Saints (27 page)

“You must think I’m a slut,” she said coarsely.

“I don’t,” he denied. He only vaguely sensed that by accusing him she was forcing him to deny every single thing he really felt.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever kissed,” she said.

He doubted it.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Of course I do. It’s just—you kissed me so—”

“I kissed you like my mother kisses my father, because that’s how much I love you! Charlie, can’t you love me, too?”

“Sally, this is so quick—”

“It’s only because I was afraid I was losing you! Charlie, we’re going to America and I don’t know anybody there! Won’t you take care of me?”

“I—of course, I—”

“I’m not asking you to promise anything. Just don’t ignore me, please!”

No, not promise anything. But even being here with her was betrayal of his promise to himself that he would marry wisely, marry well. He could not entangle himself with a girl like Sally. She was too coarse for his future. Or was she? Perhaps the lesson God meant him to learn today was that his future would not be special. That his proper mate was a sturdy girl with the hips to bear a dozen children and the strength in her back and legs and arms to plow a field. He could not decide which was harder to bear, the knowledge that he was only fit for a working-class marriage after all, or the fact that at this moment, with Sally’s kiss fresh on his lips, the impress of her body still strongly felt, at this moment he could not think of anything more important in his future than Sally Clinton.

“Charlie, are you promised to Caroline?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you do care for me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a proper lady,” she said. “I’m not what you think.”

“I think you’re a proper lady.”

“Charlie, you’ll be my friend forever?”

“Of course I will.”

And their interview was over. Charlie had a terrible feeling, helping her out of the old foundation, that he had promised her much more than he could possibly have meant to. He felt that he had betrayed himself, but what could he do? As he walked through the field his knees were weak from the passionate embrace. He felt guilty; he felt exhilarated. He braved Harriette’s stern look of disapproval and squeezed Sally’s hand in farewell.

“In America,” Sally said. She smiled shyly in a half-successful effort to hide her triumph.

Charlie watched the two sisters on their way, then walked back home, feeling unsatisfied and ashamed and blissfully happy. What an incredible, miraculous day. He had lost a few illusions, but he had also conquered a fear that he hadn’t ever named: that no woman could ever love him.

When he got home the house was still. At first he assumed that his parents were out. Had there been an evening meeting scheduled at the hall? No—even love could not make Charlie forget his responsibilities. Perhaps they had gone visiting, then, though it was unlike Mother not to lay a supper for him. He took off his jacket and hung it on the peg by the door, then began undoing his waistcoat as he walked to his room. It was not until he was naked and began looking for his nightshirt that he realized what was wrong with the room. There was nothing of John Kirkham’s in it. For weeks now it had been a constant annoyance, John’s clothing here and there, his unmade bed, his poor-man’s habits. And now it was all gone. For a moment Charlie thought his Father had gone; to his surprise, it was not a joyful thought. He had come to rather like the man, though loving was out of the question. Then he realized that John would not have gone any farther than across the hall.

Charlie strode to his door and flung it open. Across the hall the other door was already open; John Kirkham stood there, regarding him placidly. He was in trousers and shirtsleeves, but his rumpled hair spoke of his being recently in bed. In Anna’s bed. They regarded each other without words, until Anna emerged from the bedroom, John moving aside to make way for her.

“We thought since he was baptized,” Anna said, “that what God had made clean was worthy of my love. I’m surely no better than God.”

Charlie said nothing. There was no answer. When he had set himself in Father’s favor against Robert’s attack, Charlie should have known it would end with the old man in Mother’s bed. He had thought, however, that the permission would come from him, that only his consent would allow John back into Anna’s bed.

“You’re naked, Charlie,” John pointed out gently.

Yes. Naked, that was it. His authority, his power was only clothing that could be stripped away in a moment. Charlie turned away and closed the door to his room behind him. He lay on his bed, staring up into the empty gloom that hovered just under the ceiling. He heard his mother knock softly on his door, but he said nothing. The door might have opened a crack—he thought he heard the sound of it. If she did open the door, his nakedness drove her away again, and he was alone.

At first he tried to think of anything else, but it was impossible. So he allowed himself to conjure the scene. John Kirkham, dissipated and weak-eyed, yet still manly; Anna Kirkham, heavy with the residue of so many pregnancies, and yet all the more voluptuous in her lingering beauty. Each knew the paths of the other’s body so well that trespass was inevitable. And as Charlie thought of his parents doing what he had so long prevented, he forced himself to believe that it was all right, that John was clean now, forgiven now, worthy of her after all. That his mother was still his mother, despite her unfaithfulness to him.

