Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  On the farm, talk of St. Louis was constant.

  At first, St. Louis came to her as a fall, like a light snow, of names: Chouteau. Vandeventer. Eads. Gratiot. Laclede. St. Charles. Lafayette. Even Grand, which was a boulevard. Shenandoah, Gravois, Soulard. If there was a street name in St. Louis as dull as Oak or Fourth, Margaret never heard it. And every good thing was from there—shoes and boots, silks and nainsooks and Saxony woollens, books, pianos, books of piano music, candy, sugar, chewing tobacco, her mother’s mouton capelet, pearl buttons. There was a vast emporium in St. Louis called Carleton’s which carried goods sent specially from Paris, France, and London, England, and from Japan and China and India (if only tea—Lavinia drank tea). John Gentry seemed to take personal credit for the way St. Louis blossomed just over the eastern horizon of Gentry Farm, and the fact that they could get to St. Louis any day they wanted, on the train from McKittrick, was a source of eternal joy to him (they should have seen the roads, if that was what you wanted to call them, in the Missouri of his youth!). Even so, he went there not more than once in two years.

  • • •

  AND then Beatrice was suddenly eighteen years old, a finished product. She could play any number of pieces on the piano, from “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Camptown Races” to “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” and some more complex pieces without lyrics, such as “Annie and I,” which had three sharps. She could sing if the song in question fell into her range. Her tone was rich and melodious. The time had come to put her on display. A lady Lavinia knew in town had a very nice piano, much nicer than the Gentry piano, which she herself could not play, so, on days when John Gentry had to take a wagon into town anyway for business, he would carry Beatrice along and leave her at Mrs. Larimer’s house on Pennsylvania Street, and Beatrice would play for her. Sometimes, with enough notice, Mrs. Larimer would invite a few friends in to have tea while Beatrice was playing.

  The summer Beatrice was eighteen, the cousin of a friend of Mrs. Larimer, a man named Robert Bell, took over the town newspaper. He had money and credentials. What John Gentry knew about Robert Bell, within the first week, was that he was backed by some family capital, he was ambitious, and he had grown up in St. Louis in a big house on Kingshighway, a very wealthy and forward-looking neighborhood.

  It was Robert Bell who decreed, young man though he was and new to town, that the Unionists would march at the front of the Fourth of July parade just behind the band; the farm-produce displays, the fire engine, the horse drill, and the mules would march in the middle; and the Rebels (numbering eight by now), dressed in their old Confederate uniforms, would march at the back, behind the Ladies’ Aid Society and the German-American Betterment Society (which dressed in traditional Bavarian costume). He wrote about his plan in the newspaper, alternating discussions of the controversy with news of the war in Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and then the Philippines, until everyone in town had had their say and gotten bored with the War Between the States, especially since the new war seemed to be going so well. According to John Gentry, this strategy of promoting patriotism over infighting was a mark of genius in such a young man, and he went by the office of the newspaper to tell Robert Bell as much. The young man thereupon invited John Gentry and his family to watch the parade from the windows of the newspaper office, which was closed for the afternoon.

  To Margaret, Robert Bell was a disappointing sight. He had enormous muttonchop whiskers that only partly disguised his receding chin. His hair was thin and flyaway. His eyes were his best feature, rich blue and much more expressive than his words. He was nicely dressed. But he was considerably shorter than Beatrice—the top of his head came only to the middle of her ear. He made Margaret feel awkward just by standing next to her. He was attentive to them, though. He showed Lavinia to the best chair, which was pulled up right in front of a large open window looking out on Front Street, and then he showed Beatrice to the chair beside that one, and he brought her a cake and a cup of tea. Elizabeth and Margaret he left to fend for themselves, but he had gotten in nice cakes—light, with raspberry filling and marzipan icing, something Margaret had never seen before that day. He also had gotten in enough lemons for real lemonade, which he served with ice. He was comfortable with luxury, just what you would expect in a Bell from St. Louis—Margaret could see this thought passing from Lavinia to her grandfather when they caught each other’s eye and raised an appreciative eyebrow.

