The Secrets of Mary Bowser (19 page)

There were other Lyceums and Atheneums and all manner of theaters in Philadelphia, of course, with operas and concerts and so forth. But we weren’t welcome there. So though my beau owned genuine mother-of-pearl opera glasses made in Paris, there wasn’t a venue in all of Pennsylvania where he might use them. Theodore and I never spoke of it, him too proud and me too incensed to dwell on the places from which we were excluded. Perhaps he was right about the predictability of the discussions at the Gilbert Lyceum, but I preferred that to the unpredictability that race prejudice brought to the rest of colored life in Philadelphia.

One hot Saturday afternoon, Theodore drove us all the way past Rittenhouse Square. When I mentioned how my throat parched from all the dust the horse kicked up along the ride, he suggested we stop for a dish of ice cream. I felt as elegant as could be when Theodore pulled the phaeton up beside a confectionery, tied the reins to a waiting-post, and promenaded me inside.

A wooden counter ran along one wall of the store, and a ring of tables was set before a dark curtain that hung across the entryway to the kitchen. A white girl, no more than three years old, stood before the counter in a dirt-streaked pinafore, sobbing. Wondering that any child who lived in a confectionery could have a thing in the world to cry about, I knelt beside her, murmuring a stranger’s words of comfort.

The girl held out a doll, its arm dangling loose. As I reached for the broken toy, the curtain rustled behind me and a man asked Theodore, “What can I get you, sir?”

Watching me struggle to push the doll’s porcelain limb back into its socket, the girl let out such a howl, one might have thought it was her own arm that was dislocated. “Maggie, leave the customers be,” the man said.

I turned to tell him it was all right. But before I could speak, he caught sight of my face. His features hardened, and he barked his words at Theodore. “What do you mean, bringing one of them in here? Get your darky concubine away from my child.”

I thought by then I’d heard every aspersion some hateful white person might fling. But nothing prepared me for the shock of that shopkeeper mistaking my light-skinned beau for a white man and presuming I was his harlot, calling me so right to our faces.

Hearing me harassed, Theodore straightened to his full height, holding his eyes on the confectioner and carefully fastening the pearl button that had come undone on his gray kid riding glove. He arced his hand along the countertop, sending platter after platter of daintily arranged meringues crashing to the floor, before turning and offering me his arm.

Much as I wanted to match his gallantry, still I trembled with mortification as I held the broken doll out to the little girl. When she shrank away, whimpering, I laid the pieces on the nearest table and slipped my arm through Theodore’s.

Once we were outside, I was grateful for how quickly he unhitched the phaeton. We rode across Philadelphia without a word passing between us, his silence the only solace he could offer for the insult I’d suffered.

The next time I saw Theodore, we were both careful to avoid any conversation that might recall that afternoon. Much as I longed to forget the indignity done to me by that white man, I should have known Theodore was too chivalrous to let it go unanswered. A few weeks later, as we took our Saturday ride, he seemed especially purposeful about our route. That same igneous shame blazed over me as I realized we were headed back to Rittenhouse Square.

“George took Hattie to Lemon Hill last week,” I said. “She told me the gardens look beautiful this time of year. Let’s go right now and see them.”

But Theodore was determined. He wouldn’t even speak until he guided the phaeton to the spot where we’d stopped before.

“See what I’ve done.” He nodded triumphant at the building.

The storefront was empty, every sign of the confectionery gone.

“It seems my father had the opportunity to acquire some realty in this neighborhood not long ago. And, as the proprietor of a certain establishment could not bear to serve a negress, I certainly didn’t want to do him the indignity of paying rent to a negro, either. So I had him evicted.” He smiled. “You see why I’ve no patience for all the talk at your Lyceum of petitioning the legislature and organizing for our rights. What is the point of all that rigmarole, when a man who is shrewd with the dollars in his pocket can get his way well enough?”

As he flicked the reins, directing the horse toward Lemon Hill, I thought of the sobbing girl and her broken doll. She’d have no new toy now—likely no dinner to eat or place to sleep, even. Her suffering lent little balm for my own, though I knew I couldn’t make Theodore see that, proud as he was for all he’d done to defend my honor.

