Assigning them a composition on the Greek myths, Mother dismissed her charges, sending them directly into the care of Mademoiselle Millepied for their French lesson. Raising me by the elbow from where I sat grading examinations, she promenaded me into the parlor, where we discovered Papa in a state of apoplexy, fairly wearing out the carpet with his angry pacing.
“What is the meaning of this, Hester?” he demanded. In an instant my mother’s strength—so assiduously acquired over the recent season—evanesced, leaving her cowering in her shoes before her husband.
“You’re one to talk of means,” I retorted, the color rushing into my cheeks, “having deprived us of them these many months!”
“I was not aware that I was addressing you, Mary. Have you learnt your disrespect for your elders under your mother’s tutelage?”
“Nicholas—” my mother pleaded.
“You have wounded me to the quick,” he replied. “What is a man to think—how is he supposed to hold high his head among his countrymen—when his wife flagrantly reveals herself to be no better than…than—”
“Than an unprotected damsel?” Mother said softly.
“It is not to be borne, madam!” Father thundered. “I am offended even beyond the bounds of reason! My conjugal reputation is tarnished—”
“And you lay the blame for this at my feet?”
Ignoring her attempt to interject reason into the discussion, Papa continued to raise his voice in equal measure to Mother’s increasing quietude. “You have tarnished my conjugal reputation by revealing to the world in a most public manner the landscape of our domestic relations. I am a target of derision at my club. My pride has been sorely tested, Hester.”
“No more so than my heart. What would you have me do? If you do not, can not, will not send me the means to support our children, I am left to ameliorate the matter on my own. The academy is completely respectable in every way, I assure you, Nicholas.”
“A respectable endeavor for widows and spinsters, perhaps, but not for a wife. My wife.”
“In name only. In word but not in action.”
She had finally scored a palpable hit. My proud father managed to appear both crestfallen and sheepish. “I confess, Hester, that my present…ehrm…household situation is now too strongly cemented by both time and obligations to ever be dissolved without my making ample provisions for the person in question.”
“I have lost the thread of your meaning, Nicholas.”
He slapped his gloves on the mantel. “It’s this, damnit!” My mother bit her tongue; Papa never swore, and now he had done so twice within the space of five minutes. “There’s been another reversal,” he said, his voice strained and tight. “I have been accused by a British lieutenant of illegally employing Frenchmen and using French equipment for my ventures in Labrador. The authorities confiscated my sealskins—every last one of them—even the inferior pelts. Though I’ve brought a damages suit against the officer, I’ve come back to London with nothing. There,” he said, taking the liberty of sinking into a chair. “That’s the whole ugly business. Here’s your bloody thread, Hester. I could not afford to provision Elenor even if I’d a mind to.”
“In that case, it is fortuitous that I have found a respectable means of caring for our children.”
“Respectable! Woman, you presume to use that word in connexion with your—this establishment!”
Whereupon poor Mother, who had more or less managed with astounding grace to maintain her equanimity in the face of such an assault upon her undertaking—and by extension, her character—lost those capabilities of restraining her temper. “You dare to speak to me of respectability!”
As witness to this appalling domestic spectacle, I was being indoctrinated with a lesson about the world that I should never have found in any text: If a woman is not permitted to assert a majesty of mind, why fatigue her faculties with the labors of any species of education? Why give her books if she is not to profit by the wisdom they inculcate?
My mother turned at the sound of alarmed footsteps belonging to small children and their governesses running down the narrow hall toward the parlor. With one deft movement she kicked aside the cast-iron doorstop, leaving the oaken portal to shut in their curious, though well-meaning, faces. Her foot would ache like the very devil come morning.
“You are still my wife, Hester, regardless of our…conjugal…circumstances.” Papa gave me an uncomfortable glance. “And as your husband, I have the right to forbid you to do anything that discredits my name and reputation.”
“Yet you’re perfectly capable of doing it yourself,” I said under my breath. Though I loved my father, I was torn between my duty and affection for him, my anger at his conduct, and my wish to protect my mother from the sting of his betrayal.
“At which seminary did you learn to cross your father? Hester, I warn you, Mary will never get a husband if she lets her tongue run away with her. I am exercising my rights—as a husband—to demand that you close this academy as soon as practicable. And if our daughter’s sauciness is an illustration of what happens when you fill young ladies’ heads with subjects and ideas suited only to the male mind, the sooner the better!”
What kind of civilized society protects the malefactor and punishes his victim? As a young girl I bore witness to this exercise of dominion in the bosom of my own family, and it festered within my soul.
How my heart broke for my mother; what consternation her fragile nature must have then endured, having valiantly struggled to make ends meet and still maintain all due propriety and decorum, while her philandering husband lectured her about respectability! Yet she was duty-bound to obey his wishes, for any business or property under a man’s wife’s control was his to do with as he saw fit. And so, at the expiration of eight months, my mother, by my father’s positive command, broke up her establishment and moved us to modest lodgings in the neighborhood of Marylebone. Knowing that my father now
