Authors: Phoebe Matthews
“All right,” she said, “which of you is related to Millie Pedersen?”
Hadn’t expected that.
Tom said, “Millie Pedersen is kind of a legend in April’s family. Someone knew her in Hollywood. When we tried to find out more information about her, we kept running into dead ends. Couldn’t even find a death record in California.”
Mrs. Thornton folded her hands and looked from one to the other of us. “You’re not related to Millie?”
Okay, we were asking about a stranger and maybe she thought that was none of our business. We were strangers here, right, outsiders. Were there small town secrets that weren’t supposed to go beyond the town limits?
Storytelling time and I tried to remember the keep it simple rule. “I spent a lot of time with my great grandmother when I was small.”
That much was true. The rest wasn’t and I did feel guilty because Mrs. Thornton was a nice lady. But I was afraid if I mentioned reincarnation, that might not go over well. So I gave great grandmother an adventure.
“Back when Gran Marianne was a teenager she went to Hollywood to try her luck at acting. She only stayed a short while. I guess a lot of girls did that? Anyway, she knew Millie, talked about her a lot.”
“What did she say?” Mrs. Thornton’s eyes narrowed and I knew if I got one detail wrong, she would catch it.
“She said Millie was small, very blond, big expressive eyes, a bit on the thin side with pretty legs, and kind of shy.” Some of that was what Laurence had said, some was what I had seen in the studio dressing room mirror.
Mrs. Thornton let out a slow breath. “Yes, that was Millie. I was maybe four or five when she went off to Hollywood. The Pedersen family lived down the street from us, over on the other side of town. Those houses are all gone now, pulled down for a tract of new houses, one story, all look alike, I can’t imagine what these young people are thinking. Not efficient to heat at all.”
“You knew Millie?”
Tom asked.
“Oh yes. I used to sit on the porch steps and watch her sashay off to school with her girlfriends. They all had their hair bobbed and they’d leave home with clean faces. And then they’d round the corner, right in front of my house where their mothers couldn’t see them, and they’d pull out their little mirrors and they’d put on lipstick. Funny how that seemed so wicked back then. I don’t suppose it was anything more than Tangee. Tangee was a pale orangey pink stuff. Waxy, as I recall. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to have my own lipstick.”
“So you saw her often?” Tom steered the conversation back to Millie.
“I thought Millie was a princess. I hadn’t started school yet and those girls seemed so grown up and beautiful to me. She couldn’t have been more then seventeen when she ran off to Hollywood. I don’t know where she got the money. The Pedersens were dirt poor.”
“Did she go with someone else?” Tom asked. That’s why I needed him, he was good at thinking up useful questions.
“No, the last they heard of her, the depot master saw her board the train to Minneapolis, well, actually, he flagged it down for her. He didn’t know she was running away.”
“Flagged it down?” I had visions of the Railway Children standing in the middle of the track waving their arms.
Mrs. Thornton explained, “This wasn’t a regular train stop back then. If there was a passenger or a package pickup, the station master set a signal for the engineer to stop the train by the platform. There was a long wood platform stretching the whole length of the back of the depot. Gone now and it’s funny, I haven’t thought about it in years. And then you’d have to hurry and get on, because those trains didn’t wait around.”
“So the station master stopped the train for a seventeen year old girl and didn’t think that was odd?” I asked.
She thought about it, then smiled. “It was a different world, dear. Everybody knew everybody. And he knew Millie, never considered questioning her. He thought she was visiting relatives in the city. Perhaps that’s what she told him.”
“So when did her family realize she was gone?”
“Oh, right away, I suppose. It wasn’t anything anyone explained to a five year old. But I remember the talk from later because I would have been about eight when, well, back to your question,” Mrs. Thornton said. “The Pedersens were frantic until they finally got a letter from her, all the way from California. There I go. California isn’t that far away now, is it? I went out there with my husband during World War 2, his company sent him, they built parts for airplanes, and we stayed three years but I really didn’t like it and so when the war ended, we came back home. Now, dear, you finish up those sandwiches.”
“Do you know where Millie is buried?” Tom asked, and then he did as he was told and ate the last of the small sandwiches.
For a moment I forgot Millie, leaned back in my chair and smiled. There was something so homey, so like my childhood visits to my great grandmother Marianne and to my grandmother Alice, in the way Mrs. Thornton pushed food on Tom. I remembered my father complaining about that trait to my mother, saying, “Your mother is always insisting everyone eat more. I know when I’m full.”
And I remembered my mother explaining that grandmother had lived during the depression and to this day couldn’t stand to see a crumb wasted.
Like my grandmother, Mrs. Thornton obviously liked to see a man finish up the last crumb. Then she said, “Millie died in California you know, in a car crash. She and her brother. I suppose the Pedersens could have had them shipped home, but they didn’t. Like I said, they were dirt poor.”
