The Chaperone (20 page)

The bride was perfectly lovely in a white lawn dress with a high lace collar and a V-insert of patterned lace and pintucks. She wore her hair in a high pompadour adorned with real orange blossoms, a gift from Miss Harriet Carlisle, her new sister-in-law and Maid of Honor. The tall and elegant groom wore the conventional black, his striped tie worn ascot fashion and held with a silver pin.

Mr. Carlisle, a prosperous lawyer, is well and favorably known in Wichita, and when and whom he would marry has long been the subject of speculation among our city’s single ladies. By all accounts, he is smitten with his young bride, who was recently orphaned in a tragic farm accident, and who seems a very worthy young lady with a sweet disposition. The new Mrs. Carlisle has already made many friends here in her adopted community.

—“Society News,”
The Wichita Eagle,
June 7, 1903

Cora would long appreciate
that the reporter left out the low point of her wedding’s festivities, which was when Raymond Walker, a farm boy turned defense attorney who sometimes played cards with Alan but who hadn’t even come to their engagement party, attempted to make the first toast at the reception, apparently forgetting, or not caring, that he was drunk. Raymond Walker was shorter than Cora, but wide in the shoulders, with flame-colored hair, and a deep, theatrical voice that made it easy to command attention. When he stood and started talking about friendship and love, even the busy waiters turned to look.

“Alan!” he boomed, raising his glass of lemonade. “What a good, decent man you are!”

This statement was met with a burst of applause, with other guests raising their lemonades and adding, “Hear! Hear!” and Cora laughing and nodding in agreement. But then Raymond Walker, still standing, set his lemonade on the table and nonchalantly removed a silver flask from the interior pocket of his jacket and proceeded to take a long, audible gulp. Cora glanced at Alan, who sat beside her, staring at Raymond Walker with a forlorn expression and shaking his head in tiny, almost imperceptible movements.

“Some people marry for love,” Raymond continued, giving the entire head table a misty-eyed look. “But, Alan, you’ve shown us all that real propriety, and real charity, begins at home.”

Alan stood. But his two uncles and a cousin were already moving toward Raymond, their faces grim. Someone wondered aloud if they should take the flask away, but someone else said, “No, just get him out.” Raymond Walker shook the men off and said he was leaving on his own. He staggered out, big shoulders back, under a collective glare of disapproval, although Cora could only stare, stunned, at her dinner plate. An orange blossom fell from her hair, landing in her roast beef.

He was just a drunk, she told herself. And he was wrong. It wasn’t charity—Alan loved her, loved her as much as she loved him. He’d told her so, many times, and he’d said it with such sincerity, and with such hope and kindness in his eyes. He was the one with good fortune, he’d said. He’d been looking for her his whole life.

The door was barely closed behind Raymond Walker when Alan’s father stood, raised his lemonade, and in his most venerable voice told Alan, who was still standing, how very happy he and his mother were to invite a young woman as fine as Cora into the family, and that he had made them very proud, and that they wished them many children and happy years. He walked across the room, shook Alan’s hand, and then embraced him to loud applause, and then it was as if the horrible moment with Raymond Walker simply hadn’t happened. When Alan took his seat again, reaching for her hand, she was surprised to see he had tears in his eyes. Her humiliation already receding, she was moved to see that his father’s words meant so very much.

The only advice
Cora ever got about sex came from Mrs. Lindquist, who told her, just a few weeks before the wedding, that she didn’t want to scare her, but she felt she ought to know that a man was different from a woman in that he was often a slave to his physical self, with far more desire than necessary for a happy home with a reasonable amount of children. It was a wife’s duty, she told Cora, to both submit to this desire and to temper it, for it was a powerful force, and a husband, even a gentleman, could not always be expected to think with his mind.

“It’s the same as feeding horses and dogs,” she added, cracking an egg on the side of a bowl. “You don’t want to starve them. But they always want more than they need.”

Cora wasn’t scared. In fact, she was intrigued by the idea that at least in this one arena of her marriage to Alan, she would be the one in charge. She wouldn’t abuse this power. She had no intention, to borrow Mrs. Lindquist’s terms, of starving her handsome fiancé, or even letting him go hungry for long. Still, he was older than she was, and more educated, and more used to society and having money and living in a city. As much as her speech had improved through diligent study of grammar and the way Alan and his family lived, Cora hardly felt his equal, especially when they were out in public. But if Mrs. Lindquist was correct, when it came to the intimacies of marriage, even with all she didn’t know, he would be at her feet.

