One Step Enough

by Carla Kelly

  Her indulgence continued with a stop at the Palace Drug Store, where she indulged again with a cherry phosphate, enjoyed it, and drank another one. See here, Della, you are frittering, she told herself, and felt not even slightly repentant, although she did burp a lot on the walk home.

  Sitting at the kitchen table that night while Angharad finished a page of addition, Della wrote her first letter to her husband, describing how she had frittered. She hesitated only a moment before telling him she had written to Dr. Isgreen, requesting an appointment. She hesitated a little longer and then decided not to mention that she also wrote to ask the doctor about fertility. It was easier to include a paragraph on Kristina Aho’s upcoming wedding to Mr. Whalley and describe the gift of towels.

  She had no hesitation in telling him that, all in all, it was a good day, even if she had cried for her father and wallowed in some misery. She set down her fountain pen, wondering if it really was misery. There was no one she had to hide her tears from, no Aunt Caroline to shake her and remind her that tears were a waste of time for a scoundrel. All she had to do was feel sad for a good man gone, and not worry about the Aunt Carolines of the world.

  She continued the bedtime ritual she and Owen had established for Angharad, with the usual prayer and then singing “Ar Hyd y Nos.”

  She did something different then and lay down with her stepdaughter, asking her if there was anything she wished to talk about. “It is like this, Angharad,” she said. “I always wanted someone to ask me about my day, and if I had any problems. No one ever did, but you may tell me about your day, if you’d like. Any subject.”

  Angharad considered the matter. “One of the boys teased me because I don’t talk like everyone else,” she said finally. “He said I have an accent.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I gave him my best smile and told him that it is a privilege to be Welsh,” Angharad said. “I told him I can speak two languages.” She laughed. “I asked him how many languages he could speak. He didn’t bother me after that.”

  “Bravo, Angharad,” Della said, impressed. She had enough room on the bottom of her letter to Owen to include that and compliment him on raising a forthright child.

  She could have died with the loveliness of the next moment, when Angharad patted her cheek and asked, “How was your day, Mam?”

  “I thought about my father and cried a little,” Della told her, touched to her heart. “I’ve already told you about the wedding we are going to on Saturday.”

  “Will Mrs. Aho wear a beautiful white dress with a train?” Angharad asked.

  “Probably not, because she has been married before and white is for first-time brides,” Della replied. “I know it will be lovely because Mrs. Aho has impeccable taste and an artist’s eye.”

  Angharad nodded. “Did you miss Da today?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Why does he want us here and not in Knightville?”

  “Because it is too hard for me and you,” Della said, after gathering up her diminished stock of courage, weighing it and finding it not so wanting that she could not provide an honest answer. “We worry too much when he is in the mine.”

  “What will he do?”

  “I don’t know,” Della said frankly. No sense in lying to a child. “I hope when this project is done he will join us.”

  “Doesn’t he know that we need him here with us?”

  “He’s remembering his friends who are gone now and wants to make mines safer for others too,” Della said.

  Angharad sighed. She raised her arms, spread her fingers and looked through them. “We need him.”

  “We do. Angharad, would you like me to tell you about my father, at least, when I learn more about when he was a boy?”

  “Aye, Mam.”

  Angharad closed her eyes and settled herself for sleep. Della lay beside her until she slept, then went to the kitchen. She sat a long moment with paper and fountain pen in front of her, then wrote to Karl Anders, the man she was never going to see or write or think of again.

  Maybe she had been hasty about that.

  Chapter 36

  L

  With a tip of his hat, the postman delivered three letters to Della on Friday afternoon: one from Knightville, one from Scofield, and the other from Salt Lake City. She opened the one from Knightville first.

  As onerous it was to have a perfectly serviceable husband living at some distance, she felt a layer of callous around her heart drop away at his salutation: My Darling. He wrote in Welsh next, then added in English that he wouldn’t translate it until they were together again.

