Compromise with Sin Page 5

  Eventually the town gave him grudging acceptance, a nod here and a “good morning” there. People began to refer to him among themselves as “our halfbreed.” His standing in the small community escalated about a year after he’d come to town when he appeared at Henkleman County Bank, presented a satchel with a large sum of money, the bills arranged by denomination with all the faces pointed in the same direction, and opened an account. Ever since, he had been greeted at the bank with, “Good morning, Mr. LaFontaine. What can we do for you today?”

  Louise picked up Dolly off the floor of the Buick and handed her to Marie, whose cries had settled into muffled sobs. “Dolly is safe, too.” She lifted Marie’s braids in order to take her into her arms without pulling her hair. “There, there now.” She regretted having let guilt and fear crowd out, if only momentarily, her maternal concern. She pulled Marie close with a silent promise to keep her safe forever.

  Once on the road, Marie’s mood brightened. “We scared the Sawyers so bad their pants will never get dry.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Frank, what possessed you to teach our daughter such vulgarity?” Louise’s tone of voice was that of a scolding parent, something she couldn’t help when Frank behaved so childishly.

  Before Frank could respond, Marie said, “We were playing Blind Girl’s Bluff. Father gets down on the floor and operates the pedals, I place my hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel, and Uncle Yonder sits in back and says, ‘Now, right hand to three o’clock, Marie.’“

  Marie’s approximation of Yonder’s voice had Frank and Yonder chuckling.

  “’Now back to two o’clock,’ or ‘left hand to nine o’clock,’ and so on. And he tells Father, ‘Ease up on the gas, Frank, not that much,’ and so on. So it looks like I’m driving the automobile.”

  Louise glared at the back of Frank’s head. “Frank, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’re supposed to set an example for Marie. And did you even once consider that your shenanigans reflect on us all, not just on yourself?”

  She had married Frank having had little experience with men. Most made her wary. In Frank, a man who was kind and charming, she found a haven. He had inherited his standing in the community but was not particularly civic- or business-minded, a likeable companion but a feckless Irish dreamer not to be taken seriously. Louise once thought this characterization of her husband unfair, but as the years passed she could not ignore the mounting boneyard of failed ideas. But where would she be without him? Living in a garret with a leaky roof, pretending to be a widow, doing piecework to feed herself and her child? No, she was fortunate to be Mrs. Francis Morrissey. And fortunate that Frank and Marie adored each other.

  “Shenanigans, you say. Well, at least Marie has never hit anything, which is more than I can say for someone I know.”

  As much for herself as for him, she let his words melt her icy mood. She forced a smile, knowing he would hear it in her voice. “Well, someone I know should have provided proper training.”

  Marie giggled, and Louise gave her a squeeze. For everyone’s sake, she willed herself to remain congenial, knowing that her irritation with Frank had nothing to do with him and everything to do with The Twister Tenth Anniversary Observance, for it would bring her face to face with Doc.

  5

  May 1904

  The following Tuesday morning, Louise was dressing for breakfast when there came a knock on the bedroom door.

  “Yes?”

  “Cook says two people didn’t show up.” It was Henryetta’s voice.

  “You go on. I’ll join you shortly.”

  Louise was not above working in the Inn’s kitchen or dining room now and then. Or occasionally assuming the duties of Mr. and Mrs. Monfort, the resident front desk managers. These tasks came with being the innkeeper’s wife. Frank drew the line at cleaning rooms.

  Louise went to the bedroom where Marie sat playing with Dolly. “Get dressed and come downstairs with your father to have breakfast.” She pushed hair away from Marie’s face. There was no time to re-do her braids.

  “May I work in the kitchen?”

  Louise sometimes let her daughter grind coffee or help the dishwasher by putting away cups and saucers. “After you eat breakfast.”

