No Place for a Lady

by Vivian Vaughan

  “Then when you’re elected President, goddamnit, pass a law. Until then stay out of my business. Go back to Boston.”

  “I will, Morley. Just as soon as I have your signature on these papers.” Slipping the handle of her parasol under an armpit, Madolyn rummaged through her reticule. “I have them right here.”

  Twelve

  Until challenged by an obstinate brother, Madolyn hadn’t known she possessed such persuasive powers. Not that Morley signed the papers, he didn’t. But before she left the ranch, he did show a whisker of his old self, a touch, however slight, of the affection he once felt for her.

  What an encouragement that had been! One day she would have Morley back to his old self. She hadn’t really believed he was like Papa. She hadn’t wanted to believe such a heinous thing. But Morley possessed a temper, no doubt about that. She watched him struggle to control it when she withdrew the papers.

  “I told you, goddamnit—”

  Carlita came out the back door at that moment, stopping Morley’s tirade in midsentence. She wore the same black dress and apron and the same wary expression as on Madolyn’s first visit. At sight of Morley, she stopped in her tracks. When her wariness turned to fright, Madolyn’s stomach bunched in a knot. Morley couldn’t, he just couldn’t, have turned out like their father. But of course he could have.

  Clements passed Madolyn, carrying an oversized crate on his shoulder. “This here’s the last one, Miss Maddie.”

  “You uncrated and assembled everything?”

  “Yes’um.”

  “What in tarnation’s goin’ on?” Morley shouted.

  Anticipation eased Madolyn’s anxieties. Thrusting the papers she so desperately wanted him to sign into his hands, she took off after Clements.

  Carlita continued to wring her hands on her apron. She shook her head vigorously when Madolyn approached. “No, no.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  Carlita cast a furtive glance toward the hut. “No, no.”

  Madolyn’s heart sank, but she graciously attempted to soothe the woman’s concern. It was, after all, Carlita’s home. “Then we shall send it back for another, Carlita.” Inside the earthen-floored adobe, the remembered aroma of peppers and spices welcomed her.

  There it stood. Not a fancy dining table, but looking for all the world like one, here in these primitive surroundings. With all three leaves in place, the table took up most of the room. “Perhaps you would like it better without these.” Madolyn grasped one of the leaves, prepared to remove it, but Carlita stopped her by flattening both work-scarred hands on the leaf.

  “No.”

  “But you said…?”

  “What in tarnation’s goin’ on?” Morley bellowed from the doorway. Madolyn’s precious papers were fluttering in his limp hand. His eyes fairly popped from his head. She ignored him.

  “I know it takes up a lot of room,” she told Carlita, “but with ten chairs— I mean, you only need eight unless I or someone…The extra two chairs are for company.”

  “We don’t have company!” Morley bellowed. She tossed a calm smile his way.

  “Then it’s time you started.”

  After what felt like one full minute, every second meant to intimidate, Morley turned his attention to the crates stacked on the floor beyond the table. Clements had opened them, but for some reason, Clara and Betsy stood by, holding them closed.

  Madolyn’s disappointment evaporated at the expectant expressions in their wide green eyes. “Here, here, let’s get these things open, girls.”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Morley bawled. But she ignored him, again. That was one thing she was good at, one thing she had learned on her own without Miss Abigail’s tutelage—how to ignore belligerent men.

  Moving Clara aside, Madolyn opened the first box and began emptying the contents onto the new table. “Piece goods,” she explained to Carlita. “For dresses and shirts for the boys.”

  At the bottom of that box were the shoes. When she handed the girls each a pair of brown leather shoes, their reticence vanished. Each little girl sat on the earthen floor and began to stuff her dirty little feet into them.

  “Wait, girls.”

  In unison the girls looked up at her, their eyes round at the prospect of having their prizes taken away.

  “I ordered stockings. Let’s find the stockings.”

  “So, you’re broke, are you?” Morley accused, still from the doorway. “I told Grant you were an impostor.”

