Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  Papa Hansen rubbed his chin. “What do you think, Emma?”

  “Oh, Papa, it’s a wonderful idea. Please, may I do it?”

  “Not so darned fast,” Mama Hansen cried. “What about gettin’ the work done here? I’ve got this little one here and Kirstin is off at the Reinhardts. There’s cows to milk, and you”—she glared at her husband—“want to get a whole bunch more. There’s the garden to put out and hoe and harvest, the canning to be done, and laundry and cooking and God knows what all. I need her right here at home. Not off at some fancy high school and workin’ for somebody else.”

  “I understand, Mrs. Hansen,” Miss Connor replied softly. “It would be . . . a . . . strain for you. But Emma really must stay in school until she is sixteen. But, what’s more important is that this is the greatest possible gift that you can give her. I have never known a child who has more potential to benefit from further education. If she completes high school and passes the state examination—and I have no doubt that she would—she could become a teacher. Teachers are earning thirty dollars a month nowadays. Emma is already doing high school work and helping me teach the first and second graders. She has gone beyond what I can teach her. She’s been doing algebra and Latin on her own all year.”

  “That’s all well and good, but high school is four years, ain’t it? A long time until she gets a job. In the meantime, what about my work? Algebra and Latin don’t get the milkin’ done.”

  “She would be home during the three months of summer when the garden work and canning is heaviest,” Miss Connor replied. “Is there any chance that her sister could return home?”

  “We need the money.”

  “Well, maybe with the extra income from sellin’ the milk from the new cows, she could come back,” Papa offered. “The barn addition will be done by fall and we can increase the herd by then.”

  “But there’ll be the bank loan to pay off. And what if Kirsten wants to get married? She says that Reinhardt’s younger brother has been courtin’ her.”

  “Guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  The table fell silent. Finally Miss Connor spoke. “Well, please give it serious consideration. Emma is an exceptional pupil. It’s worth some sacrifice to provide her with a good education.”

  “Ya,” Papa Hansen replied. “We’ll think about it.”

  Mama was silent, unsmiling.

  Please, oh, please, Emma thought, set me free. Let me fly.

  CHAPTER 3

  1916

  EMMA SLID THE brass weight across the scale’s balance beam to the 10 lb mark, then poured beans from a large metal scoop into the pan, briskly at first, then slowly until the beam rose and hovered at the midline. She poured the contents of the pan into a paper sack.

  “That’s ten pounds of navy beans at eleven cents a pound for a dollar ten, plus ten pounds of flour, fifty cents, for one sixty, five pounds of sugar at nine cents, forty-five; that’s two oh five, and thirty cents for the coffee. Two dollars and thirty-five cents. Will that be all, Mrs. Schultheiss?”

  “Ja, tanks. You iss zo fast wiss tze numbers, Emma. I can’t do tzat in English, but I trust you godt it right.” Emma punched the keys on the big brass cash register so that white tabs reading $2, 30c and 5c popped up in the little glass window. Mrs. Schultheiss had difficulty when she heard numbers spoken in English, but she understood them readily if she saw them. She sat her infant on the counter and fumbled with her pocketbook with her free hand.

  “Here, I’ll hold the little one,” Emma said.

  Mrs. Schultheiss pulled a small cloth purse out of her pocketbook and carefully counted out the correct amount in coins. “Tze prices, tzey always goink up.”

  “I know. Quite a lot since I started working here. It’s the Great War driving them up, I think.” Emma wondered if she should have said that.

  “Ja.”

  The war, already churning in Europe for two years, was a sensitive topic with the Schultheiss family. German immigrants were often treated with hostility or suspicion. There was much wild talk of America entering the war against the Central Powers, of the vile acts of the “Huns,” stories of atrocities in Belgium.

  “Let me help you carry the groceries out. You’ve got your hands full with the baby.”

  The Schultheiss’ team and buggy stood in front of the Oosterfeld’s grocery alongside two Model T Fords. Emma knew that Mrs. Schultheiss would have to trudge up the street with her infant on her hip to retrieve her husband from the tavern.

