The Bride's House (18 page)

She took part in quiltings with Mrs. Travers and her friends, sewing quietly and efficiently, never gossiping and only joining in the talk when it turned to serious subjects. And she participated in outdoor exercises such as sleigh rides and ice skating with those her own age, although she was not athletic, and sliding about on blades on the ice frightened her, as did other sporting activities, such as bicycling. She might have turned that fear to her advantage, pleading helplessness, but flirting was foreign to her. In that, she was like her mother, although Nealie’s lack of artifice was thought fresh while Pearl’s seemed dull.

Pearl dressed tastefully but too plainly to suit. She had come of age in an era when women put aside their bustles and stays and glorified in their uncorseted bodies. Pearl, however, preferred the old-fashioned look favored by Mrs. Travers. In winter, she wore stiff mohair, gabardine, or taffeta, of a severe color, cinched against her bony form. In summer, she dressed in white, which gave her a washed-out appearance. And she eschewed the broad hats then fashionable, preferring bonnets that made her look even taller and thinner.

Charlie had no criticisms of his daughter, perhaps because he preferred that his precious child stay by his side. He wanted her home in the evenings where the two often sat on the horsehair furniture in the parlor and read to each other or discussed the mining business.

Charlie had more than a fatherly devotion to Pearl. He had come to depend on the girl professionally. During Pearl’s growing-up time, Mrs. Travers suggested that Pearl go on to one of the universities in Denver or at Boulder. The girl was bright and serious, and Charlie could afford the tuition. Pearl herself hoped to do that, because she wanted to learn more than she had been taught in the Georgetown schools. And since she was not interested in any of the eligible young men in Georgetown, she thought that she might meet her future husband at a university. It had never occurred to Pearl that she would do anything in her life but marry—marry and bring her husband home to live in the Bride’s House, because she could not imagine leaving her father.

“I’ll ask Papa to send me,” Pearl told Mrs. Travers when the two discussed her going on to school. Charlie had never denied her anything, so Pearl believed she had good reason to expect he would agree to her going to a university.

“We’ll have to think how to appeal to him,” Mrs. Travers said, because she was not so sure Charlie would give up his daughter.

“It might help,” Pearl said, “if I told him I would study geology so that I could better understand his mining investments.” She would go to a school only fifty miles away and promise to come home every weekend so that he would not miss her.

Mrs. Travers broached the subject of college one evening at the supper table. “It’s a shame to end Pearl’s education here, smart like she is.” Charlie didn’t respond, and Mrs. Travers added, “She has her father’s blood.” When Charlie frowned at that, Mrs. Travers added quickly, “That is to say, she’s smart like you, Charlie, clever.”

“Clever and smart mean the same thing as hardworking,” he replied.

“I never heard of a body hurt by learning.”

“I went to school a little, but I didn’t learn much,” Charlie said. “I’ve found teachers to be about as wise as rabbits. They don’t know good ore from Deuteronomy.”

“Oh, now that might have been true in our day, but it’s not any longer. The girl could study geology, but who knows what else she might learn.”

“Learn to strip her shoulders and bare her legs, that’s what.”

“Papa!” Pearl interjected.

Charlie reddened a little and cleared his throat. “Now, I’m not saying you’d do that, Pearl, but I don’t care to have you associate with that kind of person.”

“I believe you can trust me,” Pearl said in a rare display of defiance. Then she added, “Perhaps I would find someone there who would be a suitable husband.” She assumed that her father, like her, believed she would marry one day and that he would want her to choose a man as ambitious and hardworking as Charlie.

“I wouldn’t have you marry now.”

“I’m Mama’s age when you married her.”

“She’s right,” Mrs. Travers put in, and Charlie glared at her.

“You’re much too foolish to choose a husband,” Charlie said, to the two women’s distress. Pearl might lack some qualities, but she had never been foolish.

“It’s what I want, college, that is,” Pearl said at last. “I am asking you to send me, Papa.”

Charlie tossed his napkin onto the table. “Lidie, you’ve forgotten the hereafter. Has your mind gone soft?”