  Madolyn tensed. She wasn’t actually afraid of Morley; at least, she didn’t want to be. But good sense prevailed, and she decided to wait for another day to break the news that he, not she, had paid for every item in the room.

  Trembling inside, she nevertheless managed to smile sweetly. “The pittance these things cost wouldn’t go far in providing me a secure future, Morley.”

  “Spend your last dime, then. See if I care.” He tossed the papers to the new table and turned to leave. “Go back to Boston, Maddie.”

  “You signed—”

  “I ain’t signin’ nothin’.”

  Behind her, the girls’ whispers tugged at her heart. Morley stomped away from the hut. Don’t sign them, she thought. You’ll pay for it, Morley Sinclair. This family needed so many things she didn’t know where to start, what to order from Abilene next.

  But what they needed most was love and security, patience and compassion. Even after she returned to Buck, Madolyn was plagued by the haunted look on Carlita’s face—gratitude that someone was doing something for her children, uneasiness that she was breaking all the rules.

  When Morley was out of earshot, Madolyn restated her willingness to exchange the table for one that suited Carlita.

  “No, gracias. Está hermosa.” She ran callused hands over the leaf. Her smile was wistful. Her eyes anxious, yet proud.

  “Beautiful,” Madolyn translated quietly, glad that on this day she had understood one positive word spoken by her family.

  The girls alternated between running circles around the table in their new shoes and sitting in one, then another of the new chairs.

  “It is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Carlita’s wistful eyes were even more expressive than her chantlike repetition. “But you do not understand,” Carlita explained in halting English. “You cannot change our life.”

  “He’s my brother. As badly as I hate to admit it, much of his abominable behavior was learned at home. Not his swearing, mind you. Mother wouldn’t have stood for that. But the way he treats you, well, our father treated our mother much the same. Some people claim such dastardly traits are inherited.”

  “How he treats me?” Carlita quizzed with bowed head, as though to utter a simple question were a breach of conduct.

  “You’re submissive,” Madolyn explained. “The girls, too.”

  Carlita’s head came up. “We are servants.”

  “Servants?” Madolyn was horrified. “You are the mother of his children. No decent man would treat you like a servant. No decent man would refuse to allow his children to be educated, or deny his family a proper home to live in, when he spends five hundred dollars for a horse.”

  Carlita shrugged.

  “With your help, Carlita, I shall right those wrongs. Before I leave this place your life will be eased and my nieces and nephews will be educated.”

  Carlita’s black eyes begged. “Please, señorita, leave us to our life. Do not give Morley cause to send us away.”

  “Send you away?”

  Carlita clutched her girls to her skirts. “My girls and me, señorita. The boys, he would keep to work the ranch. But my girls and me…we have no place to go.”

  Madolyn struggled to contain her outrage. “Send you away? You are his…” Rage swallowed embarrassment. “You’re the mother of his children.” Her gaze dropped to the girls. “His precious daughters. He couldn’t send you away. Not even the son of our father could be so hateful.”

  Carlita straightened her shoulders a bit.
“It is not so hateful, señorita. We are servants…”

  “You are not servants…”

  “Sí. It is not to be ashamed of; it is the way things are.”

  “The way things are! Not to claim one’s children? Not to care what happens to them? Not to want them to have better lives?”

  Carlita shrugged.

  “Why, he has you so frightened you won’t even eat at the table with him. Or the girls.”

  “In my country it is the way.”

  Madolyn doubted that. A place where women were more downtrodden than in America? Little green eyes peered at her from the girls’ precious faces. “You’re not my servant, Carlita. Call me Maddie, uh, Madolyn or something. I’m your sister-in-law, or I will be—”

  She stopped. Perhaps she should wait a while longer before she tackled their living arrangement. As though he were inside her head, she could hear Tyler accusing her of meddling. Perhaps she was. But it was for a good cause.

