Louisa and the Missing Heiress (4 page)

I grimaced, knowing that much of this tirade was for my benefit, since my family spent much of its resources supporting the charities of Boston. “You come for dinner, too, Sylvia. Father would love to see you. He has questions for you, I suspect.”

“The conversation will be worth a meal of carrots.” Mr. Wortham bent to place a kiss on my hand, in the Continental manner. “We will come. Dot will be—”

But before he could finish the sentence, the front door slammed, and Mrs. Wortham herself, half-visible through the red velvet curtains of the doorway, appeared in the front hall. She was muttering distractedly to herself as she pulled at her gloves.

Craning my neck for a better view, I saw my old friend and was both startled and concerned by the change. She looked more cosmopolitan with her hair draped in the gentler style of French taste rather than the gaudy, silly ringlets of American style. But her walking costume of dusky rose and rabbit fur was the same one she had worn the year before, made by a Boston seamstress. Had she purchased no Parisian fashions? Moreover, Dorothy was hatless, and premature lines etched her pale forehead. How sad she looked!

When Dot finished with the removal of gloves and coat and turned away from the hall table mirror, she finally saw her husband and guests, watching.

“Why, Louisa! Alfreda! Edith! Sarah!” Mrs. Wortham exclaimed, her mouth a round O. “What a surprise!”

MR. PRESTON WORTHAM unceremoniously dropped my hand and strode to the doorway for a husbandly embrace. He smiled his tolerant smile.

“Dearest, have you no greeting for me? Where have you been?” he asked gently and slowly, as if speaking to a wayward child. And then, in surprise, “Why, Dorothy, you have changed your clothes! In the middle of the day!”

“What is strange about that?” she asked defensively and with a little anger. Quite unlike Dorothy, I thought with increasing concern. Marriage and travel did affect a young woman, but this Dot, with the distant, almost frightened look in her eyes, with that strained note in her usually gentle voice, this seemed not to be Dot at all.

“I thought it was a new hat you needed, dearest, although we agreed to limit our clothing allowance.” Mr. Wortham no longer smiled. Behind him, Alfreda Thorney cleared her throat. A reference to money had been made, in front of others. Quite not the thing to do.

“Hat? Whatever are you talking about?” Dorothy asked.

“Did you forget about tea today?” Mr. Wortham kissed his wife’s forehead, and with tenderness brushed back a lock of pale hair that had wandered free. There was something about the gesture that reminded me just then of a play, when the guilty husband has staged a display of just that kind of tenderness that requires an intimate touching of the wife’s face before her close friends and family, a superficial pretense of amiability. Whatever had Preston Wortham gotten up to?

“No, my dearest, I did not forget. Tea was for tomorrow. Not today.” A scowl appeared on Dot’s pale brow.

“No, sweetest, the invitations were for this afternoon. . . .”

“Tomorrow . . .” Dot insisted, and the five guests politely studied the carpet and cleared their throats, for their tones of voice had indicated a quarrel was in the making.

“Today,” Mr. Wortham insisted, determined to have the last word.

“Perhaps madam would take a cup of tea?” Digby offered.

“Tea,” Dot agreed. “A fresh pot, Digby. I’m chilled to the bone. Though if my guests have been waiting since teatime they are probably ready to float away.”

Miss Alfreda frowned at this flippancy and I imagined her thinking, Was this how Europe affected young women of breeding? Made them forgetful and rude? Her nieces, should they wed, would honeymoon in Niagara Falls.

“Just so,” Miss Alfreda said. “I really must be on my way. Harriet has asked me to conduct some business for her before the shops close.” This, too, was a familiar refrain, for all of Boston society knew that Harriet Brownly treated her sister no better than a paid companion, there to fetch and carry.

“Dear Aunt Alfreda, don’t be angry,” Dot said, taking her aunt’s black-gloved hands and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I am so sorry. Perhaps you will come again tomorrow . . . I have a present for you, from Venice. But you must come back tomorrow or I won’t give it to you.”

“Well, dear niece, if you insist. But don’t lose your hat tomorrow.”

“Hat? Why is everyone going on about hats? Of course I won’t. Tea tomorrow, at three. All of you. You, too, Edgar.” And that offhand “you, too” indicated a certain lack of affection between brother and sister. Without, I hope, in any way condoning coldness in the family, I could not help but wonder who could blame Dorothy for preferring tea parties without her brother in attendance? Edgar Brownly, the heir and his mother’s favorite, in addition to being a glutton, was the kind of spoiled only son who beat street dogs for fun and insisted that his sisters walk behind him on Sunday as they promenaded to church. He had once publicly berated Dorothy for being in possession of a pamphlet on women’s suffrage.

