Her father said that was correct, more or less. They had only to hold themselves out as man and wife.
This was too much for her mother, who straightened her back. “But without solemnizing the act,” she said, “it is not a true marriage in the eyes of God.”
“What kind of solemnizing did Adam and Eve do?” Charlotte wanted to know, but no one answered.
Her father said, “Why are you asking, Clare?”
“Oh,” Clare said. “It was this man on a wanted poster named Kilian Smith. The poster said he stabbed his common-law wife. He’s wanted for murder.”
Kilian Smith wore a dapper hat and dapper bow tie. In the photograph he stared right back at Clare with eyes that seemed surprisingly mild. And yet a man with eyes that gentle had wound up stabbing to death the woman he loved, which was impossible to imagine and made you wonder about the strangeness of romance.
8
As a return address, Aldine wrote General Delivery, Post Office Next to Woolworth Building, New York City. Then she dropped her letter to Ansel Price in a post box as she might drop a bottled message into the sea. She made herself wait two weeks before checking for mail, and when she was handed a letter with a return address from Mr. Ansel Price, Loam County Schools, Dorland, Kansas, she was surprised at the wave of unease that rose within her. She felt almost ill from holding the unopened letter in her hands. She moved to a corner of the lobby. She suddenly realized just how keenly she wanted to escape Floyd’s stillness as he sat beside her in church or in Leenie’s flat, his body so inert that he seemed almost asexual, and yet his goodness was so irreproachable that she felt stifled. She had to escape the feeling she had when she watched Will and Leenie hold hands during prayer at the dinner table, their bond an electrical current that did not reach her even if Leenie took Aldine’s hand. In their presence, she was a dark window.
Aldine drew in a great draft of air. She closed her eyes and kept them closed as she fingered open the envelope and unfolded the letter. When she opened them again and read, Dear Miss McKenna, It is with pleasure that we offer you the position, she felt an excitement she’d not felt since she decided to sail to New York. That decision had not turned out well, maybe, but it had led to this, and the job in Kansas would be all her own doing from start to finish.
Before she left the building, she had written back with her acceptance, and that night, well into dinner, she said, “I think I might go to Kansas and teach school.”
They stared, of course, so she unfolded the letter from the school and showed them.
Will, who had been carefully spooning grape jelly, looked at her in a disbelieving way. “That’s where Elder Lance is from. You remember.”
She had not and was not pleased to remember it now.
“Do you know where Kansas is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aldine lied. There had been no prior need to memorize the position of American states. Perhaps it was farther than she thought.
“I just barely got you back with me!” Leenie said. “What if you don’t like it? Besides, you can’t go that far by yourself!”
Aldine stared at the dark jelly. So it was distant, the place called Kansas. “It’s no farther than you went, Leen.”
“But it’s different. I had Wills. You had me. What’ll you have?”
“A more thrilling job,” Aldine said, wondering if it was more than a hundred miles. “My own life.” She hated it when Leenie called him Wills. She’d decided she would have to pretend a little bit in order to get their approval. “Plus, they’re Mormons,” she added.
Will was again looking at the letter. “How do you know?”
“It said in the advertisement. It warned that anyone uncomfortable living with adherents of the Church of Latter-day Saints need not apply. Though it said applicants needn’t be adherents themselves.”
Will fell silent and Aldine pressed her advantage. “And besides, with a babe coming you’ll soon need more room here. You’ve been kind not to say so, but it’s the truth all the same.”
“But the train,” Leenie said. “That’ll cost a packet because it’s so far off.”
Will shook his head. “Your aunt wouldn’t forgive me,” he said. He began smoothing his small measure of jelly onto his toast. “It’s out of the question.”
“I’ve already bought it,” she said.
Leenie didn’t like this, and gave Will a worried look before she said, “How do you have the money, Deen?”
“Dr. O’Malley,” Aldine said carefully, “gave me a big raise after you left.”
“You never said a thing before!”
“How do you think I got here?” Aldine said irritably.
Leenie shrugged. “Sedge, of course.”
“No,” Aldine said. “She didn’t have it. Not after she paid for yours.”
Leenie was kind enough to look guilty. “How much do you have?” she asked.
Aldine didn’t want to tell her. If it wasn’t more than she deserved, it was more than she deserved from a doctor whose accounts she’d kept for three years.
“I lost nearly all of it in the exchange rate.”
“But how much?”
She had come this far. “I started with a thousand pounds.”
The silence in the room expressed their astonishment. She spun her bracelets under the table, the smooth rings warm against her wrist.
“A thousand?” Leenie said. Will didn’t speak, but the way he looked at her made her feel she’d been selfish in some way.
“It cost three hundred quid to buy a third-class bunk. And as you know, a pound is worth very little here.”
“But you still had enough to buy a train ticket?”
“Yes. I’ve not touched it since I started working.”
“I can’t believe you want to leave me,” Leenie said.
“I don’t want to leave you. I need to find my own way, Leenie.” She gave her sister a heartfelt look, wishing she could explain that she thought it would be nearby, no farther than Edinburgh was from Ayr. “I do.”
The table fell silent then and remained silent until at last in a small voice, Leenie said, “When would you go then?”
Dr. O’Malley had wanted to look at her without her clothes on. He had said, in his reasonable voice, that it would be like the statue of Venus de Milo, like nudes in a painting. For perhaps the last time in his life, he would see beauty. She could give him that small gift, couldn’t she? He wouldn’t touch her. It was not a sin to be beautiful, or to be looked upon as a thing of beauty. He had explained it very well, and she had been sorry for him, to be what he was: old and alone, sick with some kind of cancer.
So in his sitting room with the high ceiling like a church, with the heavy velvet drapes and the small panes of icy glass through which light became more wistful, she had at last unbuttoned her dress and let it fall, removing then her slip, her brassiere, her garter belt, her stockings, and finally her drawers. She had not known what to do then, so she asked.