by Mae Wood
“You speak Chinese?”
“A very little. Enough to order food, but I’m working on it. And Japanese.”
“That’s impressive. I only speak a little German. Do you?”
“No,” he says. “My parents were born here, so I don’t know any.”
“Mine immigrated shortly before I was born,” she says, “but we weren’t encouraged to speak it outside of church. Prayers are the only things I really know. Well, prayers and a few curses.”
He laughs and orders a waxed bag of fried rice balls for them to enjoy.
“Alice,” he says in the car in front of her building, not yet cutting the engine. “I’d like to take you out again, but I need to be very clear about something.”
The warmth that has built within her immediately fades and she steels herself for whatever hard fact she is about to face.
“I’m leaving in a few months for a trip. I’m going with my father to Japan. We’re part of a mission to do some business on behalf of the city and to bring back some specimens for the zoo.”
“What kind of animals?” Does she even know what kinds of animals live in Japan? She’ll have to look it up in case a student ever asks.
“Probably some birds, but mainly plants. I think the plan is for a Japanese garden.”
“I’d love to see it.”
“And I’ll be happy to show it to you when it is finished and you’re back in Seattle. I assume you go home for the summers?”
“Yes, I do. I’ll be back in September.” She thinks about leaving it there, and not telling him the rest, but he’s been open and kind with her. Harboring a secret isn’t something she wants to do, and if he wants to see her again, and if he knows about Elliott, then it’s fine. She isn’t being a liar toward Fred or betraying Elliott. “Fred?” she asks in a quiet voice, after he cuts the engine and begins to open his door. He turns his face toward hers, expectant and patiently waiting for her to continue. “I appreciate you being forthright with me about your trip, so that I don’t get my hopes up. And I’ll repay the favor—”
“And tell me that I’m presumptuous and you don’t want to see me again? I knew that I shouldn’t have bought you the rice balls. I should have made you wait for the rice balls so that I could take you out again.”
“No, that’s not it at all, you silly,” she says with a laugh. “I’d be happy to go out with you again, but there is someone else.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Seattle isn’t a big city, Alice.”
“You don’t know him,” she says again.
“Doesn’t matter really,” he says with a shrug. “As long as he’s not here and there isn’t a ring on your finger, that’s all I need to know about this other fella.”
Twenty-seven
Alice
May 1916
Up the stairs and in her apartment, Alice takes off her coat and boots while Frankie quizzes her about her afternoon picnic on the slopes of Mount Rainer with Fred, and Alice provides all of the details.
“You have to find out if he has a friend. Or even better, a brother. Oh, Alice, wouldn’t that be lovely? If we found brothers? Then we could be sisters.”
“I have two of my own already. Plus, if we were sisters, I think we might get in spats and I really don’t like quarreling with you.”
“But I only have the one sister and she’s so much older and so serious.”
“Evelyn is lovely, and hush.”
“Ah ha, you can be the bossy older sister. You’re doing your level best already. See, we can make this work. Just find out if Fred has a brother.”
“I’ll ask,” Alice says, “but we don’t have any plans set, so he may change his mind about taking me out again.”
“Bah,” she says. “You always say that, and then a couple of days later you’re dancing or at the theater or out for dinner and now a picnic. He won’t change his mind. And neither will someone else, apparently. You got a telegram this evening!”
“A telegram!” Elliott. She knows it’s from him. Elation and guilt rip through her in equal measures. A telegram is extravagant, expensive, and it was here, waiting for her, while she was out with another man.
Frankie hands her the envelope with Alice Hirshhorn visible through a cutout window. “Open it,” Frankie encourages.
Caught up in the excitement of the telegram, Alice turns the envelope over and tucks a finger under the loose seam before she realizes she wants this to be private. That whatever Elliott has sent her must be exceedingly important to be rushed around the globe via wires and Morse code. Maybe he’s on his way to her already. Maybe he’s enlisting in the war. Maybe he’s saying good-bye. No, she thinks. It’s good news, and good news that she doesn’t want to share immediately. “I’m going to read it in my room.”
“Spoilsport,” teases Frankie. “If I ever got a telegram from a beau, I’d read it from the rooftop.”
Alone in her room, Alice sits on her quilt-covered bed and extracts the canary yellow pages.
Her heart stops for a full minute and her world tilts.
Father died. Please come home. Suzanna.
Dear Elliott,
I’m home (well, if you can count Lake Michigan as home). I met my family here at a little camp on the lake shore that I mentioned. We spend August here each summer. It’s a simple cluster of cabins. But it’s good to be back home with my mother and sisters and nieces and nephews. As for the menfolk, we all try not to think about them being bachelor farmers for the time. Heavens knows what they do or how they survive, but they seem to manage fine. Perhaps next summer you can join us here. When I mentioned it to you, I meant it. Both of my brothers-in-law are here for a few days off and on, so you wouldn’t be the sole man about the place.
The return train was filled with happy memories of you. It was long and slow, though, and I spent most of the journey daydreaming. No strange man on the train to chat with this time (or to enter my sleeping compartment in the middle of the night). Oddly enough, though I was moving farther from you, I felt closer to you as the carriages rocked their way east.
