MARIE DID NOT begin her story the next night. She was tired and wanted to do the telling when she wasn’t. I didn’t care.
Three days later we both felt better. We again smuggled tea up to our room. This time I sat in the corner and she on the end of the bed, arranging herself one way, then another. “Oh,” she said. “Now you must help me. Where should I start?”
“Your name, I think, would be a good place.”
“Oh, well, yes. My name is Marie Louise Perry.”
“And where are you from?”
“Abington, Massachusetts, though mostly we thought of ourselves as from Boston. Now, of course, in Boston there are Perrys who are very wealthy, but we, I’m sad to say, are only second cousins.”
“So you are not rich. I was so hoping you were.”
Marie smiled. “No. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we weren’t poor. Father had a store. We had a house just south of town with a garden and a carriage barn.”
After having been so shy about it, Marie spoke easily about growing up in Abington. She told me that she and her sister had attended the girls’ academy and worked in their father’s store after school. She was happy, she said, until she turned sixteen. Suddenly, Sunday afternoons were no longer for friends or walks in the woods. She was to stay at home and receive callers.
“I hated it. Boys—you couldn’t call them men—who mostly fidgeted and tried to think of things to say, and I, of course, would have to sit there, wanting to scream, and agree that, yes, it was a very lovely day. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, John Ferguson asked me to marry him. I said right out that I didn’t love him.”
I laughed. “You said it like that? Did he take offense?”
“He didn’t. I think he was relieved, having been put up to it by someone who said he must now find a wife. So Mr. Ferguson stopped coming, but Willard Hoskins started coming more. One Sunday, he showed up on our doorstep, smelling of witch hazel and patting his pink neck with a handkerchief. I wanted to run.”
“Did you try to discourage him?”
“I couldn’t. He just told me in a rush that he wanted my hand in marriage. Said it would be advantageous. That his impressions of me were of the purest kind. Oh, Joseph, you should have seen him, hair greased and parted down the middle. And that stupid handkerchief! Finally, I got a word in and said no. He then asked if he might leave with some glimmer of hope. I said I thought it best if he didn’t.”
“So you are not here because you were forced to marry him?”
“No, but if I had married him, this is exactly where I would be. But it wasn’t just him. I had two more of that sort. By this time Mother was worried, and not just her. One evening my aunt Augusta came to dinner. In our first moment alone, she took my hand. I’ve brought you a little something, she whispered. From Boston! She handed me a small box. What do you think was in it?”
“A potion?”
“No. A pair of lady-plumpers.” The silence that followed conveyed my ignorance. “My goodness, Joseph, you have been out in the woods for a while. Lady-plumpers are ceramic pieces that you put in your mouth to push out your cheeks so that men might find you attractive. Aunt Augusta was almost in rapture. This will be our little secret, she said. They are the fashion!
“I thanked my aunt, though I was mortified and wished that she and everyone else would take no interest in my affairs. I hurried to my room, but when I got there, what do you think I did with the plumpers?”
“You hid them under the bed.”
“No. I placed those melted down tea cups in my mouth. I stood before the mirror and wondered if I looked better with my cheeks puffed like a squirrel. And, of course, it was almost impossible to speak. My aunt said that one merely needed to practice, starting with simple things such as How very interesting and Do you really think so?” Marie garbled these phrases, and I couldn’t help but laugh. We paused for tea.
I was enjoying myself. I liked Marie’s story, despite her discomfort at having to drive suitors away with a broom like they were young bears snuffling around on the back porch. But when she began again, there was a different look on her face. She spoke of a young man named James Wilson. He had been hired by her father to work in the store.
“He was handsome and mannered,” she said as though it were all a long time ago, “said to be on leave from university, awaiting an inheritance. Soon, he was moved from dry goods to clothing because he was good with people about clothes and had a keen eye. Two of them. They were gray and unafraid, and when they were on me, I knew it, even when my back was turned. Had he made his advances early on, I would have rejected him out of instinct. But he had patience. And his silent looks did more to my heart than any words could have.”
“He did not approach you?”