But if Dot’s tone of voice to Edgar was cool, she was equally cool to her husband. Mr. Wortham put his arm about his wife’s shoulders. Dot, with the smallest of movements, shrugged him away.

The honeymoon, whatever it had been, was over, and relations with her family had not mended. I felt my old sense of protection for the girl who was smaller, slower, more vulnerable than myself rise to the surface. And somehow Dot seemed to sense it as she turned to me and began to whisper, “Louy, dear Louy,” in the noisy confusion of donning coats and gloves and final comments about the weather. She seemed so curiously weary. She leaned in to kiss my cheek and I smelled a familiar odor: Dr. Borden’s Cherry Cough Elixir. Was Dot ill?

The others were out the door, but with a slight pressure on my hand, Dot signaled me to delay for a moment. “So good to see you! And I mean it. . . .” Dot smiled, but even the smile seemed tinged with sadness. “Imagine coming home after months and months away and finding Aunt Alfreda fuming in your parlor!” We laughed, but too briefly, too halfheartedly. Our conversation was making me even more concerned.

“But, Dot, you did forget, and you seem strange. Is there any way I can be of help?”

“Oh, Louy, if only you could. If only I could talk completely openly with a trusted friend. I have made such a mess of it. There is so much sorrow and worry here, because of me.”

I felt I had to reach out to Dot, and somehow I had an instinct that the situation was urgent. She seemed so tired, so weary, almost as if she were in terrible danger! I whispered, “Then talk with me, Dot. Remember when you confessed to me that you put the boiled potatoes in your governess’s bed because she would not let you sit on the stairs and watch the dancing at New Year’s? I never told, Dot. You can trust me.”

Dot sighed, and her blue eyes seemed to look into a great distance. “Oh, how innocent we were then. . . . Come tomorrow, Louy,” she whispered back. “Early. I must talk to someone. I love him so, yet I am in terror. I must tell him, I must . . . Perhaps you will be the one to understand without judging. Perhaps to you I can explain. . . .”

“Explain what, my dear? Why all this whispering like schoolgirls telling secrets?” Preston appeared suddenly behind her, smiling wolfishly and a little too widely.

Dot’s smile faded. “Only how much I hope Louisa will come back tomorrow,” she said. “We have so much to talk about. And I have a present for her, from Florence.” She turned back to me, her eyes wide. “I do hope you will like it. I carried it around all morning in that awful Italian heat. . . .”

What on earth was wrong between these two? And this talk of presents when something was so amiss? I am sure I frowned or at least looked alarmed. “Of course I will come back tomorrow.”

“Well, then. Good-bye, Miss Alcott.” Mr. Wortham smiled. The door was closed. Slammed, in fact.

As I turned away, I considered knocking and demanding a second audience with Dot on the spot. But since the door had indeed been shut in my face, the polite thing to do—if there was a polite thing to do—was to leave. I wondered yet again why society seemed so confident in defining politeness in a way that seemed so uncomfortably close to cowardice.

 

 

“WELL? HOW DID she look?” Abba’s right hand was probing the cavity of a freshly butchered chicken. There was a smear of blood on her cheek and feathers in her hair.

I hugged my mother with affection and kissed her clean cheek as my sister Lizzie sat on a stool and helped herself to a cracker from the cracker jar. Lizzie, my “angel in a cellar kitchen,” our shy, stay-at-home Lizzie, who was nineteen then, and happier in the family kitchen than anywhere else in the world.

Our simple, lovely kitchen was a relief even to me after the stifling, overfurnished Wortham parlor, with its fragile china figurines balancing on thin-legged tables ready to be toppled by wide-hooped skirts and all those acres of new upholstery waiting for the first stain.

“Abba, I said I would do the kitchen chores today. You were to rest this afternoon,” I protested.

“I told her.” Lizzie sighed, sounding older and wearier than her years.

“You were late,” Abba said. “I thought perhaps you had disappeared upstairs to your garret to write. I didn’t want to interrupt. Lizzie, leave some crackers for your father, please.”

“I will write today, but later. Let’s finish this stew,” I said, rolling up my sleeves. “It is for the shelter, I assume, since it has meat in it.” I tied an apron over my dress.

