The Bride's House (14 page)

Nealie hadn’t known that. There was so much they had to learn about each other. It was odd that they were married and they’d never told each other about their families. But then, she’d have married Will, and she’d known even less about him, as it turned out. Nealie had been wed only a day, and already she found marriage a strange thing. There was so much she didn’t know.

She’d learned already that Charlie wouldn’t put up with certain things. He was sweet and loving, and it seemed that he would give her most anything she wanted, but he expected her to behave herself and to act like a lady. On the train, when she’d pulled her skirt above her ankles so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor with the cigar stubs and tobacco spit, he’d pushed it down. And when a man in the depot smiled at her and she’d smiled back, Charlie had told her she oughtn’t to be so free with herself now that she was his wife.

Nealie wanted to look around the station in Denver, which was so much bigger than the one in Georgetown, but Charlie hurried her out and found a hack, asking the driver to take them to a store Mrs. Travers had recommended, not that the older woman had ever been to it. She’d heard it was a good place to purchase furniture. A doorman ushered them inside, and Nealie gaped, because the place was as elegant as the Hotel de Paris, with polished furniture upholstered in plush, with tables and chairs, draperies and wall coverings, as far as she could see. She thought that it was the sort of place where Will would shop—and his wife. She glanced at Charlie, wondering if the clerks would recognize them as only a hired girl and a miner and ask what they were doing there.

But in those strike-it-rich times, they were not the first couple with newfound money to enter the store, and there was a certain eagerness about them that made the employees all but rub their hands together. Within seconds, they were taken up and asked about their needs. “We want the very best,” Charlie said. “I can pay for it.”

And so they were shown the wallpapers and fabrics, the mahogany love seats and chairs, the tables and fern stands, velvet drapes and lace curtains, and a hundred useless baubles. They were not taken in so much as they might have been, however. Nealie had always been frugal, and Charlie saw no need to pay more because a piece of furniture had a manufacturer’s name attached to it. At the last minute, Nealie asked if they could get a better price because they had bought so much. When Charlie frowned, she wondered if she’d embarrassed him, but the clerks agreed, and then Charlie seemed pleased at her bargaining.

They ordered yellow wallpaper with a gold Chinese design for the dining room, gold velvet drapes, thin wooden shutters, and a Persian carpet. The mahogany dining table came with twelve chairs upholstered in gold plush. The parlor was all red—red wallpaper, with two horsehair love seats and side chairs trimmed in red velvet, an ingrain carpet in red and orange, a red cloth with gold tassels for the library table. They bought the library table, too, and a stereopticon to go on top of it. Then Nealie selected a pianoforte, a huge square instrument with carved legs, and a matching stool

Since carpets and drapes did not come in the bright green of Nealie’s dress, she begged Charlie to use the yellow wallpaper in his study, and they bought matching drapes and lace curtains. Charlie selected a desk the size of a cookstove and cabinets with glass doors and hidden compartments in the bottom. Then they ordered a great brass bed made of pipes that gleamed like sunshine and curved in all directions and walnut dressers and wardrobes.

As they were about to leave, Nealie whispered something to Charlie, and he turned to the clerks. “There’s another thing we’ll be needing,” he said, while Nealie turned away. “A cradle. I expect you could sell us a cradle.”

The clerks took them into a side room where cradles and small beds, tiny chairs and high chairs, were displayed. “Which one?” Charlie asked.

Nealie studied the cradles, then pointed to one that was small, made of a light wood that reminded her of the desk in Will’s cabin. But Charlie shook his head. “You don’t want to bend all the way over to pick up the baby. You’ll hurt your back.” When Nealie looked at him in surprise, for she hadn’t thought about such a thing, he said, “That’s what you learn working in a mine.”

They left the store pleased with themselves, a little proud of their good taste. “You picked us some pretty things,” Charlie told her.

Nealie smiled at him. “I’m glad you like them,” she said. But she had been thinking about Will when she chose them.

