One Hundred Years of Marriage (12 page)

“Oh, of course.” If she could sell the hat and the cake stand too, it would be a good week and this was only Sunday. She’d pay the bill at Sawyer’s and order some hat frames. She smiled at Mrs. Winberg.

“Howdy,” Wendell had come up behind her. His collar button was undone and he smelled a little sweaty from grinding one of the ice cream churns.

“Oh. Mrs. Winberg, have you met my brother, Wendell Jenkins?”

“Ah, I see this fine young man at church.”

“How’d ya do,” Wendell said and lifted his white straw. He turned to Victoria. “Vic, I saw— this morning I saw Father give—”

“He gave me a nickel to go buy him a newspaper.”

Wendell tipped his hat again and left. Victoria felt the heat of humiliation in her face. Why hadn’t she thought fast enough to send Wendell off on some errand, anything to postpone his pathetic begging until they were out of earshot of Mrs. Winberg? He was old enough to know better. Of course, he only wanted to have a root beer with the other boys, and she, the big sister should have had a nickel in her pocket, and now Mrs. Winberg, a good customer, knew she hadn’t even that.

“Miss Jenkins,” Mrs. Winberg said, seeming to have taken no notice of her embarrassment. “I have a great favor to ask.”

“Of course.” Ah well, even if the cake stand didn’t sell, this might be a good week.

“I want you to walk with me around to Station Street.”

“Now? Certainly.” She offered her arm to Mrs. Winberg who took a good grip on it, and they moved swaying through the crowd out into the road.

“You have such good eyes, Miss Jenkins. Artist eyes. I want you to give me a frank opinion on a house.”

There was only one house on Station Street they could be going to see. One of the oldest houses in Chisholm, it had once belonged to a doctor and had been standing empty for years. This house was so surrounded by overgrown evergreens, it had nearly vanished from sight of the street. The rumor was the price was too high, so after awhile the public had condemned the house as too dark for habitation.

To Victoria’s surprise when they reached the house, Hortense Winberg pushed through the cedar bows, continued right up onto the porch and reached into her huge pocketbook to withdraw a key. As she worked the key in the old lock, she spoke as though the ideas were just coming to her. “This might make a nice house for Karl, you think?”

“It’s awfully large,” Victoria murmured hoping they could turn back.

“He needs his own house vonce he takes a vife. A new vife should have her own house. This is so, Miss Jenkins?”

The lock was jammed.

“Perhaps we should go,” Victoria said, but Mrs. Winberg kept twisting the key. Finally the lock relented and Mrs. Winberg burst into the front hall with a great Germanic, “Ach!” The air was musty, but not as bad as might be expected. The woman leaned on her cane and held out her free hand. “Such a vide hall. You wouldn’t expect.” Mrs. Winberg lumbered toward the back of the house. Victoria quietly closed the door and followed.

The butler’s pantry and kitchen were large but smelled like an old well, and Mrs. Winberg, squinting and sniffing about in the dark green light looked like an underwater creature, bumping here and there, counting cupboards and drawers. “The moldy drain boards, ve don’t vorry. Replace mit soapstone.”

Victoria followed her into the paneled dining room, trying to take as little interest as her natural curiosity would allow.

“Now the parlor. This is why you are here. Its light. Almost none.” Mrs. Winberg stood in the dimness beside the beautiful carved mantelpiece, more grand than any Victoria had seen. “Up and down. Four sides of the property, those evergreens blocking. I vouldn’t vont people to laugh. Hortense Winberg valls up her boy on Station Street. You have alvays been my friend. Is dark?”

“Yes, Mrs. Winberg, it’s dark.”

“Ah, well. So ve look upstairs, while ve’re here.” And with great effort, Mrs. Winberg hoisted herself, step by step, up to view the four empty bedrooms on the second floor and then on up to see the three little ones on the third.

“Ach, Miss Jenkins, let’s sit,” she puffed and almost fell into the window seat of a narrow front dormer. Victoria placed herself carefully upon a handy apple crate, the only loose object in the entire house. Though Mrs. Winberg made a sizable obstruction, the afternoon light streamed into the little room creating a silhouette at Victoria’s feet.

“There’s a lot of light up here above the trees,” Victoria said, her first positive comment on the house other than her yes’s and no’s.

“Oh, you noticed that, too?”

