TWENTY
Tend and Befriend

1868

_______

Abigail hated missing her annual trip to San Francisco in November to review spring fashions. She wired money to Shirley, who made the purchases, and Abigail paid her a commission for her work. Shirley used the money for legal fees, she told Abigail, still seeking more time with her daughter. Shirley told her one of her attorneys, Eloi Vasquez, had taken an interest in her case—and her. “He’s of Spanish descent with cocoa skin and dark eyes and I think I’m falling in love,” Shirley had written. “Perhaps that verse about all things coming together for good was speaking to me all the time.”

“Maybe that’s so for me too,” Abigail had written back.

Travel stimulated Abigail’s thinking. She was challenged by dealing with new people, had no fear of disagreeing with those who saw the world differently. Their perspectives gave her ideas for her novel. She liked seeing how another state intervened in the suffrage fight. But alas, mothering kept her close to home, working in the millinery and being a seamstress. She didn’t see much stimulation in that work.

Then a mother brought her fifteen-year-old daughter in for a fitting of a dress. The girl had a waist the size of an embroidery hoop, with skin as white as a baby’s first tooth. Listless was the word Abigail used to describe her as she pinned the dress the mother had sewed. The woman hadn’t been satisfied with her own efforts and so had hired Abigail to make alterations. The child’s corset trussed her already ample breasts and tiny middle into an abnormally curvy shape.

“Do you like the way the dress fits you?” Abigail asked the girl, who had shrugged her shoulders.

“What does it matter if she likes it or not,” the mother said. “Fix the gap between her small midriff and her bodice. The dress needs to make her look . . . inviting.”

“What is she inviting?” Abigail loosened the pins and let out the material so the bodice wasn’t pushing upward in such a stark fashion.

“She’s of marriage age. What else?”

“Yes, she is. But many girls are waiting.” Abigail kept her voice light, as though she gossiped about the latest news rather than promoting an obvious contrast to the mother’s view. “Girls are going to school and finding interests, in addition to traditional roles.” She fussed at the sleeves but returned to loosening the waistline. We have to do something about the corset. “Some of the latest fashions from San Francisco—where I’ve been going on buying trips—are designed to have a little fuller waistline. Just as we are all free from the war, our bodies are seeking freedoms too. Our corsets might be squeezing the life from us women. There’d be less fainting or need for smelling salts if we could take deeper breaths.” She smiled, engaging the mother while she let out the dress seams.

“She does faint often. I assumed it was her weak nature—which makes her less appealing to the opposite sex, of course, and means I must do everything I can to affect that.”

“Let’s loosen those stays, shall we?” Abigail raised the girl’s arms and did the deed before the mother could protest. “Doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yes, ma’am, it does.” The girl’s eyes sparkled. She inhaled and let a long breath escape. She’s relieved.

“After she’s done her religious duty and married and had children, she can think about taking deeper breaths.”

“The frock will fit better if it’s looser,” Abigail said. “And give her room to eat a bit more. Robust is invitational too.” Healthy is the finest aphrodisiac of all. “My own Clara Belle has found less corset and more carrots give her energy, and she can sing better too.”

“Really?” It was the first time the mother seemed intrigued by Abigail’s words.

“Are you a singer?” Abigail asked the girl.

“She’s a lead in the church choir. The young music director has shown an interest in her voice.”

“You see? Let her natural talent loose and who knows what joys the Lord might bring into her life.”

The mother harrumphed but gave Abigail the go-ahead to loosen the whalebone stays a bit more. The dress fit much better and made the girl look less like a wicker mannequin and more like a young woman.

“You’re a fine seamstress,” Abigail told the mother. “This was an easy fix. We have to pay more attention to our God-created forms and not let fashion force us into . . . unintended shapes. I’ll finish this up and you can return for a final fitting next week. Will that work?”

“I hope we haven’t ruined her invitational design,” her mother said.