  My word, Owen, she thought, as she read another paragraph of love, in English. Food followed love, as he went into a paragraph rhapsodizing Sister Tate’s cooking. Business was next, with a cut-and-dried sentence or two about measurements on Level Two, which had been cleared of rock and rubble now and was the focus of the carpenter work. She couldn’t help that her heart raced a little faster.

  Compassion followed, with a report on Aaron’s broken leg, and how Mr. Weisman had put Owen’s youngest crew member to work learning to type. Aaron is already whining about Saul’s handwriting, she read.

  He asked if she had found a job yet and then asked about Angharad’s first week of school, said he hoped they would have a pleasant time in Salt Lake at Mrs. Aho’s wedding, and concluded with a paragraph that made her frown. The letter you forwarded from Gomer Thomas fair amazed me, he wrote. He has invited me to be his assistant mine inspector for the state of Utah, with a salary of one hundred dollars a month. I told him I would think about it, but I shouldn’t, should I?

  “No, you shouldn’t, you duplicitous man,” Della said out loud, and not softly either, because the boy playing pick up sticks on his porch next door looked up, startled.

  He had enclosed a letter for Angharad, so she set it by Angharad’s place at the table, after a peek inside to see what he had drawn for his daughter. She smiled to see a perfectly dejected-looking Saladin—snout on paws, eyes mournful—with a thought bubble reading, “I want to hoooowl without my girls.”

  What now? The letter from Dr. Isgreen, or the one in the envelope from Anders, Court and Landry? That was no contest. She opened Emil’s letter, pleased to read that he would be at the wedding tomorrow and they could talk then. What you’re telling me is intriguing, indeed. I believe I can enlighten you about Sigi, she read. See you at the First Presbyterian Church.

  Stop by my office, Uncle Karl’s letter began, with no preamble. You know I work on Saturdays. I want to see you. That was all. Owen’s letter went under her pillow, Emil Isgreen’s on her bureau, and Uncle Karl’s in the trash.

  Considering that the Interurban was leaving at six the next morning, Della stayed up too late answering Owen’s letter. The letter wasn’t long, because she knew she would write more after the wedding. She finally closed her eyes and dreamed of nothing more frightening than catching the train.

  Angharad was so excited about the double delight of riding the train to Salt Lake and going to a wedding that she had trouble sitting still as the Interurban chugged its way through the small towns between Provo and the capitol.

  “We’re going to a wedding,” Della confided to the lady across the aisle, who, from the expression on her face, seemed to think children should neither be seen nor heard.

  Della knew Angharad liked a good story and could probably sit still with the proper encouragement. “My darling, you will agree that I am an amateur at raising a daughter.”

  “I believe you’re doing fine, Mam,” Angharad said generously.

  “You’ll think I’m a complete idiot, but let me tell you something I did once to my poor father.”

  There was no need to drag out the entire story, not with her stepdaughter’s father possibly even underground as they sat there on the Interurban, but she held Angharad close and told her about an angry twelve-year-old who scolded her father for not buying her a locket on a chain.

&nb
sp; “I was furious at him, and I said some things I shouldn’t have,” she concluded. “I worried about it for years, until your father told me that he made mistakes too, in raising a daughter. Maybe I shouldn’t have worried so much. What do you think?”

  “Da is right,” Angharad said with no hesitation. She sighed. “I shouted at him a few times, but that was a long time ago. I think I was four. Maybe five.” Her brow puckered as she seemed to consider the matter. “He has learned a lot in the last two years. I haven’t needed to yell much.”

  Della smiled inside at that, knowing Angharad’s artless reasoning would go into a letter headed to Knightville soon. “What does he do to make you smile?”

  In answer, Angharad took out the little notebook and pencil she always carried in her handbag, the bag Owen had told Della belonged to Gwyna. Bracing her arm against the rhythmic swaying of the railcar, she drew a circle and quick lines and dots and then held the notebook out to Della.

  “This is me sometimes.” She turned the circle upside down, and Della saw the frown. “Da turns it over, and look.” The smiling face grinned at them both. “We both do this. If I am angry about something, he waits a while, and then I find a smiling face somewhere. He says I can do it too, whenever I want.”

