Work Song (18 page)

Just then Miss Mitchell from the cataloguing section, young and rather pretty and somewhat of a flirt, came in with a question. I dealt with it in no time and she pranced out.

Sandison watched the back of her until she shimmied out of sight, then turned to me with a frown. “Morgan, I don’t see you making eyes at young things like that even when they’re asking for it. What are you, some kind of buck nun?”

This turn of topic took me off guard. Good grief, did my social situation look that dusty to someone whose own idea of mating in life was the grandee and grandora sort? Trying not to show how much that smarted, I stiffly assured my white-bearded interrogator: “I enjoy female companionship when it presents itself, never fear.”

 

 

“THIS DAY GOT AWAY FROM ME.” Grace guiltily bustled past me, trying to tie her apron and control her braid at the same time, when I came in at the end of my own hectic day. “How do you feel about cold turkey for supper?”

“Rather tepid. Let me see what can be done.” Following her to the kitchen, I scrounged the cupboard, coming up with cheese that was mostly rind, some shelled walnuts, and macaroni. Yielding the culinary arena gracefully, so to speak, Grace stood aside while I whacked chunks of the turkey into smaller pieces and set those to simmering in cream and flour in a baking pan.

“Such talent.” She watched with folded arms as I did my imitation of Escoffier. “If all else fails, you can get on as a cook at the Purity,” she ventured.

Up until then, I had not offered any explanation of Rab mysteriously summoning me to the cafeteria, nor, for that matter, of Rab herself. “Yes, well, Miss Rellis you heard mentioned by our fleet young friend the other day,” I fussed with the meal makings some more while coming up with a judicious version of the past, “and to make a long story short,” by which time a pot of water was boiling merrily and I dumped in the macaroni for what was going to approximate turkey tetrazzini, “someone I knew when she was just a girl ends up as the fiancée of none other than Jared Evans. Isn’t it surprising how things turn out?”

Grace’s expression had gradually changed from puzzlement to a ghost of a smile. “You lead an interesting life, Morrie.”

As I combined the macaroni and turkey and added the walnuts, I took the opportunity to bring up the question that was in my mind and doubtless Hoop’s and Griff’s these past many suppers. “Now you tell me something—why is a holiday bird like this such a perpetual bargain at this time of year?”

Razor-sharp shopper that she was, Grace looked at me as if I did not understand basic commerce. “Don’t you know? The homesteaders’ crops dried up, so they tried raising turkeys. The whole dryland country is gobblers these days, and what that does to the price, you see, is—”

“I can guess, thank you.” I tried not to show it, but the news of hard times in the other Montana, the prairie part of the state where agriculture drank dust if rain did not come, hit into me all the way to the hilt. My hands took over to grate the cheese atop the other ingredients while the remembering part of myself was transported to Marias Coulee and the parting of the ways there, Rose’s and mine. So deep in thought was I that I barely heard Grace’s expression of relief as the turkey dish went into the oven looking fit for a feast. “You’ve turned the trick again, how do you do it?” She patted my shoulder as she passed. “I’ll call you and the Gold Dust Twins to the table when it’s done.”

My mood refused to lift during supper; the boardinghouse blues are not easily shaken once they get hold of you. The same exact faces that had seemed so companionable three times a day now surrounded me like random passengers in a dining car, right, left, and center. The four of us were at that table because nowhere in our solitary lives was there a setting for just two. I knew Hooper was a widower, and no one had ever been willing to put up with Griffith as a matrimonial mate. Grace still was beholden to her knightly Arthur, touchy as she was about any appearance of being “taken up with” by an unworthy successor. And I, I had to be classified as something like an obligatory bachelor, always mindful that for a woman to be married to me would be like strapping her to a lightning rod. A quartet of solitudes, sharing only a tasty meal.

Tired from brooding—tired
of
brooding—I excused myself from small talk after eating and went up to my room to lose myself in a book. The one I had brought home was a lovely blue-and-gold volume of letters titled
Let Me Count the Ways
. The illustrious surname incised twice on the cover caused me a rueful moment; Casper used to tease me whenever he caught sight of my Browning collection, asking if I was reading up on how to get a suntan.

I tucked into a pillow and the coverlet, hoping to be transported, and was. In the marriage of poets, I found from the very first page, each wrote with the point of a diamond. Dazzled and dazzling, Robert Browning was a suitor beyond any that Elizabeth of Wimpole Street could have dreamt of:

The quality in that. The pages fell still in my hands as I thought of such a matching of souls. The ceiling became a fresco of Marias Coulee as I sank back on the pillow and imagined my version.

Rose always did know how to stump a good argument.

Wincing, I put away reverie and sat up. My mind took a resolute new posture as well. You don’t need to be an Ecclesiastes devotee to realize there is a time to equivocate and a time to do something.

Still in my slippers, I trotted down the stairs. In the living room, Grace whirled from the sideboard where she was putting away her mending, looking flustered at my hurried arrival. I halted at the foot of the stairs, she braced at her end of the room. Practically in chorus, we blurted:

Both of us stumbled to a pause. She caught her breath and expelled it in saying, “You first.”

“I’d be impolite.”

“Morrie
,
out with it, whatever it is—we can’t beat around the bush all night.”