  The crowd outside the window undulated forward and then separated and backed toward the newspaper office as the band turned into the road. Margaret watched them for a few minutes, and then she did what she so frequently could not help doing, she glanced at a newspaper on the table beside her, and began to read the articles. Since everyone around her was admiring the parade, she was free to read, but not, she thought, free to pick up the paper and open it in the midst of a celebration. The dispatches related that American ships had landed preparatory to taking Santiago. As for Puerto Rico, victory belonged to the Americans, for General Miles had taken San Juan without resistance. Then there was an article about the fate of a two-headed bull-calf born in Montgomery County (died at three months), and an article about the extension of the MKT Railroad somewhere in Kansas. At the bottom of the page was another headline and part of an article, “County Man Returns from Mexico Expedition”:

  Little did Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, of this county, suspect, when he was growing up on Franklin Street, that he would someday travel the world and consort with famous and prominent men. Mr. Early is an astronomer. Before he journeyed to the mountains of central Mexico, the world was a different place. We had the sun, the moon, and the stars. We had Mr. Harriman and Commodore Vanderbilt, but we never had these last two gentlemen at the same time. Now, in effect, we do, for Dr. Early’s expedition has discovered something we would not have suspected to be possible in God’s grand Creation.

  Beside the print was a photograph of a man that she thought she recognized, but perhaps it was only that he looked much like all the other young men she knew, the arching brow, the straight vertical of the nose, the square chin. He was wearing a hat in the Western style; his glance was direct and challenging. Unfortunately, she could not ascertain what his great discovery might be, because a man picked up the paper from the table beside her and carried it off. The Earlys were well known around town as Rebel sympathizers, too prominent and wealthy to end up as bushwhackers, but not the sort of people John Gentry socialized with. Margaret seemed to recall that there were many boys but no girls in the family, and that when the father had died (what was his name? Patrick?), the Rebel sympathizers had turned out in great numbers for the funeral, and John Gentry remarked, “There was another one who was never the same since the war.”

  Outside the window, the Union soldiers (numbering fourteen) had passed, and the brass band, and now came a row of wagons. The first of these bore a pile of hemp, upon which sat girls from the orphanage dressed in white and carrying bouquets of daylilies, black-eyed Susans, and a few late shrub roses. After these girls came Mr. Alexander’s wagon that he got from a circus. It was pulled by a team of four grays with red ribbons braided into their manes, and into it he had loaded his best white sow and her squealing piglets. Then came the tobacco wagon that some of the local farmers kept in a barn somewhere. Margaret could smell the fragrance of the leaves as it went by.

  She regarded Robert Bell and Beatrice. He was staring out at the tobacco wagon, but he had his hand on the back of Beatrice’s chair. She was fanning herself. She glanced at him. Even sitting down, Beatrice could nearly look him in the eye. Then Margaret saw her mother look at the two of them and away, then shift in her seat and adjust her skirt to cover her feet. Lavinia’s hair, which had once been so thick that she could hardly pin it up, was more manageable now, but she was the sort of woman who did not age, just as John Gentry, who was seventy-five, seemed closer to sixty. It was Lavinia’s oft-repeated lament that the supply of men in the county was short. There were numerous gr
andfathers, but husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were scarce.

  Beside Margaret, Elizabeth leaned forward to watch the troop of horses go by. Whereas Beatrice was dark and tall, Elizabeth was brown-haired and small-boned, with a turned-up nose; Margaret thought she was beautiful. Beatrice had no dimples where they should have been, Cupid’s-bow lips (her best feature), and large hands (and feet). But Beatrice had a way about her. Her smile was slow, her movements were slow—not as if she were lazy or sluggish, but more as if she had all the time in the world. Just now, Margaret saw her smooth her hand over the silk of her skirt, and heave a relaxed sigh. Robert Bell smiled down at her, perhaps in spite of himself. But he stepped back, and removed his hand from Beatrice’s chair.

  The horse drill passed. The riders wore bands across their chests and rosettes on their shoulders, and they waved their hats in unison as they went by, first to their left and then to their right. Every couple of minutes, they halted in formation, swept low over their horses’ necks, then waved their hats over their heads and trotted forward. It occurred to Margaret to wonder again what Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had discovered that changed the face of creation as the music faded into the distance when the brass band turned off Front Street four blocks down.

  Elizabeth nodded toward John Gentry and said, “Look at Papa.”

