Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  MARGARET was twenty-three. Two girls her age, Mathilda Tierney and Martha Johnson, had gone out West to Idaho as itinerant teachers. They had found an abundance of eligible men and had married right away. It was exciting, it seemed, for a man or a woman to set out alone, not so exciting for them to set out as a couple. To Margaret, however, it seemed like a long trip, no matter how you made it. Lavinia said that she was a lazy thing, and that books had taught her to be more lazy. After you read a few of them, you had the feeling you knew all about wherever the book took place, so why take the long train ride? On top of all of this, according to many authors, dangers abounded in all of these locations. You had the dangers of train wrecks and gunshots and sinking ships and outlaws, but also the likelihood that you would be swindled. Inheritances would be stolen. Letters would go astray. The friendliest stranger would be the one that, long ago, purloined the deed to the family home. How much more preferable, it seemed to Margaret, in spite of the uncertainty of her future, to wake up in the warmth of the morning and look out the window at blooming honeysuckle, the skittering of squirrels, the cawing of crows and jays as they objected to the cats.

  The natural thing would be that a bookish girl would teach school. There were schools around, both county schools and local academies, and plenty of the girls teaching in them knew less than she did. She might have talked her way into one of them, and perhaps she would have gone to a teacher-training institute—there was one held for three weeks each summer in the county seat. But the girls who taught school did not speak highly of the work—the big boys and the little girls and the firecrackers and the lost and damaged books and the evident indifference of one and all tested the teachers’ patience unmercifully. The schoolhouses were drafty and chill or stuffy and hot. A schoolmistress had to dress with extra sobriety. A girl of twenty might look thirty or forty, and the older boys, who were almost her age, or, in some cases, older than she was, would tease her anyway. Lavinia felt that teaching was an occupation of last resort, to be attempted only when all matrimonial prospects were exhausted. Look at Martha Johnson—all the way across the country in Idaho, and what was her honeymoon, according to her aunt, but doing all the dishes her new husband and his brother had dirtied over four or six months, and carrying in and firing all the water herself—there were no servants in Idaho, even uncooperative ones, but she was married, safe and sound. As long as her mother could talk like this, Margaret knew, she wouldn’t have to teach.

  Margaret and Lavinia looked on the bright side every day. There was an apple tree (reliably pollinated by the tree next door, so that it bore every year), a pear tree, a rhubarb patch, a raspberry patch, and a strawberry bed. Their old horse Aurelius lived in the barn (replaced on the farm by a much younger and more elegant pair of black Morgan horses from up in Audrain County). A hired man who worked for all the families in the neighborhood took care of Aurelius in the mornings and the evenings, and Margaret gave him apples during the day. They sometimes took him out for a drive to the farm, where Lavinia and Beatrice consulted about Lawrence and the baby, Elliot.

  Robert and Beatrice were thoroughly generous with them—every wagon from the farm into town brought them a ham or a sack of potatoes or a peck of apples that they didn’t need. They had an account at every shop. This abundance became a burden to Lavinia—there was only so much apple butter that could be eaten, only so many articles of clothing they could wear, only so many shawls they could use to go out to the barn, only so many quilts they could pile up. And so they became very charitable: If a quilt had the least little fraying or a shawl had fallen into disfavor, they donated it to the church, just to unburden the cupboards a bit. They made rugs for the church, ripping up dresses that were only two or three years old. Every poor family in town became a judge of their pies and jams. If someone fell sick, Lavinia was the first to bring a hot dish to the family, or to offer to take a spell of nursing. Lavinia had been industrious for so many years that her industry had become redundant.

  Margaret avoided these activities as best she could. She would wake up, read for an hour or so, eat a leisurely dinner, take a walk, read another chapter. But even though she set this example, still, they baked on Monday, washed on Tuesday, ironed on Wednesday, mended on Thursday, scrubbed on Friday, and blacked the stove on Saturday. They delivered pies and breads to every social event in town. There wasn’t enough work for both of them. Maybe she should take up embroidery? Tatting? Crochet? Watercolor? Music? Lavinia racked her brain. Poetry? A lady was perfectly capable of writing elegant poems containing uplifting sentiments for the local newspaper if she wished. Over in Pettis County, there was a married woman who wrote a regular feature—every two weeks—about etiquette, and in Pike County, there was an old woman, much older than Lavinia, who published her memories of the early days from time to time. Gardening? Margaret helped mulch and bed at the end of the autumn, and started a few plants for the spring. By the end of the winter, Lavinia felt she had exhausted her ideas. Margaret teased her. She would say, “Ship me to Alaska.” (Gold had been discovered in Alaska.) “It might take me a year to get there and a year to get back. Ship me to Cuba. Ship me to China.” Lavinia would say only, “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” Several times a week, she sent Margaret to help Beatrice at the farm.

  Unbeknownst to Lavinia, who would not have approved, Beatrice had taken up cardplaying, and was having afternoon parties, not in any way dissimilar to those Mrs. Larimer had once had. The first time Margaret was present at one of these, she watched a few hands and helped Marcie, Beatrice’s new hired girl, serve the cakes and tea. They were playing poker.

