The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [2]
—MISS CATHERINE E. BEECHER, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, p. 117
I HAVE MADE UP my mind to begin my account upon the first occasion when I truly knew where things stood with me, that is, that afternoon of the day my father, Arthur Harkness, was taken to the Quincy graveyard and buried between my mother, Cora Mary Harkness, and his first wife, Ella Harkness. My father’s death was not unexpected, and perhaps not even unwelcome, for he was eighty-two years old and had for some years been lost in a second childhood.
I could easily sit beside the floor grate in my small former room above the front parlor of my father’s house and hear what my sisters were saying below. The little bed I had slept in as a child was pushed back against the wall to make room for discarded sticks of furniture and some old cases. I sat on a rolled-up piece of carpet.
Ella Harkness’s daughters numbered six. Of those, two had gone back to New York State with their husbands. Our three, Harriet, Alice, and Beatrice, were all considerably older than I, the only living child of the seven my mother had borne. Miriam, my favorite of the sisters, a schoolmistress in Ohio, had died, too, of a sudden fever just before Christmas. Some twenty years separated me from Harriet, and all the others were even older than she was. I had many nephews and nieces who were my own age or older and, it must be said (was often said), better tempered and better behaved. Some of my nephews and nieces had children of their own. I was what you might call an odd lot, not very salable and ready to be marked down.
"I don’t want to be the first to say ..." I could see Harriet from above. She squirmed in her seat and smoothed her black mourning dress for the hundredth time. She wore the same dress to every funeral, and the only way we’d gotten her into it this time was to lace her as tight as a sausage. The others let her be the first to say it. I leaned back, so my shadow wouldn’t fall through the grating. "It don’t repay what you feed her, since she don’t do a lick of work."
"She an’t been properly taught’s the truth," said Beatrice, "but that’s her misfortune." No doubt here she threw a look at Alice.
"I’ve had my own to worry about," complained Alice. Since Cora Mary’s death, I’d been seven years with Alice. The easiest thing in the world for Alice was to lose things—her thimble, her flour dredger, her dog. If you wanted to stick by Alice, then it was up to you. She was a church-going woman, too, but whenever she forgot her prayers, she would say, "If the Lord wants me, he knows where to find me." That was Alice all over Needless to say, I generally found myself elsewhere, and I would wager that was fine with her. Her own brood numbered six, mostly boys, so they were more often than not busy losing themselves, too. It was my niece Annie who kept the engine running at Alice’s. Right then, in fact, Annie was out in the kitchen, getting our tea. It wouldn’t have occurred to Harriet, Beatrice, or Alice to lift a finger to help her. It occurred to me, of course, but that hole of kitchen work was one I didn’t care to fall into, because it was easy to see how those women would pull up the ladder, and there you’d be, hauling wood and water, making fires and tea, for the rest of your life.
"We could have sent her on the cars to Miriam. Young people her age seem to go on the cars without a speck of fear. Or Miriam could have come got her." This was Harriet.
They pondered my sister Miriam, a spinster who’d taught reading to little Negro children in Yellow Springs. Harriet’s tone revealed some sense of injury that Miriam was no longer capable of being of use in this way. But Miriam had been a strict woman, the sweetest but the strictest of them all. Her fondness for me had been mostly the result of the distance between us and our lively correspondence. I knew that even if Miriam were still living and I had gone