Saints (64 page)

“Don’t be angry, Charlie,” Sally said.

“I can if I want.”

“I won’t complain,” Sally said. “I’ll do better.”

“So will I,” Harriette said. “I was so happy to be together like this, that’s all, but I’ll be more careful in the future—”

“No!” Charlie shouted. “You haven’t been listening to me! I don’t want you being careful! Out there, out in the street, there we can be delicate and pretend to be strangers and watch every word we say. But here in my home, here with my”—he lowered his voice—“with my wives, I will say what Charlie Kirkham really feels like saying, I’ll feel what I feel like feeling, and so will you. We will
not
tell lies to each other, we will tell the bloody truth and get used to it. And then, by heaven, we will be happy.”

Sally was abashed. The one thing she had not expected was that Charlie would take charge. This was between her and Harriette. No one had ever interfered between her and Harriette before.

“You’re right,” said Harriette.

“Come help me with the dishes, Harriette,” Sally said.

“We will both help you with the dishes,” Charlie said.

“You’re terrible at dishes, Charlie,” Sally said.

“Don’t complain,” said Harriette. “When he breaks enough, you get a new set.”

The evening lasted until late, and though it was still awkward, Sally got better at pretending not to be annoyed. It still bothered her when Charlie and Harriette had a joke between them that Sally didn’t understand. It was always a reference to some poem or other, and it made her feel stupid not to know what they meant. Sally liked poetry, but she couldn’t hold it in her head the way they did—she could hear a poem once, then forget the title so quickly that later in the day Charlie would mention it and she’d not know what he was talking about. He had never criticized her for it, and still occasionally read to her, but now Sally realized how much he had needed someone to share his love of poetry. And it was the other wife, not her.

What do I have to offer him? What does he really get from me? I’m not clever, I just work in the house and try to look pretty for him when he comes home. He could replace me with a painting. I should get his father to paint me and then I could go away. What he gets from me in bed he gets as well from her. And I’m far too dull and stupid to satisfy him in conversation. Hearing the way they talk together, about doctrine, about literature, about the government of the city, it’s a miracle he ever stayed awake this past year, forced to converse with me alone for hours on end.

Stop it, she told herself. Smile. Take part in the conversation.

“How can people say such things about Brother Taylor?” she asked.

Charlie looked embarrassed. “Tyler, Sally. I was talking about the President of the United States.”

“The names sound so alike,” Sally said, laughing lightly. Silently she retorted, I’ve only been in America for twenty months, and
I
didn’t have four months in Washington, so don’t you dare to despise me for my ignorance! Then she had to watch in misery as they changed the subject to one they knew she could handle: gossip about whose business was doing well and whose wasn’t in Nauvoo. It went on forever. I can never compete with her, Sally realized. Beauty is only good to attract a man—it’s the mind of a woman that will keep him, especially a man like Charlie, who lives in his mind and not in his body.

Yet that night, when Harriette was gone and Charlie lay in bed with her, it was only to the body that Sally had recourse. It was the final indignity when Charlie gently kissed her and said, “Sally, I’m tired tonight—all I want to do is sleep.”

She tried to keep her crying silent, but the bed shook as her shoulders trembled, and Charlie said, “Sally, what is it, tell me what’s wrong. If it means so much to you tonight, of course I will—”

“It doesn’t. I’m sorry. Go to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep when you’re crying and I think it’s probably my fault.”

“It isn’t.”

“You were crying louder and louder to make sure I’d hear you. Now I’ve heard you, tell me what you want to say.”

Angry, she rolled over abruptly to face him. “If it had been Harriette tonight, would you have been too tired?”

“Is that it! Well, my darling, if you really want to know, after the first night Harriette and I have had intimate relations four times, and another five nights we have merely lain in bed and talked or read. You’re ahead, seven to four. I see now why you were so eager tonight—you wanted to double her score.”

“I don’t want to know about it!”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“You made me tell you!”

“I wondered when it would come to this. What a liar you were tonight, pretending it was
her
you missed, that you weren’t the least bit jealous that she was my wife. I could laugh.”

