All Bedlam Courses Past (part eighty-one)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part eighty-one)

We have spoken of the bargain a thousand times, you know it very well, that since the day of her christening you are promised to Amaldi’s Anna Maria. But the university, your medical studies, the room holding one bed and four students! How could the marriage be? It could not. For a time. And the family in Livorno, imposed on far enough, you said, for the room and meals. And the hours at the hospital, and the poverty, and the better times to come. And so the marriage could not be. For a time. Then those people. And the opportunity (so-called) in America, the Contessa’s name alone to silence the gossips’ tongues. And so the marriage could not be! For a time, Gio. And Anna Maria passing twenty-eight years, spending her days cloistered in her father’s house, humiliated to show her face! And your poor mother, Gio, who knows what they say when they point behind her back, because her son in America, the Spiritualist, wishes what they’d warned her he would. His freedom! To marry a

Never mind.

Elope! Flee! Élucide would say it, too. But Polly had been talking to Ranilde.

Well, what was it to set your cap at a man?

She let prospects flit, told her imagination: no embellishing. And no emotion. Consider the gent before you.

He would never take her anyplace. Mr. Unversaght seemed, from a distance, immovable…maybe unconversant was the better word, as to passions. But some of that wealth could be spared.

“Mother, Roman wonders why you and Papa have never visited.”

“Mother, we will call our daughter Cartesia.” Ha.

With Eugene the question direct was possible: What if you married me?

Would he consider the hostessy aspect of a Mrs. Ebrach at Crownhaven? The profit in it, the calls on the town ladies, the forced returns. But weighing matters in that light, would he decide she was not…

Grand enough. Old enough. There was a sales pitch she didn’t know how to frame.

So then, Richard, is this what you really want?

Her parents had told her she was not to speak to Everards again on any excuse. (Although they hadn’t, because that was too harsh and too definite.) How old was he now? Aging, yes…

Pickling, as Papa would say.

But he was still…that.

For all the dirt drink had driven him to, the most literal of wallowings, a Horace sermon embodied (and of these, he deserved to sit through ten)…

For having kindheartedness in a mother; the power of faith, for that matter…

Erudition in a father; for inheriting neither…

For having a brother who—

Who, surprisingly, could step out.

She wanted to keep awake, not wake tomorrow to an alteration. Her plans and lists, as long as she was under this roof, could not safely be jotted down; they needed fixing in memory.

86

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part eighty-two)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)