xt patient arrived, another childhood friend. As the day wore on, and one friend after another came in with a vague complaint, she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. She was glad that these young women still considered themselves her friends, but part of her was feeling frustrated at the lack of real patients.
In the late afternoon, Houston drove up to the clinic in her pretty little carriage and told Blair she thought she was expecting, and would Blair please examine her to see if she was? Houston wasn’t pregnant, and after the exam, Blair showed her around the clinic. Mrs. Krebbs had already gone home and the twins were alone.
“Blair, I’ve always admired you so much. You’re so brave.”
“Me? Brave? I’m not brave in the least.”
“But, look at all this. It’s happened because you knew what you wanted and then went out and got it. You wanted to be a doctor, and you let nothing stand in your way. I used to have dreams, too, but I was too cowardly to pursue them.”
“What dreams? I mean, besides Leander?”
Houston waved her hand. “I think I chose Lee because he was such a respectable dream. Mother and Mr. Gates approved so heartily of him, and in turn I got their approval.” She stopped and smiled. “I think there was a part of me that enjoyed all those tricks you played on Lee.”
“You knew about them?”
“Most of them. After a while, I began watching for them. I was the one who suggested to Lee that John Lechner was the culprit.”
“John was always a bully, and I’m sure he deserved whatever he got from Lee. Houston, I had no idea you thought of yourself as a coward. I so badly wanted to be perfect like you.”
“Perfect! No, I was just frightened, afraid of disappointing Mother, of enraging Mr. Gates, of not living up to what the town expected of a Chandler.”
“While I seemed to make everyone angry without even trying. You have so many friends, so many people love you.”
“Of course they do,” Houston said with some anger in her voice. “They’d ‘love’ you, too, if you did as much for people as I do. Someone will say, ‘Let’s have a social,’ then someone else will say, ‘We’ll get Blair-Houston to do all the work.’ I was too cowardly to ever say no. I have organized socials that I didn’t even attend. How I dreamed of telling them no. I used to imagine packing a bag and climbing down the tree outside your bedroom and just running away. But I was much too cowardly. You said I had a useless life and it has been.”
“I was jealous,” Blair whispered.
“Jealous? Of what? Surely not of me.”
“I didn’t realize I was until Lee made me see it. I’ve won awards, scored high on tests, had many honors, but I know I’ve always been lonely. It hurt when Mr. Gates said he didn’t want me, but he did want you. It hurt when you wrote me of all the men you danced with one evening after another. I’d be studying a chapter on the correct way to amputate a leg, and I’d stop and reread one of your letters. Men have never liked me as they have you, and sometimes I thought I’d give up medicine if I could be a normal woman, one who smelled of perfume and not carbolic.”
“And how many times I’ve wished I could do something important besides choose the colors of my next dress,” Houston sighed. “Men only liked me because they thought I was, as Leander once said, pliable. They liked the idea of a woman they could browbeat. To most of the men, I was a human dog, someone to fetch their slippers for them. They wanted to marry me because they knew what they were getting: no surprises from Houston Chandler.”
“Do you think that’s why Lee asked you to marry him?”
“Sometimes, I’m not sure he did ask me. We saw each other a few times after he returned, and I guess I so expected to marry him that, when the word marriage came up, I said yes. The next morning, Mr. Gates asked if it was time yet for the announcement in the paper. I nodded, and the next thing I knew the house was full of people wishing me a lifetime of happiness.”
“I know about the citizens of Chandler and their curiosity. But you loved Lee all those years.”
“I guess so, but the truth is, we never seemed to have much to say to each other. You and Lee talked more than he and I did.”
Blair was quiet for a long while. It seemed ironic that all these years she’d envied her sister, and at the same time her sister was envying her.
“Houston, you said you used to have dreams that you were afraid to pursue. What were they?”
“Nothing much. Nothing like you and medicine. But I did think I might be able to write—not a novel or anything grand, but I thought I’d like to write articles for ladies’ magazines. Maybe about how to clean silk charmeuse or how to make a really good facial mud.”
“But Mr. Gates would hate that, wouldn’t he?”
“He said those women who wrote were probably adulteresses who’d been thrown out by their husbands and had to support themselves.”
Blair’s eyes widened. “He doesn’t mince words, does he?”
“No, and I let him bully me for years.”
Blair ran her finger along a cabinet top. “And your husband doesn’t bully you? I know you said you loved him, but now it’s…I mean, it’s after the ceremony and you’ve lived with him.” No matter how many times Houston said she loved the man, Blair would never be able to believe her. Yesterday, she’d seen Taggert in front of the Chandler National Bank. The bank president, half Taggert’s size, was looking up at the big man and talking as fast as he could. Taggert had just seemed bored as he looked over the man’s head at some place down the street, then he’d taken out a big gold pocket watch, looked at it, then down at the little bank officer. “No,” Blair’d heard him say before he walked away. He was impervious to the man’s entreaties to stay and listen.
And that’s how Blair thought of him: impervious. How could Houston love a man like him?