The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories Read Free Page A

later, the Godfreys learned that Toy and Mae were living together, and that Toy’s teen-age sister, Mina, was living with them.
    Both James and Georgia would testify that they assumed Toy and Mae were married. But they apparently never asked when or where the wedding took place or why they hadn’t been invited to attend. Then one day, during a conversation with Georgia, Mae revealed that she and Toy were living together out of wedlock.
    Georgia was upset. She knew that if Gatewood Lafayette Woolley, the patriarch of the large Woolley clan—he had sired 10 children by two wives—were to find out that young Mina had been living in such an unrespectable domestic environment, there would be hell to pay. She urged Mae to marry Toy before that happened.
    Mae wasn’t interested. It was a policy of the Dallas school board at that time that female teachers must be single. If she were to marry Toy, she would lose her job. Besides, she said, Toy wasn’t the first man with whom she had had an affair. And, she said, he might not be the last. She wasn’t ready to marry.
    Georgia enlisted her husband in a campaign to apply pressure to both Mae and Toy.
    If Mae would marry Toy, the Godfreys told her, she could file for a divorce immediately. They just wanted the couple to appear to have been married during the time that Mina lived with them.
    Finally, Mae acquiesced. On March 11, 1933, she and Toy drove to Hugo, Okla., and got married. It was a “courtesy affair,” Mae would testify, meant only “to save his name with his family.” She said Toy had promised to divorce her immediately.
    On the same day—apparently only a few hours after his wedding—Toy applied to rent a room that Mrs. Joynes had advertised at her home on Elliott Street. He told her he was single. Mae moved into a room of her own on Belmont Street. But when the school term ended in June, Mae and Toy rented an apartment and moved back in together.
    Their marital bliss, if they enjoyed any, didn’t last. Within a week, Mae was demanding a divorce. Toy resisted, but finally said he would grant her one if he could be the one to file for it. Mae agreed, packed her bags and went home to Comanche County. Shortly, Toy drove to the Cantrell farm and begged her to return to Dallas with him. Instead, they took a trip to Galveston to talk over the possibility of making a success of their marriage.
    â€œI decided we could never be happy,” Mae said. She went back to her parents, and Toy returned to Dallas. On July 12, he filed for divorce. In his petition, he charged that soon after their wedding, Mae had begun “a course of cruel treatment, disagreed with him continuously and that he could not please her at all.”
    â€œShe did not want to live with me,” Toy would tell the reporters at the jail after his arrest. “She preferred the company of other men to mine.”
    Meanwhile, at the house on Elliott Street, Mrs. Joynes had learned that Toy was courting Dorothy. “If I had known he was married at the time, he could not have gone with my daughter except over my dead body,” she would testify.
    Then, on the afternoon of Aug. 26—two days before his divorce was final—Toy, carrying a suitcase, was starting out the door with Dorothy. “Well, Mrs. Joynes,” he said, “Dorothy and I are going to Oklahoma to be married.”
    â€œI told him I didn’t think that a very honorable thing to do—start off like that without telling me before,” Mrs. Joynes said. “I asked him to put the marriage off for a while. … I suggested they could have a nice home wedding later on. But he walked off with Dorothy. … They returned the next day. They said they had been married. But Dorothy had no wedding ring on her finger.”
    The newlyweds lived with Mrs. Joynes for a week, then bought the cottage on Ellsworth. For the first two days of their marriage, Toy was a