A Good Man (14 page)

Someone says, “Bitch.”

In the front row, Randolph Tarr’s head gives a twitch.

“I’ll say good evening now.” Ada’s voice is even and pleasant. Head held high, carriage impeccable, she walks into the audience, files down the narrow corridor that opens for her, serenely passes through a gauntlet of hostile looks. Dunne rushes after her and overtakes his ward just as she is going out the door of the saloon.

The men drift back to the bar, many muttering and shaking their heads in disgruntled amazement. Solomon’s doorman is already busy harvesting coins from the floor. Case feels a tap on the shoulder and turns to face Ilges. “Look at poor Lawyer Tarr,” the Major says, “calculating how many clients he’s likely lost tonight. Given all the Southerners in this town, a man would think he had been dropped down in Georgia. Having your wife rub your customers’ noses in their defeat –it’s not good for business.”

Tarr and his daughter have only one well-wisher: Peregrine Hathaway, who is showering a visibly dismayed Miss Celeste with frantic compliments, compliments she seems incapable of appreciating in her distraught condition. Despite this, Peregrine slogs on, a trooper of good cheer.

Case turns away from the distressing scene. “I’m going to leave now,” he says to Ilges in an undertone. “Would it suit if I came by at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Yes,” says Ilges, “that would suit.”

Case departs without bothering to attempt to collect Hathaway. Outside the Majestic, he pauses to draw in a draft of cool, fresh air and give a glance to a sky speckled with ice-chip stars. Then he starts for the Overland Hotel, boot heels thudding hollowly on the planks of the boardwalk as Ada Tarr, that strange woman, insinuates herself into his thoughts.

Up the street, he sees two figures that bring him to a halt. Mrs. Tarr and Mr. Dunne stand in the shadows of Wetzel’s mercantile. The great slab of Dunne’s body is tipped so close to her that she is forced back against the storefront. He appears to be pressing some argument or declaration, emphasizing whatever he is saying with vehement bobs of the head.

Dunne’s aggressive posture, his way of boring in on the woman, connects to what has just transpired in the saloon – the song, the hostile reception to it. Something arises in Case’s brain, a picture comes to him of a small man, his trouser bottoms soggy with melted snow, shrinking back against a wall in the Queen’s Hotel in Toronto, trembling, as he’s berated. The words
Dunne, bloody Dunne
suddenly come to Case and he wonders if he might have the answer to why Dunne acted as if he presumed to know him that night in the Cypress Hills.

Now Dunne is gallantly holding out his arm to Mrs. Tarr. She hesitates before taking it. A decorous advance down Front Street begins; they look like a long-married couple out enjoying a pleasant evening stroll.

SEVEN

THE AFTERNOON FOLLOWING THE
disastrous concert, Ada Tarr sits on her sofa, a book on her lap and her husband’s straight razor in her hand, taking a wicked satisfaction from the sharp
snick
that accompanies each angry snap of her wrist as she slits the leaves of
Daniel Deronda
. Randolph is very particular about shaving with a keen razor. He would be scandalized to see her using his to cut the pages of a novel.

It had been her intention to keep George Eliot’s latest, delivered by post from Chicago six weeks before, in reserve for when the snow flies, something to light dreary winter nights. But now she is desperate for something to take her mind away from last night and her anger at her husband. The quarrel after the concert was a vicious affair. Randolph had been apoplectic about her singing an anti-Confederate song, but coldly so, which is his fashion when he is truly furious. Ada knows he suspected she had chosen that song purposely to give offence, but he wouldn’t come right out and say what was on his mind. If he had, she could have explained. Told her husband that thinking about the deaths of Custer’s poor boys had led her to think about her own brother Tom’s demise on a battlefield more than ten years ago. She could have mentioned how, as she had pushed that coin about the floor with her toe, trying to summon up what she should sing, she had come to recall the night Tom had told the family that he had enlisted. She had
seen
them, her parents, herself, Tom, all singing her brother’s favourite song, a young man’s foolhardy war anthem. Instead of clinging to him and weeping, they had striven to give him the brightest, cheeriest send-off they could.

She had sung that song in memory of the darkness and sadness they had not expressed that evening. Nothing more. True, she had leapt before looking, but if you didn’t do that now and then, you were apt to pass your days unable to feel life at all.

