The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  "Please do, because I am ready to take it." She turned with a flounce that belied the neat smoothness of her hair and the soft youthfulness of her round face.

  A few moments later, Horace returned to his seat, and we suspended our conversation.

  Now events began to move very quickly. One thing I’ve noticed is that when a particular notion enters your head, then its very particularity makes everything tend toward it, and the tending goes faster and faster. One day you will have barely thought of something, and that little thought inspires such excitement and fear that you don’t want to think of it again, but some few days later, maybe three or four, the thing you could hardly think of is now done, and you are embarked upon a new life.

  I happened to see Thomas Newton again the very next day, this time on Maine Street. I was taking a pair of Alice’s shoes to be repaired. Maine Street was crowded, as usual, but just after I saw Mr. Newton coming toward me, the sidewalk grew strangely deserted. I saw him glance around just as he smiled at me. He said, "Well, Miss Harkness, you are out early this morning after a long evening."

  "It’s a fine morning. I wanted to get my errands done before the heat of the day—"

  He touched my elbow and turned me to walk along with him, then said, "Mrs. Duff gave an excellent performance last night, but I thought Mr. Adams rather stormed and ranted a bit." George Adams and Mrs. Duff had given us a scene from Macbeth, the climax of the evening and entirely lit by two burning torches, one of which Mr. Adams held above his head. Much of the audience had been distracted from the impresario’s eloquence by the proximity of the flaming torch to the curtain above the stage, but Mrs. Duff, required by her role to look upward at that very moment, had managed to sustain her concentration, only stepping gracefully across the stage and clinging briefly to Mr. Adams’s upraised arm.

  "Mrs. Duff showed considerable presence of mind. I admired that very much."

  "I’ve heard something about you, Miss Harkness."

  "That’s not a very kind thing to say, sir."

  "You have swum across the river."

  "My nephew Frank told you that."

  "He did."

  "You and Frank seem to be on terms of great intimacy."

  "We are."

  "I have to admit that he wasn’t lying, but it’s been over a year since I did that, and the river was lower then and not so fast. I wouldn’t try it this year."

  "Few girls can have done the same."

  "None that I know of, but my sisters would say that the fact hardly speaks in my favor. Quite the contrary."

  "And you ride your brother Roland’s horses bareback and have beaten Frank in every race."

  "You shouldn’t be quizzing Frank about me."

  "I would if I had to, but I don’t. He’s terrifically proud of you. He considers you hardly a female at all."

  This I would have taken as an insult, if Mr. Thomas Newton hadn’t said it in such a merry way. As it was, his tone made me laugh out loud, and then he looked at me most candidly, and I found myself having to look down to my shoes. This reminded me of Alice’s shoes, and I saw that we had long since passed the bootmaker. I exclaimed, "Oh!" and turned around, and Mr. Newton caught me tightly by the elbow. I said, "I’ve forgotten my sister’s shoes!"

  And then we walked back there in silence, and I am sure that we were both thinking hard. I certainly was.

  After the bootmaker’s, he walked me back to Seventh Street. We hardly spoke, but I was aware of his presence every step of the way, as if something about him had grown excessively large and was pushing at me. This was new in my experience, and I didn’t know what to think. I glanced at him a couple of times and noticed that I found his looks much more pleasant than I had only a few days before. Where I had seen only pale fecklessness, I now saw a subtle play of expression, evidence of considerable intelligence, and a certain grace of figure that was set off by plain, everyday clothing. I saw evidence of cogitation and choice where I had seen only a dull surface before.

  When I took him in to Alice, who was hemming shirts by a window in the parlor, it was clear that she as yet saw only the dull surface. She hardly looked up, said, "You’ll be Mr. Newton," and promptly stuck three or four pins between her lips.

  I said, "I can pick up your shoes Monday, Alice," and she exclaimed, the pins falling into her lap, "Can you believe it, those boys had a squirrel in here! It was running all over the house! I would have fainted dead away, except that I had to help them catch it!"

  "A wild squirrel?" said Thomas Newton.

