Private Life (6 page)

around the curves of their track, as she pedaled harder and went faster, was exhilarating.

Beatrice said that Dora was a hardy and determined bicyclist--that she belonged to a club

of thirty members, both male and female, and they cycled all over St. Louis, which had

many good roads. She could pedal up a long, steep hill and fly down the other side (this

idea appealed to Margaret from the beginning). Once, Beatrice said, Dora had bicycled

some twenty miles in one day, around the periphery of Forest Park, all by herself. No one

had said a thing against it, because all the young people in St. Louis who didn't have

bicycles were planning to get them, and, it seemed, a young lady bicycling alone was

somewhat scandalous, but not wildly so.

This bicycle even impressed Lavinia and John Gentry, who did not try riding but

enjoyed watching, as did all of the farm laborers and workmen. Bicycles were expensive.

Beatrice told them that Dora had confided to her that the bicycle had cost almost a

hundred dollars. When Beatrice quoted this sum, Elizabeth and Margaret were not

horrified--they were impressed. Three boring months of wedding plans, and here, all of a

sudden, was the casual wealth of the family Beatrice was marrying into palpably

demonstrated. John Gentry was impressed, too--all of Gentry Farm, he said, though

without the men and mules, was worth only 120 bicycles. Margaret rode the bicycle even

as it got colder and colder, and every night she wiped it off and put it away in the barn.

As sometimes happened in Missouri, one of those days dawned bright, a fugitive

remnant of Indian summer before the closing in of snow and gloom. On that day,

Margaret was up the moment she saw the sunlight beneath the shade. It was not a

Sunday. She could slip out of the house without getting breakfast, but also without

arousing much of a fuss, and she did.

She went straight to the bicycle. The door of the barn was already open, and she

walked the vehicle into the sunlight. Her plan was to ride it to town, some two miles off,

and then, perhaps, beyond. The puzzle was which route to take. There were three

possibilities. When they walked to town, they always cut across the upper pastures,

petting the horses and mules and climbing the fences, thereby reducing the distance to

about a mile and a half, but there was no question of that. When her grandfather drove the

buggy, he took the western way around, which was more or less level and about three

miles, in order to save the horses. That would have been her more sensible choice, but in

fact she turned southeast, toward the bottomlands, because, after a flat stretch of some

quarter of a mile, there was, first, a long curving hill around Old Saley's Bluff, then a

long rise, and then the turn toward town. At this point, the road rose slightly again, and

after that there was a set of steep dips and rises through Walker's Woods, followed by

another flat stretch down Front Street (and right past the office of the newspaper). By this

late in the year, the road had frosted and was pretty hard, though not icy. She

congratulated herself on her good sense.

Pedaling straight forward was a new experience for her, and she understood at

once how Dora had gotten all the way around the famous Forest Park in an afternoon.

Covering distance in this solitary manner was marvelously intoxicating. The brown fields

and the blue sky were all around; they seemed to dissipate crisply and evenly into all the

distances--forward, backward, upward. The fields were darkly defined by the denuded

brown trunks of hickories, black walnuts, and oaks. In Mr. Jones's pasture, across the

fence from John Gentry's hay field, five or six white hogs were grunting and rooting for

acorns; the noises they made had the clarity of gongs ringing in the air. And then she

went down. She gripped the handlebars and felt the cold wind lift her hair and, it seemed,

her cheeks and eyebrows. The brim of her hat folded back, and the hat itself threatened to

fly off her head, but though she gave this a passing thought, she didn't, could not, stop.

The wheels made a brushing, clicking noise in the dirt of the road, and she knew

instinctively to keep going no matter how much such going now shocked her. Tears

poured down her cheeks, and then she was halfway up the next slope--inertia--she knew

what it was called. But she slowed again, and then she was stopped and the bicycle tilting

to the side. Truly, riding a bicycle was living life at a much faster pace, and very

stimulating. She dismounted and pushed the bicycle up the remaining expanse of the

slope. She was now two farms away from Gentry Farm. She had forgotten this part of it-that she would be a solitary traveler for the first time in her life. She remounted the

bicycle and pedaled for the next few furlongs, possibly as much as a mile. Everything

about the effort was more difficult than she had expected, and fairly soon she was

breathing hard. She rarely if ever had done that before in her whole life, given her lazy

nature and her mother's views about proper female employments. She knew, of course,

that she could turn the bicycle around and go back to the farm, but she also knew that she

was more than halfway to town. The long slopes behind her seemed to grow longer,

steeper, and more arduous with this thought, and then she was to the series of dips into

Walker's Woods.

The pleasure of these dips, which she had happily foreseen, was that from this

direction, south, they gradually diminished toward town. There were three of them. She

pedaled hard into the first, and over the edge. She lifted her feet out to either side, and

down she went, holding tight to the handlebars. She aimed, with some nervousness, for

the bridge at the bottom of the hill and then was across it. After the bridge, the trees

thickened and the light grew dimmer. Her momentum carried her fast up the first bit of

the next hill, and she managed to resume pedaling more quickly than she had, and so

pedaled to the top, back into the sunlight. The drop of the second dip was immediate;

down she went. This time, she started pedaling as soon as she got to the lowest point of

the road, and once again managed to get up the entire hill before exhausting herself.

Fortunately, the third dip was quite long and shallow--pleasantly relaxing. Though her

cheeks burned in the cold, she was warm with the exertion. Though her arms trembled

with the effort, her legs felt strong. The seat of the bicycle was springy and comfortable.

