Chapter 6
They buried Olivia Baker's mother on a gray Boston morning, in a wind off the harbor that got in under everybody's coats.
There were eleven mourners. Olivia counted them because counting was an occupation.
Her brother Gerald stood at the head of the grave, hat held to his chest, his face arranged.
His intended, Miss Cora Whitcombe, stood a correct half step behind him.
The rest were neighbors, two cousins from Salem, and the minister.
Nobody wept. Mrs. Baker had been dying for ten years. The grief had been used up long ago.
Afterward, on the path, the neighbors came to Olivia one by one and said what neighbors say.
"Such devotion, my dear. Ten years. I don't know how you did it."
"She never wanted for anything. That's your doing."
"A daughter in a thousand. Your mother was blessed."
Olivia thanked them. She had a way of thanking people that used very few words and closed the subject. She used it now. But she heard the tone. It was the tone people used for a good servant, or an old chair that had held up better than expected. Warm. Approving. Finished with.
Gerald came down the path last, drawing on his gloves.
"Well," he said. "That's done. Cora's mother has a cold luncheon laid on. You'll want to see to the coats."
She said that she would. Gerald nodded, already looking for the carriage.
Nobody asked her what she meant to do now.
It did not occur to any of them that she might do anything at all.
* * *
She was twenty-eight years old. She had been eighteen when her mother took to her bed. In the ten years between, she had not left the house on Chambers Street for more than an afternoon.
She had never resented it. That was what people did not understand, and she had stopped trying to explain. She had loved her mother. Nursing her had been work that Olivia was good at, better than the two women Gerald had hired and dismissed in the early years.
She knew how to lift a body without hurting it. How to change a bed with a person still in it. How to read a fever in the color of a fingernail. She knew every draft in that house and how to stop it. She could make a beef tea that a woman with no appetite would drink.
For ten years she had been needed every hour of every day.
And now, quite suddenly, she was not.
Gerald inherited the house. That was the law.
Olivia had never expected otherwise. What she had not expected was how quickly the house would change hands in every way but the deed.
Cora Whitcombe became Cora Baker three weeks after the funeral, in a quiet wedding out of respect for the dead.
The day after, Cora's trunks came up the front steps. Olivia's went up the back ones.
"The attic room is quite dry," Cora said. "And the light is very good for sewing. We thought you'd prefer it, Olivia, being used to your own company."
Olivia said that the attic would do very well.
It did do well. It had a bed, a chair, a washstand, and a window that looked at other people's chimneys. The ceiling sloped so that she could stand upright only in the middle of the room. Her three dresses went on the hooks behind the door. Her mother's Bible went on the sill, where the light was.
At night, she could hear the carriage horses shifting in the mews, the bells from the North End, and Gerald's voice below, going on about the shipping. She was welcome, Gerald said, to stay as long as she liked. Nobody was turning her out. She was family.
Family, it turned out, meant that she took the trays up when Cora had a headache.
It meant that she sat with Cora's mother when Cora's mother came to visit and was tiresome.
It meant that she mended, did the flowers, and made the beef tea.
She was thanked, warmly, every time, in the finished-with tone.
It meant that she was not paid because one did not pay family.
And it meant that when there were guests at dinner, and the table was counted, there was sometimes one chair too few. On those evenings she was the one who found she had a headache herself, and took a tray in the attic.
The tray was no hardship. She had eaten off trays for ten years.
What she minded, when she let herself, was that nobody in the house looked at her. They looked past her, or through her, toward the tray. She had become a pair of hands with a tray on them.
* * *
It was Cora who said it, in the end. Over the sewing, without any unkindness at all.
"I've been thinking, Olivia. You know, you might be happier in service."
Olivia's needle stopped. Cora, matching a thread, noticed nothing.
"There are such good positions now for a woman with your gifts.
A lady's nurse, or a companion. The Thorndikes are looking for someone for old Mrs. Thorndike.
I said at once, well, Olivia is simply made for it.
Nursing is so clearly your gift." Cora smiled.
"One wants to see one's gifts used, doesn't one? Not wasted up in an attic."
"That's very thoughtful of you, Cora."
"I thought you'd be pleased."
Olivia went on sewing. Her hands did not shake, because her hands never shook. But she sat with the needle going in and out of the linen, and she understood. It was a truth she had known for years without ever putting words to it.
