Louisa and the Country Bachelor : A Louisa May Alcott Mystery (9781101547564) (5 page)

Father cringed. His noble nose flared. Philosophers are almost always above such things, but he disliked being reminded that the Alcotts were often at the mercy of others' charity.

“I am Louisa Alcott,” I said, quickly offering my hand to end that particular conversational lead. “This is my mother, Mrs. Alcott, and Father, my sisters Anna, Lizzie, and May. And our good friend Miss Sylvia Shattuck.” Each person nodded, obviously fascinated by this vision of femalehood.

Ida Tupper was buxom and of smallish height, but her elaborately coiffured blond hair and richly feathered hat made her a foot taller. Her womanly figure was exaggerated by her wide crinoline skirt and an expensive fox stole around her sloped shoulders. Father, the vegetarian, stared in heartbreaking dismay at the poor creature's still-attached head, with the black-bead eyes.

A large ruby ring flashed on Mrs. Tupper's right hand, and a three-stone diamond ring glittered on the other. Her smile put her face in conflict. She pretended sophistication; she seemed more of a child playing at dress-up, since there was a simplicity to her that bordered on silliness.

“Let me kiss you, my child,” she said, doing just that instead of contenting herself with the offered handshake, and then she retreated a step and gazed at me.

I gazed back, trying to memorize her face and gestures so they could be added to my notebook. Here was the perfect foil for my sincere and sensible Kate Loring. Here was my Miss Amelia—all flounces and coquettishness and not an ounce of common sense, at least in comparison to Abba.

“Your naughty uncle said naught of your arrival, but then how could he? I have been out of town, you see. Down to Boston and Worcester to take my brother to see another specialist, while I saw my dressmakers. There are no decent dressmakers in Walpole, you know, just that poor Lilli Noot-eboom, the Dutch girl, with her old-fashioned patterns.” She paused to breathe, then began again. “You are to call me Ida, not Mrs. Tupper!” said this woman I had met the moment before.

Abba gasped. In addition to being married to the philosopher of Concord, she herself was descended from one of the oldest families in New England. Such precipitous familiarity did not suit her.

Benjamin winked at me from under his red Turkish cap. “Don't rush the child; she'll take fright,” he said.

“We are a family who values manners,” said Cousin Eliza coldly, now herself spying the long-lost pot of stew and trying to push it under the settee with her toe.

“Thank you,” I said, “but perhaps Uncle is right, Mrs. Tupper. I'm sure we'll be great friends once we've had a chance to actually get to know each other.”

“I do hope so,” cooed Mrs. Tupper, sitting next to me on the settee. “I heard from dear Eliza that you are theatrical? Will you be performing in Walpole? There is a group of young people and such who put on the occasional play here.”

“I had thought I might, but I have been so very busy, preparing the house and . . .” I stopped. I had been about to say, “writing,” but I did not like to discuss my work with strangers. There is no better way to take the wind out of a story than to discuss it before it is written. “. . . and finishing my seaming,” I said. Even Ida Tupper should understand the task of seaming linens.

“Well, I do hope you and the other young people will provide some summer entertainment. It can be so humdrum in Walpole, can't it, Benjamin? I get quite fed up to the gills with quiet days and quieter nights. I suspect it is because I spend so much time caring for an invalid, and because my dear husband, Jonah, is gone from me for so long. It is unfair, that is what it is. Unfair.” Ida Tupper pulled a lace handkerchief from her little netted purse and sniffed. “Oh, I miss him sorely. Ain't it so, Benjamin? Many's the afternoon that that kind man sitting over there”—she waved her handkerchief in Uncle's direction—“that generous soul, gave me his shoulder to weep upon.”

“Tea?” asked Eliza frostily. “Your cup is empty.”

“Thank you. It took ever so long for Benjamin to use my first name without adding the last. How are you today, Benjamin? Did you sleep well last night?” Ida Tupper asked, drying her eyes and forcing a brave smile onto her face.

Benjamin blushed a color no less intense than that of his red Turkish cap. I recalled Abba saying he hadn't called his wife by her first name until they had been married a year. I doubt he had ever referred to her sleeping habits. Uncle was keeping fast company.

