Woman's Own Page 6

  “She’ll come home one day,” Emily said, feeling a longing for her mother such as she had not felt in years. “When she’s ready. When her losses do not hurt her so much.”

  The girls had questions, which she answered as honestly as she could. Why did Emily not write for the money for them all to travel to England? Because it was better for Patricia and Lilly to be influenced by the security of a humble but decent home and honest labor rather than by showy grandeur that could all disappear without warning. Did she regret her hasty marriage? The hardship it brought, indeed, but the result--her home, her daughters, her friends--never. Why had she never remarried? “There was no one.” She shrugged, knowing it was not even half the reason.

  “May I write to her, Mama?” Lilly asked.

  “I think that would be lovely, Lilly.”

  “Mama, may we tell no one? Not even Agnes Marlene?” Patricia asked. “I mean, it is awfully stunning and it would simply shatter her!”

  My dignity was so hard won, Emily thought. And Patsy would throw it to the gossips for the sake of prestige.

  “It’s Mama’s life to tell or not tell, not yours. Don’t you dare,” Lilly warned.

  “Telling won’t do anything but cause people who respect me as I am to be either envious or suspicious of me,” Emily answered. “It might give you a moment’s pleasure and cause me a great deal of discomfort. Please, do not.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Emily reminded herself that they were only girls, impressed for the moment at the mere thought of what their mother had once had, had once been. Girls have visions like no other creatures. Someday, she hoped, they might recall the story for the intended lesson.

  “Patricia, as to my original purpose, you must begin to behave as a woman of taste and discipline. Those young men whom you do not seriously consider must be dismissed--you can no longer collect them. It is cruel and indecent of you. No more flirting, fainting, and tromping on their feelings. I’m afraid you’re going to get a bad reputation if not some real trouble--you know what is said of girls of that stamp. It is better that you don’t keep company at all than to have a lot of beaux at hand and not a one you could possibly marry. Retire your swatches and fashion plates for the time being. We are in no hurry to marry you. If you behave kindly and honestly, you will find a nice young man soon enough. And he will like it best if he has not come at the end of a very long line.

  “And, you may not see young Mr. Montaine again. I will not have you in his company. It is a well-known truth that many an unfortunate poor girl has borne a bastard for a rich young man; many a rich man has settled away a housemaid whom his son has tampered with. Since you do not come from the neighborhood into which he will marry, it is pointless to ride about in his coach.”

  “But, Mother!”

  “Patricia, you must believe me. Your virtue is irreplaceable and the most important asset you can take to your marriage bed.”

  “But, Mama, I’m sure rich young men have married women without quite so much money because…because they are beautiful, or charming, or--”

  “Not nearly so often as you wish to believe, Patricia.”

  In spite of herself, Lilly’s cheeks became pink. She was thinking of Andrew. Her mother had verbalized her own dilemma. He seemed a perfect gentleman, but she was not of his class, and she knew she should dismiss him before he looked at her with real notice. When she stopped seeing him in the library, she knew she would never see him again. She already sensed that he was passionate. She swallowed.

  Patricia did not heed the warning with the same earnestness. “But what am I to do with myself if I’m not to keep company with any beaux? I’ll rot here!”

  “You might rekindle some of your friendships with young ladies of your acquaintance whom you’ve cast aside for beaux. You might enjoy yourself, if you try, and in time there will be a good and mature young man. Meanwhile, I insist that you stop this trickery. It is not only mean-spirited, it is dangerous. More prudent behavior, Patricia.” Emily stood up from their bed. She leaned over and kissed each forehead, Patricia’s second. “It is for your own good, my dear. Please believe me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  It was a long while after Emily left their room before Patricia and Lilly turned down their lamp. Although they both discussed their mother’s story, an eavesdropper might have thought they were talking about entirely different things. Each girl reacted differently to her mother’s history. Neither realized she had arrived at a crossroad; it was at this juncture that they would separate and no longer understand each other. Lilly recalled with pleasure their trips to market to buy or their jaunts to city brownstones to sell jams or breads. She liked to think about their mother’s fierce but dignified bargaining. Patricia, on the other hand, had been bored and sulky during these excursions and had often wished to be left behind. Patricia had never liked any pastime that even vaguely resembled a chore.

  Now Lilly was more impressed than ever. “Imagine,” she whispered, “having nothing at all, not even food, and then someone shows you how to put up jellies and you begin to sell them! Do you know what that’s called? It’s called enterprise. Of all the poor women with children to feed, how many of them do you suppose have enterprise? Do you remember when Mama stitched dresses long into the night? I can remember when she was still awake, sewing, when we woke up in the morning.”

  Patricia was not thinking about that at all. For every comment Lilly made about industry or enterprise, Patricia wondered aloud what it might be like not to have to measure out the cream in a teaspoon but pour as much as you please into the coffee. Or to buy whatever dresses you like, not make your own, limited to two good ones each year. Or to call your driver to bring ‘round the landau, rather than asking your mother for horsecar fare. Imagine, Emily having been that rich. Patricia would die to be so rich!

  “I’m going to be rich, that’s what. Won’t it be grand?”

