“May I move in with you until the wedding is over?” I begged. “Please?”
Grandma smiled and blotted the ink on the last line she’d penned. “Well, as much as I would love your company dear, your mother would never allow it. . . . But as long as you’re here, Harriet, maybe you can listen to my speech and tell me what you think of it. I’ll make us some tea, first.”
I would’ve rather had a bottle of sarsaparilla, but Grandma didn’t have any in her icebox. I sat down at her kitchen table while she put the kettle on to boil, savoring the peace and calm. I liked eating in Grandma’s kitchen. Our kitchen was the domain of Bess, our Negro cook, and Maggie our hired girl, and they didn’t like anyone venturing into their territory. Grandma didn’t have any servants and preferred sitting in her kitchen more than any other room.
“I’m never getting married,” I said with an elephant-sized sigh.
“Never is a very long time, Harriet. And marriage is what gives you a purpose in life—not to mention a family. Just think: If I hadn’t married Horatio, your mother never would have been born. And if your mother hadn’t married your father, you never would have been born.” She scooped tea from the canister into the pot while she talked, then set cups and saucers in front of us.
“If having babies is the only reason to get married,” I said, “then count me out for sure! The last thing I need is a drooling, squalling baby. And if Alice decides to have one, I’m moving in with you for good.”
“Most people get married for love, Harriet. . . . No, don’t make a face. I know you don’t understand it now, but someday some lucky man will come along, and when you fall in love with him it will be like plunging over Niagara Falls. You won’t know how you ever lived without him. That’s how I felt about Horatio.”
“I don’t think Alice ‘fell over the falls’ with Gordon Shaw. I think Mother steered her straight into him, like beaching a ship on a sandbar. I can’t figure out what Alice sees in him. Or what he sees in Alice, for that matter.”
“I hope that both of them are looking for the right qualities in each other. And I hope, for Alice’s sake, that there is more to Mr. Shaw than a handsome face and a wealthy father.”
“Well, there’s nothing more to Alice, I know that for sure. Aside from a pretty face and fluffy blond hair, she’s completely hopeless. She has trouble remembering how to uncork her smelling salts, and she needs them at least three times a day—that’s how often she swoons.”
“Now you’re exaggerating,” Grandma said with a smile.
“What do men see in women like Alice—and my mother? No offense, I know she’s your daughter, but Mother doesn’t do much of anything except look pretty and fuss over Father and go to club meetings.”
“I know. Poor Lucy,” Grandma said, shaking her head. The kettle reached a boil and she rose to pour the water over the tea leaves. “Lucy was overly influenced by Horatio’s mother, I’m sorry to say. I wasn’t home much of the time when she was little, so my mother-in-law made her into the woman she is today. Lucy acquired a taste for expensive things because Mrs. Garner kept buying her extravagant toys—imported dolls, a rocking horse, an enormous dollhouse. She even bought a miniature porcelain tea set so Lucy could learn the tea ritual from a very young age. And the last thing Grandma Garner did before she died was to make sure Lucy married well.”
“You mean to my father? He was a prize? I don’t believe it. He owns a department store, for goodness’ sake. He has a moon face and spectacles. His forehead gets higher and higher every year.
What in the world did Mother see in him?”
“He was a very nice looking, up-and-coming gentleman back in the early nineties, when they married. Not as handsome as my Horatio, but not every woman can be as fortunate as I was.”
I didn’t say so, but I had seen pictures of Horatio and I didn’t think he was handsome at all. He looked scrawny and pasty-faced to me.
“Horatio and I went to Niagara Falls on our honeymoon, and it’s a perfect metaphor of what love is like: powerful, beautiful, terrifying, overwhelming—and there’s no turning back once you fall over the edge.”
“But you’ve told me stories about how hard your marriage was, especially living with Horatio’s parents and trying to learn all those society rules. You made it sound horrible.”
“Did I? I didn’t mean to. Marriage can be difficult at times, I’ll grant you that. But being married to Horatio gave me a great deal of joy, as well.” She smiled, and even with silver streaks in her dark hair, I could see remnants of the lovely woman Grandma Bebe must have been. She poured tea into my cup and pushed the sugar bowl across the table to me. “Here. I know you like it sweet.”
