Private Life (7 page)

that it has no mind of its own."

"Mules are very intelligent," Mr. Early declared, putting an end to that

conversation. They walked along. As the aftereffects of her effort dissipated, she was

coming to feel chilled. It was now past noon. The breeze had stiffened, and the air was

colder than it looked in the sunshine. The steel of the handlebars communicated the chill

into her hands, and her feet were growing numb. She could feel the ground right through

her thin boots. He said, "Are you visiting anyone in town?"

"Mrs. Larimer, up here a ways. Though she doesn't realize it yet."

"Have you ever seen a telephone?"

"I don't think so." She wasn't sure whether she knew what a telephone was.

"The patents have been bitterly contested, or else they might already have

telephones here. But they don't." He snorted disapprovingly. "With a telephone, you

could let Mrs. Larimer know you were coming."

"From here, I could also shout."

He cleared his throat. This time, he also smiled a bit. He had even, healthy teeth.

There was no evident reason why he would choose not to laugh or smile, but his smile

quickly vanished, as if loaned rather than bestowed.

She shivered inside her jacket, and stopped to wrap her flannels more firmly about

her waist, this time for warmth. The bicycle stuttered on the road, and Mr. Early glanced

at her once, but mostly he gazed around in a discerning way, as if he were measuring the

speed of the wind or gauging the likelihood of rain. She pressed on, feeling her cheeks

beginning to freeze. Fingers, too. Discomfort was overwhelming that earlier sense of

pleasure. She stopped suddenly, leaned the bicycle against her skirt, and cupped her

cheeks in her hands, just to warm them. He said, "Are you in pain, Miss Mayfield?"

"I'm

freezing."

"Indeed! I hadn't noticed a chill." He waited for her, but she saw through her

fingers that he looked at her curiously, as if her behavior were simply a phenomenon and

had nothing to do with him. And, indeed, it did have nothing to do with him. But she had

the suspicion that, were she to fall over in a solid frozen block of ice and expire right

there, he would be unmoved except by the novelty of the situation. She put her hands

back on the handlebars and pressed on, this time hurrying as much as she could with her

long and flapping skirts. She said, "I have to keep going. It's just there. We're almost to

the Larimers'."

"Are we? I'll be sorry to give up your company." He neither smiled nor bent

toward her in any way; she was so frantic by now that this remark seemed to her to have

no meaning at all, to be launched onto the frigid air like a snowflake. But he exerted

himself to keep up with her, and then they were at Mrs. Larimer's gate, and she was

fumbling with the latch. He didn't help her, just held on to his staff and observed her.

When she had gotten through the gate with the bicycle, he tipped his hat and said, "Well,

it's been a pleasure to meet you, Miss Mayfield. I admire your fortitude."

She dropped the bicycle beside the path and ran up the steps to the porch.

Charlotte, Mrs. Larimer's hired girl, opened the door at once, and then it was all frostbite

and tears and warmth and concern. After that occasion, she didn't see Mr. Early (Captain

Early, Dr. Early, she subsequently found out) for a very long time.

THE MARRIAGE took place--a morning wedding at Gentry Farm, with Beatrice

in a dark-green velvet dress and Robert in a suit with a collar of the same dark-green

velvet. Owing to the time of year, Lavinia and the Bells had decided that it would be

better to have a small wedding in town followed by a larger party in St. Louis after the

New Year, and their caution turned out to be justified--snow began falling during the

afternoon reception at Mrs. Larimer's. It was so thick that if the guests hadn't left early it

would have been impossible to get back to the farm. As it was, the horses pulling the

carriage had to struggle the last quarter-mile, and Margaret and Elizabeth had to huddle

down, covered over and suffocating with blankets, while John Gentry whipped the horses

and urged them forward. Lavinia would not let the girls jump out and walk, because their

dress boots were thin and the snow was already eight inches deep. Then they spent the

days between the wedding and Christmas isolated at the farm, drinking tea and nursing

John Gentry through a bout of catarrh. The weather continued cold and wet; only Lavinia

went with Robert and Beatrice to the marriage celebration in St. Louis.

