A Fireproof Home for the Bride (25 page)

Emmy approached the long oaken counter that separated her from the news floor, and waited patiently as a young woman sitting in front of a large switchboard on the other side of the counter held up a finger and then pulled a cord from her desktop, expertly plugging it into a hole at the top of the board. The operator had white-blond hair just like Emmy’s, a reassuring sign that she was in the right place.

“May I help you?” the woman asked Emmy.

“I hope so,” Emmy replied, managing to quell her excitement at the prospect of working in such a fascinating place. She held out the well-worn newspaper. “I’m here about the switchboard job?”

“Hallelujah and hello.” A red light blinked on the desk, and the woman pressed the switch under it.

“Good afternoon,
The Fargo Forum,
how may I direct your call?” she said into a mouthpiece that connected to her headset. “Oh, hiya, Carlene, it’s Dot. Hang on, I’ll get him for ya.” She strung another cord, and a phone rang at a nearby desk. Emmy watched the man at that desk pick up the receiver, at which point Dot flipped another switch. She then turned to a girl passing with a stack of papers. “Louise, take the board for a minute, would you?” She handed the headset to the girl in exchange for the papers and stood in front of Emmy, extending her right hand over the counter. “I’m Dot Randall. These are edits. Follow me.”

Emmy quickly passed through the swinging half door at the end of the counter and fell into step. “I’m Emmy Nelson,” she said, expecting her name to elicit some sort of response. It didn’t. “We’re cousins, I think.”

Dot stopped midstride and gave Emmy the once-over. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said with a distinct air of bemusement. “Did someone die?”

Emmy laughed, caught off guard by the question. “No, why?”

“My mother said we’d meet over your mother’s dead body.” Dot shrugged.

“I’m staying with Josephine for now.” Emmy lifted her shoulders. “I don’t even know how you and I are related.”

“Let’s see.” Dot scratched her head at the point where her blond ponytail was secured with a red piece of ribbon that matched the gingham blouse under her gray split-front jumper. “My father’s father was Aunt Jo’s older brother—right, and Adelaide’s, too—which makes you and me second cousins. Technically, she’s my
great
-aunt, since she was my grandfather’s sister. He died in the First World War, long before I was born. So did his older brother, Hans. Tragic story—they died within two days and ten miles of each other in the battle of Meuse-Argonne, probably killed by distant relatives on the German side. Jo and Adelaide had some sort of falling-out after that, and Adelaide left, never to be heard from again. Though I guess you know that part. Anyway, Aunt Jo find you on the side of the road?” Dot tilted her head in a way that made her ponytail brush her right shoulder.

“You call her Aunt Jo?” Emmy asked, holding back the flood of questions that Dot’s easy information sharing prompted.

“Yeah, but boy, does she hate it.” Dot laughed. “Says it’s too
Little Women
for her taste, though if you ask me, that’s a pretty great book, and she’s a
lot
like that Jo.”

“I haven’t read it,” Emmy said, increasingly won over by Dot’s patter.

“Well, you should.” Dot put her hands on her slim hips. “You ever run a switchboard?”

“No,” Emmy replied, surveying the rack of pegs and holes. “I’ve never even seen one.”

“It’s not trigonometry or anything. My mom used to run it, and Aunt Jo before her. It’s sort of in our blood, I guess.” Dot waved Emmy around the counter and led her past the desks, only half of which seemed to be occupied. “The job’s a few nights a week, while I study for my exams. Though we could also use a copygirl, if you’re interested in more hours. Louise is leaving at the end of the month to get married. We have a lot of turnover in that job, for that reason.”

“I’d be happy to take whatever you have,” Emmy said, following Dot through the room. “Though don’t I need to formally apply? Mr. Utke at Moorhead High said you could call him on my behalf.”

“To be honest, we’ve only had a few applicants,” Dot said, winking. “The job’s pretty much yours if you can do it. How is old Reinhold, anyway? Have you read
The Caine Mutiny
?” She said the title with a deep, dour accent. Emmy laughed, making Dot smile at her own cleverness. “Do yourself a favor and skip right to
Marjorie Morningstar.
To, die, for. Just don’t tell him I said so.” They stopped at a larger desk, set apart from the others in the front of the room, where a heavyset man wearing a sweat-stained white shirt rapidly drew lines and circles on a typewritten sheet with a thick red pencil.

