In Need of a Good Wife (5 page)

Now, it is only
fitting that your men pay the expenses of
importing their brides as well as a small fee for my efforts. I’m
sure you agree. But you may be wondering how they might
regain those funds. There is one last element of my proposal
that may convince your most pragmatic of men.
The
land office
is at this time allowing unmarried women to
file a claim for
the same 160 acres as men, adjoining any parcel of land they
choose. In this way, your bachelors could double their holdings
at the time of marriage to one of my girls.

Please do think it over, sir, and I will await your response.
In the meantime I am

Yours sincerely,
Clara Bixby

“So, ladies,” Clara said. “How long do you think it took him to reply?” She scanned the room as the women glanced at each other, no one bold enough to wager a guess. “How long?” She pointed at a woman in the front row wearing a yellow dress, her inky hair coiled in a snood. “You there—how long do you think it took him to reply?”

“Two months, ma’am? This town sounds quite remote.” She said this with a little trepidation and looked to her friend for support. The friend shrugged, and the woman in the yellow dress glanced out the sitting room window at the street, as if to confirm that Manhattan was still there and that they were still in it, its teeming population, its noise and food and history offering the security of a place established.

Clara shook her head. “In fact,” she said, “Mayor Cartwright’s letter took only seven days to reach me. I can only conclude he replied that very day. Since receiving the mayor’s enthusiastic endorsement of my plan, I have received letters from eight men describing the sort of wife they’ve been praying for. And that is why you are here today. If you have the providence to match one of these descriptions, you will begin to correspond with one of the bachelors and, come late spring, travel with me to Destination, Nebraska, where you will begin your new life.”

A wave of excitement passed through the room, evidenced by the quivering hair arrangements and clasped hands Elsa could see from where she leaned against the wall. The girl in the yellow dress stood and slipped down the side of the room and out the door, leaving an empty chair in the front row. Her friend whimpered and wrung her hands in her lap.

Clara shrugged. “Anyone else feeling a doubt should take her leave now. This is an opportunity for those who wish to see it that way, but I have no interest in convincing the unwilling. Each of you who leaves makes my job easier.”

A lone girl in the center of the room stood and called boldly, “Thank you, ma’am,” then worked her way out of the row and closed the door behind her.

Clara gave the woman a forthright nod of her chin, then motioned to Elsa. “Miss, standing in the shadows, here is a chair for you.” She pointed to the empty seat in the front row. Elsa felt all the eyes in the room turn to her for the second time since the meeting began, and to calm her nerves she picked up the thread of her unending silent conversation with God.

Lord, what have I done to
offend you this evening?
Elsa asked. She felt at once his reply, a dry patch spreading in her throat, a cough exploding from her lungs in one short burst. She turned her back on the ladies in the room and put her hands to her mouth in case she should cough again. A moment passed and her throat regained its moisture.
All right, Lord, I
will listen. Not talk.

She made her way to the front of the room, where Clara stood patiently, her steady hand still pointing toward the chair. Elsa was suddenly aware of her clothes, the cotton dress, once dove gray, now the color of leaves laid bare after the snow melts. Her hair was wiry in its simple bun and silver around her temples, the colorless strands threading through the yellow blond. Most of all, Elsa was aware of the space she occupied in the narrow aisle between the wall and the last chair in each row. She had to turn her hips slightly to move through without bumping the shoulders of each woman she passed. When she was a young woman, her size had shamed her, but life had worn her vanity like water on rock. It had been years since Elsa had given any thought at all to her appearance. She was the shape of the container into which she was poured. It wasn’t a fact on which to linger.

When she passed into the light, she saw Clara’s eyebrow lift slightly, wondering, Elsa knew, if Elsa was old enough to be the mother of most of the girls in the room. Of course, she was. There was nothing she could do about that.

Elsa settled into the chair and Clara turned her attention back to the room. “This brings me, ladies, to the matter of requirements. You simply
must
be at least twenty-one years of age—I will consider no exceptions to this rule. And you must provide a certificate from a physician of your fitness to travel. Winter in Nebraska, I am told, is a good deal colder and longer than the one we have here in Manhattan City, and I’d be surprised if this town has a doctor. Those of you with fortitude are the ones who will be chosen.”

A few potential brides shifted in their seats, and Elsa found herself hoping they would follow the other timid women right out the door. She was bewildered by how suddenly fierce her desire was to secure one of the spots. The feeling had come on as if out of the blue.
So I’m to go then, Lord?
Elsa shook her head in surprise.

She wasn’t a bit afraid of a place without medical care—of that she felt sure. A physician had examined Elsa only once in her life, in the steerage deck of her ship when it first touched North America at Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence River. There had been reports of illness on board. The immigration officials would quarantine every passenger, ensuring that those who were not yet ill would contract the disease, if they found even one confirmed case of cholera.

The physician had lined up the children first, the girls and boys together, and made them strip to their underclothes. Twelve-year-old Elsa stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her fingertips pressing into the ample flesh that ringed her ribs. She felt the eyes of the boy on her right skim her freckled shoulder. He was less than half her size. Elsa stared straight ahead, afraid to look in the doctor’s direction to see what he was doing to the other children. Her hair was the whitest blond then, parted down the center and scraped into tight braids by her Tante Gretchen’s comb. As the immigration physician made his way down the row, Elsa felt a crease forming in her forehead that pulled painfully on the strands of hair at her temples.