Margaret finally met Dora and the other Bells in the spring. Dora turned out to be

a squat, plain girl with thin hair and nothing more to offer, Margaret thought at first, than

a bicycle and a kind nature. But Dora seemed to take a great and flattering liking to

Elizabeth and Margaret, incessantly seeking their advice and offering to take them places

around town. She was far more sophisticated in her bringing up than they were, but, as

Lavinia pointed out, she was the sort of unfortunate girl whose own mother never gets

over her disappointment in what she has produced. There had been the nanny all the way

from England, and now a boarding school in Des Peres. One night, while they were

undressing for bed in the big house on Kingshighway, Lavinia remarked, "You girls can't

know how short your lives have been. From the mother's point of view, first there is the

infant, then, almost immediately, there's the young woman. That's how it seems." She

lowered her voice, though they were sitting by the fireplace in their own set of rooms, the

door shut and everyone else gone to bed. "When a lady's first concern is to preserve

herself unchanged by the passage of time, it may be that the easier course is to simply

forget the girl exists."

But Mrs. Bell was kind to Margaret and Elizabeth, inviting them to stay for a

month in the winter, and taking a special interest in Elizabeth. She and Elizabeth were the

same height and built in a similar way, and one of Mrs. Bell's fancies was to dress

Elizabeth in her own old clothes, and to give certain pieces to her, on the understanding

that Elizabeth would use her skills to remake these dresses and coats, preserving the fine

goods but updating the style. John Gentry said, "Does she think the girl is going to have

to sew for her living?" But Mrs. Bell acted more as if Elizabeth were her own sister than

the sister of her son's wife. The goods were beautiful, and Mrs. Bell, as befitted a St.

Louis society woman, had hardly put any wear into them.

JOHN G ENTRY died in a condition of some satisfaction. He was almost

seventy-six. At the funeral, the minister said, "John Gentry entered the state of Missouri

riding in the back of a wagon. A son of the South, he proved himself a patriot to the

larger nation, and he earned the respect of both sides." ("Well, he did that with his

shotgun," whispered Lavinia.) "He took care of his slaves and, after that, his servants and

his workmen, his mules, his acres and his horses and his daughters, and his

granddaughters. He sustained his connections with friends and relations on both sides of

the conflict, and the same cannot be said for every Missourian of those days. In doing all

of these things, he took good care of his soul. And so"--the minister sucked in a deep

breath and lifted his eyes above those assembled in the pews--"we plan to meet John

Gentry up yonder, where no doubt he has already been put in charge of something." The

congregation laughed and nodded, and afterward, many said of John Gentry that he was a

generous man. To Margaret, his life seemed complete and all of a piece. The world had

swirled around him, but he had done as he pleased and remained as evidently himself as a

tree might, or a stone might. Lavinia and her sisters kept pronouncing his eulogy: "Well,

Papa was always Papa, I'll say that for him."

Robert Bell took over the farm. What happened was entirely practical--Lavinia's

sisters all had lives of their own, in Hermann, Chicago, and West Branch, Iowa. The farm

would not be sold or broken up, everyone agreed (either land prices were low and certain

to rise, or they were high and destined to go higher--Margaret didn't know which), and,

furthermore, such a farm would virtually run itself, so efficient was the operation John

Gentry had set in place. Therefore, Robert and Beatrice with their two little boys,

Lawrence and Elliott, who had followed hard on the heels of the marriage, would live on

the farm, being seen to by Alice. Lavinia, Elizabeth, and Margaret would move into the

house in Darlington. Once installed there, Margaret understood without its being said that

she was to parade herself, the blooming Elizabeth in tow, up and down Front Street,

executing errands at the retail emporia and the better workshops. A single lady, especially

an old maid, as she was getting to be, could not just stroll about uptown without calling

her sense of propriety, or her actual virtue, into doubt; nevertheless, a subtle reminder to

any unmarried or widowed and gainfully employed men, young or old, that a single lady

had certain personal and social advantages was not out of order.

