The Secrets of Mary Bowser (21 page)

I looked at those bills, cast down as if he were playing a game of jack-straws. “I work very hard to make this fair a success. Please don’t mock my efforts.”

My plaintful tone melted any mockery away. “I’m sorry, Mary. I didn’t come here to upset you. I only came because I miss you, and I wish to see your beautiful smile again. You can’t hide yourself away forever. Please, let us start the New Year together, happy.”

The way he pleaded at me with those hazel eyes, I wanted to wrap his words around me, a goosedown comforter against the lonely chill that had settled on me all year. “I don’t mean to hide myself away. It’s only, I feel so alone. More alone when I’m in the midst of other people.”

“You don’t have to be alone.” He stepped around the table and took my hand. “I wanted to wait until New Year’s, to take you to a moonlit corner of the Purvises’ garden, before I spoke. But I’ve started now and I might as well finish.”

He pulled an embroidered stool from among my goods, guided me to sit, and knelt beside me. “Missing you all these months has made me care for you more than ever. I hope you will do me the honor of being my wife.”

I didn’t know what to say. The last thing I expected that day was a marriage proposal.

Theodore didn’t wait for me to find my voice. “You must know I care for you,” he said. “And I believe you care for me. Don’t you?”

I thought of how he doted on me, even in the face of his family’s disapproval. How his calling me pretty made me see a different person in the looking glass than the Mary I otherwise found there. Theodore always made me feel bold and special, things I wanted very much to be but mostly didn’t believe I was. Hattie already wore George Patterson’s betrothal ring, and she teased me enough through all the years Theodore and I courted that I might have known his proposal would come sooner or later. I even thrilled with the hope of it, before Mama died. Now, worn from my year of mourning, I longed for the happy future he promised.

Then I remembered Papa’s words to me the day I left Virginia. “I care very much for you. Only, I can’t accept, until you ask Papa’s consent. You’ll have to write Bet, have her read him your letter and send you his response.”

Triumph rang out on Theodore’s face. “Hang Bet! I’ll buy your papa and ask him myself. Surely that will be a grander purchase than all your anti-slavery gewgaws put together.”

I thought of the half-naked, kneeling slave figure that decorated goods at fair booths all around us, and of my father, standing proudly beside me as we said our farewells that May morning so many years before. I hated that Papa was a thing Mahon could sell or not sell, as he chose. And suddenly I hated Theodore for talking about him that way, too.

In a moment, I was on my feet. The stool toppled over, its clatter turning heads throughout the hall. But I didn’t care. “How can you speak of my papa so?”

“Because I adore you. Once we’re married, you can have everything you ever want. A whole wing of our house to keep old Papa in magnificent style. A new dress every day of the year. Opportunities to reciprocate all the invitations you’ve ever received a thousand-fold.” He beamed at the idea, not bothering to consider what I might make of all the grand intentions he had for me. “You won’t need to worry about earning a penny here and a penny there for the Anti-Slavery Society. We will make them over a great check every year, so you can spend all your time just being my darling wife.”

Something in his words put me in mind of the antlers mounted in his parents’ dining room. My stomach always turned at the sight of them, as I imagined how each elk or deer felt at the moment it was shot. Wasn’t that what I’d become if Theodore had his way? Another animal caught and displayed, tribute to the wealth and power of the Hinton clan.

“My dresses may not be so numerous and ostentatious as your cousin Phillipa’s, but they suit me fine. My work is important to me. If you really loved me, it would be important to you as well.” I nodded toward the people staring at us. “You’ve embarrassed me in front of many friends and still more strangers. I will thank you to go. Good day, and good-bye.”

I strode out from behind the booth, making my way toward the small corner table where Zinnie was selling holly wreaths. Evergreen reminders of His everlasting love, she called them. Her hands grew scratched and red as she fashioned dozens of wreaths in the days before the fair, though they sold more slowly than nearly anything else we offered.

My heart, grown so heavy since Mama’s death, seemed to splinter into a million piercing shards whenever I thought over that conversation with Theodore. He must have been as sore with me as I was with him, because for once he relented without getting his way. And so what I broke off that day stayed severed.

