The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell (5 page)

As far as washing, I would do that in my room with a bucket of water made warm in the kitchen below. I would use the same water to wash things that could not go to the woman down the street, picking a day when the sun was coming through the window and the cotton would dry on the back of the chair.

All of that was easy enough. The evenings downstairs were less so. Mr. Blandin made it known that I was there at his request, but I still felt out of place, as one might expect. I was unpracticed at the banter, and I often found myself forcing awkward laughs a short moment after those around me. I sat at a table off to the side and soon had a chair that was considered mine. I was shy at first about playing the violin, but the men seemed to like it and began making requests. I knew many tunes, but not the canal songs with their refrains about low bridges and unruly mules. These I had to learn. One evening a scruffy coal loader named Jimmy Lawson called out for me to play “Never Take the Hindshoe.”

“Don’t know it,” I said over the din.

Jimmy rose to his feet, unsteady. “I’ll sing it fer ya.” Blandin’s became quiet.

Jimmy had been drinking and wasn’t any choirboy to start with, yet he managed to stumble his way through a song that warned against getting near a mule’s private parts, for, as it said, “the business end of a mule is mighty ticklish.” With these words, the room burst into hoots and howls—the mere mention of private parts, even those of a mule, the cause for great laughter.

But not every canal song was of low humor. The boat men also entertained a variety of romantic notions—songs about the perils of the canal and verses about tearful ladies left behind, sung plaintively as if they had set sail for China. As silly as those songs seemed to me, the men enjoyed them. Soon, I came to share their good spirits, more so after I discovered that a glass of beer made it all go a little easier. In time, stubborn mules and private parts became funny to me too.

What didn’t become funny were the cruel comments about the boatmen’s cooks or wenches, as they called them. These were unmarried women who, for pitiful wages, did the cooking and cleaning. Even after the meals were served, their duties were usually not complete until the master of the boat was fast asleep. I would feel myself flush when they were mocked, but, of course, I said nothing. Worse, I had to display some merriment, so I got good at acting amused when I wasn’t. And if I didn’t laugh heartily enough at a crude joke, it could be forgiven along with my other faults—I was slighter than most and didn’t drink whiskey or chew tobacco. But because of these shortcomings and, most surely, because I was there at the invitation of Daniel Blandin, I became, soon enough, everybody’s little brother.

* * *

I stood with my arms folded until my students realized that nothing would happen unless they were still. When all was quiet, I recited the very words that had been said to me just a few years before: “Dance is not a series of learned figures. It is a formal gesture between a man and a woman. You will learn the manners.”

And thus it began with the etiquette: the proper way to approach a lady, when to bow and when to curtsy, how to escort a partner to her seat, when to withdraw. I told my students how I had been taught at the academy by Miss Burchett, a matron who always looked like she had just eaten a lemon and who recited rules till we were saying them in our sleep. To lighten the load, I scrunched my face and imitated her nasal declarations. “A gentleman is
always
introduced to a lady. A lady is
never
introduced to a gentleman.”

My students laughed at the mimicry, but in Miss Burchett’s class we hadn’t even smiled for fear we would be made to sit in the corner. Miss Burchett acted like Moses come off the mountain—commandments for everything, and all of them designed to keep the sexes apart. “All intimacy ends with the dance!” she would proclaim at least once a week. And that, without fail, would lead to her golden rule: “It is better to be deemed prudish than indiscreet.” These rules had no good effect that I could see. For my part, I would have welcomed anything that might have even passed for indiscretion, a recollection I did not share with my students.

In the lessons that followed, I started in on the quadrille: how the couples were numbered, their positions, where the head of the hall would be. Then came a walking tour of the basic figures: right and left, ladies chain, forward two, and chassez. By the second week it was time to play the violin and call out the figures. Soon my students could perform a simple version of the quadrille. Ahead of us still were the so-called promiscuous figures, more complicated maneuvers in which partners switched for a portion of the dance.

