A Northern Light (23 page)

As we finally turned in to our own drive, our shoes sodden and our skirts muddied, I realized I had figured out a way to use my word of the day after all. Mr. Loomis's shirrtails had not quite covered his bare behind, and I had seen, though I truly wished I hadn't, that it was pale, flabby, and horribly hispidulous.

Put the letters away, Mattie,
I say to myself. No, myself answers.

You're no better than your aunt Josie. Reading other people's letters is something she would do. You're a snoop.

I don't care.

Stop this. Go to sleep. You know all you need to know.

But I don't. I know that Grace was pregnant. And I know she got that way because of Chester Gillette. And I think that they came to the Glenmore to elope. There's just one thing I don't know, and if I can find it out, I will put the letters away and go to sleep: I don't know why Chester Gillette wrote
Carl Grahm
in the guest book, and until I find that out, I'm going to keep reading.

South Otselic
June 25, '06
Dear Chester,

I am much too tired to write a decent letter or even follow the lines, but I have been uneasy all day and can't go to sleep because I am sorry I sent you such a hateful letter this morning. So I am going to write and ask your forgiveness, dear. I was cross and
wrote things I ought not to have written. I am very sorry, dear. I shall never feel quite right until you write and say you forgive me ... I am very tired tonight, dear, I have been helping mamma sew today ... I never liked to have dresses fitted and now it is ten times worse. Oh Chester, you have no idea how glad I shall be when this worry is all over ... I am afraid the time will seem awfully long until I see you, Chester ... Oh! dear, I do get so blue. Chester, please don't wait until the Last of the week before you come. Can't you come the first of the week? Chester, I need you than you think I do...

I keep reading, but there's nothing in the letter about Carl Grahm. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. I put Grace's letter down and shuffle through the bundle until I find what I'm after—a few letters written by Chester. I open the first one.

June 21
Dear Grace,

Please excuse paper and pencil, as lam not writing this at home and have nothing else here. I received your letter last night and was just a little surprised although I thought you would be discouraged. Don't worry so much and think less about how you feel and have a good time...

There is more in the letter about a trip some of his friends are taking and that he cannot leave Cortland before the seventh of July, but nothing about Carl Grahm. I open the next one.

July 2, 1906
Dear Kid—

I certainly felt good when I got your letter although I also felt mean as I hadn't written all week. Wednesday and Thursday I had to work on the payroll and Friday a friend came and stayed all night. Saturday I went up to the lake and am so burned tonight I cannot wear a collar or coat. We went out in the canoe and to two other lakes, and, although the canoe was heavy to carry, we had a good time ... As for my plans for the Fourth I have made none as the only two girls I could get to go with me have made other arrangements because I didn't ask them until Saturday...

Now I see why Grace sounded so worried in all her letters. There were other girls. She wasn't the only one. There were girls that maybe he wanted to be with more than he wanted to be with her. Lord, what a mess of trouble she was in. Chester had put her in the family way and she needed him to marry her, but he didn't seem to want to. Not if she had to plead with him to come for her, not if he barely wrote to her, and when he did, told her about other girls he was taking around.

Not if he fought with her at dinner about trying to find a chapel.

I can't imagine how frightened Grace must have been, alone with her terrible secret, waiting and waiting for Chester to come. I remember all Pas warnings about men and the one thing they want, and I shudder to think what would happen to me if I ever found myself a baby before I found myself a husband. But then I comfort myself with the knowledge that Chester
did do
right by her in the end. He came and got her and brought her to the North Woods to elope, didn't he? Even if they did fight about the chapel. Why else would he have brought her here if it wasn't to elope?

I am so confused. I don't know what to think. I feel like the little feather shuttlecock in the badminton games the guests play, batted about from one side to the other.

There is one more Chester letter. It is our of order in the stack, dated earlier than the previous one. Maybe it will tell me what I want to know.

