In Need of a Good Wife (39 page)

For once, the mayor was in his office. Clara stood in the hallway, suddenly shy, and watched him working at his desk, the pen clutched in his enormous paw of a hand. Outside, the rain hammered the windowpanes, and she could see that Mr. Cartwright had recently come in from it. His hair was matted and wet along his neck, his shirt cuffs soaked transparent, making a mess of the papers he dragged his arm across as he wrote. Clara leaned her umbrella against the wall and took a step toward his desk.

“Good morning,” she said, uncertain where to begin.

The mayor looked up. “Oh, Mrs. Bixby—just the woman I have been wanting to see.”

“Mr. Cartwright, I hardly know what to say.”

“Well, that’s because I haven’t yet told you of my business proposition.”

“It’s such a grand gesture, sir, that no respectable person could
accept
it.”

“But how did you know?” He shook his head. “You must misunderstand my idea—”

“But I came to say that if you gave it only as a gesture, believing that I would, as decorum demands, return your gift, I am sorry to disappoint you, sir. For I am
keeping
this money. Every penny.”

Mr. Cartwright’s bushy eyebrows drew together. “What money?”

“Experience has taught me that when someone offers to help you, you should take their help. Especially when you have no hope of fixing the problem on your own. So I am keeping the money. I don’t even feel any guilt about that,” Clara said in astonishment, almost to herself. “You shouldn’t have offered to give it if you didn’t think I would accept.”

The mayor held up his hand. “Mrs. Bixby—I honestly do not know what you’re talking about.”

Clara smiled and shook her head. “If you didn’t want me to know where it came from, why did you wrap it in your own handkerchief?”

The mayor shook his head.

“All right, I’ll play along,” Clara said. “My hearing was this morning. Judge Tharp came from Fremont.“

“It was this morning? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you. You’ve already done so much to help me, to take my side against these men. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”

“And? Where does the matter stand?”

“Mrs. Gibson never appeared to give her so-called testimony. The judge let me go.”

“So it is finished then? You are free?”

“It wasn’t finished until I went upstairs to my room to find a great sum of money wrapped in your handkerchief, slipped under my door. As you know, I have always intended to pay these men back.”

“Yes, I do know
that
,” Mayor Cartwright said. “But Mrs. Bixby, you have to believe me—that money did not come from me.”

Clara stared at him a moment, dumbfounded. Why would he lie?

“Don’t you think if I had the money all along, I would have offered it to you sooner and settled this matter?”

“But who else could it be?”

Cartwright shrugged. “Perhaps it came from … your husband?”

Clara replied with a halfhearted laugh and then a sigh. “You must know that Mr. Bixby has been gone for some time.”

“I had heard something …” Cartwright said, pretending to look through the papers on his desk to save her from the awkwardness of a direct gaze.

Clara saw then: He was embarrassed to have done so grand a thing for another man’s wife, absent as her husband might be at the moment. Perhaps he had believed she would take the money and leave town, that he could know she was all right but wouldn’t have to face her again. She would pretend to speculate for his sake about who else could have given her the money, but she would never doubt that Randall Cartwright thought she was worth something, worth helping, that he saw what she could be if sorrow and debt and George released their hold over her.

“Maybe Mrs. Healy?” Clara said, watching his face for a sign of relief.

He shrugged again. “Anything is possible in this town.” He laced his fingers together on top of the desk. “I wanted to come find you today to tell you some things. The first is that my Uncle Kellinger has finally gone home, as they say.”

“Oh!” Clara said. “By train?”

Cartwright shook his head. “Home to his final rest, that is—not to Missouri. In his sleep last night.”

“Oh, Mr. Cartwright, I’m so sorry to hear it.”

He gaped at her. “I’m not.
You
met the man—he was the most miserable, profane, ungodly man west of the Mississippi. I believe this rain is a direct result of his wickedness finally taking leave of the county.”

Clara laughed. “Well, I’m sure he had his reasons.”

“I think he took great joy in making others miserable.” Cartwright shook his head and pressed his thick fingers against his eyes. “That was the first thing I wanted to tell you. The second is that I have decided I have had quite enough of everyone coming to me with their problems.”

