The Wives of Henry Oades (35 page)

“Oh, thank God,” said Nancy, sagging against Henry, closing her eyes.

Margaret stood alone, her hands to herself. They’d been emancipated, set loose to resume their queer lives. With Henry gone, she hadn’t dwelt daily on the particulars of their peculiar arrangement.

“Mind your mum,” said Henry to John. Nancy took Henry’s arm, and Margaret took John’s, conscious of its adult hardness.

T
HEY CAME OUT
to a glaring sun, to a lawn and steps littered with paper cups and chewed cigar stubs, but not to the tar and feathers Margaret had feared. There were several dozen people still milling about, a listless lot, waiting for their buggies to arrive, most of them. One man who bore a striking resemblance to Benjamin Disraeli advised them to leave town if they knew what was good for them. Another jovial bloke said he pitied Henry. One wife was more than enough for
him.

“Bet you’re pecked from dawn to dusk, brother! Bet the pretty one doesn’t let up.”

“Oh, shut your old trap,” said Nancy, linking arms with Margaret. Margaret smiled, unfazed by the fool’s insult.

John went for the carriage, coming back on foot half an hour later. “Somebody stole a wheel and untied the horses,” he said. “They’re gone. I looked everywhere, Dad.”

Eavesdropping Benjamin Disraeli with his long sloping forehead approached, offering to take them home for twenty dollars.

“Twenty dollars!” said Henry, incredulous. He looked left and then right, as if expecting the sibling bays to come trotting up on their own. He was as thin as Margaret had ever seen him, and he stank. It was disgraceful the way prisoners were left to ferment.

“You can always walk,” said the man. “No hack will take you.”

“I’d have to pay you at the end,” said Henry.

“No deal,” said the man, walking away.

“I’ve no money on my person,” said Henry, fumbling with his watch and chain. The man shrugged and continued walking. Henry freed the watch, holding it aloft. “Here! Will you take a good watch instead?”

“The girls are at Potter’s,” said Nancy.

Henry shouted, “Solid gold, sir! And an additional stop will be necessary.”

The man gave the watch a brief inspection before pocketing it. He brought them home in his raggedy carriage, refusing to exchange the watch for money once there. Henry offered twenty-five dollars and a broody hen. “Nope,” said the man.

Henry started up the front walk behind Nancy and the children. Margaret remained in the road, pleading with the greedy bounder. “The watch belonged to his father, to his grandfather before that. It’s all he has of them.”

Henry called from the porch. “Bother the watch, Meg. He’s not going to change his mind. Come inside now.”

“A deal’s a deal,” said the man, riding away.

Margaret went inside finally, where the reunion was already starting without her.

At Home

N
ANCY SAID
H
ENRY
looked exhausted. “You should rest.” He said he could rest any time. “Whatever you say,” said Nancy, settling down next to Margaret in the front room.

“Where’s John?” Margaret whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “He was here a minute ago.”

Henry sat in his chair holding Gertrude, a weary king on his throne. Josephine and Martha brought their projects before him—a sea-green apron with tiny perfect stitches, a collaborative drawing of a family with two mothers and a dog with a halo, Ham, presumably. Josephine charged up the stairs to change for her solo recitation, descending again with deliberate grace, her hair swept up in a grown-up style. She stood beside the marble pedestal, upon which sat an empty vase that didn’t go.

“My heart leaps up when I behold, a rainbow in the sky.”

She managed Wordsworth’s poem without once faltering. They clapped until their palms stung. Henry embraced his daughter, tears standing in red-rimmed eyes. “Lovely, Pheeny.”

“Please call me Josephine, Father,” she said.

“Josephine, sure. Sure, lovely girl.”

“We should let your father rest now,” said Nancy.

“I could do with a bath first,” said Henry.

Margaret took the children upstairs while Nancy went to work in the kitchen, getting out the tub, heating and pouring the water, beating an egg for his hair. He got in and sat back, spreading wide his arms.

“I’ve missed you so, Nan.”

She undressed quickly, her heart brimming with love. He drew up his knees, making room for her and her blue-veined girth. They simmered for the longest time, kissing, caressing, feeling for the baby’s head, his fluttery movements. They did not discuss the days in jail, or the confiscated cows, or Ham’s murder, or John and Dora, but all else under a lover’s sun. The kitchen was dark by the time they emerged from the cold water, limbs and breasts solid gooseflesh. Drying off, Nancy thought of Margaret, self-banished to another room.

