We Five Read online

  “Permit me, then, to disparage her for the opposite reason. I shall mark the very odd stripe of liberality to her character.”

  “Do as you wish, Mamma, but I believe Mrs. Colthurst’s kindness devolves from her great fondness for us. And in my mind, there is not a thing odd or wrong about it.”

  “Then I shall confine myself to my feelings about your daily absence from this house. Surely, I cannot be singular in pining away for a missing daughter. Doesn’t Carrie’s mother feel similarly deprived?”

  “I suspect, Mamma, that it isn’t my society you are missing so much as my lack of attendance to your every hourly need. Which distinguishes you from Mrs. Hale. Carrie’s mother doesn’t lie abed all day as you are wont to do, with sufficient opportunity for indulging in troubling contemplations. She occupies herself in her solitary hours with industrious and conscientious endeavours. She plays upon the harp. She bakes muffins for the poor. Then in the evening, when Carrie returns, the two are pleasantly restored to the company of one another, but neither will have considered the separation as any sort of trial. To be quite honest, Mamma, I’ve never seen such sensible affection demonstrated betwixt a mother and daughter.”

  Mrs. Barton’s eyes flashed; her nostrils dilated. It was a look half put up and half sincere. “I noted three, perhaps four, things in that last peroration which pricked this particular mother’s soul—the last being the most distressing. Have we nothing between us which remotely resembles the affection shown by Carrie and Sylvia Hale for one another?”

  “I’ve seen little evidence of it.”

  Mrs. Barton flung a palm to her chest and gasped.

  “Hold, Mamma. Let me finish. We haven’t the same affection because its character bears no similarity to our own. Carrie and her mother are in some ways more like friends than relations. We are different. You are the mother and I am the daughter, and we know our rôles and we do credit to them.” Maggie cleared her throat. “After a fashion.”

  Mrs. Barton’s frown transformed into a fully blown pout. “I think that I should like to be your friend someday.”

  “And yet, with all candour, Mamma, I would not choose you for a friend. I simply would not.”

  Clara Barton rose from her bed and then promptly put herself down upon the edge. Her hands made themselves into little fists that bunched and clutched the folds of the counterpane with straitened vexation. “Such a thing to say to one you love! Or do you love me?”

  Maggie sate down next to her mother. She took one of Clara’s hands and laid it within the cradle of her own unturned palms. “Stuff! Of course I love you. I simply mean that as much as I esteem Carrie, I could never be Carrie, and as much as, I’m certain, you esteem Mrs. Hale, you could never be Mrs. Hale. The idea, for example, of spending the entirety of one’s evening reading aloud to one’s mother would be the death of me. You know I can scarcely hold myself still long enough to read a book.”

  “No, but do you not, my daughter, keep yourself still and staid to stitch and baste all the day long?”

  “I do not always sit as I sew, Mamma. Sometimes I pace, if you must know. As for books, we haven’t money to buy a single one.”

  “Nonsense! We could buy a book if we wanted. Mrs. Colthurst gives you a good wage. And the annuity your late uncle left us provides a bit of quarterly interest. We are not paupers.”

  Downstairs the clock on the hearth mantel had begun to chime the time: seven thirty (or very nearly seven thirty, for the clock ran fast). Maggie sprang from the bed. “Now I am late.” She reached down and kissed her mother on the cheek and then pivoted on her heel to face the door, poised for swift retreat. Just as suddenly she bethought herself of that thing which often troubled her. “Oh. The palpitations that came again last night—have they now suspended?”

  Mrs. Barton nodded, smiling pleasantly. “This morning, my dear daughter, I am ticking as regularly as a newly wound clock. My vision is restored as well. It was so cloudy yesterday, but now it is clear.”

  “Was it the drops Dr. Osborne gave you?”

  “Most assuredly! Molly’s father is a veritable wonder. How fortunate for me that you and Molly are such good friends or I should never have known him—so skilled he is, and so kind and considerate. And I shouldn’t even mention how very little he charges.”