  “Just how?” Lilly asked. She was contemplating being rich as well, but she was wondering how many boardinghouses one must own, how many jars of jam must be put up, how many hems stitched.

  “Mama is right. I have to stop just amusing myself and take the matter of marriage more seriously.”

  Lilly’s brows drew together in a frown. She had not thought Patricia less than serious before.

  “I’ve been giving far too much time to all the wrong young men. Roger has a cousin who is actually a lawyer. He’s older than Roger, of course, but not yet married.”

  “Patricia, Mama told you to retire your swatches and--”

  “Oh pish, you know what she meant. And she’s right, too. I have to see myself as a marriageable woman, not a young girl collecting beaux. If I’m going to collect beaux, I may as well collect richer ones.”

  Lilly sat straight up in the bed. “Patsy, you know what Mama said about rich young men like Dale Montaine. Don’t you believe her? Do you think she was just saying that?”

  “No, silly, I’m sure it is entirely true; that girls of lesser means are often taken advantage of by richer men. I certainly won’t let something like that happen.”

  “But Patricia, if you keep playing mean tricks on young men, one might decide to get even.”

  “It’s just that I think I ought to look a bit further, unless I want to measure out the cream and make do on only two good dresses a year for the rest of my life,” she replied, unconcerned.

  “Patricia, you’re so dishonest!”

  “No, I’m not. And so what? Men don’t want honest women. All they really want…” And she listed all the same tricks and traps, tried and true, studied and perfected, only to be repeated on men of means. What was the difference, after all, between a rich husband and a poor one, but money?

  As Lilly listened to her sister, she felt a knot grow and tighten in her stomach. She had previously found Patricia’s quest for marriage tiresome and silly, but it was growing into a fearful obsession, a goal for which Patricia seemed
willing to make dangerous sacrifices in her character. Patricia was becoming worse than dishonest, Lilly feared. She was becoming immoral.

  “Patsy,” Lilly said softly, “sometimes I wish I didn’t even know you.”

  “Hah! You say that now, but wait till you’re an old spinster, and I live in a big fancy house. Then you’ll be glad enough to know me; you’ll want to come to my parties and meet all my friends.”

  “I’d rather get a tooth pulled,” Lilly said in disgust, slumping down into the bed and pulling the quilt up to her chin.

  “That’s what you say now.”

  Noel Padgett lay on his back, knees bent, on the bed that was far too short to accommodate his long frame. He could still hear a few sleepy murmurs from the room beneath his. Mrs. Armstrong would be embarrassed to know how thin these walls were; plaster didn’t cover them all and there was no rug on the floor. Her voice had wafted upward while she told her daughters her story. He sensed it was half a story.

  There had been something nagging him all evening and now he understood exactly what it was. Here was a handsome woman who seemed to deliberately quiet her own good looks. She pulled her fair hair back into a conservative bun and wore dour gray dresses, buttoned high and topped with a white starched collar. Her attire and her behavior weren’t out of place in this neighborhood of simple, hard-working folks. But he had sensed a provocative quality in her from the moment he looked at her, from the moment she spoke.

  Noel had lived both rich and poor, both in the city and in the open western plains. He had been around all manner of people from country schoolmasters to city women with lives so carefully drawn they could be framed. He knew bankers, politicians, cavalry officers and their wives and daughters; homesteaders, rangers, ranchers, miners, horse thieves, scouts, trappers, and Indians. He was forty years old and had never married because he had lived in worlds so different his tastes had become confused. He liked the soft, pretty city women whose hands bore no calluses; he liked their fresh clean smell and elegance. He had met a goodly number, both in Philadelphia where he was born and spent his youth, and out West when city women traveled with their husbands or fathers. He also admired women with the strength and courage to forge west, to homestead. But most of those women, if they made it, turned into tough old boots at a pretty young age. Only Indian women were both soft and tough, gentle and brave. And they had enough brothers who could wear the paint of war to start a whole uprising.

  Emily Armstrong’s own daughters did not understand why she had made it out of poverty when so many poor women could not. Plenty of people could put up jellies, sew hems. To turn such modest domestic skills into a living took gumption and sophistication, tenacity and intelligence, strength and determination, stature and decorum. It was always the confident man in a decent suit of clothes who seemed as though he didn’t need the work who would get the job, not the poor jobless man in filthy clothes, hunched in a defeated posture. Emily approached people with that proud tilt to her chin, that painfully proper manner, her impeccable but not ostentatious diction.

  Why had she not remarried? She had said there was no one, but Noel had trouble believing that so handsome and clever a woman would be ignored. It must be more that she liked her independence, which made her all the more desirable. For the first time, he was not anxious to get out of the city.

  There was iron under the velvet of her skin. Her voice, light and controlled, issued command. Her manners were not stiff, but natural and unstrained. She had a dignity that placed her high above those around her. And she was decent, good in her heart--good enough to share with hungry, jobless beggars even though there was no real bounty in her cupboards. Many women were polite without being good deep down. She was proud. If she ever got the notion he was taken with her, she would really get her bustle in a knot. She would have him down the road in short order. Despite her size, she was forceful. He would have to be careful.

