She tried another one: What do you think is the best way to get a husband?
Now that’s a question I have never asked myself and about which I have nothing to offer anybody in a St. Valentine’s Day article or elsewhere. I have never gone out to get a husband. I haven’t ever, as that old-fashioned expression has it, set my cap for anybody.
Take Lewis who is this minute in the kitchen giggling with Eliza McIntyre. I certainly did not set out to get him. It was some months after Alton — no, Edward — had died, and people were trying to cheer me up, not that I needed any cheering up. I mean, after all the losses I’ve sustained I’ve become philosophical. But my Cousin Wanda’s grandson had an exhibition of paintings. The poor deluded boy isn’t talented, not a bit. All the same I bought two of his paintings that are downstairs in the hall closet, shut off from all eyes.
Anyway, at the opening of the exhibition there was Lewis looking all forlorn. He had come because the boy was a distant cousin of his dead wife. Lewis leaped up from a bench when he got a glimpse of me and said, why, Lucy, I haven’t seen you in donkey’s years, and we stood there talking while everybody was going ooh and aah over the boy’s paintings, and Lewis said he was hungry and I asked him to come on home with me and have a bite to eat.
I fixed a quick supper and Lewis ate like a starving man, and then we sat in the back parlor and talked about this and that, and about midnight he said, Lucy, I don’t want to leave. This is the nicest feeling I’ve ever had, being here with you. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the dead, but there wasn’t any love lost between Ramona and me. I’d like to stay on here forever.
Well, after that — after a man’s revealed his innermost thoughts to you — you can’t just show him the door. Besides, I couldn’t put him out because it was beginning to snow, and in a little while the snow turned to sleet. He might have fallen and broken his neck going down the front steps and I’d have had that on my conscience the rest of my life.
Lewis, I said, it seems foolish at this stage of the game for me to worry about my reputation, but thank heaven Cousin Alice came down from Washington for the exhibition and is staying with me, and she can chaperon us until we can make things perfectly legal and aboveboard.
That’s how it happened.
You don’t plan things like that, I wanted to tell the girl. They happen in spite of you. So it’s silly of you to ask me what the best way is to get a husband.
My silence hadn’t bothered her a bit. She sort of closed one eye like somebody about to take aim with a rifle and asked: Exactly how many times have you been married?
Well, she had backed up. She was repeating herself. That was practically the same question she had asked me earlier. It had been put a little differently this time, that was all.
I certainly had no intention of telling her the truth, which was that I wasn’t exactly sure myself. Sometimes my husbands become a little blurred and blended. Sometimes I have to sit down with pencil and paper and figure it out.
Anyhow, that’s certainly no way to look at husbands — the exact number or the exact sequence.
My husbands were an exceptional bunch of men, if I do say so. And fine-looking, too. Even Art, who had a harelip. And they were all good providers. Rich and didn’t mind spending their money — not like some rich people. Not that I needed money. Because Aunt Sallie Mae, for all Mama’s suspicions, left me hers, and there was nothing spiteful about her stipulations. I could have the money when, as, and how I wanted it.
Anyway, I never have cared about money or what it could buy for me.
There’s nothing much I can spend it on for myself. Jewelry doesn’t suit me. My fingers are short and stubby and my hands are square — no need to call attention to them by wearing rings. Besides, rings bother me. I like to cook and rings get in the way. Necklaces choke me and earrings pinch. As for fur coats, mink or chinchilla or just plain squirrel — well, I don’t like the idea of anything that has lived ending up draped around me.
So money personally means little to me. But it’s nice to pass along. Nothing gives me greater pleasure, and there’s not a husband of mine who hasn’t ended up without having a clinic or a college library or a hospital wing or a research laboratory or something of the sort founded in his honor and named after him. Sometimes I’ve had to rob Peter to pay Paul. I mean, some of them have left more than others and once in a while I’ve had to take some of what one left me to pay on the endowment for another. But it all evened itself out.
Except for Buster. There was certainly a nice surplus where Buster was concerned. He lived the shortest time and left me the most money of any of my husbands. For every month I lived with him I inherited a million dollars. Five.
My silent reminiscing like that wasn’t helping the girl with her St. Valentine’s Day article. If I had been in anybody’s house and the hostess was as taciturn as I was, I’d have excused myself and reached for the knob of the front door.
But, if anything, that young lady became even more impertinent.
Have you had a favorite among your husbands? she asked and her tongue flicked out like a snake’s.
I was silent even when my husbands asked that question. Sometimes they would show a little jealousy for their predecessors and make unkind remarks. But naturally I did everything in my power to reassure whoever made a disparaging remark about another.
All my husbands have been fine men, I would say in such a case, but I do believe you’re the finest of the lot. I said it whether I really thought so or not.
But I had nothing at all to say to that girl on the subject.
Yet if I ever got to the point of being forced to rank my husbands, I guess Luther would be very nearly at the bottom of the list. He was the only teetotaler in the bunch. I hadn’t noticed how he felt about drink until after we were married — that’s when things you’ve overlooked during courtship can confront you like a slap in the face. Luther would squirm when wine was served to guests during a meal, and his eyes looked up prayerfully toward heaven when anybody took a second glass. At least he restrained himself to the extent of not saying any word of reproach to a guest, but Mama said she always expected him to hand around some of those tracts that warn against the pitfalls that lie in wait for drunkards.
Poor man. He was run over by a beer truck.
The irony of it, Mama said. There’s a lesson in it for us all. And it was broad daylight, she said, shaking her head, not even dark, so that we can’t comfort ourselves that Luther didn’t know what hit him.
Not long after Luther’s unfortunate accident Matthew appeared — on tiptoe, you might say. He was awfully short and always stretched himself to look taller. He was terribly apologetic about his height. I’d ask you to marry me, Lucy, he said, but all your husbands have been over six feet tall. Height didn’t enter into it, I told him, and it wasn’t very long before Matthew and I were married.
He seemed to walk on tiptoe and I scrunched down, and still there was an awful gap between us, and he would go on about Napoleon almost conquering the world in spite of being short. I started wearing low-heeled shoes and walking hunched over, and Mama said, for God’s sake, Baby, you can push tact too far. You never were beautiful but you had an air about you and no reigning queen ever had a more elegant walk, and here you are slumping. Your Aunt Fran cine was married to a midget, as you well know, but there wasn’t any of this bending down and hunching over. She let him be his height and he let her be hers. So stop this foolishness.
But I couldn’t. I still tried literally to meet Matthew more than halfway. And I had this feeling — well, why shouldn’t I have it, seeing as how they had all died on me — that Matthew wasn’t long for this world, and it was my duty to make him feel as important and as tall as I possibly could during the little time that was left to him.