Hannah was touched and proud. Until Peggy added, “I suppose you could say ‘tis the sort of thing I should ask my mother, but it isn’t, I promise you. Och, well, she told me all a girl has to know. But she told it fast and turned her head away as she did, and I don’t know to this day which of us was more embarrassed by it, and her having been with child more times than I’ve fingers on my two hands.”
Peggy chuckled, but Hannah’s heart grew colder, anticipating what was coming.
“I knowthatpart of it,” Peggy said, “and I trust Royal knows what I might not. But I want to know more than the way of it, plain and simple like my mother told me. I want to know how to make him happy with it. And that’s never a thing she told me, ah, well, I suppose she couldn’t, could she? Even if she knew…but you’ve been married, Hannah dear, and I thought…
“You don’t have to tell me word for word,” Peggy said, the sudden thought making her sit straight up in bed. “I’m not after embarrassing you, or me. But I— I’m a plain dab of a girl, Hannah, that I am and that I know,” she said, cutting off anything Hannah might have protested, “and he’s everything any girl would want. And so good to me.
“Why, when he first asked me to wed him,” Peggy said in dreamy accents, “I didn’t say yes right off. I wanted to, for all I haven’t known him long. I’ll never know him better. There’s no doubting he’s the one for me. But I knew my obligations. It broke my heart, but I had to tell him my family needed the moneyI was making. Never think he only offered me money to send to them each week— as if that wasn’t more than enough! No, not he. No, he said he’d welcome them coming to live with us, every blessed one of them. He said the house was big enough and could always be made bigger; the boys could help out, and the West needed women—even if my sisters aren’t old enough to be women, and my poor mother’s neither a widow nor a wife, still that way I’d always have company. I was so happy—but then I recalled the way of things at home, and asked him if there was a problem with the Irish here, too. He laughed and said, ‘Yes—there’s not enough of them.’
“There never was a better man,” Peggy vowed, “or a luckier girl. But I…I’m more than grateful to him. When he kisses me, I…ah, Hannah, there’s got to be more to it than what my mother said. I see those scarlet women and saloon girls, and I know they know. He’s promised to be faithful to me, and I believe it, but I don’t want him regretting it. I want him to have the best. And you, you are my best friend, and you were a married lady. I’ll be a married woman tomorrow—and though I want to be a lady, I want him to be satisfied…Please, can you tell me anything I ought to know?”
Hannah lay very still. What should she say? Her own hard-earned truth? That nature knows nothing of love, and so for all the love in the human heart, still sometimes the body cannot follow the heart? But from all the reading she’d done in all her medical books, she knew that was only once in a thousand, thousand times. She’d speak from her dreams then, and not her experience. Peggy, too, deserved the best.
“Peggy,” she said gently, “remember that for all he’s a man, he’s likely as fearful as you are, if only because he loves you as much as you love him, and wants the best for you, too. So be kind and careful with him, and fair. Let him know what you’re thinking and feeling, and never be embarrassed with him as you are with me, or your mother. Because what will pass between you two is sacred—and will be as much fun for him as what the saloon girls charge for, too. Better, because it’s given and taken with love. You’ll see. And,” she said in a rush, “maybe even better yet, because it’s free.”
She laughed at that, she couldn’t help it, and so did Peggy. When they’d finished, Peggy chuckled her good night, and Hannah sighed with relief. Because for all her inventiveness, she didn’t know what else she could say. There was onlyso much she could invent. Holding John had been wonderful, kissing him had been, too, and his fondling had made her yearn for whatever more he could offer. But the rest, the embarrassment and humiliation of failure, she thought as she burrowed into her pillow, was best left, as it always had been, to silence.
“If you don’t get to bed,” Gray observed, looking up from the book he was holding, and watching Royal stalking around the deserted salon, “you’ll never get up on time in the morning.”
“I’ll go to my room, and let you get some sleep,” Royal said, but Gray snapped the book closed and spoke before his friend’s long legs could take him from the room.
“No. Something’s eating at you. I’d let you pace until it came out, but I’m your best man, remember? I’m supposed to get you to the altar bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but I’ve a feeling it might take all night for you to spit it out. I’ve only known you most of your life, remember. What is it?”
“Damn,” Royal said, collapsing onto a hassock near Gray’s chair, and putting his head into his hands, “I’ve got the miseries. Yeah. Gray,” he said, looking up and staring hard at his friend. “Listen. It’s about…after the wedding.”
Royal fell silent, and when it seemed he’d not speak again very soon. Gray said, “Oh. I guess you went upstairs for tea every time you went to Misery Annies, hmm? Or Mother Blessed’s house? And those times you came with me to New Orleans, you were teaching those girls to play cards when you got them alone in their rooms, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Damn it, no,” Royal blurted angrily, and then lowering his voice and his eyes, said quickly, “But that’s it. See, I never known nothing but whores and suchlike. But now…I can’t even say Her name in the same breath with them, it wouldn’t be right. I don’t want to scare her or shame her tomorrow. Damn it, Gray. You’ve had an education. You know women. I know a man does the same thing with a good woman as he done with bad ones, but…but it just don’t seem right.”