He slept at last, and the scenes he had not been able to avoid awake pursued him even more vividly in his dreams. Only now it was not Anna Kirkham who sluttishly accepted what she ought to have refused—it was Sally. And in John Kirkham’s place, the animal of lust was Charlie. In his dreams he had no self-control at all. He woke in the darkness, panting from his imaginary passion, ashamed of his nakedness and of his dream. He got up in the darkness, dampened a cloth and washed himself, then pulled his nightshirt over his head and crept under the covers. Like a child he pulled them up to his neck and curled his knees up near his chest. The more he remembered the ecstasy of his dream of Sally, the more guilty he felt, until he found himself praying and weeping, damning himself and pleading for forgiveness. And yet all the time he knew he was a hypocrite. Even though it was a dream, it was a powerful experience, not to be quickly erased from his memory. And once again before morning he dreamed the dream again. It terrified him, for what you dream three times comes true. He lay awake for hours the next night, and the night after, praying and struggling to keep his mind from evil. It was the sorest trial of his life so far, he was sure; the war in his heart was between God and Satan, and he did not know what weapons he could array on God’s side.

Matthew was not a fool, whatever Dinah might think. He knew, for instance, that Dinah meant to go to America. There had been enough hints. Charlie’s remarks about his and Anna’s plans to emigrate; Dinah’s frequent wistfulness about favorite places in Manchester; her occasional unaccustomed tenderness with Matthew. A blind man could read those signs.

The question, of course, was when, and how she’d broach the matter with him. He had confided his worries to Robert, but regretted it at once, for of course Robert became cold and businesslike and told him not to worry, it would all be taken care of. Matthew did not want it taken care of. He wanted it avoided entirely. He wanted Dinah to be changed. He wanted her to love him, so that she would not think of leaving him. But she was thinking of leaving him. Perhaps not desiring it, but it was surely one alternative she was considering.

He toyed with the idea of going to America himself. That would silence her, he suspected. “Good morning, Dinah. How would you like to go to New York with me? Robert and I want to manufacture our locomotive in America.” How close was New York to Nauvoo, or whatever the place was? Couldn’t be far. Wasn’t America just a string of cities along the coast, with mountains, forests, and Indians only a few miles inland from the sea? She could go visit her Mormon friends as often as she liked. They would stay together. But of course he couldn’t do it. Not now, anyway. In a few years, they might be ready to reach out to other places, but right now it took all their capital and all their attention just to stay ahead of competitors. They had already had to fire three employees for revealing secrets to other manufacturers. And America would be even worse. Yankees were notorious sharpers. It was said a Yankee could steal the wings off an angel and then turn around and sell him the boat passage home. Besides, Matthew wasn’t altogether sure that Robert would trust him to head an operation in America, so far from supervision. Robert didn’t have much faith in him. No one did, really.

He couldn’t help the way it preyed on him, that Dinah wanted to leave him. He could tell himself that she had gone mad, that she was following her damnable prophet. Made no difference. He still came home and saw her so beautiful and wise, so much above him; he desired her more than anything else in the world, and yet she did not want him. She was courteous, but they were only in a truce. She despised him, and every time he loved her in her bed, he felt ashamed, as if it had been a gift bestowed on him by someone who was wondering the whole time if he had bathed. So he had taken to visiting whores.

The first time was almost by chance. He was feeling low; it was midmorning Sunday, and Dinah was gone with the children, and he happened to sit in a park near an off-duty whore. He suspected what she was from the start—the painted lips don’t come quite clean, and the habits of walking don’t disappear because it’s forenoon Sunday. Yet he did not get up and move away. I’m a bit of a whore myself, he thought. I stay where I’m not loved because of the money. If I left Dinah I’d lose my place with Robert, that’s certain. And I don’t want to lose it. God’s name, it’s all I have. That’s how he felt that day. And so he stayed there, and even struck up a conversation with the girl. She wasn’t much older than Dinah, anyway, and though she wasn’t pretty, she reeked of desire. Here’s one that wouldn’t find me too dirty and low for her. Here’s one that considers herself lucky to get a man like me, usually has to make do with the low sort, she’d be glad for me. And one thing led to another, until she smiled and said, “You wouldn’t have three shillings I could borrow, would you?”

He fumbled in his pocket, that’s how innocent he was; this wasn’t a factory girl, she was talking another language and he just didn’t understand. But she only touched his arm and said, “You’re supposed to say, ‘What will you give me for security?’”