  The air in the stairwell was thick with the aroma of pork chops and sausage. Louise entered the dining room, filled with an eclectic mix of patrons that, this morning, included traveling salesmen wearing shoes polished to a mirror finish, overalls-clad laborers from the highway construction crew, and retired farmers. J.D. Henkleman, husband of Louise’s best friend, Dovie, and owner of the Riverbend Nonpareil newspaper, held up his end of a fault-finding discussion among the group that called themselves the Roundtable Regulars: the banker, school superintendent, Methodist minister, railroad district supervisor, and owners of the cigar factory, chicken processing plant, bicycle shop, and mercantile company. The town’s boosters, they had promoted early adoption of electricity and telephones, something neighboring Smithville had only recently embraced. Today’s heated discussion was in response to word that Union College, in spite of Riverbend’s long courtship, would locate in Smithville.

  Frank, trailed by Marie, entered the dining room through the swinging doors from the kitchen and took a table. Louise delivered their standard dining room breakfast. Steak, hash browns, eggs over easy, and coffee for Frank. Oatmeal with cream for Marie. And kolaches for both. “Here’s a hearty meal. It’ll give you the pep and energy you need for your work.” Louise enjoyed seeing Marie happy to “go to work.”

  As Louise was clearing tables, she noticed the different habits of people eating kolaches, which had become a specialty of the Inn. Some ate the doughy perimeter and saved the fruity or sweet cheesy center for a climax. Others spread the filling evenly over the dough, making each bite a marriage of sweetness and dough. Her own experience was that usually the first bite was sheer perfection against which the remaining pastry, being slightly too doughy or sweet for her taste, could not measure up. But there was always the promise of next time.

  From the corner of her eye Louise saw Marie make her way toward the kitchen, touching chairs in her path. Frank should have insisted she bring her cane to navigate the dimly lit dining room. As she neared the kitchen, the swinging doors opened.

  “Look out!” Louise yelled.

  Marie collided with Mrs. Jelinek, the plump baker, whose platter of kolaches crashed to the floor. Mrs. Jelinek clasped a hand over her mouth as a flush crept from her neck to her cheeks. She appeared to be on the verge of tears. Marie looked stunned

  Louise clutched her daughter and moved her away from the scattered pastries. “It’s all right. No one’s hurt. A few kolaches got spilled is all.”

  “May I still go to work?”

  “Of course.” Louise wanted to take Marie’s hand and guide her to the kitchen, but she helped her daughter only when asked. She held her breath as Marie took tentative steps toward the swinging door.

  The cook rushed out of the kitchen toting rags and a bucket. She nodded toward Mrs. Jelinek, who stood by, wringing her hands, being too fat to bend over. “That one’s trouble. Eats like a field hand, she don’t speak English, and I plain don’t trust her.”

  From the look on Mrs. Jelinek’s face, she appeared to grasp the cook’s meaning, if not her words.

  “It’s just her Old Country ways.” Louise gestured and smiled to let Mrs. Jelinek know she was not in trouble. Louise pitied the woman whom she had hired six months earlier. She might have been no older than Louise, but her haggard face suggested a hard life.

  “Besides,” Louise said to the cook, “how would you get by without her kolaches?”

  The Bohemian baker had introduced the rich, sweet pastries to the breakfast menu and almost overnight they became the talk of the town. That she usually made more than enough for the breakfast crowd was her one saving grace with fellow workers.

  Now that things were under control, Louise carried a coffee pot to the table of three ol
d-timers, who worked at the Burlington yards, where trains were serviced and repaired. Caught up in conversation, they seemingly hadn’t noticed the commotion. They went on talking as she refilled their cups.

  “Before The Twister women knew how to act like ladies,” the man wearing a railroad cap said.

  “Have you noticed they’s been more two-headed calves borned?” The oldest of the trio poured coffee into his saucer and back into his cup, then repeated the ritual.

  “By golly, now you mention it, more folks come down with the consumption,” the red-haired man said.

  Overhearing their talk reminded Louise how recollections of events had organized themselves neatly into two categories: before and after The Twister. “The storm of the century,” people called it. J.D., always a stickler for correct spelling and punctuation in his newspaper, had proclaimed The Twister to be a storm of such magnitude that it merited capitalizing to distinguish it from lesser tornadoes.

