word obey, and Theodore launched into an awkward monologue, deploring the laws that gave control of a wife’s property to the husband and renouncing all claim to Nina’s, and then he coughed self-consciously, as if catching himself, and professed his love.
We’d put the confrontation in Mrs. Whittier’s cottage behind us, not that Theodore ever fully conceded his position, but he’d softened his rhetoric after that day, as any man in love would. The abolition movement had split into two camps just as the men predicted, and Nina and I became even worse pariahs, but it had set the cause of women in motion.
I’d been present when Nina opened the letter containing Theodore’s proposal. It had come late last winter during a long reprieve in Philadelphia with Sarah Mapps and Grace, as we’d prepared for a series of lectures at the Boston Odeon. Reading it, she’d dropped the pages onto her lap and broken into tears. When she read it to me, I cried too, but my tears were a mix of joy and wretchedness and fear. I wanted this marriage for her, I wanted her happiness as much as my own, but where would I go? For days I couldn’t concentrate on the lecture I was trying to write or hide the bereft feeling I carried inside. I couldn’t bear to think of life without her, life alone, but neither did I want to be the burdensome relative living in the back room, getting in the way, and I couldn’t imagine Theodore would want me there.
Then one day Nina came to me, plopping on the footstool beside my chair in Sarah Mapps’ front room. Without a word she opened her Bible and read aloud the passage in which Ruth speaks to Naomi:
Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people will be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
Closing the Bible, she said, “We can’t be separated, it isn’t possible. You must come and live with me after I’m married. Theodore asked me to tell you that my wish is also his wish.”
Theodore had bought a small farm in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We would make an odd trinity there, the three of us, but I would still have Nina. We could go on writing and working for abolition and for women, and I would help with the house, and when there were children, I would be auntie. One life ending, another beginning.
In the dining room, the minister was offering a prayer, and for some reason I didn’t close my eyes as I always did, but watched Nina reach for Theodore’s hand. We’d made a plan that I would give the married pair two weeks of privacy and then join them in Fort Lee, but I thought now of Mother and the question in her letter, Will I see you again? It seemed more than the elegiac pondering in an old woman’s heart, and I wondered if I shouldn’t seize the break in our work and go to her.
“What do you know, we are husband and wife,” Nina said when the prayer ended, pronouncing it herself.
The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers—foxglove, pink azalea, and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with molasses in keeping with Nina’s brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined up, pretending it hadn’t fermented. I’d consumed a sloshing cup of it too quickly and my head was floating about.
I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our friends, our people, and thank God no one is speaking today about the cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier’s son John, whom I’d not seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a poem he’d written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me, he greeted me like a