  Their grandfather was sitting in his chair with his knees apart and his body squarely situated. His hat was pushed back on his head, and he was wiping his brow. Margaret said, “It’s hot.”

  “His face is very red.”

  “Look at Mr. Bell. His cheeks are steaming.”

  Elizabeth murmured, “Proximity to Beatrice has given him a case of humidity,” then laughed, and Margaret smiled. One of the great loves of her life was Elizabeth’s low, rippling laugh, never girlish or coy, but always gay and sassy. Margaret said, “I think Papa likes Mr. Bell.”

  “It’s true that he has made no disparaging references to Mr. Bell’s nose, his height, his horse, his waistcoats, or his ancestry.”

  Margaret and Elizabeth exchanged a glance, and they nodded. They both knew that the task was to win Mr. Bell, not to approve him.

  Lavinia was watching the procession of the German-American Betterment Society. Their uncle Anton was in the second rank, wearing his hat and his short pants and carrying his Bavarian walking stick. The entire association was singing a song Margaret didn’t know, in German.

  “Oh dear,” said Elizabeth, standing up.

  John Gentry had fallen off his chair, and the chair had fallen over. Lavinia at once knelt down beside him, and the man behind her moved the chair. Everyone turned to look. Mr. Bell bustled over, and Beatrice stood. Mr. Bell sent a young man out, and then her mother helped her grandfather to sit up. The young man returned with a cup of water; Lavinia administered a few sips. John Gentry took a deep sigh, put his hat on, removed it again, put it on again. His face was dreadfully red, Margaret thought. Outside the window, the Rebel soldiers passed, their rifles on their shoulders and their marching feet making the only noise. The crowd in the street was quiet—the Rebels’ participation in the parade was more startling than anyone had anticipated. Who had seen those uniforms in thirty-three years?

  Mr. Bell and another man helped John Gentry back into his chair, and he drank the rest of the water. He shook his head. He shook his head again, then he reached for Beatrice’s hand. Mr. Bell moved Beatrice’s chair so that she was sitting a bit closer, and Elizabeth resumed her seat next to Margaret. With her other hand, Beatrice gently smoothed her grandfather’s hair back from his forehead, a kindly thing to do, and something Margaret would not have thought of. It was often remarked in her family that Margaret did not have a fine sensibility, or, even, a female sensibility. When she read aloud about the death of Little Nell, her voice was steady and her progress unremitting. When she read aloud Miss Alcott’s book, which was sent to Lavinia by her aunt Harriet, it did not occur to her to weep at the passing of Beth. She thought that, for all of Jo’s boyishness, she was a sentimental thing. Lavinia found her mysterious when Margaret shed no tears the day their cat Millie was caught in a raccoon trap or when Alice and Beatrice contracted the cholera and it seemed as though one or the other of them—or both—were set to pass on. But, apart from the fact that the first thing Margaret felt about these lamentable events was that they were interesting as well as sad, there was always also what she was feeling now, watching John Gentry, Beatrice, and Robert Bell, that a play had begun suddenly, perhaps when she wasn’t looking. Now, Mr. Bell’s leaning over Beatrice with a smile had something to do with Papa’s collapse and something to do with the marching of the Rebels in the parade and something to do with the paper on the table, and these events were designed to go together. Her task seemed to her at these times to be not to leap into the action, but to observe it and discern a pattern, though what she would do once she had discerned it, she could not imagine. In all the times she had entertained this sensation, she had never in fact discerned a pattern. She didn’t know what to make of herself, truly. She might have said that for ten years (and who could remember before that?) she had repeatedly pressed on, doing and thinking what she judged to be right and natural at the time, only to be told afterward that she had done just the wrong thing. It was as if she were plowing a furrow, intent upon the ground in front of her, only to stop and look around and discover that she was in the wrong field, and, indeed, the wrong country entirely. No, it would never have occurred to her to smooth her grandfather’s brow.

  When the parade was over, Lavinia and Mr. Bell helped Papa to his feet, and then out of the newspaper office and around the building, where they got into the wagon, Papa first, Beatrice and Lavinia after him. Margaret and Elizabeth were assisted into the back, and then Beatrice drove the pair of mules to the Fête. Mr. Bell followed on his own mount, a fine bay Missouri Trotter with a white blaze and a white front foot.