She had been needed all her life.
She had never once been wanted.
Her mother had needed her. The house had needed her.
Gerald needed her now, for trays, flowers, and Cora's tiresome mother.
Old Mrs. Thorndike would need her next, at a wage, with a half day on Thursdays.
She was good at being needed. She had made herself excellent at it.
And at the end of all of it, when the need was done, she would be thanked in the finished-with tone and sent up the back stairs.
Nobody had ever, in twenty-eight years, looked at her and thought, I want that one. Not for what she can do. For herself.
"I'll think about the Thorndikes," she said.
"Do," Cora said. "Only don't leave it too long. Good positions go."
* * *
The paper came from Bridget.
Bridget was the housemaid, an Irish girl of nineteen with a cousin in Nebraska.
She read the matrimonial papers the way other girls read novels, and kept them under her mattress.
She lent one to Olivia on a wet Thursday afternoon, in the back passage, with a look that was half daring and half shame.
"You needn't say anything, miss. Only my cousin Nora went out by one of these. She's a farmer's wife now, with a house of her own and two little ones. She says it's not so bad as people think. The men are lonesome, mostly, she says, and glad of anyone sensible."
"And is Nora happy?"
Bridget considered this. "The wind never stops, she says. But she has her own door, miss. Her own door with her own name on the box outside it. She wrote that twice in one letter."
Olivia had never read one. They were sold at the newsstand by the Common, with their black headlines. She had thought them faintly disgraceful, in the way she had been raised to think it. She took this one up to the attic and read it by the window while the rain ran down the chimneys outside.
It was a strange advertisement to read. Column after column of men she would never meet, each one describing himself in the fewest and most flattering words he could find.
Handsome. Prosperous. Of sunny temper. One man in Dakota owned two hundred acres with a piano, and wanted a wife who could play the one and did not mind the other.
She could hear the lies in them the way she could hear a wrong note.
She had spent ten years listening to people tell her they were feeling better.
And then, low on the third column, there was one that did not lie.
A physician, aged thirty-six, widowed three years, in sole practice in a silver camp in the Colorado mountains...
She read it once, quickly, as she read the newspaper.
Then she read it again, slowly.
There is in his household a motherless girl of eight years, placed in his care, who has known great sorrow and needs a woman's hand.
There was nothing in it about pleasing appearance.
There was nothing about ease. He said the house was plain.
The town, he said, was rough. And in so many words he said that he would not promise more than he had.
It read like a doctor's note, she thought.
Then she thought, well, of course it does.
Something that was almost a laugh caught in her throat.
The advertiser can promise respect, an honest living, and a home.
A home. Not a position. Not a room up the back stairs. A home, with a child in it who had known great sorrow, whom nobody else in his town would take. A child who needed a woman's hand. She could hear, under the plain words, how much he did not know how to say.
Then she came to the last line, and stopped.
The mountain winters are very long, and a house with one person in it is a lonely place.
She read that line twice.
The rest of the advertisement had been written by a physician.
That line had been written by a man. She thought he had looked at the honest, careful notice he had made and had been unable to leave it there.
So he had let one true sentence out at the end.
Patients did that. At the door, with a hand on the frame, when the rest had been said.
Olivia sat a good while with the paper in her lap and the rain going down the chimneys.
Then she got up. She took her writing case from under the bed and sat down at the sill, where the light was.
Sir, she wrote. I am twenty-eight years of age and unmarried.
For ten years I nursed my mother through a long illness, and she has lately died.
I am not afraid of work, or of sickrooms, or of children who do not know how to be children.
I have spent my life tending people. I am told that it is my gift.
She read that back. It was true. It was not enough. He had asked for honesty.
I will tell you plainly why I am answering, since you wrote plainly.
I have a brother's roof over my head and a place at his table when the count allows.
I am not unhappy. But I have lately understood that I would rather be cold in Colorado than furniture in Boston.
I do not think I have ever wanted anything so much as to be of use to someone who wants me there.
She signed it Olivia Baker and blotted it. Reading it over was not to be thought of. If she read it over, she would soften it.
She put on her bonnet and walked it to the box on the corner herself, in the rain. She would not leave it on the hall table for Gerald to see. Then she went back up the back stairs and made the beef tea.