Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  In the books that Margaret read, the young lady in receipt of a proposal always found herself astonished and embarrassed—she blushed with happiness and could barely speak at the thought of marriage. Margaret would have been surprised if Beatrice had summoned up such a performance.

  THE WEDDING was set for the fifteenth of December. Lavinia and Beatrice spent the autumn reconsidering every item that Beatrice had stowed away in her chest in light of her new circumstances. Yes, her new people lived on Kingshighway in St. Louis, but she and Robert would be living in their town. Yes, he owned and ran the newspaper, but she was the daughter of Gentry Farm, and everyone knew her perfectly well. They hemmed the tablecloths and monogrammed the bed linen, crocheted edgings around the napkins. Margaret helped with the laundering—they bleached and starched and pressed everything. Where there were pleats, she steamed them out and ironed them in until they were exactly right. Lavinia considered how the ladies in town would be looking for signs, signs that Beatrice was thinking too well of herself, or that she did not think well enough of herself, signs that their father’s demise had taken a sharper toll on the family than Lavinia had let on, signs that their father’s demise had taken less of a toll on his daughters than it should have. Signs that her grandfather was failing, or that her mother was less fortunate and perspicacious than she appeared. They did not actually talk of these things, but every time Lavinia shook her head and decided that some napkin or pillow slip or apron or collar had to be altered, Margaret knew what she was thinking.

  Beatrice and Lavinia went to St. Louis on the train with Robert to meet his parents. They came home five days later with a bicycle of the new style, with two wheels of equal diameter and a wide seat. It belonged to Robert’s only sister, a girl of sixteen named Dora. Robert had prevailed upon Dora to loan it to Beatrice as a betrothal favor, while Dora was visiting cousins in Springfield, Illinois. Margaret and Elizabeth were to have the bicycle until Robert returned it when he went for a last visit before the wedding. Beatrice did not care about the bicycle, but described in detail the costume Dora had, solely devoted to bicycle riding, made of blue serge, with gussets behind the shoulders for leaning forward over the handlebars, and wide, skirtlike pantaloons. The girl also had special lace-up boots. Margaret and Elizabeth had none of these things, but they could tie up their skirts well enough to try riding, which they did.

  The best place to ride this bicycle was in an area the mules had pounded flat, around the biggest barn, and between the barn and the tobacco shed. It was grassless and hard, and the three of them took turns riding a figure-eight circuit one way round the barn and then the other way round the tobacco shed. It was an unusual sensation, not like anything Margaret had ever felt before. She took to it. She put on her oldest skirt, without a petticoat, and then wrapped some strips of flannel around her legs like horse bandages, leaving room for her knees to bend. Of course the spokes of the wheel could catch her skirts and either rip them or topple her over, or both, but she got used to taking care, and once she had figured out what to do, she went faster and faster, even as the weather got colder and flakes of snow began to swirl in the wind.

  To be balanced so precariously, and to feel that balance become steadier, even around the curves of their track, as she pedaled harder and went faster, was exhilarating. Beatrice said that Dora was a hardy and determined bicyclist—that she belonged to a club of thirty members, both male and female, and they cycled all over St. Louis, which had many good roads. She could pedal up a long, steep hill and fly down the other side (this idea appealed to Margaret from the beginning). Once, Beatrice said, Dora had bicycled some twenty miles in one day, around the periphery of Forest Park, all by herself. No one had said a thing against it, because all the young people in St. Louis who didn’t have bicycles were planning to get them, and, it seemed, a young lady bicycling alone was somewhat scandalous, but not wildly so.

  This bicycle even impressed Lavinia and John Gentry, who did not try riding but enjoyed watching, as did all of the farm laborers and workmen. Bicycles were expensive. Beatrice told them that Dora had confided to her that the bicycle had cost almost a hundred dollars. When Beatrice quoted this sum, Elizabeth and Margaret were not horrified—they were impressed. Three boring months of wedding plans, and here, all of a sudden, was the casual wealth of the family Beatrice was marrying into palpably demonstrated. John Gentry was impressed, too—all of Gentry Farm, he said, though without the men and mules, was worth only 120 bicycles. Margaret rode the bicycle even as it got colder and colder, and every night she wiped it off and put it away in the barn.

