In Need of a Good Wife (2 page)

Clara cleared her throat to ensure that this Reverend Potter knew she had overheard his remark. “Afternoon, gentlemen. What may I bring you?”

“Good afternoon,” the heavy man said. His gaze lingered on her face a moment. “What handsome eyes you have, miss.”

Clara pressed her lips into a line and raised an eyebrow. She knew very well that she had plain eyes, deep-set, with stubby lashes. She was tall, for a woman, and slender, with a neck that could be, on its best days, swanlike, provided she was in a well-shadowed room. Clara prided herself on that neck, her uncomplaining disposition, the pie. These were her good features—not her eyes.

The fat minister’s spirits were not dampened by her poor reception of his compliment. “And what are you serving for dinner today?”

“You’re late for dinner, but as luck or the Lord allows, we have a few chicken pies left,” Clara lied. Behind the door to the kitchen, a dozen pies sat lukewarm in their tins, still lined up where she had left them when they came out of the oven at eleven. The food would be long lost to the mice by now if it weren’t for the tavern cat, on patrol around the perimeter of the stove. He was an ornery tom, orange and slinking and just about full up of scathe for this plagued world.

“Thank you. We’ll have those.” Clara turned to go. “And an ale for me. Reverend?” He looked at his companion.

“Milk,” Reverend Potter said. “Cold.”

Clara nodded. In the kitchen she asked Bessie, the only person in this world taking orders from Clara, to warm the pies, and the girl slid them into the range on her flat wooden paddle. Behind the bar Clara drew the ale slowly, careful to keep the foam from rising over the rim of the glass. The Right Reverend ought to have his ale drawn properly, even if his friend took his God-fearing a little too seriously. Clara sighed when she heard the words echo in her mind. The
Right Reverend
. That was just the sort of thing George was fond of saying, in his signature tone of false deference. Without fail, his cheek earned him a laugh from his friends: the feather in his cap. And, as for Clara, well. She feigned exasperation, but to be the girl George had set his sights on—to be on his arm, walking up Broadway past a bevy of laundresses standing in an alley, their cheeks pink from the steam, even in January, their ravaged arms red up to the elbows—was a marvel. Those girls were sucking on so much jealousy and longing Clara liked to think it made their teeth ache.

Clara was George’s
girl
. She would have settled for being George’s hat. And when he used his poker winnings to buy her a ruby ring, and took her down to the Trinity Church to rattle off those vows, he never once broke into a smile—not even when the minister uttered the word
chastity
in the presence of her swelling belly. Clara thought of what they had done in the gallery of the Bowery Theater, behind the peach velvet drapery with gold braid fringe that skimmed the floor in time with their exertions; Clara had imagined the drapery was the most exquisite bed curtain in the finest mansion in town. That three nearby couples heaved in their own syncopated rhythm mattered not a whit to Clara. They were flies buzzing against a window pane. She had believed, for once in her miserable life, that with George the profit outweighed the loss.

But if George could float you on the air in the palm of his hand, he could tie you to an anchor and turn his back while you plummeted to the depths. New girls came through Mrs. Ferguson’s parlor in flocks, looking fresh and pink, without a care in the world for such a thing as hanging on to a
husband
. The word was still new on Clara’s tongue, tart like a berry. It wasn’t long before George took up with this one and that one, parading them around just to hurt Clara, it seemed, for there was no one else to notice. She knew all about the roving and insatiable longings of men and would have been willing to tolerate a great deal, if only George had allowed her to retain at least
some
dignity.

He had his reasons, of course, to seek solace outside the walls of their room five months ago, when they had been forced to bear the unbearable. For the baby had not survived. In times of sorrow, Clara had come to understand, women turn inside themselves. Men inch away, like worms. If that doesn’t get them far enough, they stand up on their legs and run. And so it was that George was gone, poof, in the night, with a little dark-haired garlic-eater named Lucia. People said he had taken a job at a brickworks in Buffalo.

“Miss Bixby,” Bessie called from the kitchen. “Them pies is up.”

