In Need of a Good Wife by Kelly O'Connor McNees Read Free Book Online

Elsa back to the present. “Do the best you can to describe your physical attributes and any abilities you have that you believe will make you a competent wife. Include a likeness if you are able. And don’t forget to provide an address where I can reach you. Good day, ladies.”
    A rustle of papers made their way to Elsa’s end of the row. She took one of the forms for herself and tucked it in her pocket.
    As she walked up Broadway back to her quarters at the Channing mansion on Madison Square, Elsa thought about what she should say on the form and how she might say it. It certainly was no use manufacturing a story about her beauty or youth or musical gifts. Any man would soon learn of the truth, and anyway, Elsa never told lies and she didn’t plan on starting now. Any man who was going to want her would have to want the qualities set down in her being by the Lord. Bavarian-born spinster , she thought. Healthy, strong, unafraid of hard work. Devoted to the Lord and Savior first, Martin Luther second. Currently employed as laundress. Can also cook, scour, sew, knit, and spin. She would save the object of her fiercest pride for last, render it in bold letters: Reads and writes in English.
     

In the five years Clara had been living at Mrs. Ferguson’s, she had done her best to make the room into a home. She was proud of how neatly she kept the hearth swept and stacked with wood. Next to it she had arranged her little kitchen—nothing more, really, than a narrow table and a small iron kettle for tea or beans when she didn’t feel like taking her meals in the dining room downstairs. She kept her bed stacked with quilts and the bed key handy to keep the cornhusk mattress off the floor. Mrs. Ferguson’s was known for its particularly large and aggressive brand of mice, three parts vermin and one part Satan, George always said.
    Under the window Clara had set up a table and chair for writing letters or reading books. Just outside was a streetlamp, and starting at dusk it offered her light well into the evening so she could save her lamp oil. She sat there now, her chair pushed slightly back. She had the sense of deep responsibility tinged with fear. What she had proposed to Mayor Cartwright had raised the hopes of a lot of lonely people in a town with a strange name, and they were all counting on her to follow through.
    The matter of the town’s name sparked so much curiosity among the prospective brides that Clara finally wrote to Mayor Cartwright to ask for an explanation. After she sent the letter off, she worried that her question might have caused off ense, but the mayor replied in the charmingly aggravated tone she was coming to know. Mr. Cartwright took no responsibility, he explained, for the actions of men who had come before him. Especially when those actions were of the foolish variety. The story went that a group of men intending to homestead set down on a rude map the plans for their journey west. As much of the country through which they planned to travel was unsettled, locations known by their landmarks—the site where a river split in two, or a peculiar cluster of tall, skinny trees—were known by these descriptors only. There were no towns to speak of and certainly no towns with names. One of the men marked with an X the place on the map they planned to go, and next to the mark he wrote destination , for that was what the X signified. Someone else borrowed the map, forgot to return it, and then passed it along to some other equally uninformed soul. Before long, people took to calling the place Destination , as if that were its name. “Confusion begot confusion,” the mayor explained. “As it so often does.”
    Clara marveled at the two stacks of paper before her. Just a few weeks had passed since her meeting with the prospective brides. On the left were eight letters from lonely bachelors on the cold prairie, plus one from a man who wanted only a housekeeper. On the right, she had twenty-two