On Monday and Wednesday I had nine students, four boys and five girls, ages twelve to fifteen. On Tuesday and Thursday I had seven young ladies. Four of them—Sarah Clemson, Jane Brower, and the Blackstone twins—were age sixteen and from the upper village of Honesdale. Dorothy Millen, Evelyn Sanders, and Lydia Watson were a year or two older and from the village of Bethany. The girls in my older class constantly exchanged looks and whispered to each other. I ignored it, though at times I felt excluded, as though I were back at school. And did they really believe I was a man? That thought continued to astonish me. It seemed that they did, but how long would they? After all, they looked and smelled like girls to me. How did I look and smell to them?

I had expected my younger students to be the more difficult to teach. They weren’t. They listened and did what they were told. My older girls were the ones who bridled. They sighed and put on bored expressions, making it clear that they were oppressed by the dreariness of the province. I had little patience for it.

“Are you too good for this?” I asked one afternoon. The silence said I was close to the truth. “Would you prefer the society of Baltimore?”

Miss Millen glanced about nervously. “I just don’t want to dance like my grandmother.”

“We would like to learn the waltz,” said Miss Watson.

“And the mazurka,” said Miss Sanders.

I held back a smile. I had planned all along to teach the waltz, but now I thought to use it as a carrot. “Very well,” I said, as though a bargain were being struck. “I will teach you the waltz. And the mazurka too, perhaps. But only after you show me that you have mastered the quadrille.”

The girls brightened, and the next few lessons went quite well. Even so, during our recesses, the Bethany girls would go off by themselves, and in observing them, I noticed a curiosity. In years past, I had sometimes heard young women variously compared to dolls, angels, or fillies. I had thought the imagery insipid, if not insulting. Why couldn’t they just be young women? But now, oddly, I began to do the very same thing, at least in my thoughts. Plain and round, Evelyn Sanders was a stuffed doll that one would hug at night till the seams gave out. With skin you could see through and hair the color of wheat, Dorothy Millen was a porcelain figure with folded wings, something you would set upon a shelf. And Lydia Watson, with her sturdy frame, dark skin, and long brown hair? She was a horse running loose in a field.

* * *

While reading the
Democrat
one morning at Blandin’s, I came across a notice placed by the Young Men’s Literary Society. It was for a lecture titled “Bleeding Kansas” to be given at the Cornell Hall that evening. I decided to go, wishing to hear a man of the world speak on a public issue, an experience that had not been mine before.

I arrived late so I could stand out of view at the back. It was a warm night for May, and the hall was dense with smoke and the strong odor of men’s bodies. I couldn’t see the speaker, but his voice was clear. “Now we have all heard it referred to as
popular sovereignty
. Sounds most upright, does it not? But what do we call it when men from Missouri cross over to murder and pillage those who have settled the Kansas land with the idea of freedom?
Popular sovereignty?
No! Call it by its real name.
Popular thuggery
!”

The room exploded with cheers. When the speech was done, men went this way and that, as those wishing to exchange greetings with the speaker had to push past those trying to leave. As I waited for things to sort out, a gentleman in a tailored waistcoat came up to me. “I am Kenneth Burton,” he said with a slight bow, “former chairman of this august organization, now demoted to the reception of new members. My friends and polite enemies call me Burton.”

I gave a nod. “Joseph Lobdell.”

“The dancing teacher.”

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

“Well, Mr. Lobdell, I’m heading to the Hotel Wayne for some light supper with a couple of friends. Would you join us?”

I was unsure of what to do, but the man appeared well-intended, and saying yes seemed the easiest thing. We left the hall and set off down Main, he asking polite questions about the music school while I wondered when it would come clear that I knew nothing about political matters.

We entered the hotel and were led to a table that seemed to have been held for Mr. Burton—or Burton as I soon came to call him. The dining room was full, and there was the hum of people speaking in low voices, nothing at all like the usual noise at the tavern. Moments later we were joined by Mr. John Marbury, treasurer of the Literary Society, and Mr. Howard Chase, a banker who had a seat on the Board of Merchants.

“Well, what did you think of our little meeting?” Marbury asked, once he was seated.