*   *   *

Once the walls were painted and papered, the floor carpeted, the furniture set in place, the palm trees and ferns and other potted plants arranged in the solarium, Nealie announced she would give a tea. That was what the ladies in Hannibal did. She ordered a silver tea set and two dozen china plates and teacups with pink roses on them and sent out invitations that she ordered from the newspaper office. She’d read about printed invitations in one of Mrs. Travers’s magazines and thought that was a swell idea. Then she and Mrs. Travers baked pies and cakes in the new cookstove.

“Do you think they’ll come?” Nealie asked Charlie as she waited in the red parlor the afternoon of the tea. “Maybe they think I’m fresh for asking them. Maybe they won’t want to come out in the snow.” She stood looking into a mirror at herself in the dress that Charlie had bought for her as a surprise. He didn’t know maroon was a color that made her skin look pasty or that the style emphasized her pregnancy. Nealie didn’t know it, either. “I listened, but I didn’t hear a rooster crow three times.” She added in case Charlie didn’t understand, “That means you’ll have company. But I didn’t hear a rooster at all.” She wrung her hands together with nervousness.

“That’s because they’ve all had their heads chopped off. You can’t keep a rooster in Georgetown in the winter,” Mrs. Travers said, coming in from the kitchen and standing beside Nealie at the front door. “They’ll come, all right. It’s just the snow makes them late. Now you run along, Charlie. Husbands aren’t supposed to be hanging around for teas.”

He clumped out of the house then, looking up and down the street for guests, not knowing it was fashionable to be late. Nor did Nealie, who was frantic until at last the bell on the door clanged, and she answered it, saying, “Well, do come in,” in a shrill, nervous voice. “Welcome to the Bride’s House.”

Within minutes, the house was filled. None of the women invited would have dreamed of staying away, because they had seen the delivery wagons loaded with crates of furniture and were curious about the Bride’s House. They were curious about Nealie, too. There had been much talk about the miner and the hired girl who had bought the magnificent place. Some gazed at the rich furnishings in awe and not a little envy, because they had never seen such splendors in a private home. Not only was the house filled with expensive furniture, but every side table was covered with tasseled silk shawls on which were set knickknacks—china figurines and ore samples, nut dishes and marble eggs, the stereopticon, and dried flowers under a glass dome. A few guests rolled their eyes, and Nealie overheard a woman mutter, “Tawdry.”

That sounded fine, and she said, “Thank you,” not knowing what the word meant, of course. Another remarked that standing in the red parlor, she felt she was inside a love apple. Nealie wasn’t aware a love apple was a tomato, and she thought that a fine compliment, too.

If Mrs. Travers overheard any words of scorn, she kept them to herself. Nor did the older woman remark that while the women accepted plates of gingerbread and dried-apple pie, they ate only a bite or two. She had suggested earlier that Nealie might want to order tiny pastries from the Hotel de Paris for the women to nibble on, but Nealie had replied that she didn’t want her guests going home as hungry as barn cats.

Not all of the guests were critical, of course. Nealie wasn’t the first hired girl who had married well, and for the most part, Georgetown was an accepting place. “You come and call on me,” one woman told Nealie as she departed, handing the girl her card. Nealie didn’t know about calling cards and thought she should have some made up for herself. Another woman said, “You’d be welcome at the missionary society at the Presbyterian church. We knit for the heathen.”

“I got my house to keep up,” Nealie replied.

“By yourself?”

“I wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.”

The woman didn’t remark on that, because many of the newly rich were eccentric.

Charlie returned after the guests left, as Nealie and Mrs. Travers were clearing away the dishes. He, too, had wondered why Nealie didn’t find a hired girl, but she’d told him it was her house, and she didn’t want anybody getting in her way. She took pleasure in the fine cookstove and the icebox that the iceman filled with blocks of ice each week. She said that with the hand pump that was mounted on the sink, there wasn’t a thing to washing the dishes, and she loved drying the plates and cups, making them shine.

Nealie’s eyes sparkled when she told her husband about the tea. “They said my apple pie was the best they ever tasted, and three ladies asked could they have starts of my ferns. I got so many compliments on my decorating I thought I’d bust,” she told him. “Oh, Charlie, you’d be so proud! One lady said the house was … what was that word, Mrs. Travers?”

“Toney. I think it was ‘toney.’”