“This is the boss,” Dot said, and the man looked up from his work. “He looks big and mean, but he’s as harmless as a baby wasp.”

“Stan Gordon,” he said, sticking the pencil behind his ear and extending a hand. Emmy shook it.

“Emmaline Nelson.”

“She’s our best shot,” Dot added. “If you want, I can get her trained and see how she goes.”

“Carry on, then,” Stan said, reclaiming his pencil as though he’d been temporarily missing one of his fingers.

“He likes skirts, if you know what I mean,” Dot whispered, leading Emmy to a door marked
ARCHIVES.
“This is the morgue. Don’t let the name scare you; it just means where all the dead files are kept. There’s a nice big table in there for doing research, should you need it. Some people take naps in there, don’t ask me why. Those are the ladies and gents, and this is the most important place of all.” She stopped at the final open door. “The break room, where we do our best work.”

“Where you do your only work.” A man’s voice echoed from inside of the room. Emmy followed Dot in and realized the fellow was the reporter she’d met the night before. Hatless, and with his sleeves rolled just above the elbows, he looked much younger than she’d thought at the time. She watched him fill a cup with coffee from an aluminum urn that took up a good portion of the short counter. An odd sense of familiarity hit Emmy, almost as though she’d been waiting to see him again after a long time apart.

“Oh, Jim, you’re so droll,” Dot said, handing him the stack of papers. “Here’s your slug copy.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “That’s my cousin Emmy Nelson, aspiring switchboard operator and probable copygirl. Be nice.”

Jim crossed the homey room, having to weave his way around two leather armchairs and a low-lit lamp that had a topaz-colored glass ashtray encircling its brass post. “Aren’t you the girl from the fire?” He squinted and sniffed, as though trying to smell the evidence of smoke on her.

Emmy nodded.

“Your friend’s going to live,” he said, sliding his hands into his pants pockets and shrugging. “But it’s going to be a hard few months.”

Emmy nodded again, sick to the heart that she’d ever asked Cindy to take her place. She attempted to change the subject. “I read your article three times today. It was really good.”

“Only three times?” he cajoled. “It couldn’t have been very good if you didn’t read it four times.” Emmy smiled at him, thankful for the lightening of her mood.

“I said
be nice,
” Dot said. “At least until she says yes to this crazy place, though I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

“Too late.” Jim lightly punched Dot’s shoulder as he went through the door. “You are your worst enemy,” he said with a laugh.

“Droll, droll, droll,” she said to his back, and then turned happily to Emmy. “He’s a little more puffed up than usual. We just heard this morning that the paper got a Pulitzer for our tornado coverage last summer.”

“Is that a good thing?” Emmy asked.

“Yeah,” Dot said with a bemused shake of her head. “Real good. So when can you start?”

Emmy peeled off her lightweight jacket and hung it on an empty hook on the wall, readjusting her A-line worsted beige skirt and tucking her blue nylon blouse firmly down the front. “I wouldn’t mind starting now, if it’s all right with you?”

Dot’s smile was as big as it was instant. “Okay, cuz, I like your attitude. Monday’s always quiet, so it’s a good time to train. If you can’t hack it, we’ll know right away.”

Emmy’s gaze hung in the space of the empty door where Jim had just passed. “I can hack it,” she murmured, and cleared her throat. “With your help.”

*   *   *

By the time her training was over at eight and she was on her way back to Josephine’s, Emmy understood that the evident upside to having a cousin who talked a lot was the amount of readily transferred knowledge Emmy now possessed. She had become as intimately acquainted with the inner workings of
The Fargo Forum
as if she had been born in the break room. First, she’d committed to memory the numbers on the board that correlated with the various reporters and their names, what areas they covered, and where they all sat in the newsroom. She knew which outboxes to empty and when, how to tell if the newswire machines were jammed, and to frequently check for photographs coming over the wire on a special machine that she watched, mesmerized, as it transmitted a picture of a lady in a monstrous Easter hat from a parade in New York City, one line at a time. Her initial anxiety over whether she could handle the job ebbed as she learned each piece of it. The switchboard was the most formidable, and oddly, therefore, the easiest thing to learn. Dot was impressed by how quickly Emmy learned, and had asked her to come back the next day for a test drive on the machine by herself. If she did well, she’d have her own shift by the end of the week, at improved pay of twenty-five cents more an hour than her theater salary. The notion of having a real job, with interesting work and energetic, friendly people, settled the worry that the theater fire had begun, though she still felt distraught about Mr. Rakov’s catastrophic loss and was worried sick about Cindy.

