Saints (62 page)

“You have your wish for me, Emma,” Dinah said. “Joseph will never come to my home to see his sons and daughters. You are the unchallenged mother of all his children, though you must remember that we are not his only wives.”

“You are not his
wife
.”

“Once you were the strength of the Church when he was in jail. But now, Emma, the true Church is the men and women who have entered into the Principle, and you are not the strength of
that
Church. When Joseph wants his wife to help him in his work, he will not look to you. He could have. He wanted to. But you refused him. So now take care of your children, Emma Smith. Have your house, pretend your husband has no other wife, hold your Relief Society meetings and do your good works. But as long as you refuse to accept the Principle, you are not his helpmeet, and I am.”

The pain in her belly silenced her. Only then did she hear her words. This is not what I meant to say to Emma, Dinah thought. I meant to plead with her. I meant to love her and to try to make things right.

Emma stood near the closed door, looking at Dinah with red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Dinah whispered.

“Perhaps,” Emma answered, with a soft and bitter voice, “perhaps you ought to wonder if God has judged that you aren’t fit to raise a child.”

I am no match for Emma, Dinah realized, when there are no rules. For that was the fear behind her other fears, that God intended all along that she should never have a child of her own.

I will not stay here, Dinah decided. I cannot stay here with this woman who wants to destroy me even though I loved her. I cannot stay because I know that I did her an injury which was the source of all my own pain now.

She rolled over and let her legs slide off the bed, slipped down into a kneeling position.

“What are you doing?” Emma asked.

Dinah tried to stand. Using all the strength of her arms she tried to throw herself into a standing position, but all she succeeded in doing was rising a little and turning as she fell again. The sudden lurch sent pain like childbirth into her loins. If I cannot walk, I’ll crawl, but I won’t stay here another moment. She began moving toward the door. But she could not even crawl, for when she tried to bring her leg forward, the pain in her abdomen was more than she could bear. She fell forward, and her forehead struck the wooden floor.

“Are you out of your mind, Dinah? Get back in bed.”

If she could not use her legs, her arms would do. She pulled herself forward, sliding along the floor.

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

I have already been hurt, Dinah answered silently. She heaved herself another few inches toward the door. It was the last exertion her body would endure. She felt something give way inside, felt blood begin to flow, and she retched with the pain though she had eaten nothing.

Emma flung open the door. “Help me!” she cried. “Come help me!”

Since everyone in the house had been listening to the argument upstairs, they heard and obeyed at once. It was the Lawrence girls and Emily Partridge who helped Emma lift Dinah into the bed. They saw Dinah’s blood on her nightgown and slick on the floor, they saw Emma’s stern, tight-set face, and they remembered that they, too, were Joseph’s wives, and believed that Emma hated them the same. They did not know that Emma did not fear them at all, and so did not hate them for being Joseph’s wives. They could not see Emma’s deep remorse at Dinah’s sufferings. And because she sent them out to fetch a doctor, they did not see her lean and kiss Dinah’s unfeeling lips, did not hear her whisper, “You’re the woman I wanted to be for him. How could he help but love you more than me?” They did not see her embrace Dinah and cry for a few minutes. Dinah, unconscious, did not see it either.

It would have changed the future if Dinah had known how Emma felt.

But then, it would not have been Emma if she had been able to show her feelings when Dinah could see them.

Dinah awoke with Joseph sitting beside her bed. She was disoriented. The room was wrong. “Where am I?” Dinah asked.

“In Vilate’s house,” Joseph answered. “I had you moved in spite of the doctors’ advice. I had a feeling that being in my house might hinder your recovery.”

Dinah remembered what she had said to Emma. “I was cruel to her, Joseph.”

“That was days ago,” he said. “Emma told me all that was said, by both of you. She asked for my forgiveness.”

“So do I.”

“Foolish, both of you. Who am I to forgive you? It’s the two of you who are bleeding, and then you come to me, when I’m uninjured, and ask me to forgive you both for loving me. Never mind. I was a fool to dream that the two of you could ever share a home even in the best of times. This isn’t the best of times.”

Dinah reached out for his hand. “Joseph,” she said, “am I going to die?”

“They told me yesterday that if you ever woke up again, you’d probably live.”

“I’m awake,” she said.

“I asked the Lord for a favor. Now and then he grants me one. But I suspect he was acting for the good of the Church.”

Dinah closed her eyes. “I haven’t been very good for the Church, either.”

Joseph touched her cheek. “When the word spread through the city that Sister Dinah was dying, do you know what happened? There were already hundreds looking on like sentinels when you were carried to the carriage and brought here. They’ve been coming in a constant stream, hundreds of women. They come into the house and tell each other stories about how you helped them. There’ve been enough tears shed downstairs to put the Mississippi into flood. They hold prayer circles and vigils and testimony meetings all over the city. Your funeral would have been a marvel.”

