Saints (36 page)

But the pretty girl holding his clothing, she did not cheer. Joseph smiled all the more broadly when he saw her icy expression. A new convert, no doubt, and offended that the Prophet did not comport himself with proper dignity. So many converts expected Joseph Smith to act like a minister. Well, if they wanted ministers they could have stayed with the pious old frauds who taught them lies every Sunday for a tidy fee. Come to Nauvoo, and you get the man the Lord called as Prophet, and no other.

“I’m obliged to you for holding my clothing,” Joseph said. “I think a Prophet ought to keep his coat clean, don’t you?”

She handed over the clothes without a word. It took Joseph back a little—few women would have kept their tongues at such an open invitation to comment on what a prophet ought or ought not to do.

“Well, what did you think of the little contest?” Joseph asked. How could he make a joke to ease the tension, if she said nothing, if she gave him no opening for banter?

She cocked her head a little, and spoke very quietly. “The Prophet Jacob wrestled once,” she said.

Joseph could not answer her. He had expected an attack, and instead her words excused him for his breach of decorum. “That’s right,” he said emphatically.

Only then did she turn it to criticism, only after he had agreed, only after it was too late for him to turn it to a joke. “But
he
wrestled with the Lord,” she said, “and he came away cleansed.”

She gave him no chance to answer. Without ever altering the expression of her face, without so much as a flounce of her skirt to weaken her quiet triumph, she turned and walked away. She had the best of him. She had faced Joseph Smith in a contest of words, and had beaten him fair and square, and the watching crowd didn’t know what to make of it. That sort of thing shouldn’t happen. They were uncomfortable. So Joseph laughed aloud and said, “It was a good thing for that river rat that he only had to fight
me
.”

It was enough. He had turned embarrassment into rueful, amused surrender: the tension was broken, the people laughed, and a large number of them escorted Joseph to the rain barrel where they washed him down before he went inside. Emma took one look at him, shook her head, and walked away. Joseph almost laughed aloud. I met another woman who felt the same way, he wanted to tell her. But
she
knew what to say.

Then he remembered that the Spirit had whispered that she was his. Well, fine and dandy, thought Joseph as he changed for the party. She may be mine, but what if I don’t want her? The last thing I need is a woman who knows how to shovel me under in public. I’d sooner court a rattlesnake.

The party went well. There wasn’t a band yet in Nauvoo, and the fiddler tonight wasn’t very good, but any fiddler was better than dancing to clapped hands. Joseph had a grand time. He danced a few minutes now and then, because he was a fine dancer and loved the way the quadrilles all centered around his step no matter where he stood. Most of the time, though, he talked, moving from group to group, listening a moment to get the gist of the conversation, and then saying a few words to everyone in the group. In the poverty of this young city, it helped morale if a large number of people could say to their friends, “Why, Brother Joseph spoke with me just the other night, at a party at his house.” Joseph was still the glue that bound all the pages into one book; the more people who felt an intimate connection with the Prophet, the stronger the Church would be. It was a fragile church, though, if one man was all that sustained it. What happens after I am dead? Who will make this work live after me?

So, as always, when Joseph was most cheerful, most outgoing, he brooded the most inside, where no one but Emma would see. You are weak, he said silently to all his friends. You still must drink so often from my well. What will you do when I am dry? Will your faith wither then, will you be blown away in the wind? And he smiled, and laughed, and joked, and the room was bright because of him.

Then he glanced away from a group and looked at the entry, where a tall young man was helping a lady with her cape. It was Charlie Kirkham, and the lady would be his sister, the one that Emma so wanted to meet. Joseph started toward them, to welcome them to the party and introduce them around. Then the lady turned and he recognized her. The girl who had held his clothing just an hour or so before.

Joseph did not break his stride. He gripped Charlie’s hand warmly and pulled him farther into the room. “Charlie Kirkham, the ladies have all been longing to have a turn with you at the quadrille. I told them there was a young man coming tonight who was even handsomer than me, and now at last they’ll see I wasn’t lying.” Then Joseph deliberately faced Charlie’s sister and reached out his hand. “I haven’t met your sister, Charlie,” he said.

