Compromise with Sin

by Leanna Englert

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door. “We’ll fix this. No one will know.”

  “Stop! What are you—? No!” She kicked at his ankle, striking his boot.

  When he turned toward her, she struck a backhanded blow to his chin. She clutched her throbbing knuckles and watched blood trickle from his chin, scratched by her ring.

  “Damn you,” his guttural words came out almost as a growl.

  “Get out!”

  His face relaxed into a self-satisfied expression as he dabbed at his chin with a handkerchief. “This will heal in a few days. But that . . .” He pointed at her belly.

  Fear seized Louise with a sensation that her skin was shrinking. She was about to slam the door behind Doc when a fresh stack of books on the wicker table outside the door caught her attention. She flipped open the book on top of the stack, but there was no check-out slip on the inside cover. Frantic to know who left the books, she examined the three that remained. None belonged to the library. Someone had donated them, but who? If some gossip had overheard her fighting with Doc, she would become the laughingstock of Riverbend, Nebraska.

  She collapsed on the sofa, her hand over her eyes as though she could shield herself from the thoughts that assaulted her. What would make Doc change his mind? Threaten to tell his wife? She couldn’t. Withdrawing her affection might work, not that she even wanted his affection any longer. But a baby needed a father. God pity the bastard child. And her reputation was at stake.

  A thought she hadn’t dared to consider presented itself. Maybe she would lose this baby, like the others. Tears began to flow, and soon the sound of her own racking sobs assailed her ears, alien sounds that seemed to belong to someone else. And when the tears were spent, the darkest self-loathing followed. “Daughter of the devil.” Betraying a husband who had been more than just a good provider. Frank awakening her in the night to go outside and see the magical northern lights. Sitting at her sickbed and telling stories to cheer her. He had never raised a hand to her except on one occasion when he was drunk. And when he learned the next day that her bruises had been caused by his hand, he was genuinely remorseful. No marriage was perfect. Would he let her bear another man’s child and raise it as his own? What if he threw her out? The home for unwed mothers in Omaha—she could go there to have the baby. But they would make her give it up. No, better to go somewhere and pretend to be a widow. Her rainy day fund would provide support for the duration of her confinement but not much longer. Such thoughts had presented themselves before, but she banished them. Now their gravity held her in its gray stillness long after the fire sputtered its last.

  It was getting dark. Frank would worry if she did not arrive home soon. Home, a place she’d come to think of as temporary. She stood and shook off pins and needles in limbs that had gone to sleep.

  She collected her hat and handbag and began buttoning her coat, one she had worn against her better judgment. The red, fitted coat, her favorite, had a curly black lamb collar and cuffs, and solid brass buttons. One of the buttons loosened when she tugged it to meet the buttonhole over her bosom. I waited too long to tell Doc.

  It was futile to dwell on what might have been. She directed her thoughts to the practical matter of the button. It would need reinforcing before she wore the coat again. But then it occurred to her that, given her expanding figure and the necessity of going into her confinement, she would have to put the coat away until next year. Next year? Would she actually have a baby? Would she be with Doc? Or with Frank? Alone?

  She was out in the hall and locking the door when she heard Doc approach.

  His voice was velvet, the tone that had always signaled the preamble to lovemaking. “Louise, my dear, I am so sorry.”

  He placed his hand over hers and unlocked the door. With a hand on the small of her back, he guided her into the library.

  Did she dare to hope he had changed his mind? She saw the scratch on his chin.

  He frowned. “How long has the fire been out? You must be chilled to the bone.”

  His concern touched and confounded her. It was so like him to soften her in this way. “Why did you come back?”

  “I lashed out in anger, said some things I wish I could take back. Please, my dear, may we sit down?”

  Louise presumed he meant the sofa, but instead he guided her to the large reading table, seated her, and took the chair across from her.

  “Have you considered what you will do?” he asked.

  He sat less than an arm’s length away, yet she felt stranded alone with the baby—their baby. The table dividing them might as well have been a chasm. Does he care if I fall . . . and the baby?

