by Judy Alter
I never had been timid since I’d been grown, but Eli Able somehow unnerved me. He never looked up as I approached, and I had to speak his name, with all the directness I could muster, before he turned around. Then he stared, taking me in from head to toe while I stood there, awkward and unsure. He was, I decided, exactly the kind of man I despised, crude, unlettered, lacking the sophistication of either Dr. Dinsmore or Em.
“Yeah? I’m Eli Able.”
“I . . . well, I was told you might help me with a project.”
“What kind of project?” He never took his eyes off me, yet somehow his expression showed boredom rather than interest.
“I want to build a sanitarium.”
“Ain’t never built one of those.” He turned back to his drink, as though that finished the matter.
Every instinct in me told me to walk away from this man, but I persisted. Maybe it was those steel-gray eyes that had looked so directly at me, or maybe it was his air of absolute self-confidence, bordering on indifference. To this day, I don’t know why, but I asked, “Will you at least look at my drawings?”
He showed the first spark of interest. “You got drawings?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Let me see ‘em.” He held out a hand and took the offered rolls of paper, then motioned for me to follow him to a table. It seemed forever that he studied the drawings, turning them this way and that, never saying a word to me. I almost laughed as I remembered Mama’s lesson about sitting without fidgeting, but it was all I could do to keep from twisting and turning in my seat, pestering him with questions. Yet, uncomfortable as he made me, I knew Eli Able was not a man to bother until he was ready to answer.
Finally he looked at me, those eyes staring directly again, and asked, “Where are we gonna build it?”
“In Benteen,” I told him.
“Okay. You got the land?”
“Yes.”
“I need to see it.”
“My buggy’s outside.” It was the most terse conversation I had ever carried on.
“I’ll ride alongside.” And that’s what he did.
Jim seemed to take to Eli Able instantly. They did no more than shake and “howdy” each other, but I sensed they were comfortable with it.
On the long ride to Benteen, I prattled too much, made nervous by this silent, taciturn man riding by my side of the buggy. It was a glorious spring day, and we had the isinglass curtains pulled back, so conversation was easy.
I had talked, at far too much length, about my need for an automobile and how reluctant I was to give up my horse rides on the prairie and my buggy. He merely nodded, though I suspect he had nothing but loathing for the horseless carriages.
The only question he ever asked was “What’s a sanitarium, and why do you want one?”
Shifting in my seat to look at him, I said, “I’m a doctor. I need a place where I can care for patients.”
“A doctor?” He looked appraisingly at me. “A lady doctor?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling somewhat defiant. Would I have to fight that old battle again?
“That’s good. I think I’ll like helping you, lady doctor.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
I soon learned to accept Eli’s silence. He paced off the property for over an hour, never speaking to Jim or me. Jim didn’t find this remarkable at all but leaned casually against the buggy and watched.
Finally Eli said, “Good piece of land, but you got the building setting wrong in your drawings.”
“Now, just a minute, Mr. Able. I put the building the way I want it, facing the open prairie.”
He looked slightly out of patience. “Land isn’t made that way. The building won’t set right. Here, Reeves, take a look at this.” The two of them walked away, Eli gesturing broadly one minute, then pointing to the drawing the next, and Jim nodding in sage agreement. After a while they came back to me, and Jim said, “He’s right, Mattie. Can’t do it that way.”
More than slightly exasperated, I demanded that they explain it to me. Eli chuckled then.
“I won’t try to put anything over on you, lady doctor, really I won’t.” And then he explained the curve of the land and the need to turn my sanitarium on a slight angle.
“You’ll still get your view, and I’ll build you a wide verandah for sitting out and staring at that prairie, if you love it that much.”
I smiled. “I do.”
“And so do I.” For the first time, his face softened, and he almost smiled at me.
Eli Able made my heart go thump in a way that no one had in many years, not since Em had courted me, and I blushed with embarrassment, inwardly scolding myself not to be ridiculous. I was, I reminded myself, now in my late forties, a divorced woman, a doctor with a career, and he was a rough, apparently unlettered man I had known less than a day.
It did no good. I was delighted when he announced he would spend the night in Benteen, begin to draw up his lists of materials and to talk money with me.
“I . . . well, I don’t have a guest room. Perhaps you could stay on with Jim.”
“You got a barn?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ll stay there.”
I put my best effort into dinner that night, stewing one of Nora’s chickens and making an apple pie with the last of the dried fruit stored for winter.
Nora liked neither the dinner nor Eli Able. She said nothing when we were all gathered in the kitchen, but her stony silence and the dark look on her face were all I needed as signals.
“What’s the matter, princess?” Jim asked. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Nothing’s the matter.” She said it tightly.
“Sure looks like this is a celebration, and you ain’t celebrating.”
“I’m not.”
Eli ignored her, just as she did him, and it set the tone for their relationship. When he went happily off to the barn, he and Jim having celebrated with a mysteriously produced bottle of whisky, Nora turned on me.
“Mother, how could you hire someone like that? He’s . . . well, he’s nasty.”
