The Bridegrooms: A Novel

by Allison K. Pittman

  Vada looked up at her sister. She’d never seen her looking as beautiful as she did that moment. Hazel had always carried a certain hardness to her. Coarse hair, chapped skin. Her lips formed the same natural bow shape as Vada’s own, but it seemed they’d been made with thinner ribbon. Now Hazel’s face was relaxed, with just enough of a smile to bring out the Allenhouse dimple.

  “You look like you’re ready to hop on a train right now,” Vada said, feeling like an intruder.

  “Not quite. But he’s a definite contender.”

  Hazel crossed the room to the large oak armoire and opened the door wide. The backside of it was covered in cork, and a dozen slips of paper fluttered in response to the movement. They were handwritten notes—some little more than painful scrawls—and photos. All men, all with the hard-bitten features of frontier life. Some stiff in photographer’s studio chairs, a couple standing grimly next to newly killed game.

  Hazel stepped back to observe the display. “Hmm. I think it’s definitely time to send regrets to this one, and this one.” She plucked the two pictures of the victorious hunters. “And probably this one. He looks short.”

  The image of the poetic, stoic Barth was pinned prominently, as scrap after scrap of hopeful correspondence was snatched off the cork.

  “You know,” Vada said, preparing herself for the argument to come, “you don’t have to do any of this. If you want to move to Wyoming, just go. You’re twenty-one. You don’t need a husband to be able to vote.”

  “Easy for you to say.” Hazel gave a pitying look to the bearded man with a bowler hat and one suspender. “You have a man. I don’t want to give up my chance at marriage and security just because I want the rights this country owes me. I shouldn’t have to go out there and be somebody’s laundress just so I can vote.”

  “Who says you—”

  “If I move out there alone, I’ll be desperate. I’ll latch on to the first man I find. I want to be wooed. I want to be courted. I want romance, like you have with Garrison.”

  “Yes, well.” Vada remembered his familiar, dry kiss. “If that’s your aim, there’s no reason you can’t have that here. The city’s full of men—”

  “Who aren’t exactly piling up on our front porch. And once they’ve seen Lisette, what chance does an old maid like me have?”

  “Watch it, sister. You’re younger than me, you know.”

  “And you’re engaged. Practically, anyway. I want a man who wants me.”

  “So it’s not just your constitutional aspirations?”

  The glint was back in Hazel’s eyes. “That is the icing on the wedding cake.”

  The sisters stood side by side, staring at the narrow field of matrimonial possibility pinned to the armoire door. The pensive Barth stood out, untouched on all sides by an inch of reverent cork.

  “Look at him,” Hazel whispered. “Looks like he could walk right out of that picture.”

  “And you sound like you’re ready to walk right down the aisle. But I thought you said you got two letters today.”

  “Oh! How could I forget?” Hazel ran back to her desk and rifled through the pile of envelopes again. The one she selected was cream colored and obviously a heavier weight than the others. There had been a thin wax seal at its closure, and the paper itself made a rich brushing sound against the roughness of Hazel’s hands.

  “Listen to this: ‘My Dear Miss Allenhouse: Having seen your letter, I feel it is the sign I have been looking for, and I am compelled to meet you. I will be in Cleveland on business the week of the sixth. I will be staying at the Hollenden Hotel and would be most honored if you would join me for luncheon there on Monday afternoon. Given the circumstances, I will quite understand if you choose not to accompany me. However, it is my earnest prayer that you will grant me this chance to make your acquaintance, knowing full well I cannot expect any more than that. Warmest Regards, Alex Triplehorn.”

  Hazel topped off the reading with an uncharacteristic squeal. “Doesn’t he sound mysterious?”

  “He sounds…”—Vada searched for the word—“…forward.”

  “And dinner at the Hollenden?” She flung open the other side of the armoire. “What can I wear?”

  “You aren’t seriously considering going?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You cannot simply meet a man at a hotel for lunch. Not unchaperoned.”

  “So I’ll get a chaperone.”

