He changed the subject. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’re marrying her, but I had a crush on Mary since the eighth grade. In high school, a couple times, I asked her to go out with me, but she never would. She never went out with anyone. People thought she might end up in a convent, but I guess all she needed was to meet the right man.”
The door opened, jingling the bell, and Hansi got up. “Sorry I talked your arm off,” he said. “Congratulations on getting engaged.” Then he went to the counter to wait on the new customer.
Helmi Dambridge had come to Nehtaka from Finland at age five. By age seventeen she was an exceptional beauty who had scandalized her family and their Lutheran pastor, and titillated the rest of Nehtaka. The young men of the community found her particularly interesting, but she was interested only in those with “prospects.”
Her first marriage was to the handsome young owner-skipper of a sealing ship, who arrived back from an expedition to the Aleutians to discover her gone. She was living with a sawmill owner in Longview, a man equally handsome and with even more money, who didn’t sail away and leave her for months on end. Her husband promptly filed for divorce, and when the decree was final, his rival married her. But now, with a legal claim to her fidelity, he too became jealous, on one occasion to the point of blackening her eyes and loosening some teeth; she thanked him by plunging a letter opener into his abdomen.
Her lawyer provided more than legal services, and afterward they married. Twenty-five years older than she, he was totally devoted to her, while she had learned something from her first marriages. It helped, of course, that he had a very lucrative practice. Unfortunately he developed a heart condition, and at age thirty-six she found herself single again, a widow.
Still beautiful, accomplished in the bedroom arts, and with many friends in Portland society, the condition was temporary. She soon married Andrew Dambridge, a fifty-year-old bon vivant who had coveted her for years. Dambridge had built a considerable fortune through activities in railroads, lumber, and real estate. He’d also developed a reputation as a ladies’ man, but with Helmi in his bed, his philandering dwindled almost to nothing. After a few years, problems of heth reduced both his business and bedroom activities, and he died of an aortic aneurism on their ninth anniversary.
Most of his fortune he had willed to the children of his first marriage, but he’d established a very considerable trust fund for his second wife. He was not, however, a man who liked to lose possessions, so the trust fund carried the provision that if she married again, she’d lose it. She had no intention of losing it.
She’d continued her life in Portland’s upper crust until the Great Depression eroded her trust fund rather severely. In the spring of 1931, she sold her Portland mansion and bought a nine-room home in Nehtaka. She had it modernized, then moved in, a storied and somewhat reclusive figure who lived alone with a housekeeper and custodian, traveled a lot, and largely ignored local doings. The townsfolk, who of course knew nothing of the trust-fund proviso, expected her to find another millionaire and leave again, but she failed to cooperate.
The Widow Dambridge was Mary Preuss’s aunt, her mother’s eldest sister. When Helmi had moved back to Nehtaka, she’d established limited connections with her family, including Mary, appearing occasionally at family events. But mostly she kept to herself. She was in her studio, painting an Aegean shorescape from a photograph, using memory for the colors, when her maid informed her that Mary was in the parlor.
Helmi sailed down to meet her. “Mary! This is a surprise!” she said. “Sit down, dear, and tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m going to be married. And-I thought you could advise me.”
Helmi laughed. “Shouldn’t you be talking with your Aunt Siiri? She’s been married to the same man for twenty-five years, and very happily as far as I know.”
“I have talked with her. But it seemed to me that. . .”