Theodore’s phaeton seemed like an enchanted chariot, the night we rode all the way to Byberry for the grand ball the Purvises held at their home. I’d never been so far outside the city, and as we drove along I basked in the warm colors of the sun setting over the fields. Theodore and I had been keeping company for over two years by then, the giddy I first felt at being courted grown into a deeper gladsome at the ways he doted on me. Theodore was born to charm, and he always made it easy for me to adore the way he adored me.

The Purvis house was in a style Theodore called Italianate Villa, and my breath caught at the sight of it. I felt like I was in a fairy tale as we stepped beneath the archway to the carved front door. But I was brought back to reality once we were inside.

“Why, here comes Miss Van Lew, in her rose silk.” Phillipa spoke just loud enough for me to hear but low enough to make me feel like I was eavesdropping. “Just see the way it brings out the pink in her cheeks. No wonder she wears it every chance she gets.”

The flush I felt on my face deepened. Whenever I went to Bet’s attorney for money, he gave me all I asked for and ten dollars more. But still, I only purchased one evening gown each season. I couldn’t countenance spending sixty dollars or more on a new dress every time I was invited to a dance. Not when I thought of how Papa and Mama were living. Not when I hung my fine things next to Dulcey’s same few dresses, which grew more patched and faded every year. Besides, most of the ladies at the Purvises’ had only one or two fancy dresses anyway.

“Thank you for the compliment, Phillipa. I’m relieved to hear you value having color in one’s face. Especially since some unkind people say just the opposite of you.” Before she could respond, I turned to Theodore. “Would you be so good as to escort me to the garden?”

As soon as we reached the courtyard, its air heavy with the scent of wisteria, he chuckled. “That should keep the hounds at bay.”

I didn’t much care for being taken for hound bait. “Theodore, sometimes I think you only court me because I’m not Phillipa.”

“Don’t be absurd.” He plucked a cluster of the delicate purple buds, offering them up as an addition to the bouquet pinned at my waist. “I care for you very much.”

“In direct proportion to the amount that your cousin doesn’t care for me?”

“I see Aunt Gwen is incorrect. The Institute’s algebra lessons do have practical applications for young ladies.” Realizing I was in no mood for such teasing, he grew serious. “I care for you because you are as fresh and unspoiled as the first breeze of spring coming through the window of a house that’s been shut up all winter. You’re the antidote to the insufferable society Mother keeps.”

Though such compliments captivated me more than a whole hothouse full of flowers, a part of me still wondered why he always seemed to take such pleasure at how Phillipa and I hissed at each other like alley cats—and why I relished the way Phillipa glared whenever Theodore chatted warmly with me in some secluded corner.

Eight

A
ll through Hattie’s courtship with George, and mine with Theodore, she still met me outside the Upshaws’ every morning so we could stroll to the Institute together. We needed a chance to gossip and giggle about those boys, after all. So I was mighty surprised to arrive downstairs one bright autumn day in ’55 and find no Hattie.

She was never even two minutes tardy, and that day of all days, I figured she would be punctual. Miss Mapps had arranged for Miss Elizabeth Greenfield, who sang at Buckingham Palace before Queen Victoria only a year earlier, to visit our class. Hattie was already lording it over her sister Charlotte that she was to meet the famed Black Swan. Yet here she was, or rather here she wasn’t, about to make us both late.

Hattie was always up long before school, taking breakfast with her father before he crossed the property to tend North Star, the chestnut mare with a bright blaze that he kept to pull his glass-paneled hearse. But as I hurried up Sixth Street to their lot, I saw the stable doors were locked, the shutters still closed on the undertaker’s shop. I made my way to the house, worry catching my breath. When Hattie answered my knock, I saw her hair wasn’t pulled back, and her bonnet sat crooked on her head.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as she jammed her hands into a pair of mismatched gloves.

“Daddy’s been burning up with fever all night. I’ve got to fetch the doctor.” A floorboard creaked above us, and she frowned. “Susan took the week off to visit her mother out to Bridgeport, and I’m afraid to leave him. He keeps muttering about going next door, saying how the shop can’t be left untended.”

Her distress must have rubbed off on me, because before I realized it, I was offering to stay at the undertaker’s shop while she was gone.