  What a lovely man I have married, Della thought, charmed by the drawing. “I haven’t seen one of these around the house. This is new to me.”

  “We’ve been happy,” Angharad said simply, which filled Della’s cup to overflowing. “Now tell me about the locket. Did you ever get one?”

  “Alas, no.”

  “Do you still want one?”

  Did she? “I’m not certain,” Della replied.

  A glance at Angharad’s face told her that was an insufficient answer, so Della did better. “What I wanted was a heart-shaped locket. All the girls in my classroom had them—well, if I am honest, it was one girl, and her father was the mine foreman. She opened the locket and showed us a lock of her hair. Angharad, I envied her because she had long blonde hair, and it was straight. Imagine that!”

  Her stepdaughter laughed out loud. “Sometimes this summer when I should have been asleep, I heard you and Da laughing in your room. I asked him what was so funny, and he said he laughed because you made faces when you tried to comb your hair.”

  “My hair is no laughing matter,” she said, feigning irritation, which made Angharad laugh louder and earn a glare from that censorious woman across the aisle who probably never knew what it was like to have fun with a child.

  Trust Angharad to focus on the matter. “Was it the locket or the straight hair you wanted?”

  “Probably both.” Della couldn’t help a laugh of her own. “As it was, I got neither, and somehow I survived.”

  They looked at each other with real charity. Gwyna, I will do my best to help raise your lovely child, she thought as she put her arm around Angharad. She is my treasure too.

  When they reached Salt Lake City, a glance at her timepiece told Della that not even a brisk walk would get them to the church on time. Not entirely sure what to do, she took Angharad by the hand and walked quickly to the curb. She was familiar with trolleys from her days of teaching at the Westside School, but they had just missed the one headed north on State Street. She had enough money, but how did one hail a cab?

  “It appears you could use some help.”

  She turned around, surprised, then smiled. “Oh my goodness, are you here to rescue us, Dr. Isgreen?”

  “Nothing simpler. Just arrived myself, ready for a wedding.”

  Angharad clapped her hands. “Dr. Isgreen, I still have that menu you gave me from Scofield!”

  “I hoped you would keep that,” he said, and he tipped his hat to her and Della. “I enjoyed squiring two of my favorite ladies to dinner.” He glanced at Della with a rueful smile. “Seems so long ago.”

  It was years and years, Della thought, struck by how long ago mere months seemed, when so much had happened between that pleasant evening and this moment. “Emil, it’s so good to see you.”

  He winked at her and stepped into the street, holding up his hand. An automobile with the sign “Taxi” fixed prominently to the roof pulled up and stopped. Angharad stared, her mouth open. She grabbed Della’s hand.

  “Mam, I have never been in one of these. Is it safe?”

  Dr. Isgreen leaned down. “We’ll tell the cabby to drive carefully.” He opened the rear door. “Better climb in. We have a wedding to go to, and brides don’t like to wait, or so I have been told.”

  They crowded into the taxi and Emil gave directions. He leaned back and clapped his arm around Angharad. “Are you ready for an adventure?”

  “My stars,” was all the child could say.

  As the taxi pulled into traffic and darted ahead, Emil turned his attention to Della. She saw all the kindness on his open face, and also that probing doctor look, the one she needed to see.

  “What about you, Mrs. Davis? Ready for an adventure?”

  Chapter 37

  L

  Dressed in a pale-gray gown with lace on the bodice, and with a smile on her face, Kristina Aho became Mrs. James Whalley. Their faces serious, Pekka and his little sister Reet stood beside their mother as she quietly made her vows in front of the altar with the tall man whose heart was so generous that Della had to reach for her handkerchief and then share it with Angharad.

  She sniffed and thought about how the practically magisterial Mr. Whalley had overlooked her own clumsiness in Auerbach’s Menswear until she got the hang of selling stockings, collars, shirts, and braces to gentlemen, a perfectly wonderful summer job. She had heard the whispers in the break room of the dignified man’s own heartbreak of a wife dead in childbirth years earlier, and furthered her own education about sorrow that the eye can’t see.