June 25, 1906
Dear Grace—

...Three of us fellows went up to the lake and camped in a small house that one of the boys owns. We had a dandy time even though there were no girls. We went in swimming in the afternoon, and the water was great. I went out in the canoe in the evening and wished you had been there...

I stop reading. All of Chester's good and dandy times, I realize, took place on a lake. In a canoe.

Earlier that day, when the men had brought Grace's body in, we all thought that her companion, Carl Grahm, had drowned, too, and that it would only be a matter of time until his body was found.

But there was no Carl Grahm. I couldn't find him anywhere. There was only Chester Gillette. And Chester Gillette could handle a boat. Chester Gillette could swim.

You have your answer now, don't you?
I say to myself.
That's what you get for prying.

But myself is not listening. She refuses to listen. She's picking up another letter and another and another, frantically looking for a different answer.

She feels sick, so sick she could vomit.

Because she thinks she knows why Chester brought Grace here.

And it wasn't to elope.

"And don't you ever go in a room by yourself with a strange man..."

"Yes, Pa."

"...no matter what the reason. Even if he says you're just to bring him a towel. Or a cup of tea."

"I won't, Pa."

"And you watch yourself around the help, too. Workmen and barkeeps and such."

"I'll be all right, Pa. The Morrisons run a respectable place."

"That may be, but any low-down jack with a few dollars in his pocket can take a room at a fancy hotel. Things ain't always what they seem, Mattie. You remember that. Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven, it don't make 'em biscuits."

Things are never what they seem, Pa,
I thought. I used to think they were, but I was" wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

I'd seen Miss Wilcox as a spinster teacher with a fondness for the mountains. She wasn't. She was Emily Baxter, a lady poet who'd run away from her husband. I'd seen Mr. Loomis as someone who was just being kind whenever he brought Emmie Hubbard eggs or milk. He wasn't. He was most likely the reason her three younger kids all had blond hair. I'd seen Royal Loomis as too fine to ever notice the likes of me, but now we were out driving together every night and he was going to buy me a ring. I'd seen my chances of working at one of the hotels as zero, but there I was, just two weeks before Decoration Day and the official start of the summer season, sitting next to my father in the buckboard on my way to the Glenmore. My mamma's old carpetbag—packed with my dictionary, a few other books from Miss Wilcox, my nightclothes, and two of Mamma's better skirts and waists that Abby had taken in for me—was on the floor between us, heavy as a hod of bricks.

Two days before, I'd gone into the barn to fetch Pleasant out and found him stiff and cold in his stall. No one knew why. He wasn't ailing. Pa said it was old age. He was upset when I told him. He couldn't be without a mule. He needed one to harrow the crops and deliver milk and pull stumps, but a good one cost about twenty dollars and he didn't have it. He was far too stubborn to borrow it, but old Ezra Rombaugh in Inlet, whose son and new daughter-in-law were working his land with their oxen, said he'd sell Pa his six-year-old for fourteen dollars and let him pay off the cost so much every week. That's when he decided I would go to the Glenmore. He didn't like the idea any more in May than he had in March, but he had no choice.

I should have been excited. I should have been beside myself. I'd wanted to go to the Glenmore for months, ever since Weaver and I first cooked up the idea over the winter. And I was finally going. But it felt bittersweet. I wasn't working to get myself to Barnard. I was working because Pa needed help to pay for the new mule.

My mamma once had a beautiful glass basket that my aunt Josie gave her. It was a deep indigo blue, with a braided handle and ruffled edges, and it had
SOUVENIR OF CAPE MAY
written on it. Mamma loved it. She'd kept it on a shelf in the parlor, but Lou took it down one day to play with it and dropped it on the floor. It smashed into a million pieces. Lawton thought maybe he could glue it back together. He tried, but it was too badly damaged. Mamma didn't throw the shards out, though. She put them into an old cigar box and kept them in the bureau in her bedroom. She would look at them every once in a while. She would hold a piece up to the window and watch the light come through it, then put the box away again. When I was younger, I never understood why she kept the broken pieces around, why she didn't just throw them out. Riding up the Big Moose Road with my pa that day, waiting for the Glenmore to come into view, I finally did.