“Oh,” Clara said, feeling her blood rise to her cheeks. “Of course you have—and I am one of the worst off enders.”

He waved his hands. “No, no—that’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is, I don’t want to be the mayor any more. I never should have done it in the first place—it was a fool idea.” He stood up, his great towering height always a bit of a shock. “Mrs. Bixby—or what shall I call you now?”

Clara shrugged. She really didn’t know anymore. “How about plain Clara?”

He nodded. “Clara, do you know much about the Roman Empire?”

Her eyes widened. The conversation was beginning to feel like an overturned nest of snakes, slithering this way and that. She furrowed her brow. “I can’t say that I do, sir.”

Cartwright clapped his hands. “Precisely. I don’t either. But I
could
, if I had any blasted
time
to read a book now and again. And I’d like to do that.”

“Well, then you should, Mr. Cartwright.”

“And I want to learn to play the fiddle. I have always wanted to learn to do that, but would the dim minds of this town tolerate a fiddle-playing mayor, do you think?”

Clara began to laugh. “No, sir, I suppose not.”

He was pacing now. “Of course they wouldn’t—why are you laughing?”

Trying to stop only made Clara laugh harder. “I can’t help but picture you trying to dance a jig.”

“Cruel woman! A man confesses his meager little dream and you greet it with ridicule!”

Mr. Cartwright laughed now too, opening his great red mouth to roar. The room swam and Clara felt she had to sit down. Everything in her whole body felt loose for the first time in her life. All the weight she had been carrying for years lifted up and sailed away. She felt like she might break out into a jig herself, any minute. Cartwright sat down across from her behind his desk.

“Well, I certainly have no reason now to share what I had planned to tell you.” When he smiled, it showed in every feature of his face: the pink slopes of his cheeks, his upturned eyes.

Clara clamped her lips together, then said. “Please tell me. I
promise
not to laugh.”

“I’d like to take over my uncle’s claim. Make that land yield something for the first time.”

“I think that’s wonderful, sir.” She
did
think it wonderful. She loved the image of her friend working in the red afternoon sun.

Cartwright nodded. “I have come into a little money from the old man. Not much, but it seems he held on to a good portion of the proceeds from the sale of his house in St. Louis. I don’t know why he didn’t put it into the land out here.”

“Perhaps he was saving it for you.”

“Perhaps. Of course, we may not need it now that you have come into your own small fortune.”

“We?” The room rushed back into focus.

Mr. Cartwright fixed her with that smile again. “Strictly business,” he said, holding up his hand. “I wanted to propose the idea that, now that you are the head of your own household, you might claim the adjacent parcel and we might combine our efforts. We can hire out the work, grow more, sell more, and split the profits down the middle. I’ll even help you build a home for yourself—we can design it however you please. A
business
venture.”

“Business,” Clara whispered, watching him across the desk. She thought of the little white cottage, its shabby nobility, and the vision plucked at her heart, like seeing the face of a lost friend. It had been a long time since she had let the dream of it wash over her, a long time since she had felt it would ever be more than just a dream.

Cartwright nodded. He reached over and placed her right hand on his palm, then lifted it to his lips. Clara felt the bristles of his mustache rustle over the thin cotton of her glove. He rested his cheek on her knuckles, and all the while he kept his eyes on her.

“Unless I can convince you otherwise,” he said.

I am grateful to my editor, Claire Zion, for seeing the possibilities in this story, and my agent, Marly Rusoff, a true advocate and source of support. Thank you to Michael Radulescu and Julie Mosow for their tireless efforts on many fronts, as well as the team at Berkley: Leslie Gelbman, Leslie Worrell, Erica Martirano, Lara Robbins, Amy Schneider, Jhanteigh Kupihea, and all the others in design, sales, marketing, and publicity who may be missing from this sentence but not from my thoughts.