“Quite lively,” I said, thinking this would be a good thing to say.

Burton snorted. “Of course you found it lively. You thought you were attending a literary convocation but found yourself in a nest of barnburners. I tried to resist, but I was deposed.”

“Burton,” said Mr. Chase, “you were not
deposed
. Your term had expired, and someone else was elected. You were not chairman for life.”

“Well, no thanks to you.” Burton then turned to me with mischief in his eye. “You know, there are some who believe that I am opposed to the political transformation of the
literary
society because I have sympathies for the South—which, of course, I do. There are even whispers that I am a spy—”

“Oh, Burton, please!” groaned Chase.

“Of course, for that to be true,” continued Burton, “you’d first have to imagine someone in Richmond actually caring to know what is happening in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.”

“As you can see,” said Marbury, “our Mr. Burton has a flair for the dramatic.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” asked Burton. “I thought I’d founded a book club, but it turns out I’ve started an ill-mannered political party. This is bitter fruit.”

Mr. Marbury rolled his eyes, and I had the sudden warm thought that I was not about to be exposed as a bumpkin, but was, instead, being fought over.

“What our good friend Mr. Burton refuses to concede,” said Chase, “is that attendance has grown tenfold since the society began political discussion.”

“Yes,” said Burton, “and if we were to start singing bawdy songs in church, I’m sure the numbers there would increase as well.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I liked this Burton. And Honesdale, I decided, was something more than I had imagined. The town, it seemed, was being run about by ideas—first, a serious and impassioned speech; then, amusing and irreverent conversation. The mixture was intoxicating, and I returned to Blandin’s tavern feeling giddy—not angry that this world was generally denied to women but excited that it was now open to me.

T
HE SCENT OF apple blossoms drifted in and made everyone light-headed. The girls chattered like squirrels, and I let it go on, remembering my days at school. Finally, I raised my hand. The hall became quiet, and I gave the news: we would begin the waltz. A cheer rose up, but I cut it short. “Don’t be fooled,” I said. “The steps are not difficult, but the grace is found only with patience and practice.”

I put out my arms as though holding a partner and performed the dance. Then I took the violin and played a song I knew only as “Laura’s Waltz.” I bowed the melody three times, telling the young ladies to remember it, for we would dance while the violin was silent. “We will hum the melody, at first,” I said, “then just hear it on our own.” Doubtful looks came back at me, but I had seen it taught this way in Coxsackie. According to Miss Burchett, it would break the habit of
following
the music. I didn’t have much of an opinion on that, but it did solve the problem of seven dancers.

The girls from the upper village formed pairs. Evelyn and Dorothy made the third. Lydia and I, the fourth. I had danced with my girlfriends at school, so taking the man’s part was not new to me. “The gentleman,” I said, “places his right hand on his partner’s back, the lady her left on his shoulder. Dance as though you have a fat pillow between you.”

As I spoke, Lydia and I assumed the posture. The others followed. When all were ready, I gave a nod. We stumbled with the melody right away, the girls unable to hold their laughter. We tried again to the same result. After that, we did better.

When the lesson was done, the girls put on their cloaks and began to leave, except for Lydia, who walked to the open window. Once the others had left, I went over to her.

“What’s out there?”

“Horses and hay wagons,” she said, looking at the fields.

“And a couple of dogs, it would seem.”

“Yes. Down by the creek. They’ve got something up a tree.”

“You danced very well today,” I said.

Lydia kept looking out and didn’t reply. I thought I should say something more, but before I could she turned and set her green eyes on me. “Professor Lobdell, would you take me as a student on the violin?”

I held back a small laugh. Such drama. “I am a music teacher, Miss Watson. Of course, I will take you. You will need to speak to your mother.”

A wisp of a smile crossed Lydia’s face. “Mother has already agreed.”

* * *

I sat in my room, lamp lit, pen in hand. My letter home was weeks overdue, but one fear or another had kept me from it. I didn’t want to tell more lies, and what could I say about my new life that wouldn’t be one? Worse, Basket Creek now seemed like a story someone had told to me.