  "They snared it on the roof! They’ve been climbing out on the roof and setting snares all summer! Can you imagine? It ran right over the dining room table; I will never eat there again!" She took three or four angry stitches. ’And last week, they caught a crow and brought it into their bedroom and kept it there all night in a box!"

  I laughed.

  "This is most assuredly not funny! I am not amused in the slightest. Why the good Lord should have sent me five boys, and the last two hooligans, and I am nearly in my dotage, I shall never in my life understand. Ahh!" She threw down the shirt. ’And now you’ll be wanting tea, though what wild animals have been nesting in the teacups I cannot tell you. You will have to take your chances!" She said this in a tone of doom and steamed into the kitchen.

  The silence fell around myself and Mr. Newton with muffling thickness. Any words I might then have uttered seemed destined to fall unheard to the floor. Thomas Newton said, "You live here with your sister?"

  "Yes; seven years it’s been. Lawrence was one then and Frederick three, and I was meant to be useful in all ways and to lighten Alice’s maternal load with an ever eager helping hand."

  With regard to that largeness I felt in Mr. Newton, I thought it was best to be candid about who I was. Mr. Newton allowed his admittedly pale but, even so, well-shaped eyebrows to lift inquiringly.

  "I found that I preferred to read. It’s not hard to hide from Alice. And I fear I’ve allowed my niece Annie to do more than her share of the household chores."

  "She was with you the other night, at the performance."

  "Yes. It turns out that she would like to board a steamship under an assumed name and pass herself off as a brazen actress, but nevertheless, she is a remarkably useful girl, and in my opinion, it’s only a matter of months before some widower with a dozen or more small children offers to make her the happiest girl in the world."

  I had never talked this way before. The voice coming out of my mouth was strange to my ears and yet strangely my own. I tempted myself to go on and on. "It was the fate of my poor mother to devote her life to a man of exceptional vanity who already had six daughters. That’s his likeness on the wall beside the door, there."

  Thomas Newton stood and stepped over to the daguerreotype. My father had been in the horse business then, so he was carrying a whip and wearing a top hat. Mr. Newton said, "A handsome man."

  "That was the first daguerreotype ever made in Quincy. A man came through, and he and my father found each other as if by predestination."

  When he turned to look at me, Mr. Newton seemed very merry, though eager to hide his merriment. Alice entered with a tray and set it down on the tea table with emphasis. She said, "I found some cakes, and I’ve checked them over for animal hair, so you may eat them with assurance." She sat down and poured the tea, immediately commencing to draw out Mr. Newton. "And so, I am told you are off to Kansas, sir."

  "Yes, I—"

  "Your antecedents are in Boston, are they not?"

  "Medford, ma’am."

  "Near enough."

  "You have parents, brothers and sisters?"

  "My father and brothers have a sailmaking factory."

  "You don’t work with them, then?"

  "I did for a while. And I was a minister of religion just out of college."

  "And which sect would that have been?"

  "We practice Unitarianism, ma’am."

  "That’s hardly a sect of religion, sir."
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  Thomas Newton kept smiling but said, "Many would say that any practice performed by New Englanders soon amounts to a religion."

  Alice handed him a cup of tea without changing her expression. She set mine on the table, and I reached for it. I expected her to inquire further into Mr. Newton’s history, but she grew a bit defensive.

  "We are Methodists, and we do not condemn our brethren in our church for beliefs and domestic arrangements that are not like our own. Dr. Hawkins just gave a sermon on that very topic this Sunday past."

  "No, ma’am."

  "And you have funds of your own that your father gave you for this Kansas adventure?"

  "I worked for him in his sailmaking factory, yes. I also have associated myself with the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company."

  "I see."

  Now Alice fell silent, drinking her tea. It was as if the words "Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company" startled or discomposed her, and she couldn’t think of what to say.

  I said, "Mr. Newton is an abolitionist, Alice. Just like Miriam was."

  All she said was, "I should have known." By this she meant that an abolitionist was just the sort of person with whom I would crown my life with her by bringing home.

