Compromise with Sin Read online

  “And get that shaggy hair of yours cut before decent folks mistake you for a derelict.”

  Just before Marie’s introduction, Frank whispered the magic words: “You are queen of all you survey, and those people are your adoring subjects.”

  Even behind the dark glasses, Marie’s face brightened with self-assurance.

  The Master of Ceremonies called out, “And now, The Chautauqua Darling, Marie Alouette Morrissey.” Marie picked up her cane and took the stage amid applause that accompanied her confident stride.

  Ten days earlier this would have been the moment that set Frank’s nerves on edge, not knowing if Marie’s delivery would thrill or disappoint the audience. Tonight was different. As much as the coaching had boosted her confidence and piano lessons had helped her adjust, he realized that taking minor roles in other acts had played a big part in her transformation. She sang in the Children’s Chorus, assisted Mr. Science in his hand-washing presentation, and sometimes played the part of the patient when the Ballantynes did their first-aid demonstrations.

  Tonight she seemed born to present. With her first step onto the platform, she became The Chautauqua Darling. Frank filled with pride and could not wait to share the wonder of it all with Louise.

  “It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea,” began Marie’ recitation of “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” a long, narrative poem about a skipper and his little daughter who sail into a hurricane. Marie milked each poignant phrase, embroidering words with her voice, pausing to build suspense, and clutching her heart at the height of sentiment:

  He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat

  Against the stinging blast;

  He cut a rope from a broken spar,

  And bound her to the mast.

  “O Father! I hear the church-bells ring,

  Oh say, what may it be?”

  “’T’is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!”—

  And he steered for the open sea.

  “O Father! I hear the sound of guns,

  Oh say, what may it be?”

  “Some ship in distress, that cannot live

  In such an angry sea!”

  “O father! I see a gleaming light,

  Oh say, what may it be?”

  But the father answered never a word,

  A frozen corpse was he.

  By the twentieth stanza, when at daybreak a fisherman sees a maiden lashed to a drifting mast, Marie owned the audience. When she spoke the final words, a hush followed. Then applause swelled and handkerchiefs waved.

  After opening the floodgates of pity with “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” she delighted the audience with “An Oversight of Make-up.”

  Dear God, The baby you brought us

  Is awful nice and sweet.

  But because you forgot his toofies,

  The poor little thing can’t eat.

  That’s why I’m writing this letter,

  ‘A-purpose to let you know,

  Please come and finish the baby.

  That’s all. From Little Flo.

  The audience erupted in applause. Marie beamed her brightest smile and curtsied.

  After the show admirers lined up to shake her hand.

  “You’re wonderful.”

  “You made me weep.”

  “I used to recite that poem in school.”

  “I’d be scared to death to get up in front of all those people.”

  “My Lucinda here can’t do half as good as you, and she’s got two good eyes.”

  After the last of the admirers had been greeted, father and daughter followed the crowd down the path beyond the glow of the Chautauqua tent, into the darkness punctuated with stars and cavorting fireflies and toward the lamplit downtown where the ice cream store remained open.

  “Got a riddle for you, Junior. What walks all day on its head?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A nail in a horseshoe. Get it?”

  Marie laughed. “Okay, I have one for you. What has a tongue, cannot walk, but gets around a lot?”

  “I give up.”

  “A shoe!”

  “That’s a good one.”

  It was a glorious night to sit at a sidewalk table sharing a Chautauqua sundae—a scoop of butter-brickle ice cream topped with chocolate sauce and marshmallow creme. Frank enjoyed watching his daughter relish each spoonful. A man shouldn’t squander a night like this drinking himself to oblivion in a stinking saloon.

  Tonight father and daughter lingered at the sidewalk table until Marie said she was getting sleepy. Frank walked her back to the hotel and tucked her into bed. Then he left in search of Bernard and oblivion.

  17

  April 1905

  One bare lightbulb lit the Inn’s cavernous kitchen when Mrs. Jelinek arrived at work just before midnight. She plopped her large handbag on the counter and set about her routine. One by one she tugged the chains of the remaining three lights which set them swinging and casting sweeping shadows.