“But you were pretty, Grandma. Mother and Alice are, too. You and my mirror have told me countless times that I’m plain. I look like Father’s side of the family. Even if I was interested in marriage, who would want to marry me?”
“Outward beauty can be a distraction for many men. Count it a blessing that you’re plain, Harriet. That way, you’ll know that a suitor is attracted to the real you, not the fancy wrappings. Believe it or not, I was very plain when Horatio met me. I was dressed in a simple calico gown with my braids coiled up on my head. I was a shy, small-town farm girl with no social graces at all. What he saw in me, I’ll never know.”
Grandma was getting more nostalgic about marriage by the moment. I needed to bring her back to the present. “I’m going to go to college when I finish school—and not some sissy female seminary, either. I want to go someplace substantial like Cornell or Oberlin. I want to be like you, Grandma, and do something important with my life. Didn’t you say that your work for the Temperance Union gave your life meaning?”
“Yes, but you can be married and still serve a cause. I did. Besides, I probably never would have joined the Union if I had remained single.”
“I don’t believe it.” Her insistence on the joy of marriage was starting to frustrate me. I blew into my cup to cool the tea and my temper, then said, “You need to explain yourself, Grandma.”
“It’s a long, sad story . . . are you sure you want to hear it?”
“We have plenty of time. I’m not going home until the wedding is over. And if Alice has a baby, I’m never going home.”
“Every marriage has its good times and bad, Harriet. Change is the only constant in life. . . .”
_ By the time Bebe and Horatio had been married for three years, she had perfected her ability to perform in society. She could pay visits to the wealthiest homes in town and make meaningless conversation for hours on end without committing a faux pas or a gaucherie. But even with flawless social skills, Bebe never achieved full acceptance by Mrs. Garner and her friends. That came by birth, not by marriage. She would always be poor little Bebe Monroe, a dairy farmer’s daughter. Many of the young women who were Bebe’s age held a grudge against her for capturing Roseton’s most desirable bachelor. The older women never forgave her for denying them a huge society wedding—a major social event among the well-to-do. They would consider her a gold digger, an upstart, a newcomer in town, even if she resided there for fifty years.
Bebe may not have been allowed to mention woman suffrage, but she did find something more meaningful to do than attend tea parties and social events. Since the Garner men owned one of Roseton’s largest industries and employed hundreds of workers, it was the duty of the Garner women to be charitable to the poor workers’ families. Once every month, Bebe and Mrs. Garner would travel by carriage to The Flats, as the sorry side of town was called, accompanied by the driver and the family butler for protection, of course.
Before Bebe visited The Flats for the first time, she had never imagined that such poverty existed. Her family had always worked hard on their farm, and life had been primitive in many ways, but at least they’d always had plenty of food to eat. In The Flats, the ramshackle tenements and bungalows were bounded by the river on one side and the railroad tracks on the other. Sewage oozed down open gutters alongside the streets, and freight trains rumbled past day and night, rattling windows and foundations. There was no grass or trees, and the yards behind the buildings were so tiny and barren that the workers couldn’t even grow food or raise animals. It seemed like a miserable way to live. Yet in the eight-block area of The Flats, Bebe counted six saloons.
“Those saloons are the reason you must never venture into this part of town alone or at night,” Mrs. Garner warned.
On Bebe’s first trip to The Flats, they visited a tannery worker’s wife, who had recently given birth. “Her sixth or seventh child, I believe,” Mrs. Garner said with a sniff. Bebe wondered where everyone slept at night in that tiny, crowded apartment. The new mother barely spoke English, but she did know how to say “Thank you,” which she repeated over and over as she expressed gratitude for the meal they’d delivered—as if Bebe and Mrs. Garner had cooked it themselves. Bebe felt like a fraud.
Two of the woman’s ragged, barefooted children had coughs and runny noses. The three oldest, who looked as though they should be in school, sat at a table doing piecework with their mother, sewing on buttons. “Can’t we do something more for that family?” Bebe asked after they returned to their carriage that first day.
“Of course not. It’s important to be charitable, but we mustn’t allow the poor to become dependent on us.”
