Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  “No, that’s it.” I needed to preserve my meager funds, especially with Christmas coming. No matter how I scrimped, I’d never be able to compete with the extravagance of Nora’s gift giving—a car, the house we’d live in together someday. Still, I couldn’t show up emptyhanded on Christmas.

  Down the counter was a disorganized pile of newspapers, and I pulled them closer. The feel of the newsprint gave me the old tingle. Was there anything more marvelous than ink-soaked paper, still smelling of the oiled machine parts and the mill’s bleach, the heft of labor present in its perfect creases? I scanned the headlines. Ambassador Bullitt had dined in Moscow, where Stalin greeted him with a kiss on the mouth. Hitler had placed all the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Germany under government control: a worrisome development, to say the least. A headline on A2 caught my eye: BUDGET OVERRUNS DOG FIRST LADY’S PET PROJECT.

  I groaned so loudly that I saw the cook glance up at me from behind the window to the kitchen. Another of the kind of headlines John Bosco and I had lived for back at the AP. It was our habit to promise extra booze to the copyeditor who could come up with the best—or worst, depending on your point of view—pun and get it past the managing editor. These headlines alone made it worth saving the free press from the humorlessness of totalitarianism.

  I realized as I read that this was the article Nora had been talking about on the phone:

  First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is confronting strong opposition to some details of her subsistence homestead project in rural West Virginia, called Arthurdale, that will resettle hundreds of impoverished citizens. Construction errors have cost the government time and money, and while there is widespread support for government-sponsored housing assistance, conservative lawmakers deride what they call extravagant amenities in the newly constructed homes, including central steam heat, indoor plumbing, and even refrigerators.

  “Will coal miners use a bathtub for any other purpose but to store their coal?” one Connecticut congressman has asked. Mrs. Roosevelt, he said, is using humanitarianism as a cover for her real agenda—Communism.

  Discord over Arthurdale has permeated even the highest office administering the programs of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Department of the Interior. One official, who asked for anonymity because he fears retribution, expressed his concerns over the project’s cost overruns. “The first lady and her friends are spending money like drunken sailors.” Those close to Secretary Harold Ickes say he is “reassessing” the budget.

  For now, at least, the Arthurdale project continues to have the president’s full support. But this year’s White House Christmas dinner is sure to be a tense one.

  Poor Nora, I thought. No good deed goes unpunished. The reporter had failed to include any detail about what the people of Scotts Run would be up against without the first lady’s intervention: another winter spent shivering in their tents. More illness and death, more despair that the promise of America had turned out to be a lot of horseshit. How much longer did these lawmakers think people would endure this way of life before they rose up to demand a decent existence? Nora was working to prevent a revolution.

  I pulled my map from my purse and unfolded it on the counter. I had two days of driving left, and on the second day my route would take me across the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, not fifty miles north of Arthurdale. I wanted to see it for myself.

  It was a cold morning, and my tires made two black stripes through the frost as I pulled onto Route 7. The dense forest east of the Monongahela darkened the road even though the branches were bare, and, with each sharp turn and blind hill, I braced myself to dodge the deer that were just waiting to leap into my path. In Reedsville, I turned south on the country lane that led to the Arthur estate. This time there were no crickets leaping out of the grass, no danger of the car overheating. But I could still see Nora and me, where we had stood beside this empty field in the blazing August sun. She’d had the broad vision to imagine an entire town. All I could think about was Ruth.

  The old Arthur mansion sat atop the fallow straw-yellow hill like a Victorian outpost on the moon. It had once been grand, built with the profits of the mines back before the war, when coal was easy to get and in high demand, but the decades had taken their toll on the grandeur. The soaring turrets sagged and the dormered windows were rimmed with chipped paint.

  At the bottom of the hill, spreading away from the road, I could see homes in various states of construction and men moving among the stacks of lumber. Each one wore leather work gloves and a wool cap, which I knew Nora had likely chosen herself. Everything would have had to be purchased for them—each hammer, every last nail. The government had hired well diggers, technicians who could design roads, an architect too. “Extravagant,” the newspaper had called these costs, but what did they expect when Nora was attempting nothing short of building an entire town from scratch, practically overnight?

  I parked Bluette behind a few other cars, one of which I recognized as Clarence Pickett’s, and climbed the half-rotted steps to the mansion’s enormous double doors. Just as I lifted my hand to ring the bell, a woman’s face appeared in the glass and she opened the door.

  “Hello,” she said. She wore a man’s wool cardigan over a cotton dress, and a line of children stood behind her.

  “Hello.” I extended my hand. “My name is Lorena Hickok. I work for the—”

  “—for the government?” She smiled and I saw that I was likely the fifty-first such official to pass through here this week. “Come on in.”