  The children did not arrive for school one week later. Not that Madolyn had expected them; but she was sorely disappointed. In an effort to right matters, she telegraphed another order to Abilene, this one for beds—one large enough for the boys to share, one for the girls. A second telegram to Lyman Bridges of Chicago requested a price list for their mail-order houses. Morley and Carlita simply had to have a larger house; the size of the dining table proved that. After Tyler explained the reason for so much adobe—lack of trees for lumber—she realized a mail-order house would fit the bill perfectly—Morley’s bill, she thought with a smile, albeit, a short-lived one.

  She could not dispel the gloom engendered by Carlita’s fear—realistic or not—that Morley could send her and the girls away at the drop of a hat. How utterly inhumane.

  During the following weeks, while she worked day and night to get the Buck-Horn Reunited Society off the ground, Madolyn never once lost sight of her vow to see Morley and Carlita legally married before she returned to Boston. Perhaps Carlita’s fears would diminish, once she was married.

  Then again, perhaps they wouldn’t. Madolyn’s mother’s fears never diminished, not until the day she died. Which proved the point: men were no damned good. And husbands headed the list.

  It took three meetings of the Buck-Horn Reunited Society for the women to become comfortable with the idea of keeping secrets from their husbands.

  “I have never kept a single thing from Willard in all our twenty years of marriage.” Frances Arndt, the parson’s wife, voiced her concerns immediately upon setting foot in the third-floor workroom. “I’m sure it goes against the Bible.”

  “The Bible says to honor thy father and mother, not thy husband,” Madolyn returned.

  “It’s a matter of interpretation,” Frances insisted.

  Camilla Crane squinted down the bridge of a knobby nose to thread her quilting needle. “It also says not to bear false witness.”

  “You aren’t bearing false witness,” Madolyn argued.

  In unison the women glanced up from the wedding-ring quilt that stretched on a frame between them. They eyed each other, then turned astonished expressions on Madolyn.

  “Didn’t you tell them we’re making a quilt to raffle off at the fall bake sale?” She tried to concentrate on the quilt, repositioning the needle before she pulled it through the layers of fabric and batting. Although her stitches were not as uniform as Frances Arndt’s, who sat beside her, Madolyn had known in advance that to become one with the group, she would have to participate in their activities.

  Besides, Loretta James had decided to postpone her vacation until after the demonstration. With school out, she eagerly joined the quilting session. “Independence Day! What a perfect day for the march. I couldn’t leave town at such an important time. Why, I would feel like an outsider when I returned.”

  “Wonderful,” Madolyn had replied. “We can use your help.” She liked Loretta, she really did, but watching the care the schoolmarm took with every stitch on the wedding ring pattern, Madolyn suspected that more was at stake here than bringing the founding fathers to their knees.

  Unless it were one particular founding father, brought to one particular knee. She stabbed her needle through the quilt top, batting, and lining, trying to dispel the sickening image of Loretta and Tyler.

  “Aren’t we making a quilt to raffle at fall bake sale?” she asked, again rhetorically.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Don’t you always make a quilt to raffle at the bake sale?”

  “Yes, we do, but—”

  “What if they ask where we’re making it?” Camilla quizzed. Worried glances darted from woman to woman.

  “I doubt they will,” Madolyn argued. “Since making a quilt is an annual project, they will assume you are quilting in the same place.” She paused, needle poised, to consider. “Where is that? In case someone asks.”

  “At the parsonage,” Frances supplied.

  “And here we are hiding out at the local house of ill repute.” Murmurs spread in a wave around the perimeter of the quilt. Madolyn was glad Goldie had declined to join them.

  “No offense, Maddie,” Hattie Jasper, wife of the mercantile owner, added. “We know you had no choice.”

  No choice? Indeed, she hadn’t had a choice. Tyler brought her here under false pretenses. He tried to use her to get back at her brother, then to persuade her to take his side against reuniting the town. Yet, through it all, she realized the thing she had the least choice about, no choice, actually, was the perfidious way she felt, light-headed and sort of free, when they were together.

