The Bride’s House Read online

  “That’s because they’ve all had their heads chopped off. You can’t keep a rooster in Georgetown in the winter,” Mrs. Travers said, coming in from the kitchen and standing beside Nealie at the front door. “They’ll come, all right. It’s just the snow makes them late. Now you run along, Charlie. Husbands aren’t supposed to be hanging around for teas.”

  He clumped out of the house then, looking up and down the street for guests, not knowing it was fashionable to be late. Nor did Nealie, who was frantic until at last the bell on the door clanged, and she answered it, saying, “Well, do come in,” in a shrill, nervous voice. “Welcome to the Bride’s House.”

  Within minutes, the house was filled. None of the women invited would have dreamed of staying away, because they had seen the delivery wagons loaded with crates of furniture and were curious about the Bride’s House. They were curious about Nealie, too. There had been much talk about the miner and the hired girl who had bought the magnificent place. Some gazed at the rich furnishings in awe and not a little envy, because they had never seen such splendors in a private home. Not only was the house filled with expensive furniture, but every side table was covered with tasseled silk shawls on which were set knickknacks—china figurines and ore samples, nut dishes and marble eggs, the stereopticon, and dried flowers under a glass dome. A few guests rolled their eyes, and Nealie overheard a woman mutter, “Tawdry.”

  That sounded fine, and she said, “Thank you,” not knowing what the word meant, of course. Another remarked that standing in the red parlor, she felt she was inside a love apple. Nealie wasn’t aware a love apple was a tomato, and she thought that a fine compliment, too.

  If Mrs. Travers overheard any words of scorn, she kept them to herself. Nor did the older woman remark that while the women accepted plates of gingerbread and dried-apple pie, they ate only a bite or two. She had suggested earlier that Nealie might want to order tiny pastries from the Hotel de Paris for the women to nibble on, but Nealie had replied that she didn’t want her guests going home as hungry as barn cats.

  Not all of the guests were critical, of course. Nealie wasn’t the first hired girl who had married well, and for the most part, Georgetown was an accepting place. “You come and call on me,” one woman told Nealie as she departed, handing the girl her card. Nealie didn’t know about calling cards and thought she should have some made up for herself. Another woman said, “You’d be welcome at the missionary society at the Presbyterian church. We knit for the heathen.”

  “I got my house to keep up,” Nealie replied.

  “By yourself?”

  “I wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.”

  The woman didn’t remark on that, because many of the newly rich were eccentric.

  Charlie returned after the guests left, as Nealie and Mrs. Travers were clearing away the dishes. He, too, had wondered why Nealie didn’t find a hired girl, but she’d told him it was her house, and she didn’t want anybody getting in her way. She took pleasure in the fine cookstove and the icebox that the iceman filled with blocks of ice each week. She said that with the hand pump that was mounted on the sink, there wasn’t a thing to washing the dishes, and she loved drying the plates and cups, making them shine.

  Nealie’s eyes sparkled when she told her husband about the tea. “They said my apple pie was the best they ever tasted, and three ladies asked could they have starts of my ferns. I got so many compliments on my decorating I thought I’d bust,” she told him. “Oh, Charlie, you’d be so proud! One lady said the house was … what was that word, Mrs. Travers?”

  “Toney. I think it was ‘toney.’”

  That didn’t sound right to Nealie, but she nodded and chattered away to Charlie, describing how the women wore their best silks and velvets, their bonnets trimmed with lace veils and birds’ wings, and how they exclaimed over all her pretty things. “It was toney, all right.” When she stopped for breath, Charlie hugged her, and she hugged him back, forgetting for a moment that it was Will, not Charlie, she’d thought about when she’d planned the entertainment.

  The women began to wash the dishes, chattering over Nealie’s triumph, and Charlie left the house, wandering up to Alpine Street to buy tobacco at the Kaiser Mercantile, proud of the way his wife had held her own with Georgetown society. The store was crowded, and he was in no hurry, so he looked at the stock of gold pans and picks, the stacks of yard goods and clothing, and cans of tomatoes and peas and beans lined up on the shelves. He liked the orderliness of the place, because despite his rumpled clothing, Charlie was a tidy man. A stove stood in the center of the room, and Charlie held out his hands to its warmth, because he had left the house without a coat, and it had snowed that morning. He stood there, half hidden by the stovepipe, smiling a little, basking in Nealie’s happiness.