That didn’t sound right to Nealie, but she nodded and chattered away to Charlie, describing how the women wore their best silks and velvets, their bonnets trimmed with lace veils and birds’ wings, and how they exclaimed over all her pretty things. “It was toney, all right.” When she stopped for breath, Charlie hugged her, and she hugged him back, forgetting for a moment that it was Will, not Charlie, she’d thought about when she’d planned the entertainment.

The women began to wash the dishes, chattering over Nealie’s triumph, and Charlie left the house, wandering up to Alpine Street to buy tobacco at the Kaiser Mercantile, proud of the way his wife had held her own with Georgetown society. The store was crowded, and he was in no hurry, so he looked at the stock of gold pans and picks, the stacks of yard goods and clothing, and cans of tomatoes and peas and beans lined up on the shelves. He liked the orderliness of the place, because despite his rumpled clothing, Charlie was a tidy man. A stove stood in the center of the room, and Charlie held out his hands to its warmth, because he had left the house without a coat, and it had snowed that morning. He stood there, half hidden by the stovepipe, smiling a little, basking in Nealie’s happiness.

And then he heard someone speak his wife’s name and mutter, “Hired girl.” His smile faded as he listened to the woman continue, “Honestly, Jim, you would laugh if you saw it. One room was all in red—red, for heaven’s sake. And the dining room was hopeless. We all know he dabbles in gold mines, but does she have to spread it all over the walls and the windows? There’s a piano, and what do you bet she doesn’t know a sharp from a flat!” The woman laughed, then said, “Her tongue wags at both ends. She could talk the leg off a chair.” She added something in a low voice to the man beside her, and he laughed. “She’s been married only three months, but from the looks of her, she’s six months along. If we were anyplace else, a person like that wouldn’t be accepted in society. It’s scandalous. Why, do you know—” The woman stopped suddenly when she spotted Charlie. “Why, Mr. Dumas, I just came from—”

“I heard where you came from.” Charlie turned to the man. “Say, Jim, is she your wife?” When the man nodded, Charlie said, “I want you to step outside with me.”

The man started to protest, but when he saw the look on Charlie’s face, he exchanged glances with his wife and followed Charlie through the door onto the board sidewalk. Charlie turned to face him, looking down on the man, because Charlie was half a head taller. “You still work at the Bobcat? I haven’t been up there in a while,” Charlie said.

The man nodded. “Charlie, my wife didn’t mean—”

“It’s Mr. Dumas. I’m one of the men that owns the Bobcat, so you can call me Mr. Dumas. I guess you could say I’m your boss.” Jim would have known that, of course. Few in Georgetown weren’t aware that Charlie Dumas had come into money and was now a mining speculator. In fact, already men were seeking him out not just because he was rich but because of his knowledge. Unlike many of the Eastern investors who’d never been underground, Charlie knew all about mining, knew when a claim had been salted or a vein was about to pinch out. He understood a mine was no good if there wasn’t a mill or smelter nearby or a railroad to ship out the ore. He could tell when a mine was dangerous from lack of ventilation or shoddy timbering or when it might flood from underground water.

“Mr. Dumas, I’m sorry—”

“Shut up,” Charlie said. He stared at Jim a moment, then said slowly, softly, “I never held a thing against a man because of his wife.” Jim looked relieved at the words, but then, Charlie continued. “Here’s the thing of it. I couldn’t hit a woman, wouldn’t ever do it, not even if she made me as mad as a yellow jacket, like your wife just did. Mrs. Dumas never did a thing to your missus, but just asked her to have a cup of tea, and your wife insulted her in the worst way. A man can’t stand by when that happens. So, I guess this is the only thing I can do.” Charlie made a fist and swung, hitting the man in the jaw, punching him as hard as if he’d been hit by an ore cart. Jim’s feet went out from under him, and he flew backward off the boardwalk, landing on his back in the muddy street. Charlie stepped down into the street next to him, bent over, hitting the fist of one hand into the palm of the other, but Jim didn’t get up. “Now you hear me good. If I ever hear of you or your missus saying a word against Mrs. Dumas, I’ll ask you to get your wages and get gone. Do you hear me?” When the man didn’t answer right away, Charlie thundered, “Well, do you?”