The house was small and cramped, not the spacious doctor's establishment where

they had lived on Mackie Street, but an extremely modest appropriate-for-newlyweds

house on Cranmer Street. Lavinia had been through the wringer of local gossip upon the

occasion of the doctor's death, which, though it had been deemed understandable on the

whole, was a topic of considerable vitality, given the additional bad fortune of the deaths

of Ben and Lawrence. Lavinia was not ready to be batted about at local church suppers

and quilting bees any more than she had to be, yet a reclusive life would certainly invite

as much remark as a bold one. The key was to find a sociable but self-reliant middle

ground.

It was a beautiful spring. Margaret enjoyed the succession of blooming trees

planted everywhere--pussy willows followed by forsythia followed by dogwood followed

by redbud, cherry, peach, apple, hawthorn, and lilacs white and purple. Some trees were

fragrant, some merely foamingly rich and beautiful. She felt this unusual wealth of

blooming to be a promise regarding the new century. As an old maid, she should have

been sober and circumspect, but she didn't seem all that old to herself, not as old as

Beatrice, who was becoming plump and harried and now wore her hair like Lavinia.

Lavinia, of course, only had eyes for her new grandson, Lawrence, whom she considered

the spitting image of Ben. He looked like a Bell to Margaret, however. She understood

that Mrs. Bell agreed with her. Elizabeth confided that Mrs. Bell was disappointed in this

offspring, and had said to Elizabeth more than once that she "couldn't understand how the

Bell heritage proved so strong, considering that the Bells themselves are short and pale,

though sturdy enough." Both the Branscomb heritage (hers) and the Gentry-Mayfield

heritage had been overwhelmed--or "Perhaps the word is 'drowned'"--in the Bell heritage.

Elizabeth and Margaret laughed and laughed. "What every mother needs is a nice cradle,"

opined Mrs. Bell, "so that she may rock her child and appreciate him, but not have to

endure any suffocating personal contact." She supplied Beatrice not only with a beautiful

hand-carved family cradle, but also with a nurse. In other words, she occupied herself by

taking care of all of them according to her notions of kindness.

That summer, Mrs. Bell and Lavinia put their heads together and decided to do

the easiest thing first, which was to take Elizabeth in hand, since she was almost nineteen.

According to Mrs. Bell, there were plenty of up-and-coming young men in St. Louis,

who, if not involved in manufacturing, were associated with the May Company, or

perhaps the beer brewers, or were lawyers who had gone to school with the scions of

wealthy St. Louis families and would be useful in some business or other. By the end of

the summer, Elizabeth was betrothed to a man from New Jersey, a lawyer named Mercer

Hart, who had come to St. Louis to assume a position with Mr. Danforth's livestock-feed

company. Mrs. Danforth and Mrs. Bell belonged to a fashionable ladies' club, where once

a month they listened to speeches about humane improvements to the lives of the lower

orders, or other equally edifying topics. Margaret went along once. The speaker, a man

from Wisconsin, discussed interior ceiling heights and their effect on the mind's tendency

to think either in concrete particulars or in accordance with more transcendental spiritual

ideas. Another one, which Mrs. Bell reported over the supper table, concerned the

writings of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, which proposed that no modern person could be

said, objectively, to be "fit enough" to reproduce and that, in fact, excessive human

reproduction would certainly destroy the world as they knew it. Mrs. Bell talked about

these ideas with approbation for several weeks.

Mercer Hart was a fairly young man, and had gone to Kenyon College. Dora and

Margaret were eager for a look at him, but when they met him, they found him to be

excessively polite--though, at least, taller than Elizabeth. They briefly perked up when