In Need of a Good Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

her withered hand clutching Rowena’s wrist. Her voice dripped with such exaggerated sympathy, Rowena could have choked. “I know it’s difficult to hear the words of these cruel gossips, words which can’t possibly be true, but I am only thinking of you. A widow, however grieved, must think about her future.”
    And so Rowena had agreed to the dinner out of sheer weariness. But after two stultifying hours of conversation about Donald’s button factory and his collection of antique candlesticks, she had nearly leapt from her chair when a member of the Channings’ army of maids whisked her empty ice cream dish away. Rowena muttered her good evening and scandalized all three of them by insisting that she would find a carriage home, alone. Outside it was pouring rain, and water gushed in rivulets through the mud in the street. Rowena tried to open her umbrella, but the ribs were stuck—it had been ages since she’d actually needed to use it—so she tucked it under her arm and hurried on, the sides of her soggy bonnet sinking against her cheekbones. She imagined that with each sure footstep, each clack of her heel on the cobblestone, she was breaking one piece of Mrs. Channing’s limitless bone china, until the woman would have to suck her soup out of her nephew’s sweaty hat.
    Rowena’s anger kept frothing up inside her as she passed through the square onto Broadway. Suddenly, her heel caught a rough stone and she slid and fell, landing hard on her back side with a splash. The world halted for a long moment. She felt a roiling then in her lungs like nothing she had ever known, and she took a breath, then stood and screeched like a banshee. All the couples who were hurrying home from the theater scattered like a horde of mice. Rowena hauled back with her umbrella and pummeled it against the lamppost with all her might. “I will sell my body to the sailors at South Street,” she shrieked at everyone and no one, whacking the base of the streetlamp over and over until the glass lantern swung dangerously from one side to the other, “before I marry that dull, yellow- bellied …” she whacked and whacked and tried to think of what else he was … “ festering-eared Donald Channing!”
    “Miss,” a man said, approaching her carefully. “Do you need help?”
    She looked at him, her big doe eyes wide and wild. The things she knew she should say— No, thank you, sir, I’m fine or Yes, sir, I need a whole lot of help indeed —flashed through her mind like the words painted on the banners soldiers carried into battle. But instead she opened her mouth and let out a twisted wail so beastly it seemed to curl the hair at his temples. His mouth dropped open and he stood staring stupidly at her. She lifted her umbrella straight up in the air as if she intended to clobber him over the head with it, a near impossibility, since Rowena was barely five feet tall, and he shrank away and turned a corner, his eyes on the ground as he ran. Seeing how easy it was to get rid of him coaxed a rippling laugh from her chest. But the laugh turned down on the end, into a sob, and she sank down in the gutter and cried for a full ten minutes before scraping herself up and walking the rest of the way home.
    Rowena now understood that there were particular sorrows one would never get over. She no longer saw her existence as an ascending march toward happiness; instead, it was a stasis to be endured, a clanging and sputtering machine that produced nothing.
    Miraculously, as far as Rowena could tell, the Channings had not heard about her outburst just a block away from their home. Rowena shook her head, wondering if this was providence or a curse, since, if Mrs. Channing had seen the incident with the umbrella, Rowena would be saved from worry about being invited to anything ever again. She picked up her pen and pulled a leaf of paper from the desk drawer.
    Dear Mrs. Channing , she wrote. Thank you for your kind invitation. Since our last visit I