Mr. Sprague and Miss Harvey came around the corner of the house. They were “stepping out” together. Miss Harvey held a parasol against her shoulder. She twirled it, making its white ruffles float out like the petals of a daisy. They strode down the hill on the sidewalk.
“For example,” Maud explained to Enid, darkly, lowering her voice. “Say they get married. Everything she has earned in the factory office, everything she owns, becomes his. Or might as well, even if the new law says otherwise. Cousin Carrie says they find loopholes to keep us in our place.”
Flora straightened her back, watching the couple going down past the big houses and feeling indignation at Maud’s words. She realized that she had herself imbibed these ideas at the women’s meetings. Enid was new to such understanding; only wistfulness crossed the girl’s face as she, too, watched the couple.
Ellen, finger pressed against the article where she had left off reading, narrowed her eyes behind her spectacles. She watched as Mr. Sprague, wearing a brown linen jacket, and Miss Harvey, in a white dress with green stripes, turned the corner past the house with hydrangea bushes. Mr. Sprague was evidently expounding on something, for he slowed his pace, describing something in the air with his hands.
“Them two. Skinny and bony. Pity the cook they hire.”
No one knew Ellen’s story. Flora and Maud whispered about her. Maybe her husband murdered someone. Do we know if she was married? No, not for sure. She simmered, never quite coming to a boil; behind her compressed lips, they sensed secrets, resentments.
“I agree we should start a committee,” Flora said. “We’ll help, Enid, won’t we?”
Enid nodded—of course—chin in hands, gazing out over the grass with its purple and white flowers too low for the lawnmower’s whirring knives. Her hair, soft and heavy, coiled at her neck. Pink, at last, Flora saw, in her cheeks. Her compliance in Flora’s offer to volunteer was all of a piece with washing dishes or learning to read or improving her grammar. Enid was increasingly agreeable, quieting within, watching Flora, picking up cues and copying them. Released, and relieved.
Ellen sighed, again, and picked up the paper. “That’s that, then. Just when pickling is starting.”
—
It rained, all the next day. Enid hunched over her sewing, silent, as she often was when she had had bad dreams. Flora tried to make her smile.
“Give her time,” Josephine murmured, passing in the hallway, a stack of folded sheets in her arms. “You can’t make someone’s happiness.”
That evening, Flora left Enid in the kitchen, darning the heel of a sock. Ellen was bottling pickles amidst steam smelling of vinegar and mustard seeds.
Outside, on the street, pinwheels of spray rimmed the wheels of passing carriages; raindrops rolled down the Solomon’s seal leaves, plinking a puddle beneath the workshop window. Flora entered the barn.
Mr. Tuck was expecting her. An array of wood squares, matchsticks, glue and clamps covered her workspace. She was making miniature tables. First she put together the table aprons, then glued matchstick legs to them. She sanded the squares of wood and positioned them atop the apron and legs. Her fingers shook. Tired, she breathed out to steady herself, wondering why a man like Jasper Tuck would have chosen this work, requiring sparseness of movement as he transformed the immutable and massive materials of a mansion—timbers, spikes, bricks—into components as frail as tissue.
“Your sister working?”
“I told you. She’s sewing. She’s always sewing.”
“Got a lot of sewing needs in that house.”
“As a matter of fact, we do. Clothing for nine people. That’s a lot of mending. A lot of darning.”
He held a chisel in one hand, tapped it with a hammer, incising a line.
“I want you to go out on the next fine day. Go out in the dress and talk to a lady. Take the house for her to see. Before it gets too big and heavy.”
“What lady?”
“The sisters told me about a friend of theirs.” Tap tap tap. “Lives over on Summer Street.” Tap tap. “Big white house.”
When Flora had first seen the dress, touched its white wool, heard the rustle of its petticoat, she had been a different person, a girl without someone to care for. Enid’s presence changed things in a way Flora did not know how to explain to Mr. Tuck. It was not the making of the houses that she minded. It was being Mr. Tuck’s salesgirl, his representative. Now that she spoke, in effect, for both herself and Enid, and worked towards their eventual establishment as respected citizens of the town, she could not bear the thought of walking through the streets like a dressed-up doll, pulling the miniature house. Even if Mr. Tuck were to drive her, she could not see herself climbing down from the wagon and going up to a house wearing a dress that a man had bought for her, one that fit with frightening precision. She could not see herself speaking in a warm, false voice about the virtues of owning a house that looked just like your own, attempting, for her own pecuniary gain as well as Mr. Tuck’s, to convince a woman—whom she might have encountered at a suffrage meeting—to buy something unnecessary, made by an indigent man with no family or friends, who had come out of nowhere after Josephine was no longer the beloved wife of a sea captain but the grieving manager of a lodging house.
She trembled to the extent that she could not hold the little table, so picked up a piece of paper faced with pulverized glass, for smoothing. She recognized fear by a blood taste in her mouth and a darkening around the edges of her eyes. She could not say yes. She could not say no.
“Sometime next week, I was thinking.” A curl of wood shaving clung to his collar. His eyes were as alert and unfathomable as a racoon’s. “The next fine day.”
“I will be
