The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [25]
He took my fingers in his and spread them apart, staring at my hand as at a strange and wonderful object. At last, he said, "Better than Quincy?"
"Already better than Quincy."
The conviction of my reply perked him up, and I saw for the first time that I wasn’t merely to follow him to Kansas but was sometimes to lead him. My husband was less sure of himself than my suitor had been.
In our room at the Vandeventer House, he set our little carpet bags by the door and the large, heavy box, which he’d carried up the stairs with the heaving and groaning help of the porter, between the bed and the window.
There were two chairs beside the window, and after I took off my bonnet, Mr. Newton led me to one of them and sat himself in the other. We rocked back and forth without speaking. We had the bridal room, which meant that no one else was sleeping in our room with us, though should our departure be delayed, we would have to move the next day. The bridal rooms in Saint Louis were in such demand that you could have one to yourself only for one night, or so they told us at the Vandeventer House.
After some minutes, Mr. Newton said, "Did your sisters speak to you about marriage?"
"They told me what they knew."
"What was that?"
"Harriet said if at all possible not to allow you to fire guns in the house, but if I had to give way on this point, to draw the line at pistols, but absolutely not to allow horses into the better rooms, because sometimes they panic and damage your good furniture. She learned her lesson the hard way with a two-year-old colt Roland had—"
Mr. Newton began laughing.
"Well, he did kick to pieces a very nice lowboy she had, with a shell design on the drawer fronts ..." I cleared my throat. "And Alice told me that my husband would figure very significantly in the conception of children, but she couldn’t bring herself to describe exactly how. She just said that I would be better off if I kept a table between us at all times, especially early on in the marriage. Another tactic was to always have a cup of hot tea in my hands, day and night. Those were her words exactly. Day and night."
I laughed, too.
"And Beatrice said that every town in America had lots of clubs and public betterment organizations, so that if you played your cards right, you could spend an evening with your husband maybe once or twice a year and have the rest of your time to yourself ...."
"You’re making these things up!"
"Do you have anything to add, Mr. Newton?"
"My dear, I am as ignorant as you."
"Then," I said, "I suppose we’d better not worry about it."
"Miss Dorothea Tonkin gave me some advice."
"What was that?"
"To always let you do as you please and to never require you to ask for money."
"I didn’t see you two speaking."
"I vowed to do as she suggested."
Now I fell silent, a bit startled.
"She said, ’Your wife is the sort of young woman who will always be thoughtful and prudent, and so you need not prove your authority over her by means of undesirable constraints.’ "
"I hope that she knows me better with our short acquaintance than my sisters do after twenty years, because they would hardly agree." I didn’t know that I agreed with this kind assessment, either, but I held my tongue. Of course, later events tested my prudence considerably.
He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that my sisters were so long gone as to be of very little import. And it was true. In all the time from that day to this, my sisters have never seemed so far behind me as they did that night in the Vandeventer House.
I found Mr. Newton a remarkably pleasant and agreeable man, more so with every passing hour.
The next morning, after we had dressed and taken our first marital breakfast and been informed by the porter that we would have to vacate our room before ten, Mr. Newton led me by the hand over to the heavy box, and as I stood there, he pried