After talking to Ezra Rombaugh, Pa had inquired at the hotel to see if they still had any positions vacant, and they did. I was sorry I couldn't work for Miss Wilcox anymore, but the Glenmore paid more and she was happy for me to go. She said my wages would more than cover the price of a train ticket to New York City. I hadn't the heart to tell her that I'd written Dean Gill to say I wasn't coming.

I was to receive four dollars a week. Pa said I could keep back a dollar for myself. I told him I would keep back two or I would not go. "You know I'm keeping company with Royal Loomis," I said. "I'll have need of a few dollars myself soon." I had three dollars from Miss Wilcox, plus the nickel left over from my fiddlehead money, but I'd need more. Setting up house was an expensive proposition. Pa blinked at me, but I didn't blink back. I'd counted on him still feeling bad enough about hitting me to let me have my way on this, and I was right. There is an advantage to be found in most everything that happens to you, even if it is not immediately apparent.

Pa went right to Inlet after I found Pleasant, and left word at O'Hara's for Bert Brown to come get him. It was only the end of May, but the days could get warm. Bert collected dead livestock and rendered them down. He didn't pay anything for them, but he saved you digging a hole. I was sure that any soap made from Pleasant would be harsh enough to take the skin off your hands, and any glue made from him would be stronger than nails.
Icosahedron,
my word of the day, means twenty-sided. It is an almost entirely useless word, unless, of course, you want to describe something with twenty sides. Then it is perfect. It was a fitting word for Pleasant, who mostly dug his heels in and bit and kicked, but who got me to the Glenmore when I couldn't get myself there.

Pa turned right off the Big Moose Road, and then right again, into the Glenmore's drive. I could see the hotel now, looming tall. A trio of beautifully dressed women strolled toward the dock, parasols over their slender shoulders. A family alighted from a surrey at the front of the hotel and walked leisurely across the lawn. Their maid stayed behind, counting the pieces of luggage as they were unloaded. Suddenly I wanted to tell my father to turn around. I didn't know the first thing about fine people, or how to behave around them. What if I dropped soup in someone's lap? Or spoke before I was spoken to? Or poured wine into the water glasses? Pa needed that new mule badly, though—I knew he did—so I didn't word.

"Abby know how to deal with that stove?" he asked me as Licorice, the new mule, pulled the buckboard up to the Glenmore's back entrance.

"Yes, Pa. Better than I do." Abby was going to be in charge of everyone, and she would get the meals, too.

"I talked with Mr. Sperry. You're to serve in the dining room and help in the kitchen and clean the rooms, but I don't want you nowhere near the bar, you hear? You stay away from the dancing pavilion, too."

"Yes, Pa." What did he think I was going to do? Knock back a few shots every now and again and show off my fancy quickstep?

"Anything happens and you want to come home, you just send word. Don't walk all the way by yourself with that bag. I'll come and get you. Or Royal. One of us will."

"I'll be fine, Pa. Really I will."

I got out. My father did, too. He lifted my bag down, walked me to the kitchen door, and peered inside. I waited for him to hand me the carpetbag, but he didn't. He held it hard against him. "Well, you going in or not?" he asked me.

"I need my bag, Pa."

As he handed it to me, I saw he'd gripped it so tightly his knuckles had turned white. We were not the kissing kind, me and Pa, but I wished that maybe he would at least hug me good-bye. He just toed the ground and spat, though, told me to mind myself, and took off in the buckboard without once looking back.

I was cleaning the table when I saw it. A dime. Lying next to the sugar bowl. I picked it up and ran after the woman who'd left it.

"Ma'am? Pardon me, ma'am!" I called.

She stopped in the doorway.