“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just a little too happy, I guess.”

N
ANCY PUT THE TUB AWAY
before calling Margaret down. Together they decided on flapjacks and Margaret’s special syllabub. The punch was best when made with port, but they were out. Margaret cut the brandy with cider, sweetening the mix with brown sugar and nutmeg. Minutes later, John came in the back door with hay caught in his hair, looking surprised to see them.

“I came in for—” He laughed nervously. “I don’t remember what I came in for now.”

Margaret set down the nutmeg grater. “You’ll join us for supper, won’t you, John?”

“Of course, he will,” said Nancy. “It’s his father’s homecoming night.”

“I need to see to something in the barn first,” he said.

“Wait,” said Nancy. She poured the syllabub into her best company bowl and handed it to him. “It needs to be milked on. Try to be quick, all right? I’m about to start the flapjacks.”

He took the bowl and left, returning an hour later. The syllabub should have been put in the icebox outside for a while, but the flapjacks and bacon had been sitting too long already. Nancy brought the punch to the table warm, placing the bowl in the center, arranging the new cups all around. “Supper’s on!” Grace was brief, though heartfelt. Martha piped up the instant it was over.

“Are we going away soon?” she asked.

Nancy had had every good intention of giving Henry at least one night’s peace, but she had forgotten to instruct the children.

Bright tears welled in Martha’s eyes. “This is a very bad place, Dad.”

Nancy and Margaret simultaneously shushed her.
Let your dad be. Let him enjoy his
supper, his first night home. We’ll discuss it later.

Henry smiled, handsome as could be, at the head of the table where he belonged, his beard and hair clean and curly from the egg shampoo. “The next place will be a good place, sweetheart. I promise.”

“We don’t need a palace, Henry,” said Nancy. “A nice house in a nice neighborhood. A room for you and me, one for John, one for the girls, and one for Margaret is all.”

“Is
all
,” teased Henry.

Nancy reached, helping herself to another ladle of punch. “Well, it’s high time Margaret had a little privacy. And an allowance of her own too, come to think of it.” She laughed, joy and syllabub gone to her head. “Don’t pout. We won’t bankrupt you. Just give her half of mine.”

“That wouldn’t be right, Nancy,” said Margaret.

Margaret didn’t know how she felt. Nancy had never expressed herself aloud.

And you’ll have me
, Margaret had said that morning.
If you need me.
Nancy had come to love her in a way she didn’t have words for.

“It most certainly would be right,” she said. “I can’t think of anything more right, Margaret. We should have thought of it a long time ago.”

Epilogue

M
R. GRIMES RODE OUT
a day later, finalizing the sale of the farm to himself for services rendered plus fifteen hundred dollars. He and Henry had been in negotiations for more than a month now, but Henry hadn’t wanted to get anyone’s hopes up.

The Oades family moved the following week to a rented flat in San Francisco, where Nancy’s baby, a girl named for Margaret’s Mary, was born in May. She came in the dead of night as they liked to do, headfirst and fast. Margaret loved her immediately and without reservation; Mary was her own stepdaughter, after all. She cut the cord and washed the baby in warm water, taking her time. The child was an Oades, no doubt there, with that thatch of ginger hair.

Nancy lifted her head from the pillow. “Is she all right?”

Margaret swaddled the baby and put her to Nancy’s breast. “See for yourself.”

Mary latched on and began to greedily suckle. Nancy gasped with joy, long tears running. “It’s coming, isn’t it? I feel it. I have milk this time, don’t I?”

“You’re doing splendidly,” said Margaret, looking down, her own eyes filling.

Henry knocked on the bedroom door. “May I come in now?”

J
OHN AND
D
ORA
had been married two months by the time Mary came. They shared the cramped flat, sleeping on the front room divan. Margaret regularly caught them sporting with each other. Dora would break away from John, feigning shock to see Margaret. Margaret would pretend to have noticed nothing. She took long city walks to escape, but Dora was always about when she returned.

“Soon,” Nancy said almost daily. Henry was considering a lot on Elizabeth Street, upon which Nancy imagined having a grand house built. “Soon we’ll all have room to spread out.”

“We shall see,” said Margaret, not picturing a house big enough.

