“She’s worse. She’d go after you with a pair of scissors.”
“Then why isn’t she put away?”
“She’s going to be.”
“What’s holding it up, if she’s dangerous?”
“My mother. She doesn’t want to see her go.”
“How old is your mother?”
“Fifty-five or-six.”
“She’d be lonely, is that why?”
“Yes, I guess so. But Rhoda hates her. She hates all females.”
“But not all males?”
“That’s what her trouble’s been.”
“Oh, there was one like that in Richterville. When did it start?”
“Oh, maybe ten years ago.”
“The one at home, too. It started about the same age for her. Fourteen or fifteen?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing you can do for them except put them away. They don’t like men, either, you know. The one at home did a terrible thing to a man.”
“What?”
“I won’t say.”
“You know so much, and you know so little.”
“That’s the trouble, Abraham. You’re told to act like a lady, but you see things and hear things. But ask anybody a question and they tell you to shut up. One day Sarah and I were in the backyard, sitting in the swing, and we heard some voices in the alleyway back of our barn. We went to see what it was, and there was a man sitting on a log. There were two other men with him. And the girl I told you about, she was doing something to the man. Out in broad daylight. I told Sarah not to look, but she saw. Broad daylight. I thought I was going to faint.”
“Weren’t they afraid of the constable?”
“That’s it. One of them was the constable. They weren’t boys. They were all men. It isn’t funny, Abraham.”
“I guess it isn’t, but I have to laugh. Your father, with six daughters, protecting them from the world, and there in his own back alley, in broad daylight. The constable.”
“Your father killed two men, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Why did you bring that up all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. Thinking of us girls, and what we saw in the alleyway. And you, so elegant and stylish, but your father killed two men. I often think of things like that. Sin isn’t only in New York, or Europe. They try to make us believe that, but it’s everywhere. I guess there’s just as much in Swedish Haven, and Gibbsville! I heard such things about the Railroad Street in Gibbsville that would turn your stomach. When we have our children we mustn’t pretend as if sin was every place else. I want our children to face the truth. We’re not much better than other people, just because our fathers are rich. The girl, the one I was speaking about, she’s related to me. Her mother was a Hoffner. They weren’t the Close Hoffners. That’s what my father and mother called the ones that are related to us closely. But they were Hoffners, all right.”
“It makes me feel better, to hear that you have some family skeletons too.”
“Don’t tease me, Abraham. My grandfather got rich because he could read and write. He rooked people. I know, because my father brags about it. He wouldn’t to you, but at home he did. Do you know why we were married in the Reformed? Because my grandfather was expelled from the Lutheran. Somebody that couldn’t read took a paper to the Lutheran preacher, some kind of an agreement with my grandfather. And when the preacher read it, it was a scandalous thing. Dishonest. And Grandfather Jacob Hoffner was expelled from the Lutheran Church. Didn’t they ever hear that over in Swedish Haven?”
“They were too busy talking about my father, I guess.”
He believed himself when he told her that he loved her. He was becoming accustomed to her Pennsylvania Dutch sing-song and her trouble with v’s and w’s; d’s that came out t; j’s that came out ch; s’s for z; z for s; the diphthong in how made to sound like hah; and the words and constructions that Miss Holbrook’s School had not corrected. He had grown up with the Pennsylvania Dutch patois as part of his own speech, and he was accustomed to the accent that it left on the English speech of his fellow citizens; but his father did not have it, his mother had only a trace of it, and he himself had largely got rid of it during his years at the University and as an officer in the army.
The manner of her speech was a strong, if subtle, factor in the growth of love. Her voice was low, without being especially deep by nature; and the sing-song character of the Pennsylvania Dutch accent retards the speed of speaking. Thus she communicated her words to him in quiet tones and at a rate of utterance that made her delivery always gentle and required a slowing down of his listening faculties. It made what she had to say seem thought out; well considered and deeply felt, even when the most trivial things were being discussed. As against that easy, not unpleasantly musical enunciation was the trusting violence of her love-making, so that he often found as he listened to her that he was thinking as much of the contrasts as of the things she had to say. It was indeed as though the way she spoke of everyday things was an agreed-upon deception, a secret of their own that hinted at a more esoteric secret that they revealed to each other—and she especially to him—when they would make love.
The love was genuine enough on her part; on his it was a gradual development. She had been disturbed by him from the first, and it came as a happy discovery that she could have such deep feelings for a man who already met her first requirement for marriage, namely, that he would not be marrying her for her money. The said requirement receded into forgotten unimportance as she saw him more frequently and as he courted her. There was, of course, an element of gratitude in her love; she was thankful that his look and presence made him desirable enough so that his economic status in relation to hers could be so easily dismissed, and she could enter into romance unhindered. Then after their first week of marriage Adelaide Lockwood acquired a female pride in the new knowledge that while he was in control of their store of ecstasy, she could make him eager to share it.
Abraham Lockwood’s experience with women, wholly a matter of satisfying sexual needs, had paradoxically been preparing him all his mature life for just such a love as began to grow in him. From the whores at Phoebe Adamson’s place in Juniper Street he had gone to the whores in Washington; and in later years, after his return to Swedish Haven, he had used a dressmaker in Gibbsville. Arrangements with her had to be made in advance and by letter. Annabella Crowe’s house was in Second Street, only a square away from the main business thoroughfare. On the first floor of the house she had a room in which her lady customers could examine materials and make their decisions; a second room where they could be measured and have their try-ons; a third room, in which her sewing women worked; a fourth room, a kitchen which also served as her dining room. Annabella Crowe’s living quarters were on the second story, more than adequate since she lived alone. She was a woman in her early thirties who had been deserted by her husband and had been briefly and secretly the mistress of a county judge, who set her up in the dressmaking establishment before parting company with her. In the vicinity of the railway and canal stations there had been whorehouses for several decades when Abraham Lockwood returned from the War, but none of them had been operated with any sense of discretion, and he avoided them. A Gibbsville lawyer introduced him to Annabella Crowe. “What do you do for a piece of tail,” Abraham Lockwood had asked. The lawyer answered evasively, but optimistically, and shortly thereafter he gave Lockwood the name and address of Annabella Crowe. “Go there at ten o’clock Tuesday night,” said the lawyer.
At the appointed hour he knocked on the door, which was swung open immediately and quickly closed. A woman he could not see said, “Go upstairs where you see the light.” He mounted the stairs, and the woman, who followed him, said: “To your left.” It was the middle of three rooms on the second story and the only one in which there was any illumination. It had a single, heavily curtained window, a large, ornately carved double bed, with a wardrobe, dresser, and chairs belonging to the same suite. “I’m Mrs. Crowe, and I know who you are but I don’t know much about you. You’re single?”