CHAPTER THREE

“MRS. TUPPER, IS your husband still run off, then?” asked Eliza sweetly, arranging a pillow behind Benjamin's back.

A run-off husband! Oh, where was my notebook?

“Oh, you are such a tease! Yes, he is still traveling. And where is yours, Eliza?” countered Mrs. Tupper.

“Mending the chicken coop, I believe, or perhaps now he is repairing the roof. At least I have a vague sense of his whereabouts, more than some wives,” Eliza said with a wickedness I had never before heard in her voice.

“Now, Eliza,” said Benjamin.

Mrs. Fisher came in just then with the tea tray. She saw Mrs. Tupper, gave her a sour look under knitted brows, clattered the tray onto the table, and left without a word.

Eliza stared unhappily at the service. Mrs. Fisher had used the best china, the transparent hand-painted kind that is meant to sit in a glass case and look pretty because it is really much too delicate to use. I knew exactly what my cousin was thinking, and I, too, would have been more at ease with a thick mug. But housekeepers can be vain about such matters; when company arrives, even just poor relations, they feel they must trot out the good stuff.

“My husband is a commercial traveler,” explained Mrs. Tupper with a bright smile in my direction. She helped herself to a plate and a piece of seedcake, and that gesture revealed much about our neighbor. Well-bred women wait to be served by the hostess. “Poor Jonah works ever so hard, because he knows I do like the nice things in life. Don't you, Louisa? Like the nice things. Poor man. He does love me so, and I him, of course. I think a woman without a husband to guide her is lost, don't you?” She crooked her pinkie over her teacup and smiled.

Eliza and Abba exchanged glances. Anna peered devoutly into her teacup, trying not to smile. May and Lizzie stared openmouthed at this vision of femininity.

Sylvia, sitting opposite me on a footstool, since all the chairs had been quickly claimed, calmly stirred her tea, then gave me a knowing look. We had both left Boston to escape this kind of thing, her eyes said. And then she said aloud, “From the frying pan to the fire.”

“What was that?” asked Mrs. Tupper in her high, chirping voice.

“I said, ‘This year, the mountains look higher,' ” answered Sylvia calmly. “Don't you think? I must read my Confucius and see what he thought of mountains.”

Mrs. Tupper squinted out the window, puzzled.

“I understand your household includes your brother and son. They don't take tea?” I asked.

Her bright smile momentarily dimmed. “Clarence, my son, is out of town at the moment. He has many interests. And my brother is a complete invalid, poor man. He has the fever again today, and must stay indoors with a compress. You know how weak he is, Benjamin.” She pouted. “And my father-in-law, Mr. Tupper, avoids us, I think. That is, he never calls on us, nor does he escort me to Sunday service, as one might expect. I might call him mean-spirited, if I were inclined to gossip, but one never speaks ill of the dead, or of the family; that is my belief. Mean-spirited. I would never say that. I am quite afraid of him.” She giggled and fluttered her spangled fan.

Father had had enough of this aimless style of conversation. He decided it was time to quiz Sylvia, one of his favorite pastimes.

“Sylvia, you have not revealed this latest reason for fleeing your home,” he said, sternly stirring his tea and accepting a plate of cake from Eliza. Sylvia, the family once approximated, usually ran away from home twice a year. Now that she was grown, it still counted as running away in society's eyes, since she left without a husband, which she disdained to acquire, or a father, who had gone to his heavenly reward (or elsewhere) many years before.

“Mother has said I must never darken her doorstep again,” Sylvia said. “She has thrown me out of the familial hearth. Cast me away from the ancestral home.”

“That nonsensical speech means you and your mother have quarreled,” said Abba. “How you young people love your dramas. Could you be a little less hyperbolic and a little more specific about what has happened?”

“It is because of your conversion to the Romish faith,” guessed Father.

“Catholicism?” Sylvia looked confused. “Oh, that was months and months ago. Now I am reading Confucius. The Oriental. ‘Men of intelligence are free from doubts, moral men from anxiety, and men of courage from fear.' Isn't that charming?”

“I'm not certain that charm demonstrates progress in your logic,” said Father. “I will have to reread him to decide. Benjamin, do you have a volume of Oriental philosophy?” and without waiting for an answer, Father wandered out of the parlor. We heard his footsteps move down the hall, toward Uncle's crammed library.