  Vada laughed. “Doc doesn’t even know about this.” She ran her hand along the collection of clippings. “You can’t break it to him with an invitation to lunch.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about our father.” Hazel’s intense stare belied her true intention.

  “Oh no.” Vada held up her hands. “Two ladies at luncheon aren’t any more proper than one.”

  “Ah, but if one is accompanied by her fiancé…”

  “Stop calling him that.” Vada’s words came out harsher than she intended. “We are not engaged. We have an understanding.”

  “But—”

  “And that’s not the point. Garrison would never leave his office long enough to have lunch downtown.”

  “Not even for you?”

  “No.”

  Hazel laid her head on Vada’s shoulder. “Sure there’s nothing you can do to convince him?”

  “Oh, Hazel, feminine wiles would never work on Garrison.” Or at least she didn’t think so. She’d never actually tried.

  “Please, Vada.” Her sister took her in a full embrace. “No one’s ever wanted to take me to lunch before. Please?”

  Vada’s mind filled with images of ballrooms and parlors. Parties full of young people gathered around punch bowls and dance floors flashing beneath swirling skirts. All of it she remembered as a blur, as she had been the one spinning and laughing and dancing. And at the corner of her vision, Hazel sat with a cup of punch and a cookie balanced on her lap or standing in full view, trying not to look for a partner. Her dress permanently rumpled, her hair disheveled on one side, her face clinging to dignity.

  She sighed. “All right, Hazel. I’ll ask him.”

  “Oh! Thank you!” She gave Vada a final squeeze before she took a pushpin and impaled the cream-colored envelope right next to Barth’s portrait.

  3

  During the week, Molly Keegan controlled the Allenhouse kitchen with a fearsome Irish fist. She arrived before dawn each morning with a basketful of fresh eggs, butter, and cheese from her family’s small farm just outside of town and spent the day clattering pots and pans, slamming cupboards and drawers—all the while singing tales of heartbreak in her thick Irish brogue.

  But every Thursday night, promptly after serving the family supper, her meaty hand swiped the pay envelope from the kitchen counter and stomped out the back door, yelling over her shoulder that she’d be back Monday mornin’ if the good Lord willed it and the drink didn’t kill her.

  More than once the Allenhouse daughters implored her to leave a little something bubbling on the stove to get them through the week’s end, but she always refused, saying it was a sorry lot of girls they were that couldn’t stir a stew.

  So it was Vada who found herself rattling around, finding a few of Thursday’s sausage-stuffed corn muffins in a bowl covered with a blue-checked towel and the remnants of yesterday’s fish wrapped in waxed paper in the icebox. Four potatoes were left in the basket hanging above the icebox, a tin of peaches in the cupboard, and half of a blueberry cobbler in the pie safe.

  “It’ll have to do,” Vada muttered to herself. She lit the stove’s burner and put a pot of water on to boil. Just as she touched the knife to the first potato, the back door opened, ushering in the third of the Allenhouse sisters, her arms full of brown-wrapped packages.

  “Althea, let me help you with those!” Vada took the largest of the packages, feeling its familiar bulk within the coarse twine. “Pork roast?”

  Althea’s weary nod mirrored Vada’s lack of enthusiasm.

  “And let me guess. Ya
ms, turnips, and carrots?”

  Althea silently confirmed each item on the list, and the two busied themselves stowing the vegetables in the hanging basket and the roast in the icebox until the next morning, when all would be assembled in the oven to simmer while the family was at church.

  The Allenhouse girls knew how to prepare exactly four meals: the pork roast being one, followed by pot roast (with similar vegetable trimmings), fried bacon and eggs, and corned beef hash, provided they had leftover corned beef. It made for monotonous Sunday rotations, but to linger in the kitchen for the culinary tutelage of Molly Keegan meant being at the mercy of her unpredictable temper.

  Vada poured her sister a glass of water from the cool pewter jug and placed it on the table before resuming her chopping. “Anything interesting come over the wires today?”