  She would have expected Beatrice to be a cautious player, as befitted someone who was fresh to the game and who also seemed to be preening herself on her matronly respectability, but her sister wasn’t careful at all—she had been doing more at Mrs. Larimer’s than playing the piano. She liked to raise the stakes and to bluff, and she smiled and laughed in frank enjoyment of the whole thing. After the ladies departed, she confided to Margaret in a comfortable way that she was up for the winter, thank goodness. She had been afraid, around the first of the year, to tell Robert about her gambling debts, but her luck had changed, and she had put some of her stake by. And, she said, it was not as though Robert didn’t like to play—what do you think he did on those quiet days at the newspaper? If he weren’t to play, and to play well, the businessmen around town would laugh at him.

  Margaret sat in on a few hands, though she had no source of funds—she borrowed from Beatrice. She was lucky and cautious, and after a few parties—say, by the end of April—she was up by almost ten dollars, which she left in a jar at the farm.

  It was about this time that Mrs. Jared Early began to join them. Here was a woman who was older than Lavinia, possibly sixty at that time, but she was active and healthy. Margaret watched her, thinking of that strange encounter she had had with Andrew Early—Captain? Dr.?—but Mrs. Early didn’t notice Margaret. She seemed to like Beatrice, and she had a friend who came with her to games, Mrs. Hitchens, another widow, about fifty, who always wore beautiful hats. She had moved to town from Minneapolis—“for the fine weather,” she said.

  Margaret knew by now what Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had done to change the nature of the universe—he had gone with an expedition to Mexico and looked at the stars, and he had charted stars in the southern sky called doubles—two stars whirling in tandem. That spring, the spring of 1902, Captain Early was more famous than ever—everyone in town agreed that he was a wonderful example of what a town like theirs, full of enterprise and independent minds, could produce. Her memory of the man she had encountered on the bicycle, though, gave Margaret a chill; she thought he was nothing like anyone else she’d known.

  Mrs. Early was a tall, generously built woman, sociable and good-humored. Margaret noticed that she often smiled quickly to herself, as if she was enjoying some thought that she dared not share with the other ladies. She had long, thick hair, still mostly dark, piled lux
uriantly on her head. The ladies knew plenty about her—she had no daughters, but quite a few sons, of whom Andrew was the eldest (now thirty-five). They had come along all in a row—Andrew, Henry, Thomas, Daniel, and John, all named after famous men that Mr. Early was said to have known. Patrick had died as a boy of the cholera. Mrs. Early did not live in a mansion or have a big farm, but she had a nice two-story house on Maple Street, painted bright white and surrounded by a picket fence, with lots of flowers in the garden and a nice orchard in the back. There had been a large farm, but that was lost after the war. Only John lived in Darlington. He was twenty-eight, worked in the bank, and had married a girl from Arkansas. He also had a big house, but even though Mr. Jared Early had been dead some eight or ten years by now (and quite solitary for years before that), Mrs. Early did not live with her son and daughter-in-law. Beatrice said that there was family money, though she wasn’t quite clear about its source, but all the boys were enterprising. It was said that Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens traveled together, and that they had not only visited Andrew in Germany but had gone to a famous spa there, and then to Paris. All the Earlys had gone to college for at least a year—Andrew, the brilliant one, had gone to college in Berlin, Germany (after he completed his studies up in Columbia, it was said, there was no college in the United States that could teach him anything he didn’t already know). He was now teaching at the University of Chicago, which had been founded by the Rockefellers because the big universities in the East were too slow to enter modern times. It was very grand to be teaching at the University of Chicago and, as far as Margaret understood it, to be on the payroll of the Rockefellers, but, to her credit, Mrs. Early didn’t talk about Andrew any more often than she talked about the other boys. Henry was in New York City, working on Wall Street; Thomas was in Texas; and Daniel was in England. Mrs. Early talked about their wanderings as if they were customary and entertaining, as if the strangest one among them was John, married and working in a bank in town. She did not have a habit that others did (Beatrice, for example) of topping some other lady’s anecdote with something more impressive of her own, though they all knew she could have. She saved her competitive streak for the poker table.

  Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens sat at different tables. Every hand was five cards, and at first the ladies continued to chat while the hands were dealt and they were arranging their cards. Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens chatted along with the rest of them, complimenting the cakes, or discussing the first strawberries, or comparing knitting patterns, but Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens never picked up their cards as soon as they were dealt. They glanced about while the rest of the ladies were scanning what they had, then they picked up their cards, looked at them, and laid them down again, still genial. The betting rounds proceeded with lots of laughter and talk, as if each betting decision was a daring choice, and, indeed, it did seem to the other ladies to be so. Mrs. Early would urge them to be a little more bold—“Raise her two, Mrs. Landon. I’m sure you can stand it!” or “Surely, Miss Mayfield, you needn’t fold just yet.” Her voice was so friendly that Margaret felt as though Mrs. Early was helping her along, that she had Margaret’s interests foremost in her mind. But Margaret never followed her advice, though some of the other ladies did. These ladies did not always come to grief, but often enough they did. Margaret understood Mrs. Early’s purpose—to plump the pot a little before laying claim to it. At the other table, Mrs. Hitchens was doing the same thing, though in a different way—“I’m not sure I would lose hope, dear,” or “It’s so nice when the wagering is confident and straightforward.” The stakes were low, but toward the end of the afternoon, after the losing players had dropped out, the value of the chips would metamorphose—nickel chips would be worth two bits, dime chips worth half a dollar, and two-bit chips worth a dollar. When the winning ladies consolidated at a single table, Mrs. Hitchens dropped out with a smile and an “Oh, I am a bit tired after all.”

