Something Worth Doing

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  When she wasn’t working in the millinery, making patterns, dusting the plate rail in the parlor, directing the children and breaking up skirmishes between the boys, and potty training her toddler, she was imagining plot lines. If she could sell more novels, she could add to the money in the teapot and they would one day have that newspaper. Judith Reid consumed her days. She wrote the novel as though she were Judith, a woman who had loved an artist who disappeared. Judith, the lead character, is then taken to Oregon from Missouri, where her mother dies. Judith must care for her siblings and is forced to work in her father’s sawmill. She makes the audacious decision to defy her father, resist the “invitation” of a reckless man whom her father chose for her to marry, and returns to Missouri where she rediscovers her long-lost artist, and both live happily ever after. She read her book out loud to Ben.

  “I always like a happy ending,” he said. “But why do the men always have to be such scoundrels. And is the first love always the best? I mean, it was for me with you, but I wonder if it was for you with me?”

  He pulled his starched collar from his neck and put it in the box on the dresser top. They’d returned from church, lunched, and had the afternoon for a quiet time and so she’d read to him.

  “It’s not about you, Ben, or me. It’s fiction. Listen to what Putnam’s Weekly says about the novel.” She picked up the popular magazine. “‘Novels are one of the features of our age. We know not what we would do without them. . . . Do you wish to instruct, to convince, to please? Write a novel! Have you a system of religion or politics or manners or social life to inculcate? Write a novel!’ See, a story is the perfect way to convince women of what’s possible. Readers expect to be entertained, but there has to be tension and struggle as there is in life. They wouldn’t read it if it didn’t have something the characters are trying to accomplish and the reader given to wonder if they’ll ever achieve it.”

  “The women always come out smelling like roses though.”

  “It’s the only place where we can be assured of roses. Real life promises us thorns.”

  “Not always.” He looked at Clyde turning pages in a book as he sat on the horsehair-covered chair.

  “True. But enough encounters to leave us bleeding. I write so women know there are other ways of living, especially if we stand firm and don’t marry the first man who asks us. Or don’t assume an early marriage is a requirement of womanhood. Just see where I’d be if I’d fallen into Mr. Bunter’s trap.”

  “Your timing was excellent, Mrs. Duniway,” Ben teased.

  Except when it comes to having babies. Clyde really must be our last. “Well, you had a big part in when we got married, as did my father’s poor decision.”

  “But everything worked out.” Ben kissed her neck. “Didn’t it?”

  “Yes, it has. But there’s so much more to do, Ben.”

  “There always is, with you.”

  “I’ll have to sell,” Kate said.

  “Probably let the help go?”

  “We shouldn’t have had so many children so close together.”

  “What’s done is done, Catherine. Regrets will weigh you down. Let’s think of the options you have.”

  There’d been an accident, an explosion on board the steamship, and Captain John was dead. It wasn’t fair. So much of life wasn’t. Abigail helped her sister through the funeral and the reading of the will several weeks later. Kate received the house, a small savings that would last the year perhaps, and the steamship company gave her one month of John’s salary. Nothing else.

  Kate’s youngest slept on her breast. She stroked the child’s forehead with the back of her finger. “I’ve been so spoiled. We could have saved the money we paid for help. I should have done my own laundry.”

  “Stop. Think of what you can do.” Abigail put on her pragmatic hat.

  Kate sighed. Even in grief, she looked coiffed and held together, her shoulders straight, not hunched over in sadness. “I guess I could teach. I know what they paid the male teacher last year, and he left for greener pastures. With that salary, I could maintain the house, maybe have enough for a nanny.”

  “Let’s see if Sarah Maria might like to live here instead of with Fanny. She could help with the children.”

  “She would be of assistance. But Fanny needs her too.” She sighed. “John was only thirty-eight years old. We had our whole life ahead of us.” She brushed tears from her cheeks.

