CHAPTER FIVE
Gretchen
GRETCHEN DIDN’T MEANto eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to overhear Sylvia’s conversation with Summer and to deduce that Summer was displeased by the news of Jeremy’s surprise visit. Gretchen wondered if someone—Anna, perhaps, since she was his closest friend among them—ought to warn him that he might not receive a cordial welcome.
As the newest Elm Creek Quilter, Gretchen scarcely knew Summer, who had participated in Gretchen’s job interview but had left for graduate school only a few weeks after Gretchen and her husband, Joe, had moved into the manor. Gretchen had no idea how long the two had been dating, but she believed that they had lived together for a time, until some disagreement or another had compelled Summer to move out of Jeremy’s apartment. She wondered how any young couple could rebound and resume a normal dating relationship after living together, but she had seen couples with extraordinary devotion overcome even greater obstacles. She wasn’t sure, however, if Summer and Jeremy were one of these. They were both delightful young people, but that didn’t mean they were perfectly matched.
She and Joe, on the other hand—well, she could not have found a better, more loyal, or more loving husband if she had submitted a list of the qualities she most admired to the Lord above and had him made to order. They had met at church when Gretchen was an aspiring teacher, two years into a home economics and elementary education program at a small college that had awarded her a scholarship; Joe a machinist at an Ambridge steel mill outside Pittsburgh. He was a wonderful dancer, polite and respectful to her parents, and handsome enough to inspire envy in all but her closest friends, who loved her so much that her happiness was their own. On their wedding day, she had considered herself the luckiest woman alive, and after forty-six years of marriage she still believed that, even though life had not turned out as she had expected.
Their newlywed years had begun promisingly enough. Gretchen earned her degree and found a job teaching at a Catholic primary school, and she supplemented her modest income and Joe’s wages by picking up occasional housecleaning work from the same family that had employed her mother and grandmother as domestic help. Joe was too proud to bear this easily, so he worked long hours and accepted as much overtime as he could, determined to have Gretchen end her association with the privileged family that had employed hers for three generations. Inevitably, as soon as the couple got a little bit ahead, the car broke down or the furnace went out or the roof needed to be repaired, so they committed themselves to frugality and found their happiness within each other, hopeful that more prosperous times would come their way.
But all their hopes were shattered on the morning Gretchen’s principal came to her classroom and somberly informed her about a terrible accident at the steel mill. Joe had been taken to Allegheny General Hospital, unconscious and with a broken back. He was not expected to live.
When Joe survived that first night and woke the next morning with no memory of the steel beam that had pinned him to the floor for an hour before his friends could free him, Gretchen deliberately ignored the doctors’ grim predictions that he would never walk again. Trusted friends urged Gretchen to convince Joe to accept the doctors’ diagnosis rather than encourage false hope, but Gretchen refused. Let the rest of the world condemn him to a wheelchair; she would believe in him. Joe needed her to believe in him.
In the long, slow, painful months of his recovery, Gretchen quit her job so she could stay home to care for him. Their modest savings quickly disappeared, but Gretchen made ends meet on a small monthly stipend from Joe’s union. And, against Joe’s wishes, she convinced her former employer to hire her on permanently as a housecleaner on Saturday mornings, when she could arrange for a neighbor to check in on Joe from time to time.
Gretchen knew Joe blamed himself for the misfortune that had forced her to give up teaching, which she loved, for backbreaking labor in the home of a spoiled princess of a woman who felt entitled to Gretchen’s loyal service thanks to their intertwined family histories, but Gretchen didn’t blame him. It was an accident of fate, no one’s fault, but he refused to see it that way, and instead redoubled his efforts to recuperate. Within months he could sit up in bed unassisted, and soon after that he could move from the bed to the chair on his own; within a year, he could stand. From the kitchen below she would hear him attempting slow, shuffling steps across the bedroom floor above, but she resisted the temptation to dash upstairs to watch, knowing his pride would suffer. For Joe, it was bad enough that she had to work to support them, a fact of their married life they accepted but did not discuss. If he did not want her to watch him struggle to walk, she would leave him alone until he was ready.
