The Wives of Bath Read Online Free

Ladies College” in purple and gold letters. On a grassy field behind a tall wire fence, beefy women with curved sticks were whacking a ball in the rain. Then we turned into a narrow drive lined with weeping willows. Their wet boughs dragged close to our windshield, like the soggy ears of English sheepdogs.
    Morley pulled up in front of the turreted building that we had seen from the road, and Sal and I stared at the front tower, which poked skyward like a disapproving finger. A flock of grey pigeons suddenly flew up from its roof and settled on the ivy-covered archway. The ivy had been partially cleared off over the door, andthere, under a carving of the spiky tassel of a clover flower, I read the words,
“Built in 1890 as a residence by Sir Jonathon Gilbert Bath and shortly thereafter converted to Bath Ladies College for the instruction of Christian gentlewomen. Our daughters shall be useful and ornamental, like the clover that smells sweet in the meadow. Anno Domini 1896.”
    I noticed skinny black strips of metal strung across the school windows. Bars—the school had bars. I didn’t ask myself why. I’ve always been too suggestible for my own good.
The Trouble with Morley
    I want to make this clear. I was sent to school for two reasons:
    Its headmistress, Vera (the Virgin) Vaughan, was a distant cousin of Morley’s.
Morley’s unfortunate inferiority complex about bringing up females.
    Naturally, this put me in a bit of a jam. Anybody related to Vera Vaughan was a traitor and a scum at school. And there was another problem: I didn’t want to be locked up with people I didn’t respect—i.e., girls, my least favorite gender. I didn’t know how to explain this to Morley.
    You see, Morley had never had a sister, and my mother died of a brain tumor four years after I was born, and he’d been counting on her to bring me up. Not that Morley looked down on women, like I did. Maybe he thought in secret that my mother had let him down, but he never said an unkind word against the female sex; he was just guilty of a failure to understand them, which turned out to be no favour to me.
    I wish I could say I felt neutral about them, like Morley. I wanted to be as reasonable as possible. But girls were only mockboys as far as I was concerned. My embarrassment started with the American cowboy movies I saw in Madoc’s Landing. I didn’t like it when the whiny girl star would trick Audie Murphy into kissing her; I wanted him to get on with leading the cavalry charge. I’d ask Sal why Audie allowed girls to be in his movie. And she’d say: “To upset complainers like you.”
    Basically, you understand, Morley sent me to Bath Ladies College because Sal suggested it. He’d never have thought of it himself. She knew about his relative who ran a girls’ school in the city, and she wanted to get rid of me.
    “Do you see what I mean, Sal? There are bars on the windows here,” Morley said. I felt smug. The school didn’t impress me. It wasn’t decrepit enough. And it didn’t sit in a nasty-smelling marsh like Lowood, the school in
Jane Eyre
where girls dropped dead like flies of typhoid fever. I knew Morley didn’t have time to read, so he wouldn’t know about Lowood, and Sal said the books I read were for people who went to university. Except for the Eaton’s catalogue, which she consulted each fall so she could order me a new winter coat, Sal is almost an illiterate.
    Of course, my feelings for Sal are a little complicated. I needed her because she was the only person I knew who would take me shopping for a new posture corrector without feeling sorry for me. A little hump here or there was nothing to Sal. She’d been to Africa, where she’d nursed women with tapeworms, Dumdum fever, and lymphoedema of the breast. Once she’d treated a man with elephantiasis of the scrotum. She’d shown me a picture of what he looked like in
Manson’s Tropical Diseases
. The poor guy’s privates swelled up like a garden hose tied in