“No. He kept his distance. I would be the one to find some reason for us to speak. Did the red cloth need to be reordered? This went on for some time, but once he was sure of my attraction, it changed. He would find me alone, in the stockroom or upstairs with the fabrics. His attentions were at first tender, but soon his lips were hard upon me, and his hands followed closely behind. He was insistent, and after all the pretending by the others about their pure intentions … well, I liked it.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“That too.” Waves of feeling crossed Marie’s face and crashed into those going the other way—anger, sadness, and perhaps still a longing for the passion. She gave a sorry laugh. “I was in a state of sin for the liberties I had permitted him, so, as you might imagine, I spent some time wondering about what God thought of it all. I prayed and asked forgiveness. I vowed that James would not touch me again, but as soon as he came near, I went weak. His hands were on me, and I let them do what they wanted. Then he took my hands, and I learned what he wanted. By then, I was given over to it, eager to touch him and please him. Only lack of opportunity kept me from even greater sin.”
I felt a strange disapproval. “What did you think would come of it?”
“James did the thinking. He proposed that we run away. He said that Father would not consent to our marriage, though it was not clear as to why. I believe now he was stealing from us, and that was the real reason he wanted to be gone. In any case, may God forgive me, I helped him steal more.”
I wasn’t sure that I had heard her right. I was about to ask, but I saw Marie start to tremble. Then out of her mouth came sobs, words, and sudden gulps for air as though she had forgotten how to breathe. “I have sinned … and when the time comes … I will stand before God … ask His forgiveness … but how could I ever again stand … before my father … having stolen from him?”
Marie wept. I wanted to offer sympathy but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I would never have stolen from my father. She tried to explain.
“I had money coming to me upon my marriage, so I thought at the time that what I did was—that’s not true. I knew it was wrong. Horribly wrong. I stole money from the safe. James, of course, had told me about his inheritance. I cared little for his money, but the story, I suppose, kept me from asking questions. We would pay everyone back when the money came through—a thin thought by which I betrayed my father.”
Marie was in distress, and I suggested that perhaps she had gone as far as she needed to for the night. But she said that if she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to start again. So she kept going and told how she and James had taken one of her father’s carriages into Boston and then traveled by train to New York. She told how a ferry had brought them to Jersey City where they were married by someone who James said was a judge and how quickly thereafter James Wilson became someone she didn’t know. In this, of course, I was not only her sister but her twin. And now I did feel sympathy.
“I think his greatest pleasure was in ripping me from my home and my church,” she said. “Think of it—more powerful than God. But once he could have me anytime, it wasn’t half the fun. Love really didn’t exist for him. He just knew its language, like the way he sold cloth to ladies.”
Marie said that they rented a shabby room above a bar run by a woman named Olga and her daughter Ulena, a heavy-set girl who cursed and belched like a man. For all his supposed manners, James took a liking to them, and Marie said that she heard his voice coming from the landlady’s room across the hall on several occasions.
“What was he doing there?’
“Discussing business, he said. Wouldn’t say what.”
“And the inheritance?”
“Oh, yes, that. When I brought it up, James said that there was more delay and that he had to look for work. His search must have taken place in the bars around Jersey City, judging from his condition when he returned. God knows where else he’d been, but his interest in me lessened even more. All the while, our money, our stolen money, was draining away.”
The candlelight didn’t soften the devastation on Marie’s face. “You poor child,” I said, giving voice to the years between us. “Did you want to go home?”
“Go home?” she said in disbelief. “How could I go home? What trust hadn’t I broken? What sin hadn’t I committed? Too many letters to be sewn on one breast—I should look like someone’s discarded sampler.”
Marie shook her head as though she couldn’t believe her own story. “I took to walking the streets while James was off doing I didn’t know what. Saint Mary’s was two blocks away, so I spent part of each day there, pretending to pray, just to have somewhere to go. One afternoon I came back and found James and Ulena on the floor behind the stairs. At least I presume it was Ulena, for all I could see was a fat rump sticking up in the air, an image I shall not soon forget.”
A silence followed. I could hear someone moving below, but the rest of the house was quiet. Marie looked away.
“She was slovenly, Joseph. She was fat and slovenly, yet he preferred her to me. She could excite him with her barnyard manners, and I could not.”
“Surely, you left him then.”
Marie shook her head. “No. He left me. That night—with Ulena, our money, and a good portion of the week’s receipts, if the landlady’s fury the next morning was any measure. She said that she was going to the police and would have me arrested for robbery. I had to leave.”
“But you were done with him.”
“Not quite.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Joseph, you’ll have a good laugh over this. Really, you will.” Marie paused to gain courage. “I chased after them.”
“Chased them?”
“Yes, as though she had stolen my shawl. Olga said they had been seen at the train station. So with the little money left in my purse, I bought a ticket, thinking I would find them in some town where the train went, for whatever good that would have done. I hadn’t eaten in days. I wasn’t well. I boarded the north-bound train and then I don’t know what. I woke up in this room.”