses so as to minimize their

disadvantages of appearance: With her blue eyes and fair hair, Margaret wore only shades

of blue. Elizabeth, who was not fair, was allowed blue and green. Beatrice, dark like their

father, wore deep reds, sometimes pink, and occasionally a faded and respectable violet.

Beatrice grew tall; she had to wear wide sleeves. Elizabeth's frocks, with their buttons

and tucks and insets, always drew the (ever-foreseen male) eye to her slender waist.

Margaret's wrists were a bit thick, according to her mother, so she had to wear gloves into

town. The girls trimmed hats. They knitted shawls. They crocheted collars and edgings.

They bleached, trimmed, pressed, and set aside in their chests the household linens they

would need one day. They embroidered.

For some months when Margaret was sixteen, there was a lengthy discussion of

whether they should purchase a loom. Lavinia had heard that there was an enterprising

woman in Osage County who made beautiful carpets. Lavinia wondered if this woman

might take one of the girls, perhaps Elizabeth, as a student, or even adopt her outright-Lavinia felt that you never knew what an enterprising woman would do, anything was

possible. But John Gentry put his foot down, and so the girls learned a humbler craft that

winter, braiding rugs from rags. As the rugs grew beneath the fingers of her mother and

sisters, Margaret read aloud, as a novelty, a book that had been written by a famous

woman from St. Louis named Kate O'Flaherty Chopin. Her grandfather told them how he

remembered the very day back in 1855, when Lavinia was still an infant, that the first

train belonging to the Pacific Railroad brought down the bridge over the Gasconade

River. Many were killed, including Mr. O'Flaherty, Kate Chopin's father. John Gentry

was interested in everything about the railroad, for it had been a great boon to him.

Nevertheless, he and Lavinia agreed that the fact that Mrs. Chopin wrote novels for

remuneration was an unfortunate outcome of her trials. Beatrice, Elizabeth, and Margaret

were encouraged to pity rather than admire her. But books were books--the hoped-for

suitors would require an appealing degree of cultivation. Beatrice, with her talents (and

good looks), and Elizabeth, with her skills (and her thick mane of chestnut hair), might

get as far as Chicago or even New York (in Mr. Alger's books, the best place to find

yourself ending up was New York), but even Margaret could get to St. Louis.

On the farm, talk of St. Louis was constant.

At first, St. Louis came to her as a fall, like a light snow, of names: Chouteau.

Vandeventer. Eads. Gratiot. Laclede. St. Charles. Lafayette. Even Grand, which was a

boulevard. Shenandoah, Gravois, Soulard. If there was a street name in St. Louis as dull

as Oak or Fourth, Margaret never heard it. And every good thing was from there--shoes

and boots, silks and nainsooks and Saxony woollens, books, pianos, books of piano

music, candy, sugar, chewing tobacco, her mother's mouton capelet, pearl buttons. There

was a vast emporium in St. Louis called Carleton's which carried goods sent specially

from Paris, France, and London, England, and from Japan and China and India (if only

tea--Lavinia drank tea). John Gentry seemed to take personal credit for the way St. Louis

blossomed just over the eastern horizon of Gentry Farm, and the fact that they could get

to St. Louis any day they wanted, on the train from McKittrick, was a source of eternal

joy to him (they should have seen the roads, if that was what you wanted to call them, in

the Missouri of his youth!). Even so, he went there not more than once in two years.

* * *

AND then Beatrice was suddenly eighteen years old, a finished product. She

could play any number of pieces on the piano, from "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair"

and "Camptown Races" to "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower," and some more complex pieces

without lyrics, such as "Annie and I," which had three sharps. She could sing if the song

in question fell into her range. Her tone was rich and melodious. The time had come to

put her on display. A lady Lavinia knew in town had a very nice piano, much nicer than

the Gentry piano, which she herself could not play, so, on days when John Gentry had to

take a wagon into town anyway for business, he would carry Beatrice along and leave her

at Mrs. Larimer's house on Pennsylvania Street, and Beatrice would play for her.

Sometimes, with enough notice, Mrs. Larimer would invite a few friends in to have tea

while Beatrice was playing.

The summer Beatrice was eighteen, the cousin of a friend of Mrs. Larimer, a man

named Robert Bell, took over the town newspaper. He had money and credentials. What

John Gentry knew about Robert Bell, within the first week, was that he was backed by

some family capital, he was ambitious, and he had grown up in St. Louis in a big house

on Kingshighway, a very wealthy and forward-looking neighborhood.

It was Robert Bell who decreed, young man though he was and new to town, that

the Unionists would march at the front of the Fourth of July parade just behind the band;

the farm-produce displays, the fire engine, the horse drill, and the mules would march in

the middle; and the Rebels (numbering eight by now), dressed in their old Confederate

uniforms, would march at the back, behind the Ladies' Aid Society and the GermanAmerican Betterment Society (which dressed in traditional Bavarian costume). He wrote

about his plan in the newspaper, alternating discussions of the controversy with news of

the war in Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and then the Philippines, until everyone in town had

had their say and gotten bored with the War Between the States, especially since the new

war seemed to be going so well. According to John Gentry, this strategy of promoting

patriotism over infighting was a mark of genius in such a young man, and he went by the

office of the newspaper to tell Robert Bell as much. The young man thereupon invited

John Gentry and his family to watch the parade from the windows of the newspaper

office, which was closed for the afternoon.