How could she not notice the wonderful possibility here in contrast to a dim corner of the kitchen in which she sketched at home in the judge’s house. She could paint here in any weather instead of winters painting in her coat and gloves on the back porch.

Mrs. Winberg tapped her finger against the windowpane. “Look, look, the social. We look over the mayor’s house.” Then abruptly she turned back to Victoria. “You know, Miss Jenkins, I married very late Mr. Winberg.”

“Oh?”

“When I was twenty-five my poppa gave up on me and sent me to care for his old aunt who was dying on a farm outside Munchen. Four years I stayed on that farm caring for that old lady, seeing all my dreams go up the chimney. At last she died and before I can even go back to my poppa, a boy on the next farm said to me, ‘Hortense, I’m going to America, go with me.’”

Mrs. Winberg placed a hand on each great knee, and leaned toward Victoria. “Miss Jenkins, I never would do such a thing, but when I telegrammed to my poppa that his aunt had died, he did not come. He sent back telegram saying, ‘You bury her!’”

The look on Mrs. Winberg’s face had changed; anger tightened the eyes and caused her jowls to shake. “He had told me this aunt vas his favorite, but now after I work four years, I discover this old lady vas nothing to him! Nothing! And I, her servant, vas less than nothing.” As suddenly as it had come, the tightness left Mrs. Winberg’s soft face and she said, “So I said yes to Mr. Winberg, and I haf a good life in America.”

Hortense slapped her knees and leveled her gaze at her listener. Victoria felt herself sway on the apple crate. Mrs. Winberg was saying you too are old, left on the vine, as everyone knows. And there was no denying that she was now past thirty. But what was unbearable was to have it made clear that the whole town, even the immigrant baker’s widow, knew in what low esteem she was held by her father.

She watched Mrs. Winberg’s eyebrows slant up in the middle of her forehead like little praying hands. All Victoria had to do right now to make this dear woman happy was show a little enthusiasm for this house—just suggest that lilac bushes could hold down a property line as well as a bunch of shaggy evergreens. But she must not raise any hopes, unless, perhaps—

The glories of the house could not be denied. She should keep an open mind. And heaven knew it would be the right thing for poor Wendell whom Father squelched every day. If she married Karl Winberg, she’d always have change in her pocket for her younger brother. And Hortense Winberg would help her furnish the house. They’d do it together, making curtains, searching for second-hand pieces, and it would be so good to have this loving mother for herself. It was not the house on Station Street or being married or even the possibility at this late date that she might have children. What she craved was Hortense Winberg herself, not just to be a good customer, but to treat her as a mother would. Maybe a little bossy, very confident—
Ve don’t vorry about the moldy drain boards—
a woman who cared only for her children and had money to help them.

Victoria looked away from the wild urgings of Mrs. Winberg’s raised eyebrows. Why disappoint this woman whose affection she craved? But she couldn’t take advantage of these good people—people who were what they seemed—as light and sweet inside as out. If she married Karl Winberg in order to gain a loving mother, she and Karl would sit downstairs in that parlor each night—Karl smiling, nodding, uttering not a word to drown out the dark howling in her head. She was not a simple person. She stood.

“Let me go down first, Mrs. Winberg. You put your hand on my shoulder.”

* * *

As Victoria tried to rub the dirt from the potato patch off her red, raw fingers, all the long ago images of the house on Station Street—the walnut paneled dining room, the handsome mantle in the parlor, the sunlit upstairs room where she could paint—folded into themselves like a big picture post card, just something seen on a tour.

Just then Alice came around the corner of the house and squatted down beside her in the potato patch. Victoria was so glad to see her little girl—hair in a terrible tangle, hat hanging by its string—her teeth gritted against the sting in her nose.

“Where’d you girls go, darlin’? You didn’t say goodbye.”

“I sold Lillian Gish for a lot of money. It’s for the china.” Alice began to pull dollar bills from her coat pocket, and the wind caught one, lifting it up above the garden like a dry leaf. Alice leaped for it, but the wind drove it down again, and Victoria flattened herself on the potato mound to trap it.

“Goodness, gracious,” Victoria said, sitting up and dusting off her long apron. The rest of the money fluttered, safe in Alice’s grip. The wind had driven tears in clean white streaks across Alice’s dusty cheeks. Victoria glanced at the house. “Let’s go in, darlin’, it’s so cold out here.” She handed the dollar back to Alice, put the potatoes in her apron pocket, and struggled to her feet. Already her swelling belly had made her clumsy.

