Chapter Text
chapter one: the widow from doylestown
***
MARIAN
April 1882
Less than a year after being married in this very church, Marian finds herself returning to bury both her father and her husband.
It is a Tuesday – a day she has always considered inauspicious, there is just something so dreadfully flat and relentless about Tuesdays – and the April sun is unpleasantly, unseasonably warm against the wool of her black dress.
She stares at the gravestones, unable to take in this strange new reality. General Henry Brook Jr., 1825 - 1882 , reads her father’s, interred next to her mother (Susannah Brook, beloved wife and mother, 1832 - 1870 ).
And there is her husband’s – Dashiell Montgomery, 1844 - 1882 .
How easy, how simple, how neat it all appears – one’s entire existence boiled down to one line carved in stone.
And next to Dashiell’s is a blank spot where she supposes she will one day be buried, reduced to nothing but Marian Brook Montgomery, 1860 – ? . She breaks off with a shudder at the thought, unable to imagine the year. Will she even get the benefit of having Brook listed in there, or will it only be Montgomery, erasing anything that she doesn’t owe to her late husband? Will she be listed as nothing more than a beloved wife (not mother, not unless she marries again – but surely she will? does she even want to?), the same as every other woman whose remains sleep under the ground of this churchyard? All of them uniform, disposable, a graveyard of bones that were once dutiful wives for men who made decisions, took action, moved through the world, spent all their money.
This is a terrible way to think, she knows all too well, but she cannot seem to staunch the bitter thoughts that pour from her mind, poisoning her memories.
For it is not only their deaths she has been shocked by – both taken too quickly, quite suddenly, by a wave of cholera. Their deaths have simply uncovered a bigger, more painful betrayal that she had never expected.
“I am very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Montgomery.”
She turns and sees the lawyer from yesterday, Mr. Raikes, making his way over to her. He is tall, and dark – and in one lifetime, she might have thought him handsome. Studying his face, she thinks he is not unattractive, but not exactly classically handsome.
What a thing to be thinking of at a time like this.
She smiles at him politely, squinting into the sun (it seems like a very cruel God who would make the sun shine so brightly on the day she buries both her father and husband, at only twenty-two years old), and raises a hand in greeting. “Thank you, Mr. Raikes.”
He arrives by her side, and stops, standing vigil by the freshly turned earth, his face solemn, his posture erect.
“It is very kind of you to come,” she says, after a long moment. “There were not many mourners, you see.”
They stand in silence, not speaking.
“What will you do now, Mrs. Montgomery?” The lawyer asks, his voice kind. “Forgive me for the bluntness of the question – but I remember you mentioned some aunts in New York, and –”
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “I will go to them, I suppose.” I have no other choice, she thinks, the anger sloshing in her belly like acid. “There is nothing for me here, not anymore.”
And even if there was something worth staying for, she thinks, more sourly still, she would have no money to allow her to do so. No money, no house, nothing. For it turns out that both her father and Mr. Montgomery had lost all their money speculating on railroad shares that Mr. Raikes has assured her are quite worthless. Both houses are rented – her beloved childhood home, and the new white house with green shutters Mr. Montgomery had brought her to as a new bride. Perhaps they had both been owned, originally, as she had always been led to believe, but no longer.
She has inherited the horrifying sums of seventeen dollars from her father and thirty dollars from her husband. Her entire existence, boiled down to forty-seven dollars, the same way her life will one day be boiled down to one meaningless line on a gravestone.
She cannot stand any of them, suddenly – men, the way they decide things, the way they run things, the way they think they know best. The way they conceal the truth, and claim it is for your benefit, when it is really for their own.
“You do not deserve this, Mrs. Montgomery,” Mr. Raikes speaks again. “I am truly sorry.”
“Marian, please,” she says, and perhaps it is too informal, but in truth, she does not particularly want to be called Mrs. Montgomery anymore. Even hearing the name rankles her, and she cannot stand to answer to it.
“Marian,” he smiles, looking pleased, as though they are not here because her husband is rotting in the ground under her feet.
She does not answer – she does not have anything to say – and stares unblinkingly at the horizon.
There is nothing here for her – and what is here, she no longer wants. The thought of a second wedding to some earnest Bucks County farmer who may simply leave her penniless once more, leave her to deal with this mess once again – or, maybe worse, bury her under his name, as nothing but his beloved wife, and leave her here in this Doylestown churchyard – it is quite repulsive. She burns with anger for this unknown farmer, who she already blames for a lifetime of penury, for the indignity of choosing her epitaph without her knowledge or her input.