  When Emma returned to the store, Piet Oosterfeld smiled from the stool where he was stacking cans on shelves flanked with barrels and sacks. He didn’t speak; it wasn’t necessary. Emma had readily mastered every task there was to operating the store. Moreover, she was efficient and courteous with the customers, remembered their names, asked about their families, anticipated their needs.

  Emma had become comfortable with the Oosterfelds, a gentle and reserved childless couple. Indeed, she would have been ashamed to admit that she was happier with them than she was at home on the Hansen farm. She had become a surrogate daughter to the Oosterfelds, she enjoyed working in the store in the evenings and weekends, she very much appreciated the comfort of living in the village, where rooms were well heated and electric lights glowed at night.

  But the greatest source of her happiness was attending Stanton Mills High School. How quickly the four years had gone by. She had loved her courses and earned high marks. She was in line to graduate as the class valedictorian in two months.

  The thought filled her with pride, but also unease. What lay ahead? She would take the state examination to qualify for an elementary teaching certificate next month, so teaching in a one-room country school was a possibility, but that plan had been displaced by a newer, more unreachable dream—college, four years of college and a Bachelor’s Degree.

  Biology was driving her there. Biology. How she loved it. During her junior year she had gained an overview of the living world, the tree of life so carefully organized in the Linnaean system from the simplest unicellular organisms through sponges, coelenterates, and echinoderms to the majestic kingdoms of higher plants and animals.

  Emma’s knowledge of Latin made it easy for her to learn the formal Linnaean names of the phyla, orders, families, and species as well as body parts from textbook drawings and dissections. She had gathered the leaves of seventy-three species of local trees and presented them, carefully pressed and labeled, to the class, and followed that with an equally impressive collection of insects, killed with chloroform, dried and mounted on pins in boxes. Henrik had helped her with both collections during her visits and summers at the home farm.

  But it was Emma’s studies of human physiology and hygiene during her senior year that had blown the glowing coals of her enthusiasm into a bright flame, for here she was brought face-to-face with the most fundamental question of biology, which was not taxonomy or anatomy as stressed in last year’s course, but a more profound question: how does it work?

  Her puzzlement began with the “germ theory” of disease. Her textbook described the work of Robert Koch, who had shown that anthrax and tuberculosis were caused by germs—properly called “bacteria.” His work was so beautifully logical. Koch always found this particular germ in the lungs or sputum of tuberculosis patients. He could grow the germ in pure cultures in the laboratory, and it caused tuberculosis when he introduced it back into animals.

  But what were bacteria? The textbook said they were tiny plants, but that didn’t seem right to Emma, because the drawings in the textbook certainly didn’t look like plants and they weren’t green. How did this miniscule creature cause disease and why did some people recover while others sickened and died?

  The high school had no microscopes that would permit Emma to see bacteria for herself, yet the textbook insisted that they were everywhere—in milk, water, and food, in the air. Why didn’t everyone get sick? Then came the section on smallpox vaccination. How did that work? No one co
uld find the smallpox germ—why not? Emma pestered Mr. Witherspoon with questions, which he could not answer.

  “I’m afraid I do not know, Miss Hansen,” he said. “Perhaps no one knows as of yet. You will have to go to a college or university if you want to pursue it.”

  So indeed she would.

  There was a particular poignancy to Emma’s questions because little Aaron had died of diphtheria just a month after his second birthday. Her family had watched in agony as the pale little boy gasped and choked, his neck swollen to twice its normal thickness. Mama and Papa had assumed that it was “just croup” and delayed summoning a doctor until it was too late; their grief was compounded with guilt.

  Mama was engulfed with depression, which persisted even now, two years later. Papa’s silences and fierce involvement with farm work deepened. Emma had been living in Stanton Mills when baby Aaron died, so she had been spared the agony of witnessing his asphyxiating death, but the recollection of his miniature coffin being lowered into the barren ground still brought tears to her eyes. Why was such suffering visited on the innocent child she had so often rocked to sleep?