  It was Monday night, and she had already put in a shift cleaning the Sokol Hall. Monday was the worst, having to lug cartloads of trash and mop floors sticky with beer after Saturday polka fests.

  But now at the Inn, she made two ham sandwiches, which she ate greedily, as it was her first meal of the day. She followed the sandwich with a hardboiled egg and a glass of milk.

  Then it was time to make kolaches, and she fell into the familiar routine, her eye telling her just how much sponge, milk, sugar, and butter to use. Counting overflowing scoops of flour was her one concession to measuring.

  While stirring she imagined herself standing in her own little kitchen back in Bohemia where her son Miklos would lick his lips and rub his belly as he watched her. When the pans of fragrant pastry came out of the oven, the sixteen-year-old boy would clap his hands and squeal, to the disgust of his father and four siblings. Picturing him now, she wiped copious tears with her apron.

  She remembered having to leave her tiny house in Bohemia when her husband was promised a steady job at a cigar factory in Riverbend, where his cousin had worked his way up to supervisor. She had wept often in the days before their departure. Even a final farewell to the pigs and chickens brought sobs, which she had to muffle as the family was sneaking away under the veil of darkness. The pigs would more than pay the landowner the back rent he claimed to be owed.

  On board ship it seemed the steerage passengers vied to tell the most outrageous stories about Ellis Island. One rumor Mrs. Jelinek’s husband reported to her set her weeping loud and often: “They don’t let nobody in what’s crazy in the head or deaf, dumb, or blind or got a disease. They send people back for so much as looking dreamy-eyed.”

  Mrs. Jelinek warned Miklos to say nothing unless someone asked him a question. She drilled him over and over because his head would not hold her words for long. After the ship docked at Ellis Island, a photographer—later Mrs. Jelinek discovered he worked for a Bohemian-American newspaper—shot a picture of the boy in his high-water pants and boots about three sizes too large. He was grinning and holding a little American flag.

  Miklos stayed close by his mother on the walk from the ship to the immigration processing center. Standing in an endless line, Mrs. Jelinek prayed Miklos would not attract the attention of the uniformed inspector who carried the dreaded blue chalk to mark the lapel of anyone suspected of carrying disease or becoming a burden to society. Those bearing the blue X were pulled from the line for further examination.

  “Stop squirming.” Mrs. Jelinek knew the heat of the room made Miklos’ woolen jacket prickly.

  He started to scratch, occasionally at first, then in a frenzy that caught the eye of an inspector. Seeing the uniform, Miklos snapped to attention. The inspector looked directly into his eyes and frowned. Miklos looked back and frowned. The inspector’s frown deepened. So did Miklos. The inspector scratched his own head. Miklos did the same. The inspector strode toward Miklos, grabbed his lapel with one hand, and brought out a piece of chalk fro
m his pocket with the other. Miklos reached for the inspector’s lapel, but the inspector grabbed his arm, whirled him around, and pinned his arms behind his back. Miklos whimpered. The inspector let go of his arms, marked his lapel with an X, and moved on.

  Amid the stares and whispers of others waiting in line, Mrs. Jelinek clutched her son, almost as tall as she was, and rocked from side to side until a second inspector wrenched him from her arms and led him away.

  After the family completed processing, they were directed to a small, crowded room where they sat waiting to learn of Miklos’ fate. It came through a translator: “Your son has failed the simple tests and must be deported. The shipping line will pay for his passage. Who will meet him at the boat?”

  Mrs. Jelinek begged the inspector to let her accompany Miklos, but her husband spoke loudly over her objections, naming his brother and sister-in-law, who would almost certainly put Miklos in an institution. Seized by an idea, Mrs. Jelinek threw back her head, thrust out her chest, raised her elbows, and crowed like a rooster. Her husband grabbed her, and the interpreter let her know that no one would fall for her act so she might as well settle down.