“All right,” Clara called. “Thank you, Bessie.”
Miss
, everyone had started calling her again, but
Bixby
was George’s name. Clara supposed it was a well-intentioned attempt to offer her a clean slate. She was no longer George’s wife, but neither could she go back to the young woman she had been before, Miss Clara Wilson. She was something new altogether:
Miss
Bixby.

As if she were merely George’s spinster sister instead of the woman he had once vowed before God to care for all of his days.

Clara carried the pies on a tray from the kitchen to the bar and lifted them onto the plates. At the table, both ministers were reading newspapers. Reverend Potter, nearly blind it seemed, held his about an inch away from his right eye and moved the page back and forth, keeping his head still.

“Reverend Arthur,” he said. “Did you read this story about—let’s see now … where is it?—this town of Destination, Nebraska?”

Reverend Arthur folded his paper and laid it on the table. “No. What an odd name for a town.”

“Indeed, it is.” Reverend Potter read.

Two men died Saturday after their destructive rampage claimed their lives, as well as the lives of two reliable workhorses—and caused thousands of dollars of damage. Samuel and Terrance Young, brothers and veteran inebriates employed at Drake’s Brewery in Destination, population now down to 105 from 107 including the town and its outskirts, managed to set fire to their own shoes, and, in attempting to outrun the flames, spread them across a dry field and inside a barn that contained two tethered horses and a cow. The building was quickly consumed with the men and horses inside, though the cow made an ambling escape. This is the third such incident in this beset frontier town in as many months. While a handful of the original settlers brought wives and sisters with them, all those women died or returned to eastern cities long ago and the town is now populated almost entirely by bachelors. The only fair faces to be found are those, besmirched with rouge and sin, belonging to the fallen women who live together in a house of mirth at the edge of town. Said Destination’s mayor Randall Cartwright, regarding the debauchery of Destination and the death of its citizens, “I mourn the loss of those men only in as much as I didn’t have the chance to hang them myself from the only tree in town.”

Reverend Arthur shook his head. “My word.”

“It’s true what the reporter says,” Reverend Potter told him. “This town
has
been in the news before. I recall it distinctly. Do you notice they don’t even mention a church—probably haven’t gotten around to building one yet.”

Clara brought the plates to the table and the ministers put their newspapers under their chairs. “Enjoy your dinner, gentlemen,” she said, setting the pies down.

“We thank you, miss.” Reverend Arthur unfolded the white napkin and draped it across his knees. “For two confirmed bachelors such as ourselves, a tavern pie is the closest we come to a home-cooked meal.” He pierced the pie’s crust with the tines of his fork and a cloud of steam rushed out. “Now, Reverend Potter,
this
is divinity.”

The ministers bowed their heads and Arthur said an impassioned grace. Potter gave Arthur’s
Amen
a disdainful glance and set about what was for him, a man dubious of all human pleasures, the grim task of eating. Clara returned to her broom, glancing occasionally at the tavern door, attempting to will another customer or two into existence. What would her father say if he could see his tavern and her in this lowly state? Clara felt she had sunk as low as it was possible to go—the only job left was laundress, but she vowed she would die first. One had to preserve a little dignity, no matter what the cost.

At the table, the men continued their conversation. “This is what I try to impress upon my congregation, though they are deaf and dumb to it,” Potter said. “A godless man has no compass. A town of godless men is bound for destruction. This Destination is obviously well on its way.” He was getting excited, his voice beginning to squeak like a hinge.

Clara glanced at the door once more and saw the portly Reverend Arthur nod in response to his companion’s comment. But his eyes were on Clara. She turned sideways to avoid his gaze, but it asserted itself as if it were a physical thing, a lurid hand tracing the outline of her figure. The longer he leered at her, the harder she clenched her jaw. Dr. Calumet had told her to keep a calm disposition, that agitation could bring on the crippling headaches that had plagued her since the baby died. Of course, Dr. Calumet didn’t have to work in Rathbone’s tavern.

Potter creaked on. “Destination, Nebraska, is like so many places in this land. What that town needs is religion. Don’t you agree, Reverend Arthur?”

“What that town needs,” Arthur said, scraping the last of the chicken gravy from his plate and licking it off the fork with considerable relish, “is some women.”

When the men finished their meal, they placed a stack of coins and a pamphlet about redemption on the table.