“Why don’t you read to
me
at night?”

Charlie got up and lit a candle. “All right. You want reading, you’ll get reading. But first get out of bed and wrap your hair the way that Harriette does. And make sure you have five new poems memorized each night, because I’ll expect you to recite to me from memory—”

“I can’t do that! I’m not Harriette!”

“Then why in the name of heaven do you want me to treat you like Harriette!”

“I don’t! I don’t want you to treat me at all! Why are you even here with me tonight? You know you’d rather be with her!” She was so angry she wanted to break something, tear something. All she could find was the pillow. She plumped it savagely, then threw herself down on it. Unfortunately, she was higher in the bed than she had thought, and she banged her head against the headboard. The pain was sudden and stayed with her, throbbing. She moaned and held her head and rolled away from him. To her fury, he was laughing.

“It isn’t funny!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He climbed back onto the bed and tried to comfort her.

She pushed him away. “I hate you,” she said.

“Good,” he said, removing her nightgown. “Then this’ll make you suffer all the more,”

Afterward they talked for a few minutes before sleeping, the way they always did. “That didn’t solve anything, you know,” Sally said.

“So? It was your idea anyway,” Charlie said, yawning. “I always wanted to grow up to be a monk.”

She didn’t answer. Just lay there, realizing that perhaps something had been solved today, after all. The three weeks of hiding from each other had ended. Sally could get on with life. There were many things to hate about living the Principle. But at least now Sally knew what they were. That was an improvement, to know what the problems were, instead of waiting in dread for them to happen.

“Your worrying is keeping me awake,” Charlie murmured.

“I’m not even moving.”

“I know.” He poked at the taut muscles of her thigh. “You’re rigid as a wall.”

She was. Consciously she forced herself to relax her arms and legs, relax the tightness across her stomach; she nestled against his back and rested her arm on him. I can’t be rigid, she decided. There’s no way to survive this if I cannot bend.

They were still putting new clapboards on the exterior walls of the old house when Harriette moved in. But Dinah was better now and needed her house again, and so Harriette put her few clothes into a box and waited for her husband—no, her brother-in-law Charlie—to come with his new shay and bring her home.

Harriette did not want to leave this miserable little hut. It was not entirely her fear of living in the same house with Sally; even though they would maintain their own sections privately, there was bound to be even more tension than before. Yet that was merely a cross she had to bear—the price she had to pay for the husband God had given her at last. Charlie was worth ten times the cost, she knew. Yet she was also reluctant to leave Dinah’s cabin because she had liked the way of life there. Dinah complained of having her husband come to her so irregularly, complained of the uncertainty of such solitude. But Harriette reveled in it. She had no previous marriage to compare it to. It was like the lovers of ancient poetry—Troilus coming secretly to Criseyde, with a prophet as their Pandarus; Uther coming in the darkness, disguised, to get Prince Arthur on Ygraine. Harriette had wanted to conceive her first child here. Perhaps, she thought with a moment of hope, perhaps she already had.

The shay approached up Mulholland, which had just been graded; it was a cheerful sight in the morning sunlight, the dust rising behind the little two-wheeler, the single horse tossing its head. Charlie had brought Dinah, of course, and she waved a greeting with such vigor that Harriette was glad in spite of herself. Dinah had a way of deciding what the prevailing mood would be, and no one could resist her decision for long.

Charlie helped Dinah from the shay, and Harriette took her by the arm and waist to lead her into the house. “I’m not so weak anymore,” Dinah insisted, but Harriette noticed that she leaned a little and walked with uncertain steps. “You’ve kept the flowers growing,” Dinah said with pleasure. “Oh, I’ve missed this wretched little place!”

Harriette brought her inside, and Dinah walked around and touched everything. “It’s so funny to think,” she said, “that all these things that have so many memories for me, have completely different memories for you.”

“Not so different, perhaps.”

Charlie spoke from the door. “Is this box all you have, Harriette?”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“Take your time with it, Charlie,” Dinah said to him as he picked it up.

He was gone. “Welcome home,” Harriette said.

“It’s a lovely place. I wonder who the first bride was to welcome her husband here.”