Gray thought about his answer. He’d no more experience with good women than Royal had, even if, in his travels, some he’d known in a biblical sense had been of a higher class and station in life than the sort Royal had known. He’dcertainly no more knowledge of virgins; now that he thought about it, the idea of initiating one was as terrifying as Royal seemed to think. The more he considered it, the more he realized Royal was right—a man could do such wrong things that he could really terrify an innocent, or put her off the thing forever after. But Royal was a good man, and Peggy loved him so absolutely that Gray rejoiced for them. They both deserved the best answer he could come up with.
The problem was that Gray found that though he’d an expensive college education, and an equally expensive carnal one, neither seemed to hold the answer he was looking for. Perhaps, he thought, bemused, because he’d never looked for it before. But he’d been thinking about love a lot more these days. Now he searched his heart instead of his past. Since reality held no answers, his dreams might. He thought about how he wished to love and be loved, and found an answer. He could only hope it was the right one.
“Like I said when you first met her: women aren’t that much different from us, except for the obvious, and I think you saw that’s so,” he said slowly. “But good women are brought up different, that’s true—or at least, maybe bad women manage to forget how they were brought up. What I’d do…? Well, it sounds crazy, but philosophers say a man should look into his own heart to find all the answers. So, I’d take that a little further, and I’d try and think of how it would feel to be a girl who didn’t know much about what goes on between a man and a woman. Yeah. I think that’s it.
“Think about it,” he said, leaning forward as he warmed to his theme. “Think about how you’d feel if you had a female body and didn’t know what it was for. What would you want touched? When? And how? Then go ahead and do it for her. Well, damn it,” he said, as insulted as upset by the look growing in Royal’s widened eyes. “Why not?”
“Because that’s plumb crazy. Why…why,” Royal sputtered, “if’n I thought that way. I’d scare her to death, is what. She’d up and die, right there and then. That’s why. She ain’t no whore. That’s what I’m saying!”
“Then you better change your tune before you hear the wedding march, my friend,” Gray said, very much on his high ropes, because he’d an uneasy fear Royal was right. “You treat your wife like she was a saint, she’ll end up like Ma Carter, in Laredo. She was a minister’s wife, for God’s sake, before she took up the trade. And she always said it was because…well, never mind.”
Gray drew a deep breath and thought of his classical studies as well as real life; he remembered the way his brother and sister-in-law were with each other, as well as how his favorite characters in fiction acted, reviewing them in his mind—from Romeo and Juliet to Joshua and Lucy Dylan. And then he was positive, whatever popular opinion might hold, that he was right.
“Listen, my friend,” he said with conviction, “a woman feels things just like a man does. If love is right, then the rest of it—what we usually pay for with a woman—then that’s right, too. The difference is how and why we do it. When you pay, you’re out to get your satisfaction. That’s it. When you love, you’re out to give her as much as you get. That’s the way of it, whether the woman is good, bad, or plain indifferent. And a wife’s never indifferent, no matter what some fools in the bunkhouse say. Or at least I don’t think you’d want one that was. Now, don’t tear my head off, because I’m only asking, and I don’t expect you to answer out loud, but do you think Peggy’s got no lustful feelings for you? Think she’s going to lose them when she says, “I do?” You want her to? What do you want, a wife or an angel?
“Listen, a wife’s a woman you love too much to just want once, anyhow. And she wants you enough to stay with you for the rest of her natural life, whatever. Right? So if you love her, you’re not going to make a mistake. You can’t. Because if she loves you, she’s not going to care if you do, anymore than you’d care if she did. Because everybody makes mistakes, and love can correct most of them.”
When he’d done speaking, Gray was as impressed with himself as Royal seemed to be. They both sat staring into the fire, thinking.
“Yeah. Well. I thank you kindly,” Royal finally said calmly, rising. “Think I’ll be going to bed now. See you at sunup. And thanks.”
Gray remained sitting by himself long after Royal had gone. Because he was thinking of how easy it was to come up with answers when your only problem was giving them to someone else. And then he sat up longer, thinking of how lucky Royal was.
The preacher was so entranced by the guests that he had some difficulty concentrating on the wedding service. The women were dressed to the teeth, andif he didn’t mistake it, some wore paint. The men were elegant and poised, or posed, as no men he’d ever met in his life had been. For all that the groom had looked respectable as he could hold together when he’d first made the arrangements, and his best man was Gray Dylan oftheDylan family, up Wyoming way, the guests all were, if the preacher didn’t miss his guess, from a theatrical company that was playing in one of the theaters in town. That presented an unforeseen problem. Of a moral nature.
Of course, the theater was evil incarnated, and evil was always fascinating, which was why the preacher couldn’t help staring. But some theater was enlightening and ennobling, and so he told his wife when they peeked into the parlor to see the wedding company assembling there. There was certainly nothing wrong with Jenny Lind, on stage, that was. And that Mr. Wilde who’d toured through the territory a few years ago had been everything that was gentlemanly, hadn’t he? Wasn’t Phineas T. Barnum as American as a turkey? Mr. Edison was recording performers singing, wasn’t he? so that soon everyone in America might be listening to grand music right in their own parlors, or so even the December edition of the national church journal had said.
The theater, the Rev. Mr. Howard finally told his wife, may have been wicked once upon a time, but they’d do well to remember times were changing. And just look at the tall cowboy and his shy bride. That lovely couple was no more theatrical than their own calico cat was. Thus reassured, after a hasty consultation the Howards stepped out into their parlor: Mrs. Howard to man the pianoforte and the Rev. Mr. Howard to raise his good book, and theater or not, they were ready to begin.