Randolph had been determined to make her pay for what she had done, but he had been just as determined not to reveal the real reason he was so upset with her. So there had been no mention of the potential damage he believed had been done to his business, no mention of the clientele he feared she might have offended. She knew her husband never stooped to talk of money. That was beneath a gentleman. But believing himself a gentleman did not stop Randolph Tarr from continually
thinking
of money, of loss and gain. So he criticized not the substance of the song itself but rather the way she had performed it, sneering, “It is beyond me how a respectable married woman could caterwaul in public like that in such a vulgar, unladylike fashion, like the lowest of music-hall sluts.”

Of course, she had given as good as she got, saying that if he thought she had behaved in an unladylike way, how much more ungentlemanly it had been of him to browbeat the women of his household into exhibiting themselves before a crew of rowdies in a saloon. Why? Because he wanted to parade himself before the town as a
philanthropist
. If he had given it a moment’s thought couldn’t he have predicted what result that would have on Celeste? Didn’t he see the toll the evening had taken on her? The state she was in?

There is nothing that can set Randolph off quicker than the suggestion he is not an exemplary father. He had begun to shout, and she had too, and ad brought Celeste to the top of the stairs in her nightgown where she stood in hysterics, screaming for them to stop, which sent Randolph bounding up the stairs two at a time, to wrap his sobbing daughter in his arms, happy to prove he was as considerate and sensitive a father as any young girl could wish for.

That scene, if any more were needed, demonstrated her stepdaughter’s unsoundness. The acorn does not fall far from the oak, and as with her father, there is something hidden, unfathomable, unknowable about that girl. Ada cannot, for the life of her, decide whether Celeste is playing off Lieutenant Blanchard and Peregrine Hathaway against one another, or whether her behaviour simply testifies to a complete and utter absence of feeling for anyone but herself. Right now, she is off picnicking with the sincere, doting English boy who has been mailing her a blizzard of letters ever since they met at last New Year’s Ball at the military post. Celeste had insisted on reading these letters aloud to her and her replies to him. Was Celeste taking her into her confidence to prove she was loved, or was she seeking approval for the romance? Likely her motives are as unclear to the girl as they are to her.

It’s Ada’s guess that Celeste’s new admirer, Lieutenant Blanchard, son of a prominent Philadelphia family recently posted to Fort Benton, is destined to win her hand, not the sweetly innocent and steadfastly devoted Peregrine Hathaway. As far as she can tell, it isn’t Blanchard’s wealth and social position that has turned the girl’s head. Nor can it be his looks that have captivated her. Lieutenant Blanchard is pear shaped and waddles like a duck. Ada believes Celeste is so smitten with him because he does not defer to her wishes. All her previous suitors fell all over themselves trying to please her, but Blanchard is an astoundingly self-important and self-satisfied young fellow who expects Celeste to second all his opinions and cater to his every whim, which includes preparing him custard to soothe his chronic dyspepsia.

Is it possible that these two really love one another? It makes Ada feel mean spirited to ask the question. And it naturally leads to another. Has
she
ever really loved Randolph Tarr? At the time of her engagement she was sure she did, but perhaps she had deluded herself and made what her mother had always disparagingly referred to as a
marriage of convenience
.

Four years ago she had found herself alone and penniless. The typhoid had carried her father off; two days after he succumbed, her mother lay dead of the same malady. Her brother had been in the grave for over a decade. The little family property that existed had to be disposed of for a pittance: a set of china, a family silver service. The Jessups did not own a house, but lived in a teacherage supplied by the school in which her father taught. She had had to vacate it to make way for the new schoolmaster, crate up her mother’s books, take the train to Chicago, and begin a search for a suitable position. When she had read Mr. John Harding’s advertisement for a governess in a newspaper, she had immediately applied. Helena, Montana, was a distant, unknown place, but Ada was what her father called a plunger, and she dove heedlessly into these waters. Her ideas of a governess’s duties were hazy and ill defined, derived from her reading of English novels. She was soon to learn that if her own notions of what should be expected of her were vague, her employers’ were even foggier. The Hardings did not read English novels. They disdained novels of any description whatsoever.