Emmy steered the wagon onto the soft dirt drive of the estate, happy to see the warm lights of the cottage. If only Emmy could find a way to explain to her aunt why she couldn’t go back to her parents’ house, even for one more night, she could then ask Dot if she knew of a place where she could stay longer.

The temperature had dropped considerably, with frost predicted overnight—or at least that was the weather report Dot had shared as Emmy left the building. Music could be heard as Emmy neared the front door, a song that she remembered from her childhood, something low and sweet in its yearning vocals. The words
smile the while you kiss me sweet ado
popped into Emmy’s head as she heard them float through the slightly open door.

“Hello?” Emmy entered the kitchen, and her stomach growled. She realized she hadn’t eaten a bite since her half of the ham sandwich at lunch. “Josephine?”

“Bring yourself a glass,” Josephine said from the parlor, her voice loud over the strains of the song as it wound down, only to scratch and start again, Josephine’s sweet soprano slightly higher than the tenor’s rich notes. “There’s a song in the land of the lily…”

Emmy took a glass from the cupboard and a piece of fried chicken from a discarded plate on the counter. She went into the cozy room, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light enough to see her aunt standing next to the wide horn of a Victrola with a delicately formed goblet in her hand that swayed to the tune as she sang it through to the end. Her hair had been released from its bun and floated in a white cloud around her shoulders, which were draped with a flowing silk gown printed with long-legged white birds. The glow of the fireplace lit Josephine’s face, contorted with the sentiment of the song. At the words
till we meet again,
she held the glass in the air toward Emmy, the exquisite fabric swinging loosely from the sleeve and almost touching the floor. A messy stack of black records, some in brown paper sleeves, others without, gleamed next to the player on a side table.

“Not that glass.” Josephine folded onto the fainting couch; her legs tucked one at a time under the robe. The magazines from the night before toppled onto the floor, but Josephine didn’t seem to notice or care. She removed the stopper from a crystal bottle that was surrounded by more of the tiny stemware on a table next to her. The thick log in the fireplace popped and hissed in concert with the needle of the Victrola clicking around the finite circle at the center of the record. Emmy flipped the heavy round head of the player in her palm and swung it aside before selecting a goblet and holding it under the unsteady trickle of dark liquid that Josephine poured. “Claret. I only drink French wine.”

“I thought you worked at night,” Emmy said, perching on a rocker next to the fireplace. She took a cautious sip of the wine, expecting it to taste sweet like the grape juice used for communion at church, but found it bitter instead. The chicken, however, was delicious.

“You pay attention. I like that,” Josephine said, draining her glass and refilling it. “Today’s a holiday.”

“Yesterday was a holiday,” Emmy corrected softly. “Today’s just Monday.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. Some holidays are celebrations of the self, of having lived long enough to have not died.” Josephine burst into a cackle, covering her mouth with a hand that had taken on spidery dimensions in the low light. “In other words, it’s my birthday.” She raised the glass, found it empty, and refilled it, making Emmy wonder why she didn’t simply use a larger one.

“Happy birthday,” Emmy said, tilting her own wine a bit less tentatively. “If I’d known I would have planned something nice.”

“You
are
something nice, dear girl,” Josephine said, stretching out along the couch and resting her head on her propped-up right hand. “Besides, when you reach sixty-six alone, there’s hardly any reason to celebrate. Instead, I mourn.” She laughed again, the sound of it like breaking glass.

“You have an odd way of mourning, I must say,” Emmy replied.

Josephine leaned forward just enough to look as though she might tip onto the rug between them, and focused her gaze on Emmy. “Scarlet fever took Mother when I was ten. My father drank himself into the grave next to hers when I was fourteen. My brother Hans joined the army and enjoyed it so much that my other brother, Otto, went right along after, leaving his pregnant wife and four children behind. If you want to meet my brothers, you’ll have to make your way to Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, in France. The cemetery is quite beautiful.” She looked at the glass. “French wine for American blood. A paltry payment, but it will have to do.”