“Oh, I’ll get it, Papa,” Pearl said, jumping up. “We made a Charlotte pudding.”

“Your aunt Lidie can fetch it,” Charlie said, and Mrs. Travers rose and went into the kitchen to dish up the dessert. She took her time after the obvious dismissal.

When father and daughter were alone, Charlie asked, “And what about what I want, Pearl? Would you push me aside just to attend classes on subjects of no value to you and to cavort with young men? Have you no feeling for your papa, for how lonely I would be?”

“You would have Aunt Lidie,” Pearl replied in a soft voice, a last attempt to convince Charlie of the rightness of her plea. “I will be home every weekend and on vacations. Why, you yourself are gone as much as I would be.” Then she added, “Couldn’t we try it for two years, even one?”

“Aunt Lidie is not my daughter.” Charlie leaned back in his chair and added, “I will allow you to go if you have your heart set on it, but think what it would do to me. It would make me unhappy if you were to go away, and I do not think you would want to disappoint me that way.”

So because she had always put her needs second and because disappointing her father was the last thing Pearl had ever wanted to do, she set aside her hopes for a university education.

“Perhaps in a year or two when you are older,” Charlie said, but both knew that would never be.

*   *   *

So instead of going away to school, which might have opened up a new world and broken her father’s hold on her, Pearl became Charlie’s secretary. She handled his correspondence and searched through the volumes in his library when he needed information on ore bodies or geological formations. Although she had grown up in a mining town and was familiar with mining terms, she found much of the work foreign to her, and she set about learning what she could about mining in order to better aid her father. She kept Charlie’s accounts for him, and on occasion, she entertained his callers when he was occupied elsewhere. Her father’s associates found her knowledgeable if not especially entertaining.

Sometimes, Pearl toured mines with Charlie, who pointed out the way a tiny vein of gold was streaked through the host rock and taught her to differentiate between real gold and fool’s gold. Although some of the miners were superstitions about women underground, they did not dare object when the woman in the mine was the daughter of Charles Dumas. Here, Pearl’s lack of artifice held her in good stead. She considered gold to be a commodity, not just a metal used for adornment, so she did not remark, as other women did when shown the workings of a mine, that the vein of ore would make a lovely necklace or teased couldn’t she have enough for a ring. She understood that gold was measured in ounces per ton, or fractions thereof, not in rings and bracelets. The young woman knew that politics and the economy, not just supply and demand, affected the price of precious metals. So the mining men who escorted her along the adits and into the drifts were comfortable with her.

Moreover, Pearl was not afraid of heights and did not flinch when she climbed into the bucket that lowered the miners and their visitors down the shaft. Nor did she worry about dirtying her skirts in the underground muck. All this made Pearl stand out from other women who were permitted in the mines, although if she had known she was different, Pearl would not have liked it, because she did not care to be noticed.

Several young men thought of Pearl as a special friend, but not many were attracted to her for romantic reasons. She was plainspoken and direct and far too serious. An older man might find her knowledge of mining to be good conversation, but few men her age cared for moonlight talk about the composition of an ore specimen or how long the ore body at Cripple Creek would last. Those who did court the young woman may have had ulterior motives. They were fortune hunters, or at least that was the impression the girl took from her father. While Charlie did not call them that outright—after all, he loved his daughter and was sensitive of her feelings—he managed to convey to the girl that anyone who came calling was in reality courting an heiress.

Charlie was not wealthy on the scale of the robber barons in the East, but he was one of the richest men in Colorado. Some of his associates wondered why he remained in Georgetown, which by the turn of the century was deep in a decline from which it was clear it would not recover. Never a major metals producer, Georgetown suffered a devastating loss with the silver crash of 1893, because silver was the primary metal in its mines. When the government stopped backing the price of silver, the value of the metal plunged. Charlie knew what was coming, and he had gotten out of silver when the price was still high, investing his money in gold, copper, and other metals.

