[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  55

  After the bad time with Bart Crandall, Clare limited his visits to the post office to once a week, on Saturday, when it was easy to walk into town. He would offer Bart Crandall no further information about the person they’d lost track of in Kansas. He just approached the counter, took a taffy or butterscotch, and waited for Bart Crandall to say, “Nothing this week,” or “What’s the name I should be looking for?” to which Clare just gave a friendly nod before departing, but one day in May the dreary sequence was finally undone. The moment Bart Crandall caught sight of Clare coming through the door, he raised an envelope and held it out for him.

  McKenna, the return address said. Harvey House Emporia Kansas.

  “Thanks,” Clare said. He tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. He bet it was in his face, though.

  “Is this the relative—A. McKenna?” Bart Crandall asked.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” Clare said. If he had to say something, this was the answer he’d practiced to say. He’d learned it from Mr. McNamara, and it was a good one. He grabbed a butterscotch from the saucer, thanked Mr. Crandall, and was gone.

  The town’s small library was housed in the clubhouse of the Fallbrook Women’s Club. Clare went inside, took several books from a shelf, then sat at a desk removed from regular traffic. Tearing open the envelope seemed ungodly loud, but no one shushed him, and he wouldn’t have cared if they did.

  Dear Clare, the letter said.

  I am well and happy and I thank you for asking. I appreciate hearing all your news especially about your family. I am glad that all of you are happy in California which sounds like paradise itself. She went on in this neutral tone for several more sentences before signing, Your teacher (and friend), Aldine McKenna.

  A postscript was then added. If Charlotte has taken any photographs of each of you in California I would love to have some for my scrapbook.

  Clare touched his finger to the paper she’d held in her hands and written on and even brought the stationery close to his nose but there was nothing of her in its scent. It was restaurant stationery. Harvey Houses, it said at the top, Civilizing the Old West.

  He read the letter three times. After that he knew it word for word, but there weren’t really any words for him. The only thing with meaning was the P.S. Aldine had never had a scrapbook, as far as he knew. And photographs of each of you. Not of all of you. A picture of his father. That’s what she wanted.

  He waited three days to write back. Be cheerful, he told himself. Cheerful and chatty.

  Dear Aldine,

  Neva misses you but she is much better, even I can tell. This makes all of us happy especially my mother but all of us really. I might go back to school in the fall but right now my father and I pick fruit all day and can eat all we want. The strangest of our news concerns Charlotte who is dating a regular adult man about town. Doesn’t that beat all? Mr. McNamara’s tall and skinny with no hair whatsoever, forty years old at least, and he wears little gold rimmed glasses in the shape of hexagon or maybe octogon. I keep waiting for my father to put an end to it, but he hasn’t yet. Mr. McN’s taken Charlotte for 3 rides in his fancie Packard once all the way to the ocean and Ida says he’s the catch of the town, kind of like the king here. She said if Mr. McNamara didn’t have bigwiggy (her word) friends up north, Fallbrook never could have built such a fine big school. She said he got the funds because he was at Stanford U. with Congressman Somebody or Other. We all like it here, especially Charlotte and my mother who never mention Kansas except to say they’re never going back. Neva misses you, I can tell you that, and I miss Kansas a lot myself though of course not a bit as much as my father who I think will die if he doesn’t get back.

  He’d written that last sentiment almost without thinking, and he knew at once how much it might mean to her, and then—he couldn’t help himself—he added, I guess you always had your heart set on my dad.

  He shouldn’t have added that. It was a mistake and a sorry one at that. But he was at the bottom of a full page. He wasn’t going to rewrite a whole new letter. He was ready to be done with it. He addressed it to A. McKenna, and under Yours always, he signed his name as she’d always said it: Clarence. Then he dropped it into the drab green corner mailbox.