  Abigail patted her sister’s hand. “It’s the way it is now. Tragedy happens. I’m not dismissing the hole in your heart.” She didn’t want to think of what her life would be without Ben in it. “John would want you to go on, to make the best of it. Why don’t you talk to the school board? That’s a good idea. You’re certified and would make a fabulous teacher for Canemah’s sprouts.”

  “It’s one of the few respectable things a widow can do. Or remarry. Your old suitor has been by.”

  “Bunter? Oh, that man! You’re not that desperate. We’ll help as we can. Harvey will too, if we ask. Please don’t, you know, marry just for safety. Because in the end, there is no guarantee. We women have to protect ourselves.”

  “I have you all,” Kate said.

  “Now, what will you wear to your interview? And who is on your local board? We’ll see if we can politic them.”

  Kate smiled. “Discreetly, of course.”

  “That’s my sister. We’ll get you through.”

  It was what they had to do a week later when Kate learned she had the job, but it would pay half the salary of the man who had left.

  “Outrageous,” Abigail said. “I’m going to write a letter to the editor about such unfairness.”

  “Can they do that?” Sarah Maria, the youngest Scott sister, had come to live with and help Kate out.

  “They said it was the law.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. But they make the school board laws, or at least they can fudge them,” Abigail said. “They could change it if they wanted to. I’ll go talk with them.”

  “No. Don’t. Please. It’s a good job, one I can do. And I can sew in the evenings. Maybe Harvey needs someone at the Oregonian to copyedit. I’m good with details.”

  “Yes, you are. And a better writer than he is, if I might say so.” Better than me. “I can use another to crochet reticules. They’re popular now. At least you won’t have to marry someone you don’t wish to.”

  “Yes. Bunter has been by again. He seems to like Scott girls.” They both turned to Sarah Maria.

  “Don’t let that man near you,” Abigail said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Good. We will tend and befriend each other. That’s what women can do.”

  Abigail’s newspaper would have to wait. Family needs came first.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Building the Ladder

  1869

  _______

  In late February, in the last year of the decade, Abigail learned she was pregnant again. “Oh, Ben. I . . .”

  “It’s the Lord’s doing,” Ben said.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s our doing.” She sighed. “Six children? How will we manage? I don’t mean to demean, but the matched teams—you haven’t sold one all last year and you’re getting older too, like me. You can’t do that heavy haying or picking apples at our old place forever.”

  “We’ll do fine.”

  “I’ve got to find something else I can do to bring in money.”

  “Abigail . . . what you have to do is take care of yourself now.”

  “At least I’ll be carrying through the summer when there are fresh fruits and vegetables. Let’s see if we can get more chickens. We can sell the eggs.”

  “We might have to dip into the teapot.” He said it quietly.

  “No. That’s the newspaper money. We’ll think of something else.”

  “Or God will,” Ben said. “You underestimate him.”

  “God put us here so we’d take care of his earth and make good decisions. Tripling or quadruplin
g ourselves, I’m not sure that’s wise at all.”

  “‘Be fruitful, and multiply,’” Ben said, his voice a tease.

  “That would be the Scripture you’d quote.”

  “We men memorize certain ones.” He took her in his arms. “It’ll be fine, Abigail.”

  “It isn’t always, Ben. Maggie died. John died. You were injured. Bad things do happen.”

  “And people overcome them. My worst worry is over your health. You’ve got to take fewer buying trips, let Shirley do that for you.”

  “I still have to pay her. Oh, Ben, I’m worried. If business falls off, what’ll we do?”

  “Don’t wear future worries. Dress for today.” He patted her back, and she let herself sink into his chest if only for a moment. “I have confidence. Something will come our way. It always has.”

  “Yes, but what has come has often been more misery than amusement.”

