“I think it’s a bad idea too,” Ana suddenly spoke up. With a gasp, Rosa spun around to find Ana and Marta standing just inside the open doorway. How much had they overheard? “I like Mrs. Nelson but it’s too dangerous to go back to the hospital. What if somebody sees you and takes you away from us?”
“Mija, no one could ever take me away from you.”
“Then why are we hiding?”
Rosa hesitated. Lars had made his point and had nothing more to add, but Marta and Ana were shooting her pleading looks, and she knew she had lost the argument. “Very well,” she said. They were right; even the slightest chance that the police or the bootleggers might be checking local hospitals for them posed too great a risk. The children needed her more than Elizabeth did.
She could not pay for Henry’s medical care, but someday she would make it up to the woman who had befriended her and had given her reason to hope when so many other people she had known her entire life had turned their backs on her.
While Lars went down to the lobby to settle the bill, Rosa retrieved her shears from her sewing basket and took them into the small bathroom, where she balanced them carefully on a small ceramic shelf meant to hold a water glass and stared at her reflection in the cracked mirror. She had once been radiantly beautiful—dark, wide-set eyes fringed with long lashes; high, elegant cheekbones; full, red lips that curved gracefully into a beckoning smile. Worry and care had taken the glow from her skin and etched twin grooves from nose to chin around her mouth, which was usually either pressed into a hard line as it was now or twisted into a melancholy frown. Her eyes were haunted and shadowed, and she had become too thin, so the high cheekbones gave her face an almost skeletal cast. Her only remaining beauty of the many she had once carelessly taken for granted was her hair—long and thick, raven black with a sheen like obsidian, unmarred by gray. She wore it unfashionably long, braided into thick ropes and pinned up at the nape of her neck, and when she took it down at night, it cascaded down her back to her waist, a dark, silky waterfall. As the popularity of the bob had soared, her hair had become her most unique, admired, and recognizable feature.
She took a deep breath, removed every hairpin, and let her long hair tumble down. Swiftly and decisively, she braided the heavy locks into one long plait, took the shears in hand, and sawed through the braid at the nape of her neck. Immediately her head felt lighter, as if she had severed a chain tethering herself to the ground. Setting the braid on the edge of the tub, she finger-combed her hair into place and trimmed the ragged ends into a neat, smooth bob. When she was satisfied that from a distance she would resemble any other Southern California housewife, she set down the shears and cleaned up the loose snips of hair that had fallen lightly to the floor. If only she had some way to conceal the all too noticeable and memorable cuts and bruises on her face.
She considered throwing the braid away, but something compelled her to keep it. She left the small bathroom and knelt beside her sewing basket, where she exchanged the shears for two small lengths of a narrow ribbon, which she tied around the ends of the severed braid.
“Mamá,” exclaimed Marta. “Your hair, your beautiful hair!”
Lupita gasped, her eyes wide with horror. “Mamá lost her hair!”
“No, I didn’t,” said Rosa, holding up the braid. “It’s right here.”
“Sew it back on,” Lupita ordered. “You don’t look like a mama. You look like a young lady.”
Despite everything, Rosa laughed as she tucked the braid into the sewing basket. “Thank you, Lupita.” She had spent the last twenty minutes studying herself in the mirror and she knew she looked every bit of her age and then some. She was digging into her overstuffed satchel for Elizabeth’s tan cloche when a knock sounded on the door and Lars called out to let them know who was there. Clutching the hat, Rosa hurried to let him in, but he stood transfixed in the hallway, staring at her newly shorn head. “A good disguise, don’t you agree?” She tugged the cloche over her dark bob. “If I’d answered the door with the hat on, you wouldn’t have known me.”
As he entered the room, he gave her a wry look that told her he would know her anywhere. “You’d fool a lot of people at first glance,” was all he would admit.
It was time to go. With the girls’ help, they carried their belongings downstairs in one trip, and they quickly loaded up the car and drove to the train station. Ocean mists had rolled in with the onset of dusk, and the children yawned and tried to make themselves comfortable in the backseat.