The wind pushed them towards the house, and Victoria took hold of the railing to steady herself up the back steps. It would only torment the child to say she shouldn’t have sold the pig. How could her parents have let things come to such a pass! Holding the door against the wind so Alice could enter, she suddenly knew she hadn’t made a choice at all fifteen years ago. A creature like herself, a witness to wickedness, was simply ineligible for the Winbergs’ easy happiness.

Inside the kitchen, Victoria sank down in a chair and opened her arms to hug Alice. Such a short little bundle. When she opened her eyes, Dan was standing in the doorway, smiling his indelible smile. MacGaffin was behind him in the dining room, silent and waiting, as still as a dark painting.

“Hello, pumpkin,” Dan said to Alice, “we were worried about you and your sister this morning. I suppose the scholarly Felicity has gone on to school?”

“I got a lot of money for my pig,” Alice said.

“That’s swell, Alice. It couldn’t have come at a better time.” Dan stepped forward and reached out his hand.

“It’s for the china,” Alice said softly.

“That’s nice,” he said.

Alice looked to her mother, but Victoria turned her head away and covered her mouth. How could MacGaffin take this little girl’s money? He’d undoubtedly overheard this conversation, and if he were a decent man, he’d rush forward and say they had another week, and he’d send over a load of coal because this little girl deserved it. How could he be so heartless, leaving them here with no china to paint, no pig to fatten, all her plans cut off. She clamped her hand tighter on her mouth. And you, Dan, how can you do this, after saying you’d find the mortgage payment yourself? How can you, a grown man and a father, take your eight-year-old daughter’s money rather than go out and get a job like other men. She dropped her hand.

“Dan?” she asked. “Isn’t there any other way?”

He looked at her, his face naked, innocent. “Vic? Don’t fuss and make things harder on Alice here.” He held out his hand for the money.

“Mama?” Alice asked and Victoria had to face her and take in a shuddering breath and make a little smile and nod so that the little girl would know that it was with her mother’s blessings that she would give up her plans.

Dan and Mr. MacGaffin went out the front door.

“Why did you let him do that?” Alice cried.

“Now, sweetheart,” Victoria spoke softly and reached out to gather Alice in her arms. But Alice darted away and ran for the stairs. Victoria let her go. Alice deserved a good cry, and since it was all she was going to get, her mother wasn’t going to try to talk her out of it.

Victoria stepped to the sink and rested her hands on the cool edge. Through the window she watched little twisters of dust dance above the empty potato patch. The pig house would be broken up and tossed into the stove. Dwindling. Everything dwindling. Victoria covered her face and sobbed, “Mama!”

THE END

1894

And what of Dan, that sweet, broken man, that bitterly disappointing husband? What had convinced such a confident talker that he would never amount to anything?

I, Daniel Slocum Hale, would have been the runt of the litter if there’d been a litter, but I was an only child and believed I was David and Goliath all rolled into one—smart and brave, a boy who had ideas. The son of a pretty school teacher and a man who’d fought with Colonel Chamberlain in the Army of the Potomac, I thought myself a kind of eleven-year-old aristocrat with musical talent that would begin to show itself as soon as we’d settled into our new home, and Mother and I had more time for my piano lessons. Even though she was a Quaker, she was teaching me to play the Methodist hymns.

When Father galloped toward the plank-flat, purple horizon of Oklahoma Territory to register our claim, I stood on the wagon seat and waved my bandanna, hailing the start of our new life as landowners. Tomorrow morning when the claims office opened, Dad would sign his name, buying us the right to break the sod, plant, build a cabin, and make improvements on our 160 acres. After five years, an inspector would come around to judge our fences, barns and sheds, our fine house with glass windows and an iron stove, and then it would be our farm forever, and we’d buy more land with the profits.

Everything was going according to plan. In Wichita we’d stopped to buy fencing wire, meal and bacon, a bushel of sweet potatoes and enough butter to refill our crock. Right now the crock was sitting in a little eddy in the creek, and our wagon, loaded with everything worth taking from our dried up place near Broken Bow, Nebraska, stood beside the creek that ran through our claim. We had nine boxes of fruit jars with enough of Mother’s pickled peaches, corn relish and canned tomatoes to go to Glory with.