  As sometimes happened in Missouri, one of those days dawned bright, a fugitive remnant of Indian summer before the closing in of snow and gloom. On that day, Margaret was up the moment she saw the sunlight beneath the shade. It was not a Sunday. She could slip out of the house without getting breakfast, but also without arousing much of a fuss, and she did.

  She went straight to the bicycle. The door of the barn was already open, and she walked the vehicle into the sunlight. Her plan was to ride it to town, some two miles off, and then, perhaps, beyond. The puzzle was which route to take. There were three possibilities. When they walked to town, they always cut across the upper pastures, petting the horses and mules and climbing the fences, thereby reducing the distance to about a mile and a half, but there was no question of that. When her grandfather drove the buggy, he took the western way around, which was more or less level and about three miles, in order to save the horses. That would have been her more sensible choice, but in fact she turned southeast, toward the bottomlands, because, after a flat stretch of some quarter of a mile, there was, first, a long curving hill around Old Saley’s Bluff, then a long rise, and then the turn toward town. At this point, the road rose slightly again, and after that there was a set of steep dips and rises through Walker’s Woods, followed by another flat stretch down Front Street (and right past the office of the newspaper). By this late in the year, the road had frosted and was pretty hard, though not icy. She congratulated herself on her good sense.

  Pedaling straight forward was a new experience for her, and she understood at once how Dora had gotten all the way around the famous Forest Park in an afternoon. Covering distance in this solitary manner was marvelously intoxicating. The brown fields and the blue sky were all around; they seemed to dissipate crisply and evenly into all the distances—forward, backward, upward. The fields were darkly defined by the denuded brown trunks of hickories, black walnuts, and oaks. In Mr. Jones’s pasture, across the fence from John Gentry’s hay field, five or six white hogs were grunting and rooting for acorns; the noises they made had the clarity of gongs ringing in the air. And then she went down. She gripped the handlebars and felt the cold wind lift her hair and, it seemed, her cheeks and eyebrows. The brim of her hat folded back, and the hat itself threatened to fly off her head, but though she gave this a passing thought, she didn’t, could not, stop. The wheels made a brushing, clicking noise in the dirt of the road, and she knew instinctively to keep going no matter how much such going now shocked her. Tears poured down her cheeks, and then she was halfway up the next slope—inertia—she knew what it was called. But she slowed again, and then she was stopped and the bicycle tilting to the side. Truly, riding a bicycle was living life at a much faster pace, and very stimulating. She dismounted and pushed the bicycle up the remaining expanse of the slope. She was now two farms away from Gentry Farm. She had forgotten this part of it—that she would be a solitary traveler for the first time in her life. She remounted the bicycle and pedaled for the next few furlongs, possibly as much as a mile. Everything about the effort was more difficult than she had expected, and fairly soon she was breathing hard. She rarely if ever had done that before in her whole life, given her lazy nature and her mother’s views about proper female employments. She knew, of course, that she could turn the bicycle around and go back to the farm, but she also knew that she was more than halfway to town. The long slopes behind her seemed t
o grow longer, steeper, and more arduous with this thought, and then she was to the series of dips into Walker’s Woods.