She had heard of bicycle clubs traveling vast distances--the Columbia cyclists had

traveled to Kansas City and to St. Louis in a contest of some sort. She came over the rise

at the top of the third hill, and the town lay before her, bright in the winter sunshine. She

sat up straighter and began pedaling in what she considered to be her most dignified

manner. And just then her skirt caught in the back wheel and brought her to a halt. She

put her foot down as the bicycle tipped.

She dismounted carefully to the left, turning about and holding on to the seat of

the bicycle. The lower hem of her skirt was well entangled; she squatted down, still

holding the bicycle, and began to work the stuff out of the spokes. Her leg wrappings

were collapsing all about her, and she saw that she had to pick those up, too. She was

breathing harder than she had ever done.

A voice nearby, a male voice, said, "I haven't seen a bicycle in this town before,"

and she started violently, though she didn't jump up for fear of rending her skirt. There

was a man, quite close by the side of the road, leaning against a leafless maple tree and

peeling a staff. He stood up, and then bowed slightly. Margaret nodded, surprised--she

hadn't noticed him on her way up the hill. He was tall and handsomely dressed, in a gray

suit of clothes, with a soft gray hat sitting squarely on his head. Every man she knew

wore a hat, and you could tell quite a bit about a man by the way he wore his hat-slouched forward, pushed back, rakishly tilted to the right or to the left. This hat was like

the roof on a steeple--as square as if it had been positioned with instruments. With this

thought, she recognized him as the young man in the paper, at the parade, who had

changed the universe. Unfortunately, though, her skirt was still jammed between the

spokes, and her fingers were too clumsy in her gloves to pull it out. She said (politely,

thinking of how often Lavinia had criticized her manner with strangers), "I believe this is

the first, but it won't be around much longer, as we must return it to its owner in St.

Louis."

He seemed to peer at her, but did not lean forward. He looked as if leaning in any

direction whatsoever was impossible for him.

He said, "We haven't been introduced, but may I be of assistance?"

Her skirt slipped from between the spokes, not terribly blackened after all. She

stood up, then had to bend down and gather up the strips of flannel she had wrapped her

legs with. She said, "No, we haven't been introduced, but I recognize you from the paper,

Mr. Early. I'm Margaret Mayfield. Have you ridden a bicycle?"

"When I was studying in Berlin, I rode a bicycle quite often, but it was not nearly

as nice as this one. I haven't had occasion to ride one, though, in some years."

"I understand it's the latest model." She looked around for a spot to sit down, a

rock or a stump, so that she could rewrap her legs, but it appeared she would have to walk

the bicycle to Mrs. Larimer's, at least half a mile, and reorganize her outfit there. Mr.

Early said, "My bicycle in Germany had a roomy basket attached to the handlebars. Most

convenient."

"That would be," she said. She paired her flannels and draped them over her

shoulder, then wrapped them around her waist so they would be out of the way. She

wheeled the bicycle forward, and he fell into step beside her. Though the bicycle was

between them, she felt how tall he was, at least a head taller than she was, and on top of

that there was the hat.

Margaret detested most company other than the company of books; however, she

adjusted her own hat and walked on in as congenial a manner as she could. Mr. Early in

the flesh looked younger than Mr. Early in Robert's paper, but she recognized the eyes

and the brow--not those of a conversationalist. It appeared that she was obliged to walk to

Mrs. Larimer's with a man who would have to be chatted to, rather than one who was

happy to do the chatting. Just then, out of what Lavinia would have called her

"orneriness," she vowed not to do it, no matter how lengthy the silence. As an alternative,

she reviewed her recent headlong progress on the bicycle, and found it as exhilarating in

retrospect as it had been while she was enjoying and enduring it. She took a hand off the

handlebars and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. They were stiff with dried,

or frozen, tears. She put her hand back on the handlebars. It made her smile to think of

having gone so fast.

They walked on, and he said nothing. Undoubtedly, she could return home by this

route, but she saw that there was the problem of the three dips, which had, as it were,

poured her northward into town--if she were to turn around, they would present a barrier

not unlike that of three walls rather than three dips, and then, of course, there would be

the longer and less steep, but somehow even more disheartening, climb up the hill to

Gentry Farm. But how tedious to go home the long way, and (she looked about) mostly

into a westerly wind. She could certainly leave the bicycle at the newspaper office and

walk home across the fields--there was no snow as yet, and if her grandfather had turned

the sows out into his upper pasture and woodlot, she could use her hat to wave them off.

He spoke abruptly: "Do you have other leisure occupations?"

His ponderous and yet resonant voice scattered her thoughts and made it

impossible for her to answer the question, or, in some way, even to consider it. Leisure

occupations? What did that mean? They walked on. He tried again, "Perhaps our mothers

know one another. My mother is Mrs. Jared Early."

She recalled thinking that his father was Patrick. Perhaps that was one of the

brothers. She said, "Certainly, they do. My grandfather is John Gentry."

"You live at Gentry Farm."

"I

do."

"When I was a boy, we had a pair of mules from Gentry Farm. Napoleon and

Wellington."

"Did my grandfather name them?"

"No doubt he did, as our other mule was called Dick. But those two mules were

old even then. They would have come to us before the war."

"I am sure that before the war Papa made use of a whole different set of generals.

Since then, it's either Northerners or Southerners, but all West Pointers."

Mr. Early cleared his throat again. Margaret came to understand later that this

represented a laugh.

She couldn't keep herself from saying, "Lee and Grant are the oldest, twentyseven and twenty-five. My sister and I sometimes ride Zollicoff. The most stubborn one

is Halleck, though I have to say he's very handsome for a mule."

Mr. Early cleared his throat again, which made her think he was going to say

something. He didn't. After a few moments, she said, "What I like about the bicycle is