“For the shelter,” Abba agreed. “We can make do with vegetables, but those girls need meat to keep their strength up. Childbirth is difficult enough, but when there is no family to support you . . . why, it’s a wonder more of them don’t end in the river.”

Yesterday one of the residents of the Charles Street Home for Unwed Girls had been found drowned, tangled in a fishing net. Abba had taken it very badly. She had known the girl, had tried to cheer her up by teaching her to knit booties, and to give her courage by explaining the mysteries of breaking waters and umbilical cords. The child had been only fourteen and would not say who the father of her unborn child was, only that he would have nothing more to do with her, and her own father, a collier out of work with a broken leg, had kicked her out. She had shown up at the shelter two months before, carrying her old rag doll and nothing more.

“Such a tragedy.” Abba sighed. “That poor child. They say suicide. But I wonder if her father, or perhaps the father of her child . . . Men can be violent.” And she probed fiercely into the chicken as if evil could be found there, and destroyed.

“But tell me how Dot—how our new Mrs. Preston Wortham—looked,” said Lizzie, who enjoyed talk of crinolines and the new fashions.

“Absent. She missed her own tea party.”

“That is strange,” Abba agreed.

“Not that I blame Dot,” I said. “Sarah and Edith and Edgar and Miss Alfreda were all there waiting to pounce on her. It seemed as though we were having the exact same conversation as we had had last year . . . except, of course, last year Dot wasn’t married yet. I have invited her and Mr. Wortham for dinner next Sunday, by the way. Sylvia will come, too.”

Abba nodded. “Sunday . . . Louy, your father will be here, so it will be vegetables, but I could make a cake for us,” Abba mused. “It isn’t like Dottie, though, to miss a tea. She was never as bright as you, but she was always reliable.”

“I know. Something is wrong, I fear. She has asked me to come back tomorrow, before the others. For a talk.”

“Perhaps she and Mr. Wortham aren’t getting along. I hope she doesn’t discover this marriage was a mistake. So many were against it from the start. But she seemed so happy. Ah, well, love is a mystery, isn’t it? Pass the salt over, Louy.”

“Where is Father?” I asked, knowing Abba would appreciate this often-asked question. My father’s absences were a frequent occurrence! A typical man, he had absolutely no sense for the domestic sphere, a trait forgiven by his women, as his obliviousness was caused by a deep concern for the welfare of his fellow man. Even when he occasionally infuriated me, I always admired him as someone who had such strong views and did not mind what others thought and said. And my father’s convictions and impractical notions allowed Abba and me to indulge our favorite conspiracy: keeping at least one of his feet on the solid, practical earth and preventing his spending all of his minutes on his theories of the virtuous life and harmony with nature.

“In Worcester for the night,” Abba said. “Giving a conversation.” Father made an occasional dollar by giving talks in private homes, especially after Abba had complained repeatedly of our poverty and his dinner had been reduced from the luxurious abundance of carrots, winter greens, and potatoes to a meager slice of bread and vegetable broth.

“Just as well,” I said. “He would not like the sight of you tearing at that chicken. Not even for charity.” Eccentric though they were, we respected Father’s vegetarian beliefs, borne out of love for his fellow creatures. “And our May? Where is she?” May, in her early teens at that time, was as different from Lizzie as I was from Anna. Anna was calm; I was volatile and moody. Lizzie was shy and found talking to people outside her own family as dismaying as a trip to the dentist for a tooth pulling; May was a butterfly, happiest when in her party dress and out and about.

“With a French tutor, I believe,” Abba said. “Or perhaps her music lesson. I can’t keep her lessons straight.”

When the chicken was in the stewing pot and our own vegetable potage put on to simmer, I folded last night’s mending into a basket and put my hat and coat back on. It would be dark soon, and too cold and windy for walking, but there was one last errand of the day.

The Home, as the people of Boston referred to it, was a ramshackle house on Charles Street, once empty and unfit for living and now filled with a dozen girls and women, all in various stages of pregnancy and with nowhere else to go. The building showed the city’s ambivalence to this reminder of sin and misfortune among them: One side of the façade had been hastily and clumsily painted in large red letters spelling out the word
whore
; the other side was graced with a new porch and several rocking chairs, courtesy of an anonymous donor. Sylvia and I spent much time there. I realize now that my experience working with these young women was the best education in life I could have had.