“Are we going home?” asked Lupita sleepily, where she sat between her older sisters holding her new doll on her lap in a fair imitation of Rosa holding Miguel.
“No, mija,” said Rosa. “We’re going to a city called San Francisco to meet a doctor who can help Ana and Miguel.”
“Is Papa coming too?”
From the corner of her eye, Rosa saw Lars wince. “No, Lupita,” she said. “He isn’t.”
“Why not?”
“He can’t leave the farm,” Marta spoke up tiredly. “Who would take care of the livestock and run the post office?”
Marta’s reasoning must have satisfied Lupita, for she played quietly with her doll for the rest of the short drive. Lars parked and helped Rosa carry their luggage to the platform before climbing back into the car and speeding away.
“Girls, stay here and watch our things while I buy our tickets.” Rosa picked up Miguel, who had squatted down to study a line of ants crawling along the wooden boards. In a lower voice, she added to Marta, “Don’t take your eyes off those valises for a second.”
“Isn’t Mr. Jorgensen coming with us?” asked Marta.
“Of course,” Rosa replied, with a reassuring smile for all of her daughters, who all looked equally anxious. “Aren’t you excited for your first train ride? We’re going to have a wonderful adventure.”
Lupita beamed, but Marta and Ana managed only brave, pensive nods. Rosa promised them she would be right back and hurried to the ticket window to pay for a private car and six fares to San Francisco. On impulse, she also bought four lemonades from a vendor’s cart and carried them carefully back to the children. “A treat to toast our journey,” she said, handing each of her daughters a cup and helping Miguel with his. The girls brightened, and as they sipped their lemonade, they chatted excitedly about what it would feel like to sleep on a train. Rosa only half listened as she scanned the darkened streets and sidewalks for Lars, but there was no sign of him. “Done, Mamá,” said Miguel, pushing his half-full cup toward her. Absently she took a drink, wondering how far Lars had gone, how quickly his long strides would bring him back to them.
No more than five minutes passed before the train chugged into the station, white steam billowing from the smokestack. Clinging to her leg, Miguel watched, fascinated, his fingers in his mouth, while Lupita crouched behind the largest suitcase and covered her ears with her hands. A slow smile spread over Ana’s face as the train came to a halt, and she watched, eyes shining, as passengers disembarked—men, women, children, young and old, dressed in smart suits and fine hats or in more humble attire, plain and durable but neat and proudly worn. As the conductor strode along the platform, calling out the destinations ahead, other northbound passengers began to board. Biting her lip, Rosa looked through the crowd in vain for a tall, thin, fair-haired and purposeful farmer, but Lars did not appear.
A porter approached and offered to help her with her luggage. She agreed, worried that refusal would make her more memorable. In any event, she thought as she followed the porter aboard and helped the younger children up the steps, she had to board. If Lars missed the train, she and the children had no choice but to travel on without him.
Suddenly she felt a pang of worry. What if he had been recognized as he hurried back to the station, and what if, even now, the police were interrogating him? Worse yet, what if John’s mob colleagues had apprehended him instead? Her heart pounding, she followed the children into the private car and managed a polite smile as she tip
ped the porter. Perhaps, instead of parking the automobile, Lars had decided to keep driving, either home to the Arboles Valley or on to Los Angeles or off to some remote locale where he could lose himself among strangers. She could not blame him if he had. He was safer on his own.
Still he did not appear. As the children explored the train car and exclaimed over each novelty discovered—the bouncy leather seats, the clever washbasin, the bunks they could fold down when they wanted to sleep, if they could possibly sleep with so many marvels surrounding them—Rosa sank into a seat and gazed out the window. Outside the conductor passed, calling out a final warning to passengers who lingered on the now nearly empty platform bidding sad farewells to loved ones.