“Ah, enticements come in many forms. Natural being the best of all.”

The girl smiled and her cheeks held color for the first time since she’d arrived.

That day Abigail realized she could affect a girl’s future right at home. The satisfaction surprised her. Perhaps those words in the intimacy of a fitting room were part of a “still hunt.” She’d make sure Clara Belle knew that her own corset fittings had influenced another young girl’s future. Sway could happen any place where one paid attention, one conversion at a time.

“We have to have a specific plan for the newspaper,” Abigail decided.

The entire family sat around the table. Ben ground coffee beans as Abigail urged how they might all get involved in starting a newspaper. Clara’s musical talents were advanced enough that she began giving music lessons for actual pay rather than trading for beef or pork. The boys could contribute to the Duniway finances by shooting sparrows to sell to the local butcher—the ones the Duniways didn’t eat themselves. Ben, back working with the horses, taking only small doses of laudanum that kept the pain from spiking, also helped.

Abigail speculated on a piece of property near the dock after a day she’d taken a brisk walk and saw the potential there. The property wasn’t yet for sale but should have been. She located the owner, made an offer, and it was the Duniways’—who sold it two weeks later at double the price when a steamship operator decided it was the perfect site for his expansion. Just as I thought. She’d figured that out before he had.

Ben had put his name to the purchase and the sale as required. But he resisted her suggestion that they speculate on Portland property. “It’ll never be as big a place as Albany,” he’d said.

But off and on he bought land that she told him would be good investments in towns throughout the state. She put a portion each week of millinery income into the teapot for her newspaper.

She used old Argus issues to cut out dress patterns she’d seen in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She could spy a dress photograph and remake the design. She hadn’t thought of it as unusual, but her sisters all brought ads to her to reproduce the patterns. She did that while she spoke with Ben. “Harvey’s buying Portland property and selling like we did here in Albany. At a profit.” She considered asking Harvey to make a purchase or two for her, but he’d never agree to such a thing without Ben’s approval. “We’ll rue the day we let land on Front Street slip by us. I could be a very rich woman if not for hesitation of the male sex.”

When she wasn’t working in the millinery, making patterns, dusting the plate rail in the parlor, directing the children and breaking up skirmishes between the boys, and potty training her toddler, she was imagining plot lines. If she could sell more novels, she could add to the money in the teapot and they would one day have that newspaper. Judith Reid consumed her days. She wrote the novel as though she were Judith, a woman who had loved an artist who disappeared. Judith, the lead character, is then taken to Oregon from Missouri, where her mother dies. Judith must care for her siblings and is forced to work in her father’s sawmill. She makes the audacious decision to defy her father, resist the “invitation” of a reckless man whom her father chose for her to marry, and returns to Missouri where she rediscovers her long-lost artist, and both live happily ever after. She read her book out loud to Ben.

“I always like a happy ending,” he said. “But why do the men always have to be such scoundrels. And is the first love always the best? I mean, it was for me with you, but I wonder if it was for you with me?”

He pulled his starched collar from his neck and put it in the box on the dresser top. They’d returned from church, lunched, and had the afternoon for a quiet time and so she’d read to him.

“It’s not about you, Ben, or me. It’s fiction. Listen to what Putnam’s Weekly says about the novel.” She picked up the popular magazine. “‘Novels are one of the features of our age. We know not what we would do without them. . . . Do you wish to instruct, to convince, to please? Write a novel! Have you a system of religion or politics or manners or social life to inculcate? Write a novel!’ See, a story is the perfect way to convince women of what’s possible. Readers expect to be entertained, but there has to be tension and struggle as there is in life. They wouldn’t read it if it didn’t have something the characters are trying to accomplish and the reader given to wonder if they’ll ever achieve it.”

“The women always come out smelling like roses though.”

“It’s the only place where we can be assured of roses. Real life promises us thorns.”

“Not always.” He looked at Clyde turning pages in a book as he sat on the horsehair-covered chair.