Charlie’s associates thought it odd that he stayed on in the town when he could have bought a mansion in Denver—or in New York, for that matter, because his investments were not confined to Colorado. When asked, Charlie replied that his blood had grown thin in the high country and he’d turn sluggish at a lower altitude. Besides, he said, he was too set in his ways to resettle. Moreover, he told anyone who asked that he had a sentimental attachment to the area where he had made his early fortune. But the truth was that nothing could have lured him away from Nealie’s house, the Bride’s House. He would leave it only when he was carried out in a box and buried beside his wife under the angel in the Alvarado Cemetery.

*   *   *

Charlie kept the Bride’s House in pristine condition, the fanciful trim repaired, the façade painted. He added a fountain in the yard and a fence across the vast expanse of front lawn. A gardener cared for the lilacs and other flowers, kept the grass clipped and the fountain in working order. So it was obvious to anyone who visited Georgetown that the owner of the place was a man of some means. It was also obvious that the big house could accommodate a husband for Pearl, and the young men who did call on her were as aware of that fact as they were of Charlie’s money.

Among Pearl’s few swains was a young violinist who had opened a music shop in Georgetown. He played duets with Pearl, lavishly praising the young woman’s performance at the piano. While Charlie enjoyed his daughter’s music, he surely knew she was no virtuoso, and he told Pearl the man was a self-seeker.

“I have come to the same conclusion,” Pearl replied, because she had no interest in spending her life with someone who did not know an ore vein from a violin string. In fact, Pearl had discouraged two or three other would-be suitors on similar grounds, before her father could interfere.

She thought better of Tom Glendive, the manager of a gold mine in Cripple Creek, who sought her father’s advice on a technical problem. He developed the habit of dropping in on Pearl whenever business brought him to Georgetown, staying for tea and sometimes for supper. Tom was older, somewhere in his thirties, and charming, and he made Pearl laugh.

“Have you heard of Pat Casey, who discovered the Casey Mine in Central City?” Tom asked as he was sitting at the supper table with Pearl, Charlie, and Mrs. Travers.

“The dumbest Irishman who ever lived. He carried a gold watch but couldn’t tell the time,” replied Charlie.

“You have, then.” He turned to Pearl. “He once called into his mine, ‘How many of youse are down there?’ Five, came the reply. Old Pat scratched his head for a minute, then said, ‘Well, half of youse come for a drink.’”

Pearl laughed out loud, for although she herself was not clever in telling stories, she loved to hear them.

Another time, as Tom and Pearl sat in the gazebo, he asked if she knew the story of Silver Heels. When Pearl said she didn’t, Tom told her that Silver Hells was a dance-hall girl in Buckskin Joe, a town well to the south of Georgetown. He glanced at Pearl to see if she were offended, for surely she knew that a dance-hall girl was more likely a fallen woman. But Pearl had lived in a mining town all her life, and she accepted prostitutes as a part of Georgetown.

“Go on,” she said.

“Silver Heels was named for her shoes, and she was a beauty, a favorite with the miners. Came the smallpox, and all the good women quit the town, leaving only Silver Heels. She stayed to nurse the miners. Her face was the last one many of those poor fellows saw before they left this world. The pox was about done with when Silver Heels caught it, and it destroyed her beautiful face.”

“Was she killed?” Pearl asked, caught up in the story.

Tom shrugged. “Who’s to say? But every now and then a woman wearing a heavy veil visits the graves of the men who died. I’ve heard it happens even now.”

“Do you think she’s Silver Heels?” Pearl asked.

Tom studied her a moment. “What do you think?”

“I would like to believe she is.”

*   *   *

Pearl began to look forward to Tom’s visits. He took her for carriage rides and hikes in the mountains, and invited her to visit his mine in Cripple Creek, although Pearl quickly demurred, for she thought such a thing improper. Sometimes he brought boxes of pastries that could not be found in Georgetown, cigars for Charlie, and once he gave Pearl a locket made of gold from his mine. He had not been so bold as to put his own likeness inside, so Pearl fitted it with a picture of her father instead. Pearl found herself thinking of the man when she should have been reading mining journals or working on the accounts, and so it was not long before the infatuation came to Charlie’s attention.