Even if she had the money to stay, she thinks, she would not stay here to rot above ground, simply waiting to die and rot underground alongside these traitors.
“Yes, I will go to New York. I will clean out the house and then I shall be on my way.”
***
Two days later, she waits on the front steps of her childhood home, all of her belongings packed into the carpetbag she now holds tightly in both hands.
She had cleared out her home with Dashiell first – shockingly easy, once she enlisted the help of some church busybodies who were happy to list things for sale for her, as they mumbled about her misfortune. They had not had time to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of furnishings and knickknacks, and she does not want to sort through whatever it is they did manage to collect, all of it now tarnished with her knowledge of the truth.
No, she simply collected the things that were not poisoned, the things worth keeping from this terrible place: the dresses she liked best; the few novels she owned; a childhood rag doll she could not bear to leave behind; a fragile photograph of her mother; a journal; several hats.
She has kept a pressed flower in the pages of her journal for some years now – Dashiell had given it to her while they were courting, and she had kept it, sentimental slip of a girl that she was. When she picks up the journal, it falls from the pages, and she watches it flutter to the ground. Slowly, decisively, she grinds the stupid thing under her heel, watching it turn to dust – which is all it has ever been, really. Simply garbage waiting to be disposed of.
She leaves the fragments of the flower on the ground of their bedroom, and leaves the house without a look over her shoulder. In truth, she very badly wants to look back, but she refuses to do so, as though Dashiell’s ghost is hanging around the house, hoping to catch her in a moment of weakness.
The same church busybodies help her clear out her childhood home. After an hour or so, she simply gives up and leaves them to it. There were so many things she thought she would have wanted to keep – old letters, photographs, sentimental little tchotkes – but now she hates the sight of all of it. Things that once held dear memories to her now seem to laugh at her, cruel jokers sitting on the worthless shelves.
She spends her last night in Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, in Doylestown (the only places she has ever really known), right here in her childhood home, tucked in her girlhood spindle bed. It is not comforting, as it once was. It does not feel like a warm embrace she remembers. It feels much too small, like a suffocating grasp from which she cannot wait to escape.
She barely sleeps that night
***
Mr. Raikes is to collect her to take her to the station at 7:30 am, and she is on the doorstep waiting for him twenty minutes before. She cannot spend another minute in this shell of a home.
The air is crisp, cooler than yesterday. She does not like April: it always feels like a cruel joke. You wait for the warmth, the brightness, the rebirth of Spring, but early April in Pennsylvania isn’t really spring. It is simply a liminal space between winter and spring, a kind of purgatory of mud and weak sun and cold air, and unending rain.
She is strangely cheered to see him driving up to the house – it is nice, she thinks, to see a friendly face. She hadn’t realized how few of them there were until now.
He helps her into the carriage, and she tells him that the houses are empty, that there is simply the bed left to sell – or burn, she thinks, but she won’t say that.
“I am sorry to say goodbye to you so soon, Mrs. Montgomery,” he says to her, and she is strangely warm at these words. “I think we could have been great friends.”
“That is very kind of you to say, Mr. Raikes. And please, call me Marian.” She repeats this from yesterday, and wills him to remember. She cannot bear to be Mrs. Montgomery a second longer. “If you are ever in New York, you must call on me. You have my aunts’ address.”
“Do you mean it?” He asks, interested in the offer. “I will take you up on it, if you are quite serious.”
“Yes, I am!” She nods, not realizing she had really meant it until now. “It will be so nice to see a friendly face from Pennsylvania. I am quite overwhelmed at the thought of how new and strange New York will be.”
Overwhelmed, but she is also excited. Excited to leave this world behind, to forget about everything. To escape her fate of rotting to death in Doylestown, condemned to poverty by the very men she had loved, who had claimed to love her.
“I imagine it will be quite grand,” he says, and his face looks wistful at the thought. “Everyone says there’s nowhere like New York City.”
“Well, then,” she says, suddenly feeling buoyant and excited. “It’s settled. You simply must come and visit.”
***
It has been so long since she last made a friend that it takes her quite a while to grasp that she is possibly – maybe – making a new one on the trip to New York.
She quite likes this Miss Scott – admires her education, her independence, her familiarity with New York, her stylish dress – and she doesn’t mind sitting in the colored carriage. It is all fresh, a change, and that is exactly what she needs. What she wants.
