“Especially when one falls so short of it.” My voice was quiet, but he heard. I stared defiantly and trembled as he glared in reply.
But he let his feeling go. A tiredness took its place. “I tried for thy mother’s sake,” he said. “I never was suited to be a dutiful Friend.”
Perhaps—neither was I.
*
When all else fell away, one shelter remained. I’ll call it now the house of Johan. I entered it gladly in spring last year, on a Fifth Month evening.
The two of us were traveling a footpath along the Wissahickon Creek, bathed in air redolent with pollens and perfumes. We strolled slowly in our cocoon of silence. My hand was ensconced in his, a signal of our increased closeness since Mother’s death. Children laughed and shoved and teased along the banks of the shallow creek. The sun was falling behind stands of thin trees on the opposite bank; as the air cooled, mosquitoes rose from the dirt, butting against our ankles in search of skin and blood. We came around a curve and saw a pair of lovers seated on a rock that stretched into the water. How earnestly they beheld one another. Perhaps it was this sight that spurred Johan to pull me to a stop beneath a blossoming magnolia. I stood wondering until he spoke.
“I have something to tell thee.” He clasped my hands in his large, callused ones, and his face paled against his locks of red hair. “I’ve decided to leave for Pittsburgh soon. Peter’s coming along.”
His words stunned me. He and Peter had spoken in my presence of leaving to work in steel; they seemed drawn to that new industry like prospectors were to the California gold rush. But I hadn’t been convinced they’d go. Johan had four years left on his commitment to Father’s workshop, and Peter had never spent so much as a night away from Germantown.
I stared at Johan’s broad-planed face. But what of me? I thought.
As if hearing this, he answered. “I want thee to be my wife.”
His words relieved me, almost. I dropped his hands. “Why does thee tell,” I said, “instead of asking?”
He flushed with an abandon more to my liking, then reached for the tree and snapped off a pinkish-white magnolia blossom. For the duration of several breaths, he beheld its display of petals, as if gathering courage. And then: “Nothing speaks so boldly as a flower.” He placed the effusive specimen in my hands, his brown eyes beseeching. “Will thee marry me?”
I wanted to say yes. Mother had thought us an ideal match; she’d bent my ear more than once to whisper hopes of a union. She’d seen the reddening of our cheeks at the family table, heard evidence of his fine mind, observed the growing sympathy between us. Several days before she died, she’d even received a leading that he should join our Meeting and we should marry. She’d reported it to me with radiant eyes, clasping my hand, much as he just had. Yet she’d had no chance to season the leading—to find if truly God had sent it, or if it was born merely of her wish to leave me settled.
I wanted to say yes to Johan, yet I hesitated; this was likely the most influential decision of my life. Any marriage would lead to both misery and joy. How could I know which might dominate ours in years to come? I examined the magnolia’s veined petals, its many glistening and sticky pistils surrounded by stamens laden with pollen. Truly, a flower is a bold thing, exposing all its offerings to its insect lovers.
My answer burst from me. “I will.” Warmth traveled outward from my heart till my body seemed to swell.
The pleased look on Johan’s face grew ever more daffy, until I craved to touch him. I stepped forward, and he opened his arms to me. With my head for the first time against his muscled chest, my ear pressed to his heartbeat, my body feeling his limbs through the linen of his shirt and pants, I came to understand the meaning of that strange word swoon. I leaned into the cave of his body, which emitted a compelling odor that I decided must be that of a man’s desire. I pressed my nose forward and inhaled deeply at his chest. He let out an involuntary moan.
I stepped away to regain rational capacity, then said, “How are we going to make a marriage happen?” I’d stopped attending our family’s Meeting out of shame over Father and hurt at my unwanted furlough from teaching. And Johan hadn’t joined another Meeting after he’d left New Jersey and come to work for Father. This meant there’d be no committee to assess our readiness, no elders to approve or disapprove our union, no worshipping assembly to house it.
“We could marry with a justice of the peace,” offered Johan.
I agreed, though that might require taking an oath; this was how Father and Patience had achieved their marriage. Yet I wanted Father, at the least, to see the rightness in our union.
“Has my father approved?” I bruised a petal of the magnolia and inhaled its honeyed scent, perhaps more like a woman’s desire.
Johan looked down and scuffed the dust with his boot. “He dislikes me.”
This was true. Father was a less aesthetic man than Johan; he would consider anyone deficient who wrote poetry, as Johan did, and took time to marvel at a flower. I tried to keep the dismay from my tone. “Has thee asked?”
“The answer was no.”
He watched for my response. And Father’s refusal did cause the hot-air balloon of my happiness to sink a bit. But then I cut the ropes that were holding that buoyant balloon near the ground. I let it rise and float.
“I’ll do it anyway!” I cried, elated. “In Pittsburgh!” Excitement swirled through me. I’d build my own life, away from the disgrace and gloom of Father’s.
Johan stood to full height, radiating what I see now as impetuousness but saw then as an admirable power in a man several years my senior. “I’ll do well for us,” he said. “There’s so much growth in steel! But I need time to find a position. I’ll send money for the train as soon as I can.”
What was this? He and Peter would leave me behind? I pulled his arm. “No! I’m coming, too! We can marry as soon as we get there, or even before we go.”
He ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I don’t want us to start our life together in a rush. Give me a chance to find us a decent place to live and save up some money. I’ve barely got enough for my own fare and a few weeks’ food and rent.”
I had but little money myself. Regardless, I ought to have refused to stay. With the sharp voices of Father and Patience rising to my room each night, the old stone house held little comfort. And without my teaching work, no purpose filled my days. Standing beneath that flowering tree with Johan, I ought to have told him, “I’ll borrow to pay my way. I don’t care if we sleep in an alley. I want to leave as badly as thee does.”
Instead, I agreed to meet the two of them in an undetermined span of weeks or months, dependent on their luck. I gave Johan and Peter the right of their sex to travel at will, and accepted the confines of mine.
All that remained was for Father to learn of the young men’s plan.