  Subdued, she went with the family to say good-bye to Miklos. With no idea of what was happening, he mirrored her choking sobs. It was when the men took him away and he looked back over his shoulder at his mother as though she could save him, that she collapsed.

  A slap across her face brought her back to consciousness, and she gazed up at the fuzzy image of her husband. He lifted her to her feet, and she followed with a leaden shuffle as he guided the family out of the building to their new life in America, to a home in which any mention of Miklos was forbidden.

  In spite of her husband’s order, Mrs. Jelinek enlisted her eldest son to write and post letters to Miklos─she dictated them once a week. She wondered if anyone read the letters to him. No one ever wrote back.

  Mr. Jelinek’s job was not all it was cracked up to be. It could take years to advance from cigar roller to a decent-paying supervisor’s job. He took to spending his free time in the saloon. The two oldest children left home. To pay the rent and avoid eviction from the house Mrs. Jelinek’s cousin owned, the two remaining children quit school and took jobs, and Mrs. Jelinek went to work at Riverview Inn baking bread, pies, and kolaches. Eventually she hired on at the Sokol Hall as well.

  Work offered a refuge from her husband’s drunken rampages—they occurred almost nightly—and his flailing fists.

  One day Mrs. Jelinek shyly approached the stern-looking man who taught English classes at the Sokol Hall. Learning some English was essential to carrying out the plan in her head. And so she attended classes three evenings a week. Her crying spells became less frequent. To anyone who cared to notice, it seemed she had quit grieving over Miklos and accepted her new home.

  But she needed more than English. She needed money. Her husband’s drunken sprees became opportunity. On the nights he took off his pants before falling into bed, she pilfered cash from his pockets and stashed it on a shelf under her corsets.

  Tonight, once the kolaches were in the oven and emitting their yeasty aroma, Mrs. Jelinek made another sandwich, this time with meatloaf. By skipping meals during the day and eating only as she worked during the night, she was able to squirrel away pennies, nickels, and dimes from her grocery allowance.

  In the morning, before the Inn’s cook arrived, she stuffed her canvas tote bag with butter, eggs, pork chops, and potatoes.

  Awakened before dawn by an insistent knock on the kitchen door, Louise grabbed her robe and stepped into her slippers. She opened the door to see the cook, her chest heaving from climbing the stairs.

  “That Mrs. Jelinek,” the cook said. “I catched her stealing.”

  Louise followed the cook to the Inn’s kitchen where Mrs. Jelinek stood with her head bowed, her rough, red hands twisting her apron. On the table where she had made kolaches and bread sat her tote, bearing a telltale grease stain, and next to it, all the food she had stuffed in it.

  The cook clattered about, hoisting pans, firing up the griddle, and beating batter in preparation for breakfast.

  Louise directed Mrs. Jelinek to sit at the desk in the corner of the kitchen. Sitting across from the baker, she nodded toward the evidence. “You’ve been stealing from me.”

  “Not you.” Mrs. Jelinek shook her head emphatically. “Kitchen.”

  “When you steal from the kitchen, you steal from me.” Louise considered how Frank dealt with pilferers. He fired them on the spot, but before they could leave he made an example of them to other employees.

  “I pay you well,” Louise said. “Why do you steal?”

  “My boy Miklos, Bohemia.” She pointed to her head and shook it.

  “You left him in Bohemia?”

  Mrs. Jelinek nodded.

  “You send him money?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you steal?”

  “People not want Miklos. People not care Miklos. Miklos big boy,” she held her hand above her head, “little child,” she pointed to her head. “Miklos need Mama.”

  “Are you going back to Bohemia?”

  Tears welled in the woman’s eyes and spilled onto her ruddy cheeks. She wiped her nose and eyes with her apron. Then she reached in her handbag and took out a rumpled newspaper clipping. She laid it on the table and tried to smooth its wrinkles before showing it to her employer.

  A boy holding an American flag stood in front of a ship, surrounded by expectant-looking immigrants.

  “He came to America?” Louise asked.