In order to create the fictional town of Destination and the fictional people who live there, I relied on primary accounts written by women settlers Rachel Calof, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, and Mollie Dorsey Sanford. Mari Sandoz’s
Old Jules
was also helpful, as was
Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier
by Chris Enss,
Midwest Heritage
by John Drury,
Nebraska: An
Illustrated History
by Frederick Luebke,
Law and Order in Buffalo
Bill’s Country
by Mark Ellis,
Empire on the Platte
by A. Richard Crabb, and the Library of Congress American Memory archive on prairie settlement. J.C. Furnas’s
The
Americans
and Jane Nylander’s
Our Own Snug Fireside
were once again invaluable. And, in that underground river sort of way, so was Marilynne Robinson’s
Gilead
, which might have been Elsa’s second-favorite book, if she had really lived and was born more than a few years later.

Thank you to Birgit Kobayashi, co-owner of Café Selmarie in Chicago’s Lincoln Square, for Elsa’s German recipes and baking techniques. To Jaralinn De la Ossa, much appreciation for your help understanding migraines from the inside; I am only sorry you have to know these facts. Laura Rodgers, an honest-togoodness shepherd, helped this city girl understand a little bit about lambing. But any mistakes I’ve made in rendering the details of this story are mine alone.

Thank you to fellow authors Robin Oliveira, Katrina Kittle, Kristina Riggle, Stephanie Cowell, Susan Gregg Gilmore, Tasha Alexander, Rebecca Rasmussen, Wendy McClure, Nancy Woodruff, Joe Wallace, Sandra Gullard, M.J. Rose, and Amy Stolls for their support. I count myself lucky indeed to be a member of the Fiction Writers Co-op, an invaluable source of community and friendship, as well as the robust community of book people on Twitter. Thanks also go to the many dedicated, passionate,
irreplaceable
independent booksellers we readers and writers depend on.

Thank you to my friend Lara Zielin for the writing retreat where I wrote the first three chapters about Clara, Rowena, and Elsa; to Ruth Mills, Kelly Harms Wimmer, Eleanor Brown, Lori Nelson Spielman, and family and friends who have listened to me talk about this story for a long time. Finally, to Bob: 2011 got off to a bruising start but left us on the precipice of a great adventure. Thank you for dangling your toes over the edge with me.

The story of
In Need of a Good Wife
was brewing in the back of my mind for years before I knew what shape the novel would take. For as long as I can remember, stories of settlers traveling west, leaving behind a predetermined fate to build a new life from scratch, have captivated me. Like many young readers, I discovered this genre through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House
books and Patricia MacLachlan’s hushed and beautiful
Sarah,
Plain and Tall
. Later I came to love Alexandra Bergson, of Willa Cather’s
O Pioneers!
, a sort of grown-up version of Laura Ingalls, determined to make her farm flourish on the land her father had claimed a generation before. The men and women (fictional
and
historical) who made new lives in the West seemed to have two things: immense determination and vision. They could see something remarkable in a plot of dust and they were willing to do the work necessary to bring that vision into existence. In other words, they had the makings of irresistible characters.

In search of what my westbound story might look like, I stumbled on a book called
Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order
Brides on the Frontier
. The vignettes in this slim volume told the stories of all sorts of arranged marriages across the West in the second half of the nineteenth century. The matches met with varying degrees of success. Some produced loving, or at least friendly, marriages. Other prospective spouses weren’t as lucky. In 1873, a woman named Eleanor Berry began a correspondence with a man she met through a San Francisco newspaper. When he proposed, she traveled by train to his town to meet him for the first time and marry him. En route, the train was robbed by armed bandits. Eleanor arrived to what was to be her new home empty-handed, only to recognize her intended husband as one of the robbers.

I couldn’t get enough of these stories. Another told of Asa Mercer, who thought of himself as a “bride entrepreneur.” He published an advertisement in the
Puget Sound Herald
in 1860 about a community meeting for bachelors interested in the “much-needed and desirable emigration” of eligible women to the town. Mercer determined he would travel east, collect a group of willing brides, and simply import them to the bachelors in Washington State. For a price, of course. Things did not quite work out as Mercer hoped—some of the brides had a change of heart before or during the four-month journey by ship. Some died along the way. In the end, Mercer delivered far fewer young women than he had promised, and few of his customers were satisfied.