  Abigail wrote an essay on equal pay for women and asked Harvey to publish it. He declined, he said, because it wasn’t up to the Oregonian standards. She fumed as she told Ben. “He said it was ‘florid with female emotion’ and needed better punctuation. ‘Florid with female emotion,’” she sputtered. “How would he know about female emotion? That’s called ‘passion for a subject.’ Yes, I could use a little polish with my paragraphs and exclamation points, but he’s an editor, for goodness’ sake. Why didn’t he edit it? No, he didn’t like the conclusion, and my arguments were strong. He knew if he published it, I’d change minds. One day I’ll publish it in my own newspaper. And I’ll write articles promoting women having the right to vote. See what Harvey says about that.”

  She’d forgotten in the three years since Clyde’s pregnancy that the condition increased her anxiety, and she spent days in bed where she worried over fluctuations in the fashion industry and the costs of changes to her business and how they’d survive taking care of six children. Women now wanted bustles instead of crinolines. Dresses took scads more materials, and women liked the brighter synthetic dyes over those of plants. Silks and satins weighed more than linen or cotton, and women’s corsets had to be reinforced to deal with the extra load. Loops of materials called panniers swooped as overskirts, emphasizing smaller waists by the many layers of fabric. Abigail lay awake at night obsessing over purchases. At least men’s fashions kept to the grey, brown, and black shades, with changes in tie length the only real upgrade. Women’s fashions changed so quickly that by the time she got the dresses back for fittings, the design had to be altered too. She’d sewed Sarah Maria’s wedding dress, the color of cream frosting. Her sister had married a lawman. I’ll have to temper my villains now. Sarah Kelty was the epitome of innocence and an advertisement for the latest fashion.

  For Abigail, the wedding was a nostalgic time. All the Scott girls now married off to men they either loved when they began or, like Fanny, learned to love. They all thought of Maggie, wishing she could have been there. Pregnancy made Abigail teary. She’d forgotten about that too.

  Since she wasn’t traveling, Abigail and two other Albany women started the first suffrage association in the state in Albany. “We’ll tend and befriend more women to join us,” she’d declared, and her cohorts had agreed, talking with a neighbor while sweeping a back porch or sharing conversations while helping a friend peg laundry to the line. Abigail took more time with her clients, who told her stories of their trials, of a woman’s “teapot” money set aside for her daughter’s Easter coat, only to have her husband take it to buy himself a racehorse. Not long after that, Abigail learned that woman had died in childbirth, and the editor of the Democrat paper wrote condolences to the husband for being “left with the obligations of a family.”

  “He has a racehorse to comfort him,” Abigail told Ben as she read aloud the editorial.

  She wrote a letter to the local editor about 172 New Jersey women having voted for the presidency with ballots in a separate box. Of course their preferences hadn’t been added to the totals, but just the idea of women making their mark like that, imagining a female with head held high, acting like the citizen she was, offered Abigail hope. Wyoming had scheduled a vote in December to grant women’s suffrage. Still, the Fourteenth Amendment recently ratified had once again claimed a “citizen” and “vote” had to be male.

  She put her essay rejected by Harvey in a drawer, intending one day to rewrite it. She’d ask Kate to review it before she delivered it to Harvey again. Right then, she had another kind of delivery to worry over.

  The pain frightened her. It was different, more like with Willis’s wretched birth when Ben had gotten lost in the fog and hadn’t found the doctor. And it shouldn’t have been happening yet. With the first splintering contractions, she told Ben to seek the doctor. Now. And he had. Her labor went on for hours, maybe days. She lost track of time, felt herself in and out of consciousness at times, fatigued beyond anything she’d ever experienced. Kate was there. Clara Belle’s sixteen-year-old frightened eyes leaned over her with a cool rag to soothe her forehead.

  Then finally—Ralph Roelofson was born. November 7, a month before he was due. Abigail was exhausted and bleeding and still in excruciating pain when they placed him on her breast while the midwife assisted in cutting the umbilical cord. But Abigail was grateful Ralph came early and was smaller than her other babies, because if he’d been full term and larger, both he and Abigail might well have died.