  And then he heard someone speak his wife’s name and mutter, “Hired girl.” His smile faded as he listened to the woman continue, “Honestly, Jim, you would laugh if you saw it. One room was all in red—red, for heaven’s sake. And the dining room was hopeless. We all know he dabbles in gold mines, but does she have to spread it all over the walls and the windows? There’s a piano, and what do you bet she doesn’t know a sharp from a flat!” The woman laughed, then said, “Her tongue wags at both ends. She could talk the leg off a chair.” She added something in a low voice to the man beside her, and he laughed. “She’s been married only three months, but from the looks of her, she’s six months along. If we were anyplace else, a person like that wouldn’t be accepted in society. It’s scandalous. Why, do you know—” The woman stopped suddenly when she spotted Charlie. “Why, Mr. Dumas, I just came from—”

  “I heard where you came from.” Charlie turned to the man. “Say, Jim, is she your wife?” When the man nodded, Charlie said, “I want you to step outside with me.”

  The man started to protest, but when he saw the look on Charlie’s face, he exchanged glances with his wife and followed Charlie through the door onto the board sidewalk. Charlie turned to face him, looking down on the man, because Charlie was half a head taller. “You still work at the Bobcat? I haven’t been up there in a while,” Charlie said.

  The man nodded. “Charlie, my wife didn’t mean—”

  “It’s Mr. Dumas. I’m one of the men that owns the Bobcat, so you can call me Mr. Dumas. I guess you could say I’m your boss.” Jim would have known that, of course. Few in Georgetown weren’t aware that Charlie Dumas had come into money and was now a mining speculator. In fact, already men were seeking him out not just because he was rich but because of his knowledge. Unlike many of the Eastern investors who’d never been underground, Charlie knew all about mining, knew when a claim had been salted or a vein was about to pinch out. He understood a mine was no good if there wasn’t a mill or smelter nearby or a railroad to ship out the ore. He could tell when a mine was dangerous from lack of ventilation or shoddy timbering or when it might flood from underground water.

  “Mr. Dumas, I’m sorry—”

  “Shut up,” Charlie said. He stared at Jim a moment, then said slowly, softly, “I never held a thing against a man because of his wife.” Jim looked relieved at the words, but then, Charlie continued. “Here’s the thing of it. I couldn’t hit a woman, wouldn’t ever do it, not even if she made me as mad as a yellow jacket, like your wife just did. Mrs. Dumas never did a thing to your missus, but just asked her to have a cup of tea, and your wife insulted her in the worst way. A man can’t stand by when that happens. So, I guess this is the only thing I can do.” Charlie made a fist and swung, hitting the man in the jaw, punching him as hard as if he’d been hit by an ore cart. Jim’s feet went out from under him, and he flew backward off the boardwalk, landing on his back in the muddy street. Charlie stepped down into the street next to him, bent over, hitting the fist of one hand into the palm of the other, but Jim didn’t get up. “Now you hear me good. If I ever hear of you or your missus saying a word against Mrs. Dumas, I’ll ask you to get your wages and get gone. Do you hear me?” When
the man didn’t answer right away, Charlie thundered, “Well, do you?”

  “I hear you.”

  Charlie nodded then and put down his hands. He turned to the men who’d gathered outside the store to see what was going on and looked at each one. They’d heard. They knew he wouldn’t stand for anyone speaking against Nealie. They knew what he’d do. Charlie waited a moment, perhaps to see if anyone would challenge him. And then one of the men said, “Hello, Charlie,” and the others relaxed and shuffled back into the store. The story got about pretty quick, and before long, everybody in Georgetown knew better than to gossip about Nealie Dumas.

  Charlie went on home then, waiting on the porch for a few minutes to calm down, reaching into his pocket for his pipe, but he had forgotten to buy the tobacco. Nealie heard him and opened the door and said grandly, “Welcome to the Bride’s House, Mr. Dumas.” He never said a word to her about what had taken place at the store. And while Nealie found out later on that Charlie had tromped a man the day of her tea, she never knew the cause of it.

