Lidie

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1

Perhaps my sisters would say that my sojourn in Kansas and Missouri, and then all the way to Massachusetts to visit my dead husband’s family, chastened me. But when they saw me upon my return from Medford, they didn’t say anything like “I told you so.” They welcomed me kindly, and sorted out my living arrangements. My sisters, Harriet, Alice, and Beatrice, actually were my half sisters, the daughters of my father’s first wife, and considerably older than I was. They seemed to me more like aunts than sisters. I was the only surviving child of my father’s second wife. Alice told me that I would stay with her and her husband, Frederick, as I always had, because, even though Beatrice had more space, she had too much on her mind, what with Christmas coming on and all the business she had to attend to at Lorton and Silk, her husband, Horace’s, emporium, and Harriet was very busy on her farm, mostly because she didn’t trust others, including me, to take proper care of the chickens. It had always been a pleasure to me that Alice’s house was farther from the center of town, more modest, quieter, since my nephews that Alice had called “hooligans” were out of the house, and the remaining two, Larry and Fred, behaved themselves, and actually did errands. And I knew the neighborhood well, which was comforting.

Now, I was more willing than I had been before I went to Kansas to help my niece, Annie, who was a year younger than me, do all the housework Alice burdened her with. When we were growing up, the only thing I didn’t mind was stirring the washing in the tubs, and, because I was tall, I never minded wringing out the laundry and hanging it on the lines, but I didn’t do it often enough for my sisters to think that I was “of use.” I hoped that helping Annie would be a way I could renew my connection with her—­helping her, but not telling her much about what had happened or how I felt about it.

I wore my black mourning dress; Alice understood that the death of Thomas Newton, abolitionist or not, was a tragedy, and that it was unlikely, given my plain visage and wayward nature, that I would find another husband, and so I might be starving them out of house and home forever. But all three sisters were sympathetic, perhaps more than they might have been if I had told anyone about Lorna. Not even three months before, I had attempted to get Lorna out of Missouri to a free state, and because of my incompetence, I had failed. I didn’t tell anyone in my family about this, because some of them would sneer at my incompetence, and others would shake their heads at my foolishness. What I thought that I learned in Kansas Territory (we’d called it “K.T.”) and in Independence, Missouri, was to keep my eyes open. I did wonder more than I had about my brother-­in-­law Roland, who was from Kentuck, and swore up and down that he hated “d—­—­ned abolitionists,” but had never owned a slave, though he said his cousins in Kentuck had a right to. My eighteen months in K.T. and Missouri showed me that this slavery issue was a messy nightmare that I wanted to stop thinking about, at least for a while.

Only a day or so after I moved in, Annie walked into the parlor and handed my sister Alice a bit of paper. Alice turned it over in her hand, and then she stared at Annie as if she were seeing a specter. The piece of paper turned out to be a ticket to the theater on Maine Street, where Annie and I had once seen Dombey and Son and a bit of Macbeth. It was a free ticket to a production of A Christmas Carol, because Annie had a role in the play, the role of Ebenezer Scrooge’s betrothed, Belle, who appears in Christmas Past, and is quickly excised from the story. Somehow, Annie had gotten herself out of the house and to the theater while keeping up with her work. I thought that I shouldn’t be surprised, because I remembered how much Annie had enjoyed everything about the Dombey and Son play. I wondered if seeing that one was what had inspired her to act onstage, or simply to find a way to get out of the house.

About an hour later, when we were carrying water for the washing up, I teased the information from her—­where had she gone the night before, when I heard the back door creak and peeped out the window at seven-­thirty in the cold and misty night? She explained about the rehearsals she had sneaked away to, and that there were to be two performances, one two nights before Christmas and one the night before Christmas. I threw on my shawl, got out the door, and headed down to the theater to buy myself a ticket. I must say that I hadn’t felt as perky, or maybe a better word is “hopeful,” since I could remember, and for a brisk fifteen minutes, as I walked, I thought nothing of what I had left behind in K.T. and Missouri.

