The Emancipator's Wife (11 page)

Before nightfall, thought Mary uneasily, somebody would call somebody out, or someone would end up thrashed with a cane behind the line of carriages where black grooms walked the blood-horses to be raced later in the afternoon. And the young ladies of her acquaintance, Frances and Meg, Eliza and Mary Jane and Isabelle, all clustered together, giggling at Arabella Richardson's jokes or crying out admiringly at Meg's new walking-dress of pleated jaconet, as if nothing more serious existed in all the world.

Don't they remember that Isabelle's brother KILLED Meg's brother three years ago, over a letter written to a newspaper?
Mary wondered, puzzled and angry.
Don't they care who gets elected, who runs the nation?

Of course, it didn't do for a girl to thrust herself in among the gentlemen once the talk got heated, for fear of hearing words no young lady should hear. But that didn't mean girls had to act like imbeciles, just to get young men to like them.

She realized that the sun-dazzle in her eyes was growing brighter, that sections of leaves were disappearing from the chestnut trees, appearing and disappearing, as things do in dreams. Her stomach curled with dread. In a small voice she said, “I think I'm getting a headache,” and Elizabeth's annoyance changed swiftly to her old protective sympathy.

“Maybe if you sit down in the carriage where it's shady it'll go off.” She put her arm comfortingly around Mary's shoulders, though Mary knew perfectly well that her headaches never “went off.”

She had had them, on and off, for a year or more; it seemed to her that since she'd begun having her monthlies they'd become more frequent, and worse. Sometimes Mammy Sally's remedies of bitter herbs would stave them off. More frequently nothing helped.

“Well, I'm not going back home,” Frances hastened to put in. “You just sit still and be quiet, Mary.” And as if to emphasize her words she fluttered off in the direction of Arabella and her cronies. Even in her agony, Mary felt a stab of furious resentment, that she could not be joining her as the center of the boys' attention. Wittier and quicker-tongued than the fairy-like Frances, she surreptitiously enjoyed the game of drawing beaux away from her sister.

It was like the knowledge that her father sent her more presents than he sent Frances or Ann.

“I'll get you a wet napkin to put on your eyes.” Elizabeth guided Mary gently to the carriage, with clearly no intention of leaving the speaking either. “Ninian, I think I saw Dr. Warfield over near the tables. Do you think he might come and see Mary?”

By the time Ninian came to the carriage, with the gray-haired professor of obstetrics and surgery from the University in tow, old Nelson had fetched a glass of ginger-beer and had put up the hood of the barouche in a vain effort to approximate by shade the darkness that Mary's throbbing head craved. As Mary heard the voices approach, she heard Nelson offer, “I can take Miss Mary on home and be back in an hour, Miss Elizabeth.”

“That's probably best,” agreed Elizabeth.

And Dr. Warfield—whose daughter Mary Jane had been shyly slipping away all afternoon to speak to Cash Clay among the trees of the groves—asked, “How often does your sister have these nervous headaches, Mrs. Edwards?”

“Sometimes two or three a week. Sometimes she'll go a few weeks without one.”

Old Dr. Warfield climbed into the carriage, making it rock like a ship in the storm and bringing Mary's lunch heaving back into her throat. She wanted to scream at him to go away, to leave her alone....Elizabeth and Ninian climbed in also
(rock, sway, lurch!),
Elizabeth taking her seat beside Mary and the two men opposite. It would have been, of course, completely improper for any man to have been in the carriage alone with her. “May I take your pulse, Miss Mary?”

Elizabeth turned down the cuff of Mary's glove; the medical man's gloved fingers felt warm on her icy wrist.

“Your sister is of a nervous disposition, is she not, Mrs. Edwards?” There wasn't a soul in town who hadn't heard of Mary's alternating charm and tantrums.

“Yes,” replied Elizabeth, “very much so.”

“And I believe Mr. Edwards told me that this is your little family politician?”

“She has a very lively mind.” Much as Elizabeth might disapprove of Mary's unladylike zest for politics and study, she would never admit this to even so prominent an acquaintance as the professor.

Just let me alone!
Mary wanted to scream at them, and began to weep as the hammering in her head increased. She opened her eyes a slit: Dr. Warfield looked like a buzzard, with unhealthy skin and a straggling beard. As she watched, half his head and a portion of his right shoulder disappeared into a fiery cloud of migraine light.