  And here he was, smiling as she had never seen Mr. Whalley smile, and gazing down at all the loveliness beside him that came with an instant family. Della wanted for Owen to be seated beside her so she could hold his hand and lean against him. She watched as the four of them walked down the aisle to a triumphal march, and she silently begged her husband to give up mines. She remembered the tears on Kristina’s face as she buried her Matti in Scofield’s now-overcrowded cemetery. She saw no tears now, only love for the new husband beside her.

  “Time has a way of moving us on, hasn’t it?” Dr. Isgreen said on her other side.

  She nodded, too full of all kinds of emotion to speak. She wanted to be here; she wanted to be in Knightville with Owen. She remembered Matti’s funeral a little over a year ago in the fall of 1899, her first brush with death in the mines. She wanted to soak in all the love and beauty right here and right now and forget the sight of Matti’s body under a bloody piece of canvas.

  Her mind seemed to race back and forth, tugging at her sleeve, as she thought of all the miners who died in May. She repeated her own agony of placing paper flowers her students had made on the bodies as they lay in the makeshift morgue that her classroom had become. Later in the church’s reception room, she watched Kristina throw her bouquet of real flowers toward an eager handful of ladies. All the images jumbled in her mind until she had to sit down and try not to shake, try not to appear anything but joyous, in this room of happy people.

  She wanted to be alone, but Emil Isgreen sat beside her. “It’s not easy,” was all he said, which gave her permission to turn her face into his sleeve and cry.

  “Why am I remembering the hardest things right now?” she managed to say finally. Thank the Almighty that everyone’s attention, even Angharad’s, was focused on a new bride cutting a cake. She took Emil’s handkerchief gratefully.

  “Because you’re human,” he said. “Because you care deeply. Don’t be afraid of it, Della.”

  In a quiet corner of the reception hall, after Pekka and Reet had taken Angharad to their table for cake and ice cream, Della quickly told Emil Isgreen everything that had happened in Knightville. She glossed over nothing and he listened.

&
nbsp; By the time she finished, she felt her heart resume its normal speed. She wiped her eyes, wished they weren’t so red, but knew she could manage.

  “I know I told you some of this in my letter. Should I be embarrassed for telling you all of this?” she asked.

  “Not at all. Allow me a liberty.”

  She nodded and he put his arm around her shoulder. “I say this as your physician, Della. You may not agree with me, but what you’re doing is normal and natural, and by golly, so painful.”

  She nodded again.

  “Let me tell you something else, dear friend. I made my own vow that awful week in Winter Quarters Canyon. With Bishop Parmley’s approval, I sent a letter to all the widows, telling that I would provide them and their children a lifetime of free medical care.”

  Della chuckled at that, a watery sound, but a welcome one to her own ears. “Emil, you’re never going to make your fortune treating diseases of the rich, are you?”

  He laughed out loud at that, throwing back his head and letting loose with a real guffaw, loud enough for heads to turn in their direction, which appeared to bother him not a bit. If he was anything, the Pleasant Valley Coal Company’s doctor was a confident man.

  “Guilty as charged, Della,” he said. “And you’re one of my patients too.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply. “I needed that.”

  “This is no time for lengthy mental therapy, but I have to share something with you.”

  “Share away. I think Angharad is on her second or third piece of cake. I’ll have to pry her off the ceiling, but that’ll keep.”

  “You’re a good mother,” he teased. “In your letter, you mentioned Saul Weisman and his Viennese friend Sigi’s theories about dreams.” He reached in his suit pocket and pulled out two sheets of closely typed paper. “It hasn’t been translated entirely into English yet, but there is a Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud who is making quite a splash in the world of … I hardly know what to call it … well, I don’t know what to call it except mind studies. I have a few excerpts in English, and I look forward to reading the whole work someday. That’s your Sigi.”