Authors: Jane Smiley
Wednesday, mended on Thursday, scrubbed on Friday, and blacked the stove on
Saturday. They delivered pies and breads to every social event in town. There wasn't
enough work for both of them. Maybe she should take up embroidery? Tatting? Crochet?
Watercolor? Music? Lavinia racked her brain. Poetry? A lady was perfectly capable of
writing elegant poems containing uplifting sentiments for the local newspaper if she
wished. Over in Pettis County, there was a married woman who wrote a regular feature-every two weeks--about etiquette, and in Pike County, there was an old woman, much
older than Lavinia, who published her memories of the early days from time to time.
Gardening? Margaret helped mulch and bed at the end of the autumn, and started a few
plants for the spring. By the end of the winter, Lavinia felt she had exhausted her ideas.
Margaret teased her. She would say, "Ship me to Alaska." (Gold had been discovered in
Alaska.) "It might take me a year to get there and a year to get back. Ship me to Cuba.
Ship me to China." Lavinia would say only, "Oh, for goodness' sake." Several times a
week, she sent Margaret to help Beatrice at the farm.
Unbeknownst to Lavinia, who would not have approved, Beatrice had taken up
cardplaying, and was having afternoon parties, not in any way dissimilar to those Mrs.
Larimer had once had. The first time Margaret was present at one of these, she watched a
few hands and helped Marcie, Beatrice's new hired girl, serve the cakes and tea. They
were playing poker.
She would have expected Beatrice to be a cautious player, as befitted someone
who was fresh to the game and who also seemed to be preening herself on her matronly
respectability, but her sister wasn't careful at all--she had been doing more at Mrs.
Larimer's than playing the piano. She liked to raise the stakes and to bluff, and she smiled
and laughed in frank enjoyment of the whole thing. After the ladies departed, she
confided to Margaret in a comfortable way that she was up for the winter, thank
goodness. She had been afraid, around the first of the year, to tell Robert about her
gambling debts, but her luck had changed, and she had put some of her stake by. And,
she said, it was not as though Robert didn't like to play--what do you think he did on
those quiet days at the newspaper? If he weren't to play, and to play well, the
businessmen around town would laugh at him.
Margaret sat in on a few hands, though she had no source of funds--she borrowed
from Beatrice. She was lucky and cautious, and after a few parties--say, by the end of
April--she was up by almost ten dollars, which she left in a jar at the farm.
It was about this time that Mrs. Jared Early began to join them. Here was a
woman who was older than Lavinia, possibly sixty at that time, but she was active and
healthy. Margaret watched her, thinking of that strange encounter she had had with
Andrew Early--Captain? Dr.?--but Mrs. Early didn't notice Margaret. She seemed to like
Beatrice, and she had a friend who came with her to games, Mrs. Hitchens, another
widow, about fifty, who always wore beautiful hats. She had moved to town from
Minneapolis--"for the fine weather," she said.
Margaret knew by now what Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had done to
change the nature of the universe--he had gone with an expedition to Mexico and looked
at the stars, and he had charted stars in the southern sky called doubles--two stars
whirling in tandem. That spring, the spring of 1902, Captain Early was more famous than
ever--everyone in town agreed that he was a wonderful example of what a town like
theirs, full of enterprise and independent minds, could produce. Her memory of the man
she had encountered on the bicycle, though, gave Margaret a chill; she thought he was
nothing like anyone else she'd known.
Mrs. Early was a tall, generously built woman, sociable and good-humored.
Margaret noticed that she often smiled quickly to herself, as if she was enjoying some
thought that she dared not share with the other ladies. She had long, thick hair, still
mostly dark, piled luxuriantly on her head. The ladies knew plenty about her--she had no
daughters, but quite a few sons, of whom Andrew was the eldest (now thirty-five). They
had come along all in a row--Andrew, Henry, Thomas, Daniel, and John, all named after
famous men that Mr. Early was said to have known. Patrick had died as a boy of the
cholera. Mrs. Early did not live in a mansion or have a big farm, but she had a nice twostory house on Maple Street, painted bright white and surrounded by a picket fence, with
lots of flowers in the garden and a nice orchard in the back. There had been a large farm,
but that was lost after the war. Only John lived in Darlington. He was twenty-eight,
worked in the bank, and had married a girl from Arkansas. He also had a big house, but
even though Mr. Jared Early had been dead some eight or ten years by now (and quite
solitary for years before that), Mrs. Early did not live with her son and daughter-in-law.
Beatrice said that there was family money, though she wasn't quite clear about its source,
but all the boys were enterprising. It was said that Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens traveled
together, and that they had not only visited Andrew in Germany but had gone to a famous
spa there, and then to Paris. All the Earlys had gone to college for at least a year-Andrew, the brilliant one, had gone to college in Berlin, Germany (after he completed his
studies up in Columbia, it was said, there was no college in the United States that could
teach him anything he didn't already know). He was now teaching at the University of
Chicago, which had been founded by the Rockefellers because the big universities in the
East were too slow to enter modern times. It was very grand to be teaching at the
University of Chicago and, as far as Margaret understood it, to be on the payroll of the
Rockefellers, but, to her credit, Mrs. Early didn't talk about Andrew any more often than
she talked about the other boys. Henry was in New York City, working on Wall Street;
Thomas was in Texas; and Daniel was in England. Mrs. Early talked about their
wanderings as if they were customary and entertaining, as if the strangest one among
them was John, married and working in a bank in town. She did not have a habit that
others did (Beatrice, for example) of topping some other lady's anecdote with something
more impressive of her own, though they all knew she could have. She saved her
competitive streak for the poker table.
Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens sat at different tables. Every hand was five cards,
and at first the ladies continued to chat while the hands were dealt and they were
arranging their cards. Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens chatted along with the rest of them,
complimenting the cakes, or discussing the first strawberries, or comparing knitting
patterns, but Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens never picked up their cards as soon as they
were dealt. They glanced about while the rest of the ladies were scanning what they had,
then they picked up their cards, looked at them, and laid them down again, still genial.
The betting rounds proceeded with lots of laughter and talk, as if each betting decision
was a daring choice, and, indeed, it did seem to the other ladies to be so. Mrs. Early
would urge them to be a little more bold--"Raise her two, Mrs. Landon. I'm sure you can
stand it!" or "Surely, Miss Mayfield, you needn't fold just yet." Her voice was so friendly
that Margaret felt as though Mrs. Early was helping her along, that she had Margaret's
interests foremost in her mind. But Margaret never followed her advice, though some of
the other ladies did. These ladies did not always come to grief, but often enough they did.
Margaret understood Mrs. Early's purpose--to plump the pot a little before laying claim to
it. At the other table, Mrs. Hitchens was doing the same thing, though in a different way-"I'm not sure I would lose hope, dear," or "It's so nice when the wagering is confident and
straightforward." The stakes were low, but toward the end of the afternoon, after the
losing players had dropped out, the value of the chips would metamorphose--nickel chips
would be worth two bits, dime chips worth half a dollar, and two-bit chips worth a dollar.
When the winning ladies consolidated at a single table, Mrs. Hitchens dropped out with a
smile and an "Oh, I am a bit tired after all."
Mrs. Early's eyes were cheerful. Margaret never saw her scowl or lose her smile,
nor did she fidget or sigh or touch her hair or move her shoulders, as many of the ladies
did without seeming to know what they were doing. They all thought that their friends
didn't actually mean to take their money, but Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens did mean to
take their money. They preferred it when the ladies all had to show their hands, and in
order to promote this, Mrs. Early introduced high-low, in which both the high hand and
the low hand split the pot. Once they started playing in this way, it seemed more fair and
more fun, but Margaret saw that Mrs. Early also won more money. And she won more
often at stud-horse poker than at draw poker. After a while, Margaret got wise to the fact
that Mrs. Early was counting the cards, and that she never forgot that if there were three
kings faceup on the table, the likelihood of her completing her flush was minimal. When
they played draw poker, she paid close attention to how many cards each of them asked
for, as if this told her something, as, indeed, it did. She and Mrs. Hitchens also liked to
play vingt-et-un, and Margaret soon came to understand that Mrs. Early was keeping
track of the cards that were laid.
One day that summer, when Margaret was sitting beside her at the table, Mrs.
Early had just cut the cards. When she took the deck in her hand, she said, "There's a card
missing." The missing card was under Mrs. Johnson's chair. This incident passed without
remark, but to Margaret, the idea that a woman could be so familiar with the size and
weight of a deck of cards that she would sense that a single card was missing was
remarkable.
Lavinia had gone to Kirkwood to visit Elizabeth. The weather had been hot, but
the heat had broken--it was late July. Margaret set out for the the farm just after dawn to
bake a blackberry pie. Beatrice kept up John Gentry's special blackberry patch, and
Lavinia and Margaret had already helped her pick and process many jars of jam, and this
pie would be the last of the season. There was a fresh breeze, and the rolling fields were
fragrant from the hay that had been cut and baled; down in the bottomland, the hemp was
five or six feet tall. It would take her fifteen minutes to pick enough berries for a pie, and
no time at all to make the pie--all you did with a blackberry pie was roll out the crust, pile
in the berries, some sugar, and some flour. It had to be done early, though, before the heat
of the day. Robert was still at breakfast when she came in. She saw at once that he and
Beatrice were glowing with the pleasure of new and interesting gossip. Beatrice was
saying, "So--is he coming here?"
Robert glanced up as Margaret entered the kitchen, then said, "They say he is.
Where else would he go at such short notice?"
"Isn't there a brother in New York?"
She said, "Who are you talking about?"
"Andrew Early," said Robert. "Captain Early."
She knew who he meant, but said, "Mrs. Early's son?"
Robert
nodded.
"He lied," said Beatrice. "It's a tremendous scandal."
Margaret closed the door behind her against the flies. She said, "People lie all the
time."
"He misrepresented his observations," said Robert. "That's more than lying."
Margaret sat down and took Elliott on her lap. She handed him a rusk. She
smoothed his hair and could feel the warm contours of his head through the silky strands.
She said, "What observations?"
Robert looked at her. "I gather that he said he discovered that the sky is full of
these double stars, except that it isn't. At any rate, he's been fired from the University of
Chicago, whatever the reason."
"Dr.
Early?"
"Dr. Early. Captain Early. I never do know what I'm supposed to call the man. No
one calls him Andy, that's for sure."
She said, "I saw him once. When I was riding that bicycle of Dora's."
"You talked to him?" exclaimed Beatrice.
"I could hardly avoid it. He walked along with me for a piece, but I was so cold I
had to run into Mrs. Larimer's to get warm. He was courteous, but in a stiff way. Not at
all like his mother. And he didn't seem to feel the cold, even though I was freezing. He
struck me as a strange man." Elliott struggled to get down, and she set him on his feet.
Beatrice sucked in her breath. "Was he quite frightening? I do think
she
is a bit
frightening. She's up over fifty dollars." Robert scowled and she shrugged, then said, "I'm
still up, Robert."
Margaret said, "'Off-putting' is more the word."
Robert now looked at her. It was a fact that he didn't care about Beatrice's poker
parties. He thought that they were fast, and that fast wasn't bad, at least for the wife of the
editor of the newspaper. He nodded. "Captain Early is the most famous man this town