An Unlikely Friendship (4 page)

"How are the others faring?"

"She's mean to us all. But mostly to me. She does it on the sly, so Pa doesn't hear or know."

"Of course she does. Here, would you like some tea?"

I said yes and she ordered one of her servants to fetch it, and before long we were sitting at the tea table in her elegant parlor and I was feeling better. I looked around the room. "Why can't I live here with you?" I asked for what was likely the twentieth time.

"Because your pa needs you."

I gave a bitter laugh. "Pa? Needs me?"

"Yes. He needs all of you." She poured tea out of a silver pot she'd once told me had been made by Paul Revere and handed down in her family. "Did you ever think how it would hurt him if you left?"

I hadn't.

"Besides, you
are
a lady. I wouldn't have you in my house if you weren't."

"She said it takes seven generations to make a lady."

"Then tell her about your grandfather Levi Todd's wife, Jane, who was living in a stockade in Kentucky when she wove her wedding dress from the weeds and wild flax that were the only materials she had. She may not have had frills and ruffles, but she was a lady."

I listened intently. Once Grandma Parker started on family legends, she never stopped. But if you paid mind to her, at least she wouldn't go on forever.

"What do you need, child? Is there anything I can give you?"

"I want a hoopskirt," I said petulantly.

"Did you ask your stepmother?"

"Yes. She said I'm too young."

"Well, you are a mite young. But when the time comes, I'll help you make one."

She was an excellent seamstress, my grandmother. Together we had made several of my dresses. She paid for the fabric and the bows and ruffles. She was always giving me money for something.

Her home was beautiful and, with her white hair and lively blue eyes and chiseled features, she was beautiful, too. I was proud of her, proud to be part of everything she was. And she was the matriarch in town, known as the Widow Parker.

"Will you come and visit us sometime?" I asked when I left.

"I don't go down there anymore," she said. "Not since my daughter died. She is welcome to come and pay her respects to me anytime she wishes. Now remember what I told you. Tell her about Grandmother Jane and the woven wedding dress."

She hugged me when I left and pressed some coins into my hand. "Buy yourself a little something," she murmured into my ear.

My spirit soared when I left her.

***

B
Y LATE SPRING
Liz Humphreys arrived with all the ceremony of a true Southern belle. The carriage bearing her was drawn by two horses and included a footman who put down the step with a flourish of a bow. Out stepped Liz, holding a froufrou of a puppy dog.

I'd wanted a dog after Mama died but Pa had said no. Liz intended to let this one not only live in the house but sleep in her bed. And Pa was fine with it.

Everyone greeted Liz with the good wishes they usually saved for politicians who stopped in Lexington on their way to Frankfort. She was done up in fine feathers too showy for our town. All ruffles and bows and golden beribboned curls under a velvet hat I would kill for.

She came with four more trunks of clothing. I hated her on sight. The only thing that kept me from jumping on her and pulling her hair was that she wasn't wearing a hoopskirt.

"M
Y ROOM AT HOME
is bigger than this. But at least this isn't as bad as I expected."

"What did you expect, a wooden shack surrounded by savage Indians?"

She raised her chin. She was pretty. I had to give her that. "No. My mama told me you-all weren't that bad off." She plumped herself down on the bed and set the dog, Pierre, on the floor. I thought of my father's hunting dogs out back in the pen and how I'd always wanted a dog for a house pet.

"What do you do around here?" she asked.

"What people do anywhere. There's lots to do." I found myself defending Lexington.

"Is your daddy an important man?"

"He's a state senator. He knows everybody. My grandfathers started this town. Our best friend is Senator Henry Clay. He's going to run for president, and when he lives in the White House I'm going to be invited for a visit."

She eyed me unblinkingly. "My grandmother rules society in Frankfort. Every year she leads the procession in the ball. She wears a lace cap like aristocrats from the federal period. If she doesn't accept you in town, you're an outsider forever."

We sat, each on a bed, facing each other. I swung my foot. "I'm going to have a pony one of these days. My pa says so."

"Will you let me ride it?"

"If you behave."