“This is Dinah Handy,” Charlie said. “And Dinah, this is Brother Joseph.”

She extended her hand, and her fingers were cool and dry in Joseph’s as he bent to kiss them. No sign that she was flustered, or felt at all shy about having spoken so boldly to the Prophet only that afternoon. In the candlelight she was even more fragile and lovely than before, but Joseph knew that it was a lie. She was exactly as fragile as a thin and wicked blade. And now he put together all he had heard of Charlie’s sister with all he knew of her himself. This was the woman who was regarded as the strength of the Saints on the voyage of the
North America
. This was the woman who had visions and spoke in tongues, the woman that Emma wanted to meet. And I have made her angry. I stripped to the skin to annoy her today, I provoked her into a public quarrel, and
she
is the woman whose influence among the Saints is strong enough that even though she’s a newcomer, Emma wanted particularly to meet her.

And the Spirit said she was mine.

“Sister Kirkham,” Joseph said, “a pleasure to meet you again.”

“Again?” asked Charlie. “You didn’t tell me you had met before.”

“Just a few hours ago,” Joseph said. “But I assure you, Sister Kirkham, that I usually wrestle with angels. It’s just that there’ve been so few angels this week, and I wanted to stay in practice.”

Of course the story had already passed through the party twice tonight, and so everyone knew what she had said to him today. The onlookers laughed, but again Dinah Kirkham did not so much as smile. She only bowed her head gracefully for a moment and withdrew her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “My brother spoke so softly. My name is Mrs. Dinah
Handy
.”

She had done it again, taken the conversation away from him and embarrassed him in front of his people. What a knack. I’m going to adore this woman, Joseph thought angrily. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “When will I have the pleasure of meeting your husband?”

Charlie spoke quickly. Obviously it was a sensitive subject. “He stayed in England,” he explained. “It was a legal thing. He took her children away from her when she decided to come here and help build the City of God.”

The other guests at the party were all listening now, and they murmured in sympathy. They all knew about sacrifice for the Kingdom of God, and Dinah’s loss made her one of them at once. But this had also changed the mood of the party, from good cheer to reflectiveness, the last thing that should happen this early in the evening. Yet he couldn’t think how to turn the mood of the party back again without being boorish. The party was out of his control—for now, at least, it belonged to her.

“You make me ashamed to be having fun tonight,” Joseph said to her.

She paused for just a moment, but in that moment she understood what he was asking her for. “If I wanted never to have fun again,” she said, suddenly smiling, “I could have stayed in England.”

The listeners laughed, relaxed, returned to dancing and conversing and telling jokes. The smile lingered on Dinah’s face long enough to be convincing. Long enough for Joseph to want her to smile again, for when her face was bright and warm like that he could not imagine her husband letting her go for any reason.

But the smile was gone, and her steady gaze told him that she knew she had done him a favor by giving him control of the party again. Or did she know? Joseph could not be sure. It was so easy to read meanings and intentions into her impenetrable silence. It made him appreciate loquacious women for the first time in his life.

“My wife wanted to meet you,” Joseph said.

“I would like to meet her,” Dinah answered.

“Would you follow me?”

She nodded gravely, and as Joseph led her across the room he felt for all the world like a schoolboy running an errand for his teacher. He almost laughed aloud at the thought. What a schoolteacher she’d make! The boys would fall in love with her and live in terror of her all at once. But God help the man who married a girl who had once had this woman for a teacher.

Joseph led her to where his wife quietly supervised the punch. “I wish I could leave the table and talk with you,” Emma said, when the introduction was done.

“But I was just going to ask you if I could stay and help you serve,” Dinah answered. Joseph left her gladly then. And yet he could not keep from noticing her through the rest of the evening, now and then seeing her serving punch or talking earnestly with a sister or carrying something to or from the kitchen. Wherever she was, she was an island of solid purpose in the frivolity of the party. People who spoke to her were never laughing or smiling when they left, and Joseph saw that it took a while before they could rejoin the bright and laughing conversations, or return willingly to the dance. She does not fit into this group, Joseph realized. Instead she fits the group to her.