So he said it, and she answered, “My crinkum-crankum.” Then she giggled.

“What?” He understood, all right. He just didn’t know what to say.

“Look, for three shillings, you can do a grind. Unless you want a perpendicular.” She giggled again, but then sobered. “I don’t do nothin’ else.”

He should have got up and walked away. He even thought of it. But he wanted her after all, and when he got up he did not walk away; he reached down and offered her his arm.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We might be seen. My place is only three blocks from here.” She told him the address. They walked separate ways. He thought of just not keeping the rendezvous. He thought of going home. He thought of Dinah, and decided it would serve her right. The whore pretended much more passion than she felt, but when it was over her smile was genuine enough. “I don’t usually do it in the morning,” she said. “But you was so sad.”

Pity. It should have made him angry, but instead he only laughed at her and made arrangements to meet her at the same time the next week. It seemed an appropriate thing to do during the Mormon meetings.

Did Dinah know? Matthew feared she did, and hoped she did; it was the only pleasant tension left in his home life. Would it hurt her? Would she be angry? Or would she only nod complacently and say, “One expects a hog to wallow in the mire—that’s his nature.” That was like her, that was possible—but even that gave him the pleasure of comtemplating a quarrel that he would surely win. In his imagination he was a much better arguer than he was in fact.

And whenever he was with a whore, he imagined it was Dinah, her so lovely body yielding to him completely, enslaved by his ardor. I would be so masterful, if only she would let me rule her.

“Matthew,” she said one night, after the children were in bed. “Can we talk?”

“Mmm,” he said, looking up from the drawings he had taken home to study during the night.

“It’s important.”

Slowly, unconcernedly he rolled up the papers. He felt an ecstasy of tension inside, for her tone said that the time had come at last. She was going to precipitate a change. Had she found out about the women? Would she rage?

No. She was very calm, and she said nothing of the women. “My family is going to America. Did you know?”

So it was America, not the whores. He knew this scene; he had played it out a hundred times in his silent imaginings. She would say, Let me go with them. And he would answer, I am not an unreasonable man. I understand that a woman can have desires that are different from her husband’s. So in a year or two we will take a voyage to America, and you may see your family and visit your prophet, and perhaps then we can decide whether to move there for an extended period of time. She would see his magnanimity and love him for it. He would turn this issue of religion to advantage after all. “Yes, I knew,” he said.

“I’m going.”

He waited for a moment, for her to finish her statement. But that was it. Name of God, what did she think she was, his brother? No, by heaven, she was his wife!
I’m going
indeed. Didn’t she know that he had the power to restrain her? He could lock her up if he chose, or commit her to a lunatic asylum, there’d be no trouble with that; not a judge in the world would move to block him. How dare she announce it, as if it were her right! “Oh,” he said. He heard his own calm voice with surprise. Surely he had meant to speak more forcefully than that.

“If you wanted to come, I would be glad of it.”

Her tone was so complacent, as if she cared not a bit whether she ever saw him again or not. The woman had no justice in her, and no mercy. He found words to say now, but they were grotesquely inappropriate to his feelings. “I thought I had kept my part of the bargain. I do not think I deserve to be deserted.”

She had not noticed the enormity of what
she
said, but she seemed now to take offense at the word
deserted
. “I think if you may follow women into bawdy houses without blame, I may without sin follow the Spirit of God to Zion.”

This was not how the whores were to have been discussed. It was to be a tempest, not a quiet freezing of the air between them. He was supposed to bow before her rage and penitently explain that it was because she made him feel so unworthy, so unloved that he went where affection could be purchased. Now such an explanation was impossible. She was not furious at him; she did not weepingly accuse him. She only sat there using his whores like a wager in a game of cards. He had bet on her guilt; she countered with his own, as if she was not hurt by it at all. And that made his visits with the whores seem even filthier, to know that his wife did not even mind, that Dinah only regarded it as a means to get her own way. He wanted to shout at her, to accuse her of being cold and unfeeling. But when he opened his mouth, he quietly said, “I don’t want you to leave.” He had meant to command. Instead he pled.

“If you came with me, I wouldn’t have to leave you.” And then she broke her perfect posture, leaned forward a little, and came as close to passion as she would come in the whole strange conversation. “Matthew, when one has communed with God, one cannot bear the thought of losing him. I’d gladly die before I’d stay here, now that God has made plain the course I’m meant to follow.” Matthew heard the trembling in her voice; she meant it, and he knew that she was capable of martyrdom. No ancient saint had anything on her.