But their limited means and his limited mobility meant an end to Saturday night dances and Sunday matinees with friends. Instead, they entertained themselves in the evenings by listening to the radio or reading aloud to each other. Most often, Joe would read aloud while Gretchen quilted. His voice, as strong and deep as before the accident, comforted her, and the piecework drew her attention from the shabby furniture, her made-over dresses, the diminishment of their expectations, the loneliness and isolation of their lives. Gretchen’s scrap quilts brought warmth and beauty into their home, allowing them to turn the thermostat a little lower or to conceal a sagging mattress and threadbare sofa cushions. She quilted to add softness and color to her hard, muted life, to give purpose to her hours, and to distract her from the unfairness of fate.
Although Joe defied his doctors’ expectations and learned to walk again, he never fully recovered his old strength, and any accidental jolt made him grimace from pain. Eventually he had no choice but to abandon his plans to return to his old job, his old life. For many long, bleak months he sank into depression, but Gretchen refused to go down with him. Since Joe no longer needed her constant attention, she found a new job as a substitute teacher, and while it was not steady work, it helped pay off some debts and got her out of the house.
Eventually, impressed by his wife’s indomitable resolve and intrigued by the solace she found in creating objects of comfort and beauty, Joe took up refurbishing old furniture when a chance discovery of a broken antique rocking chair in spired him to fix it and sell it for a twenty-dollar profit. Next he restored a bureau and matching chest purchased for a few dollars at a yard sale, and sold both to a shop in Sewickley, netting fifty dollars. Within months, neighbors and strangers alike frequently stopped by the garage to browse through the finished pieces on display or to schedule an appointment to drop off worn or damaged furniture for him to refurbish. Joe made a sign and hung it above the entrance to the garage: JOSEPH HARTLEY: FINE FURNITURE REPAIRED AND RESTORED. He worked when he felt able, resting when the strain on his back and legs became too much. He taught himself cabinet making and woodworking from library books and soon began designing and building his own original pieces.
As his reputation grew, Joe took on almost more work than he could handle, but he set everything aside upon receiving a special request from Gretchen’s grandmother. Her church, a Croatian parish in Pittsburgh, needed a skilled restorer to repair ornate cabinetry in the sacristy, someone who knew how to properly care for the old wood but who wouldn’t cost them a fortune. Joe promptly accepted the job free of charge, which delighted Gretchen’s grandmother and prompted her to exclaim that Gretchen had married “a treasure.”
“He’ll make a wonderful father someday,” she told Gretchen privately, patting her arm affectionately. Gretchen could only smile and agree that she thought he would, too. She didn’t add that she and Joe had been trying again, having postponed starting a family during Joe’s long convalescence, but month after month, the blessing of a child was denied them. Gretchen ached to hold a child of her own, but she had begun to fear that she never would.
The repairs in the sacristy of Holy Family Catholic Church took Joe several weeks, and whenever Gretchen had a day off from teaching, she would spend the morning with her grandmother and bring Joe a sack lunch t
o share at noon. One day, when the restoration was nearly complete, the pastor, Monsignor Paul, examined Joe’s work thoughtfully before remarking that he knew of another worthy organization that could benefit from his talents. “They won’t be able to pay,” the priest told him frankly, “but you’re a faithful steward of your talents, and I think you’ll find the work has other rewards.”
