Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (23 page)

Back at Miss Sebastian’s, after transforming the dining hall into a festive ballroom, Agnes and her coconspirators hastened to compile a list of which young men had performed their own community service and which had simply enjoyed a day off of school. The names of the “workers” fit on one side of a single sheet, while the “shirkers” took up three whole sheets. They distributed the lists to the other young ladies with emphatic reminders that they must all hold the line, and only then did they race off to the dressing rooms backstage of the school theater to freshen up and dress for the dance.

Because of the last-minute details, the social had already begun by the time Agnes and Marjorie raced back, breathless and excited. Students and faculty from both schools were mingling and enjoying refreshments, and it seemed so like the previous year’s gathering that Agnes’s courage faltered for a moment. All it would take for her plan to fail was for one girl to give in to infatuation or pity and accept a shirker’s invitation to dance.

Her plan had to succeed. It must.

The directors of both schools came to the podium to commend the students on their hard work that day—Agnes was heartened by the indignant frowns that appeared on many girls’ faces—and speeches of thanks from charity directors followed. After a long round of applause that not all of them had earned, everyone awaited the first notes of music from the bandstand.

Faculty members and their spouses took to the floor first, and then one by one, young men summoned their courage and asked young ladies to dance. Agnes held her breath as a young couple stepped out onto the dance floor, then exhaled in relief as she recognized her eldest brother with the prettiest girl in Miss Sebastian’s senior class. A few others followed, all of whom were on the “workers” list. Then, right beside her, a handsome “shirker” asked one of the most popular girls at Miss Sebastian’s if she would care to dance. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and she looked as if she meant it. “Since it’s the Service Day Social, I’m only dancing with young men who did their share of the work today.”

Agnes was to hear many versions of this refrain echoed around the room as young ladies—often sweetly, sometimes sternly, occasionally with great regret—demurred when invited onto the dance floor. Certain young men were never without a partner and, as if the rules of popularity had been entirely discarded, some of the handsomest, wealthiest young men were relegated to glowering on the sidelines while scholarship students and chess club champions enjoyed the attention of one charming girl after another. Agnes was so preoccupied with maintaining the resistance that she forgot she had come to dance, too, until a touch on her elbow reminded her.

She turned around, preparing herself to let a shirker down gently, only to find Richard smiling at her.

“How did you get in?” she exclaimed, but then she noticed his fine suit and polished shoes and realized she had made a dreadful mistake.

He frowned thoughtfully and patted his pockets. “Sorry, I must have lost my ticket stub.”

Agnes sank into the nearest chair. “You’re a Warrington student.”

“You said you’d dance with me if I came,” he reminded her. “I intend to hold you to that.”

Wordlessly she nodded, and as he held her in his arms on the dance floor, she wanted to rejoice and she wanted to die of embarrassment. She was furious that he had let her believe that he was a hired worker, and mortified that she had leaped to conclusions based upon his attire and his facility with a hammer. Of course he had worn work clothes to service day; so had she! And not all Warrington men were afraid to get their hands dirty. In her own way, she was as much of a snob as the students who had bought their way out of service.

Next year, she was certain, there would be very few of those.

The girls held fast, and the young men learned that the way to a Miss Sebastian’s girls’ heart was to show compassion for the less fortunate. Or at the very least, the less empathetic young men realized that they had to tolerate a bit of work first if they wanted to enjoy the dance later. Perhaps many of the young people from both schools would never pick up trash or wield a ladle in a soup kitchen on any other occasion, but Agnes hoped that some of the lessons Miss Sebastian intended the day of service to teach would linger with the students and inform the choices they made later in life.

True to his word, Richard never divulged that Agnes had organized the dancing strike, even when some Warrington men tried to organize their own counterstrike wherein they would shun the ringleaders at all school mixers thereafter. “I almost gave up your name when I heard that,” Richard teased Agnes when they met for lunch a week later. “I wouldn’t mind having you all to myself.”

Agnes was too modest to tell him he needn’t worry about competition from any other young man, but she was sure he knew.

