I returned to K.C. in the spring of ’72 as I have said, got a haircut and a twenty-five-cent bath at the barbershop, and having donned my city clothes from a trunk I kept in storage, went over to Amelia’s school.
That prune-faced headmistress could not have been kindlier.
“Ah,” she said, pouring me a dinky little cup of tea, “we were so concerned that you would not get back to us in time from your scientific expedition.”
I was aching to see my niece and what further refinements she had acquired over the winter, but figured I had ought to play along with Miss Elizabeth Wamsley, especially when sitting in the parlor of her Academy for Young Ladies, with a potted plant sticking its leaves into my ear and a crocheted doily under both arms and another back of my head to catch the bear grease.
“I trust,” Miss Wamsley said, “that you collected many rare fossils for deposit in our Eastern museums.”
You can see what little Amelia’s version of my buffalo hunting must have been.
“You must tell me about it,” Miss W. went on. “But first, I do think we should dispose of certain matters which, though crass, are pressing. Indeed,” she said, showing her long front teeth in a supposed smile, “aren’t they usually one and the same? … Now of course you understand, dear Mr. Crabb, that when a student withdraws after completing more than two weeks of a given term, no refund of fees is granted.”
I swallowed all my tea in one gulp, so that it wouldn’t make too much of a mess in case I dropped the cup and saucer.
“Amelia has run off,” I says, and my heart turned to bone.
Miss Elizabeth Wamsley give a high titter that sounded like somebody was ripping a silk shawl.
“Not in the least, my dear Mr. Crabb! Our dear Amelia is to be married. We had no earlier means of apprising you, no telegraph or postal address by which one could reach your far-flung desert and mesa.”
“Who to?” I asks. I reckon if I had been elsewhere than that stuffy parlor with its stink of dried flowers, I should have followed up the query with a fervent threat to kill him. I had just naturally assumed that anybody who might want to marry Amelia, or say he did, would be some low-life skunk. You see, in spite of my frequent mention of how much class she had developed, in the bottom of my mind was the memory of pulling her from the gutter, and a conviction that if left to her own devices she would return there.
Miss Wamsley says: “Modest as we habitually are here, Mr. Crabb, I do think that in this case we might be permitted to suggest our satisfaction at Amelia’s engagement. Wamsley Academy alumnae are mistresses of some of the finest houses in our Nation, and ____”
“Who to?” I asks again, for I didn’t realize she was delaying so as to build up the effect, rather than soften the blow.
I swear to you she then mentions the name of a state senator, and says it was his son, a young lawyer in K.C., who Miss Wamsley had hired to represent the Academy in a matter of nonpayment of tuition-here she give me a meaningful look-in the course of which business he come to the school, saw Amelia, and “his heart was pierced by Cupid’s bolt,” according to my informant. The courtship took place over the winter, and the marriage was set for May. That was why Miss Wamsley was a-worried about the fees: her semester run to June. The money I had laid down the last fall covered only the first term. So far in ’72 Miss W. had carried Amelia on credit, though of course she knowed a celebrated explorer like myself was good for it.
I paid her forthwith a handsome sum. I was ashamed of my quick and erroneous judgment on Amelia, but the rapid rise of that little gal made me dizzy. A respectable marriage was what I had dreamed of for her, but coming this soon had caught me unawares.
The old crow cleared out soon as she got her cash, and sent for Amelia, who was taking her needlework class or some such. My niece give me a kiss upon the cheek and I was sure relieved I had had it shaved just prior. For if anybody come close to the gentility of Mrs. Pendrake, it was her. And mind you, Miss Wamsley had them Academy girls dress right severe in dark-colored clothing and covered from chin to ankle, without paint or powder or jewelry, and most of the students I seen didn’t have no more distinction than a flock of sparrows. They was drab. Not Amelia. In the same circumstances, she looked exactly supreme.
She set beside me on the sofa, with her hands in her lap and her chin at a graceful angle, and said: “I trust your trip was gratifying.”
“Miss Wamsley,” said I, “has told me you was getting married.” A little spark come into her eye, and I quick added: “I don’t have no objection.” Then I said: “I reckon you are in love.”
Amelia first looks proudly down her nose, and then she suddenly goes into a knowing expression: not tough or cynical, but simply realistic.
Putting aside her formerly lofty tone, she says: “You never really believed I was your niece by blood? Because if you did, I would honestly feel awful.”
You know how you can go along in life for years without facing essential matters of this type. Absolute definitions generally make a person feel worse. I’ve known heavy drinkers who have survived for years merely by not admitting they was confirmed drunkards. I expect you thought back a ways when I commenced my association with Amelia that I believed in our blood-relationship on mighty flimsy evidence; that a girl in her position would say anything a customer wanted to hear; that playing the role of my niece was a hell of a lot easier profession that the one from which I had reclaimed her.
These considerations was not unknown to me. But look here: the kind of life I had lived, I had earned a right to say who was or wasn’t my kin. Every real family I had ever possessed had been tore away from me by disaster. I got to figuring the natural relationships was jinxed for me, and when little Amelia offered herself, I accepted forthwith and believed the privilege was all mine.
“I mean,” she says, “I knew you were getting your fun out of it and so was I, but I have this chance now to become respectable, and who knows when it would come again?” She takes my hand, and she says: “I’d like it real fine if you could give me away. My mother ran off with a drummer when I was twelve, and my father drank himself to death a couple years later. That was in Saint Joe, and then I came downriver. A fellow that came into Dolly’s used to tell me about the Mormons; which is how I know about their ways.” She smiled; I reckon you could say she somehow preserved a innocent quality that was genuine.
Well sir, after I got used to the idea, I was right proud. I felt forlorn in that I would soon lose the company of my “niece,” but the satisfaction that I had significantly altered her fate brought me back almost even again. If respectability was always denied me personally, at least in this instance I was able to arrange it, so to speak, for another. That’s about as high as a white man can aspire.
“Amelia,” I says, “you don’t have to have blood-ties to get a family feeling about a person. I am connected in natural brotherhood to a man who is so low as to drop snake heads in the whiskey he sells, and I do not give a damn for him if you will pardon the expression. Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.
“So you are my niece in the only fashion that means anything. And because I love you as such, I am not a-going to give you away. You had better go as an orphan to this wedding, which is the truth, anyway.”
She really did protest, which made me feel good for I reckon she wouldn’t have wanted me there had she not had some fondness for me, but I stayed firm. I seen now that my old dream of getting her well married and then dropping around to the house of a Sunday to take dinner with her and her husband would not work. I could never keep up the pose of explorer or fossil-hunter or whatever the tale she’d handed the senator’s son as regards her “uncle.” However, after a time I did realize that it would be humiliating to have nobody stand up for her, considering the wedding was to be a social affair attended by the better class of K.C. So I promised to provide a man.