Though Waters Roar

by Lynn Austin

  She did after he did.

  One weekend in November, Claudia and Maude asked if they could work extra hours to cover Bertha’s shift and give her the weekend off. “Lyle is home on leave,” Claudia explained. “This will be the last time Bertha will get to see him before he sails for France.” I gave her the time off. She cried for days after he left.

  Once Lyle landed in France, Bertha kept track of his steps and all the battles he fought more diligently than General Pershing did. Her daily news reports brought the war right into China, Glassware, and Silver Goods. It didn’t look like the war would be over anytime soon, which was bad news for Bertha and Lyle, but it was great news for me. I loved my job.

  I did miss spending time with Grandma Bebe, however, now that I worked such long hours. In December, she called one day to ask if I would drive her to the train station and water her violets while she was away. “Where are you going, Grandma?” I asked.

  “To Washington, dear. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but the prohibition amendment is coming up for a vote before both houses of Congress this month. I can’t sit quietly at home and wonder about the results. I’ve waited much too long to see this day and worked much too hard for it.”

  I was happy for her, but a little sad that I had become so wrapped up in my job that I had lost track of her progress. America had been fighting in Europe for only nine months, but Grandma Bebe had been waging war against alcohol since she was my age. I eagerly awaited news from her in Washington. On December 17, the House of Representatives voted to pass the amendment. The next day the Senate did the same. I thought Grandma Bebe would be triumphant when I picked her up at the train station again, but she seemed surprisingly subdued. Considering how hard she had worked to get the amendment passed, it seemed to me that she should be jubilant—even if she couldn’t toast her success with champagne.

  “What’s wrong, Grandma?”

  “We can’t sit back and rest just yet. The amendment still needs to be ratified—which means getting thirty-six out of the forty-eight states to approve it. Many state legislatures won’t even get around to voting until after the Christmas recess.”

  “How many years have you been fighting this battle, Grandma?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . let me think. We started our local chapter of the WCTU before the Great Flood of 1876 . . . so it has to be more than forty years by now.”

  “So it shouldn’t be too hard to wait a few more weeks until after Christmas, should it?”

  “We’ll still have our work cut out for us, though,” she said with a sigh. “The temperance chapters in each state will have to work to get the amendment before the state governments, which means talking to legislators, signing petitions, gathering support . . . Yes, we still have a lot of work to do. But I keep thinking of all the families and the children whose lives are ruined by this evil every day. They are the reason I’m doing this, Harriet.”

  I carried her suitcase into her house for her and saw the mountains of paper on her dining room table, and I wondered what Grandma would do with herself once the amendment passed. I knew what she would do if it didn’t pass—continue working, of course.

  Christmas approached, and as I was strolling past Woolworth’s on my lunch hour one day and saw rolls of brightly colored wrapping paper in their store window, I came up with a great idea for the holidays: free gift-wrapping. I went inside and bought a dozen rolls of paper and fifty yards of ribbon with my own money. When I told my staff my idea, Bertha claimed to be an expert at wrapping packages. She offered to teach my other salesclerks how to do it.

  “First you fold the ends in like this . . . then you crease it real good. . . .” I watched Bertha work, admiring her graceful hands— and suddenly noticed a plain gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. “And then you tie it like this. See, Miss Sherwood? Doesn’t it look pretty?”

  She looked up, expecting praise, and must have seen my puzzled frown. She looked down again, following my gaze, and gasped.

  She snatched the ring off her hand and stuffed it into her pocket, but of course it was too late.

  “You’re married.” It came out as a statement, not a question.

  “Please don’t fire me, Miss Sherwood! Please! I need this job and—”

  “You and Lyle got married.”

  Tears filled her eyes at the mention of Lyle’s name. “We eloped the weekend before he was shipped overseas. I wanted to be with him and be his wife so badly . . . just in case he . . . you know . . .”