  "Yes, sister, you should have known, because Harriet knew the day we met Mr. Newton."

  Alice cleared her throat.

  Now we sat quietly for some ten minutes, sipping our tea and eating the cakes. Alice sat in her rocking chair, rocking furiously. From time to time, Thomas Newton glanced at the likeness of my father on the wall. He still seemed amused, which I found pleasant as well as curious. Nothing Alice said touched me, because, without naming it to myself, I knew that I would soon be on my way to Kansas.

  CHAPTER 4

  I Embark on the Ida Marie

  In packing household furniture, for moving, have each box numbered, and then have a book, in which, as each box is packed, note down the number of the box, and the order in which its contents are packed, as this will save much labor and perplexity when unpacking. In packing china and glass, wrap each article, separately, in paper, and put soft hay or straw at bottom and all around each. Put the heaviest articles at the bottom, and on the top of the box, write, "This side up:" —p. 316-17

  I MAY NOT HAVE MENTIONED earlier in this account that when I was fifteen, I attended the Quincy Female Seminary, which opened on Sixth Street and Maine. Miss Doty was our principal, and Miss Catharine Beecher herself, the very woman who wrote A Treatise on Domestic Economy, came to Quincy to supervise all aspects of the school. I must say that the good opinion that the citizens of Quincy perennially maintained of themselves was always bolstered by the number of prominent Americans who lived in, passed through, or involved themselves in the town’s affairs. Of course there were always Senator Douglas and Mr. Browning, but there was also Miss Beecher, and Miss Beecher’s rumored views on the slavery question hardly dented her fame in Quincy. When our school closed its doors after a few months, every pupil was given an inscribed copy of Miss Beecher’s volume. After Mr. Thomas Newton went away that afternoon, I went up to my room and pulled Miss Beecher off my shelf for the first time ever. I opened it, and this was the first thing I read: "The number of young women whose health is crushed, ere the first years of married life are past, would seem incredible to one who has not investigated this subject, and it would be vain to attempt to depict the sorrow, discouragement, and distress experienced in most families where the wife and mother is a perpetual invalid." I must say that this observation did not surprise me at all, but even so I did not consider that it applied to me, or, for that matter, to life in Kansas, where the climate was known to be supremely healthful—just mild enough, of course, but just brisk enough, too. I cannot say that I knew exactly what Miss Beecher was talking about. I presumed that she was referring to the deleterious effects of cooking, cleaning, making fires, washing, ironing, and dusting, not to mention shirt-making, knitting, embroidery, and all other forms of coarse and fine needlework. I pitied poor Annie. When I pictured myself in Kansas, I saw myself plucking apples and peaches off heavy branches, strolling by the side of one of those refreshing streams, or taking a brisk walk through tall grasses, perhaps in pursuit of a pretty little cow who would have come into my possession somehow. I would lead her back to our (weathertight and cozy) cabin and later enjoy having churned her milk into cool and delicious butter.

  At Miss Beecher’s I had excelled in the area of daily exercise, and my health had never been threatened from that time to this. Miss Beecher had been emphatic on the subject of "calisthenic exercises," which we girls were obliged to perform daily, to the accompaniment of Miss Ivins playing the piano, in a large room in the school fitted with giant windows, which were open in the coldest weather. Miss Beecher was a great believer in ventilation. Every month that we were there, Miss Beecher herself checked our spines for distortions. We wore loose clothing and undergarments, and I have to say the whole experience gave me exactly that enjoyment of free bodily movement that was such a matter of despair for my sisters. Reading Miss Beecher’s book was much like watching her stride down the hallway, feeling her brisk fingers on one’s shoulders and back, listening to her speak. She did what she pleased and wasted no time.