  The children stood behind her waiting to resume their parade. Some of them held paper, string, and fabric; one little girl had a bowl of popped corn and a spool of thread. I glanced ahead of them into the parlor where a grand blue spruce about eight feet tall stood in the corner.

  “Mrs. Roosevelt had it sent,” the woman supplied. “It’s too much, really.” I could imagine that the growing scrutiny of the endeavor to build this town made the residents feel they had to justify or denounce each expense.

  “It’s gorgeous,” I said.

  “It’s the first one most of these children have ever had. Are you looking for Mr. Pickett?”

  When I nodded, she pointed me back down the way I had come, toward the kitchen. I waved goodbye to the children—all of them were wearing new shoes, I noticed—and walked back through the entryway, where cut paper snowflakes hung on red thread from the tarnished brass chandelier. They undulated in the drafty space and filtered triangles of yellow light. I couldn’t help myself: I untied one of the red bows and slipped the snowflake into my pocket for Nora. Here was something I could give her for Christmas.

  Passing through the dining room, I saw a handful of older students sitting around a long table copying a list of words written on a blackboard on wheels: surface, cauliflower, applause. A cacophony of chatter and clanking pans filled the kitchen as the preparations for lunch unfolded. Two women faced off beside the sink with their arms crossed, Clarence standing between them. One looked to be about seventeen, her brown hair pulled back in a thick braid down her back. The other could have been her mother, except they looked nothing alike. The older woman was as pale as a worm, with red-gray hair and nearly transparent eyebrows.

  “Now, gentlewomen, I know we can come to an agreement.” Clarence spoke with the same steady patience that I remembered from my first visit. I smiled at this use of such a mannerly term and could see both gals in question trying hard not to roll their eyes.

  “Mr. Pickett, I’d rather be back in my tent than do one more week’s laundry in this loony bin. It ain’t right.”

  “Now, you don’t mean that, Mrs. McNamara. Your tent had no running water and hardly any food. We all have to divide up the work here. That’s part of communal living. Each one does his or her share.”

  “Well, all’s I’m saying is some’s doing their part and more, and some’s sitting around reading the first lady’s magazines. For example,” she said, narrowing her eyes at her foe.

  �
��Oh, you’re just jealous cause you can’t read, you old cow.”

  Clarence closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they were as placid as a summer pond. “This is a hard time for all of us, but remember that this arrangement is temporary. Soon, you’ll all be in your own houses, with your own land. A little space is going to do us all some good. Besides,” he said, “when you hold it up against what the Lord sacrificed for us, laundry and cooking and tolerating each other isn’t so awfully hard a thing to bear, is it?”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Clarence invoke religion, and I knew it had to mean he had reached the end of his tether.

  “Well, the way I learnt religion,” Mrs. McNamara said, “is each wife is supposed to minister unto her own husband’s underwear and nobody else’s. Half of these men don’t even know how to wipe their behinds properly.”

  “Hi, Clarence,” I said.

  He looked up at me like I’d saved him from a couple of nails through his own palms. “Miss Hickok! What a wonderful surprise!”

  The women turned and gaped at me.

  “Miss Hickok, allow me to introduce Mrs. McNamara and Mrs. Kilch, two members of our new Arthurdale family. Ladies, please meet Lorena Hickok. She is a field agent—”

  “Let me guess—another official here to watch us like we’re animals in a zoo,” Mrs. McNamara griped as she turned to the pot in the sink and leaned over to scrub the bottom of it.

  “Are you gonna take our picture?” Mrs. Kilch asked.

  I shook my head. “Actually, I’m here to visit Ruth Johnson. Is she upstairs?”

  The women exchanged a glance and then looked at Clarence. He put his hand under my elbow. “Yes, she is. I’ll show you the way.”

  We walked toward the foyer, where a grand staircase curved to the second floor. At the bottom of the stairs, a sign with the letters lh hung on the wall.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Ladies’ Housing,” Clarence said. “Just a reminder to the gentlemen to use the staircase that leads to the rooms on the other side of the second floor. It’s not ideal for married couples, but for now we’re trying to keep the peace and separate quarters seems to help.”

  Our footsteps echoed in the oak stairwell. A wide, pale stripe ran down the center of the staircase where a lavish oriental rug had once made climbing the steps a quieter endeavor. It was gone now; gone too were the oversize pictures that had hung on the stairwell walls, leaving behind only nail holes and isosceles triangles of grime. I tried to imagine what the pictures had depicted—symbols of wealth or the ghosts of wealth past, surely. Probably show horses, hunting dogs, a brood of children in sailor suits and Sunday dresses clustered around Grandfather Arthur in his carved armchair. The pictures had all been sold, no doubt, and now hung anonymously in some hotel.