“I doubt that, Nora,” I said as calmly as I could. “But he is supposed to be very capable.” What in heaven’s name would she think if she knew the thoughts going through my mind?
Eli Able stayed in Benteen four days. We worked out the materials he would need to get started, and we agreed on the terms. I went to the Benteen State Bank and was able to secure financing that would not send me to the poorhouse, so the sanitarium was under way. I was walking on clouds, though I had to ask myself strictly how much of that airy feeling came from the prospect of the sanitarium being a reality and how much came from Eli Able.
We had loosened with each other during the four days, getting to the point of gentle teasing. He was, I sensed, a man’s man who had not spent a lot of time around women, and both Nora and I made him slightly uncomfortable. I, on the other hand, found him so attractive in a strongly physical way and yet so increasingly capable at the work which he was about to undertake that I was like a schoolgirl with a crush, afraid at any minute I’d reveal myself through a blush or an inadvertent comment. It was not an easy way to establish a relationship.
“Eli, how long will it take to build the sanitarium?”
“Don’t know, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am. My name is Mattie. Jim uses it all the time, and you can, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I gave up in exasperation. “You must have some idea of how long it will take you.”
His eyes actually twinkled. “Take as long as I want to. Depends on how well I like working for a lady doctor.”
I did blush that time.
The last night before Eli returned to Scottsbluff, we had a party of sorts, with the Whittakers, Jim, Will Henry and Nellie, his bride. We toasted the sanitarium with homemade wine given me by a patient, though Jim and Eli stuck to their whisky, pronouncing it much finer stuff.
�
�What will you call it, Mattie?” Sally asked.
“The Benteen Sanitarium, I guess.”
“How about the Armstrong Sanitarium?” asked Jim.
“No. It shouldn’t have my name on it.”
Eli watched me closely, offering no suggestions. But much later that evening as he headed toward the barn, he laid a brief hand on my shoulder and whispered, “I think you should call it Mattie’s Place.”
Nora refused to join our party, and I was acutely aware of her absence. She was locked in her room. And as I sat there and looked at the faces of those I held dearest, I thought about other faces that weren’t there. Em—did he know about the sanitarium? Was he still as resentful? What would the evening have been like if he’d been there? Probably it would never have come to pass, if there were still Em in my life. I counted my blessings.
But I also thought about Lucy and Jed. They had rarely come in from their claim in the four years since Luther had died. We had remained close, for there was never any thought that I hadn’t put out every effort to save the child, but Lucy withdrew into herself. It was that long, deep grieving that I knew was ahead when she took the death with such apparent calm. But on this evening, when we celebrated a milestone in my life, I longed for her to be part of it, and I resolved to ride to see her in the next few days.
Eli Able left the next morning. As I stood by the gate, he reached down from his horse to touch my face in a familiar gesture and murmur, “I’ll be back, lady doctor.”
Blushing, I looked straight at him for a moment, then turned and ran for the house, hoping no one in town had seen either his gesture or my reaction. But I thought I heard him chuckle as he rode away.
I closed the office and rode out to the Gelsons’. Nora, of course, refused to accompany me. At seventeen, she had left childish pursuits behind, like riding out on the prairie with her mother or her stepgrandfather, and had become, I thought, too interested in boys, particularly in young Clint Folsom, son of the banker and current mayor of Benteen. Clint was an attractive lad, even I could see that, but one spoiled to town ways with no appreciation of hard work. His father boasted of his intellectual superiority and apparently paid little other attention to him. Nora, however, paid a lot of attention to him, and he became her constant companion at whatever social event was going on in town. They took long rides together and lately had begun to go out in Banker Folsom’s car, a practice I did not condone at all. But nonetheless, this day Nora was working at Whittaker’s, where Sally, with more charity than need, I suspected, had put her to work behind the counter.
I reached the Gelsons’ just before midday and received a warm welcome from Lucy.
“Mattie! You’re just what I needed. Get down off that horse and come in.”
“Thanks, Lucy. I’ve missed you and decided it was time to come for a visit.”
“Well, I’d been wondering about you, too. It’s just . . . I still don’t like to come to town much. Jed reckons I might never get over it, but I think I will.” Then she laughed. “Nice to see you can still ride a horse this far.”
“Lucy Gelson, middle age is not that bad!”
She laughed again and led me inside. Lucy and I didn’t visit often, but when we did we lost no time making up for long silences. Our friendship, now more than twenty years in duration, seemed to pick up the moment we were together.
“I want to tell you the news, Lucy.”
“Is it good news? You look radiant, so I expect that it is.”
“It is. The sanitarium is about to become a reality.”
“Yes, Jed brought the news from town, and I’m so glad for you. Tell me what’s happened.”
“Well, you knew I’d purchased the land. Now I’ve hired a man to do the building.” And I told her, briefly, about Eli Able, stressing, I thought, his capabilities and his unusual personality.
“Sounds interesting. I gather you think so, too, Mattie.”
“Lucy, what do you mean by that?”
“You know very well what I mean. Oh, drat, here come Jed and Jim. You’ll just have to tell me more about Eli Able some other time.”