  It was dusk when I stood up and stretched my arms above my head. I had read about the girl who comes home from her boarding school, whose mother is laid in the grave, and who has to take over her duties. I read about the girl who visits her sister in a distant city and assumes her sister’s role. I read about the woman removed to the west, whose health failed. I thought, Mary Simmons, Eliza Carson, Bella Morton. But of course, I did not think, Lydia Harkness, not once. I had looked at the pictures of my bones and muscles and brain and sacrum and nerves and spine and heart and lungs. I wondered if Thomas Newton had ever seen such pictures or knew that "the throbbing of the heart is caused by its alternate expansion and contraction, as it receives and expels the blood." I wondered if he knew that one’s skin was continuously "exhaling waste matter in a form which is called insensible perspiration." I looked at the back of my hand and smelled its skin. I wondered if he knew, as I now did, that frequent changes of garments worn next to the skin prevented the reabsorption of those very noxious products earlier thrown off by the skin and the decay that resulted therefrom. I wondered for a moment about the organ of touch. "This office," Miss Beecher wrote, "is performed through the instrumentality of the nerves of feeling, which are spread over all parts of the skin." Miss Beecher seemed to know a great deal more than I or my friends in school had ever given her credit for.

  Excitement suffused me. It felt like dread, but a sort of eager dread, which moves toward its object rather than away. I knew that I should not have kept reading Miss Beecher’s manual, because now, in addition to looking forward to a strange future in a strange place with a strange man (and all men were strange enough to me), I, with my cerebellum and my left ventricle and my lacteals and my follicles, was strange as well. I remembered one thing Harriet had said to me years before in exasperation when I threw down the sampler I was attempting to stitch and declared that I hated sewing most of all. She said, "If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows! And a female’s brain is too weak to hold those sorts of things!"

  Our courtship, of necessity, proceeded apace, as it was foreshortened by the arrival of Mr. Newton’s boxes and the knowledge that September was at hand and therefore those who were departing for Kansas must make haste and do so, so as to make as much use of the mild fall weather as possible. Mr. Newton was, in general, a reserved suitor, though kind, always kind. We sat in silence much of the time, which he seemed comfortable in breaking only by raising two subjects, my virtues and Kansas. Both subjects were delicious to me. Mr. Newton had never met anyone quite like me, so strong and vigorous, so freely spoken, manifesting so few traits of false modesty and fearfulness, in which, he led me to believe, I was unique among females of his experience. I
could ride a horse! I could shoot a gun! (Frank’s character reference.) I could swim! I was fond of reading! I could walk many miles in an afternoon! All of a sudden, my uselessness had been turned upside down. These qualities, he assured me, prepared me wonderfully well for Kansas, and I had every reason to believe him. One night, in particular, I remember quite well. The August heat had mitigated somewhat, and we were sitting by a window in Alice’s parlor just at dusk, with our heads together, enjoying the cool breeze. Mr. Newton was talking enthusiastically about Kansas, and I was soaking up every word. This was, possibly, the only time in my experience of Mr. Newton up to that time that he spoke with such enthusiasm.

  "You can’t imagine such a fine and intelligent man as Dr. Robinson!" His eyes glittered with admiration. "Of course he maintains the highest principles, or Mr. Thayer—he’s our benefactor—would never have associated himself with the man, but added to that, well, he’s been everywhere, to California, even, and made a great profit, and he’s said to be a wonderful doctor, compassionate and knowledgeable far beyond the general run! He has matters at Lawrence—that’s where we are going—entirely in hand. We had assurances of that before we left the east. We couldn’t have chosen a superior leader to Dr. Robinson, and his wife is just the thing for the west—you’ll admire her, I know. I’ve seen her twice. There’s utterly no nonsense about Mrs. Robinson. She’s the very type of a mother!" He sighed with pleasure and grasped my hands. "You need have no fears, my dear! Our Emigrant Aid Company has everything so well organized! When the Missourians see what New Englanders can do in the west, they’ll come around, that’s assured! I fully expect that these few conflicts I hear reports of will be as short-lived as they are exaggerated. We have nothing to worry about."

  I couldn’t help tweaking him just a bit, saying, "Are you reading aloud to me from some bill? Because this is a great advertisement for Dr. Robinson," but then, when his face fell, I offered, "You know, my sister Miriam ran a school for the children of escaped slaves in Ohio. I might have gone to teach there."