  56

  All that spring Ellie was aware of Ansel’s restlessness and disquiet. He worked steadily, resolutely picking fruit in the orchards—Hurd had told her this—and was polite but spoke only when he had to. He ate his lunch with Clare but Clare told her that he often gave him half his lunch. He wasn’t hungry, he said. He’d begun smoking cigarettes, too. In the late afternoon after his work shift, he would sit on a rock in the shade beyond the blue-bottle tree where an arroyo—that was what the locals called it—afforded a long downsloping view to the east. For hours he would sit there with the dog and smoke and look off. He couldn’t like it here. She understood this as she might understand the troubles of a bear brought to a place without winter. It was as if the rhythms of these hours and shadows and seasons were not his, and never could be. She understood this, but allowed herself not to care, just as he had allowed himself not to care when she was imprisoned by the farm.

  She had been looking for a place for them to rent. While Ansel scanned the newspapers for news about rainfall and farm yields in Kansas, she browsed the House for Rent advertisements. She told Ida that she didn’t see any reason to leave a town where she only needed to dust the furniture once a week, and where if you set a cup of coffee down on the counter, you didn’t come back to find it covered with the topsoil of your neighbor’s wheat field. They ate like royalty, especially on the weekends, when she and Ida made any number of elaborate meals: fresh corn chowder, say, with pickled beets, strawberry salad, and a ham stewed in kumquats the color of the sun at twilight.

  While Ida worked during the week, Ellie took up the cooking and enjoyed having fresh ingredients close at hand. Everything grew here: not just oranges, lemons, and limes, but also avocados, guavas, apples, plums, and apricots. When Ida came home from working all day at the packinghouse, Ellie might serve fresh beef tongue, fried apple cakes, spring onions on toast, and guava pudding. Everyone exclaimed over the food, except for Ansel, who ate little and kept up merely a stiff cordiality. Neva ate more, and Clare, too. Since taking up with Mr. McNamara, Charlotte limited her portions (and was looking trimmer for it) but one night, after a supper of pork chops with plums, wilted dandelion greens, fried yams, and orange sherbet, Charlotte looked at her and, with what seemed like true wonder in her voice, said, “I had no idea you could cook like this.”

  That very night, sitting alone with Ida in the dimming kitchen, Ellie said, “I haven’t felt this way since the Harvey House.”

  Ida gave her sister a smile. “You do seem happy.”

  Ellie wouldn’t have thought she could be happy if her marriage had so many holes in it. “Happiness of a kind,” she said. “I think I’m contented.”

  Ida nodded.

  Outside, they could see Ansel smoking under the blue-bottle tree. Ida said, “Did we do anything to get his goat?”

  “It’s not you.” Except for her and Ida, the house was empty. Hurd was in his workshop welding. Charlotte had walked into town. Clare was helping Neva with a tree house. And Ansel was staring off. “He just misses Kansas,” she said. She looked at him out there. “Sometimes when he’s out there smoking I think he’ll just stand up and start walking east and never look back.”

  A moment or two passed. “What would you do then?” Ida asked. Her expression was hard to read. Was she worried for her, or did she think Ansel’s leaving would be a blessing for them all?

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said. “Do what I do now, I guess.” She thought about it. “In lots of ways, he’s already gone.”

  On the table between them stood a blue bowl filled with lemons. She had polished and arranged them herself to look like something in a painting. She picked one up and turned it in her hands. It was one of the odd-shaped mutation
s, normal on one end but split at the other, so that it appeared to have a beak. “Have you ever made lemon marmalade?” she asked.

  Ida said she never had. “Want to try?”

  “Maybe sometime,” she said. She turned her head toward the sound of someone hammering out of doors, probably Clare. He’d promised Neva he would try to replicate their old tree house—she supposed he was pounding footholds into the side of a eucalyptus tree. She said, “There was a schoolteacher who lived with us who craved some special kind of lemon marmalade.”

  “This would be the famous Miss McKenna that Neva is always talking about?”

  “Infamous is more the word.”

  Ida’s Geiger counter was as good as ever. “Do tell,” she said.