“Will they be terribly disappointed that I’m going to live?”

“They’ll get along.”

“Joseph,” she asked, “will you still—come to me, even though I’ll never have your child?”

“Do you think I came to you only for that?” He bent and kissed her. “Besides, we have children. Val and Honor, they’re ours, remember.”

She shook her head. “No they’re not, Joseph. I dream of them all the time, I was dreaming of them just now before I awoke. I saw Val as a little copy of his father, and Honor as pretty as Matthew’s sister Mary. I’m too late already. Even if I had them now, they’d never be mine.”

“Dreams can lie.”

“I have no children,” Dinah said.

Joseph held her hand, and she could see prophecy come into his eyes. “You’ll have ten thousand children,” Joseph said. “All the children of the Kingdom of God will honor you, and your own works will praise you.” Then he kissed her again. “And your husband will love you forever, worlds without end.”

He left her, and she thought of the hundreds of women who had heard her speak, who had prayed with her, the thousands who had read her poetry or believed the rumors of her prophecies spoken in tongues. These are my children. God did not want me to close myself within a single home and bear ten children and raise perhaps half of them to adulthood.
I
wanted that, but God had other plans for me. I must open myself into every home, and bear ten thousand daughters of the Spirit before my life is through. And she lay in her bed and wept in relief until the weakness of her body overtook her and she fell still.

Joy and torment, peace and pain, they were faces of the coin, they were hours of the day. The only life worth living, Dinah told herself, is the life with equal balance of fulfillment and regret. Only the cattle in the field have utter peace. Only the gnats with lives measured in days die unencumbered with regret.

The next day she asked for pen and ink, and began to rime her way through all these thoughts. Sonnet, couplets, anything small and neat—they were such comfort, for when she had cut idea or passion down to fit such little forms they were small enough she felt no terror of them anymore. They became comprehensible, they had meaning, they were sometimes even beautiful, and they began appearing almost every day in the
Times and Seasons
, so that even before she could get up from her bed, she had resumed her ministry.

Harriette! The gargoyle that had always loomed over them, her face set in stone so that it could never smile, living like an unattached shadow in the interstices of the family’s life—Charlie suspected for a moment that Sally was insisting he marry Harriette so that he would suffer for the Principle as much as she. But of course she wanted no such thing.
Sally
thought of Harriette as a beloved older sister. How could Sally know that Charlie was afraid of her?

I’m not afraid, he told himself. I just don’t like her. But if Sally could consent to the Principle, how could Charlie refuse Harriette? So he said yes, with far more confidence than he felt, and then spent the next hours wondering why God had consigned him to this deplorable fate. Perhaps I’ll be lucky, and the Lord will let my life be mercifully short.

But Sally had said that Harriette would say yes. Sally said that Harriette already loved him. He began to remember the face of the sphinx as she watched him. He had always thought she disapproved of him—after all, she was his senior by nearly two years, and she had been the chaperone at times when Charlie was afire with adolescent lust. Now he realized that her sternness might have been concealment of affection that she dared not show.

Her secret love for him made her suddenly fascinating. Now he remembered that Harriette had interpreted the poems Charlie sent to Sally from Washington—Herrick’s Julia poems, with talk of “liquefaction of her clothes” and “sweet vibration each way free”—how that must have stung Harriette to be so privy to her sister’s conjugal affairs, all the time wanting the man that Sally could not fully understand. No wonder she brooded over the wedding, not like a vulture, as Charlie had thought at the time, but like a tragic widow hovering at the grave of a love she could never have. She must have grieved that night, must have been mourning during all our joy, and yet she never gave a sign of it. And now, because Charlie and Sally were obedient to the Lord, Harriette would now have what had long seemed so impossible to her.

This new image of Harriette did not make her more desirable to Charlie, but it made the idea of marrying her more tolerable; to be able to view himself as charitable and noble appealed to Charlie, and his role within the romantic tale he spun was so admirable he almost liked it.

Facing Harriette, though, that image faded. For he
was
afraid of her. Sally sat in a corner of the room as Charlie proposed. It was excruciating to speak so frankly of marriage with his wife looking on. What flustered him most, though, was a feeling that for Harriette’s sake he should say at least something about love. Even in the midst of his most romantic version of this tale he had not been able to fool himself into thinking that he
loved
her. And yet surely a woman deserved to hear of love from the man who would be, after all, her first husband.

“Charlie,” Harriette said, in her distant, aloof way, “it’s sweet of you to try, but I don’t expect you to say that you love me. You only just learned about the Principle—it would smack of adulterous desires if you had actually been feeling more affection to me than would be appropriate for a sister-in-law. You are only proposing marriage to me out of obedience to the Lord. I expect no more than that.”