Richard fascinated her. She knew from the first day they met that he was nothing like the young men her parents considered suitable, the boys she met at dancing school or the endless society functions her parents forced her to attend. He had a careless roughness refreshingly free of all the practiced mannerisms and studied indifference of the sons of her parents’ friends. Over time she learned that although Richard had been raised in the countryside, he was near the top of his class, admired by even the most sophisticated and urbane of his fellow students, and a natural leader. She assumed her parents would adore him as much as she did, especially since he embodied so many of the values extolled by her mother’s father, the wealthy but populist senator. But when she told her parents about Richard, they heard only that he was the son of a horse farmer, of all things, probably on scholarship, with no family connections that mattered. They forbade her to see him, but she was in love and she was not under her parents’ constant scrutiny. Agnes and Richard met at cafés and school functions, and her parents were none the wiser.

Then war came. To prove his patriotism in the face of anti-German sentiment, Richard left Warrington to enlist, and emboldened by his actions, Andrew did, too. Richard proposed, as so many young men did before they went off to fight, but Agnes was too young to marry without her parents’ consent. She spoke to her mother first, and won her consent only after she vowed to become Richard’s lover rather than wife if they forbade the marriage.

Her father was even more furious and resistant than her mother had been. “If you marry that man,” he roared, “you leave this house forever. You will be dead to us!”

His words shocked her into silence. She could only stare at him, the man she had always admired and loved so deeply. He thought she had betrayed him, that she would willfully destroy the Chevalier family’s good name. She knew he was wrong, but she had no time to waste, no time for him to come to know Richard, to accept him. Her darling Richard might not return from the war. She might have only those two weeks with him before he reported to basic training, two weeks in exchange for a lifetime with her family.

She was her father’s favorite daughter, and yet he could cut her out of his life with a word.

“I will miss you all very much,” she told him, her heart breaking. Then she hurried off to tell Richard she would be his wife.

They had a simple civil ceremony, with Andrew and Marjorie serving as witnesses. Agnes had wanted her brothers and sisters present, but she could not ask them to defy their parents and share her banishment. Later that day, Richard’s brother-in-law, James, and Richard’s eldest sister’s beau, Harold, arrived, having learned too late of Richard and Andrew’s plans. James decided to enlist so that he would be in the same unit as his brother-in-law, and Harold did as well.

Agnes was not comforted by the knowledge that James and Harold would be looking after Richard on the battlefield. Their selflessness and courage would not stop a bullet. They should have tried to free Richard from his enlistment, not join him in it. It was utter madness, and she alone seemed able to see it.

They returned to Elm Creek Manor together, for a few bleak days of grievous good-byes. The men’s last days before they were due to report for basic training flew by swiftly. Harold asked Richard’s eldest sister, Claudia, to marry him, and she accepted, but they did not rush off and marry as Agnes and Richard had done, as so many other young couples had done. Agnes marveled at their certainty that they would be granted the chance, later, to have a proper wedding celebration. She wished she shared their confidence, and she hid her fear as best she could. She could not bear to send Richard off to war believing anything but that he would return, safe and sound, to raise a family with her, to grow old with her. Believing anything else might bring the worst down upon them.

All too soon, the men departed. Agnes settled into a strange new life, a bride without an adoring husband by her side, disowned by her family, an unwelcome stranger in an unfamiliar home, caught between two bickering sisters, all of them fearing for the men they loved. In time she won over all of the Bergstroms except Sylvia, who was jealous that Agnes had captured her beloved baby brother’s heart. Sylvia had concluded early on that Agnes was a flighty, spoiled, pampered child, and nothing Agnes said or did could persuade her otherwise. Agnes resolved to win over her reluctant sister-in-law with time and patience, for Richard’s sake.

Knowing how proud Sylvia was of her quilts, Agnes asked for lessons, thinking that a shared interest might draw them together and that quilting would help distract her during the lonely weeks between letters from the men. Flattered, Sylvia agreed and suggested that Agnes choose a simple pattern or a sampler as her first project. As Agnes paged through patterns, selecting a variety of blocks she thought she could manage with Sylvia’s guidance, Claudia took her aside and told her she would master the skills more quickly and thoroughly if she chose a more challenging pattern. With no reason to question the advice of the sister who actually liked her, Agnes chose to make a Double Wedding Ring quilt, for the name seemed to promise that she and Richard would have many happy years together. Sylvia tried to convince her to stick to the sampler, a suggestion Agnes later wished she had followed. The bias edges and curved seams of the Double Wedding Ring proved too difficult for her inexpert stitches, and her first half ring buckled in the middle and gapped in the seams. She might have done better on a second attempt, but before she could cut another piece or sew another seam of her wedding quilt, the news came that Richard and James had been killed, victims of friendly fire in the South Pacific. In shock and grief, Sylvia lost James’s unborn child and kindly Mr. Bergstrom was felled by a stroke.