“May the Lord continue to bless you,” Reverend Arthur called to Clara.

She waved from the far side of the tavern. “If he does, he’ll keep you out of my sight,” she muttered as they climbed the stairs to the street.

Not another soul came in after them, so Clara sent Bessie home and straightened up behind the bar. The newspapers under the chairs caught her eye—she had not seen them when she cleared the men’s dishes. Clara crouched down to sweep them up and, standing, struck her head on the underside of the table so hard the room went white for a moment. So much for protecting her head. She sighed as she rubbed the rising knot with her fingertips and remained there on the floor, resting her brow on her knees, then willed herself up and into the chair where Reverend Potter had sat.

His newspaper was still folded open to the story on Destination and Clara skimmed it. She had seen the newspaper ads and brochures: “Cheap farms! Free homes!” and “Great inducements to settlers with limited means!” She had heard the talk—many people who had very little here in New York wanted to make a go of it out west. After all, they had practically nothing to lose. But Clara was skeptical. Could it really be as easy as all that? At one time, she had almost gone herself, but there was always something keeping her in New York; first her parents’ care before they died, and then George. She supposed both of the ministers were right in their assessment of the town’s needs. God was an essential tool in keeping men from behaving like animals, it was true. Clara felt that the Lord had done very little for her personally, but she didn’t begrudge him that; instead she took it as a kind of compliment. She was weathering her own storms all right. She didn’t need or expect his intervention.

But Reverend Arthur was on to something when he said that the town needed women. For how else did men come to God if not through the influence of their mothers first and then their wives? Men needed women—that was a fact. This rooting around in a public tavern for a hot meal was a shame, and Clara truly believed it hobbled a man to have to concern himself with these mundane tasks. A man with a wife could be and do anything if he knew his hearth and home were in order, with a strong-shouldered woman at the ready. When she had first met George he was doing just fine on his own, but under her care he became his better self, more vigorous, cleverer, full of ideas. And all because she believed in hot food, cold baths, thick wool socks, feather beds, fresh air, and church twice a week, and every night after dinner she asked George to read novels to her as they sat together in front of their tiny hearth in their room at Mrs. Ferguson’s. And Clara hung on his every word, full of love for the way he stumbled along, flubbing the pronunciations but selling his flub as if the makers of the dictionary were wrong not to have consulted
him
beforehand. There was no doubt in Clara’s mind that she had been a devoted wife. She hadn’t
driven
George away, the way some people said. They didn’t know everything, didn’t know that he was trying to outrun the sorrow that nipped at his heels, a son born and buried in the same week.

She glanced again at the article. It was a funny sort of thing to try to conceive of, a town with no women. Imagine being the first one to go! Who would want to do it? She had heard about some of the things men had tried to entice women to the west. The “heart in hand” catalogs made a sad little stack of hopes and dreams on a wire rack in the post office, pages and pages of three-sentence advertisements by marriageable men and women. But did lasting matches actually result from these connections? The system seemed fraught with potential problems. For one thing, how could a woman know if a man was telling the truth about himself? No man was going to pay a penny a word to announce to the world of eligible ladies that he was a
Weak-willed man of 40. Will drink too much and treat
you poorly, while you break your back working in my hovel.
Clara chuckled at the thought of this ad drawing a response from a beleaguered woman who respected that, at the very least, this prospective husband was honest. How low their sights were set, the women who had endured the long and terrible war of rebellion.

And yet any place that wasn’t Manhattan City, wasn’t teeming with drunks and piles of garbage and endless noise, held quite an appeal. Lately, Clara had caught herself daydreaming of a small white cottage where she might live alone, taking in sewing. She must have seen a picture of it somewhere, in a magazine or an old book, and it wasn’t located anywhere in particular, just somewhere far from William Street and the room at Mrs. Ferguson’s still haunted by everything that had happened there. The cottage was a place apart. A family of birds lived in a tree nearby and she imagined that she could leave a pail of water out for them to splash in. She would scatter stale bread in the grass for them too. The roof of the cottage sagged slightly and the trim around the windows needed paint, but it was quiet and tranquil and plain, and for that it was beautiful.