"How do I look?" Leta asked her 12-year-old niece June, who had been eagerly assisting her for the past thirty minutes. Leta was sitting at her vanity, where she had just put the final touches on her hair. She stood, pressing down her new dress with her hands.
June grinned with admiration. “Beautiful, Aunt Leta,” the girl cooed.
“Well, I hope I look good enough,” Leta said with a bit of superstitious humility. She didn’t want to be over-confident, but she was still pleased with her appearance this evening. Her sometimes unmanageable hair had smoothed and curled to her satisfaction, softening the sometimes harsh features of her face. The past three days working with her sister-in-law Florence in the flowerbeds had colored her skin just enough to give her a kind of glow. While she could not afford the new dress, she believed that on this particular night, she needed one.
She was in her fourth month of being courted by Mr. Waldo Johnson, a banker from Cleveland who she had met one winter evening that she and her brother Aaron were visiting a speakeasy in Sandusky. The proprietor had been seeking someone to deal cards in his back room and invited Aaron who agreed to take a night off from his usual local haunt. As Florence was anxious about her husband traveling so far, especially as the federal prohibition agents had been raiding establishments in Northwestern Ohio frequently over the past several months, Leta accompanied him. While she didn’t play cards, she did enjoy the atmosphere and conversation around the bar itself.
Mr. Johnson was the fourth man who approached her during that long Saturday night, and the only one who behaved as if she was a lady. They talked and flirted for two hours. He told her he was opening a new branch office in the growing community. When it became clear that Aaron would be dealing cards until the wee hours, Leta informed him that she had accepted Mr. Johnson’s offer to drive her home.
It surprised neither that Aaron actually arrived home before she did. However, in her own self-defense, Mr. Johnson invited her to dine with him the next Friday, which she cheerfully accepted. And so it went for four months, conversations, date and long encounters in hotel rooms. For two months after his business in Sandusky concluded, Mr. Johnson continued to drive the distance to be with her.
Tonight she had a sense that he was going to propose marriage. He had nearly said so when he invited her to his own city for the weekend. He was a widower with children, and she suspected she would be meeting them.
Leta was ready to be married once again. Since her ugly divorce from Leech Hoose, she had given up her children to their father, had several furtive encounters and ended up living with her brother’s family. She felt unsettled and alone.
Now, she believed she had some opportunity for advancement. Mr. Johnson was a banker. Once married, she would retrieve her children from their unhappy life with their father and move to Cleveland, where she had no reputation, would become a respectable banker’s wife, keep her own house, join a large church, and even return to sewing. As she left her room, she confessed in a hushed whisper to her young niece that this was the time.
However, it was not to be. While Mr. Johnson’s proposal later that night—after a lovely drive, delicious dinner en route and series of compliments—was to invite her to move to Cleveland, it was not as his wife, but his mistress. He revealed that the mother of his children was very much alive, and he “would never leave his family.” Yet he had set some money aside and could get her a small apartment where he could visit her on a frequent basis, and they could continue their mutually enjoyable situation. Driving every weekend and claiming that the bank branch in Sandusky needed his supervision was stressful on all of them. His offer would be far more convenient for everyone.
Leta clutched her hands tightly together, hidden in her lap where he couldn’t see them and continued to smile and nod. It took every ounce of her composure to not scream at him for his brutal insensitivity. But what rose in the back of her mind was a self-condemnation: What else could she have expected, a woman like her? It was a joke that he would marry her—already four times married! And a woman who was so willing to include carnal relations in the relationship?
God was punishing her. That’s all she could conclude. Still, she wasn’t a homewrecker.
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