So much loss, so much pain, so much grieving. Agnes would not have survived it except for Claudia, who forced her to keep going, who gave her work to do caring for Sylvia as she recovered. Gradually Sylvia grew stronger, but she was never the same. None of them could be, but Sylvia had lost a child. In compassion for her, Agnes found the strength to keep going.

If only she could return to Philadelphia, resume her studies at Miss Sebastian’s Academy—but she had closed the door to that life, and at Elm Creek Manor she must remain.

The war ended. Harold came home, and Claudia threw herself into preparing for their wedding as if to deny all the loss, all the suffering the family had endured. She expected Sylvia to help, but Sylvia seemed unable to summon any interest and had difficulty remembering the tasks Claudia assigned to her. Exasperated, Claudia turned to Agnes, and in a futile attempt to keep peace between the sisters, Agnes took over Sylvia’s duties, thinking to relieve her of an unwanted burden.

One day a few weeks before the wedding, Andrew paid an unexpected visit on his way from Philadelphia to a new job in Detroit. Agnes was pleased to see her old friend, though the sight of him brought tears to her eyes as she remembered happier times when they were carefree students in Philadelphia. He walked with a new limp caused by the wound he had suffered trying to rescue Richard, and although he treated Agnes the same as always, he coldly shunned Harold. Agnes did not ask why; something in the steely gaze Andrew fixed upon his former brother-in-arms warned her that she did not want to know what had passed between them in the war.

That evening after supper, Andrew spoke privately with Sylvia in the library. Agnes was passing in the hall when the door banged open and Sylvia stormed out, furious, tears streaking her face. Andrew had followed her as far as the library door. His face, too, was wet from tears.

“What happened?” Agnes asked him. As soon as the words left her lips, she felt a flash of panic. She did not want to know.

But Andrew had already taken her hand. “Agnes, there’s something you don’t know about the way Richard and James died.” He hesitated. “You should know the truth.”

But Agnes tore her hand from his grasp and begged him to say no more. What did it matter how Richard had died? All that mattered was that he was never coming back to her. That was burden enough. She could not bear to add to it the picture of her husband’s last moments—the explosion, Richard bleeding, limbs torn off or blasted away, screams of agony ripping from his throat. She imagined too much without hearing Andrew’s story.

Andrew left the next day, but before he departed, Agnes never once observed him take Claudia aside to tell her the horrific tale of the men’s deaths as he had told Sylvia, as he had tried to tell her. Agnes vowed to absent herself whenever Sylvia chose to tell her sister what Andrew had said. Then, a few days before the wedding, a terrible argument erupted between the two sisters, worse than any Agnes had witnessed. Sylvia stormed from the house carrying two suitcases, and although Claudia assured Agnes she would return, Agnes knew with bleak certainty that she would never see Sylvia again.

Claudia and Harold married, although moments before walking down the aisle, Claudia had confessed to Agnes that she was not sure if she should go through with it. Even so, the couple seemed happy, so Agnes dismissed Claudia’s last-minute nerves as perfectly understandable given the circumstances. Perhaps the couple was too happy. They threw lavish parties nearly every week, spending money as if to make up for all the deprivations of the war years, as if by laughing and dancing they could undo all the pain they had suffered. Agnes looked on in dismay as Harold and Claudia neglected Bergstrom Thoroughbreds, selling off horses for a fraction of their value to raise cash, which they spent as quickly as they earned it. Agnes had learned something of financial matters from her father and tried to steer the newlyweds down a more prudent course, but they laughed off her concerns. Fearful that they would lose everything, Agnes secretly invested money in stocks and bonds, but she knew the dividends could not possibly keep up with the Middens’ spendthrift ways.