  Maggie shook her head intemperately. “Dr. Osborne cannot charge much above what he does, Mamma, or word would get out that he is practising the medical arts without proper training or proper credentials. In truth, you and I both know he’s a dentist-surgeon. He pulls teeth. Whatever facility he purports to have for healing the sick—and I shall be charitable—has been gained in a most haphazard and piecemeal fashion.”

  Mrs. Barton bristled. “However the gift has come to him, he is the best I have ever had, and I am quite on my way to a full recovery.”

  “And he drinks.”

  “I thought you were late.”

  “I should simply like to remind you that Doctor Osborne, as you have chosen to denominate him, drinks. He drinks gin. More gin than is prudent, according to Molly, who, I fancy, frets about him daily. If you are setting your cap for this doctor, who is not, in fact, a doctor in any proper legal sense, I would rather you not.”

  Mrs. Barton gaped in disgust. “What an inestimable privilege it is for me to be receiving such sauce and pepper from you, and at such an early hour!” Mrs. Barton folded her arms in a harlequinade of parental disapproval.

  Maggie held her ground. “You are a widow, Mamma. And he is a widower, and I would rather not have him for a father, and that is that.” She turned again to go.

  “You know very well and good,” said Mrs. Barton, addressing her daughter’s back, “it was the death of Molly’s mother and that baby which drove him to the spirits. But two years have passed and he drinks far less than he used to, for he has told me it is no longer necessary to apply such a heavy salve to his mourning heart, when the heart seems to be mending itself sufficiently without medicinal assistance.”

  “Medicinal indeed,” mumbled Maggie.

  “What was that you said?”

  “No film or cloud has ever passed over my eyes, Mamma. What I see, and see quite clearly, is a woman who wishes to marry a certain dentist who would be a doctor, and if I am to place myself before this looking-glass…” Which Maggie did, taking the opportunity of reflection to adjust her bonnet. “…I would see, as well, a daughter who could not under any imaginable circumstances permit her mother to do so.”

  Mrs. Barton’s voice became adamantine: “My darling dear! You are neither my keeper nor my turnkey. It is unavoidable illness that has placed me with frequent inconvenience upon this cot, but I am still free and unbound in thought and spirit; whatever control you feel you exercise over me is illusory.”

  “If you have done, Mamma, I will conclude this most uncomfortable interview by stating that if you marry Dr. Osborne, I shall very likely kill myself.”

  Mrs. Barton turned to look at nothing at all upon the bedroom wall. “Mind, just don’t throw yourself down the well and pollute the town drinking water.” Then, turning back to her daughter’s dorsum with a sad moan of repentance: “You are so very fond of Molly. Would you not wish to have her for a stepsister?”

  “You know that in a very real sense Molly is already my sister. Molly and Jane and Carrie and Ruth. We are, all of us, much more than mere friends. There is no need for you to marry a frequently intoxicated tooth-tugger to have what I, in point of fact, have already. Now I’m very late, Mamma, and I’m keeping the other girls. You know we walk together, and when one of us is late we are all late. Mrs. Colthurst doesn’t like that.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Osborne has already put things into motion. He has asked me to marry him.”

  Maggie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to steady herself. “I rather suspected.”

  “And now that it is become a very real thing, have you anything new to say in response?”


  “Anything new? No, Mamma, I have not.”

  Maggie moved with a heavy tread to the door.

  “Are you going to leave without kissing me?”

  “I’ve kissed you already.”

  With that, Maggie Barton betook herself in great haste down the steps and then flew out the front door and down the lane, whilst her mother sate up in bed and bowed her head in silent lament.

  Then Clara Barton raised her head and shook it, and shook her shoulders as if to wrest herself free of a tangible burden placed thereupon, whilst saying to herself, “I do not live only to satisfy the whims of my selfish, benighted daughter. And I will not have this special day spoilt!” Subsequently, she stretched out her arms and yawned and embraced the morning in a mood that was uplifted by calling to mind Osborne’s visit the previous day under the pretext of administering drops to clarify his patient’s vision. Yet the visit carried a far more consequential purpose: the bestowal of a formal proposal of marriage. This recollection was succeeded by a recurrence of the rapturous thought that Osborne was returning the next after noon—this very after noon—to hear her answer!