  The pleasure of these dips, which she had happily foreseen, was that from this direction, south, they gradually diminished toward town. There were three of them. She pedaled hard into the first, and over the edge. She lifted her feet out to either side, and down she went, holding tight to the handlebars. She aimed, with some nervousness, for the bridge at the bottom of the hill and then was across it. After the bridge, the trees thickened and the light grew dimmer. Her momentum carried her fast up the first bit of the next hill, and she managed to resume pedaling more quickly than she had, and so pedaled to the top, back into the sunlight. The drop of the second dip was immediate; down she went. This time, she started pedaling as soon as she got to the lowest point of the road, and once again managed to get up the entire hill before exhausting herself. Fortunately, the third dip was quite long and shallow—pleasantly relaxing. Though her cheeks burned in the cold, she was warm with the exertion. Though her arms trembled with the effort, her legs felt strong. The seat of the bicycle was springy and comfortable. She had heard of bicycle clubs traveling vast distances—the Columbia cyclists had traveled to Kansas City and to St. Louis in a contest of some sort. She came over the rise at the top of the third hill, and the town lay before her, bright in the winter sunshine. She sat up straighter and began pedaling in what she considered to be her most dignified manner. And just then her skirt caught in the back wheel and brought her to a halt. She put her foot down as the bicycle tipped.

  She dismounted carefully to the left, turning about and holding on to the seat of the bicycle. The lower hem of her skirt was well entangled; she squatted down, still holding the bicycle, and began to work the stuff out of the spokes. Her leg wrappings were collapsing all about her, and she saw that she had to pick those up, too. She was breathing harder than she had ever done.

  A voice nearby, a male voice, said, “I haven’t seen a bicycle in this town before,” and she started violently, though she didn’t jump up for fear of rending her skirt. There was a man, quite close by the side of the road, leaning against a leafless maple tree and peeling a staff. He stood up, and then bowed slightly. Margaret nodded, surprised—she hadn’t noticed him on her way up the hill. He was tall and handsomely dressed, in a gray suit of clothes, with a soft gray hat sitting squarely on his head. Every man she knew wore a hat, and you could tell quite a bit about a man by the way he wore his hat—slouched forward, pushed back, rakishly tilted to the right or to the left. This hat was like the roof on a steeple—as square as if it had been positioned with instruments. With this thought, she recognized him as the young man in the paper, at the parade, who had changed the universe. Unfortunately, though, her skirt was still jammed between the spokes, and her fingers were too clumsy in her gloves to pull it out. She said (politely, thinking of how often Lavinia had criticized her manner with strangers), “I believe this is the first, but it won’t be around much longer, as we must return it to its owner in St. Louis.”

  He seemed to peer at her, but did not lean forward. He looked as if leaning in any direction whatsoever was impossible for him.

  He said, “We haven’t been introduced, but may I be of assistance?”

  Her skirt slipped from between the spokes, not terribly blackened after all. She stood up, then had to bend down and gather up the strips of flannel she had wrapped her legs with. She said, “No, we haven’t been introduced, but I recognize you from the paper, Mr. Early. I’m Margaret Mayfield. Have you ridden a bicycle?”

  “When I was studying in Berlin, I rode a bicycle quite often, but it was not nearly as nice as this one. I haven’t had occasion to ride one, though, in some years.”

  “I understand it’s the latest model.” She looked around for a spot to sit down, a rock or a stump, so that she could rewrap her legs, but it appeared she would have to walk the bicycle to Mrs. Larimer’s, at least half a mile, and reorganize her outfit there. Mr. Early said, “My bicycle in Germany had a roomy basket attached to the handlebars. Most convenient.”

  “That would be,” she said. She paired her flannels and draped them over her shoulder, then wrapped them around her waist so they would be out of the way. She wheeled the bicycle forward, and he fell into step beside her. Though the bicycle was between them, she felt how tall he was, at least a head taller than she was, and on top of that there was the hat.

  Margaret detested most company other than the company of books; however, she adjusted her own hat and walked on in as congenial a manner as she could. Mr. Early in the flesh looked younger than Mr. Early in Robert’s paper, but she recognized the eyes and the brow—not those of a conversationalist. It appeared that she was obliged to walk to Mrs. Larimer’s with a man who would have to be chatted to, rather than one who was happy to do the chatting. Just then, out of what Lavinia would have called her “orneriness,” she vowed not to do it, no matter how lengthy the silence. As an alternative, she reviewed her recent headlong progress on the bicycle, and found it as exhilarating in retrospect as it had been while she was enjoying and enduring it. She took a hand off the handlebars and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. They were stiff with dried, or frozen, tears. She put her hand back on the handlebars. It made her smile to think of having gone so fast.