  “I’m at a loss,” she said. “What I believed turned out to be a myth.” She fingered the loose button on her coat. “You’re not the man I thought I knew.” She paused, knowing what she was about to say was false, but she was grasping for an accusation, some way to strike back. Her breathing grew shallow. “I question if there even was a faculty position. Perhaps it was just a ploy to keep me from ending our affair.”

  He took her hand. “Of course it was real. I had every intention of taking the position, getting a divorce, and having you with me as my wife.”

  Louise heard a plea in his voice. Had he not said those words—“my wife”—she might have been able to hold back tears. She retrieved her handbag and fumbled for her handkerchief, forgetting until her hand touched it that it was wet. She slammed her handbag on the reading table. The loose button fell to the floor.

  Doc seemed not to notice. He stood. “I found you irresistible because you were a strong, rational woman, my dear, not like most of your sex. Face the facts. You are in a predicament, and . . .” he paused, seemingly reluctant to go on.

  You are in a predicament. Now it flashed before her, all the object lessons of women in life and literature who had fallen prey to a man’s charms only to be left alone with their “predicament.”

  “Louise, there’s a risk, a strong possibility of a medical complication. There’s no good way out. Come, we shall dispose of this burden—”

  She stood, her hands on the table, and leaned toward him. “So now, it’s a ‘medical complication,’ is it? This ‘burden’ you speak of is a child. Do you know how I’ve longed to have a child?”

  “A child you cannot explain to an impotent husband? Possibly a child who’s impaired? Summon your wits, woman.”

  “Impaired? Now you’re sounding desperate.”

  “Have it your way.” Doc walked toward her, bent down, and picked up the button. He gave it to her, letting his hand linger so that for a moment they held it together. He didn’t speak, but his eyes said it all: time was running out.

  He gestured toward the stove. “Oil those hinges.”

  2

  December 1894

  The night after the confrontation with Doc, Louise became a woman on a mission. As was their custom after supper Frank retreated to his cluttered den to work on his latest obsession, a contraption he called the Whirlwind Maid. On its top would be compartments to hold various cleaning supplies, and underneath, a motorized canister with a hose for collecting dirt. He would harness electricity so that one maid could do the housekeeping chores of two, rendering the sweeper, broom, and rug beater obsolete.

  “Poetry in motion” was how Frank envisioned vacuuming with his Whirlwind Maid, a product that would outperform and outclass the Hoover, a noisy, ugly bag-on-a-stick with a trailing power cord that could trip its operator.

  The scene in the back parlor, Louise’s domain, was one of domestic tranquility. Walnut beadboard wainscoting with blue toile-patterned wallpaper above. Grandfather clock in one corner, upright piano in another. Under the glow of an electric lamp, Louise sat wrapped in a crocheted afghan in her upholstered chair, her feet propped on an ottoman. Holding a pillowcase clamped in an embroidery hoop, she worked a needle threaded with orange floss in and out, laying down back stitches for the outline of a butterfly.

  The clock ch
imed, and she flinched. She’d always wanted to silence that clock, which Frank’s father had named “Goliath.” Silence its nagging—hurry, wait, too late, get caught up, kill time, time is running out.

  She took some deep breaths, stuck her needle in the arm of the chair, flexed her fingers, and examined her progress. The daisy and back stitches passed inspection, but she ripped out the satin-stitched leaves. To produce perfectly aligned stitches required a tranquil mind and steady hand, a state she might never know again.

  Most nights, Frank would have begun drinking by now. But sometimes when he lost himself in a project he might abstain for a week or more, as though intoxicated by the project itself. Perversely, tonight, she worried that her husband’s ebullient mood could work to her disadvantage.

  Butterflies were taking shape on the pillowcase, but eventually even the daisy and back stitches went awry. To kill some more time she cut enough workable lengths of embroidery floss to finish the pillowcases and threaded several needles. As Frank would say, “Fish or cut bait.”