Gretchen knew Joe was eager to resume his paid work, but he could hardly refuse the monsignor’s request when phrased in such terms. He quit work early for the day so the priest could escort him to the other site, a few blocks away. Gretchen accompanied them, and as they left her grandmother’s neighborhood, the small but well-kept bungalows gave way to row houses in disrepair—broken windows, trash in the gutters, graffiti on walls and telephone polls, crumbling stoops leading to front doors boarded up with plywood, children in tattered clothing playing unattended in the alleys. Gretchen remembered her grandmother remarking that the neighborhoods surrounding hers had “gone downhill” in recent years, but she had not expected so dramatic a decline. Nor had she expected the monsignor to lead them to a three-story Victorian house with peeling paint and a front yard entirely taken up by a vegetable garden and a rusty swing set. An elderly white man pushing a shopping cart stuffed full of discarded bottles and newspapers and a thin African-American woman a few years younger than Gretchen browsed through two card tables set up in the driveway, one stacked with canned goods, the other with used clothing. A neat, hand-painted sign above the front door announced that they had arrived at Abiding Savior Christian Outreach.
As the monsignor knocked on the front door, Gretchen and Joe exchanged a wary look behind his back, but they both quickly masked their feelings when the door swung open to reveal a barrel-chested African-American man in a brightly colored tunic, black slacks, and sandals. “Good to see you, Father,” he greeted the monsignor before his gaze lit upon the Hartleys. “I see you brought some company. What a pleasure.”
“This is the man I told you about,” Monsignor Paul said, resting his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe Hartley, the carpenter who’s restoring our sacristy so beautifully. This is his wife, Gretchen. Gretchen and Joe, I’d like you to meet Louis Walker, my good friend and a true servant of Christ.”
“I’m glad you can help us,” said Louis in a deep voice flavored with a Southern accent, shaking Joe’s hand and then Gretchen’s. He beckoned them to follow him inside, into a small front room with shabby sofas and chairs lining the walls and a table covered in parenting magazines in the center. Upstairs an infant squalled, and from somewhere closer but yet unseen came the voices of young women engaged in heated conversation punctuated by laughter. The floorboards creaked beneath worn carpeting as Gretchen trailed after the men, past a dining room with a long table set with at least a dozen mismatched chairs and into a kitchen where the smells of fried chicken, scorched oil, and boiled greens lingered in the air.
“You can see the problem right here,” said Louis, rapping on the door to a cabinet under the sink. “The folks who owned the place before us knew how to cut corners better than they cut wood.”
Even Gretchen could see that the cabinet doors were too large and banged into each other rather than closing properly. A quick glance around confirmed that all of the other cupboards were similarly poorly constructed. Joe tested the door of the nearest cabinet and could open it only a third of the way because the hinges had been set too far from the edge.
Joe looked around, shaking his head. “All of these doors need to be replaced.”
“That’s a little out of our operating budget,” Louis replied dryly. “Any way you can fix these so they hang right and shut tight enough to keep the mice out?”
Joe ran a hand over his jaw, considering. “I could remove them, sand ‘em down, and reset the hinges, but I think you’re going to need all new hardware. Most of these are rusted through.”
“One of my parishioners has a son who owns a hardware store,” said Monsignor Paul. “I could probably arrange a donation if you tell me what you need.”
“Let me look around and I’ll make a list,” said Joe. “But I don’t need to wait for the hinges to take care of the sanding. I can start as soon as I finish the work at Holy Family.”
Gretchen hung back as Louis and Joe discussed the project while the priest looked on in satisfaction. At the sound of voices, she scooted out of the doorway just as three teenage girls, one in the later stages of pregnancy, one carrying an infant, burst into the kitchen chatting and teasing one another. Their demeanor became more reserved at the sight of the priest, whom they greeted respectfully, but lightened when they saw Louis.
“What you girls up to?” Louis asked. “Shouldn’t you be studying?”
“We finished,” piped up the smallest of the three, an African-American girl who wore her hair in tight cornrows with red beads on the ends. She looked to be about fifteen, Gretchen thought, trying not to stare at her rounded abdomen.
Louis’s eyebrows rose. “What’s your teacher going to say when I tell her you got all that work done in an hour?”
The girl carrying the baby glanced at her companions and shifted the baby to her shoulder, patting her gently on the back. “What Alicia meant was that we’re almost done. We’re going to go over our math problems one more time. We were just taking a break.”
“Uh-huh,” said Louis, skeptical.
