To say it another way, her grandmother’s exhortation to me had begun to make a lot of sense. Kate might well have been thinking so too, and given our open affection toward each other, anybody who had seen us as we’d traveled to and through America, and now in Lebanon, Kansas, would have assumed married love.
With new power in my heart, and a feeling that many things of the worst kind in my life had come to an end, I set myself to observe Kate. I wanted to see how she had taken to life on the prairie. If the matchmaking business had become a success—and signs of prosperity abounded—how was she doing it? Was her approach here any different from how she operated in Ireland? Whence came her customers?
From what I could see, Lebanon sat in the heart of farming country, and the little interaction I’d had with local people when we first came here suggested decent, straightforward folk who worked hard. I didn’t yet know, though, some of the relevant social factors, such as the general level of financial comfort, the ratio of single women to single men, the popularity of marriage.
Perhaps the most likely noticeable difference would be in the practice of religion—or so I thought. In the Ireland that Kate had known, close to 100 percent of the rural population attended Mass on a Sunday; here I didn’t know how many denominations existed or the depth and zeal of observance. The plains hold many worshippers.
All things considered, I could scarcely have been more interested in anything in the world when, on that first morning, I sat in the back room of her “office,” as she liked to call it, and listened through the open door to the first marriage candidate of the day.
Nothing in Kate’s practice of matchmaking had changed. Had we been in Borneo, she would have said the same things—or so I felt. Here, though, in Kansas, something unusual did happen—the first man to arrive brought his mother.
He had the same shyness, the same awkwardness as Neddy the Drover. His name was Jubal Johnson—had Kate not asked him to spell it I should never have known how, and however deeply American his accent, he spoke so slowly that I had no difficulty in understanding every word.
Not that he said much at all; his mother did most of the talking. Jubal sat there as if he were mute; his ears, thinned by the weather, looked like wide, semi-transparent leaves. Mrs. Johnson said that she wanted him to find a wife; she was getting old; the farm was now too big; he needed help; and he needed to have children, and stop being a child himself. Those were his mother’s words.
Kate said, “Let me talk to your son alone, right, Mrs. Johnson?”
She had to ask twice. First, the mother said, “He don’t talk for himself.” And then she said, “No secret questions, now.”
Kate said, “I’m sure you have no secrets, Mrs. Johnson.”
Jubal relaxed—that was Kate’s gift. He’d have told her anything, and he did say that the reason he hadn’t married was because he wouldn’t put any woman he liked under the same roof as his mother. Kate told me afterward that she had difficulty in not laughing out loud.
“How do you handle something like that?” I asked her.
Kate said, “A girl came to see me a few weeks ago looking for a husband. She said that most men are frightened of her. She’s six feet tall, built like a small castle, and although she has a kind heart it’s well hidden and she shows to the world an eye so cold I needed a fur coat. That’s the girl for Jubal Johnson.”
Next came the weekend, busy beyond endurance. They came from all over the state to see her, and from northern Missouri, and from southern Nebraska, and from northwestern Colorado—and one youngish woman had come all the way up from the north of Arkansas. On Sunday afternoon, Bobby Bilbum sold hot dogs and ice cream, and encouraged people to hand fistfuls of grass and pieces of fruit to Jerry, who batted his eyelids at them all.
They came from farms and feed stores and grain mills and grocery stores, from church congregations and sporting clubs, from the plains and the prairies; she brought Catholics and Protestants and Shakers and Quakers and Lutherans and Baptists and Buddhists.
“Where are the Jews?” I asked.
“They have their own matchmakers,” said Kate, “and they came here to meet me. I learned so much from them.”
“How did you get so busy, so fast?”
She laughed. “Ben, d’you remember the look on your face when I first told you I was buying a giraffe?”
“I can never see the look on my own face, Kate.”
“Jerry packs them in,” she said. “About three weekends after you went back, people started arriving here at six o’clock on Sunday morning. The state police had to come and regulate the traffic, there must have been five hundred cars and trucks and tractors. In this dusty little place! Bobby thought that he’d died and gone to Heaven.”
Let me describe her to you, as she sat there that twilit evening, the last marriage seeker gone. The sun of the plains had ended her pallor and yet had given her white lines around her eyes from squinting against the glare. She still cared for her hands, which didn’t look like they belonged on the land. We sat on the porch, maybe two hundred yards from the nearest house in that small town, and yet she looked as though she’d come from a salon in New York. Her long skirt of charcoal gray barathea rustled every time she moved; and I tried not to look at the bosom beneath the embroidered cream blouse.
Her command impressed me more than anything—that calm, level air, changed only by a sudden thought, question, or laugh. Call me fickle, call me disloyal to my past life, but my heart turned over that evening. I could understand, and longed to replicate for her, every caring act my father had ever done for my mother. Even now, such a long time afterward, I wish I hadn’t.
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I’d planned to stay two weeks—until the day after the ball. It would mark the end of the search—or so I learned, because as Kate and I stood on the porch of the house, and watched a group of happy men string a banner that shouted THE CHUCK MILLER BALL, she said to me, “If this doesn’t do it—nothing will.”
