Mama’s marital purgatory lasted a full three weeks. I know because she informed me of each successive failure with a baffled little shake of her head. Another, more expressive, woman might have fretted. Mama transferred all anxiety into effort, that is, into housekeeping, and had no qualms conscripting me into service.
We washed and aired the linen, mended bedspreads, darned socks, scoured floors, polished silver (a quick job, to be sure), and this in the f irst four days. The shop, like all shops along Union Street, had been built into the side of the bluff. Spiders colonized every corner, closet, and window frame. At night when I lay down to sleep, I could feel the tickle of the webs I swept daily and the prick of tiny legs down my skin. Before long whatever romantic notions I’d entertained of the life we’d encounter in Reliance were soundly crushed, for it truly appeared I helped buy Mama the title of wife with all my remaining claims to freedom.
I began to dream in food: poached eggs, chicken livers fried in lard with onions, sow’s-foot stew with broth thick enough to hold a penny—any number of tasties might have made the toil acceptable. I might even have taken some satisfaction in the labor. As it was, I shat out most of Mr. Dryfus’s graham bread and healthful fare, and Mama’s guts suffered terribly.
“Mrs. Dryfus,” said Mr. Dryfus one night as we sat, the very likeness of a family: Mama with her tatting, Dryfus with a book, in the dismal little corner parlor. “If Nature had not intended the body to expel its noxious emanations, She would not have made it thus painful to refrain.”
Then he promptly set an example.
Frankly, I was impressed by this and more by the fact that he’d noticed Mama’s discomfort at all. Mama was mortif ied. Her expression alone could have torn holes in the brickwork. She walked out, leaving her tatting like a reprimand on the armchair, and me on the floor pretending great interest in Bewick’s History of British Birds, one of few books in the shop that wasn’t in German. You see, Mama could not speak or write like a lady; nor had she yet ventured to the shops among real ladies “and their dresses.” But by God, she felt she had the makings, and ladies did not pass gas. Not, at least, in parlors.
I might even have told Dryfus this, if he’d asked me, which he didn’t. Really, I’m not sure what he would have made of it if I had. Not much probably. I don’t think he wanted Mama to be a lady. Would have been just as happy to have a maid in the house as a wife. Except he didn’t have to pay a wife, and it was obvious, by now, how much he’d overstated matters when he promised a steady income.
The Register, one of three weeklies in town—the only to publish in English and German—sold by subscription, which few had money to buy. The small amount of scrip he did receive was all but worthless, issued by banks that no longer existed. People paid by other means: in corn or apples or hazelnuts and such. Once I opened the door to a toothy little man with a dead goose under one arm, which, to my horror, Dryfus passed on to the bank clerk in payment for other debts.
Refusing meat was a matter of health to Mr. Dryfus; eggs, a matter of principle. He charted his own bowel movements as a captain charts the sea and would have done the same with Mama, I think, had he the wherewithal to insist. Besides heads, he read books in three languages and championed all kinds of principles and theories, and while he never asserted himself physically, he thrust his opinions forward with an authority that only William, on that street of craftsmen, clerks, and grocers, seemed to doubt. A good number of people in town, even Hanley—who, as devil, endured the brunt of his criticisms—seemed to respect, even to like him.
Every Monday night, for example, he hosted the Reliance Phrenological Society, which from what I could see was six men drinking Wallendorf’s Beer, reading aloud scholarly articles, and offering asides and solemn nods when a pause seemed to make such responses appropriate. They deferred to Mr. Dryfus whenever a dispute arose. Mr. Le Duc, the cobbler, called him Herr Professor. William, when feeling contentious (he often felt contentious) did the same.
William’s every exchange with Mr. Dryfus, even the simplest, was prickly. And I could tell Mr. Dryfus didn’t like, any more than I did, how William watched Mama, how he did things for her like open doors and pull out chairs, and other niceties I’d read about in books. (It was William who’d written those letters Mr. Dryfus had sent Mama—I was almost sure of it. He’d written, in effect, to me and I to him and the knowledge, frankly, thrilled me.) Still, I guessed more than Mama stood between them; from the way they avoided the subject since that f irst day, I had an idea it was to do with William’s mother. Or maybe with Clara, who, from what Hanley told me, as much as raised the both of them, though they weren’t cousins, or in any way related like I’d guessed. Hanley reckoned William was a good number of years younger, not yet thirty at any rate.
Clara, I learned, had been William’s nurse in Saint Louis before William went off to the war. Hanley knew because his mama and older sister had been maids of all work in the same house. William’s mama had been Willa Stark. “The portrait painter,” Hanley said in such a way I knew the name should have meant something to me. “She died, after the war. Cholera. Lots a folks died.” Then added, thoughtful more than sad: “My mama, too.”
Two years before Mama and I arrived, Clara brought William to Reliance to live with Mr. Dryfus, which was also when Mr. Dryfus took Hanley on. (Hanley didn’t think that was Dryfus’s idea either.) Now William rented a photography shop across the street above the tobacconist and made lithograph plates for the Register. The only thing that linked them all, as far as Hanley knew, was they had all come to Saint Louis from a part of Prussia with its own slow-moving muddy river.
To be sure, my interest in all of this remained, at f irst, very much a fancy to pass the time before Mama and I left Reliance. Because things could not go on as they were. After Mama walked out of the parlor that night, she and Mr. Dryfus hardly said a word to each other. When he had anything to say, he told Clara, who communicated, in her way, with me. Depending on my mood, I might or might not tell Mama, and she ignored anything she did not want to hear. Every night she buried herself in her tatting, he in a book, and the tense, watchful silence made me want to stand up and shout every last curse word the backroom men had taught me. Surely they couldn’t go on like this. Surely Mama would have to listen to reason and run away with me, away from this place, away from Reliance.
But one morning in the third week, I saw a change between them. Mr. Dryfus sat for a long time at the kitchen table after breakfast, meerschaum pipe cocked between his teeth, watching Mama cube parsnips as if he’d never before seen the task done. Mama, catching my eye, gave a sober little nod, the grim look in her eye replaced by pride, almost. Relief, certainly.
After that, Mr. Dryfus said no more about f inding me a more suitable accommodation, and Mama would hear no more of leaving.