And truly,
during their first nights together as husband and wife, her refined and mannered Alan did seem like a man possessed, his gentle caresses ceasing as he began to labor over her, his hands gripping the pillow above her shoulders, as if he needed to hold tight to something else to avoid doing her harm. If it weren’t for the peppermint smell of his aftershave, she wouldn’t have recognized him as the same man who, during the daytime, laughingly complained about lazy court clerks and taught her to play chess and held out his arm for her on their strolls down Douglas Avenue. In her room, she couldn’t see him. He only came to her after dark, and he never brought a lantern. She was grateful. With any light, she would have had to worry how her expression should be—forbearing? Determined? She didn’t know. She had seen animals mating on the farm, so she understood the mechanics of sex, but she knew nothing of how she should behave as a human, as a woman. She doubted Alan, given his advanced age, was a virgin as well, and she worried that in her ignorance, she would do something unheard of and embarrass herself. Even in darkness, she didn’t know if she was supposed to just lie still, or if it would be all right to let her arms and legs wrap around him, as they kept wanting to do. She didn’t want to appear sex-crazed. But she didn’t want him to think she was bored, because if anything, her body and her mind wanted him to go on longer, and she felt oddly bereft every time he slumped over her with a quiet cry, and it was done. She wasn’t sure what he would think, if she let on about that.

Afterward, reaching across the bed to hold her hand, he would ask if she was all right, as if he had damaged her somehow, which she didn’t understand, because she was his wife. And she had told him, even before they were married, how much she wanted a child, how she didn’t want to wait, how much it would mean to her to know someone, even a little baby, who shared her blood. And she wasn’t hurt. In fact, even when he was holding her hand and what she needed from him for a child was already released inside her, even then, she wanted to crawl across the bed and move her hand against his side and press her face into the warm skin of his chest.

But that might be strange, or too forward.

“Cora? Darling? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she would say, squeezing his hand, because she couldn’t say more than that.

Having the twins
nearly killed her. She wasn’t due for another three weeks when she woke with what felt like a pickax in her belly, her mouth and throat so parched that at first, she couldn’t cry out. When she finally did, the pickax moved, slicing into her on each side, but Alan appeared in the doorway of her room, still wearing his pajamas, his mouth going slack at the sight of her.

Later, he told her she was so pale, even her lips drained of color, that it was like she was already a corpse, but writhing in agony on the bed.

They were lucky to have a phone. Most people still didn’t, and it saved time, which the doctor said later had been crucial—she could have bled to death. As soon as Alan made the call, he returned to her with water and a wet cloth that she grabbed from him and bit down on. Her vision began to blur and darken, but she could hear him crying, begging her not to go. That scared her. He kissed her forehead, the morning stubble of his chin rough against her cheek, and whispered that he was so sorry. He kept saying how sorry he was. She was irritated, even as the pickax burrowed in. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d only been a husband. It wasn’t his fault that something in her body was going horribly wrong. It was her own defective machinery, likely bad since her own birth. Regular childbirth was Eve’s curse, a bearable pain for all women, but this, hers, was something else.

When the doctor arrived, he asked Cora if her own mother had suffered from toxemia. Or a sister? Or an aunt, perhaps? Had any of them had any trouble with childbirth at all? Any blood clots?

She gripped Alan’s hand, dug her nails into his skin.

“She doesn’t know,” he told the doctor. And then more firmly: “Don’t agitate her with these questions.”

She would never understand how she survived it, bearing down while she could barely breathe, the doctor and nurse urging her on, even when she told them about the pickax, even as she was shrieking and begging them to stop the pain. It was the placenta, the doctor told her. It was tearing off too early, and they had to get the baby out. He couldn’t use chloroform. He would need her help to push and save the baby, and to save herself as well.