“Meaning you’ve stopped searching?” I asked, as my mind said, At long, bloody last.
“Ben, you’ve been such a patient man.”
“The things that happened to us, Kate. The things that we did, Miss Begley.”
I spoke as though we’d been married, and settled down out here, and were looking back over our past. Although we were about to have a ball that might bring the right Charles Miller to Kansas, I felt it wouldn’t. With Kate, however, who could tell anything? Nevertheless, I asked the question that had been rolling around in my mind.
“What do you think will happen at the ball?”
She smiled. “Aren’t these the nicest people out here?” Lowering her voice, she said, “The Charles I knew would make his own way here. If that was what he wanted to do.”
I reached a hand out and rested it on her shoulder.
“What was it you said to me once? There’s one thing we can’t stop, you said.”
“You mean the world from turning?” She laughed. “I’m pleased you remember it.”
I wanted to say, Kate, I recall every word you ever spoke to me—but it would have come out sardonically, and that would have broken the mood.
“Of course I remember it. Miss Begley. I make you sound like a teacher, don’t I?”
“I wasn’t, Ben. That’s what you made me. I always felt, from that first day, that I was sent into your life to teach you.”
Clearly, there is no God. For if there were, He would have taught me how to challenge that. I let it go. We watched the men drag the banner across to the other tree, trying to keep it up from the dust of the street. She had one more question.
“Do you remember when we told the Canadian soldiers that we were neutral?” No laugh accompanied the question, and that told me she had something else in mind.
“That whole neutral business,” I said. “It probably saved our lives but I don’t know how to judge it.”
“Do you mean it’s wrong not to take sides?”
“Probabl
y. Given all we know now.”
She didn’t look at me—never did when she wanted to achieve something large with me.
“I often thought that you were ‘neutral’ with me.” She stressed the word.
“But you wouldn’t have wanted anything else,” I said.
“No,” she replied, dragging out the word. “No, not then.” She quit the porch and went indoors.
To my own credit, I knew that I was being manipulated. First the grandmother had mended her fences with me, and had then proceeded to do what she knew best—get two people on the road to marriage. Then Kate’s behavior and attitude on board ship—coy and affectionate but keeping a flirty distance—bore no resemblance to her past ways with me.
She also referred to our past deeds together—France, Mr. Seefeld, the snow in Belgium, the night in the cellar of the hut. My inner man said to me, Tell her that you see what’s going on. In short, I knew that I was being set up—and I went along with it because that was what she wanted.
She danced her legs off that night. From the first bars of the fiddle she took to the floor and danced. Her hair, now longer than I’d ever seen it, flew out like a banner and caught the light, and her eyes reflected back that gleam to every man, woman, and child in the room.
Only about 50 percent of the people who came could fit into the barn at any one time—and that barn was fifty feet long and forty feet wide. Bobby Bilbum had spent weeks building a separate loose box for Jerry at the southern end, and from there he looked out in his lovely benign way at the band on the northern end. We put out a tub of apples and pears and oranges, and everything we could lay hands on outside the door of his box, and all night long, supervised by Bobby, people fed Jerry.
Sydney fared less well. She didn’t like the crowds or the noise, and spent much of the early evening shivering in my arms. It occurred to me that perhaps some race instinct (perhaps I should call that “breed instinct”) told her that most of the people there would have been only too pleased to take her home and serve her for Sunday lunch. At about nine o’clock, I took her back to the house, set out a massive dish of food for her, hauled her bed down the floor, and left her to it, knowing that she’d eat and then fall asleep.
It ranks as one of the most bizarre evenings of my life. For the first hour, Kate danced with all the neighbors, all the men who had proved so kind to her when she arrived (though when they came to offer help, she told me, they were usually accompanied by their wives).
Next, she danced with the men who had come to look for help in finding wives. Some of her successful couples showed up—“Still happily married,” as she said later—and she danced with the wives as well as the husbands.
She danced with Bobby Bilbum; he surprised them all with his fluid, light-footed steps—but not me; I had seen how Bobby moved from the day I first met him, and I’ve frequently observed how delicate on their feet big men can be.
Kate danced with me too. You’re familiar, I expect, with the traditional image of a society girl who likes to dance. Venetia and I—we’d never danced; the opportunity had never arisen. I bet that she was a wonderful dancer, though, those legs, that easy carriage with that long neck, and the head raised like a swan. Well, that image, of the girl dancing, her head thrown back laughing as she twirls and swirls across the floor, delighting everybody with her gaiety—that’s how Kate looked that night.
“Did you ever have such a good time?” She laughed up at me. And we both said together, “Better than Killarney.”
“I’m watching you,” she said.
“I’m throwing no punches tonight.”
“Or ever again,” she said, mock-scolding.
“Except to protect you,” I said.
We whirled some more.
“Are you all right?” I asked. She greeted every person past whom we waltzed, and they smiled, laughed, applauded, waved to her.
“You’re worried for me, aren’t you?”
“In case you’re disappointed,” I said.