  Mrs. Early’s eyes were cheerful. Margaret never saw her scowl or lose her smile, nor did she fidget or sigh or touch her hair or move her shoulders, as many of the ladies did without seeming to know what they were doing. They all thought that their friends didn’t actually mean to take their money, but Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens did mean to take their money. They preferred it when the ladies all had to show their hands, and in order to promote this, Mrs. Early introduced high-low, in which both the high hand and the low hand split the pot. Once they started playing in this way, it seemed more fair and more fun, but Margaret saw that Mrs. Early also won more money. And she won more often at stud-horse poker than at draw poker. After a while, Margaret got wise to the fact that Mrs. Early was counting the cards, and that she never forgot that if there were three kings faceup on the table, the likelihood of her completing her flush was minimal. When they played draw poker, she paid close attention to how many cards each of them asked for, as if this told her something, as, indeed, it did. She and Mrs. Hitchens also liked to play vingt-et-un, and Margaret soon came to understand that Mrs. Early was keeping track of the cards that were laid.

  One day that summer, when Margaret was sitting beside her at the table, Mrs. Early had just cut the cards. When she took the deck in her hand, she said, “There’s a card missing.” The missing card was under Mrs. Johnson’s chair. This incident passed without remark, but to Margaret, the idea that a woman could be so familiar with the size and weight of a deck of cards that she would sense that a single card was missing was remarkable.

  Lavinia had gone to Kirkwood to visit Elizabeth. The weather had been hot, but the heat had broken—it was late July. Margaret set out for the the farm just after dawn to bake a blackberry pie. Beatrice kept up John Gentry’s special blackberry patch, and Lavinia and Margaret had already helped her pick and process many jars of jam, and this pie would be the last of the season. There was a fresh breeze, and the rolling fields were fragrant from the hay that had been cut and baled; down in the bottomland, the hemp was five or six feet tall. It would take her fifteen minutes to pick enough berries for a pie, and no time at all to make the pie—all you did with a blackberry pie was roll out the crust, pile in the berries, some sugar, and some flour. It had to be done early, though, before the heat of the day. Robert was still at breakfast when she came in. She saw at once that he and Beatrice were glowing with the pleasure of new and interesting gossip. Beatrice was saying, “So—is he coming here?”

  Robert glanced up as Margaret entered the kitchen, then said, “They say he is. Where else would he go at such short notice?”

  “Isn’t there a brother in New York?”

  She said, “Who are you talking about?”

  “Andrew Early,” said Robert. “Captain Early.”

  She knew who he meant, but said, “Mrs. Early’s son?”

  Robert nodded.

  “He lied,” said Beatrice. “It’s a tremendous scandal.”

  Margaret closed the door behind her against the flies. She said, “People lie all the time.”

  “He misrepresented his observations,” said Robert. “That’s more than lying.”

  Margaret sat down and took Elliott on her lap. She handed him a rusk. She smoothed his hair and could feel the warm contours of his head through the silky strands. She said, “What observations?”

  Robert looked at her. “I gather that he said he discovered that the sky is full of these double stars, except that it isn’t. At any rate, he’s been fired from the University of Chicago, whatever the reason.”

  “Dr. Early?”

  “Dr. Early. Captain Early. I never do know what I’m supposed to call the man. No one calls him Andy, that’s for sure.”

  She said, “I saw him once. When I was riding that bicycle of Dora’s.”

  “You talked to him?” exclaimed Beatrice.

  “I could hardly avoid it. He walked along with me for a piece, but I was so cold I had to run into Mrs. Larimer’s to get warm. He was courteous, but in a stiff way. Not at all like his mother. And he didn’t seem to feel the
cold, even though I was freezing. He struck me as a strange man.” Elliott struggled to get down, and she set him on his feet.

  Beatrice sucked in her breath. “Was he quite frightening? I do think she is a bit frightening. She’s up over fifty dollars.” Robert scowled and she shrugged, then said, “I’m still up, Robert.”

  Margaret said, “‘Off-putting’ is more the word.”

  Robert now looked at her. It was a fact that he didn’t care about Beatrice’s poker parties. He thought that they were fast, and that fast wasn’t bad, at least for the wife of the editor of the newspaper. He nodded. “Captain Early is the most famous man this town ever produced, but not beloved. Though I never knew him myself.”

  “Who did?” said Beatrice. “He’s very old.”

  “He’s not more than thirty-five,” said Robert. “He was born a couple of years after the war. He’s something like five years older than I am. And his brother John is a personable fellow.”