Near the end of the party, Charlie was still lingering, and Joseph told him he should go home. “You ought to make an early start tomorrow. It might take you all evening to find decent lodging at Springfield.”

Charlie smiled. “I’d go in a moment, Brother Joseph, but it might not look right, to go off and leave my sister to find her own way home.”

“Fetch her and go, then.”

“But she’s in the kitchen talking with your wife. I didn’t think it was my place to interrupt.”

Joseph laughed. “What did Emma say to you this afternoon, to make you so terrified of her?”

“Oh, I’m not terrified. I just think it a better policy to keep at least one wall or fifteen people between her and me.”

So Joseph went off to the kitchen, chuckling over the way people seemed so determined to misunderstand Emma, forgetting for the moment how many times he himself had misunderstood; forgetting, too, how often people were offended, not for misunderstanding her, but for understanding her too accurately.

Dinah stood in the kitchen with her back to the door. She was talking seriously with Emma, and Joseph knew from the way Emma pretended not to see him that it would be better if he did not interrupt. So he stepped back through the door. But he stayed close, and unashamedly eavesdropped, for he heard Emma say, “You have to understand, Sister Dinah, that my husband is a man as well as a prophet,” and he had to hear Dinah’s answer.

“I expected nothing else,” Dinah said. Joseph could hardly hear her.

“That’s not true,” Emma said. Joseph winced at how bluntly she spoke. “You expected him to be perfect. You put too much of a burden on him. It’s as if you walked up to him and said, ‘I left behind my children for you.’”

Dinah did not answer for a long moment. Then she said, “You are mistaken, Sister Emma. I left my children behind because the Holy Spirit came to me and said, ‘I have an inheritance for you in the beautiful city.’”

Joseph had heard those words before. In a dream, a dream of the marshes, when a squirrel, of all creatures, had spoken to him. But that dream had been fulfilled, hadn’t it? With someone else, the dream had been fulfilled. It had been a great proof of something. Was it wrong then? Or was it only coincidence now?

“We
do
need you here in Nauvoo, Dinah,” Emma said. “It is you who will make it a beautiful city.”

“You overestimate my gifts,” Dinah said.

“No, Sister Dinah,” Emma answered. “You underestimate my husband. You saw him today and he was less than you expected. Now you must understand that he is far more than he seems.”

“Today I found it hard to tell the Prophet from the ruffian as they wrestled half-naked in the mud.”

Joseph knew Emma so well that he could almost say her words along with her. Icy and harsh, that was Emma when someone attacked her husband. “Perhaps you have had a moment in your life, Sister Dinah, when you would not have wished to have someone watching you to judge your godliness.”

When Emma spoke in that tone of voice she was so offensive that many a woman had wept and many a man had raged. Instead, Dinah answered softly, so softly that Joseph could not make out the words she said. Then there was nothing but silence. Whatever was going on in the kitchen, Joseph had delayed longer than he should have. He swung open the door and walked in swiftly, as if he had crossed a room to get there. “When you women finish solving all the problems of the city, there’s a young man out here who wants to go home.” By the time he was through speaking, however, he realized that he had misunderstood most of what he heard through the door. He had thought it was his wife attacking, and Dinah retreating under her verbal blows. Instead it was Emma whose eyes were filled with tears, whose face was full of pain. And Dinah, this stranger who said nothing and understood too much—Dinah Handy was comforting her.

“Thank you for a lovely evening,” Dinah said quietly to both of them. Then she was out the kitchen door and across the other room. Joseph wanted to call her back, to demand an explanation. But he wasn’t sure what it was that needed to be explained. He was angry, that was all, angry and unsatisfied, for this woman had said no more than half a dozen sentences to him and yet in those few words she had undone him every time.

“I hope you were listening,” Emma said.

Joseph nodded.

“You’ve shattered that girl,” Emma said. “You broke her heart today.”

Joseph almost laughed aloud. “Shatter
her
! She’s made of stone!”