I hope you enjoy the little painting I’ve done here on this letter for you. Another Aesop’s fable for you—the tortoise and the hare. (I counsel myself to be patient, but it’s so difficult. I wish you were here. You’ll simply have to come to fetch me as soon as humanly possible.) I hope my last letter with the photograph arrived. I sent it two months ago, and I don’t expect that your letters will find me back home, much less on the lake shore, and I know things can take an age to reach you, but when you get it, please let me know.
Have no worries that you will find me in Seattle when you return. April cannot come soon enough.
Love,
Alice
“Are you done with your letters?” says her sister Suzanna.
“Yes,” says Alice, tucking the letter to Elliott in an envelope addressed with his name. She stacks the two letters on the corner of the desk in their bedroom. She and Suzanna share a bedroom that has the only bit of quiet in the small cabin. The space is loud with four children, but none are Suzanna’s. Yet. Next year that will have changed. Suzanna married in the spring and Alice has no doubt that this time next year, Suzanna will have a child or one on the way. But she might not be a spinster aunt after all, Alice thinks wryly.
Suzanna picks up the letters and shuffles them in her hands. “Two men!”
“Suzanna!” Alice hisses, stomping her foot. “Those are my letters.”
“I’m not reading the contents. I’m reading the addressees, which are entirely public. Frederick Wertheimer and Elliott Keller? Two men?”
“It’s not as scandalous as you’d think.” Alice lunges toward the letters, but Suzanna whips around and holds them high in the air.
“I hope it’s scandalous!” says Suzanna, her eyes bright. “You have to tell me!”
“Fine. You can’t tell Mama,” says Alice, using her stern teacher voice.
Suzann
a sits on the edge of the bed and signs a cross over her heart. “I promise.”
“Or Judith,” cautions Alice, knowing their eldest sister wants Alice to be married as much as their mother does.
“Or Judith,” Suzanna agrees with a nod.
Alice crawls onto the bed next to Suzanna and confesses to her younger sister. “I don’t want them to pin their hopes on anything. I’m twenty-nine next month.”
“But two men! Two! That’s double the odds! Who are they?”
“I met Elliott on the train to Seattle last summer. He’s a businessman—from Ft. Wayne, strangely enough—who is in the Philippine Islands now. Fred owns a shoe store in Seattle.”
“And…” prompts Suzanna.
“And—” Alice exhales, deciding to spill all of her secrets to her sister. “I’m older than Elliott by two years. He doesn’t know that yet. And he lives across the Pacific Ocean. Fred is older than I am. He’s funny and charming and he’s here. I mean, he’s not here. He’s there, in Seattle.”
“Do you think either will propose? Or both?” Suzanna clasps her hands together in excitement.
“I don’t know,” says Alice, falling back on the bed to stare at the ceiling.
“But you want to be married, yes?” asks her sister.
“Yes. I never thought it was for me, but I think I’d like it. That I could belong to someone. And now with Father gone, I hate to say this, but I really think hard about getting married. I do, Suzie, I do.”
“So which one?”
“Would I pick or do I think might pick me?”
“Will you tell me who you’d pick?”
“No.” Alice isn’t even sure herself. She and Elliott seem like plunging headlong into a swirling destiny, while she and Fred feel easy and light. And she’s entirely grateful that her younger sister doesn’t push her to give an answer.
“Then who do you think will ask?”
“Elliott. He will when he returns. I’m confident of it.”
“And if Fred asks first?”
“I’m not expecting that. If he’d wanted to be married, he could have done that a long time ago. He knows everyone in the entire city. We can’t go anywhere without seeing people he knows. I thought he might ask, though. Shortly before I left, he took me out for an entire day. He has a car and we drove to the mountains and picnicked and played in patches of snow and I laughed so much. And occasionally, he’d become a little quiet, and I thought—” Alice purses her lips and shakes her head before taking a big breath and letting it escape in one giant whoosh. “But he didn’t. So, here I am.”
Suzanna pats Alice’s knee. “I won’t tell Mama or Judith. I promise. But you have to promise to tell me more. I want to hear all of it.”
And out of Alice’s trunk come the embroidered shoes and the pink rose petals, now dried and pressed between the pages of her bible.
Twenty-eight
Alice
September 1916
A year, she thinks. A year and nothing has changed, except the students in her classroom. The week has been filled with confusion and wariness and the expectation of great things to come. A fresh slate. She laughs to herself, looking at the blackboard at the front of the room, quiet now that the students have gone. The board is neat and clean except her name and a simple list of rules for the children, expressed as virtues: honesty, courage, loyalty, fairness. Adding one more to the list for herself: patience. She will need that for navigating the children and these next few months as she awaits Elliott’s return.
That night, she begins another letter to Elliott, her pencil hovering over the margins of the paper, planning out the pumpkins and gourds that will be seasonal when this letter reaches him in late October. Her mind fills with the daydreams that she has of their future when she paints for him. Frankie interrupts her watercolor dreams of the tropics, asking if she’d like a cup of tea.
