Bell acted more as if Elizabeth were her own sister than the sister of her son’s wife. The goods were beautiful, and Mrs. Bell, as befitted a St. Louis society woman, had hardly put any wear into them.
JOHN GENTRY died in a condition of some satisfaction. He was almost seventy-six. At the funeral, the minister said, “John Gentry entered the state of Missouri riding in the back of a wagon. A son of the South, he proved himself a patriot to the larger nation, and he earned the respect of both sides.” (“Well, he did that with his shotgun,” whispered Lavinia.) “He took care of his slaves and, after that, his servants and his workmen, his mules, his acres and his horses and his daughters, and his granddaughters. He sustained his connections with friends and relations on both sides of the conflict, and the same cannot be said for every Missourian of those days. In doing all of these things, he took good care of his soul. And so”—the minister sucked in a deep breath and lifted his eyes above those assembled in the pews—“we plan to meet John Gentry up yonder, where no doubt he has already been put in charge of something.” The congregation laughed and nodded, and afterward, many said of John Gentry that he was a generous man. To Margaret, his life seemed complete and all of a piece. The world had swirled around him, but he had done as he pleased and remained as evidently himself as a tree might, or a stone might. Lavinia and her sisters kept pronouncing his eulogy: “Well, Papa was always Papa, I’ll say that for him.”
Robert Bell took over the farm. What happened was entirely practical—Lavinia’s sisters all had lives of their own, in Hermann, Chicago, and West Branch, Iowa. The farm would not be sold or broken up, everyone agreed (either land prices were low and certain to rise, or they were high and destined to go higher—Margaret didn’t know which), and, furthermore, such a farm would virtually run itself, so efficient was the operation John Gentry had set in place. Therefore, Robert and Beatrice with their two little boys, Lawrence and Elliott, who had followed hard on the heels of the marriage, would live on the farm, being seen to by Alice. Lavinia, Elizabeth, and Margaret would move into the house in Darlington. Once installed there, Margaret understood without its being said that she was to parade herself, the blooming Elizabeth in tow, up and down Front Street, executing errands at the retail emporia and the better workshops. A single lady, especially an old maid, as she was getting to be, could not just stroll about uptown without calling her sense of propriety, or her actual virtue, into doubt; nevertheless, a subtle reminder to any unmarried or widowed and gainfully employed men, young or old, that a single lady had certain personal and social advantages was not out of order.
The house was small and cramped, not the spacious doctor’s establishment where they had lived on Mackie Street, but an extremely modest appropriate-for-newlyweds house on Cranmer Street. Lavinia had been through the wringer of local gossip upon the occasion of the doctor’s death, which, though it had been deemed understandable on the whole, was a topic of considerable vitality, given the additional bad fortune of the deaths of Ben and Lawrence. Lavinia was not ready to be batted about at local church suppers and quilting bees any more than she had to be, yet a reclusive life would certainly invite as much remark as a bold one. The key was to find a sociable but self-reliant middle ground.
It was a beautiful spring. Margaret enjoyed the succession of blooming trees planted everywhere—pussy willows followed by forsythia followed by dogwood followed by redbud, cherry, peach, apple, hawthorn, and lilacs white and purple. Some trees were fragrant, some merely foamingly rich and beautiful. She felt this unusual wealth of blooming to be a promise regarding the new century. As an old maid, she should have been sober and circumspect, but she didn’t seem all that old to herself, not as old as Beatrice, who was becoming plump and harried and now wore her hair like Lavinia. Lavinia, of course, only had eyes for her new grandson, Lawrence, whom she considered the spitting image of Ben. He looked like a Bell to Margaret, however. She understood that Mrs. Bell agreed with her. Elizabeth confided that Mrs. Bell was disappointed in this offspring,