The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [96]
"But I must say, though it sounds hard, that it’s for the best that Mr. Wheelwright and I had no children. Mr. Wheelwright was not sympathetic to imperfection. A very learned doctor in Massachusetts, who was familiar with all the latest systems, said that it was clear to him that this daily working with circles, this daily seeking after what you might call rolling perfection, well, it made the man a bit inflexible." She lowered her voice. "I made myself clear to Mr. Wheelwright. I was not going to be brought to compromising my own standards. I was an older bride, twenty-five, you know, and we, as a rule, are a stiff-necked bunch. And so Mr. Wheelwright and I had made our peace."
"Mr. Bisket is younger than Mr. Wheelwright, then?"
"Oh, yes. Mr. Wheelwright was nearly sixty. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr. Bisket looks to me for guidance. That is not the ideal most people hold, the husband looking to the wife for guidance, but I can’t see why it shouldn’t work, can you?"
I thought of my sisters and my mother, and their husbands. It had been a long time since any of them had looked to her spouse for guidance. I said, "I don’t feel I know much about marriage. I’ve only been married since the summer."
"My dear," she said, "as far as I’m concerned, you can be married for twenty or thirty years in our day and not know a single thing about marriage if you don’t strive to learn. We live in fallen times. My learned doctor friend in Massachusetts felt that relations between men and women were certainly different in former times, to the benefit of all. Woman should not be subject to male whim, as we are, but should live in full exercise of her capacities. I, for example, was never ill another day in my life after I made my position clear to Mr. Wheelwright."
It was more difficult to live as two couples than as one. Since there were two rooms, the question always arose of where we would sit in the evenings. Thomas and I didn’t feel comfortable sitting in our room, which we might have preferred once in a while, because to do so seemed unsociable. And yet Louisa and Charles, as I now began addressing Mr. Bisket, must have craved some time alone, too. If Louisa had been thrifty and warmed only their room, the larger of the two, we wouldn’t have felt the waste of leaving our room empty while we sat with them, but she was prodigal in all things, one of her significant attractions in a world where frugality was the norm and the frugality of others always worthy of remark. It seemed as though to live smoothly, we needed one room or three. Two was just the wrong number. But I dared not complain, even to Thomas, or, indeed, to myself. Every day, I saw others who were sick and shivering.
Louisa had strong opinions about slavery, too, which she did not hesitate to detail. She was more radical than her husband and more outspoken by nature than Thomas, so she often held the floor on the subject when we sat about the stove in the evenings. In her mind, and according to her learned doctor friend and many of the best people, she said, back in Boston, the lives of women and those of slaves were not so much different. When Charles and my husband smiled or squirmed at this (and glanced about at Louisa’s grand furnishings), she caught them up short. "Now," she said, "you are looking at my things and judging the general estate of woman by a very particular, and I might even say peculiar, gauge. A slave may wear beautiful clothes, read and write, and do his master’s business with perspicacity and care, and he may even have some appreciation of and gratitude for his lot in life, and he may certainly be attached to his master, but his circumstances do not therefore reflect or mitigate the circumstances of millions of others who live under the thumb of someone else, who have no freedom and no money and no say in their own fate. Just because one person