I found newness and pleasure in one place only. I went to bed with the dark and rose before first light, and every morning the sun and clouds conspired in a fresh performance that was unrepeatable and stunning.
I wanted to go to Pittsburgh and track Johan and Peter down. But I had no address, not even the name of a neighborhood in which they might be lodged. I hadn’t the means to travel there and search, and even if I had, where could I have stayed, as a young woman in an indecent condition? Aside from all that, my vomiting would have made the train ride calamitous. I kept quiet, trying to keep my grief little enough to hide, praying a letter would come before my condition became obvious to others.
Meanwhile, Father grew more surly by the day. He tried out man after man to replace his son and apprentice and found them wanting. At meals he snapped at us; Patience snapped back. If she wanted a window open, he wanted it closed. If he thought the day had been fine, she cursed its early darkness. And as they grew further acquainted, the venom they exchanged over such minor matters became more poisonous. But I kept quiet, wanting to be unnoticed. I continued in my household work and attended to the postman’s comings and goings assiduously.
I thought to call on my former classmates, or on the students and the kindly parents who’d doted on me for how well I’d served them, if only to relieve the tedium; but these Friends would have been dishonored merely by engaging in teatime with the disowned Samuel de Jong’s daughter. If I’d confessed to my far worse dilemma, I would have compromised their consciences with my secret—and increased our family’s disgrace by revealing that yet another of its members had a loose hold on virtue—and handed them the power to ruin me.
I waited for a letter from Johan through Sixth Month and Seventh, then Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh. To spend months in waiting may sound like a passive state, but in truth, it was quite strenuous. I prayed day and night for the address and train fare to arrive. Father’s behavior worsened; he was sour to all whom he encountered, and most nights he drank and complained of minuscule injustices loudly enough for passersby to hear—until he finally made his way to bed, at Patience’s insistence. At such times I couldn’t help but pity her.
Demand for his cabinets had hardly slowed, due to his skill. But no neighbors or acquaintances would take me on for day jobs when I sought them. Thus I had no way to earn money. Perhaps my own unhappy and resentful manner was as much to blame as Father’s was.
By Twelfth Month, Germantown was ensconced in snow. The postman did manage to get through most days, delivering mail by the opening in Father’s workshop door. But I received no letter.
Soon after the new year began—a full year after Mother’s death, when my pregnancy was more than six months along—Patience forced me from inertia.
Father had gone to get a saw blade replaced, and I was shoveling the most recent snow off the back porch so we could reach the outhouse. The sun was at its peak, making sweat run down my face as I shoveled. Patience came out the kitchen door, approaching me with some strong intention. The skin around her blue eyes wrinkled as she narrowed them against the brightness.
“Thee shouldn’t be doing that.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Doing what?” I stilled the shovel.
“Lifting that snow.” A smile flitted across her mouth, revealing her small and even teeth. “Unless thee wants to bring on an abortion.”
I was stunned at her understanding. I had in fact been half hoping to bring one on, not merely then, but in strenuous walks and hill climbing. I’d considered throwing myself down the stairs, but this frightened me too badly. I had nowhere near the funds that I imagined a surgical abortion would cost, and I feared a furtive visit to its hidden practitioners even more than I feared self-injury. It wasn’t possible to come to womanhood without hearing of some desperate soul who’d perished afterward from bleeding or infection.
My pulse quickened as Patience brought her rough-skinned face to mine, filling my view. “I’ve been watching you. I’ve heard you retching in your room. I’ve seen you adding fabric to the waists of your skirts.” She pulled me to her—easily, since she was stronger—and moved her coarse hands along my belly to confirm her knowledge. “You’re a disgrace!” she hissed, shoving me away. “I’m going to tell your father and have you banished from this house!”
She appeared fierce and angry, but I’m certain she was pleased inside to have found a way to be rid of me. Her distaste for having her husband’s daughter in the house had been ill disguised from the start. As soon as she’d married Father, she began asserting her discontent with my housekeeping. The way I washed the supper pots using Mother’s method annoyed her no end, for instance, as she thought it was too frugal with water.
“Two grown women in a house,” she told Father in my earshot, “is one too many. Tell her to follow my ways or find another house.” Father replied with a grunt—no doubt pressing a tumbler of beer to his lips.
My pregnancy gave her a chance to swoop in like a raptor and dislodge me from my lifelong nest.
In panic I begged her not to tell Father of my circumstances. I said I’d leave in any case. But she had no intention of sparing me.
“What makes thee better?” I said. “Thee shared a bed with a man before marrying. Thee could have become pregnant then.”
She glared in disgust. “Don’t pretend the two of us have anything in common.” Then she marched out to buy meat at the market.
I rushed to pack an old leather valise, aiming to leave before she or Father returned. What should I take, without knowing where I was bound? Some items to sell should come along, I realized: the gold ring from Grandmother, the cashmere shawl from Great-Uncle Clarence’s trip to India, the silver belt buckle that had come from a great-aunt to Mother, the silver candlesticks, three pewter thimbles. All of these Mother had bequeathed to me in her will. But though I roamed the house in wild pursuit, checking closets, trunks, and cabinets, I found not one of them.
On instinct, I entered my parents’ bedroom and opened the trunk Patience had brought from Ohio. Beneath sundry effects I found a small cloth purse. I pulled open its strings. Inside it held a listing of these items from a Philadelphia pawnbroker’s shop and twelve dollars remaining in bills and coins. Patience had pawned precious things that by rights were mine.
Her treachery ought to have been evident to me before; in her months with us, though she had no paying situation, she’d come home with a new gown, a hairbrush, a hat, hairpins, and a pair of shoes. She’d been gilding herself with my inheritance.