I hadn’t ever warmed to the idea of setting foot inside a building where corpses came and went. Usually Hattie teased me about my fear, but now she forgot it entirely as she hugged me her thanks and pressed the key her father kept at his watch chain into my hand.

“Don’t worry about North Star, I’ll tend to her later,” she said. “Just mind the shop, and I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found Doc Weatherston.”

I felt all the cold of that metal key as it turned in the lock of the undertaker’s shop, revealing a small, square parlor where Mr. Jones received his customers. The walls, painted a condolent yellow, were decorated with embroidered mottoes. A mahogany étagère in the corner held a display of Hattie’s landscapes. Though the pall of death was too close for my comfort, I took my place on one of the figured damask settees set around a low rosewood table. I drew out my
Metamorphoses,
meaning to distract myself by reading ahead in my lessons. Captivated by Mr. Ovid’s tales, I started when the front door swung open some half an hour later.

“Hattie, you gave me such a fright.” I laughed as I looked up from my book.

But what I saw stopped up my laughter. The person standing across from me wasn’t Hattie. It was a short white man, his face doughy beneath a shock of orange hair.

“What do you want, sir?”

I hadn’t called a white man sir since leaving Richmond, but the appellation slipped out without me even realizing it. A white man has no business at a colored undertaker’s. And a colored female has no business being alone with a strange white man.

“I’m wanting Joons.” His accent was rough and heavy. The sound of trouble.

“He’s not here.”

“What I hae for him will not wait. Fetch him, or we will all be sorry.”

“Mr. Jones is too sick to come to the shop.”

“Is he abed next door?” His cold eyes shifted in the direction of the house.

I thought of Mr. Jones alone in his sickbed. “The doctor is there with him, tending his fever.” I ventured the lie as boldly as I could. “He was raving earlier, so the physician won’t have him left alone.”

“Raving?” The man pulled out a handkerchief and mopped at his brow. “What has he said?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been to the sickroom myself.”

Without so much as a good-day, he turned and went out the door. I watched through the window as he climbed onto the driver’s bench of a high-sided buckboard and charged away.

I was still worrying the lace on my sleeve when the buckboard reappeared a half hour later, with a colored man sitting beside the orange-haired one. The white man remained on the driver’s bench while his companion jumped down. When he swung open the door of the shop, I saw it was Miss Douglass’s cousin, David Bustill Bowser.

“Miss Van Lew, what are you doing here?”

“Looking after things while Hattie runs an errand.” I dropped my voice, though I knew the stranger outside couldn’t hear. “You know that man?”

Mr. Bowser tugged at his goatee. “He’s a friend of ours. He came by earlier to make a delivery. On behalf of the Odd Fellows.”

I’d seen Mr. Bowser and the other members of the Odd Fellows burial society marching behind Mr. Jones’s hearse as it wound through Philadelphia’s streets to the Lebanon burial ground. But the idea of a white man doing odd jobs for a negro fraternal order didn’t make any sense to me. “He didn’t leave anything when he was here. Just said he had to speak to Mr. Jones and then stormed out.”

“I hope McNiven didn’t frighten you. He’s a Scot, he forgets about custom in this country. I don’t imagine he can understand how a young colored lady feels to find herself alone with a white man.” He motioned to the back room. “If you unlatch the rear entry, we’ll bring our cart around and unload the delivery.”

Mr. Bowser went out to lead the cart horses along the narrow passageway to the rear of the shop, leaving me to open the communicating door between the parlor and Mr. Jones’s work room.

Stacks of planked wood lined the walls, carpenter’s tools neatly arranged on an adjoining bench. Smelling cut pine standing ready to be assembled into coffins made the hair on the back of my neck rise up. I couldn’t bring myself to more than glance over to the embalming table, with its assorted tubes and funnels.

Not caring to see that white man, nor the corpse he meant to deliver, I unlatched the service entry as quickly as I could, then hurried back to the parlor. I closed the communicating door tight, trying to ignore the sound of the broad back doors being swung open and Mr. Bowser and his peculiar companion carrying their delivery inside.

A few minutes later, Mr. Bowser came through the communicating door.