  * * *

  That was Nealie’s only party in the Bride’s House, because she was sensible of her condition and had read in a magazine that women in the latter stages of pregnancy were not to be seen in society. She was content those last months to remain inside the house, building a nest, as Mrs. Travers put it. Each day, she cleaned the Bride’s House, waxing the floors, oiling the woodwork, sweeping the carpets. She gloried in the house and kept it as clean as a hymn. The Bride’s House was magical, and Nealie could not believe that such a magnificent place was hers. She never tired of wandering through its rooms, examining the house with awe. A dozen times a day, she drew aside the lace curtains to peer at Sunrise Peak or stood in the front hall admiring the staircase that curved up to the bedrooms.

  She rarely left the house except to go to the Kaiser Mercantile to buy groceries, and she loved walking home, stopping on the walk beside where she would plant the lilac hedge—Charlie had ordered the bushes—staring at the house and knowing it was hers. Sometimes, as spring came on, she walked a little, stopping to visit Mrs. Travers, and once she stopped for the mail. Charlie always went for it in the afternoons, complaining sometimes that he couldn’t walk a block without someone stopping him to swap gossip about the mines, to ask his advice. She thought he’d be pleased she’d saved him a trip to the post office. When she handed him his letters, however, Charlie frowned at her and asked in a harsh voice, “What are you doing with the mail? You got no business picking up my mail.”

  He never raised his voice to her, and Nealie was taken aback. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Pleased? The mail’s mine. Don’t you ever do it again.”

  Nealie stared at Charlie a moment, confused, and then she understood. Charlie was afraid that Will would write to her. He picked up the mail just in case there was a letter from Will. And maybe there had been. Maybe Will had written to her, and Charlie had torn up the letter. What if Will had sent her a letter saying he was coming for her?

  Nealie stared at her husband for a long time, wanting to ask if Will had written. And Charlie stared back at her, perhaps waiting for her to ask. Nealie knew she couldn’t, however. She’d promised never to mention his name. So she bowed her head and left the room and never again went for the mail.

  As she neared her time, Nealie took to sitting in a little rocker in the upstairs hallway, stitching baby things and staring through the lace curtain at the falling snow, although it was spring. She had never been a needlewoman, but she liked rocking back and forth, thinking, feeling the baby move inside her, dreaming that someday, Will would come back. She would answer the door, dressed in gray silk, and she would say, “How nice to see you, Mr. Spaulding,” and hold out her hand. Will would find her elegant and refined, and see how she had come up in the world. He would be impressed with the house, the gardens, and he would ask to see the baby, and it would break his heart. Will would cry because of the way he had treated her. She would forgive him, and he would beg her to go away with him. The dream always turned fuzzy then, and Nealie was never sure how it ended. But the dream never went away. She was thinking about Will when the first labor pain hit her.

  * * *

  Nealie smelled lilacs. But it was too early for lilacs, and besides, the bushes hadn’t even been planted. They were her favorite flowers. That was why Charlie had ordered two dozen bushes to be set around the Bride’s House. She opened her eyes to the light flooding into the bedroom and looked around. The curtain was open and the window, and through it was the view she’d come to love of Sunrise Peak, its summit dusted with snow. Nealie turned her head a little and saw the lilacs then, a bouquet as big as a sagebush, sitting on the table beyond the baby’s cradle. She inhaled the fragrance as she glanced at the sleeping infant, satisfied.

  The labor had been a hard one, and long. Charlie had fetched Mrs. Travers when it started, and the woman stayed with Nealie through the night, and the next day. “The boarders will understand, and if they don’t, they can eat their shoes,” she said. During the second night, Mrs. Travers called in another woman to help, because the delivery was worse than anything she had seen before. They made the girl drink water in which eggshells had been boiled and placed scissors and shoes upside down under the bed to ease the birthing, and the second woman remarked that she didn’t understand why Nealie was having so much trouble, because the girl had slender ankles, a sure sign of an easy delivery. But it hadn’t been easy, and the two women were afraid Nealie would be torn apart before the baby was born.