To Margaret, Robert Bell was a disappointing sight. He had enormous

muttonchop whiskers that only partly disguised his receding chin. His hair was thin and

flyaway. His eyes were his best feature, rich blue and much more expressive than his

words. He was nicely dressed. But he was considerably shorter than Beatrice--the top of

his head came only to the middle of her ear. He made Margaret feel awkward just by

standing next to her. He was attentive to them, though. He showed Lavinia to the best

chair, which was pulled up right in front of a large open window looking out on Front

Street, and then he showed Beatrice to the chair beside that one, and he brought her a

cake and a cup of tea. Elizabeth and Margaret he left to fend for themselves, but he had

gotten in nice cakes--light, with raspberry filling and marzipan icing, something Margaret

had never seen before that day. He also had gotten in enough lemons for real lemonade,

which he served with ice. He was comfortable with luxury, just what you would expect in

a Bell from St. Louis--Margaret could see this thought passing from Lavinia to her

grandfather when they caught each other's eye and raised an appreciative eyebrow.

The crowd outside the window undulated forward and then separated and backed

toward the newspaper office as the band turned into the road. Margaret watched them for

a few minutes, and then she did what she so frequently could not help doing, she glanced

at a newspaper on the table beside her, and began to read the articles. Since everyone

around her was admiring the parade, she was free to read, but not, she thought, free to

pick up the paper and open it in the midst of a celebration. The dispatches related that

American ships had landed preparatory to taking Santiago. As for Puerto Rico, victory

belonged to the Americans, for General Miles had taken San Juan without resistance.

Then there was an article about the fate of a two-headed bull-calf born in Montgomery

County (died at three months), and an article about the extension of the MKT Railroad

somewhere in Kansas. At the bottom of the page was another headline and part of an

article, "County Man Returns from Mexico Expedition":Little did Andrew Jackson

Jefferson Early, of this county, suspect, when he was growing up on Franklin Street, that

he would someday travel the world and consort with famous and prominent men. Mr.

Early is an astronomer. Before he journeyed to the mountains of central Mexico, the

world was a different place. We had the sun, the moon, and the stars. We had Mr.

Harriman and Commodore Vanderbilt, but we never had these last two gentlemen at the

same time. Now, in effect, we do, for Dr. Early's expedition has discovered something we

would not have suspected to be possible in God's grand Creation.

Beside the print was a photograph of a man that she thought she recognized, but

perhaps it was only that he looked much like all the other young men she knew, the

arching brow, the straight vertical of the nose, the square chin. He was wearing a hat in

the Western style; his glance was direct and challenging. Unfortunately, she could not

ascertain what his great discovery might be, because a man picked up the paper from the

table beside her and carried it off. The Earlys were well known around town as Rebel

sympathizers, too prominent and wealthy to end up as bushwhackers, but not the sort of

people John Gentry socialized with. Margaret seemed to recall that there were many boys

but no girls in the family, and that when the father had died (what was his name?

Patrick?), the Rebel sympathizers had turned out in great numbers for the funeral, and

John Gentry remarked, "There was another one who was never the same since the war."

Outside the window, the Union soldiers (numbering fourteen) had passed, and the

brass band, and now came a row of wagons. The first of these bore a pile of hemp, upon

which sat girls from the orphanage dressed in white and carrying bouquets of daylilies,

black-eyed Susans, and a few late shrub roses. After these girls came Mr. Alexander's

wagon that he got from a circus. It was pulled by a team of four grays with red ribbons

braided into their manes, and into it he had loaded his best white sow and her squealing

piglets. Then came the tobacco wagon that some of the local farmers kept in a barn

somewhere. Margaret could smell the fragrance of the leaves as it went by.

She regarded Robert Bell and Beatrice. He was staring out at the tobacco wagon,

but he had his hand on the back of Beatrice's chair. She was fanning herself. She glanced

at him. Even sitting down, Beatrice could nearly look him in the eye. Then Margaret saw

her mother look at the two of them and away, then shift in her seat and adjust her skirt to

cover her feet. Lavinia's hair, which had once been so thick that she could hardly pin it

up, was more manageable now, but she was the sort of woman who did not age, just as

John Gentry, who was seventy-five, seemed closer to sixty. It was Lavinia's oft-repeated

lament that the supply of men in the county was short. There were numerous

grandfathers, but husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were scarce.

Beside Margaret, Elizabeth leaned forward to watch the troop of horses go by.

Whereas Beatrice was dark and tall, Elizabeth was brown-haired and small-boned, with a

turned-up nose; Margaret thought she was beautiful. Beatrice had no dimples where they

should have been, Cupid's-bow lips (her best feature), and large hands (and feet). But

Beatrice had a way about her. Her smile was slow, her movements were slow--not as if

she were lazy or sluggish, but more as if she had all the time in the world. Just now,

Margaret saw her smooth her hand over the silk of her skirt, and heave a relaxed sigh.

Robert Bell smiled down at her, perhaps in spite of himself. But he stepped back, and

removed his hand from Beatrice's chair.

The horse drill passed. The riders wore bands across their chests and rosettes on

their shoulders, and they waved their hats in unison as they went by, first to their left and

then to their right. Every couple of minutes, they halted in formation, swept low over

their horses' necks, then waved their hats over their heads and trotted forward. It occurred

to Margaret to wonder again what Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had discovered that

changed the face of creation as the music faded into the distance when the brass band

turned off Front Street four blocks down.

Elizabeth nodded toward John Gentry and said, "Look at Papa."

Their grandfather was sitting in his chair with his knees apart and his body

squarely situated. His hat was pushed back on his head, and he was wiping his brow.