The whistle sounded. The train lurched forward and slowly began to pick up speed. Rosa stared out the window in crushing disbelief as they passed the ticket window, the lemonade vendor, and the end of the platform, until they left the station behind. As the girls crowded around the windows to watch the city of Oxnard pass by, two quick raps on the compartment door drew Rosa’s attention in time for her to see it swing open and Lars enter, breathless. She was so relieved to see him she couldn’t speak, but the girls greeted him happily.
“Sorry to cut it so close,” he said, removing his hat and dropping onto the seat beside her. He carried a few colorful pamphlets, which he showed her briefly before tucking them into his coat pocket. “I thought it might be prudent to let myself be seen looking over guides to Mexico.”
“I thought maybe you changed your mind.”
Lars folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and settled back into the seat, panting as if he had sprinted across the platform and leapt onto the moving train. “That should’ve been the least of your worries.”
Perhaps it should have been.
Before long the conductor came by to collect and punch their tickets. After he left, Lars lowered the bunks and stepped out into the hallway while Rosa and the children prepared for bed. In her exhaustion and worry she had not given any thought to their sleeping arrangements, but as uncomfortable as she was to share such a small space with Lars, she could hardly ask him to search for an empty seat in one of the passenger cars, where he would be forced to sleep sitting up or not at all. And that was if he found a vacancy, and if the conductor did not send him back to his ticketed car. So she put Ana and Marta to bed in one narrow bunk, and took Lupita and Miguel into her own, leaving one bed for Lars. She had drawn the curtain and turned out the lights before climbing under the covers, so when Lars returned, the car was dark. She heard him open his suitcase, undress, and climb into his own bunk, and then only the sounds of the train and Miguel’s and Ana’s soft, even breathing filled her ears. Lars was so quiet she knew he was still awake, and she wished that she could speak to him, to thank him for all he had done, to apologize for throwing his life into upheaval, but she didn’t want to wake the children, so it was just as well that she couldn’t find the words.
Lars’s sacrifices and kindness were all the more extraordinary given that thirteen years before, she had broken his heart.
For a few months after she had agreed to marry him, Lars never appeared at her window with the smell of alcohol on his breath. He proudly told her of the money he was saving up and the gentle rise of the hill on the southern acres of the Jorgensen ranch where he planned to build them a house. Rosa cautioned him not to break ground just yet, and several times she had to remind him that she had no intention of marrying him on her eighteenth birthday but sometime after she graduated. To her relief he did not press her to be more specific.
In the weeks leading up to her birthday, he hinted that he wanted to buy her an engagement ring, but she begged him not to, because her parents would certainly notice a diamond sparkling on the third finger of her left hand. “But I won’t ever want to take it off,” she told him when he suggested that she wear it only when they were together in the cabin, and hide it when they were apart. She didn’t tell him that she suspected her mother occasionally searched her room when she was at school. Rosa wasn’t sure what she had done recently to raise her mother’s suspicions, or what her mother thought she might find tucked away in her drawers or concealed under her mattress, but Rosa knew there was no place in her room she could hide a ring where her mother would not find it.
Then Lars suggested that she keep the ring in the cabin. “No one comes here but us,” he said. “This is our place.” And it was. Over time they had swept and scrubbed and improved the cabin with small comforts—pillows and sheets no one would miss from the Jorgensen farmhouse, a coffeepot and cups Rosa had picked up at a secondhand store—and while they both joked about “playing house,” it almost did feel like a real home of their own. Since they intended to marry someday and felt almost married already, it became easier not to wait for marriage to be intimate. And one night they were. Lars was worried about hurting her and Rosa was worried about getting pregnant, but with each encounter such worries seemed less important until they disappeared entirely. Throughout her girlhood Rosa had overheard her mother and her mother’s friends sharing countless confidences in hushed voices as they sewed or cooked, and they had inadvertently taught her how to count the days of her cycle to prevent a pregnancy. It did not always work, as Rosa had also learned from the older women, but it was the only preventative their faith allowed. Rosa resolved to be scrupulous and careful and take no unnecessary chances.