“I suppose not. I, ah, I wondered if you might like to go to Miners Day. With me, that is.”

Grace covered her mouth against a wild laugh. I felt ridiculous and, calling myself every kind of a fool, was ready to slink back upstairs when she put out a hand to stop me. “Great minds run in similar tracks. I was about to knock on your door and ask you.”

8

N
ever seen you quite so dolled up, Morrie. Mrs. Faraday will have to go some to keep up with you.”

I smoothed the fabric of my new checked vest and adjusted the silk necktie bought to match it. “Everyone tells me Miners Day is a holiday like no other. You are quite the fashion plate yourself, Griff.”

“Better be, on account of the parade. We’ve marched in every one of them, haven’t we, Hoop.”

“Since parades was invented.”

The brand-new work overalls on both of them looked stiff enough to creak, and underneath were the churchgoing white shirts and ties. Their headgear, though, was the distinctive part. Each wore a dingy dented helmet that must have seen hard duty in the mineshafts.

“Are you expecting a hailstorm?” I asked with a straight face.

Hoop proudly tapped his headpiece. “The Hill tried to knock my brains out any number of times, but nothing ever got past this lid. Anymore we only wear it the one day a year, don’t we, Griff.”

Telling me they had to form up early with the other marchers or spend the entire parade looking at hundreds of behinds, the pair hustled out while I waited for Grace to come down from her room. With the Hill not operating due to the holiday, a stillness had settled over the city, and the boardinghouse was in rare quiet. A silent room that is not your own tends to breed long thoughts. Around me now, the boardinghouse’s furnishings seemed to sit in arrested attitude, as if arranged in a villa in Pompeii. The mood of timeless deliberation drew me in and I became more aware than ever of the wedding photograph on the sideboard, where Arthur Faraday stared levelly at me. Something in that everlasting straight gaze reminded me of Casper, likewise gone too early from life and a bride who idolized him. Introspection is a rude visitor. An unsparing look into myself went to the heart, in more ways than one. I know myself fairly well: I am solo by nature. Incurably so, on the evidence thus far. But what a hard-eyed trick of fate—perhaps reflected in Arthur’s stare?—if I was destined, around women, always to be a stand-in for better men.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I heard Grace behind me, her footsteps quick on the stairs. “I had about forgotten how to dress up.”

I turned to look at her, and looked again. She had gone some, in Griff’s phrase for it. Her hair was done up in a crown braid, and atop that sat a broad-brimmed summer hat with a nice little swoop to it and a sprig of red ribbon. Her dress, attractively tailored to her compact form, was of a sea green with a shimmer to it. Even her complexion had a new glow, assisted by just enough rouge to give her cheeks a hint of blush.

“Very nice,” I fumbled out.

“You, too,” she managed.

With Arthur in the room, we stood there, shying away from further compliments, until she remembered to check the clock. “We should get a move on,” landlady back in her voice, “everyone turns out for the parade. I hope we can still find a place to see.”

“Spare yourself that worry,” I rallied. “I know just the spot.”

 

 

MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD, the populace of Butte lined the downtown streets a dozen thick. I shouldered a way for us, Grace with a grip on the tail of my coat, to the block by the library. She looked dubious as I led her past people picnicking on the steps to the big arched doorway. “Isn’t the library closed for today?”

“Except to the privileged.” I displayed the key.

We slipped in, the ornate front door sweeping closed behind us. Inside the thick walls, the din of the outside world was shut out. The foyer, its Tuscan paneling and dark timbered beams as royal as ever, stood staidly empty. I glanced up to see whether Shakespeare winked at us as we passed through the Reading Room doorway, and he may have. Grace gazed around the elegant quiescent chamber with a trace of awe, and then at me. “Sam Sandison must trust you.”

“Mmm, I suspect he simply doesn’t want me to have any excuse day or night for not being in here doing all the things he piles on me to do.”

As we passed through the Reading Room, I could not help but stop for a minute and run my eyes over the mezzanine’s ranks of books, silent but eloquent. I was smitten every time by the finest collection west of Chicago, and to have its literary riches almost to myself this way seemed like a scene in a dream. Housed in their volumes, the souls of writers waited in this great room to come out into the light of day. I would not have been surprised right then if Joseph Conrad materialized at the railing like a stalwart first mate on the deck watch, or Emily Dickinson came tiptoeing out of the shelves to peer down to the unattainable life below.

“My. It’s so different in here without anyone around, isn’t it.”

“Grace, you needn’t whisper.”

“Oh, right.” She trilled a laugh in relief. “If you promise not to shush me.”

A last lingering moment, I gazed at the varicolored bindings as a person would cast a final glance at the jeweled colors of a cathedral window. Then I motioned Grace to the stairway, but she stayed as she was, studying me. “This is the love of your life, isn’t it. What’s in these books.”

“I suppose it is,” I conceded. “As the phrase goes, for better and for worse.”

 

 

OFF THE CORRIDOR to Sandison’s office was a small balcony, like a flex in the stonework over the main entrance’s keystone arch, and the parade coming down Broadway would pass practically beneath us. Grace went straight to the balustrade and took a full look around, adjusting the swoop of her hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. Smiling her best, she plucked at the cuff of my suitcoat. “This is such a treat, you devil.”