  Mrs. Jelinek nodded. “No good.” She pointed again to her head.

  “Did they send him back to Bohemia?”

  “Yah.”

  Louise had a wifely duty to uphold her husband’s standards. But Frank was miles away. “Come back to work tonight.” From the corner of her eye, Louise noticed the cook’s disapproving glance. “Don’t steal again.”

  Mrs. Jelinek looked down, wringing her apron.

  “You’re free to go now.”

  Louise reflected on her decision. Frank would be furious if he found out. But firing Mrs. Jelinek would have been foolish, as no one else knew how to make kolaches. Kolaches, Louise realized, were the perfect justification for doing what her heart commanded when she put herself in Mrs. Jelinek’s place.

  That night Louise entered the kitchen just as Mrs. Jelinek was taking butter from the electric icebox. The woman hastened to drop the butter into a saucepan, causing the heated milk to hiss and spatter when it splashed onto the hot stove.

  Louise held up a thick wad of cash. “You teach me how to make kolaches. This should be enough to get you back home to Miklos.”

  Mrs. Jelinek scowled, and Louise tried again to get her point across. “You go home to Miklos. But first teach me kolaches.”

  Louise slipped on an apron and wrapped its strings twice around her waist. Then she opened the flour bin and lifted a scoop of flour. “You teach me.”

  Mrs. Jelinek’s eyes brightened. “Ahh.”

  Louise signaled for the baker to wait while she got a pad and pencil from her desk.

  She questioned the wisdom of helping the woman leave, especially given that just this morning Buster, the Inn’s building superintendent, had quit. But she resolved to handle matters on her own without bothering Frank.

  She watched the baker and wrote down her every move. Sometimes Mrs. Jelinek would gesture for her to help by sifting the flour, forming the dough into balls, and setting them on the baking sheet. Occasionally the baker would try to explain something about the filling or dough. Grating lemon rind for the sweet cottage cheese filling, she pointed to the underlying white rind, made a sour face, and shook her head. Louise already knew what the woman was trying to tell her, that the white rind would make the filling bitter, but nodded appreciatively nevertheless.

  As the little balls of dough were rising, Louise helped make the fillings. Tonight’s were apricot, poppyseed, and lemon. While mixing su
gar, butter, and flour for the topping, she referred to it as streusel.

  “Not streusel,” Mrs. Jelinek said firmly. “Popsika.”

  “Popsika,” Louise said.

  Louise made the next batch under Mrs. Jelinek’s watchful eye. Come time to remove them from the oven, she admired their delicate golden color and uniform size.

  Mrs. Jelinek nodded in approval.

  Louise handed her the money. “Go ahead, take it with my blessing. This is payment for teaching me.”

  Holding her apron to her gaping mouth, the baker gushed with “thank-yous.”

  Two weeks after Mrs. Jelinek’s departure, as much as Louise wanted to hire a baker, she was desperate to hire a new building superintendent. In the afternoon a hired girl knocked on her door, coming to tell her a man named Lars was waiting in the dining room.

  Louise had already interviewed two men. One seemed earnest and reliable enough but lacked experience. The other impressed her with his experience, but he changed jobs frequently, and when asked why said he just got restless to move on. Perhaps the third would be a charm.

  She went into the dining room, empty except for a wiry man with hair that resembled straw she mucked in the horse barns as a girl. He sat at a table and dug at his fingernails with a pocketknife. When he saw her he snapped the knife shut and jammed it in the pocket of his ragged overalls.

  He stood when Louise approached. “Heard you was looking for a man.”

  His teeth were rotten, and his breath stank like raw sewage. “I’m sorry, sir, but I hired a fellow just this morning.”

  His glare set the hairs on the back of her neck bristling.

  “If you say so, ma’am.” He snarled the words.

  Louise would have taken anyone else seeking work to the kitchen and asked the cook to make a sandwich or two before sending him away. Not Lars.

  He left. She watched from the window until he was out of sight.

  18

  June 1905