“Your mother is a little high-strung, but she would not cast you out for reading Confucius,” Abba said gently. Cousin Eliza was enchanted. She had the same look in her eyes I remembered from when her father told us pirate stories.

“No. I have turned down another marriage proposal,” Sylvia admitted.

Sylvia was one of the Boston Belles, possessing a soft blond beauty that, combined with her family's fortune, had produced several marriage proposals already. To her mother's dismay, Sylvia also possessed a distinct dislike of children, especially babes-in-arms, and had what Father called a wandering intellect. She passed through phases, having at various times dedicated her life to portrait painting, the violin, French poets, Aristotle, Roman Catholicism, and now Confucianism. She had little time for beaux and no time for a husband.

“Tell them whose heart has been broken,” I prompted.

Sylvia grinned wickedly. “That awful little Jimmy Stein-way. Three lumps, please. You remember him, Louy? The short boy with the large red nose?”

“Steinway? As in the piano family?” spoke up Ida Tupper, wide-eyed with interest.

“An offshoot,” said Sylvia. “Practically a weed. The Kansas City Steinways. Oh, Mother was so distressed when I refused him. ‘Who else will have you?' she screamed, and then fainted. So I have been banished till I come to my senses. Is that date bread? I'm famished.”

“It is date bread, with fresh clotted cream. It seems to me, Sylvia, you are already at your senses,” I said, passing her a plate with a large slice on it. “From what I recall of Jimmy Steinway, he would not make you a good husband. He gambles excessively, drinks even more, and once when I asked him if he had read Goethe he said, ‘Is he that German fellow who has the cobbler's shop on Brattle Street? Next time you see him, ask if he can mend morocco leather.' ”

“The Steinways,” repeated Ida Tupper in a calculating voice. Even an offshoot of that well-known family was probably very wealthy. I could read her thoughts. Money married money. Sylvia, despite her scorched gown and mill girl's appetite, was wealthy, and Ida Tupper had a son.

The tea hour was not an extended one, as Eliza was obviously weary from her household duties, so we returned to our cottage and disbanded to our various activities—Sylvia to meditate on the sayings of Confucius as found in a little bound translation, Lizzie to her piano, Anna to her correspondence, May to her paint box, Abba to her kitchen, and Father . . . he took a glance at the bare earth in the side yard, found a pair of overalls and boots in the pantry closet, and promptly began digging untidy rows, pleased to have space for a vegetable patch.

Now this patch had somewhat mystified me, when Uncle first showed me the cottage that he was allowing us to inhabit. It had been dug recently, as evidenced by uneven mounds of bare black earth, yet nothing had been planted, and Uncle Benjamin could not say who had dug it.

Father saw no mystery but only good fertile ground. “We will have fresh vegetables again,” he announced.

Abba and I exchanged worried glances. As skillful as Father was in eating vegetables, he had little talent for growing them; indeed, those summers when we had counted on the produce from his garden to sustain us we had come close to starvation.

But Abba was a loving and supportive wife, one who was truly “able and willing to face storm as well as sunshine and share life's burdens as they come,” as I had described in my story “The Lady and the Woman.”

“Shall I help you dig, Bronson?” she asked. “Louy, you go to your writing shed. You shall read us some pages later tonight.”

 

 

AT FIVE O'CLOCK, we had gathered again in the dining room for a supper of water and bread and cheese, when there was a knock upon the front door.

I opened it to find Mrs. Fisher, Eliza's helper, standing there with a steaming casserole in her hands.

“Mrs. Wells sends it with compliments,” she said. “She felt badly that the tea party was not a success.”

Abba, who had followed behind me, took the casserole. “Tell Eliza, please, that we had a lovely time, and are most grateful for the hot dish. Will you join us, Mrs. Fisher?”

Mrs. Fisher's eyes opened wide, then narrowed with suspicion. Abba had a habit of ignoring class rules and was as liable to invite a maid to share her table as a Boston Brahmin.

“Have to get back to the house,” Mrs. Fisher said. “One of the tykes emptied a bottle of ink into the carpet. But thank you for the invitation.”