But as the busy weeks of the fair blurred into a cold Christmas and then my solitary New Year’s, I realized I was more sad than sorry over what had passed. Much as I cared for Theodore, I knew there were things for which I cared more deeply, even if he never seemed to set much stock by my political causes.

Hurt as I was by much of what he said that day, still I could see he was right about one thing. I’d let myself sink too deeply into mourning, refusing to feel anything but grief about Mama. And I was grateful that Theodore made me realize it, made me ask myself why I was doing as I did.

What is wearing all those dark mourning clothes but white people’s custom? No colored person I grew up with ever did anything like that, not even free negroes. Colored folks in Virginia generally wore white for mourning, though not like whites wore black. Usually white was only a ribbon or gloves, not so showy as all-over mourning clothes but something respectful nonetheless. In Philadelphia things were different, but then in Philadelphia being the better sort of colored had an awful lot to do with mimicking whites. Now that I thought on it, I knew I needed to figure my own way to honor my mama, without losing myself in grieving forever.

Once I set my mind to that, what I heard wasn’t the sorrow thoughts that had been in my head all year. It was Mama’s voice.

Mary El, I’m sorry I died without a chance to say good-bye proper to you. But we all got to die. What matters is what comes first. Don’t be so sad I died that you forget to live. That’s what a child’s for, living long after her mama and papa are gone. And if you don’t start living again, how you gonna do Jesus’s work?

It didn’t come all at once necessarily, but bits and pieces here and there, adding up to that. And when it did, suddenly everything felt easier to bear.

The one thing no one could do the whole year past was console me like Mama would. Now she seemed ready to comfort and love and badger me even from Heaven above. I smiled to think of it, imagining her wheedling and conniving to get the archangels themselves falling into line.

Finding Mama again was like having a veil of sorrow lifted from before my eyes. After that, it was easy enough for me to lift the real veil myself, fold it up and tuck it away with the rest of the mourning attire. I couldn’t figure what to wear instead, until I went to Barnes and Charles on Chestnut Street and found the most beautiful lavender poplin day dress, not too showy but still a color you could swim in, it was so pretty and true.

Mama used to bathe in lavender every spring. “Time to wash away winter’s gloom, know I’m carrying spring around with me,” she’d say as soon as the ground began to warm and the green shoots to bud. January in Philadelphia wasn’t April in Richmond, but somehow it seemed right, washing away my year of mourning with that color.

If wearing lavender was one tribute to my mama, the other was finishing up at the Institute with the highest marks in the whole girls’ school. But still I feared that once I graduated, all Ducky’s quacking about domestic service being the only work allowed a colored woman would prove true. I was plenty vexed over it, until Miss Douglass summoned me to her classroom, making me feel like the same nervous twelve-year-old who first appeared before her a half dozen years earlier.

“Miss Mapps and I think you should attend college,” she said.

College? For a colored lady? “I’m pleased you both think so highly of me, but I don’t know any colleges that might take me.”

“Oberlin, in Ohio, has been educating females of both races for some time.”

I shook my head, knowing I was far enough from Papa as it was. “I’ve made such good friends in Philadelphia, and I like working for the Anti-Slavery Society. I don’t think I could bear leaving.”

Miss Douglass frowned but didn’t press the point. “Very well then, there are some schools in the area to which you might appeal. Perhaps Haverford, the Quaker college—”

My visit to the Arch Street Meetinghouse flashed in my mind. “I’m not too eager to be in a college that I’d have to fight just to let me enroll.”

“If our people only stay where we are wanted, our lives will be very circumscribed indeed.”

It was almost funny to hear someone as stiff and formal as Miss Douglass telling me not to accept being circumscribed. But imagining life as the only negro tossing in a sea of white students wasn’t so amusing. “I know that, ma’am. But I also know I can’t learn from someone I don’t respect, someone who doesn’t want to educate me.”

She looked at me, weighing whether to take umbrage at my pertinacity or to be flattered at how I set her teaching above that of white college professors. “If that is your choice, Miss Mapps has offered another suggestion. She requires an assistant for the secondary school class starting this fall, and she is willing to take you on.”

My heart soared at the idea. I felt more at home in the classrooms of the Institute than anywhere else in Philadelphia, and now I wouldn’t have to give them up. Quite a compliment, too, being told I was good enough to turn around come the new term and teach high school. I didn’t bother to weigh the offer, as though I might choose to clean house or take in sewing instead. I thanked Miss Douglass and accepted on the spot.

