A Surprise Evening byCamillaHumby copy
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Mrs Marie Johnson was entirely unaware of the state of their finances.
She had met Mark Johnson in Boston when he worked as assistant manager for Crumblies, a department store that supplied all the haberdashery needs for a segment of the middle class of the region. Mark Johnson was handsome and helpful, it made him popular with the ladies, who often found reasons to need to ask for his especial help in discovering just the right shade of blue cloth or understanding the cleaning requirements for the new curtains they were having made. Almost inevitably the information was already available to the lady, either that or it was a complex and bizarre question that would take some time and several visits to solve (for example: “were these cotton drapes made by slaves or free men?” A liberal minded woman had asked. The answer she wanted was ‘free men’ as she really wanted the drapes, but she needed to salve her conscience as well. Careful phrasing of the answer allowed her to spend her money and not be aware of the awful conditions the free women had been forced to work in). The real aim was to get some small vicarious pleasure of being in the company of this polite and pleasant (and handsome) young man.
Marie Van Buren had first visited Crumblies with her nanny at the tender age of 3. It had become one of the centres of her privileged but rather circumscribed life. As a girl, trips with her mother to this emporium of dreams had been a delight, particularly since they always culminated in a visit to the ice-cream parlour across the way. It was several years before she realised that the visits to Arduccio’s always seemed to coincidentally coincide with Mr Frackson and his young son being there. The asexual, innocent dalliance between the two adults continued for years until Mr Frackson was killed by a runaway milk cart. Her mother had been inconsolable, and it was that which gave her the insight that the friendship had been a slight escape from the corset of society mores in Boston.
Marie grew into a well-made girl and then young woman. Well-made meant shapely, she wasn’t slim like her friend Argenta, but then neither was she any of the polite euphemisms used to mean ‘fat’ – robust, well-built, stocky, healthy. She knew she was well shaped when she started growing breasts; she had looked in the mirror and seen shapely, sculpted legs rising to hips that had shape rather than boyish non-entities, a flat stomach progressed to an increasingly eye-drawing bust. It never became over-large, which would have been a burden to her in youth and a pain in later adulthood as it sank, rather they were firm and large and shapely. Her breasts supported themselves well, and were aided by her clothes to emphasise this endowment as she grew older. Her face was not coquettish, it was attractive in a calm way. People looked at her and saw the Goddess of Domestic Bliss rather than that of Passion.
Marie found herself being drawn down into the quicksand of dull, dull conversations, white gloves and calling cards. When she visited Crumblies for some white muslin and (genuinely) asked Mark Johnson for some advice, she discovered her own innocent dream. Only it became more than that. Mark was almost as taken by the young lady, ten years his junior, as she was by him. At sixteen she was pretty, well-shaped, and knew how to present herself. She was not particularly practical or even bright, but she knew how to make the most of her assets, such as they were. Her father would have happily married her off to his 50-year old business partner to cement the business more firmly together but, though obedient to her father in most things, she was not keen to take as husband a balding, overweight man with bad teeth. He wasn’t unkind, and he wouldn’t have been cruel, but he was shy; and he wasn’t a good catch for a girl on the cusp of sexual womanhood. She allowed his advances and wooing within strict limits, deliberately extending the period into infinity, the period between an apparent attraction and an accepted engagement.
Mark Johnson became her escape from this deadly life. She knew she was lucky. She did not have to rise at 5am to black the range or wash the sheets in cold water in winter, or sleep in the cold garret or the basement where servants slept. She knew she was lucky; but her mind was atrophying. She had taken an interest in the Civil War. She had been fascinated that a democratically elected president could take undemocratic actions to prevent the break-up of the Union as a result of democratic votes in states in the South. When she tried to ask questions though, her mother showed she had no idea what she was talking about and her father told her not to worry about such complex male problems. She once cried to a friend that she did not want to become just another woman concerned about what ribbon to wear – since the friend had called intending to ask exactly that question, this ignorantly denigrating comment had resulted in a cooling of their friendship.
Mark Johnson, she was sure, had more to him than met the eye. They began to meet secretly and he shared his ideas, he had plans, big plans. The time came when they were seen and she was forbidden to see him. And the time came soon after when they eloped. They married two months later in New York and eight months later Jesse was born to the eighteen year old Mrs Mark Johnson. She saw, too late, that she had sacrificed one prison for another, that of marriage and motherhood.
She also began to suspect that her man with big plans was not all he had seemed.
They returned to Boston for a partial rapprochement with her parents, and her father had helped set Mark up with a small shop. Mark was already thinking of the next ‘big idea’. He didn’t drink to excess, he didn’t beat her or rape her nightly or take up with other women. All of these, she heard from her new neighbours, were regular and common in the neighbourhood. Some unlucky women experienced all of them! She was lucky in that sense that Mark was a loving, kind husband and father; but he wasn’t a business man like her father.
The shop in Boston was sold for less than they paid for it, and the St Louis Trading Company he set up barely turned a profit, and then the Import-Export (Galveston) had been a success which he then opted to throw up for the chance to run a ranch up here. She had begun to suspect he was a dreamer, but she had hitched her wagon to his and went with him.
One small consolation at least, they had both kept their looks. Mark was able to look the respectable and enthusiastic young man even as he approached middle age, Marie was able to bat her eyelids coyly. And in this way they still managed to procure the support they needed for each enterprise. Their failure could not be put down to others working against them, they were simply not cut out for many of the enterprises that Mark Johnson entered into. A more dynamic and powerful woman might have driven him to achieve more, but she was not that and he was not a self-driven man; so their business ventures lurched along rather than grew, even though they put the hours and effort in.
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