The Gelson men came in for their meal, and I happily joined the family. Jake, the oldest, was away at school, and I could tell that Lucy was keenly aware of her diminished family, with one boy miles away and the other lying in the ground at the edge of their claim. Still, they were a happy family, and I almost wished that Nora and I could have some of their closeness.
Nora brought me a new problem, one I had never anticipated, a few days later. Whereas other girls would have hidden their shame for months, Nora talked openly, almost defiantly, to me.
“I think I’m going to have Clint’s baby.” She simply announced it one night when we were having dinner alone.
“Nora?”
“You heard me, Mother.”
“I . . .” Words truly failed me, I who had clung so to the sanctity of the marriage bed and had seen it violated in my immediate family. I never, never anticipated it with Nora, much as I knew that she was unhappy with her lot in life.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Doctor, fairly sure.” Her description of her symptoms convinced me.
“Well, I’ll have to talk to Mr. Folsom immediately.”
“Clint already has.”
“What do you mean, he already has?”
“We’ve worked it all out, Mother. We’ll marry very soon, and Clint and I will move to Omaha.”
“Is that what you want, Nora?”
“It’s a way out of Benteen, isn’t it?” She said it fiercely.
I sat stunned, remembering my own desperation to get out of Princeton. She had been the one who claimed Benteen was where we belonged. “Yes, I guess it is, if you really want to leave. But it could be a painful way out.”
“I know that.” She was defiant again. “I don’t love Clint, and he doesn’t really love me. He just thinks he does. But this will work out for both of us.”
“How will you live?”
“Mr. Folsom will send us money. You can, too, you know. And Clint will work. He’s smart enough to be a bank teller or something, and his father has connections in Omaha.”
Such cynicism from one so young, even from my own daughter, where I knew to expect it, shocked and saddened me, and I fought an urge to run from the room. Em, I cried silently, look now what you’ve done, though in fairness I knew that Nora was not a product of Em alone but of both of us and of the uneasy relationship between us. Psychiatrists today might tell you a girl like Nora was seeking love to replace what she lost when her father left, an act she took as personal rejection. That may be nonsense or it may be true in some cases, but that wasn’t the case with Nora. She was using poor Clint Folsom.
Stunned, I sat at the table long after Nora had left the room. You usually think that the mother is sought for advice in desperate situations like this, but Nora neither seemed to find it desperate nor to need my advice. It was as though pregnancy outside of marriage was all part of her well-thought-out plan, and she had no need of advice.
At last, I put in a call to Whittaker’s, telling them simply that I had urgent business with Jim if they would please put the word out at the store in the morning. Jim still had no phone in his soddie, of course, and word of mouth generally began at the Whittakers’ store.
Jim came in the middle of the day. Nora had gone to Whittaker’s as though nothing were wrong, leaving me a distraught and blithering idiot. I was so glad to see Jim I literally threw myself into his arms, something I hadn’t done in years, and I found comfort from this man who had been such a steady influence in my life.
“Land’s sake, Mattie, what in the world has happened?”
“Nora,” I blurted out. “She’s pregnant.”
He was taken aback, but only momentarily. “Lord God in heaven, now there’s a pickle if I ever heard of one. Sit down and get me some coffee, so you can tell me about it.”
Haltingly, I told the story, all from my point of view, of cou
rse, about her cynicism, her using Clint. For the first time, I recognized and voiced my concern for the baby. “She doesn’t really want it, Jim. She just sees it as a way out. No baby will be well taken care of by a parent who feels that way.”
“You’re probably right, Mattie, but it may not be anything you can change. Remember that old Indian saying about changing what you can and accepting what you can’t change, and have the smarts to know the difference between?”
I nodded, then had another thought. “Em will have to be told.”
“I’ll ride out and tell him.”
“Thanks, Jim, and try . . . you know, try to . . .”
“I’ll just tell him I’ll bust every bone in his body if he tries to make trouble.”
And that’s just what Jim did, from the way he told me the story later. Em had threatened to ride after Clint Folsom immediately, shotgun in hand, until Jim reminded him that a shotgun wedding wasn’t necessary. The boy had already agreed eagerly to marry Nora.
“And then I asked him, out plain, I said, ‘Em, what makes you think it wasn’t more Nora’s fault than that boy’s? He may be just a pawn in her plan.’ Old Em, he got indignant and told me not to talk about his daughter that way, but I reminded him we both knew what kind of child our princess has always been, and that she’d had some experiences as a young child that might have sent her in the what you call calculating direction. He tried to lay all the blame on you, saying yes, if Mattie had paid more attention to the poor child, but I told him to take a good look at himself. Anyway, it all came out all right. Em calmed down, says he wants to come to the wedding, but he won’t make any trouble.”
I was becoming accustomed to this latest crisis and was able to smile a little at Jim’s description of Em’s reaction. I could picture for myself those flashing eyes, filled with righteous indignation. Em probably never could be truthful with himself about his part in shaping Nora’s character, but Jim had tried. And I was grateful. And could I, I wondered, ever accept my part in having produced this spoiled child turned willful and selfish woman?