She reached down and lifted Pierre onto her lap and hugged him close. "I didn't want to come here. My mama made me come. Do you have a hoopskirt?"

Something stirred inside me. "No."

"Neither do I. I'm not allowed. Mama says I'm too young. If I could make one, I'd make it myself."

"My Grandma Parker said she'll help me make one when the time comes."

"When is that?" She looked at me hopefully.

I thought about Grandma Parker. I assessed her love and decided I wouldn't be lying.

"Soon," I said. "And if you stop acting like a silly-boots she could help you make one, too."

Liz set Pierre back down, slipped off the bed, and offered her hand, just like a man would. I took it and we shook hands. "I'm really not a silly-boots," she said. "I was just so scared when I got here. Will you be my friend?"

We shook on that, too.

L
IZ WAS A HOPELESS CASE
. I had to school her in everything. Most likely she'd associated too much with that grandmother of hers in the aristocratic lace cap.

First off, she was afraid of everything: garden snakes, the woods, lightning and thunder, turtles, bugs of all kinds, the peacocks that roamed around our house that my father used as watchdogs, and Mammy Sally.

Apparently she'd never been on friendly terms with a negro in Frankfort, and when Mammy Sally jokingly told her one day she was going to send Jaybird to scold her, she became terrified of Jaybird and all the other demons of Mammy Sally's negro world.

I must confess that I added to her fears. I couldn't resist telling her about the legend of the woods surrounding Lexington. On the Maysville Pike to the north was the thick underbrush of canebrake, peavine, and pawpaw. To the east were the large sycamores, maples, and wild cherries.

"The Cherokees called it a dark and bloody land," I told her when we were lying awake in our beds one night. "Anything you can imagine lives in those woods."

"Like what?"

"Buffalo," I lied, "wolves and giant mammoths, runaway slaves and savage Indians."

"Do the Indians ever come to town?"

"No, but they watch us all the time."

She half believed me and half knew I was just entertaining her. But her fear of the savage Indians was very real.

One day a band of friendly Cherokee Indians came through town, right past our windows. I ran to find Liz, to show her how friendly they appeared, but couldn't find her. Her screams led me to the cellar, where I found her hidden in a corner, praying and sobbing, "Don't let them get me. Don't let them scalp me, please."

I stopped feeding her fears after that. I didn't know that my tales of folklore, which I'd learned from Mammy Sally, were so effective.

T
HERE WAS NO PLACE
in our family, Pa said, for ignorant women. So in September, the best time of the year, the time when the sunshine was so mellow you wanted to drink it and the sky so blue you wanted a dress of the same color, Liz and I trudged three blocks up the hill to Reverend and Mrs. Ward's school at the corner of Second and Market.

"I thought we were going to the Lafayette Female Academy," Liz said. "That's what my mama told me."

"We can't."

"Why?"

"The
Kentucky Gazette
said that the school lost its respectability. That emulation slept and virtue fled."

"What's emulation?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, Mary, look at that." She stood there staring.

I looked. It was a coffle of slaves, all manacled together, being led, groaning and shuffling, down the street.

"Where are they taking them?" Liz asked.

I stared, too. "To the flatboats in Louisville, to be taken downriver to the markets in New Orleans," I recited carefully. Pa had told me all about it. Pa was a secret abolitionist, I think, but he dared not speak such sentiments in Lexington.

"We're going to be late for school, Liz," I said. "Let's go."

I supposed she didn't see such sights in Frankfort. Or at least she had been kept from them. She insisted on staying and staring until the slaves were out of sight. And we were late for school on the first day. Reverend Ward was not happy. And that's when we found out what emulation meant.

"It means looking up to and trying to imitate the virtues, the character, and the values of our American heroes," Reverend Ward said solemnly as we stood before him, waiting for permission to go to class. "It means trying to be better than you are. Now, so as you learn, you will both stay after school today and write a paper about who, in our history or in your family, you would like to emulate. Understood?"

I don't know who Liz wrote about. Likely her grandmother with the lace cap. I wrote about how Grandma Parker's maternal grandmother had brought food and clothing to her husband at Valley Forge. How she frequently brought provisions to the men and on one visit was greeted by General George Washington, who complimented her on her devotion to her husband and the cause.