Of course, Mr. Dickens was a great celebrity in Illinois, and not only because of his stories—­he’d been to the area once, though not to Quincy. I dare say, there were plenty of folks in our town who couldn’t understand how he missed us after finding himself in Cairo, of all places, and why did he take that trip down the Ohio River instead of a much more pleasant trip through the northern lakes and then to Chicago (though Chicago wasn’t much in those days, it was more than Cairo)? And then he wrote his book that related the horrors of that trip, and was anyone surprised? He just didn’t have the gumption, was what everyone said who happened to know the book. Even so, this play, made out of his Christmas Carol, had become a customary performance in Quincy. I’d never seen it. I arrived at the theater, handed over my four bits, and got myself a ticket up in the back rows, then walked home.

It wasn’t a bad day for December. The streets were gritty and covered with horse dung, because no one had cleaned them since before the last snowstorm, but they weren’t slippery, and the eaves of the houses glittered with icicles, though not as many as there had been in Medford. It was about two in the afternoon, the best time of day in the winter—­the sun convinces you that light is warmth after all. The bare limbs of the trees shook in the wind, a sound I liked because it made me look beyond the houses and therefore the arguments folks were having in the streets about this and that, and also what this mess in Kansas was doing to our nation, and what folks thought of Senator Douglas, who had created that violent mess by introducing the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, which allowed states, even those north of the Mason-­Dixon Line, to decide on their own whether to allow slaves. Of course, everyone in Quincy knew Senator Douglas personally, or said that they did, but I had never even seen him, as far as I knew, and if I were to see him, I thought for a moment, I would have a thing or two to say to him, but then I stopped, shut my eyes, and thought, “Enough of that!” I was walking down Maine Street, and he wasn’t.

I turned up 20th Street toward Vermont. Things got quiet. Mrs. Abercrombie was squatting on her front stoop, using the sunlight to candle some eggs. She had more chickens than we did—­maybe ten, and a rooster, too, that sometimes woke me up. Everyone in the neighborhood liked her eggs, and my sister Harriet said that she didn’t ask what she should for them. But money is chancy—­our county bank issued some one-­dollar and two-­dollar notes last year, and some five-­dollar notes this year, and no one trusted those notes. Alice gave Mrs. Abercrombie strawberries from our garden in the spring and jam in the winter, and, at any rate, we were never without eggs. She glanced at me, and I waved to her. She waved back, and I might have told her about the play, but then her two girls ran out on the stoop, slammed the door, almost knocked Mrs. Abercrombie over, though it looked like she saved the eggs. She shouted, “You girls settle down or I’m gonna give you a whipping!” But I could tell they knew she wouldn’t. They ran down the stoop and around the back of the house. Mrs. Abercrombie heaved herself up, wiped her hands on her apron, gave a sigh, and carried her basket of eggs into the house. I fingered my ticket and kept walking.

That evening, just like it was nothing, as if she had used no energy making the beds, shaking the blankets, sweeping the floors, and sorting through the vegetables, looking for rot, then making supper, Annie said, “I’m going to the rehearsal,” and walked right out the front door, and no one made a peep. Alice and I did the supper dishes, and Fred just wiped his mouth and grunted. I understood then that I should have bought tickets for Fred and Larry, up there with me in the back. Alice’s other boys were safely grown up—­either married or employed, and in Quincy, which was a rowdy town, that was the best you could hope for. And then there was Harriet’s boy, Frank. Harriet was bound and determined that Frank was not going to end up like me, and Alice and Beatrice agreed with her. They thought that clearly it fell to me that Frank had gone so astray in K.T. But when I saw him, he seemed glum to me, and resentful, and there was no seegar in evidence anymore. But he was quiet. He was reformed indeed, which I truly regretted. Yes, in K.T., he had been almost impossible to handle, and he had gotten into a good deal of trouble when he joined a gang of Mormon boys who had been kicked out of Utah. Maybe they had told Frank they were going back to Nauvoo, which wasn’t far from Quincy, but what they really did in K.T. was try to steal what they could. They had some horses, but then the horses ate some poison hemlock, and three of them died, including Frank’s. He had to walk back to Lawrence, and then Roland had made his way to K.T. and taken him back to Quincy. The only thing he’d said about those boys was that they had no idea what they were doing. I would like to have talked to him, to have found out more about his shenanigans, but also about what he thought about K.T., and all the issues we’d discovered there.