Alan was banished from the room. She didn’t know he’d gone, or how long he was away. He told Cora later that he heard Howard’s first hearty cry from the parlor, and that he’d been on his knees, his forehead pressed against the sofa’s armrest. Cora heard Howard’s first cry, too, though she never heard Earle’s—by the time he was delivered, she was losing blood, fading in and out. Even when she could hear, she couldn’t move, or feel, her arms or her legs. But she no longer felt the pickax, either, and she was peaceful, ready to sleep, even with her unquenched thirst, even having just heard the first cry of her child. She was that tired, and that afraid of the pickax’s return. “We’re losing her,” the doctor said, quietly, but she heard it, and still all she wanted was to rest, to stop having to fight, to just go with what nature intended and lay her head down on the grain. But hands pressed against her, shook her awake. “Don’t breathe in the poison,” Mother Kaufmann said. “Cora? Love? You can’t see it or smell it, but it’ll kill you.” They were both with her, their hands on her, shaking her awake though she couldn’t see them, even as they pushed and pulled her to the silo’s ladder. “Go on,” Mr. Kaufmann said, with a not-so-gentle shove. “Go on, now.” She couldn’t turn around. She had to keep looking up at the silo’s blue-sky opening, grasping for it, but she could hear them both behind her, urging her to keep climbing through the thickness on the slippery rungs, to go on and let herself be the happy woman and the very good mother they’d always known she would be.

They already had
an older Swedish woman coming in on washday, but after the twins were born, Alan asked Helgi to come in every day to do the housework and the cooking, too. So Cora spent the first months of her sons’ lives recovering in bed as the doctor suggested, a bassinet on each side, both within easy reach for breastfeeding. Despite Cora’s lingering weakness, Alan’s mother had insisted that a wet nurse was out of the question, as most wet nurses were unmarried mothers and immigrants, she said, and there was no telling what unseen weaknesses or vices babies ingested along with the milk. When the senior Mrs. Carlisle said things like this, Cora didn’t know if she had simply forgotten about Cora’s own murky background. Her mother-in-law was always kind, and she never brought up the fact that Cora could easily be illegitimate herself. But Cora knew she knew.

So even before she was strong enough to go down the stairs by herself, Cora worked to prove herself not just adequate, but excellent at nursing her ravenous boys, who both seemed a little angry for being expelled too early from the womb, and so thin and desperate for nourishment. She sang “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” to them, marveling at Howard’s fair hair and strong grip, and how Earle, with his serious eyes, already looked so much like Alan. Twins. The surprise of it made her laugh, albeit with exhaustion. Alan’s family had no history of twins. Perhaps her side did.

Alan handled the shopping. Almost every day, on his way home from work, he went to the grocery and the bakery and vegetable stands and purchased what Helgi needed to cook whatever Cora was craving. He regularly brought home calf’s liver, which the doctor had suggested to restore her blood and iron, though Cora did not crave this at all. He brought her novels and constructed a little bookstand so she could read while she nursed. The phonograph was moved upstairs by her bed, and Alan purchased records he thought she and the babies might like to hear. He would bring up her dinner and sit with her at the table in the corner of her room, holding both of the boys so she could eat. Fatherhood agreed with him. He seemed so happy, beaming down at their little faces, or, if one or both started to cry, walking them around the room and assuring them, in his low, patient voice, that they would be fine, that their mother had been through a lot, and they should give her some time to rest.

Once she was able to get up and down the stairs without feeling light-headed, she and Alan started eating in the dining room again, leaving the twins upstairs asleep, the heavy door to her room pulled shut for just that half hour, so, Alan said, she wouldn’t hear if one of them woke and started to cry. Cora appreciated that he insisted they spend this uninterrupted time together, and that he always worked to amuse her with stories of warring secretaries and belligerent judges. But it was an effort to keep up her end of the conversation—her days consisted of repeated, short cycles of sleeping, eating, nursing, and changing diapers, and there was no way to get too many anecdotes or charming observations out of that. She could ask him about things she’d read in the paper—had he heard about the fire at the ice plant? Did he really think it would cost twenty-five thousand dollars to build a new one? Had he heard Henry Ford had invented an automobile that could go over ninety miles an hour? She would plan these topics in advance, not wanting to appear such a dullard, but then, when Alan actually tried to discuss them with her, her tired mind would lose focus. Even with the door upstairs shut she might hear one or both of the boys crying, and the front of her dress would be wet with milk and she wouldn’t hear Alan at all.