  Clara Barton had deferred that answer to give herself the opportunity to talk the matter over with Maggie, but she had lost courage the evening before, and this morning woke feeling defiantly independent of her daughter’s self-imposed jurisdiction. That assertion of maternal liberty was validated when, without even raising the matter with her, Maggie had expressed an opinion that was severally predictable, very much to the point, and altogether maddening.

  But such thoughts were not without momentary repining: “I should have discussed the proposal of marriage with her at some length, for, yes, as my daughter, Maggie is entitled to some opinion in the matter. But what would it serve? Maggie is a stubborn, wilful girl, but she isn’t the mistress of this house! If only she could find a husband of her own and set herself up elsewhere—someplace where she may decide things which have naught to do with me. Would that Mrs. Lumley’s son Henry did ask her to be his wife, and then gave up the nautical profession and took up the vocation of his greengrocer father. Then she would be happy and I would be happy and there would be cabbages and radishes for everyone concerned.”

  Mrs. Barton’s thoughts now turned to the girls who formed “We Five.” “Each of those five garden flowers are at the height of bloom and blow, and yet attachments go wanting. Is there not a single man who durst intrude upon that circle of sisterly affinity? Perhaps a good many men would have them if they would only place themselves in situations of inviting eligibility. But how is such a thing possible when all they do is sit in that back room and sew and knit and squint in the darkness and cackle amongst themselves like old hens?”

  Clara Barton glanced at the eye-wash cup set upon the table next to her bed. A feeling of warm affection overspread her. Then she smiled. She bethought her of the man she esteemed—a man who had taken such good care of her through her recent illness, though he was clearly not permitted by law to do so—a man who would take even better care of her in other places than simply beside the bed, and her smile broadened with this thought, and then a frisson of something very much like love shot through her body. She fell back against the mattress in the manner of a giddy schoolgirl, hugging her pillow to her chest as if it were a newly received valentine she should place close to her heart. In the next moment, a new thought suddenly intervened; she wondered if Maggie had put away whatever it was she had purchased from Mrs. Lumley (Clara had asked for broccoli sprouts), or had it all been left downstairs to wither without attendance?

  Food was on her mind, for her appetite had returned. And it was all due to Dr. Osborne—attributable both to his physician’s skills, which he had acquired through years of opportunistic study and informal apprenticeship, and to the healing wonders that naturally derive from a man’s loving heart.

  A heart the likes of which her daughter Maggie had yet to behold.

  Chapter Two

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A., April 1906

  (from We Happy Five, by Grady Larson)

  Molly swiveled full circle in her father’s dental chair. Then she turned herself around in the opposite direction, giggling like a little girl. Attending the delight in his daughter’s voice, Michael Osborne entered the dental parlor from the living quarters in the back of the flat, which the two shared. He was whipping up lather in his shaving cup with his brush. “If you aren’t careful, you’re going to auger that chair right down into Mrs. Dillingham’s front parlor. And I’ll leave you to contend with her wrath all by yourself.”

  Molly stopped the chair from revolving. She dizzily wagged a forefinger at her father. “Don’t be silly. You always come to my rescue. That’s what fathers are for: to love, protect, and defend their children, no matter how monstrous their behavior.”

  “Explain to me how you can be on the watch for Maggie when you’re nowhere near the window.”

  Molly hopped out of the chair, grabbing one of the arms to stabilize herself. “To which window are you referring, Papa? The one in this parlor that is of absolutely no use? Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but that big tooth blocks our view of nearly everything. I must go to the rear of the flat if I’m to see anything of Polk Street.”

  Osborne crossed to the window at issue and gazed proudly upon his recent purchase: a large ceramic sculpture in the shape of a tooth. It had the words “Osborne Dental Offices” painted on it in big black letters. The tooth hung from an iron rod projecting from the lintel of the window. The morning was breezy; the tooth rocked gently and squeaked.