  The baby came at last, but neither woman had been able to stop the bleeding, so Charlie had gone for the doctor. Nealie remembered the doctor, but when was that—yesterday or the day before? She had been so tired that she’d slept, and now time was unclear in her mind.

  Charlie had stayed with her during her labor, she remembered, holding her hand, telling her it would be over soon. “Now most men, they won’t go in a birthing room. They’ll pace the floor or go to the saloon and get drunk, but Charlie Dumas, why, we couldn’t get rid of him with a stick,” Mrs. Travers told Nealie.

  And then the baby pushed its way out of her, and she screamed with the pain. She thought of Will and cursed him silently, because she couldn’t say his name out loud. Finally, it was over. Mrs. Travers told her the infant was just a little chunk of a baby, too small to give Nealie all that trouble, but Charlie said she was just right, the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. He held her up, still wet, her hair slicked down on her head, so that Nealie could see her.

  “Red hair. Fancy hair. She’s the spit of you,” he said, to Nealie’s relief, because she had feared the baby would resemble Will. “We’ll call her Little Nealie.”

  “No,” Nealie replied. “I don’t want to call her that. Her name is Pearl.” She didn’t know why she blurted out the name like that. She had been so sure she’d have a boy, one she’d name George for the town, that she hadn’t considered a girl’s name. She remembered that Will told her once that he fancied the name Pearl, and after all, it was his baby. Charlie didn’t need to know about the name, of course.

  Now as Nealie looked at the infant, sleeping with her little fist against her mouth, she decided Pearl was just right, because the infant was as smooth and pink as a pearl.

  She wanted to hold the baby and tried to sit up, but she was weak, and so she lay there and watched the sun creep into the room, feeling its warmth on her face, which was flushed and fevered. Her hair, which had darkened during her pregnancy, was curly from the damp of perspiration. She felt lethargic, but happy. Charlie came into the room then with Mrs. Travers, telling Nealie he’d engaged the older woman to care for her and the child until Nealie was stronger. And Mrs. Travers had found a wet nurse.

  “I told the boarders they could eat at the hotel if they wanted to,” Mrs. Travers said, then added, “Not a one of them complained when I said I was taking care of you and your baby.”

  Nealie hadn’t expected happiness with Charlie, and
it had come as a surprise. He was a good man. She’d thought that after a time, after they were settled in, he might change, that he’d resent her, might even beat her as her father had her mother, but he’d never once touched her except in tenderness. He brought her presents—perfume, a nightgown with lace on it, a pair of kid slippers. When Nealie’s legs cramped in the night, due to some quirk in her pregnancy, Charlie had rubbed them. And as the baby inside her grew so big that she had trouble sleeping, Charlie would go to the kitchen and bring her back a cup of hot chocolate. Then he’d sit beside her in his nightshirt and read to her from a mining book until she was so bored that she fell asleep.

  * * *

  “You’ve been asleep for two days,” Charlie told her.

  “Two days? I’m as lazy as a chicken.” She pushed the covers aside and moved her legs, and when she looked down, she saw that both her nightgown and the bed were soaked in blood.

  Mrs. Travers saw it, too. “Get the doctor. She’s still sick from the bornin’,” she ordered Charlie, who rushed out. After she staunched the bleeding, the older woman went to the cradle and picked up Pearl, handing her to Nealie. But Nealie was not strong enough to hold the baby, so Mrs. Travers laid the tiny creature beside her mother, and Nealie slipped her finger into Pearl’s fist.

  “She has a favorance to you, not Charlie,” Mrs. Travers said. “Why, you’d think you produced her all by yourself.” Nealie barely nodded, and the older woman continued talking. “Did you see the lilacs? Charlie sent all the way to Denver for them. They’re blooming down below now, even though they haven’t yet budded out up here. They came in on the train. I guess there’s not a thing your husband wouldn’t do for you. Marrying him was a stroke of luck.” Lidie Travers’s voice was almost hysterical, the way she carried on, talking to keep both their minds off the hemorrhaging.