In the week that passed (with only one snowstorm) between Annie’s presentation of the ticket to Alice and the first performance, Annie changed day by day into a girl I had never yet known. On the first day, Alice and I were sitting in the parlor, beside the window, doing some needlework—­I was clumsily mending an old quilt so that it might get through one more winter, and Alice was neatly setting cuffs into Roland’s Sunday jacket. Harriet should have been the one to do this, since she was Roland’s wife, but she didn’t have the needlework skills that Alice did, and since the death of our father, Alice had taken over some of Harriet’s tasks. Roland had a habit of wiping his nose with the cuffs of his coat, and a coat is a nightmare to clean up, so Alice made the best of her abilities and replaced the cuffs whenever she had to. I don’t know what Annie had been doing, but she must have been out of doors. She came into the parlor and tossed her gloves on the table and said that she needed money for a new pair—­she was going to Lorton and Silk, and would Alice please give her the money. In a resonant voice, she said, “I am fed up with these old bits of rubbish. My hands nearly freeze off every time I go out.”

Alice glanced at me and lifted her eyebrow, but she is, underneath all the remarks, a kindly soul, so she went to her drawer and took out some bills and put them in Annie’s hand. Right then, Annie reverted back to the grateful and quiet self I’d always known. She took the money, blushed bright red, gave Alice a kiss on each cheek, and crept out of the room. The gloves she came home with were dark-­brown kid, and went up under the sleeves of her coat. “Why not a muff?” muttered Alice. “A muff is warmer anyway.” But she kept her opinion to herself, so as not, I think, “to encourage her.” Alice and Harriet were great believers in not encouraging us.

The next day, Annie came to me when she was about to dress herself to go to her rehearsal, and beckoned me into her room, which was right beside mine—­the two rooms had been one, but Roland had put a wall down the center, and, yes, they were small as could be, but private. Annie’s was neatly dusted, and mine was not. She shut the door, took off the gown she was wearing, and said, “I want you to lace this corset as tight as you can.”

I said, “It looks tight to me already. I can’t imagine that you’ll be able to say a word if it’s any tighter.”

It was a long corset, not like the one I wore, which Alice had made for me, just a lined cotton band with a loose waist and some tucks that held me up. Annie’s went a good deal below the waist, with boning. She stared at me, then said, “The director says I need to cut a better figure.” I supposed at the time that if I was going to collude in her stage career, such as it was, I had to collude fully, not hold back. She stood up, turned her back to me. I measured the distance between two edges of the corset, from between her shoulder blades down to her hips and then I pulled the strings. She put her hands around her waist and pushed in whatever flesh was there, which wasn’t much. I pulled again. In the end, the two sides of the corset almost touched. I helped her get her gown on. Was she uncomfortable? She didn’t admit to it, and, indeed, when she descended the staircase, her step was light. Late that night, though, when I helped her out of it, I saw bruises on her back, where the rods had poked her. She said she didn’t feel them. I was glad that by Christmas Day she would no longer have to undergo what looked to me like torture, but, indeed, the whole experience reminded me of Lorna and Helen, the daughter of Lorna’s “owner,” Mr. Day. Helen was always pestering Lorna to pull it good and tight, and Lorna would roll her eyes and glance at me, as if to say, “Ah don’ see no diff’rence, do you, missy?,” and I would smile to myself, because I didn’t see a difference, either, but Helen had to have her way, at least in small issues of vanity, and if Lorna or Mr. Day gave in, she was happy and agreeable about everything else.