The third girl, her thin blond hair slipping out of its braid in wisps, avoided Joe’s eyes as she stepped around him to take a glass from a cupboard above the stove and fill it at the sink. Her tummy bore only the slightest tell-tale bulge but worry had already carved a notch between her brows.
Abiding Savior Christian Outreach, Gretchen realized, was a home for girls in trouble, as her grandmother might have phrased it. She wondered where the girls’ parents were, where the fathers of their children were.
“What time do we eat?” Alicia asked, reaching for the refrigerator handle.
“Five o’clock, same as every day,” said Louis, his warning look enough to prompt her to reluctantly release the door. “If we let them eat between meals, there isn’t enough left for meals,” he explained after the girls each helped themselves to a drink of water at the sink and left the kitchen. “My wife portions things out so that everyone gets an equal share, adjusted for how far along they are, of course, and she makes sure that everyone eats plenty of vegetables whether they like ‘em or not.”
“How many girls stay with you here?” Gretchen asked.
“Only six at the moment. Usually we have about ten. Most we’ve ever had is the most we can fit, twenty.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Pittsburgh, mostly,” said Louis, leaning back against the counter and folding his arms over his broad chest. “Some come to the city from small towns in Ohio and western Pennsylvania after their parents throw them out. When they end up on the streets, homeless folks and shelter workers know to send them our way.”
“Their parents throw them out?” echoed Gretchen, bewildered. “So young, and—and in their condition?”
“A pregnant, unmarried daughter is a huge disappointment to some families,” said Louis. “Their anger gets the better of them and they think throwing the girl out is a suitable punishment. Teach her a lesson.”
“What lesson is that?” said Joe, horrified.
Louis shrugged. “If they break the rules and shame the family, it won’t be under their roof. Sometimes homeless girls get pregnant. Sometimes pregnant girls get homeless.”
“The lucky girls end up here,” said Monsignor Joe. “The very lucky girls marry the fathers of their babies and go on to live good lives.”
“He has to say that,” said Louis, tossing the priest a wry glance. “Marriage works for some of these young mothers, but it’s not always the best solution for our residents.”
The monsignor spread his hands as if to suggest that they had long ago agreed to disagree. “The lucky girls end up here,” he repeated, �
�where Louis sees that they have a safe place to stay, enough to eat, medical care, and parenting classes.”
Gretchen, who longed for a child of her own, could not imagine throwing a precious daughter out into the world in so vulnerable a state. “Do the girls—your residents—do they give up their babies for adoption?”
“Some of them do,” Louis acknowledged, “but we try to teach them to be good mothers so they can care for their children right themselves, keep them. If they don’t want to or can’t, well, there aren’t a lot of places for these babies to go, you understand.”
Gretchen nodded wordlessly, thinking of the young mothers little more than children themselves, taking parenting classes to learn what they had probably been unable to observe in their own childhood homes. She wondered about the tables set up in the driveway, the garden plot in the front yard, and she suspected that Louis Walker ministered to a wider community than the young expectant mothers who had found shelter beneath his roof.
In the weeks to come, the stories Joe brought home from Abiding Savior Christian Outreach confirmed her hunch. To Joe’s surprise, Louis assisted him in his work rather than leaving him to it, and Joe quickly realized that Louis wanted to learn all he could so that the next time repairs were necessary, he would not need to rely on anyone else for assistance. “The Lord provides,” he told Joe, “but He’s also mighty keen on self-reliance.”
His Southern accent came from the state of his birth, Mississippi, where he had lived for his first eighteen years. He told Joe harrowing stories of growing up in the segregated South—the humiliating forced deference to whites, the segregated drinking fountains and entrances to buildings, the inadequate schools, the threats of violence that were too often actualized, the ramshackle houses in impoverished neighborhoods that lacked running water, streetlights, and paved roads. What chafed an outspoken youth like Louis most in those days was the lack of voice, the inability to improve his people’s situation, despite their ostensible right to vote, a right they were too often prevented from exercising.
A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Page 13