  Diphtheria was caused by a bacterium, Emma learned from her textbook. Why had little Aaron been infected, but no other members of the family? Why was there no vaccine for diphtheria as there was for smallpox? The doctor had injected an “antitoxin,” but it had not saved the baby. Why not? Mr. Witherspoon could not tell Emma what an antitoxin was or how it differed from a vaccine. So many questions.

  There was one area of human physiology that was completely absent from her textbook, however, and it was one in which Emma would have been embarrassed to admit, she had done a bit of research on her own: human reproductive biology. Her friend and classmate Victor Midlothian had been her willing partner in these investigations.

  Victor was the son of a bank officer in Stanton Mills and lived with his parents just a few blocks from the Oosterfeld’s grocery store. He was less intimidated by Emma’s intelligence and outspoken questions than most of the farm boys in their high school classes, and the two occasionally studied together. Indeed, Victor admitted that he would not have passed geometry without Emma’s tutoring. Rumors went around the school that Victor was “sweet” on Emma, and she supposed it was true because of his attentiveness. He was a nice-looking boy with large blue eyes and dark brown hair fashionably parted down the middle. Emma enjoyed his companionship, but she thought of him more as a brother—like Henrik—than as beau. Her plans for the future did not include a beau.

  Emma had created an embarrassment in the senior human physiology class when she asked Mr. Witherspoon why there was nothing in their textbook about reproduction.

  He had flushed and shuffled uncomfortably. “Well, those are, um, delicate matters best explained by your parents, Miss Hansen,” he replied. “Besides, surely you know the, er, basic facts.”

  “Of course. Anyone who grew up on a farm knows that, but there’s a lot about how the body works that we don’t know.” Emma, like the few other girls in the class, had reasons to want to know more. She had experienced the changes in her body wrought by puberty. The blossoming of her breasts prepared them to nurse future babies, that seemed obvious, but what on earth did the sprouting of hair between her legs and the flow of blood from her nether regions every month have to do with it? She couldn’t ask these questions of Mr. Witherspoon, and her mother’s answers had been vague.

  “It just means you can have a baby now if you lie with a man,” she said. Mrs. Oosterfeld was quiet and motherly, but Emma didn’t feel free to ask her about such personal matters.

  There had been some rather unchaste explorations with Victor while the two of them were alone on an April Sunday afternoon searching for mushrooms in Wilson’s Woods, which lay at the edge of Stanton Mills. What Victor had revealed to her not only answered some of Emma’s questions about human reproductive anatomy, but they awakened new feelings that were both pleasurable and troubling. There was so much she needed to understand. Victor coaxed for more walks in the woods, but Emma declined. “C’mon, Vic, let’s just be friends.”

  HENRIK LIFTED THE wooden orange crate filled with groceries into the back of the truck, then flipped a fifty pound flour sack off of his shoulder and laid it next to the crate. As big and strong as a man, Emma thought, just turned nineteen. He opened the door to the cab for Emma.

  “Get in and sit behind the wheel, Emmie. Pull the choke out—that knob there—while I crank ’er. Push it in when she starts up. Pull the throttle lever down—this one—so it’s not racing, but not all the way down. Then I’ll hop in and off we go.”

  The Model T Ford truck was unfamiliar to Emma. The Hansens had bought it last year while she was living in Stanton Mills. There were two handles on either side of the steering post, the knob Henrik called a choke, three pedals on the floor, and a lever coming up from the floor beside the driver, as well as three small glass-covered dials on the dashboard.

  Emma had no idea what any of them did, but she was keen to learn, and she knew that Henrik would be proud to teach her. After a couple of quick twists of the crank at the front of the vehicle, the engine sputtered into a rhythmic chugging, and Henrik jumped onto the seat, nudged Emma aside, adjusted the spark lever, and settled behind the steering wheel.

  “She starts good,” he said, as he depressed the middle pedal, pulled down the hand throttle, and twisted his head to see as he backed the truck out into the street. “The roads were so bad this spring, we couldn’t drive it, but now the ruts have dried out. Rough as hell, though. Hang on.”

  “I remember you and Papa had to bring me back home on the bobsled for Christmas, the snow was so deep.”