  I was too surprised to reply, even though I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Bertha had talked about Lyle constantly since I began working at the store seven months ago. She was in love and love led to marriage. I had seen the same starry-eyed look in my customers’ eyes when they came in for their free spoon, a symbol of their brand-new life. And even though I had forsworn love and marriage and all the rest, there were times when I looked at all those brides-to-be and I felt something very close to jealousy. I felt it now after learning the truth about Bertha and her beloved Lyle.

  “I know there’s a rule that says I can’t work in this department store and be married,” Bertha said between sobs, “but Lyle and I need the money, Miss Sherwood, and I don’t want a factory job. And I can’t just sit at home all day, either, because I’ll go crazy worrying about Lyle and—”

  “I’m not going to fire you, Bertha.”

  “Y-you’re not?”

  “I always thought it was unfair to fire a perfectly good salesclerk just because she got married. When men get married, the store gives them a raise.”

  “But . . . but your father is the one who made that rule in the first place, and you might get into trouble if—”

  “My father’s rule is unfair, and I’m not afraid to tell him so—if he asks.”

  Justice was on my side. I thought of my great-grandmother Hannah, who had defied the unfair Fugitive Slave Law. Nevertheless, I didn’t plan to confront my father unless I got caught. “I’ll look the other way, Bertha. But make sure you don’t wear the ring to work again.” She hugged me in gratitude.

  Free gift-wrapping turned out to be another successful idea, and other departments throughout the store soon copied it. My father, however, never breathed a word of praise or acknowledgment to me.

  January of 1918 turned out to be brutally cold, and business slumped when a deadly flu epidemic swept across the nation. I begged Grandma Bebe to cancel all her meetings and stay home so she wouldn’t risk getting sick. For once, she listened to my advice. My mother traveled to Washington with a group of her friends after President Wilson spoke up publicly in support of the suffrage amendment. She was in the audience chamber in the House of Representatives on January 20 when they narrowly passed the amendment. But she arrived home discouraged after the Senate decided to postpone the debate on the amendment until the fall.

  Meanwhile, state legislatures across the country began to ratify Grandma Bebe’s prohibition amendment, bringing the total to eleven states by the time spring arrived and the wedding season was about to begin. Of course, the war meant fewer weddings, since a sizable percentage of prospective grooms were overseas, but that didn’t stop me from coming up with more new ideas for China, Glassware, and Silver Goods. In fact, when Mr. Linens, Pillows, and Bedding announced that he was retiring, I begged Father to combine the two departments and allow me to run both of them. The Linens Department couldn’t be that hard to manage, since I suspected that Mr. Linens had actually been asleep at his desk for the past few years.

  “We could call it the Home Goods Department,” I told Father. “Our slogan could be ‘Everything a woman needs for a comfortable home.’ ” I hatched plans to pair damask tablecloths and napkins with my dishes and glassware to create beautiful table settings for our customers to covet. “There may not be too many weddings this year,” I told Father, “but once the soldiers return . . .”

  My father eventually agreed. He had no choice. He couldn’t find
a replacement for Mr. Linens, Pillows, and Bedding no matter how hard he tried. My kingdom expanded to twice its size, and I was on my way to becoming the queen of the basement of Sherwood’s Department Store. In April I decided to have a Hope Chest Sale in my combined departments. Young ladies could prepare for the day when their sweethearts returned from France to pop the question by making sure their hope chests were well stocked with china and bed linens.

  One morning as we were setting up for the sale, I took a good look at Bertha and realized that she was pregnant. “Please don’t fire me, please!” she begged when I pulled her into the back room for a talk. “I’ll go crazy at home all day, and we really, really need the money, Miss Sherwood, especially with a baby on the way. Please!”

  I had grown very fond of all my clerks by now, but I would especially hate to lose Bertha. She was my best salesgirl and could probably talk the Rogers Brothers silversmiths into buying one of their own pickle castors from us. I was counting on her to teach my new clerks from Linens, Pillows, and Bedding how to sweet-talk our customers into buying more than they intended during the Hope Chest Sale.