“You should have heard the way Mrs. Upshaw carried on when I gave my month’s notice,” I said to Hattie as we took afternoon tea at Bishop & Hawes a few weeks before I was to start my new job. We were sampling every bakery in Cedar Ward, trying to decide which would have the honor of making Hattie’s lemon chiffon wedding cake.

Hattie carefully inspected her plate, scrutinizing the exact hue of yellow in the curd separating the layers of cake, before asking, “What did she say?”

“What didn’t she say.
Why would anyone ever leave our cozy home, dear? I’m sure you won’t find no real featherbed anywheres else, dear. How can anyone survive the dreadful anonymosity of some boardinghouse, dear?
You would have thought I was threatening to throw myself off the Arch Street wharf, the way she went on about it.”

Hattie laughed and gave a nod to signal it was time to taste the confection. As I sunk the tines of my fork down, scooping up frosting, curd, and cake all at once, she said, “Mrs. Upshaw’s right, you know.”

“Right about what?”

“Spending a fortune just for some tiny hole in a boardinghouse.”

The limitation of my imminent salary was a sore point with me. Now that I’d be managing on a schoolmarm’s pay of just one hundred and seventy-five dollars per annum, I realized it wasn’t merely affection for the Hicksite Quakers that kept Miss Douglass wearing those same simple dresses year in and year out, without so much as a turned muslin collar to fancify her outfit.

“I’ve got to live somewhere. I would at least like it to be a place I choose, not the one Bet chose for me.”

“You wave your fork at me like that, I’m liable to bite that taste right off for myself,” she said. “Why not live where you can have three rooms to yourself, plus all your meals cooked for you? Better than Mrs. Upshaw or any boardinghouse keeper ever made. Heaven knows better than you can make yourself.”

“Where do you propose I can live like that?”

“My house. Which won’t be my house much longer, which is exactly when you should move in.”

“Your daddy hasn’t stopped celebrating the idea of finally marrying off daughter number six, and now you’re suggesting he take me in?”

She raised her linen napkin and daintily wiped a crumb from her mouth before jotting a note on her list of bakeries. “Daddy always says the first word a man learns when he has a daughter is no, and when he’s got six daughters it’s about the only word he needs. So don’t you worry about him. It was his idea. Or at least he proposed it to me. It was Mr. Bowser’s idea originally.”

“Mr. Bowser? What’s he got to do with it?”

Hattie dropped her voice, so none of the ladies seated at the nearby tables might hear. “Daddy’s been fretting over what might happen if someone brought baggage by when he was called away on business. There’s always been one of us girls around the house, until now. He mentioned it to Mr. Bowser, who put the notion of you staying at our house into Daddy’s head.”

Until that moment, I wasn’t sure Hattie ever even let slip to her father that I knew about the Railroad business. Mr. Jones never so much as looked at me sideways, let alone mentioned it to me. But now he and Mr. Bowser meant to trust me to help in it.

I told Hattie I thought she ought to choose Bishop & Hawes bakery for sure. There was something more than the usual rich and sweet to their lemon chiffon. A zest and tang, the kind of taste your mouth can call up for ages to come.

Ten

B
aggage will need tending today.”

That was all Mr. Jones ever said to me about the Railroad work. He’d pass the message while we sat at breakfast. It meant I was to stop by during dinner recess and again once afternoon classes were over, to bring food and drink next door.

When he said that single line, he always looked me straight in the eye, calm as could be. I’d expected he’d drop his gaze to his plate while he uttered so great and dangerous a secret. But Mr. Jones spoke like he acted, with neither self-importance nor worry. Just matter-of-fact purpose.

He only spoke so on days when he had to be away, dressing a corpse at someone’s house or leading a funeral to Lebanon burying ground. It wasn’t ever more than twice a week, sometimes no more than once a month, that he required my assistance. The first few times my stomach lurched, but I returned his look as steadily as I could and said, “I can see to it.” After a while, I heard the phrase with no more of a reaction than if he had asked me to stop at Head House Square and purchase a bucket of oysters for the housekeeper to serve for supper.