  And so she did, up to a point. She mentioned the girl being fired for impropriety, the girl burning the school district’s coal on Saturdays so she could sit in the schoolhouse reading novels, warm and snug, and she mentioned Ansel’s having to rescue her one Saturday when a black blizzard came up. Through these descriptions she never called her Aldine; she referred to her only as “the girl.”

  “So where is the girl now?” Ida asked.

  “Harvey House. In Emporia, our old haunt.”

  Ida was staring into her as if trying to figure Ellie out. It reminded her of how Ansel looked when he was staring at a tractor engine that wasn’t running right, and he didn’t know quite why.

  “Gil is still there,” Ellie added. “He gave her the job.”

  “Gil’s got a full-time lady friend now,” Ida said, “so he might leave her alone.”

  Ida nodded and waited for more, but Ellie changed the subject. “The other day I was trying to look through the windows of that old hotel on Main Street. It looked like there was a restaurant there a long time ago.”

  “More than one,” Ida said. “First one went great guns for a while and then the highway route changed and times got bad and it kept changing owners and getting worse and worse. You know who owns it now? James McNamara, believe it or not.” She laughed. “That man didn’t get rich by sleepwalking, I’ll tell you that. He bought it just by paying off the taxes on it, at least that’s what I heard.”

  In Ellie’s opinion, the El Real Hotel was the only building besides the high school that was even half as pretty as a Harvey House. It was brick, for one thing, a pale pink shade, and stucco roses and swoops decorated the curved roofline. The windows were leaded glass ornamented along the sides with Spanish-style wrought-iron curlicues. She asked what Mr. McNamara was going to do with it now.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we? If anybody asks, that’s just what he says. He told Hurd that the bricks, flooring, and fixtures were worth more than he paid for it, so he’d knock it down for salvage if it came to that.”

  “It’s a beautiful building,” Ellie said, and she meant it. Something had begun unfolding inside of her when she heard who owned it. Not an idea exactly. More the kind of climate in which an idea might grow. “You don’t think he’d really knock it down, do you?”

  “Oh, he might. He’ll do what it will make him money to do.”

  Ellie set the lemon back in the bowl and fell silent.

  “Ellie?” Ida said. Her expression was playful and coaxing. “You’ve got that scheming look . . . What are you thinking?”

  She looked at Ida. “I don’t even know,” she said. Which was true. It was just a feeling, and a vague one at that. But she knew one thing. She needed money.

  “Do you think there’d be any work for me at the packinghouse?” she asked.

  “Oh, sweetie, that’s awful work. I did it years ago when I was still full of vim and vigor, and I could barely handle it then.”

  “But can you ask?” she said. “Just to see?”

  57

  A Thursday, the workday done. Four days down, two to go. Ansel took them week by week. He and Clare were riding in the back of the flatbed truck with three other men, all of them tired and quiet. Clare whistled something that did not sound quite like a tune. The other three pickers were men up from Mexico. They sat with their legs stretched out before them and two of them slept. Up front, in the cab, the crew chief, Oscar de la Cueva, drove slowly with his right arm extended along the back of the seat, gazing left and right to appraise the conditions of the passing groves. Even without fruit hanging, Ansel could recognize all the trees now: Mexican and Bearss limes, Mexicola, Fuerte, and Zutano avocados, pummelos, Fuyu and Hachiya persimmons, Marsh grapefruit, papayas, strawberry and lemon guavas, macadamias, blood oranges, pomegranates, olives, almonds, satsuma mandarins—everything under the sun, was the way he thought of it. “God’s own garden,” Ellie called it, but what she really meant was, “God’s garden compared to Kansas.”

  When Oscar de la Cueva stopped the truck at the end of the lane leading to Ida and Hurd’s place, Clare in one swift set of motions braced his arm to the side rail and vaulted to the ground. Ansel stepped stiffly onto the tailgate and eased himself down. Clare waved to the crew chief and yelled thanks, but Ansel didn’t bother. Of the three remaining men in the back of the truck, the two that slept seemed to keep sleeping. The third stared forward without speaking. Clare had already started up the lane toward the house.