  I gave the matter a great deal of thought and decided that I could disguise Bertha’s condition for a while longer if I gave blue cotton smocks to all of my salesclerks to wear over their clothing. I told my father that not only would the baggy smocks protect the girls’ blouses from tarnish stains, but our customers would be able to distinguish our staff members much more easily in their smocks.

  The Hope Chest Sale was such a success that I decided it should become an annual event. Bertha continued to work for a few more months. When she began to waddle, the girls and I gave her a baby shower in the back room after the store closed on her last day. I sent her a sterling silver teething ring and a twenty-five dollar war bond after she gave birth to Lyle Jr. in August.

  Life couldn’t have been better for me. I was enjoying my work and accomplishing great things for our store—maybe not of the caliber of Mother’s and Grandmother’s accomplishments, but I couldn’t help noticing that we were all working hard for our community, each in our own way. And in the past, women in our nation hadn’t been allowed to accomplish very much at all.

  By fall, almost half of the required states had ratified Grandma’s Prohibition Amendment. I held a sale in my new Home Goods Department on warm bedding and china teapots in preparation for winter. And my mother and her suffragette friends were waiting anxiously for the promised debate in the Senate on the woman suffrage amendment. When the amendment lost by only three votes, Mother was heartbroken. And furious. But she refused to give up.

  “We’ll show those hardheaded old men,” she told me. “There’s an election coming in November, and we’re going to target all of the senators who voted against the bill to make sure they lose their Senate seats. The amendment is going to pass the next time, you’ll see.”

  On November 11, everyone rejoiced when the armistice was signed. The war in Europe was over. I visited Bertha and her baby and learned that her husband, Lyle, had managed to survive the war unharmed. He was coming home. I hired three more salesclerks and ordered a case of silver serving spoons in anticipation of the flood of engagements that would soon follow.

  During the first two weeks of January 1919, there was a flurry of voting all across the country as more and more states ratified Grandma Bebe’s prohibition amendment. Then, on January 16, Wyoming became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it. She now had the necessary votes to officially amend the United States Constitution to prohibit alcohol. The saloons she had fought so hard to close would have to shutter their doors for good. Grandma Bebe invited me to the celebration at her house, along with Millie White and all of the other longtime members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. No one at the party needed champagne in order to celebrate. It was a good thing the amendment passed when it did, too, because Grandma was seventy years old, and I couldn’t help noticing that she was starting to slow down. Her days of smashing whiskey barrels at the train depot were all behind her.

  She was jubilant, though, her cheeks glowing like a schoolgirl’s. “The last time I felt this ecstatic,” she told me, “was the day I learned that the slaves had been set free. . . . Or maybe it was when I learned how to soar on my brothers’ swing with the sky above me and the wind in my hair. . . . Or it might have been when I first saw Niagara Falls with my dear, sweet Horatio by my side. . . .”

  Meanwhile, Mother’s goals were also within sight. She had worked hard to help pro-suffrage candidates get elected to the Senate, and on June 4, 1919, when a vote was taken once again, the woman suffrage amendment passed. Once thirty-six states ratified the amendment, women would achieve equality at last. I couldn’t help feeling proud of the women in my family. Great-Grandma Hannah had helped bring about the abolition of slavery. Grandma Bebe had saved America from Demon Rum. And now Mother was close to victory, as well. All three women had worked hard and had accomplished their goals—and my mind spun with all the plans I had for our family’s flourishing department store.

  Two days after my mother’s latest victory for woman suffrage, my father called me upstairs to his office at work. I assumed it was to congratulate me on three straight months of record sales figures in the Home Goods Department. With the surge of engagements and June weddings, I was mailing out letters and handing out free spoons at a record rate. I strode confidently into Father’s office and found him conversing with a tall young man with an army haircut.