  While dismissing the old-timers’ superstitions, Louise could not shake her belief that the storm had possessed magical powers. Otherwise how had she been transformed from one person before The Twister to someone she scarcely recognized after?

  After a quick sponge bath that afternoon, Louise put on a flowery print dress that flattered her wasp waist, an illusion achieved with a painfully cinched corset. The dress was a favorite. It transported her to a setting in a photograph she had once seen: the white veranda of a Kentucky horse farm where ladies of impeccable breeding sipped mint juleps from silver cups.

  Looking in the mirror, she tamed the rogue strands of hair that escaped her otherwise well-mannered coiffure. Lamenting the streaks of gray and the tendency of her flaxen hair to resemble excelsior in the humidity, she carried on the long-standing debate with herself about whether to abandon her Gibson Girl hairstyle for the neat Marcel wave like Dovie wore.

  She noticed her hands, which Dovie always called her “signature.” They compensated for the flaws the mirror revealed—hazel eyes set a bit too wide, a somewhat determined jaw. Next she applied just enough face powder and rouge to create a look of glowing health. Then the finishing touches: beige pumps, hat, lace gloves, and parasol.

  With one last, studied look at her mirrored reflection, she was satisfied that the fluid motion with which she picked up her handbag and the book she had intended to finish reading that morning exhibited refinement. Graceful gestures anchored her in the role and elevated other behaviors so that her voice would be well-modulated, her words well-chosen, and her posture erect but not ramrod stiff. Silly, she knew, but after all these years she still sought the mirror’s assurance that she would not slip with an “ain’t” or a careless wipe of her nose with a sleeve. A cultivated lady gazed back.

  It being a mild, sunny day, Louise enjoyed her walk to the Tuesday Bibliophiles meeting. Entering Anderson’s Seed and Feed, she paused to close her parasol and let her eyes adjust to the dim light. She walked the stairs to the second floor through a cloud of seed and feed dust. When she entered the library, the musty odor of books thrust her back, as it always did, to her Wednesday afternoons with Doc. She nudged him out of her mind and recalled the private library of the Logans, her first employer. There she had discovered great literature.

  Louise joined the four women Frank called “the biddies,” a collection of individuals united in their love of literature and literacy. Dolores “Dovie” Henkleman, her sister-in-law Gertrude Gottschalk, and Madge Anderson stood fanning themselves with cardboard fans, courtesy of Ludwig’s Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlor. Louise’s neighbor, Alice Dietz, plump and asthmatic, sat in the wingback chair in the social corner, still gulping breath after having climbed the stairs. She clutched a package of Potter’s Asthma Cigarettes in one hand and an ashtray with a spent cigarette in the other. Smoking in what was undoubtedly a firetrap made Louise nervous.

  Alice’s wheezing eased somewhat, her face slack as though she’d just survived a battle for her life. Louise ached for her and remembered having led the Bibliophiles in a failed effort ten years earlier to get a Carnegie library in Riverbend, a clean space that would be free from feed dust that hung in the air and clogged lungs. And there would be a first-floor meeting room. It would be worth trying again, but now her duties as Marie’s mother came first. Louise had become consumed with teaching her daughter to read and write Braille and do sums, and with grooming her for a career as a concert pianist. Marie’s welfare meant everything. The fires of personal ambition burned no more.

  Louise and Dovie took seats on the sofa while Madge and Gertrude took the remaining upholstered chairs.

  “I don’t believe a man could have written The Trojan Women,” Dovie said. She was a tiny woman and voracious reader whose nickname reflected her bird-like energy. “I think Mrs. Euripides wrote it.”

  Madge, a former schoolteacher who late in life had married widower Andy Anderson, corrected her. “Euripedes’ wife would not have been referred to as Mrs. Euripides. The ancient Greeks did not use those forms of address.”

  The insult appeared to escape Dovie.