  At the Fête, events returned to their customary state. The band played, the comestibles were served (including two of Lavinia’s blackberry pies and almost a peck of John Gentry’s cherries) and declared the best ever. The sun went down. No one would have known when they drove home that night (an hour in the moonlight, with Elizabeth sleeping against Margaret’s shoulder, and Lavinia and John Gentry discussing something quietly in the front seat of the wagon, while John Gentry drove the team and Beatrice hummed in the evening air) that anything untoward had happened—Papa seemed hale and cheerful. Margaret’s idle thought, as the moonlit road unwound between the fields, was that she had forgotten to find a copy of the paper, and so she knew it would be some time before she learned what it was that Mr. Early had done to modify the nature of creation itself.

  THIS day, like the day her father shot himself, was the beginning of a new age—Mr. Bell became a regular visitor to Gentry Farm. He would appear in the morning, after breakfast, and drink coffee with them at the table, and then he would follow John Gentry into the fields, where he would be introduced to the mysteries of hemp, tobacco, corn, and mules. He even explored the hemp fields, which were down in the bottomlands, damp and dirty, teeming with snakes, the girls thought. John Gentry had a long, low building near the hemp fields, where, using a system of pulleys and hooks and mules and men with the hemp wrapped around their waists, he manufactured and tarred lengths of rope. But after he had explored the hemp fields, seen the workmen cut the plants off at the ground and then lay them in shallow clay ponds full of dank water, Mr. Bell suggested another plan for the hemp business. John Gentry, he said, should plant the seed differently—not so close together, but more in rows, so that the plants could mature and flower. The ultimate product of this sort of plantation was not rope but a medicinal cornucopia effective in the treatment of every ill. Robert Bell’s favorite St. Louis practitioner, Dr. Caswell, made both powders and pills for the whole city. Robert Bell took the medicine—Madison County Cure-All, Dr. Caswell called it. It was even good for the cholera. Robert said, “Thank the Lord you stuck with th
e hemp.” And John Gentry said, “You’ve got to make a mess of mule and cattle manure, and chicken litter, and till it in faithfully every fall. That’s what you have to do, and if you have some fish meal, well, then, that’s even better.” They talked about it over and over, Robert Bell nodding, as if farming were in his blood.

  Robert liked to look at the horses and the mules, and to go out with Beatrice in the gig. His Missouri Trotter was a sensible mare whom he sometimes rode and sometimes drove. He told John Gentry that he did not pretend to be a horseman but he knew some horsemen, and he knew that, among these horsemen, John Gentry had a good reputation for breeding both mules and horses. The upper part of the farm was rich pasture, and the hay fields were cultivated like the hemp fields, with plenty of manure tilled in.

  Mr. Bell and Beatrice began to take lovely walks toward evening in these sections of the farm—sometimes Elizabeth and Margaret watched them out the back attic windows, but they never saw them do anything interesting. Beatrice strode along and Mr. Bell trotted to keep up with her. The sisters had been weighing the likelihood of a proposal for several weeks by that time. At night, in whispers, Elizabeth and Margaret figured the odds. They both agreed that the odds were two to one in favor of a proposal, so there was not much to discuss. When they brought this up with Beatrice, she resisted “counting my chickens.” Even so, a proposal looked more and more like the favorite. The odds should realistically have been pegged closer to three to two, or even five to four, in favor of a proposal, especially since Margaret and Elizabeth knew that Beatrice was unlikely to do anything unusual that would throw the proposal into doubt. A book Margaret had read was Jane Eyre. In that book, the parents of Bertha—Rochester’s wife, who lives in the attic and burns the house down—had been quite secretive before the marriage of Mr. Rochester and Bertha. There was none of that in Missouri. If you didn’t divulge the skeletons in your closet to a stranger (should you be lucky enough to make acquaintance with a stranger), your neighbors and friends would divulge them for you. In short, what with the medicinal uses of hemp, the herd of equines, the flourishing hay crop, the tinkling of the piano, Alice’s pork étouffé, and John Gentry’s questionable state of health and lack of male heirs, Beatrice and Mr. Bell were betrothed not long after cessation of hostilities in the Spanish War. He rode out to inform them of that event as soon as the dispatch came in; because it was late, he stayed overnight at the farm and proposed to Beatrice the following morning.