  They walked on, and he said nothing. Undoubtedly, she could return home by this route, but she saw that there was the problem of the three dips, which had, as it were, poured her northward into town—if she were to turn around, they would present a barrier not unlike that of three walls rather than three dips, and then, of course, there would be the longer and less steep, but somehow even more disheartening, climb up the hill to Gentry Farm. But how tedious to go home the long way, and (she looked about) mostly into a westerly wind. She could certainly leave the bicycle at the newspaper office and walk home across the fields—there was no snow as yet, and if her grandfather had turned the sows out into his upper pasture and woodlot, she could use her hat to wave them off.

  He spoke abruptly: “Do you have other leisure occupations?”

  His ponderous and yet resonant voice scattered her thoughts and made it impossible for her to answer the question, or, in some way, even to consider it. Leisure occupations? What did that mean? They walked on. He tried again, “Perhaps our mothers know one another. My mother is Mrs. Jared Early.”

  She recalled thinking that his father was Patrick. Perhaps that was one of the brothers. She said, “Certainly, they do. My grandfather is John Gentry.”

  “You live at Gentry Farm.”

  “I do.”

  “When I was a boy, we had a pair of mules from Gentry Farm. Napoleon and Wellington.”

  “Did my grandfather name them?”

  “No doubt he did, as our other mule was called Dick. But those two mules were old even then. They would have come to us before the war.”

  “I am sure that before the war Papa made use of a whole different set of generals. Since then, it’s either Northerners or Southerners, but all West Pointers.”

  Mr. Early cleared his throat again. Margaret came to understand later that this represented a laugh.

  She couldn’t keep herself from saying, “Lee and Grant are the oldest, twenty-seven and twenty-five. My sister and I sometimes ride Zollicoff. The most stubborn one is Halleck, though I have to say he’s very handsome for a mule.”

  Mr. Early cleared his throat again, which made her think he was going to say something. He didn’t. After a few moments, she said, “What I like about the bicycle is that it has no mind of its own.”

  “Mules are very intelligent,” Mr. Early declared, putting an end to that conversation. They walked along. As the aftereffects of her effort dissipated, she was coming to feel chilled. It was now past noon. The breeze had stiffened, and the air was colder than it looked in the sunshine. The steel of the handlebars communicated the chill into her hands, and her feet were growing numb. She could feel the ground right t
hrough her thin boots. He said, “Are you visiting anyone in town?”

  “Mrs. Larimer, up here a ways. Though she doesn’t realize it yet.”

  “Have you ever seen a telephone?”

  “I don’t think so.” She wasn’t sure whether she knew what a telephone was.

  “The patents have been bitterly contested, or else they might already have telephones here. But they don’t.” He snorted disapprovingly. “With a telephone, you could let Mrs. Larimer know you were coming.”

  “From here, I could also shout.”

  He cleared his throat. This time, he also smiled a bit. He had even, healthy teeth. There was no evident reason why he would choose not to laugh or smile, but his smile quickly vanished, as if loaned rather than bestowed.

  She shivered inside her jacket, and stopped to wrap her flannels more firmly about her waist, this time for warmth. The bicycle stuttered on the road, and Mr. Early glanced at her once, but mostly he gazed around in a discerning way, as if he were measuring the speed of the wind or gauging the likelihood of rain. She pressed on, feeling her cheeks beginning to freeze. Fingers, too. Discomfort was overwhelming that earlier sense of pleasure. She stopped suddenly, leaned the bicycle against her skirt, and cupped her cheeks in her hands, just to warm them. He said, “Are you in pain, Miss Mayfield?”