In June, Rosa graduated from high school and took a job as a bookkeeper and clerk at the Grand Union Hotel. She had always been good with numbers and she enjoyed the work as well as the bustle and excitement of the inn, but she regretted disappointing her mother, who had hoped Rosa would attend college and become something important, perhaps a teacher like her aunt. When her mother persisted, pleading with her at least to apply to the University of California and make up her mind after receiving her acceptance letter, Rosa explained that she loved the Arboles Valley too much to leave it. Her mother accepted Rosa’s excuse with profound skepticism—and with good reason. It was not love for the valley that kept Rosa from going off to college, but love for Lars.
Rosa unwittingly disappointed Lars too. She did not realize that he had assumed she meant to marry him immediately after finishing school until he showed up at her bedroom window one night, red-eyed and slurring his words, full of lamentations and demands. Furious, she yanked the curtains shut and went back to bed, holding her breath for fear that he would wake her parents. Eventually he departed, and when he returned three nights later, sober and contrite, she only went to the cabin with him so that she could scold him. “I won’t marry you until you stop drinking,” she warned him, and he promised he would.
Weeks passed, and again he showed up drunk after a day at Lake Sherwood with his friends. She sent him away, and when he came back a few nights later, she warned him again that she would not marry him until he proved he could stay sober.
“You’ll never marry me regardless,” he told her, and strode back to his horse alone.
He stayed away a week, and as she had years before, she missed him and brooded over all that was wrong and impossible with their relationship, and she had almost decided to apply to college after all when once again he woke her with a soft knock on her window. He was sober, so she went off with him, glad and relieved. Later, as they lay side by side on the old bed in the cabin with the quilt drawn over them, she said, “I won’t marry you until you stop drinking for good.”
“I’ll stop drinking when you marry me,” he replied.
“How do I know that you mean it this time? You’ve promised before and you’ve let me down.”
“Marry me and I’ll prove it.”
“If you can’t stop before we get married, why should I believe you’d be able to after?”
“It’s not that I can’t,” he said, an edge to his voice. “I could quit, if I wanted to. I could quit tonight.”
“Then why don’t you?” she persisted. “Why won’t you, for me?”
&nb
sp; “And leave you without an excuse to delay the wedding?” he retorted. “You wouldn’t want that.”
Mrs. Diegel, the young widow who had moved to the valley from Los Angeles to assume responsibility for the hotel when her father’s health failed, certainly knew about their romance, but she was as discreet with her employees’ affairs as she was with her guests’. She never failed to greet Lars cordially when he showed up at the office with a sack lunch or a basket of fresh apricots, but she never queried Rosa about him, except to note when they had returned late from an outing and to ask her to stay late to make up for it.
Perhaps Mrs. Diegel thought Lars was only one of several suitors, because he was not the only young man to visit Rosa at the hotel. John Barclay, whom she had rarely seen since he finished school four years ahead of her, had begun stopping by at least once a week to invite her to lunch or for a glass of lemonade after work. “I’m not a frivolous man, Rosa,” he told her once, as if anyone would accuse him of that particular fault. Sometimes she found herself wishing that Lars could be half as diligent and steadfast as his friend and frequent rival without losing his passion and sense of fun. Sometimes, too, when she was angry with Lars for his drinking, she wished she could forget about him and fall in love with someone like John instead—or John himself. He certainly seemed fond of her. But although she cared about John, enjoyed his company, and cherished their friendship, she loved only Lars, and she longed for the day he would quit drinking, her mother would abandon her prejudices, and they could marry.
But that day seemed ever more elusive. She was twenty and Lars twenty-two, and he was tired of the need for secrecy and had become increasingly impatient with her interminable delays. Twice they broke off their engagement only to reconcile within the week. His drunkenness became more frequent and more ugly. When he was sober he was all that she wanted in a husband—a loyal, honest, kind, and loving man. When he drank, they argued and she despaired. How could she build a home and raise a family with someone so unreliable, so unpredictable? How could she live without the man she loved with all her heart?
Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Page 10