Charlie’s first impulse was to protest, but she had seen through him, and so he didn’t bother. If she was willing to be honest about it, so was he. “Then it’s settled,” he said with relief.

“Far from it,” she said. “I will not marry you, Charlie, if you intend to congratulate yourself on your charitableness for all our lives together. Some things must be clearly understood. I do not expect you to love me as you love Sally, but I expect you to do your duty to me. A wife is a wife. There is no reason to believe that I will be any less fertile than my sister—I have a right to an equal crop of children, as your wife, and the only way to an equal harvest is to sow an equal amount of seed.”

Charlie tried to swallow with a dry throat. This was the Harriette who had terrified him all along, not the heartbroken, romantic wallflower he had conjured up.

“When our children are born,” she said, “I am aware that in order to satisfy the world they might have to be raised without the name of Kirkham. Nevertheless, I want them to have no doubt that you are their father, and not the slightest suspicion that you might love Sally’s children more. Do I have your oath on that?”

“I’ve never known a child of my own. I don’t know how I’ll treat a child.”

“I want your solemn oath before God, Charlie.”

It angered him a little. “Do you think I’m so unrighteous that I’d neglect my children? Have you ever known me to fail in my duty?”

“Wives have few enough rights in marriage under the law—but there’s no law that will protect a plural wife or her children. To a judge our children would be bastards, and I would be a paramour with no recourse. I know you’re honorable, or I’d never bother to ask you for an oath—what is an oath to a dishonorable man?”

So Charlie swore in the name of Christ that as far as a mortal man could manage it, he’d not stint her or their children in any of the natural rights of a family.

When he had finished swearing, she nodded gravely. “I have already promised Sally that I will be her true sister, not an older sister as I was when we were young—neither of us will try to rule the other. And when I make the vows that I will make to you, I will mean them, Charlie. You may be sure of that.”

“Thank you,” he said. He wondered if the words sounded as stupid to her as they did to him. Then he realized—if she and Sally had already made promises to each other, then Sally must already have broached the subject.

“I didn’t want you to propose,” Sally said from her chair in the corner, “if she wasn’t going to say yes.”

“Thank you,” Charlie said again.

“Harriette and I have worked out housing arrangements,” Sally said. “Dinah will be in Vilate’s house for weeks, and then with your parents for some time after that, till she has her full strength. Harriette will live in Dinah’s house to take care of it for her. We understand that it is possible for a discreet man to meet his wife there unobserved.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Charlie said. It would be a relief not to have to sleep with either wife in this little house, where no room’s activities could be kept secret from someone listening in another.

“We thought of having you alternate weeks,” Sally said, “but we decided it would be safer if you kept an irregular schedule at first.”

Charlie almost asked what it was they were scheduling. He figured it out for himself in time.

“But I think it shouldn’t be hard for you to build the addition to the house that you’ve been talking about, only a little larger than we had thought. You should be able to get it finished by the time Dinah needs her house back. It will seem perfectly natural even to the most suspicious minds if you and I move into the new wing, and let my spinster sister live in the old part of the house.” To Charlie’s surprise, at the words
spinster sister
, both Sally and Harriette smiled, and by the time Sally had finished her speech, they were both laughing aloud.

How can they laugh? Charlie thought. It worried him that Sally was sounding every bit as sure of herself as Harriette. They had planned everything so neatly. He began to wonder if marrying sisters was such a good idea. They knew each other better than he knew either of them, and when they agreed on something they would always outnumber him. He felt a momentary temptation to reject their plans, even though he couldn’t think of anything to object to, just because he needed to make sure they knew he would not be put upon. But that would be childish—he couldn’t imagine himself saying, with a straight face, It’s my house and so I’ll make the rules. That was the way that he and Robert had been. There were many ways for a man to be with a wife. Surely there were as many paths open when a man had to deal with more than one at a time.

“I’m beginning to think I may need a book of advice on this,” Charlie said. They were still laughing from before, and laughed again at this.

“I don’t know of one,” Sally said.

“Perhaps something translated from the Arabic,” Harriette suggested. And this time when they broke up laughing, Charlie could not help but join them. They laughed and laughed together until the tears streamed down their cheeks. Then Charlie went and found Heber Kimball, who came to Charlie’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon and performed the marriage in the bedroom, so that no chance visitor would catch them in the ceremony.

Before administering the oaths, Heber made a little speech. “This is a hell of a place for a wedding,” he said. “Last time you got married, Charlie, the whole city came, I hear. But let me tell you—all the guests, all the drinking and dancing and singing, all the friends congratulating you—that’s what the world does to make up for the fact that those public weddings are till death do them part. It’s a marriage as the world knows how, and no better. When I seal you together, Charlie and Harriette, it’s not a marriage that ends with death. Do you hear me? Celestial marriage is just that—for this life
and
the next life. When you take these oaths, you’re sealing yourselves up for eternity.” Then he had them hold hands, and he said the oaths, and each of them said yes at the right time, and it was done.