  She spoke with her back to Althea, knowing full well she wouldn’t get an answer. Not that there was anything wrong with Althea’s ears. She could hear a whisper in a windstorm; she simply didn’t speak. She wasn’t a mute—not in any medical way. In fact, she had been a normal little girl, born when Vada was nearly five years old, and the older girl clung to memories of Althea’s little voice singing songs, counting pebbles, and wailing at childhood injustices. Most of all, Vada remembered the sound of Althea’s voice the morning the sisters woke up to find their mother gone.

  “Where’d Mama go?” Althea had asked. “Is she coming back?”

  Though Vada never asked about their mother, she had followed Doc day and night around the house, trailing his gloomy footsteps from one room to another, down to his basement exam room, and up again to the kitchen where he gave them bread and sliced cheese for supper three nights in a row.

  Then on the fourth night, sitting around a table full of empty, crumb-scattered dishes, he dragged his reddened face out of his hands and looked across the table at three little pleading faces. “She’s not coming back. Ever.”

  Young Vada and Hazel clasped each other’s hands, their feet swaying in tandem beneath the kitchen chairs, but Althea would not be silenced.

  “But why? But where? Papa? Papa!”

  Until the man rose to his terrible height. “Never!” he roared. “Never! Never! Never!” His fists slammed into the table with each repetition, making the dishes rattle and the crumbs jump off the plates. “And if you mention her again, I’ll throw the whole lot of you out to the wolves!”

  That was back when the family lived in a tiny town in southern Ohio—before the ugly rumors prompted the move to the city—and their father seemed just crazed enough to toss them into the whirling snow. So the little girls fell silent and remained hungry until the next morning when Dr. Allenhouse greeted each one with a hug and a kiss and a bowl of fluffy scrambled eggs.

  They’d breakfasted in silence, and for Althea, the silence continued. No amount of threat or cajoling or outright trickery could bring her to speak again. So she was the ideal employee at the telegraph office, never betraying the triumphs and tragedies that came across the wire to be typed onto precise yellow papers.

  Still, Vada always asked about Althea’s day, more to fill the silence than to seek information, and she smiled when she looked over her shoulder to see Althea running her finger along her tightly closed lips, the final say against any further prying.

  “Just as well.” Vada turned her attention to the chore at hand. “There’s enough excitement around here to keep a mind busy.”

  She prattled on, filling Althea in on Hazel’s newest correspondence and Monday’s lunch date, pausing only when Althea’s soft intake of breath warranted a face-to-face commiseration.

  “And the widow Thomas is here again.” Vada pointed down toward their father’s office with the knife. “I don’t know why Doc can’t see through that woman. She’s no sicker than I am, but maybe he likes the attention.”

  She turned to see Althea tapping the end of her nose.

  “I just hope the woman doesn’t plan to be asked to stay for dinner. It’s a pretty pathetic spread we have tonight.” Vada dropped the potatoes into the simmering water, added a generous shake of salt, and put a lid on the pot. “It’ll be hard enough to stretch it for the five of us. Speaking of which…” She wiped her hands on a tea towel and squinted at the clock on the wall. “It’s late. Did you see Lisette outside?”

  Althea offered an indulgent smile and shrugged one shoulder.

  “Honestly, that girl.” Vada strode through the swinging kitchen door, nearly colliding with the widow Thomas in the hall.

  “My goodness, dear.” The older woman reset her hat. “A lady really mustn’t charge through a room like a rampaging bull. Why, if Dr. Allenhouse were to see such behavior—”

  “I doubt my father would have much to say on how I conduct myself in my own home, Mrs. Thomas.” She ignored Mrs. Thomas’s breathy retort and opened the door, swinging it wide enough to usher the widow out.

  The woman’s nattering decreased with each stomp down the concrete steps. Vada stood in the open doorway, arms folded against the cool spring evening. She intended to stay long enough to see Mrs. Thomas round the corner but regretted her decision when she saw the look on the woman’s face as Lisette turned onto their street.

  The girl, as usual, sailed along in a sea of young suitors—half-a-dozen young men all jockeying for position to see who could walk closest to her, shielding her from the dangers lurking at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Lisette was seventeen years old, her hair a mass of caramel curls, long and loose down her back, held from her face by a burgundy velvet ribbon at her crown. Her wide pink lips were turned down in a pout, even as her eyes, dark and sparkling, danced with mischief.