“That would only happen if I had an expectation,” she said.
In fact, I was the apprehensive one, and I should have listened to that feeling and its implications, and I didn’t.
——
The band played something as close to a fanfare as they could get. Bobby Bilbum, by now the master of ceremonies, took the stage, and with him a lady of his own height and girth.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I pray your attention.” Applause spattered and somebody whistled on fingers. “I wish to make two announcements. The first will be an invitation to share my joy—because this magnificent creature, Ethel Pampling, has agreed to become my wife.”
Wild cheering broke out, and Kate ran up to the stage and tried to kiss both of them—they had to make considerable accommodations of height and girth for her to get to their cheeks. At the urgings of the audience, the happy couple then kissed, and a man behind me remarked, “It’s like two ships meeting at sea.”
When this delight had settled, Bobby proceeded to the next announcement.
“Now you all know why we’re here. A long time ago, our dear Kate here made a vow. She said to her new husband, an American officer, that if the war separated them, she would come here and wait for him in the heart of his own country, the very center of the United States.”
The women made oohing and aahing sounds and much applause rose again.
“Kate got here first,” declared Bobby, “and what an adornment she has been, and what a service to society—bringing people together to love each other. Tonight, we want to see whether, by any chance, we have found for her the man she’s been seeking—Captain Miller. We formed a committee—we only told Kate this quite recently—and with letters in all directions, to all kinds of people, we sent for every Chuck or Charles Miller we could find. Out of the goodness of their hearts, seventy of them turned up—and they’ve been fed and watered in the church hall for the last two hours.”
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Perhaps they expected gaiety to attach to this notion—but it didn’t happen. In fact, the guardian of that barn’s mood would turn out to be Kate, because, of a sudden, people became tense.
The remarking man behind me said, “Whose dang fool idea was this?”
A woman answered, “This is just gonna hurt.”
Bobby, usually sensitive, picked up the change of atmosphere, but too late to affect the proceedings. As he watched, the big doors opened and, directed by somebody outside, a line of men began to file in, one at a time.
Bobby called, “Kate!”
She answered his beckoning finger and went back onto the little stage, where she stood between Bobby and Ethel like a shrub between two oaks. I, and I alone, could see the anguish on her face; once again, she hadn’t thought it through.
The men, who must have been briefed, headed for the little bandstand, walking as confidently as they could muster. For a moment, each one stopped in front of Kate.
“I’m Chuck Miller—from Smith County, Kansas; my hometown is Jacksonburg, just up the road a ways.”
“I’m Chuck Miller—from Wallace County, Kansas.”
“I’m Chuck Miller—from Ness County, Kansas; my hometown is Wellmanville.”
“I’m Chuck Miller—from the town of Coldwater in Comanche County, Kansas.”
“I’m Chuck Miller—from Sedgwick County, Kansas. I have a farm near the town of Ruby.”
There had been times in my life when I’d almost wished to die; I don’t need to go into such moments again, but the embarrassment I felt in that barn might well be included among them. Not a man among the early arrivals looked remotely like the Charles Miller whom Kate had married; one was at least seventy years old, another stood no more than five feet two inches tall—and on it went.
Men in suits, men in cowboy clothes, men in bib-dungarees, men in uniform—I began to wonder what they thought they were doing there, what they had been told.
When two or three more from the counties of Kansas had declared themselves, the exte
nt of the trawl began to show. A man strode to the bandstand and announced, “I’m Chuck Miller from the great state of Arkansas.” Two more Arkansans followed, and now the parade was up and running. Chuck Miller, Charles Miller, Charlie Miller, Chuck Miller—they marched in through the great main door of the barn at ten-second intervals, walked to the bandstand, and declared themselves.
Just as I was beginning to think that these men aspired to Kate’s hand in marriage, a couple came along.
“I’m Chuck Miller from the great state of Illinois and this is my wife, Marge—and ma’am, I know I’m not the Chuck Miller you wanted to see, but all of us have come here to tell you that if he’s not here tonight, Marge and I’ll do everything we can to find your own Chuck Miller for you. That’s why we came—and I know that’s why a lot of the other Chuck Millers came. To tell you that.”
Two more couples arrived on their heels, and then two more, and soon I counted at least fifteen Chuck Millers who had brought along their wives. Now the true purpose had begun to surface. They might not have known it when they first began the enterprise, but the committee members thought that if they didn’t find the real Chuck Miller, at least they’d bring Kate the comfort, as they saw it, of surrounding her with men who bore her beloved husband’s name.
But it wasn’t over yet. One of the organizers at the barn door responded to a signal from Bobby Bilbum and held up nine fingers. Now the incoming men slowed down, and the first of this last nine to walk in at least belonged in the same age bracket as the Charles Miller I knew—and he too wore a uniform, even if it was U.S. Air Force and not army.
I shivered a little, not so much at the uniform, but at the possibility that they had in fact found the real Charles Miller. Given the way they’d structured it so far, were they keeping him until last?
Bobby compounded this anxiety in me by sidling over and whispering, “They’re very excited out there.”