But it was not over. Sally caught Heber by the arm the moment he let go of Harriette. “Why should
they
be married for eternity, when Charlie and I are only married till death!”

Heber was flustered. “Joseph isn’t sealing first wives yet—he wants us to wait until the Temple’s built.”

“That’ll be years,” Sally said. “Why should I wait? What if I die in childbirth before the Temple’s finished?”

“Well, I’m sealed to Vilate, aren’t I? And the Prophet did it himself, so it must be all right. I suppose you want me to do it now?”

“Yes,” Sally said.

“Women are like that, Charlie. You haven’t been at this marrying business as long as I have, but they keep on telling you what to do as if they thought they had a right to an opinion. Get what they want, too, mostly.”

So Charlie took wedding vows for the third time in his life. He wondered fleetingly how many more times he’d take such vows before he was through. I wonder how I’m going to live through the next few years. Truth is, I only have to worry about a few months—by then if I’m not dead I’ll probably be used to it.

There was no lingering after the wedding. Charlie was still keeping the Word of Wisdom, so there were no toasts. Heber just made small talk with them for a few minutes, then took Harriette by the arm. “I hope you’ll allow me to take you to your new house in my carriage,” he said. “Actually, it isn’t my carriage. But then, it isn’t your house.”

Harriette smiled at him. To Charlie’s surprise, her smile was merry, her eyes full of mirth. Here Charlie was feeling nervous as a goose on Christmas Eve, and Harriette was having the time of her life. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Why should she be so glad to marry a man who isn’t glad to marry
her?
Heber reached back and closed the door behind them, and in a few moments the carriage drove off.

“Well,” Sally said at last.

“Yes,” Charlie answered.

“You didn’t even kiss her, Charlie,” Sally said.

Charlie wasn’t sure if she was reproaching him or being grateful. Didn’t matter. Sally would be spending tonight alone, and so he took her in his arms and held her a long, long time, until she stopped crying. Then she made Charlie offer a prayer for the three of them. He didn’t know what to say. “This wasn’t our idea, Father, it was yours,” he said. “We aren’t asking you to make it pleasant. We’re just asking you to give us the strength to bear the burden. And if you can find a way to make us happy, too, we wouldn’t mind.” Then he felt inspired to give Sally a blessing, putting his hands on her head and saying some unplanned words that surely came from the Spirit. It wasn’t prophecy or a miracle or anything like that, but it was a sign that the Lord approved of what they were doing. Charlie was in sore need of such a sign, and took it gratefully. Then he, too, left the house, to begin a roundabout journey that would get him to Harriette after dark.

“Be careful, Charlie,” Sally told him at the door. “You might lose your way in the dark.”

“No chance of that,” Charlie said. “My luck’s been running the other way lately.” He kissed her again and left.

It was night, and he stood at the door of Dinah’s house. Brother Joseph has stood here before, he realized as he studied the grain of the wood on the door in the moonlight, the Prophet has been here before me, and on the same errand. The difference is that God has spoken to the Prophet face to face, and I got this commandment second hand. He did not let himself think of the fact that Brother Joseph also had Dinah waiting on the other side of the door. She was Charlie’s sister, but that didn’t keep him from knowing she was one of the most beautiful women in Nauvoo. Not even his utmost charity could convince him that Harriette was in that group.

He knocked, and almost at once heard the scuff of slippers on the rag rug floor. The scuffing stopped near the door, but the latch did not rise. In the pause he remembered his own timidity on that night with Sally, when he had been so frightened he could hardly unbutton his waistcoat. And remembering that night, he also remembered the Bible that had been there on the bed, and the passage that the ribbon had marked. The Song of Solomon; Harriette’s favorite passage in all of scripture; surely it was for tonight that Harriette had marked the book, though she could not have known that this night would ever come. She had marked the verses, and Charlie knew what would most gladden her to hear.

“Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled,” he said through the door. “For my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”

The latch rose, and the door opened, and Charlie came in to her. He learned that the severe dresses had concealed a supple, vulnerable body, that the sternness had been a mask for a yielding heart. In the darkness Charlie was enlightened, for he had not imagined that two women could love so differently; in Harriette’s arms he was not the man that Sally had so often held. He knew within five minutes that he had never understood Harriette at all before, that she was not at all what she had always seemed; and within an hour he began to wonder if he had really known himself. For here he lay with the warmth of a woman’s skin at his cheek, tired and tingling with new-finished love, and as he had in his most romantic dreams imagined, he whispered to her,