  “Yeah, this thing can’t get through deep snow like a team of horses. Gee, Emmie, here it is Easter and I haven’t seen you since New Year’s.” Henrik glanced at Emma, then turned his eyes back to the rough dirt road. “I’ve missed ya, kiddo.”

  “Me too, Hennie.” Than after a long pause. “How’re things at home?”

  “Well, I gotta be honest with you. They ain’t so good.”

  “What’s wrong? Is Mama still poorly? Seems like she never got over it when Aaron died.”

  “That’s part of it. But she and Susan don’t get along, always barkin’ at one another. Mama’s the boss of the house and garden, you know, but Susan’s got her own ideas, and she can’t keep her trap shut.”

  “Oh, that’s not fair. You know how cross Mama can be, and it can’t be easy, a new daughter-in-law and all, moving in right after they got married.”

  “Well, Bjorn told me they’d move out except for they want to take over the farm someday. And Papa ain’t ready for that. The farm’s all he gives a damn about.”

  “How about you? Do you want to stay on the farm?”

  “Oh, hell no. Bjorn’s the oldest; he’s gonna inherit it all anyway. Soon’s we get into the Big War, I’m gonna sign up.” Henrik flashed a grin. “Can’t you see me as a soldier boy? Take a big ship across the ocean. March across France. Kick the Huns all the way back to Berlin.”

  “Oh, Hennie. Don’t do it. Haven’t you read in the papers? All those boys, thousands and thousands of them, piled up dead in the trenches. And poison gas. It’s horrible. No, please, no. What’s wrong with you boys? Victor’s been talking that way too. Says he wants to fly one of those fighting aeroplanes.”

  “Who’s Victor?”

  “Oh, he’s a boy I go to school with. Victor Midlothian.”

  “Is he your beau, Emmie? You sweet on him, huh?” Henrik teased.

  “No,” Emma shot back. What was Victor? Something more than a friend, surely. “He’s just a nice boy, a senior like me. We study together sometimes.”

  “Uh-huh.” The truck lurched roughly, and Henrik wrestled the steering wheel, shifted back into low gear with his feet.

  “Besides, you’re changing the subject, Henrik. Please don’t go off to the army. If something happened to you, well, we . . . I . . . just couldn’t stand it. Think o
f poor Mama. After baby Aaron and everything. Besides America isn’t going to get into the war. President Wilson said so.”

  “Well, we’ll see. If the Germans start sinkin’ our ships with their U-boats again . . .”

  WHATEVER TROUBLES WRITHED beneath the surface in the Hansen farmhouse, they were ignored for the family Easter dinner. Papa and Mama sat side by side at one end of the expanded table in the front room and Bjorn and Susan at the other end, Emma and Henrik at one side, and Kurt and Kirsten, who had come all the way from Greene County for Easter, opposite. Kirsten was obviously pregnant, although she and Kurt had only married three months previously—the topic was not discussed.

  The family had completed a heavy meal of ham, scalloped potatoes, peas fresh from the garden, and bread baked the day before, with both cherry and apple pie and were so satiated that conversation, which had been sporadic during the meal, died out completely.

  Emma caught the sleepy eyes of her sister-in-law and her sister—how odd to see her with her belly so swollen. She had tried to imagine the events that had led up to that: Kurt in a state like Victor’s, her sister yielding to penetration.

  “Why don’t you all take a rest?” she said. “Susan, you worked all morning, and Kirsten you’ve had a long ride. I’ll help Mama with the dishes.”

  The young women protested, but feebly, and remained seated—as did the men—when Emma left the room. Emma was rewarded with a rare smile from Mama.

  Cleaning up and washing dishes in the kitchen were familiar tasks: scraps saved for the pigs, hot water carried from the reservoir at the side of the kitchen range to the dry sink with a second large metal pan for rinsing. Familiar, yet a bit strange, because Emma had lived with the Oosterfelds in their apartment over the store for much of the past four years. How primitive living conditions were for her family—for nearly all farm families—as compared to those who dwelt in town.