During a lull in conversation, she pulls out the letter from her Aunt Ada, which she has been carrying in her reticule as though it is very precious – as though someone will demand to see it in order to admit her into the city of New York – and skims it through again.
Dashiell had been a nephew of Aunt Agnes’ late husband, decamped to Philadelphia for business – that is how the match had been made, in the end – but she has never met Aunt Agnes or Aunt Ada. She knows that they are her late father’s elder and younger sister, and then he has never had anything good to say about them. Neither had come to her wedding to Dashiell, despite Aunt Agnes being his aunt; her father said this demonstrated their meanness, their snobbery, their refusal to forgive him after all these years.
But Aunt Agnes had written of them to Dashiell, after all, to encourage him to look them up, and she thinks that Aunt Agnes cannot be all bad. For a time, she had thought Aunt Agnes was quite responsible for her happiness.
Things were very easy with Dashiell. Well – easy is not quite the right word, for that implies a level of comfort that she doesn’t think is entirely accurate (she feels a bit guilty at the thought, but she does not think he deserves her unswerving allegiance, not anymore). But she had been twenty when they met, already restless and bored by Doylestown. He was the smartest, best-educated man she had ever met, and she had been taken by his handsome figure, his respectful manner, the way he was able to converse with her intelligently on all manner of topics.
Of course, he was some years older, widowed (his daughter and wife had succumbed to disease some years ago) – but that wasn’t an entirely bad thing, she thought. There were not very many men in Doylestown who she cared for, but Dashiell was different. More worldly, more cultured, more sophisticated than the boys she’d grown up with. She had thought herself quite in love with him.
She does not think now that she has ever been in love, and it is not simply from the burn of his betrayal. She does not know, exactly, what love is, but when she reads the works of John Keats or Jane Austen, she doesn’t think it can be the same emotion she felt for Dashiell.
For she liked Dashiell well enough, and they had many pleasant conversations together. She often enjoyed it when he kissed her; once they were married, she thought it was nice enough when they made love – she liked how much he liked it, the weight of him on her, and she liked the closeness of it. He was not frightening or violent in bed, as she had heard some men could be; if he was sometimes distant or impersonal, it was not so very bad. She didn’t mind being left alone without his touch if he was uninterested, for she liked the time to herself. Many times, his lovemaking was perfunctory and quick – which she was quite lucky for, for she knew many women were subjected to their husbands’ unending passions even if they quite hated it.
But none of this had even approached the passion, the desperation, the intensity of the love she reads about in novels or poetry. Even as a newlywed, she had wondered if the poets hadn’t all lied. Or if they simply had runaway imaginations: the same urge that led them to write about faeries and other supernatural creatures leading them to construct fanciful tales about a powerful, all-consuming love that couldn’t possibly exist.
Marian’s always been sensible. Everyone always says it's one of her best qualities – her father, her school teachers, Dashiell. And so, at twenty two, after nearly a year of marriage, she had assumed that she was simply grown-up enough now to know the truth: that romance is a pipe-dream for silly little girls, and that what she had was better, more important. For it was stable and safe and that was what mattered.
Until it wasn’t – for his death revealed that the stability she had clung to was naught but a lie, and she is still reeling from that discovery. And it makes part of her think that, if she had been so wrong about the stability, she might have been very wrong about other things as well.
***
LARRY
“Well, well!” Oscar pulls a face, flicking open the letter. “It appears my mother and Aunt have taken in an impoverished cousin of mine — widowed and orphaned, can you believe it?! A Mrs. Dashiell Montgomery, apparently. Her Christian name is Marian.” He makes another face. “Wonderful — another burden on my future purse. Some dowdy country widow with a face like a cabbage and a figure to match.”
“She might be very young and pretty,” Carrie Astor offers, “and make another match soon enough.”
“Psh,” Oscar shakes his head. “Young and pretty widows only exist in salacious gentleman’s magazines.”
At this, he gives Larry a broad wink, which Larry doesn’t entirely appreciate, not in the company of a young lady like Miss Astor.
“Goodness, Mr. van Rhijn!” Carrie pretends to be shocked. “Don’t let Mrs. Fish catch you saying such things in my presence.”
“Wait a minute,” Larry has realized something. “Did you say East 61st St? Only my parents have just moved into a house on that very street.”
The two men realize they are neighbours — or at least Larry is a neighbour to Oscar’s mother, and Larry feels positively buoyed at the prospect of a new friend. It will be nice, he thinks, to have a friend on the street.