“Some goddess, I think.”

“Proserpine?” Dinah asked.

“Proserpine was married to Death.”

“Pandora then. The one who was married to Cupid, and he forbade her to see his face, but she brought a lantern and surprised him, and so she lost him.”

“Psyche.”

“Oh,” Dinah said. “I thought it started with a
P
.”

“It does.”

“I had a factory education. She wasn’t a goddess though, was she.”

“Just a mortal that a god had chosen to love.”

Dinah took Harriette by the hands. “And now I’m evicting you.”

“It was time for the idyll to end, I think.”

“I wrote a poem for you. No, that’s a lie. I wrote it for Emma, but I think you’ll understand it, and it’s certain I can never show it to her. I can never publish it, either. So I expect you’re the only audience it will ever have. Do you want it?”

“Of course.”

Dinah opened the bag she had carried with her, and took from it a sheet of paper. She folded it carefully, then lit a candle and sealed the paper with the dripping wax. “Don’t open it,” Dinah said, “until one night when you’re sleeping alone, and you think that surely God must have a better plan for us than this.”

Harriette took the paper, then kissed Dinah on the cheek. “You’re older, Dinah,” Harriette said.

“Having your womb mutilated has a way of aging you.” Dinah was smiling when she said it.

“I didn’t mean that you
look
older.” In fact, though, she did. “I meant—I don’t know. You’re only a year older than I am. But you carry yourself as if you knew more than me. More than anyone. Tell me, Dinah, do you know everything?”

“Oh, yes,” Dinah said. “That’s why I’m the Prophetess.”

Harriette had never heard Dinah call herself that name, though everyone in Nauvoo knew who was meant whenever someone said it.

“A woman who can’t have children has to have something to do to keep herself busy.”

Harriette studied her face. Dinah meant her bitter words to be taken jokingly. But her face was too wan from long illness for the joke to come off properly. “So you’ll be mother to us all?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Just an aunt, I think. A funny maiden aunt.”

“Not a maiden.”

“To the world. I thank Father every night that there are some like you, who know me for the silly girl I am and don’t get fooled by my fine speeches and my blessings and my poetry.”

“Sorry. I
am
fooled. I want you to give me a blessing.”

Dinah smiled and reached out her hands, held Harriette’s head between the palms of her hands, and with no hesitation at all said, quietly, “Harriette my sister, you are one of the greatest of the daughters of God. He has given you a husband who will love his family more than the world. The Lord will give you more children than any of your husband’s other wives. You will see all of your children live to adulthood. And you will never be a widow in your life. You will know all the days of your life that you are the most blessed of women, and you will be happy. That is what you deserve at the hands of the Lord. I speak in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Harriette felt weak, for Dinah’s hands and Dinah’s words had filled her with such power that it seemed as though her heart hadn’t the strength to continue on its own. “Dinah,” she said. “Is it true?”

“You know it is. Of course, Brother Taylor would be very angry. He keeps complaining to Joseph about the way the sisters are usurping the authority of the priesthood by giving blessings and making prophecies.”

“What does Joseph say?”

“That if the Brethren were living up to their priesthood responsibilities, the Lord wouldn’t have to rely on women so much to do his work.”

They laughed, then kissed and embraced each other, and finally Harriette took leave of her. Dinah herself was balm for a fearful heart; but on the way home, sitting beside Charlie in the shay—careful not to touch him or look at him lest someone see and understand their true connection—she thought over and over again about the words of the blessing. It was too perfect. She could not believe it. No woman lived to see all her children survive to adulthood. No woman was happy all the days of her life. Yet Dinah had said it, and so it must come true.

The lecture hall was crowded. Springfield, Illinois—John Bennett thought with satisfaction of all the legislators who would fill a dull evening by hearing Dr. Bennett lecture on the strange and terrible practices of the Mormons. Oh, they’d get their money’s worth tonight. And when it was time to vote on extending the Nauvoo Charter, they’d think twice about leaving so much power in the hands of Joseph Smith. No man does to me as you did, Prophet Joe, and goes unpunished.