  “Harriet, I would like you to meet Robert Morton. He was discharged recently from the army, and I’ve just hired him to manage my Home Goods Department.”

  I think I stopped breathing for a moment. I tried not to panic. I managed to swallow my fear and say, “How nice for you. And which department will I be managing from now on?”

  Father looked confused. “You’re going off to college.”

  “What? No I’m not! I like working here.”

  Father had the good sense to ask Mr. Morton to kindly wait outside. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Now, Harriet, I admit that you’ve done a good job here. But you always knew that your position was only temporary.”

  “No I didn’t—”

  “This is men’s work.”

  “What!”

  “And now that the war is over and the men have returned home, it’s time to give them their jobs back.”

  “But it’s my job, not theirs! I’m the one who created the Home Goods Department in the first place. I’m the one who boosted sales to record numbers by giving away spoons. I don’t want to go to college anymore. I want to keep managing my department, just like I’ve been doing for the past two years.”

  “Mr. Morton has a family to support.”

  “I don’t care! There must be another job in the store you can give him. Or at least give me a different job to do. You hire lots of people, don’t you?”

  “The women who work for me are all salesclerks and typists.

  I’m sure you don’t want one of those jobs.”

  “Why do you keep insisting that there’s such a thing as men’s work and women’s work? Don’t you know that women have done all sorts of ‘men’s jobs’ during the war? There were women car mechanics and telegraph operators and streetcar drivers. Women worked on factory assembly lines and plowed fields and served as traffic cops.”

  “But they aren’t doing those things anymore, Harriet. The soldiers have come home and they need their jobs back.”

  “But those aren’t their jobs anymore!”

  “You can go to college in the fall like you planned. Isn’t that what you wanted to do?”

  “I don’t want to go to college anymore, I want my job back! I want to work in this store—our family’s store. Your father let you join the business years ago, didn’t he? Suppose I was your son instead of your daughter.”

  “That would be different.”

  My pulse rate soared along with my anger. “Why? Why would it be any different?”

  �
��Men have to work to support their families. Women get married and have children.”

  “Not me! I’m never getting married!”

  “It doesn’t matter if you get married or not, Harriet. My mind is made up.”

  I hated myself for it, but I began to cry. I couldn’t help it. “Please, Father. Please let me stay here and work for you. I want to come into the business with you.”

  My tears made him uncomfortable, but they didn’t change his mind. He started leading me toward the door. “I’m sorry, but it just isn’t done. Now, if you were to settle down with a husband someday and he wanted to work for me, I would consider bringing him into the business.”

  There aren’t enough words to describe my outrage.

  I don’t know how long I stood outside his office door and wept. His secretary came over with a handkerchief to console me but wisely refrained from asking me what was wrong. When I finally dried my tears, I went downstairs to say good-bye to the girls in my department. I didn’t see any reason to delay my departure, nor would I stick around and help Mr. Morton learn how to manage the department he had just stolen from me. I gave free spoons to Maude and Claudia, who had both become engaged to returning servicemen. Then I left Sherwood’s Department Store for good.

  It was pouring rain outside, but I was so furious that I didn’t care how wet I got. I walked all the way to Grandma Bebe’s house, remembering how she had walked through a downpour, too, after leaving her job at the tannery—and leaving Neal MacLeod. I knew that she would understand the terrible loss I felt at that moment, if not my rage.

  “Why, you poor thing,” she said when I appeared at her door, shivering. “Where’s your umbrella? Why aren’t you at work?”

  The second question brought more tears. “Father fired me!”

  “Fired you? Why? What happened?”

  “He said that since the servicemen have all returned, he doesn’t need me anymore. It’s so unfair!”

  Grandma Bebe pulled me into her arms and let me cry. Even in my anger and grief I was aware of how frail she had become— and how dear she was to me. When I finished crying, she took me into her kitchen and made tea.