  He rolled over, tucking his long legs under the covers, bending them uncomfortably. Damned bed was built for a twelve-year-old. He was tired of thinking; it had been a long time since he had troubled himself over the character of a woman. He closed his eyes and wished for a whiskey. He was conscious of the easy warmth of desire. He hoped the feeling would stay easy with him.

  John Giddings packed his pipe and struck a match against his shoe. It was nearly ten. Rare for him to be awake unless he was writing, and never, in his recollection, had he taken a second pipe in the evening. The Armstrong house was finally dark, but he would not be able to sleep yet. Perhaps it would be a restless night filled with disturbing dreams.

  He was twenty-eight. His parents had been dead for five years. For five years these people had been his family. Yet they knew nothing of his other personas or his private ambitions.

  He had watched her grow up and had dreamt of the day she would arrive at the door of womanhood and he would speak his mind. But as each month, each year passed, it became more and more obvious that he would never give voice to his visions. His pen could reveal his passions, but the words were difficult and bulky in his mouth.

  It had all been so clear! Patricia would be the perfect woman to share the sense of adventure that lay dormant beneath his rumpled and timid appearance.

  John had been reading voraciously and writing since he was a small boy. His eyes had gone bad from burning late-night oil before he was twelve. John Giddings wrote a few stories and announcements for the Philadelphia Inquirer; his specialty was capturing the essence of the character of ordinary working people, their triumphs and their troubles. Under the name Thorn E. Briar, his identity secret, he wrote daring pieces that stirred political plots, upset rings of thieves, exposed graft. He had done several pieces for Horace Greeley about Boss Tweed. And now he was trying to merge the two writers--the gentle, observant pen of Giddings and the fearless, scorching pen of Briar--into a third.

  He had written hundreds of pages already for a novel about the world in which he lived. He had re-created an aristocratic family, a sinister jobber of ruthless ambition, a crooked politician, fallen women and virtuous ones, orphans, thieves, and immigrants. It was his world, Philadelphia during the Centennial, filled with greed, heartless ambition, criminal bosses buying votes, while brimming with hopes, desires, possibilities. The city had its princes of industry, resented and feared by the fine old families, its immigrants with dreams of freedom and success, its simple, decent folks who believed in their work and their votes. Things were happening in America that had never happened before, that might never happen again; it was a time when a man like Wilson Montaine, an orphan who had pushed a knife-sharpening cart through Philadelphia at the age of seven, could become the richest man in the city. Known as the Philadelphia Landlord, he had stepped on many a fine old pocketbook to achieve his goals.

  At the center of John Giddings’s novel was the beautiful, naive, dreamy character of Chloe Tillets. She could not help the fact that her extraordinary beauty, inherent goodness, and charm caused men to want her, her family to resent her and use her, and women to hate her. She was victimized for all the reasons she should be cherished. She was a buxom, petite blond. She looked like Patricia, had the virtues of Emily, the intelligence of Lilly. She was in love with a man her family would selfishly deny her, a writer of modest income. A clever reader might find this character a composite of the women in the Armstrong household, but in John’s mind this was Patricia…the guileless victim of her own remarkable pulchritude.

  John had saved most of his money and hoped to own a press that would print fearlessly and would not be controlled by crooks or city fathers. He longed to share his life with a beautiful woman who believed in him. He had been so alone, living inside his stories. He knew that when people looked at him, they had no idea he was really a man of courage and passion. His clothes were clean but ill-fitting and rumpled, even after being pressed. His hair, already thinning, always appeared wispy and untrimmed, even after a haircut. He had never managed a mustache and he was small-boned and thi
n, although his ideas were muscled and hulking. No one ever imagined that his was a tempestuous nature, for he appeared timid and reserved. Yet the stories written by Thorn E. Briar seethed; they were intense, poignant, and relevant.

  Passion of another sort caused him to toss against his mattress, imagining he made love to the woman he did not have the courage to embrace. To look at her beauty left him feeling drunk. He knew he was allowed a room in Mrs. Armstrong’s house because he appeared harmless; he would be evicted if the depth of his longing was discovered. The young men who called on Patricia were all the sort he had always envied: they were handsome, amusing, and clever. Not intelligent, but what did a woman want with intelligence if she could be entertained?

  John could put words on paper that would take her breath away. He would have her know him as he knew himself--those parts not yet revealed. But he feared Patricia would marry one of those idiots, one of the muscular proudies who came to call. In aiming for luxury, he feared, she might never know luxury at all, but would find herself wed, mounted, and ridden as some brainless dolt freed himself of his urge.

  John wanted to love her, to make her body sing, to show her satisfaction that was complete, that was not his alone, but theirs, together, as one. He would make her the center of his world, feed her mind as he pampered her body, answer her emotional longings as well as her sexual cravings. If she invited him, he could say all the words that thus far he had only written, explore all the things that he had only imagined. And she would know the same joy that exhausted his nights when he thought of her. Her pleasure would be his pleasure, whether sought in quiet intellectual musings or in the most exotic of sexual passions. And he would not cease in his quest to completely satisfy her every desire until she begged him for rest. But Patricia had not noticed him yet. Nor was she likely to, he reminded himself.