  He asked her not to leave town before he returned. In that, she had no choice, either, for if the town were reunited today and a train came tomorrow, she couldn’t take it. She had no choice. She couldn’t leave without seeing him again.

  “No choice?” Madolyn echoed, with such vigor the women started. “That is exactly the point. If the division of Buckhorn had been fair, as the men claim, I would have found lodging at a hotel, and we wouldn’t have to meet in secret.” And I might not have met Tyler Grant.

  Another hum of disquietude coursed through the room.

  “It’s for a good cause,” she retorted, scarcely able to conceal her mounting impatience.

  “I doubt my Owen would see it that way,” Hattie whined.

  “Indeed he wouldn’t,” Madolyn agreed. “That is precisely the reason the world needs changing, ladies. Men control our lives. That simply is not acceptable.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Inez Bradford chimed in. “You don’t have a husband to worry about.”

  “For good reason,” Madolyn replied, lifting her eyes from the wedding-ring quilt. “I chose not to subjugate myself to another human being.”

  Loretta James’s black eyes flew to Madolyn’s, while the married women favored one another with a kinship Madolyn realized quite suddenly she would never feel. Well, good riddance. She did not need marriage and its attendant horrors.

  “It isn’t all bad,” Inez ventured.

  “No, it isn’t. If I hadn’t married Owen, I wouldn’t have little Huey and Margaret Elizabeth.”

  “Without Victor I wouldn’t have my children, either. But on a more selfish note, I kinda enjoy havin’ a man to fuss over.”

  Nods of understanding were followed by Camilla’s adding, “And someone to sit with after the evening meal is done and the dishes washed. Someone to share the day’s activities with.”

  “Someone to paddle the boys when they need it,” laughed Inez.

  Madolyn didn’t remind her that without her husband, she wouldn’t have four rapidly growing boys to need paddling. Morley, blast him, had proved for all to see, that right or wrong a woman did not have to be married to bear children.

  The indecency of it never failed to bring a spot of heat to Madolyn’s cheeks. And a pain to her heart. Her brother, father to six illegitimate children! Even her own father couldn’t claim such a travesty. At least, not that the family ever knew.

  As the d
ays passed, the quilt progressed nicely, but Madolyn was even more pleased with the way the women’s attitudes progressed. While they stitched, she read them articles written by Miss Abigail and other suffragette leaders across the country. Not that the women of Buck agreed with all the ideas, but a lively discussion developed, and day by day they learned to speak their minds—on the third floor of the local house of ill repute, leastways.

  Their confidence gained, the time had come to move on. A week after the clandestine meetings began, the ladies climbed the back stairs of the House of Negotiable Love to discover that their unfinished quilt had been carefully folded and put away, the quilting frame dismantled. In its place, Clements had erected a worktable; Madolyn provided the paints, brushes and canvas, ordered from Saint Louis.

  Goldie stood beside Madolyn, greeting each woman as she entered. It was Goldie’s first meeting since the schoolhouse. She wore a high-collared white batiste waist with vertical tucks and a black faille skirt, the creations of Frances Arndt.

  “I’m not much of a quilter,” Goldie had offered as an excuse every time Madolyn invited her to join the group. Lucky finally explained the reason Goldie refused to attend.

  “Ain’t got but one street dress. Says that bright pink outfit she wore to the schoolhouse wouldn’t be fittin’ for receivin’ ladyfolk in her own home.”

  “Excuses,” Madolyn exclaimed. But Lucky had a point. And certainly none of the women would be comfortable if Goldie wore her brassy gold kimono.

  Upon learning that Frances Arndt took in sewing, Madolyn realized she had found a solution. When she approached her privately about fashioning something for Goldie to wear, the parson’s wife agreed to sew a few garments for the madam, if Madolyn could obtain her requirements.

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t want to come to the parsonage to be measured.”

  Taken aback, Madolyn squelched the temptation to inquire how, if a madam wasn’t welcome at the parsonage, her soul could ever be saved, but she held her tongue. Their work was cut out for them, and without cooperation among the women, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reunite the town.