“That explains it,” said the doctor wisely. “A female's constitution is far more nervous than a boy's would be. The entire system of the female is rooted in the nerves and the generative functions rather than in the higher organs of thought and reason. For this reason mental activity tends to overload and debilitate her, resulting in these headaches, which are much more characteristic of the female system than the male.”

“But what can we do about them?” asked Ninian.

Her brother-in-law might be a blockhead about tariffs, thought Mary, but that was the first practical remark she'd heard concerning her headache from any white person that afternoon.

“Personally, I would recommend that she be bled, to lower her constitution. If bleeding does not relieve the pressure on the overactive nervous system we shall try a blister, to draw the heat away from her brain.”

There's nothing wrong with my brain! Just take me home and leave me alone in the dark! Get Mammy Sally to make me some of her herbs. . . .

But of course nothing would do for it but that Dr. Warfield and
Ninian accompanied Mary and Elizabeth back to the house—and to
Betsey, who was sent for and who was less than pleased about being obliged to leave the picnic and her friends to tend to a stepdaughter whom she half-suspected was putting on this show of pain simply to gain attention.

Mary was put to bed, swathed in her green-and-gold-flowered wrapper. Dr. Warfield came in with a china bleeding-bowl and a sharp little knife. He was brusque and rough-handed, his breath smelling of bourbon, and the blade gouged deep. In the stuffy, curtained bedroom the blood stank. Mary wept, wondering if she were going to die as her mother had died, but her headache didn't go away.

“Do you feel better, darling?” asked Elizabeth, and Mary had the good sense to nod. The last thing she wanted was a blister to draw the heat away from her brain.

“I'm afraid that as long as she is kept in school, she will run the risk of continuing to suffer in this fashion,” she overheard Dr. Warfield say, outside the bedroom door, as Elizabeth made sure no chink of light came through the curtains and Ninian tucked her in with brotherly affection. “Education, and the mental overstimulation of attending a political speaking, invariably react thus on the female organism.”

“Well, I know how much Mary loves school....” Her father's voice. He must have ridden back from the political speaking too. He sounded doubtful, because it was true that the headaches had become much worse in the three months Mary had been at Mentelle's. But before Mary could do much more than think in panic,
Don't take me out of the school . . . !
Betsey's crisp voice cut in.

“We shall speak to Madame Mentelle about modifying Mary's course of study, but I see no reason why she cannot continue to attend. I've heard wonderful things of her there, and of course her French has improved tremendously.”

Of course,
thought Mary.
She doesn't want me here.

She desperately hoped her father would come in and see her, maybe sit on the edge of the bed and hold her hand a little. But he didn't.

“We'll keep you informed of Mary's progress, Dr. Warfield.” Tongue click. “Now we really must be getting back—folks will wonder what's become of us....” The voices trailed away down the stairs.

Hooves and the jingle of carriage-harness in the street, dimly perceptible even through the shut curtains, the closed windows.

Mama wouldn't have left me alone,
thought Mary, grief welling up in her, almost worse than the pain.
Mama wouldn't have sent me away—or made me share a room with her cousin.
She barely remembered her mother, barely remembered sitting on her lap, enfolded and safe, in the days before Levi came along. But the memory was precious. After Levi's birth—and then Ann's and George's—her mother had had little time to give to her. But what she had had, Elizabeth Parker Todd had given. As always when she felt sick and alone, Mary tried to picture what life would be like now if her mother had not been carried out of her room like that in the dead of night, never to return again.

The anger she felt made her head hurt worse, swamping her grief in pain.

After a little time soft bare feet creaked on the hall floor, and Mammy Sally came in, bearing a cup that smelled sharply and sweetly of hot ginger and sugar. Mary drank it thirstily, and lay back in the darkness while those warm strong hands unbraided her hair, gently brushed out the long, heavy curls. She whispered, “Thank you,” and slipped over into sleep.

T
HAT WAS ALMOST THE LAST OCCASION ON WHICH
M
ARY STAYED IN
that small room. The following Saturday, when Nelson brought her home for dinner, her father announced that he had “closed the deal” on Palmentier's Tavern on Main Street, and would be converting it into a house for the family—he cast a significant eye at Betsey as he spoke, and she simpered in acknowledgment of what the novelist Mrs. Radclyffe would have called the “token of his affection” that currently swelled the front of her white lawn gown.
You didn't even ask us,
thought Mary resentfully, as Eliza gasped, “May I have my own room?” and Betsey heaved a visible sigh of relief.