“Shouldn’t the city officials be doing something about the sewage and all the garbage that’s piling up?”
“That’s entirely up to our civic government. It isn’t our duty to meddle in men’s affairs.”
Three years after Bebe’s first visit to The Flats, the neighborhood looked exactly the same. The garbage and sewage, the fleas and the flies remained unchanged. The only thing that had changed, as far as Bebe could tell, was the population, which had grown considerably larger.
“I don’t know how these families can afford to live with so many mouths to feed,” Bebe said after delivering yet another meal to yet another new mother. She felt guilty for parading into these families’ lives, well dressed and well fed, reminding them of what they lacked. To Bebe, her attempts at charity seemed like a tiny drop of goodwill in an ocean of need. “I counted five children in that apartment, and none of them looked well nourished,” she continued. “Surely there must be something more we can do than simply deliver one meal.”
“At least these women are willing to have their husbands’ babies.”
Bebe knew that Mrs. Garner had directed the jibe at her. She had turned twenty in July, she and Horatio had been married for three years, and she had yet to become pregnant. Bebe’s insides burned like hot coals as she forced herself to ignore her mother-in-law’s barb—just as she ignored countless other barbs every day. As if it were Bebe’s fault for being childless! Mrs. Garner herself had produced only one son. Bebe longed to speak her thoughts out loud but didn’t dare, and the coals of her anger burned hotter each day.
Her mother-in-law seemed convinced that Bebe was somehow to blame for her childlessness, when the fault rested entirely with Horatio. A man needed to be at home with his wife at night in order to produce babies, and Horatio rarely was. He arrived home with his father at six every evening, swearing that he’d missed Bebe and professing his undying love. He would eat dinner with her and his parents and then go out again.
“I have business to attend to,” he would say if she questioned him. She was often asleep when he returned late at night, the smell of alcohol strong on his breath. “So my nightmares won’t bother you, my dear one,” he explained. The more Horatio drank, the less he resembled the carefree, talkative man she had fallen in love with. The distance between them seemed to be growing wider and wider.
Bebe arose and got dressed long before he did in the morning, steeling herself to endure another long, lonely day with only his mother and her socialite friends for companionship. During the war years, when her life had been a daily struggle of hard labor, she had feared that the work would never end. Now that she didn’t have the usual women’s chores to do, her empty, work-free life also seemed as though it would never end. She hated her life. Then one night Horatio stopped coming home for dinner altogether.
“Where’s Horatio?” Mrs. Garner demanded when Mr. Garner arrived home alone.
“How should I know?” he replied.
Bebe had been waiting for Horatio in the parlor and didn’t intend to eavesdrop on his parents’ conversation in the foyer, but there was no other way out of the room without being seen. She shrank away from the parlor door as the Garners began shouting at each other by the front staircase.
“Well, he was with you all day at work. Why didn’t he come home with you?”
“If you must know, your son hasn’t been with me all day at work for a very long time. He fails to show up at all, half the time, nor does he do a full day of work when he does show up. He comes in late every morning and leaves whenever he feels like it.”
“Where does he go?”
“How should I know? I have more important things to do than follow him around all day. But I’ll tell you this much, I’m not going to put up with it any longer. I hired a new general manager last month to replace him. I warned Horatio that I was going to do it, and now I have. As soon as the fellow learns his way around, Horatio can look for work elsewhere, as far as I’m concerned. I’m taking him off my payroll.”
“You can’t do that! He’s your son.”
“No, he’s
your
son—you spoiled him shamelessly when he was a boy and—”
“Only because Horatio was so ill.”
“—and you’re still spoiling him to this day. It’s your fault that he never grew up.”
“How dare you blame me when the fault is yours? I told you not to force him to go to war. I begged you to hire a substitute for him when his draft notice came. He’s our only son! Horatio wept and pleaded with you, too, and you turned a deaf ear.”
A chill shivered through Bebe at their words. Horatio had told her the opposite story—that his father had offered to hire a substitute, but he had insisted on fighting. She wanted to believe Horatio’s version, except his nightmares told her otherwise. She felt stunned. Duped. He wasn’t the man she’d thought he was. And what did he do all day if he wasn’t working?