  This child surely had to be her last. The bleeding stopped, but something was still very wrong, and she wrote to Shirley to ask if progressive San Francisco doctors might have new devices to assist women with “prolapsed uteruses” and could she find that out? “There must be something,” she said. “I can’t afford to be even a semi-invalid and yet that’s what my body is advising me to do. The pain when I walk is almost unbearable and I leak. Ben says horses suffer from this too. Imagine. All those years before, I wrote of some women being treated as workhorses by their fathers and husbands and now, I find we can have similar ailments.”

  She used Ben’s cane for a time. And purchased the intimate articles that kept parts of her body in place. And she and Ben had the conversation that meant their physical relationship would need to change.

  “We won’t have a loveless marriage,” she said. “It’s never been so.” They lay beside each other, she on her back and Ben on his side with his arm across her abdomen, resting on the patchwork quilt she’d tucked around her like a mummy. Ralph was asleep in his cradle beside their bed. It was early morning and the dawn seeped through the window to ease across the tin-pressed ceiling.

  “I’ve mostly wanted the affection of your attention,” Ben said. He was tearful, but he’d suffered with the delivery of Ralph, had made bargains with God, he’d told her, that if she survived, how he would never put her through such a pregnancy again. That she came to speak of it first was the way it was with them, her pragmatism preceding both his disappointment and his understanding before he could speak of either. They’d come to terms on how to proceed.

  It was a new phase in the Duniway days, another adaptation they’d have to make. That too was the way of marriage and, Ben reminded her, of life.

  “Just don’t say ‘it’ll all work out.’”

  “I won’t,” Ben said. “But it will.”

  “Would you look at this.” Ben snapped the Oregonian and pointed to a short entry on the front page. “‘Editor Harvey Scott has resigned his post of this fine newspaper to assume the position of Collector of Customs in Portland. This distinguished federal appointment could not be bestowed upon another with as exceptional credentials as our Harvey Scott. We regret to see him depart but wish him well.’ There’s an opening, Abigail.”

  “Phooey. Pittock wouldn’t let a woman through the door to assume such a position.”

  “I wonder why Harvey gave up such a post.”

  “Collector of Customs is a lucrative job, carrying prestige and a salary no woman could ever hope to achieve. I bet he wrote that announcement himself.”
Harvey would have more money to invest in his Portland properties, in addition to gaining commercial connections from around the world. She guessed their friend Senator Baker had made that happen for him. “Still, it might be worth the uproar to see how the new editor would cover my effort to apply.” Abigail grinned at her husband. “And my rejection as a qualified candidate—except for my gender.” I could write about it.

  “You’d make it a story, all right.” Ben put the paper down, drank his coffee.

  She should apply. What could it hurt? But she didn’t need the disappointment. Why torture myself?

  “I’m having a pretty good morning. I think I’ll ride out to the farm and work the team of pintos I started. Poor things need everyday adventures that I don’t seem to be able to give. Maybe Harvey could get me on at the customs house.”

  “We’d have to live in Portland.”

  “I was only jesting.” He backpedaled. “Our business is here. The millinery. Our boarding the working girls. The school. We’re established in Albany.”

  “And I’m meeting with the Marthas this afternoon. Yes, Albany is home now.” One Martha was a neighbor and the other a music teacher from Portland. “I’ve been talking with them about a newspaper. The Revolution, the paper Susan B. and Elizabeth Stanton operate, has increased its subscribers, I’ve heard. We need that Northwest newspaper.” There’d been activity back east with a National Woman Suffrage Association formed and then an American Woman Suffrage Association, the former with a desire for a constitutional amendment to get women the vote, and the latter dedicated to suffrage for all, regardless of gender or race. The groups had righteous arguments covered by the Revolution, but campaigns for people in the Northwest would be different. Women here, as in Wyoming, worked beside their men more often than in the industrialized East. They struggled on farms and small businesses so men could see the competence of their wives and daughters, and many, like Ben, were sympathetic to women achieving more rights. They didn’t like the strident “Hurrah” features of some of the promoters carrying banners, going in to men’s clubs only to be asked to leave. Abigail had to watch her step in that regard. She didn’t want that kind of bad publicity.