  Dovie’s comments often exasperated Madge, who now taught the library’s Adult Literacy Class. Madge, who had a square, no-nonsense jaw and wore her hair in a bun, might have been more tolerant if Dovie would dress properly for their meetings instead of wearing bloomers, attire the high school girls had taken to wearing to the ice cream parlor. Dovie also enjoyed the notoriety of being the first woman in town to drive an automobile and didn’t care that people snickered at seeing her crank the engine. And everyone knew that in the privacy of her home she smoked the occasional cigar. Louise envied her friend’s ability to bend rules and get away with it, one privilege of having been born well and marrying one of the most influential men in Riverbend.

  “Well, I still think she wrote it,” Dovie said, the rapid flutter of her fan reminding Louise of a hummingbird. “It wouldn’t be the first time a man took credit for a woman’s work.”

  Madge said, “You have a point there.”

  Alice nodded as she removed her crocheting from a bag. She was making antimacassars for the threadbare arms of the library’s sofa and three upholstered chairs. When not in the throes of an asthma attack, she was inscrutably beautiful, like a porcelain doll.

  Gertrude, today’s discussion leader, looked at the Regulator wall clock, then at the watch pinned to her shirtwaist pocket. Her stalwart black eyebrows met in a frown. “My watch says it’s time to begin. Louise, it appears the library clock is nearly three minutes slow.”

  “I shall have it checked.” Louise had long ago gotten over letting Gertrude’s nitpicking annoy her, and now she found it amusing. Gertrude was the younger sister of J.D., Dovie’s husband. She always carried her Bible, which she might pull from her purse and read during a meeting, particularly if she didn’t like the turn a discussion had taken. Three years earlier, Gertrude had lost her husband. Louise felt sorry for her, a woman in the prime of life made a misfit for lack of a husband. She now lived with her mother, a woman who was much lighter-hearted than her two children. The Henkleman matriarch was also Marie’s beloved piano teacher.

  “I won’t be able to join you in the discussion,” Louise said. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t finish reading today’s selection. I apologize.”

  “That’s not like you.” Dovie set her fan in her lap. “Usually I’m the scatterbrain. I forget which of the dozen books lying around my house is the one we’re reading.”

  Louise marveled at how her good friend could appear to be moving even when sitting still.

  “Oh, and Louise, everyone in town is talking about that trick Frank played on the poor Sawyer family. Have you heard what he did?”

  Louise felt a flush rising in her face. “I’m afraid so. It’s a game he likes to call ‘Blind Girl’s Bluff.’ Believe me, I’d put a stop to it if I could.”

  Alice had been sitting quietly, crocheting and just listening until her wheezing subsided sufficiently for her to talk. “Speaki
ng of books lying around . . . I have some I’ve been meaning to donate to the library.”

  Louise’s pulse quickened. But Alice’s expression was without guile. There was not the slightest knowing twitch in Louise’s direction, nothing to suggest she might have been the one who had left books on the wicker table that long-ago December day. Deciding that anxiety over The Twister anniversary had her on edge, Louise took slow breaths to calm herself. There was no reason to believe her reputation might be in jeopardy.

  During the discussion of Euripides’ play, Louise’s mind drifted back to her tentative first days as the twelve-year-old housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs. Logan. One day while dusting books in their cavernous library, she had sneaked a look at Jane Eyre and discovered a girl whose loneliness and yearnings resembled her own. Hearing Mrs. Logan’s voice, Louise steeled herself for a reprimand, but instead her employer, with no children of her own to fuss over, welcomed Louise’s interest in books and set up a course of reading for her to follow after her day’s work was done. A favorite memory was the occasional winter afternoon when she and Mrs. Logan would sit over hot chocolate and discuss books. Louise dreamed then of one day having children of her own and greeting them with steaming mugs of hot chocolate when they came home from school.

  “Time’s up,” Gertrude said. “Madge will present the word for the day.”

  “Today’s word is progeny.” Madge said. “It is a noun that means ‘direct descendents.’ It derives from the Latin verb progignere which means ‘to beget.’ Synonyms include ‘children’ and ‘offspring.’ I shall use it in a sentence: The Trojan women’s progeny suffered at the hands of the Greek conquerors.”

  “Is the word related to ‘prodigy?’ Dovie asked.