Mr. Hardingd made a bundle in the Helena goldfields as a prospector, but unlike many others of his kind, he had held on to his wealth and steadily added to it. He bought up claims that others believed were played out, introducing innovations such as giant sluices and steam-driven ore crushers capable of squeezing out the last ounce of remaining gold from the stubborn stone. In time, these profits had given him the means to erect a mansion high above Last Chance Gulch and the hard-scrabble, smoky town that had given him his start. Ada soon learned that she was expected to make Mr. Harding’s daughters fit to inhabit the stately quarters he had built for them. It was clearly his view that if gold could be extracted from rock, surely the same could be done with his Martha and Jenny. That was what she was meant to do, to refine them, to teach them a bit of music, a smidgen of geography, a dab of French. Mr. Harding also stated that his girls must be taught to recite a little verse; he didn’t care what it was, as long as it was improving, edifying, and suitable for young women’s lips because it was his plan, sometime in the future, to send his daughters and their mother to Europe for a look-see, and he didn’t want Jenny and Martha sticking out like sore thumbs over there. Although it was left unsaid, he apparently judged his wife’s manners and education were irremediable – Europe would have to make do with Dolly Harding just as she was.

Mr. Harding seemed to think that sprucing up his girls for the Grand Tour was the equivalent of making them presentable for church; all that was necessary was to give them a quick scrub behind the ears and remind them to clean their fingernails. However, Ada soon learned that beating the names of European capitals into an anvil would have been easier work than insinuating them into the heads of the young Harding ladies. As far as they were concerned, their father’s money lent them all the allure they would ever need.

But the greatest obstacle to educating Martha and Jenny proved to be their mother. Mrs. Harding had married her tycoon when he was still merely a prospector, and she was sure everyone remembered her former occupation – Army laundress – and that all of Helena was maliciously gossiping about her and looking down their noses. She was especially suspicious of the hoity-toity governess. In Mrs. Harding’s mind, Ada, like the charwoman and the scullery maid, was a servant and she had better not forget it. She needed taking down a peg, and Dolly Harding was the woman to do it. From the beginning, Mrs. Harding took to calling Ada “Little Miss Grace and Diginity” to her face. Ada bore this for a month until one day her exasperation spilled over and she corrected the mistress of the house’s pronunciation in front of her daughters. “I think you mean to say,” she said, “that I am Little Miss Grace and
Dignity.”

Her parents had always encouraged her to stand up to injustice, to resist bullying, to exhibit independence of mind, and to defend her rights, but upon reflection she could see that humiliating a persecutor was not necessarily the same thing as demanding respect. She had only to think of how her own gentle father would have conducted himself in a similar situation to see the error of her ways.

Her father had always spoken his mind. But he had done so out of principle, smiling away personal insults. It was his Quixotic idealism that had backed him down the teaching ladder. In the beginning, he had been a professor of Latin and Greek at a distinguished preparatory school in New England. There he had intervened on behalf of a boy who he felt was being persecuted by a small-minded, vindictive headmaster. When the headmaster persisted in making the boy’s life a living hell, her father had written to the boy’s parents criticizing the conduct of the headmaster and suggesting that they remove their son from the school. When it came to light what he had done, he was immediately sacked. After that, her father had passed through a series of increasingly less eminent schools where his gentle but stubborn resistance to arbitrary authority had led to a series of further dismissals, a steady descent arrested only when there was no place lower to fall, and he landed in a one-room school in an Ohio backwater, where the dreamy scholar spent his last years drumming the three Rs into farmers’ sons and daughters.

Of course, Ada had always believed her mother’s causes, enthusiasms, and wilfulness had contributed to her father’s professional decline. His colleagues, the parents of his students had all found her mother a little more eccentric and idiosyncratic than was proper for a schoolteacher’s wife. Her abolitionism would have been perfectly acceptable in New England society if her espousal of it had been a little less fervent and wild-eyed. Some called her John Brown in a skirt. An ardent disciple of Mrs. Amelia Bloom, she had been a passionate advocate for rational and hygienic dress for females, marriage law reform, and votes for women. But people found her tiresome and annoying because she insisted on promoting her views at the most inappropriate times, at dinners and tea parties where it was understood that the conversation should be both amusing and decorous. Some tongue-waggers said that the only question upon which Mrs. Jessup’s views departed from Mrs. Bloom’s was the temperance issue. Mrs. Jessup liked her sherry; many were of the opinion she liked it far too much.