sweetheart. It’s the second largest house in town. And we’ll have our own room.”) And then once they were finally in that room, of course, things had gone awry in a way she wasn’t sure she even had the words to explain.
* * *
• • •
With the same gritting of teeth with which she had endured boarding school and Pony Club, Alice attempted to adjust to life in the small Kentucky town. It was quite the cultural shift. She could detect, if she tried hard, a certain rugged beauty in the landscape, with its huge skies, its empty roads and shifting light, its mountains among whose thousands of trees wandered actual wild bears, and whose treetops were skimmed by eagles. She was awed at the size of everything, the vast distances that felt ever-present, as if she had had to adjust her whole perspective. But, in truth, she wrote, in her weekly letters to Gideon, everything else was pretty much impossible.
She found life in the big white house stifling, although Annie, the near silent housekeeper, relieved her of most household duties. It was indeed one of the largest in town but was stuffed with heavy antique furniture, every surface covered with the late Mrs. Van Cleve’s photographs or ornaments or a variety of unblinking porcelain dolls that each man would remark was “Mother’s favorite,” should Alice attempt to move them an inch. Mrs. Van Cleve’s exacting, pious influence hung over the house like a shroud.
Mother wouldn’t have liked the bolsters positioned like that, would she, Bennett?
Oh, no. Mother had very strong opinions on soft furnishings.
Mother did love her embroidered psalms. Why, didn’t Pastor McIntosh say he didn’t know a woman in the whole of Kentucky whose blanket stitch was finer?
She found Mr. Van Cleve’s constant presence overbearing; he decided what they did, what they ate, the very routines of their day. He couldn’t stand to be away from whatever was going on, even if it was just she and Bennett playing the gramophone in their room and would burst in unannounced: “Is it music we’re having now, huh? Oh, you should put on some Bill Monroe. You can’t beat ole Bill. Go on, boy, take off that racket and put some ole Bill on.”
If he’d had a glass or two of bourbon, those pronouncements would come thick and fast, and Annie would find reasons to lurk in the kitchen before he could rile himself and find fault with dinner. He was just grieving, Bennett would murmur. You couldn’t blame a man for not wanting to be alone in his head.
Bennett, she discovered swiftly, never disagreed with his father. On the few occasions she had spoken up and said, calmly, that no, actually, she’d never been a great fan of pork chops—or that she personally found jazz music rather thrilling—the two men would drop their forks and stare at her with the same shocked disapproval as if she had removed all her clothes and danced a jig on the dining table. “Why’d you have to be so contrary, Alice?” Bennett would whisper, as his father left to shout orders at Annie. She realized swiftly it was safer not to express an opinion at all.
Outside the house was little better; among the townspeople of Baileyville she was observed with the same assessing eye they turned on anything “foreign.” Most people in the town were farmers; they seemed to spend their whole lives within a radius of a few miles and knew everything about one another. There were foreigners, apparently, up at Hoffman Mining, which housed some five hundred mining families from all over the globe, overseen by Mr. Van Cleve. But as most of the miners lived in the company-provided homes there, used the company-owned store, school and doctor, and were too poor to own either vehicles or horses, few ever crossed into Baileyville.
Every morning Mr. Van Cleve and Bennett would head off in Mr. Van Cleve’s motor-car to the mine and return shortly after six. In between, Alice would find herself whiling away the hours in a house that wasn’t hers. She tried to make friends with Annie, but the woman had let her know, through a combination of silence and overly brisk housekeeping, that she didn’t intend to make conversation. Alice had offered to cook, but Annie had informed her that Mr. Van Cleve was particular about his diet and liked only Southern food, guessing correctly that Alice knew nothing about it.
Most households grew their own fruit and vegetables,