She had had no English then. The doctor’s words had the pinched and severed sounds of her own
Deutsch
, the
ein
and
eck
and
ach
, but the content made little sense. When he finally reached Elsa, he put his icy fingertips on either side of her jaw and lifted her face. He looked from one eye to the other and back again, but never into them, then pinched the skin on her shoulder and watched to see how quickly the impression of his fingertips subsided. She could feel breath shudder in and out of her lungs, as if it consisted of a sludge of mud and pebbles instead of air. The doctor slid his hand over her collarbone then and down inside the front of her shift. Elsa felt hot tears well around the lower rim of her eyes. She knew he was feeling for her heartbeat, but he ran his rough knuckle over her nipple one too many times, and even at her age she knew there was something wrong. He grunted once, quietly, as his fingertips moved over the little knob, hard in the freezing cold of the ship, then pressed the heel of his hand into her chest and looked at the ceiling, listening.

“It beats very quickly,” he said.

Elsa blinked at him, understanding none of his words, and released tears in two slick ribbons down her cheeks.

“Please complete and return this form to me as soon as possible,” Clara said, snapping Elsa back to the present. “Do the best you can to describe your physical attributes and any abilities you have that you believe will make you a competent wife. Include a likeness if you are able. And don’t forget to provide an address where I can reach you. Good day, ladies.”

A rustle of papers made their way to Elsa’s end of the row. She took one of the forms for herself and tucked it in her pocket.

As she walked up Broadway back to her quarters at the Channing mansion on Madison Square, Elsa thought about what she should say on the form and how she might say it. It certainly was no use manufacturing a story about her beauty or youth or musical gifts. Any man would soon learn of the truth, and anyway, Elsa never told lies and she didn’t plan on starting now. Any man who was going to want her would have to want the qualities set down in her being by the Lord.
Bavarian-born spinster
, she thought.
Healthy, strong, unafraid
of hard work. Devoted to the Lord and Savior
first, Martin Luther
second. Currently employed as laundress. Can also cook, scour, sew,
knit, and spin.
She would save the object of her fiercest pride for last, render it in bold letters:
Reads and writes in English.

In the five years Clara had been living at Mrs. Ferguson’s, she had done her best to make the room into a home. She was proud of how neatly she kept the hearth swept and stacked with wood. Next to it she had arranged her little kitchen—nothing more, really, than a narrow table and a small iron kettle for tea or beans when she didn’t feel like taking her meals in the dining room downstairs. She kept her bed stacked with quilts and the bed key handy to keep the cornhusk mattress off the floor. Mrs. Ferguson’s was known for its particularly large and aggressive brand of mice, three parts vermin and one part Satan, George always said.

Under the window Clara had set up a table and chair for writing letters or reading books. Just outside was a streetlamp, and starting at dusk it offered her light well into the evening so she could save her lamp oil. She sat there now, her chair pushed slightly back. She had the sense of deep responsibility tinged with fear. What she had proposed to Mayor Cartwright had raised the hopes of a lot of lonely people in a town with a strange name, and they were all counting on her to follow through.

The matter of the town’s name sparked so much curiosity among the prospective brides that Clara finally wrote to Mayor Cartwright to ask for an explanation. After she sent the letter off, she worried that her question might have caused off ense, but the mayor replied in the charmingly aggravated tone she was coming to know. Mr. Cartwright took no responsibility, he explained, for the actions of men who had come before him. Especially when those actions were of the foolish variety. The story went that a group of men intending to homestead set down on a rude map the plans for their journey west. As much of the country through which they planned to travel was unsettled, locations known by their landmarks—the site where a river split in two, or a peculiar cluster of tall, skinny trees—were known by these descriptors only. There were no towns to speak of and certainly no towns with names. One of the men marked with an X the place on the map they planned to go, and next to the mark he wrote
destination
, for that was what the X signified. Someone else borrowed the map, forgot to return it, and then passed it along to some other equally uninformed soul. Before long, people took to calling the place
Destination
, as if that were its name. “Confusion begot confusion,” the mayor explained. “As it so often does.”

Clara marveled at the two stacks of paper before her. Just a few weeks had passed since her meeting with the prospective brides. On the left were eight letters from lonely bachelors on the cold prairie, plus one from a man who wanted only a housekeeper. On the right, she had twenty-two applications, just about half of the women who had attended the meeting.

Clara had calculated the cost of train and ferry tickets for each bride, plus what they would need for food and lodging along the way. She added her own travel costs, for she would journey with them to ensure that they reached Nebraska, and a profit of fifteen percent per bride, which seemed like a fair wage considering the work she planned to put in to making careful matches. Clara knew that even with all the care in the world, two or three women might have a change of heart. Fifteen percent would allow her to sustain that loss and still end up with enough money to establish herself in a nearby town, Omaha or Des Moines—she hardly cared where, exactly. Only that it be somewhere far from Manhattan City, with a little white cottage for rent.

The first step was to figure out just what the men were looking for.

Dear Miss Bixby,
I am a gentleman of twenty-five years employed as a porter
and postmaster at the train depot. I am seeking to correspond
with, and, if mutual adoration results, marry a refined young
lady who could make my home a paradise.

Dear Miss Bixby,
I am a bashful man who has terrible luck with
the fairer sex. I
am not bad-looking, but I suppose my nose is rather large, my
eyes rather small. I don’t drink at all, Miss—not a drop—and
I swear that I am kindhearted and honest. If a lady would
only give me a chance, I think I could make her happy.

Dear Miss Bixby,
I am in want of a wife. Requirements: Educated brunette,
amiable, musical, and knows her place. No fat women, no
teetotalers, and no Irish.

Dear Miss Bixby,
I run the butcher’s shop and am a widower with five children.
I’m in desperate need of a wife. She must be able to manage
these children plus a large garden and cook us all three squares
a day. Send along two if you can spare them.