“No,” she says, setting her pencil down and opening her pan of paints. “And before you ask, no, I haven’t heard from Fred.”
“It’s only been a week since we returned. He still has time. My wager was that he’d call within the first two weeks. I’ve got three days left.”
“I think he’s entirely forgotten me. I didn’t have a letter from him all summer.”
“And it could be that the moon is truly made from cheese.”
“Really, Frankie,” sighs Alice. “Do I never get to be the optimist here or are you claiming the title of Miss Sunny Sunshine?”
“I can’t help it.” Frankie laughs. “Who knew it would take boys turning thirty before they wised up?” She looks down at the ring on her finger, placed there by one of Fred’s friends just yesterday.
“You should resign now, you know? Before the children settle in with you. You can marry next week. I’ll find a new roommate.”
“I spoke with the new principal this morning. He’s contacting the superintendent, but he says that until I’m married, I can hold my position. I don’t want to leave the school short a teacher, but as soon as they do find a replacement—Oh! Alice! I still can’t quite believe it,” she says, admiring her ring again. “And my serious wager is that they’ll have to find replacements for both of us.”
Alice shrugs, dipping her paintbrush in the glass of water before gently dabbing the oranges and ochres.
“Have some faith, Alice.”
“I left a card at his shop the other day,” Alice says, focusing on the paper.
“You did? When? Without me?”
“Yes, yesterday after school let out, I took the new girl to show her the shops in the Arcade.”
“Sneaky sneak.”
Alice doesn’t answer, keeping focused on painting the perfect little pumpkin vine to dance along the edge of the page.
“I know we’ve talked about it until we’re both blue in the face, and I wish so hard that Elliott would come back for you, but—”
“I know, okay? And, Frankie, you don’t know if Fred’s even the least bit interested in marriage. He could have gotten married years ago.”
“Maybe it’s catching.” Frankie laughs, looking again at the ring on her finger. “His friend Charles certainly got bit by the marriage bug and I couldn’t be happier.”
Alice places her paintbrush in a glass of water and picks up her pen to write Elliott. “And I couldn’t be happier for you, either.”
Dear Elliott,
I’m marking the months and weeks and days until I can see you again. I didn’t say this to you earlier because I didn’t want to share my sadness with you, but my father passed away this spring. Time has passed, and my mother has settled in with my elder sister and her family. The grief isn’t quite as sharp, so I feel strong enough to tell you now, but I don’t wish to write about it at length. I mainly share to tell you that there isn’t a need for us to travel to Indiana before we set out on our adventure, provided that you’re still interested in an adventure with me.
Perhaps knowing that it would be a shorter journey here would make it easier for you to get away. I’ve done my research with the timetables, watching shipping bulletins in the papers, and if all goes right, travel will only take a month. And I don’t come with much more than I can fit into a trunk.
And I don’t need much. I’m not accustomed to fancy things and I don’t wish for them. A modest house with sea breezes and you at my breakfast table.
I know you want more, want to give me more, but I’m letting you know right now that you don’t need it. You don’t need anything other than yourself.
Love,
Alice
“Class dismissed,” Alice tells the students two weeks later, and the room breaks out into a din of happy chatter as the children gather their things from the cloak room and strap their books together.
“Am I dismissed, Miss Hirshhorn?”
Alice whirls to face the doorway and takes in the tall man standing there in a blue suit, hat in hand, arms open to greet her.
“Fred!” Her heart leaps at the sight of him.
He smiles, the edges of his eyes crinkling with happiness as she weaves through the children to reach him, catching herself before she entirely forgets her place and falls into his embrace. She takes a step back from him, to give him suitable space.
“Oh,” she says, remembering that her classroom isn’t the place for the affectionate hello he offers. “I mean, Mr. Wertheimer. Welcome to my class. What are you doing here?”
“You’re here.” And Alice’s own smile grows at his simple statement. “Do I need a better explanation?”
Bubbles of joy rise up within her, making her lightheaded with happiness. She had won her bet with Frankie and enjoyed an entire box of caramels as her reward for being right that Fred hadn’t found her within the first two weeks of their return, but she will gladly eat crow.
“That answer works for me,” she says, patting her hair to make sure that the chignon hasn’t fallen into too much disarray after the long day. “But truly,” she continues. “How did you find me? I’m assigned to a new school this year.”
“I need to get back to the shop, but to answer your question, I wasn’t sure where you were living this year so I tracked you down through the school’s central office.”
“Resourceful. And I’m living in the same place as I have for the past few years.”
“Then I’ll pick you up at six for dinner?”
“I’d like that.”
“Excellent.”
And with a quarter bow, his eyes giving her the caresses that he cannot, that he should not, he turns and leaves.
Following dinner, Fred takes her on a long drive around the city. The top is down and the cool evening nips at her nose.
As they crawl along the waterfront, he speaks to her in a low voice that she can barely make out over the engine and wind.
“Before you think that I forgot, I’ve been in Vancouver for business and returned yesterday to find your note at the shop. I was half convinced that you would have run off with that other fella while I was gone.”