An Unfortunate Match

Short story, 1903

Mr. Teuling was not attractive. That part was absolutely true. Meticulously frugal with both words and capital, he was the sort of person who sorted cents into separate parts of his wallet and wrote yours sincerely on notes to his wife. There was a shortness to him in every sense of the word. He thought carefully before he spoke, and still managed to offend anyway. An expression clouded not by the rain on his umbrella, but the inability to calculate whether it would dry before he reached Lexington Avenue. A quiet, dangerously dull man. I digress.

In 1886, Mr. Teuling was married to Mrs Teuling (nee Bakker) in upstate New Hampshire before they moved down closer to Wall Street in 1889. Two children quickly followed (Max Teuling-Bakker, 1890, and Ambrose Teuling-Bakker, 1891). If she was bland and brisk, he rivalled her with an extraordinary aptitude. Mrs Teuling held tea parties and soirees for impoverished Dutch emigrees, and Mr Teuling rigorously neglected her behind his desk at the bank. And all was well and good with the world for many years, in that starched, souless, sour way reserved only for the marital bliss of the upper middle classes. Until, of course, Stephanie happened.

Stephanie Houten (not of the Albany Houtens, mind, but Brooklyn) was gauche, yellow-haired, round-mouthed and emotional. Pretty in a red-cheeked way…