“Now maybe we'll be able to entertain properly.”

Robert Todd said quietly, “Now maybe my family can come and go from our own front door without crossing paths with coffles of Mr.
Pullum's slaves.”

And young Mr. Presby the tutor said, “Amen.”

Mary glanced sharply at her father from beneath her lashes, then across at Elliot Presby, the theology student who hailed from some tiny rock-ribbed village in New England. Bespectacled, skinny, with a face like a saint who's just bitten a sour lemon, young Mr. Presby had little that was good to say about the South or Southerners, and on more than one occasion had reacted to Mary's teasing with sharp anger.

Above all he detested the institution of slavery, and looked upon all slaveholders—including Mary's father—with ill-concealed disapproval. When she was younger Mary had teased him mercilessly, but now she was more and more conscious herself of the brick-walled yard on the corner near her father's house, of the men and women who sat on benches under Pullum's awnings out front, with chains around their ankles....

And of old Nelson's silence when he drove her past the place on the way to and from Rose Hill.

Cash Clay had returned from his year at Yale an abolitionist, afire to end slavery, or at least forbid the importation of more slaves to Kentucky. According to Frances, after Mary had left the political-speaking Nate Bodley had attempted to cane Cash over it.

Of course it isn't the same with our people,
thought Mary, watching as Pendleton circulated the table with a platter of boiled ham. The darkies were slaves, yes, in that they were legally her father's property—or more properly Granny Parker's property—but she knew he treated them well. Slavery in Kentucky wasn't at all like slavery in the deeper South. She'd been in and out of the kitchen all her life, listening to Nelson tell his stories, or watching Mammy Sally make her custards for the children, as lovingly as if they were her own.

Her father would never sell Nelson or Mammy Sally or Jane or even grumpy old Chaney. They were part of the family.

And where would they go if they didn't live with us?
That was something that had always bothered her about Cash's wild insistence that all slaves be freed immediately, for their own good and that of the owners' souls.
What would they do? Who would take care of them?

Then she thought,
If we move down to Palmentier's Tavern, it will be harder for Jane and Saul to meet.
It was only a few streets up from Main Street to Granny Parker's big house, of course; but she knew Granny Parker was strict about keeping her people at their duties, as was Betsey.

And she, Mary, had been consulted about the move no more than had been the slaves.

Why should I care?
she wondered, as Nelson drove her back to Rose Hill early Monday morning, with the horses' breath and her own a faint mist in the chill.
It isn't as if it were my home anymore.
She had shared a bed with Eliza, because Ann had taken over her old bed. Though they all laughed and giggled as they always did when she came home, she felt like an interloper. Ann and Eliza had to move their things around to admit her, cheerfully as they always did. But she felt, as she always felt, that things went on without her. That if she did not return, she would not be much missed.

Still, the thought of complete strangers sleeping in that bedroom, of another family reading the newspaper by lamplight in the study where she had read on those rare, precious evenings with her father, filled her with desolation. As if she were invisible, and no one cared if she lived or died. She stayed away from the house on the Saturday when the furniture was moved, joining instead with Meg and the Trotter sisters, with Mary Jane and her sisters Julia and Caroline, and her other friends from Ward's, to gather hickory-nuts in the woods along the Richmond Pike.

It was a warm day at summer's end. The leaves of the maples had begun to turn and the air within the woods felt heavy, mysterious with the coming of the year's change. The girls were joined by several of Meg's numerous beaux—Nate Bodley, Jim Rollins, Buck Loveridge, and a few others, sons of the local planters or the gentlemen of the town—and there was a great deal of laughter and chasing around the laurel thickets among the trees, under the benevolent eye of Isabelle's widowed Aunt Catherine. Mary, with her curls bobbing under a new hat of pink straw and a new dress of pink-sprig voile, flirted with Nate and let him hold in his handkerchief the nuts she gathered, a curiously exhilarating experience. In the dappled green light his handsome face looked different, gentler than it did when she'd seen him among the cronies at the political speakings. His brown eyes caressed her when he called her “Miss Mary,” and she realized, for the first time in her young life, that something might lie beyond flirting.