  The clock chimed ten-thirty, and Frank had not yet ventured to the liquor cabinet, so she got up and poured a glass of brandy. As she approached the den, her breathing grew shallow.

  He sat at his desk, his back to the door. There was a reason he called this room “The Repository of Everything.” So naming it might elevate its status in his mind, but to Louise it was a dump. She threaded her way through the maze of tools that had migrated from the workshop, rolls of linoleum, stacks of National Geographic Magazine, and chests stuffed so full of goodness-knows-what that their lids wouldn’t close.

  He looked up and smiled.

  His lopsided smile, the look of innocence, caused Louise to waver. Could she really follow through with her plan? “Here.” She handed him the brandy. “You need to relax. You’ll work yourself to exhaustion.”

  He took the glass. “What a welcome surprise. I’d have thought you’d be in bed by now.”

  “I’m too engrossed in my needlework. I can’t rest until I get it just right.”

  It was very late when Louise delivered the fourth brandy. She leaned over to set the snifter on his desk, hesitated, then deliberately and brazenly brushed her breast against his cheek. “Mmm.” She had never before played the seductress. The boldness of it frightened her, but the thought of failure frightened her even more. She pressed against him, played with his ear, and caressed his sandy-colored hair.

  He set down his pencil and turned in his chair toward her. In reaching for her, his hand hit the snifter, which Louise managed to keep from toppling. Breathing heavily, he pulled her onto his lap and made a droning noise as he nuzzled her neck. “Aren’t you the vixen tonight?” His words were garbled.

  Finally he led her by the hand to their bed. Any other night she would have resisted his drunken passion, his sloppy wet kisses, and pawing hands. But tonight she held her breath and hoped she could arouse him and he could perform.

  He rubbed himself against her, then rose on his knees and probed and thrust. He repeated the action several times, grunting with the effort. Louise even tried to guide his flaccid member, but he never got hard enough to penetrate her. He pushed himself off and fell to the floor.

  Moonlight illuminated his clumsy effort to get to his feet and find his balance. Suddenly he lunged forward and threw his fist against the wall.

  He weaved back toward the bed. “You’re not half the woman you used to be.” His slurred speech sounded more pathetic than damning. “Don’t start what you can’t finish.”

  Louise longed to escape in sleep but lay trapped next to the leaden, snoring presence of her husband. She should have bought one of the potions advertised to restore a man’s vigor. Any further attempt to seduce him would be futile, for he had been sufficiently sober to remember failing.

  She ached to have this baby. Maybe it would fill the hollow she carried from her childhood. In a home without love, she had experienced the emotion for the first time after the birth of her baby brother, Malachi. The hollow was left after a part of her stayed in the makeshift grave where she helped bury him. And then her mother gave her two more babies to care for and love. And bury.

  Frank had wanted children as much as she. The first time she was with child, he had dropped everything and built an oak rocking chair. But one day not long after her condition was beginning to show, she lost the baby. That night, awakened by a creaking sound, she had reached for her husband, but her hand fell on the rumpled quilt where he should have lain. When fully awake she heard the creak of the rocker and his muffled weeping.

  The second time, he fussed over her, patting her knee and issuing sweet reprimands to stay put while he fetched her book or embroidery hoop or shawl. The loss of that baby drove them inconsolably into one another’s arms. In the space that remained once they parted hung lingering, unspoken questions, heavy as a broken promise.

  In the gray dawn, the day after Louise’s failed attempt to seduce her husband, desperation drove her to a decision. Abhorrent as it was, she would go to Doc and have him “dispose of this burden.” Once the queasiness subsided, she would get up to put on her robe, but for now she sat on the edge of the bed. Fully awake, she noticed a tinkling on the windowpanes. Sleet? Not today. But the staccato on the windows intensified, announcing a crippling storm. She went to the window and looked at the ice-glazed trees. Only a fool would venture out.