“True. But enough encounters to leave us bleeding. I write so women know there are other ways of living, especially if we stand firm and don’t marry the first man who asks us. Or don’t assume an early marriage is a requirement of womanhood. Just see where I’d be if I’d fallen into Mr. Bunter’s trap.”

“Your timing was excellent, Mrs. Duniway,” Ben teased.

Except when it comes to having babies. Clyde really must be our last. “Well, you had a big part in when we got married, as did my father’s poor decision.”

“But everything worked out.” Ben kissed her neck. “Didn’t it?”

“Yes, it has. But there’s so much more to do, Ben.”

“There always is, with you.”

“I’ll have to sell,” Kate said.

“Probably let the help go?”

“We shouldn’t have had so many children so close together.”

“What’s done is done, Catherine. Regrets will weigh you down. Let’s think of the options you have.”

There’d been an accident, an explosion on board the steamship, and Captain John was dead. It wasn’t fair. So much of life wasn’t. Abigail helped her sister through the funeral and the reading of the will several weeks later. Kate received the house, a small savings that would last the year perhaps, and the steamship company gave her one month of John’s salary. Nothing else.

Kate’s youngest slept on her breast. She stroked the child’s forehead with the back of her finger. “I’ve been so spoiled. We could have saved the money we paid for help. I should have done my own laundry.”

“Stop. Think of what you can do.” Abigail put on her pragmatic hat.

Kate sighed. Even in grief, she looked coiffed and held together, her shoulders straight, not hunched over in sadness. “I guess I could teach. I know what they paid the male teacher last year, and he left for greener pastures. With that salary, I could maintain the house, maybe have enough for a nanny.”

“Let’s see if Sarah Maria might like to live here instead of with Fanny. She could help with the children.”

“She would be of assistance. But Fanny needs her too.” She sighed. “John was only thirty-eight years old. We had our whole life ahead of us.” She brushed tears from her cheeks.

Abigail patted her sister’s hand. “It’s the way it is now. Tragedy happens. I’m not dismissing the hole in your heart.” She didn’t want to think of what her life would be without Ben in it. “John would want you to go on, to make the best of it. Why don’t you talk to the school board? That’s a good idea. You’re certified and would make a fabulous teacher for Canemah’s sprouts.”

“It’s one of the few respectable things a widow can do. Or remarry. Your old suitor has been by.”

“Bunter? Oh, that man! You’re not that desperate. We’ll help as we can. Harvey will too, if we ask. Please don’t, you know, marry just for safety. Because in the end, there is no guarantee. We women have to protect ourselves.”

“I have you all,” Kate said.

“Now, what will you wear to your interview? And who is on your local board? We’ll see if we can politic them.”

Kate smiled. “Discreetly, of course.”

“That’s my sister. We’ll get you through.”

It was what they had to do a week later when Kate learned she had the job, but it would pay half the salary of the man who had left.

“Outrageous,” Abigail said. “I’m going to write a letter to the editor about such unfairness.”

“Can they do that?” Sarah Maria, the youngest Scott sister, had come to live with and help Kate out.

“They said it was the law.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. But they make the school board laws, or at least they can fudge them,” Abigail said. “They could change it if they wanted to. I’ll go talk with them.”

“No. Don’t. Please. It’s a good job, one I can do. And I can sew in the evenings. Maybe Harvey needs someone at the Oregonian to copyedit. I’m good with details.”

“Yes, you are. And a better writer than he is, if I might say so.” Better than me. “I can use another to crochet reticules. They’re popular now. At least you won’t have to marry someone you don’t wish to.”

“Yes. Bunter has been by again. He seems to like Scott girls.” They both turned to Sarah Maria.

“Don’t let that man near you,” Abigail said.

“I won’t.”

“Good. We will tend and befriend each other. That’s what women can do.”

Abigail’s newspaper would have to wait. Family needs came first.