Free Private Life by Jane Smiley Page A

the
    businessmen around town would laugh at him.

    Margaret sat in on a few hands, though she had no source of funds--she borrowed
    from Beatrice. She was lucky and cautious, and after a few parties--say, by the end of
    April--she was up by almost ten dollars, which she left in a jar at the farm.

    It was about this time that Mrs. Jared Early began to join them. Here was a
    woman who was older than Lavinia, possibly sixty at that time, but she was active and
    healthy. Margaret watched her, thinking of that strange encounter she had had with
    Andrew Early--Captain? Dr.?--but Mrs. Early didn't notice Margaret. She seemed to like
    Beatrice, and she had a friend who came with her to games, Mrs. Hitchens, another
    widow, about fifty, who always wore beautiful hats. She had moved to town from
    Minneapolis--"for the fine weather," she said.

    Margaret knew by now what Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had done to
    change the nature of the universe--he had gone with an expedition to Mexico and looked
    at the stars, and he had charted stars in the southern sky called doubles--two stars
    whirling in tandem. That spring, the spring of 1902, Captain Early was more famous than
    ever--everyone in town agreed that he was a wonderful example of what a town like
    theirs, full of enterprise and independent minds, could produce. Her memory of the man
    she had encountered on the bicycle, though, gave Margaret a chill; she thought he was
    nothing like anyone else she'd known.

    Mrs. Early was a tall, generously built woman, sociable and good-humored.
    Margaret noticed that she often smiled quickly to herself, as if she was enjoying some
    thought that she dared not share with the other ladies. She had long, thick hair, still
    mostly dark, piled luxuriantly on her head. The ladies knew plenty about her--she had no
    daughters, but quite a few sons, of whom Andrew was the eldest (now thirty-five). They
    had come along all in a row--Andrew, Henry, Thomas, Daniel, and John, all named after
    famous men that Mr. Early was said to have known. Patrick had died as a boy of the
    cholera. Mrs. Early did not live in a mansion or have a big farm, but she had a nice twostory house on Maple Street, painted bright white and surrounded by a picket fence, with
    lots of flowers in the garden and a nice orchard in the back. There had been a large farm,
    but that was lost after the war. Only John lived in Darlington. He was twenty-eight,
    worked in the bank, and had married a girl from Arkansas. He also had a big house, but
    even though Mr. Jared Early had been dead some eight or ten years by now (and quite
    solitary for years before that), Mrs. Early did not live with her son and daughter-in-law.
    Beatrice said that there was family money, though she wasn't quite clear about its source,
    but all the boys were enterprising. It was said that Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens traveled
    together, and that they had not only visited Andrew in Germany but had gone to a famous
    spa there, and then to Paris. All the Earlys had gone to college for at least a year-Andrew, the brilliant one, had gone to college in Berlin, Germany (after he completed his
    studies up in Columbia, it was said, there was no college in the United States that could
    teach him anything he didn't already know). He was now teaching at the University of
    Chicago, which had been founded by the Rockefellers because the big universities in the
    East were too slow to enter modern times. It was very grand to be teaching at the
    University of Chicago and, as far as Margaret understood it, to be on the payroll of the
    Rockefellers, but, to her credit, Mrs. Early didn't talk about Andrew any more often than
    she talked about the other boys. Henry was in New York City, working on Wall Street;
    Thomas was in Texas; and Daniel was in England. Mrs. Early talked about their
    wanderings as if they were customary and entertaining, as if the strangest one among
    them was John, married and working in a bank in town. She did