  Louise was a practical woman, not one to look for omens, much less be swayed by them. But once again, weather was determining her destiny. Had it not been for a deadly tornado, she and Doc would not have been thrust into each other’s lives. And had it not been for this winter storm, she would have single-mindedly pursued her plan. Instead, the storm knocked her off course, so that in place of a mental roadmap there was now a blank space for her mind to wander, and the wandering led to a new plan. It would require some preparation.

  As it happened, that night Frank wanted to retire early, exhausted from a day spent dealing with the ice storm’s aftermath. Louise turned back the bed covers and placed two flannel-wrapped hot bricks at the foot of the bed. Feeling responsible for last night’s failed lovemaking, she could not look at him directly but watched from the corner of her eye as he unbuttoned his shirt. He avoided looking at her as well, and she regretted having set him up for what must have been a terrible blow to his manhood.

  Tonight going through the motions of her bedtime ritual felt unfamiliar and awkward. As she pulled the bench out from her dressing table, its screech on the wood floor seemed unusually shrill. Before sitting down she neglected to hike up her nightgown so that when she sat its high collar nearly choked her, and she squirmed to free it. Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt her mouth fill with excess saliva. She swallowed, reminded herself that everything was in place, and picked up her hairbrush. But tonight she began brushing without counting.

  In the mirror she watched Frank take his nightshirt from its hook on the closet door. Willing herself to keep the gravity of the moment out of her voice, she said, “Do you remember the night a few months ago when you played poker at J.D.’s?”

  Frank answered without looking her way. “Those horse-thieves cleaned me out.”

  “Yonder brought you home.” She made a face. “You smelled of beer and sardines.”

  Frank slipped the nightshirt over his head. “I remember the next morning. Figured you had hit me with a sledgehammer, and I passed out.”

  Louise noticed his bruised knuckles, injured from hitting the wall the night before. Would his memory of failure thwart her plan tonight? “You didn’t pass out immediately.”

  He looked sideways at her mirror image and shrugged. “I was three sheets to the wind. What a man does when he’s drinking—”

  “Don’t be sorry.” Louise set her carved ivory hairbrush on the dresser and smiled into the mirror. “We’ve always wanted a child.”

  Midway toward joining a button and buttonhole of his nightshirt, Frank’s hands froze. “That can’t be, I .
. .”

  Still looking at his mirrored image, Louise said, “You were crazed with passion.”

  He looked away, then back again, his gaze thoughtful. He took a little breath as though about to speak but remained silent.

  So as not to appear overly anxious, Louise rearranged her brush, comb, and hand mirror on the dressing table before placing a hand on her bodice. “You even tore my nightgown.”

  He looked at her reflected hand. “I’m sorry. I hope—”

  “Not this one. My favorite baby-blue one.”

  Louise went to him and buttoned the open placket of his nightshirt, a simple act that felt awkwardly intimate. She smiled. “I hope you’re as happy as I am.”

  Unable to still her fluttering eyelids, she turned from him to plump their pillows. Frank had learned long ago to read her telltale eyes. “It’s that thing you do with your eyelids,” he had said the day he challenged her story about growing up rich and losing her family and fortune in a prairie fire.

  As they lay in bed in a spooned embrace, Louise sought with her feet the comfort of a hot brick. Her breathing eased, the knots in her shoulders relaxed, and her head settled into the pillow. Frank’s callused hand slipped between her breast and arm. What had once been their customary way of lying together now felt almost like a violation, as though his were the hands of a stranger. Too many of the ways of knowing one another had withered from neglect.

  He nuzzled her neck. “Francis Joseph Morrissey Jr.”

  At the breakfast table the next morning, Louise picked at the pork chop, applesauce, and fried potatoes on her plate. Now that Frank knew of her condition she could tell Henryetta, her cook and housekeeper, to prepare lighter fare.

  Louise sat across from Frank, or rather across from the newspaper he held like a shield, dropping it only to pluck sugar cubes from the bowl and stir them into his coffee. Slurping sounds and the clink of the Blue Willow china cup against saucer interrupted the rhythmic taps of fork against plate.