“Millie and her brother? Her brother was in California?” I blurted.
“She’d been out there two or three years. Yes, that’s right, I was eight then. So I remember that much more clearly. Her father wouldn’t even say her name and her mother cried all the time. And my mother and the other church ladies used to talk about it when they didn’t think the children were listening. But we all knew all about Millie. I was in second grade then and we were such gossips. We used to have these little notebooks we called slam books, goodness, I’d forgotten those, and we’d pass them around and write down what we thought about our classmates. We were as bad as the church ladies. Or maybe that was in fifth grade?”
“When did Millie go out to Hollywood?”
Mrs. Thornton smiled at Tom. “She was seventeen so it must have been around 1922 because it was 1925 when her brother Dion went out there to find her and try to bring her home. And that’s the year I was in second grade, 1925. That was so sad. Here. I have their obituary, thought you might like to see it.”
CHAPTER 23
That shocked us both into silence. All those shelves of boxes in the basement of the library, it would have taken days or weeks to find the obituary. Tom and I stared at each other, knew we both were thinking of the old newspapers at the library.
We watched Mrs. Thornton stand slowly and walk to the beautiful desk in the corner, a desk with a glass-doored bookcase on top and a drop-leaf writing surface on the front. She opened it, reached in, took out a heavy leather photo album and carried it over to Tom.
Leaning over his arm, she opened the book and pointed. “There. That’s it.”
Tom took the album from her and lifted out a rectangle of yellowed paper. He read aloud, “A tragic automobile accident has claimed the lives of Miss Millicent Edith Pedersen, age 20, and her brother, Mr. Dion Archibal Pedersen, age 23. Mr. Pedersen was visiting his sister in Los Angeles, California, at the time. Miss Pedersen and Mr. Pedersen were the children of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Archibal Pedersen of Spruce Road. A memorial service will be held at the Lutheran Church next Saturday.”
There were dates and lists of relatives and other details that Tom would remember. My mind couldn’t let go of that other name.
“I don’t know why my mother cut that out and pasted it in our family photo album. But she liked to paste things, arrange the pages. Do you know, that’s getting very popular again? The young women call it scrapbooking. They make up scrapbooks for all their trips. Back when I was a girl, we had scrapbooks and we pasted in practically everything, birthday cards, flowers, pictures we cut out of magazines, any old thing, but not photos.”
“Her brother?
Her brother was there?” I said again.
Mrs. Thornton nodded. “You know what is very strange, no one ever understood? There were five people killed in that crash. The Pedersens finally did get a report. Millie and another person were in one car and Dion and two other young people were in another car. And the two cars ran head-on into each other. I don’t know who the others were, not from around here, any of them. But isn’t that the strangest thing? Dion and Millie being in different cars and running into each other? It’s not like there was traffic back then the way there is now.”
She continued discussing traffic on the freeways and road trips she had taken and I don’t know what all else because Tom carried on the conversation with her. My mind was stuck on the brother factoid.
Tom said to me, “This is a great collection of photos. Come look at them, April.”
I did, stood behind his chair and leaned over with my hand on his shoulder. He held the leather bound album in his lap and slowly turned the pages. The heavy black paper was disintegrating on the edges. The photos were mounted with little black corners. The photos were slightly yellowed but still sharp and clear. There weren’t a lot of pictures but one showed a frame house with a small girl sitting on the front steps of the porch.
“That must be you sitting on the steps,” Tom said to Mrs. Thornton.
“Oh yes, that was my Sunday school dress.”
It was summer in the photo and a paved sidewalk ran past the house, the route that Millie must have walked to go to school.
I didn’t recognize anything. I kept looking, thinking that perhaps something would look familiar, and afraid that if I did see something I remembered, that would bounce me right into one of those trances. But I didn’t see anything at all to tweak my memory.
Tom turned the page and there was a longer view of the house that included the lawn and side garden. Not familiar. Of course, it wasn’t Millie’s house, it was the childhood home of Mrs. Thornton.
Maybe Millie had never been aware of the town she lived in, never paid any attention to the neighborhood, and blocked it out completely the day she climbed into that train.
“Are there any Pedersen descendants living around here?” Tom asked.
“Oh my, no, dear,” Mrs. Thornton said. “Millie’s father died a year or two later, everyone said he died of a broken heart but I suppose he had a stroke. And her mother just kind of faded away, spent years out at the nursing home. They’re both in the cemetery.”
“The cemetery, where is that?”
“Across the street from the Lutheran church,” Mrs. Thornton said. “Let’s see, their graves, southeast corner, I think, past the big Hendrick memorial. Yes, I am quite sure, three small markers, one for each of them and one for Mr. Pedersen’s mother. She used to live with them. She died long before Millie ran away. I don’t know who put up the money for the markers. Maybe there was something left over from the sale of their house.”