Henry took no time in securing a good post with an American accounting firm. John was apprenticing there as well, though Margaret did not think it would last. Their son had begun complaining of claustrophobia, likening the office to a prison cell. Collar and tie choked him. On and on he went. He’d written letters of interest to vintners in the north and was eagerly waiting to hear back.

“We’ll visit often, Mum,” said Dora.

Mum.
The girl did not let up.

W
ORD OF
M
ARGARET’S
inheritance came at the end of July. She’d been bequeathed a fortune, one thousand, four hundred and sixty-two pounds, the bulk of her parents’ estate. Her frugal mother and father would have advised saving the money. Margaret had another idea.

“Perhaps it’s time the girls and I struck out on our own,” she said one night at supper. A new life had come to her in a daydream.

Nancy was emphatically against it. “No. You belong here.”

Martha wholeheartedly agreed with Nancy. “Dad and Mrs. Oades would be too lonely without us,” she said. Margaret’s baby was nearly eight now, with firm opinions on just about any given subject.

Josephine was all for their leaving. “Why not go downtown, Mum? I know of a lovely building near the theaters. It’s spanking clean, with well tended-to flowerboxes. I could inquire tomorrow, first thing.”

John didn’t care one way or the other. “A person has to make up his own mind,” he said.

“Are you so terribly unhappy here, Meg?” asked Henry.

Margaret wasn’t. Restless was more like it, jumpy, impatient.

Nancy said in a private moment afterward, “You didn’t really mean it, did you?”

Margaret set aside the notion for the time being, and made a contribution to the lot on Elizabeth Street, putting the rest of the money in the Wells Fargo bank. For now, it was enough to know she had a choice.

The house, a turreted Queen Anne catalog house, began arriving in early September, coming shingle by shingle, nail by nail, in boxcars from Knoxville, Tennessee. That same month Margaret went to work for a milliner on Polk Street, a British widow originally of Sussex, who knew of Margaret’s second cousin, once a headmaster there. The slender tie bound them from the start.

In November, John and Dora accompanied the family to the new house, along with their precious infant, William Oades—Billy, they called him.

“Begging your pardon, Mum,” said Dora, “but I think those fancy choppers of yours scare Billy.”

Margaret took out the new teeth the moment she arrived home now.

Nancy had egged her to get them. Margaret wore the hard plates to the milliner’s shop, removing the dentures in the back room, where she spent peaceful hours alone, working with feathers and tulle. The teeth crowded her mouth and didn’t keep a good grip. Nancy said a little pain was worth the youthful effect. “What lady doesn’t make sacrifices, Margaret?” Margaret supposed she’d become accustomed to her mouth as it was.

“All the old actors wear false teeth,” said Josephine. “Some of the younger ones, too.”

Josephine was a dresser’s assistant now. She sewed and fetched mainly, and in between memorized every part, even the male parts, just in case. She’d applied for the position on her own, after reading a notice on the stage door. Henry eventually came to allow it.

“I’m of two minds,” said Margaret.

It was Margaret’s night to cook. He’d come into the kitchen with a sack of pork chops and steam beer. “She’s more grown than most her age, Meg,” he said.

“I suppose,” said Margaret, flouring the chops.

“She’s a good girl.”

Margaret nodded. “She is.”

“A brave high-minded girl,” he added.

Margaret looked at him, laughing. “Is she paying you, Henry?”

In the end, Margaret was persuaded to allow it as well. She’d never known her girl more exultant.

H
ENRY
. Margaret loved him still, for the same reasons she loved him once, for his courage, his sturdiness, his loyalty, his fathering. She no longer felt a wife’s desire for him, not really, and it was a profound relief. She indulged in memories at times, but she did not mourn. One did not mourn that sort of loss forever. If Margaret left,
when
she left, Nancy would be the one most missed. Somewhere along the way her husband’s wife had become a friend, as true a friend as any Margaret had ever known.

Margaret was in the bedroom when that stunning realization occurred, her bedroom, hers alone. It was a lovely room, with a large bay window and fireplace, though it was rather spartan in decor at the present time. That was due to change soon. New curtains were coming, the fabric for which she’d selected and paid for herself. She’d have a nice rug and reading chair eventually, and Henry promised to put up maple shelves for her books. Like those in the
Lady Ophelia
’s library. Next week, he said, at the latest.

It was nearly four o’clock. Margaret took off her shoes and lay down, this being Nancy’s turn to prepare supper.