  “It is quite large, isn’t it? Hum. Would it have been better for me to have bought myself a smaller one?”

  Molly walked over to the window as well, some of the strands from the swirl of long blond hair that had been gathered atop her head escaping and flying off to one side. “Oh, I like it that size,” she said, looking it over. “It’s a real attention-grabber. And it’s very funny. It’s as if one day a fairytale giant came to you with a toothache and he let you keep the tooth after you’d pulled it.”

  “But will it get me more customers?” mulled Osborne aloud. “That’s the question.”

  Osborne had to admit that Molly was right about the tooth impeding any view of the street below. All that could be seen beyond it was a sliver of the bright morning sky.

  “Papa, I think it was a good investment. Didn’t one of your patients say only last week that it was seeing the silly tooth which brought him to you?”

  “Not exactly. He’d already heard about my practice, so it was actually the toothache that put him in that chair. Although my giant tooth did confirm he’d come to the right building.”

  Osborne grinned. It was a crooked grin, made even more obvious by the fact that it uplifted half of his thick black moustache. He dipped his head and squinted through the narrow dagger of light entering the room beneath the tooth. “As if there’s anything else on this cluttered, woebegone street to take notice of. When my practice picks up, you have my promise: I’m going to move us out of this flat and away from this street forever. Even better: we’ll leave San Francisco altogether. I’m thinking Sausalito. I’ll find us a nice cottage there, with a handsome view of the Golden Gate. Someplace where you can plant violets and San Rafael roses, which were always your mother’s favorites, behind whitewashed pickets. I’m sure people in Sausalito have just as much need for dentists as people in San Francisco do.”

  “Oh do be serious, Papa. How can we even think of leaving Frisco! My four best friends in the world live here. And besides, shouldn’t we include Mrs. Barton in this decision, since she’s going to be a member of this family?”

  “That has yet to be decided, monkey.” Michael Osborne was now on his way back to his sink in the rear bedroom.

  Molly followed. “So you think there’s the possibility she’ll say no? Oh how could she, Papa? How could she possibly rob Mag and me of the chance to become true sisters?”

  Osborne began to apply the foamy
white lather to his accumulation of weekend whiskers. “I’m feeling fairly good about my chances with Clara. But I’m not sure your friend Maggie will be all that pleased to see the two of us wed.”

  Molly sighed. “I wish I could say you’re wrong, Papa, but no, I’m afraid she won’t like it at all.” Molly sighed again. “Oh, I do wish you had let me talk to her yesterday. Her influence over her mother is strong, and I’m worried that even if Mrs. Barton wanted to marry you—”

  “Oh, I know she wants to, monkey. No doubt about that.”

  “Yet Mag could still talk her out of it. Mag Barton is quite good at talking my heart-sisters and me out of—and into—all sorts of things. She’s very persuasive.”

  The dentist pursed his lips in thought. “So just what do you think it is, Molly girl—the thing that makes our little Mag Barton dislike me so much?”

  “I don’t think she trusts you, Papa.”

  Osborne held his razor in temporary abeyance. “Trusts me to do what?”

  “Well, to be a good husband to her mother, for one thing. I hope you don’t mind me speaking frankly.”

  “Please, be as frank as you wish. I ought to know exactly where things stand with the girl.”

  “Well, there’s also the other thing. She’s told me already how uncomfortable she is with your practicing medicine without a license.”

  Molly’s father laughed. “Oho! Wait until she finds out I’m also practicing dentistry without a license!”

  “And one thing more,” said Molly.

  “Good God! You’re making me sound like the most disreputable man in San Francisco. Is it the drinking?”

  Molly nodded. “It was drink that killed her father, you know.”

  “To be accurate, it wasn’t demon rum that killed Barton. It was a California Street cable car.”

  “Which he stumbled in front of because he was soused to the guards, Papa. You saw it happen from that dental parlor window—back before there was a gargantuan ceramic tooth blocking the view.”

  “Have you not informed my potential future stepdaughter Maggie that I drink far less than I used to?”