  She stopped in her tracks, causing the boys who followed to nearly collide with each other in her wake, and whispered something that made the tallest of the six clutch his heart in mock agony while the others exploded in laughter.

  It was at just this moment that the little group crossed paths with Mrs. Thomas, and even from this distance, Vada could sense the woman’s disapproval.

  Lisette managed to hold a contrite expression until Mrs. Thomas turned the corner, but the minute the train of the unpleasant woman’s skirt disappeared, the youthful party exploded in new mirth.

  “Lisette Allenhouse!” Vada shouted from the top step. “Supper’s on the table.”

  The flotilla continued in strolling lockstep until Lisette had one foot on the bottom step and pivoted to dismiss her faithful tugs. “Good night, boys.” She turned her back, gathered her skirt in one hand, and skipped up the stairs. She barely acknowledged the sister who followed in her wake as she washed through the front door.

  “Where have you been all day?” Vada took the girl’s straw boater with its long blue ribbon and hung it on the hat tree in the hall. “And don’t tell me you’ve been to the library because I know that wasn’t a study group I just witnessed.”

  “Honestly, Vada. You’re too young to be such a nag.” Lisette tossed the words over her shoulder on her way to the stairs.

  “What about supper?”

  “Ugh.” Lisette clutched her stomach and leaned against the banister. “I couldn’t eat a thing. The Britton twins were arguing over who would buy me an ice cream soda, so I had two. One vanilla and one strawberry. If I keep this up, I’ll be as fat as Hazel.”

  Vada chose to ignore the comment. She’d had enough conflict for one day.

  “Well then, at least come in and have a cup of tea with us.” It was a halfhearted invitation, considering how the girl was sure to ridicule the spread in the kitchen.

  “Mary Winston is having a birthday party tonight.” Lisette backed up a step or two. “Did Molly press my dress?”

  “Only if you brought it down to the kitchen.”

  “Drat!” Lisette spun on her toe and rushed up the stairs, her hair a bouncing cascade down her back.

  “Watch your language!”

  But by that time Lisette was at the top of the landing, and the next sound was the
slamming of her bedroom door.

  Moments later, Vada was back in the kitchen, draining the cooked potatoes and tossing them with the last of the cream. Althea came up behind her and silently added salt, pepper, and a handful of dried chives. Hazel made her familiar boisterous entrance, and Vada set her to work flaking the meat off the leftover fish, which she tossed in with the potatoes. The happy find of a small tin of peas completed the dish that, in the capable hands of Molly Keegan, might have been an enticing chowder. Instead, it was an irregular mass of gradient bits that didn’t even have the courtesy to steam as it was ladled onto the cheap daily ware plates.

  “Good evening, girls.” Their father’s entrance was, as usual, without fanfare. He wore a brown rumpled suit that complemented his pale rumpled face.

  The photograph of him taken upon the day of his university graduation showed him to have been handsome, if boyishly soft. Now the softness had gathered into little pockets beneath his eyes, and anything left of it was obscured behind a face full of whiskers. “We’re eating in the kitchen tonight?”

  “It’s Saturday, Doc.” Vada handed a fork to each one as she took her place.

  Hazel plunked the peaches—still in the can—in the middle of the plain, sturdy table. “No need to make fuss with fancy dishes in the dining room for a meal like this.”

  Vada winced at the comment. “Without Molly here to help with the cleanup—”

  Doc closed his hand around hers as he took his fork. “It was a simple question. No more.” He gave something just short of a squeeze before making his way to the head of the table, stopping to plant a brief kiss on the top of Althea’s head.

  When all were seated, he held out his hands and, one by one, each sister grasped the other’s, with Vada stretching her arm to reach Hazel’s across Lisette’s empty place. Doc raised one thick eyebrow in acknowledgment of the absence.

  “She’ll be eating later,” Vada said. “At a birthday party.”

  Doc’s eyebrow nestled back into place without question, and each of the sisters bowed her head.