“You won’t have to die,” he said. He did not plan to say it, and only realized after it was said that it constituted permission. Had he meant to grant permission? Surely not.

The words were spoken, though, and suddenly Dinah brightened. Suddenly she was effusive, more excited than he had ever seen her before. “You won’t have to pay for passage. Charlie’s already paid it. In fact, you know, the Apostles are making those who have money pay the way of those who don’t, or none will go to Zion; it’s a way of keeping all the Saints equal so that no one gets to Nauvoo just because he has more money than anyone else. So Charlie’s paid for seven people besides us to go—saved all his money.” Then she bent over him, embraced him, kissed his cheek. “Oh, Matthew, you’ll never regret this. You’ll see—we’ll prosper there, and within a year or so we’ll come back to visit. And you’ll visit us, surely there’s business for the firm in America; you’ll visit and it won’t be long before we’re together almost all the time. Just because I love God doesn’t mean I can’t love you, you’ll see.”

So Dinah, perfect Dinah, could be bought. Give me my way, and I’ll love you then—he felt cheapened because he wanted her love so desperately, and now it was so mercenarily given. He turned away from her embrace, he stood and walked away from her. It did not occur to him that this show of love was the truth, and her prior coldness was because she had been afraid of him. He forgot how he had earned her fear. So he felt justified in rebuffing her, felt a delicious thrill of revenge at the quiet pain in her voice.

“You are generous,” she said behind him. “I will teach the children to love you, and of course when Val comes of age I’ll send him back to England to go to school.” Then she left the room.

Name of heaven, she meant to take his son and daughter on a voyage that killed as many children as survived it. She meant to strip him of his family all at once. What, was she so happy being reared in a fatherless home that she aspired to such an abomination for her own son and daughter? Well, she’d discover how much he was willing to bear. He stood up, thinking that he would go directly to her and tell her what she could and could not do. But instead he found himself outside, heading for Robert’s and Mary’s home. Robert would know what to do. Robert would solve it.

Robert’s answer was impatience. “I told you I’d take care of it. Your children will stay in England, and if I know Dinah, so will she, and willingly, too.”

“May I not know how you plan to work this miracle?”

“If you knew Dinah as well as I do, you’d know the plan without asking. And if I told you, she’d guess it from your face before the week was out.”

“So I’m to put my future in your hands.”

“It has been for years.”

Matthew left angrily, but the visit to Robert did make him feel better: it made things easier, to know that all the money of the firm would be behind him, that and Robert’s wit and determination as well. Let Dinah plot to widow him and leave him childless all at once, like Job; he had an angel now to intervene. In this battle, God and Robert were both on Matthew’s side.

Dinah was already in bed asleep when he got home. She looked so peaceful—why shouldn’t she? She thought that she had won. As he watched her sleeping, he realized that he felt love for her quite apart from his passion. All these trials would lead to a good end. Robert would work the miracle and keep her here. Matt wanted more than life itself to truly be one with this woman, who was nobler than anyone else he knew. She was beautiful, yes, but also she knew beauty.
Was
beauty, in fact, and if he could make her truly a part of him, he too would be beautiful.

It was time for him to go to bed. On his way out to the privy, he stopped in each of the children’s rooms. Perhaps it was unnatural in a father, but he positively doted on the children, and often spent long minutes dreaming of their future, planning how he’d love his daughter and his son when they were old enough to know they had a parent besides their mother. Already, in fact, Val watched him, often did what he saw his father do. He is not ashamed to be like me, Matthew thought at such moments, despite his fear from that one terrible night when I lost control of myself and did the unthinkable, struck down Beauty because I could not own it. Val, at least, has forgiven me.

Somewhere between the privy and the cottage, his decision was made. Before he would let these children out of his home, he’d do something terrible. Yes, that was a resolve that would not flag in the face of Dinah’s iron will. He would not bend on that. Dinah had never been his, not in her heart. But these children—they were the part of her she could not withhold from him. Before he let her take them, he’d see her dead.

Upstairs, she heard him walk away from the door as she dozed; it woke her enough that she thought to pray. It was a clumsy, sleepy prayer, and she fell asleep halfway through, but to the face of Joseph Smith that she had learned to worship, she prayed for this: that before she and her children left for America, God might work a miracle and make her husband also come with her. And as she prayed she felt this certainty: that in America she would have a true marriage, that at last she would love a man she could not rule, and yet who would not rule her. It did not occur to her that it would be anyone but Matthew. And so she fell asleep content.