When Reverend Ward read it, he scowled. "Where did you learn to write, Mary? Who taught you such words and such penmanship?"

"Sometimes my own mother," I said. "Sometimes Grandma Parker. Or Auntie Ann or my older sisters."

He harrumphed. "Good girl," he said begrudgingly. "Now go and sit and wait for your cousin. I think somehow that she has not had the same education as you."

It wasn't writing and penmanship that I had to learn at Ward's. Some of the other girls, like Margaret Wickliffe and Isabelle Trotter and one of my own cousins from Boone County, Emily Todd, were as accomplished as I was. I did have to learn arithmetic, history, geography, natural science, French, and religion. Mrs. Ward taught astronomy and something I liked best. On the afternoons when her husband was busy talking politics in the parlor with professors from Transylvania, she would take us into the kitchen and teach us how to make puddings and custards, cakes and candy.

She also was responsible for having us join the young ladies' library in Lexington and saw to it that we attended performances by every children's theater company as well as performances of Shakespeare and the American premiere of a Beethoven string quartet.

It was impossible not to like Mrs. Ward. Once a month, on a Saturday, she took us shopping and to the confectionery store of Mr. Giron, whose Swiss pastry cook made special meringues and macaroons for us.

I looked up to Mrs. Ward. Until the day she disappointed me.

Every May first the school erected a maypole in the square, and a girl from Fayette County was selected to be crowned Queen of the May.

It was supposed to be the prettiest girl from Fayette County. But Mrs. Ward was overly fond of Bible verses and required that we memorize them. The girl who memorized the most, she promised, would be queen of the May.

"Even if she isn't from Fayette County?" came the question from Emily Todd, my cousin from Boone County, who boarded at the school.

"Yes," Mrs. Ward promised. "It will be a very democratic process. Remember, this is the school where respectability is all. Where discipline hasn't died and emulation doesn't sleep."

I had no desire to be Queen, but my cousin Emily wanted it so badly she swore she'd memorize the most Bible verses.

She enlisted me to listen to her. She memorized 1,373 verses. And before she reached 50, I begged off.

"Do you think I'll get it, Mary? Do you?"

If women ever could run for president of the United States, Emily would be right there in the forefront, I thought.

"She said whoever memorizes the most verses will be crowned," I said quietly.

But it wasn't very democratic.

For one thing, the girls kept reminding Mrs. Ward that the contest had more to do with beauty than Bible verses. "It's supposed to be the prettiest girl," said Virginia Claymont, who came from our county and was the next to prettiest girl in school.

The prettiest was Catherine Drake. But she was from Nicholas County.

"You all get to wear white and march in an elegant parade to James Trotter's grove where a maypole will be erected. We want to make the best display for the school," was the response Mrs. Ward gave us.

Emily recited her verses. Some of us attended the class where a weary Mrs. Ward and her husband, the Reverend, sat and listened approvingly.

One by one, those of us who attended excused ourselves and left.

There was no doubt about it. Emily won, hands down. But Mrs. Ward still wouldn't name her Queen of the May. And we all knew why, especially Emily.

She simply wasn't pretty enough. The school needed a prettier girl. Before the day was over the girls were split and arguing over who should represent the school as Queen.

Mrs. Ward was beside herself. "I can't have this contest turning my girls against each other!" So she turned it into a civics lesson and had us vote for Queen of the May. "Women can't vote," Isabelle Trotter reminded her.

"They can in this school," Mrs. Ward said.

After some very secretive voting and whispering, the votes were counted. I knew most of the girls considered Emily a Miss Prissy-Boots for memorizing all those Bible verses. But the vote, as it turned out, was a tie. It was even, between Catherine Drake and Emily Todd.

"No more of this." Mrs. Ward gathered the little slips of paper with our votes on them and dumped them in a wastepaper basket.

"Catherine Drake will be Queen of the May," she announced.

To the cries of most, that Catherine came from Nicholas County, she paid no heed.