Mrs. Early being embarrassed about things.”
“Isn’t that true!” exclaimed Mrs. Landon, but Margaret had meant her remark as a compliment, and Mrs. Landon did not.
Four days later, Margaret left on the train for Kirkwood, and didn’t hear another thing about Andrew Early for six months.
All the talk in St. Louis was of the coming fair, Olympic Games, and Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was to begin on April 1, 1903, a hundred years to the day from the Louisiana Purchase (and wasn’t it amazing that the city had been required to raise fifteen million dollars to put on the fair, the exact sum President Jefferson had spent on the whole of the Louisiana Purchase? If nothing else showed the progress humankind had made during the nineteenth century, that surely did). Among the Bells, on Kingshighway, near Forest Park, there was a blaze of chatter and news. There was absolutely no doubt there that St. Louis, Missouri, was the center of the universe, the coming city of the twentieth century, and certain to eclipse New York and Chicago, if not London, Paris, and Rome, as the greatest city the world had ever known. And why not? All the best Frenchmen, Italians, Englishmen, and Germans had decamped from those moldy old spots and set out for right where the Mighty Mississippi and the Big Muddy met and married. The twentieth century in St. Louis, Margaret was given to understand, was already vastly improved over the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, St. Louis was all cholera and typhoid fever, smallpox, and tornadoes and heat and damp air, a place where dead dogs and cats lay in the streets for weeks. Now St. Louis was shoes and shipping and flowers and ladies’ dresses and coats and magazines and beer, not to mention plug tobacco and people from around the world meeting up in Forest Park to display their wealth. Would the capital of the United States be moved to St. Louis? It made perfect sense, even if it wasn’t likely to happen. At least you could point out what a good idea it would be, the whole nation gathering right here in the natural middle of the country. And then, as if to ratify what everyone was saying, the imminent exhibition was put off for a year—until 1904—because so many nations wanted to come and display themselves that the facilities could not be built in time.
After Thanksgiving, Elizabeth had a baby—the child was named Lucy May, after Mercer Hart’s mother (whose maiden name was Wilder—“not Jewish at all,” said Mrs. Bell. “Very prominent out West somewhere. Where would that be, Mr. Bell? Where is it that the Wilders are prominent?”
“Big family,” said Mr. Bell, “prominent everywhere,” without looking up from his paper.
“Not here,” said Mrs. Bell.)
Elizabeth and Mercer exuded the gravity of genuine parents from the first day of Lucy May’s existence. Margaret got none of the feeling that she got with Robert and Beatrice, that the youth of the child was a mistake time would eventually correct. Although Elizabeth had little experience of children or infants, the nanny (actually a woman from southern Missouri named Agatha) had to show her how to do something just once for Elizabeth to understand and master it—bathing, dressing, nursing, changing, rocking, singing, carrying from room to room. Agatha said to Margaret, “Good Lord, I’ve seen some babies, you do exactly what is right to do, and it doesn’t have any effect at all, they just go their own way as if you hadn’t done a thing! This child is the kindest. Whatever you do for her makes her happy. Your sister is going to be spoiled, and go on and have another and then another, and then, one day, she’ll get one of those unrewarding ones, and then she’ll know how spoiled she is.” She shook her head sadly at this thought.
Margaret found Agatha to be such a sympathetic person that she even told her about Lawrence and Ben and that hanging she couldn’t remember she’d been taken to on the very day of Elizabeth’s birth, so long ago now. Agatha shook her head again. She said, “Those days are gone, and it’s a good thing. Down there, where I come from, near Sedalia, you were afraid to answer the door in case it might be someone bringing home a body, either dead or half alive—and which was worse, I want to know. If it wasn’t snakebite, then it was gunshot, and if it wasn’t gunshot, then