  Ansel began to walk off the stiffness in his legs. Clare stopped to throw a couple of stones at trees—his way, Ansel knew, of letting him catch up.

  “Did better today, didn’t we?” Clare said as he approached.

  Ansel nodded. He felt the cough coming on, held his breath waiting for it to subside.

  “I mean, not good exactly, but better.”

  “That’s right,” Ansel said. He was able to breathe now. “We did better.” The boy was indomitable. They were picking the last of the navels, going grove to grove, hauling ladders tree to tree, pulling down the fruit one by one until the canvas bag slung over your shoulder seemed to pancake the plates in your spine, and then you picked a dozen more for good measure before humping the fruit down to the bin that was yours and Clare’s, and stood barely more than half as full as any other pair of pickers. That was just how it was. It was tree-climbing work, and they’d never worked in trees, but Clare wasn’t giving up. He would barely set his ladder before racing up, reaching far out to one side, then another.

  “You ought to be more careful,” Ansel said one day while they sat at the edge of a grove eating their sandwiches and drinking their coffee.

  Clare said, “Well, we get paid by the box.”

  Ansel gave him that. “But you go and kill yourself and your mother will be disappointed in us both.” He was going for humor, but he meant it, too.

  “I just do it the way they do,” Clare said, and glanced toward the other men. They squatted now, eating tamales they’d warmed over coals.

  The Mexicans brought little rugs to spread in the shade of a tree for a nap after lunch. Ansel missed the occasion that Kansans had always made of a dinner. He encouraged Clare to bring a cloth for a nap, but Clare always wanted to get back to picking. Ansel didn’t mind the picking—he liked the look and the feel of the fruit in his hand—but the pace of it, the insistence on quickness, deprived him of the time to think and daydream that tractor work afforded. And he found now that having time to think and dream was as vital to him as food or water, though—and he knew this as a regrettable truth—any space he had now for thinking and dreaming always got filled up with Aldine, which shamed him. So they went back to picking even while the men from Mexico took their siestas, but it didn’t matter—he and Clare always picked less, and he had the feeling that the Mexicans resented the fact that he and Clare were picking these trees alongside them instead of their brothers and cousins. He didn’t blame them. They knew what he knew: that without Hurd’s help they wouldn’t have the work.

  As they walked up the lane toward Ida and Hurd’s house, a car from the opposite direction wheeled into view, a black Packard he recognized at once as McNamara’s, except Charlotte was sitting beside him, her head thrown back in laughter.

/>   Ansel turned slightly so as to speak to McNamara when he slowed, but he didn’t slow. The black Packard kept speed and passed by.

  They watched them go. Charlotte glanced back from the Packard’s front seat.

  “I don’t think he saw us,” Clare said. When his father remained grimly silent, he added, “I don’t think Mr. McNamara recognized us.”

  When they got to the house, Ansel didn’t go inside. “If you see your mother, could you tell her I’m out by the bottle tree?”

  He’d found a relic of a chair on the road one day and had brought it home. He sat in it now. The dog came and laid her head on his knee for a second or two before settling at his feet. He’d rolled and smoked one cigarette and started another before he heard footsteps behind him. He didn’t turn but when he felt her close by, he said, “I saw Charlotte with that man today. Do you know where they were going?”

  “If you mean Mr. McNamara, he’s taking her to see the place where she will be the domestic arts teacher.” Ansel flicked a glance at her and she said, “Mr. McNamara has offered her a job.”

  Ansel stared down through the trees. “That’s good for her. Still, it makes me worry that we’ll be beholden.”

  She didn’t respond for a few moments, and he could feel it, the distance he had put between them and the way she had started, already, to build a wall around herself.

  “We already are beholden, in a way. How do you think I got my job?”

  He swung his gaze to her. “Through Ida and Hurd.”