  Once we were out of earshot of the women, I said, “Well, besides those two killjoys, everybody around here seems to be doing pretty well.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, contemplative Clarence. He stooped to pick up a doll that had been abandoned on the landing halfway up the stairs. She had a hand-sewn cloth face and hair made of brown yarn, and he slipped her into his jacket pocket with her pale feet sticking out over the flap. “It’s true that everyone is warmer now and better fed,” he said, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. “And that certainly is an improvement.”

  “I saw the men working on the houses outside. They’re reworking the pieces to fit properly this time?” I glanced out the picture window, clouded with steam from the radiator, that faced the yard behind the mansion.

  “Mm-hmm,” he murmured with a single nod. “It sounds like you had an awful lot of trouble with the last ones.

  If only they’d listened to Mrs. Roosevelt in the first place.” And along with the people of Arthurdale, Nora was the one paying for that mistake now, not the men who had failed to heed her good advice. “I saw the tree,” I said. “The children’s decorations.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Clarence said again.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Well, Miss Hickok, it has me worried.”

  “The tree?”

  “All of it.”

  “Clarence,” I sighed. “Could you please say plainly what you mean? I’m on my way to Washington this evening. If there’s something you need me to pass on, some information, I can get it through to the right people. I can get it through to Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  He pressed his lips together in thought. I glanced nervously at the closed bedroom doors on the second floor that I could see from the landing. Ruth was inside one of them.

  Finally, Clarence answered. “I believe that Mrs. Roosevelt’s intentions are entirely good. And that she means to see this thing through to the bitter end. But the United States government is not made up of Eleanor Roosevelt alone. Would that it were! The problem is that these people’s hopes have been raised. I’ve always told them that things could be different for them, that I would do everything in my power to improve their lives. They know they can count on me, because I’ve turned up faithfully …”

  “Of course you have,” I said and touched his arm.

  But Clarence bristled. “Let me finish. I’ve turned up, year after year, with my trunk full of clean linens and warm socks and canned food. And they know why I do this—because Christ has called me to it. That kind of thing makes sense to them—they can trust it. It’s not personal, if you see what I mean. It’s not about me in particular, and it’s not about them in particular. It’s about living life in a certain way. Do you understand?”

  I winced. I wanted to. “Not really, but I’m trying.”

  He shifted his weight and relaxed his shoulders, bringing his hands together. “In all the years I’ve been coming to Scotts Run, I have never said to anyone that someday he would have a house that didn’t flap in the wind, because I myself had no money to build that house. Of course, privately, I hoped and prayed that the homes would come. But I’ve been careful about promises because of what I said before about these folks trusting me. I have to honor that trust. I can’t be careless with it.”

  “Ah,” I said, beginning to understand. “And suddenly they’ve been promised the moon.”

  “Which would be fine,” he said, “provided that the one making the promises was the moon’s rightful owner.”

  “I see your point,” I said. Clarence had read the wire story in the newspaper this morning too, I thought, and felt the same rumble of dread that I had. But I had the benefit of knowing that Secretary Ickes was no match for Nora. “Don’t forget, Clarence—this project has the president’s support. And I wouldn’t underestimate Mrs. Roosevelt. Once she sets her mind to something, you can bet she will make it happen.” I thought of the threadbare elbows of Nora’s dresses, the reams and reams of paper that flew beneath her pen when she went on a tear about something. To love her was to love the whole world more, and better—to want to be a part of the effort to save it. How I missed being near her.

  “Yes, but, you see, she can’t simply will these things—the school and the roads and the clinic—into being. She’s got to convince these other folks in Congress to approve the funding. They’ve made Arthurdale into a symbol, though what it symbolizes depends on where you’re standing.”

  “If you think it could work, that makes you a socialist,” I said with a wry smile.

  Clarence nodded. “And if you’re the type who doesn’t like the government in general, doesn’t like paying your taxes, then Arthurdale can’t be allowed to succeed. Because where would that leave one’s beloved capitalism? It’s not about the people from the mining camps anymore. They’re a case study now. And if Mrs. Roosevelt can’t change lawmakers’ minds, what am I going to tell these folks? ‘Sorry, go back to your tents’?”

  I thought of the poor-quality houses Louis had tried to push through, the delays and uncertainties around the project’s completion. “If this isn’t done right, it will fail,” I said, echoing Nora’s words from our meet
ing in the White House with Louis and the president.

  “Mm-hmm,” Clarence said once more. “Which may be exactly what a lot of people want.”

  At the second floor, we made our way down the long, narrow hallway. The house had at least ten bedrooms, and each doorway was adorned with carved oak trim and cast iron hinges that looked to weigh about ten pounds each. The floors were bare up here too and they creaked; from inside the bedrooms, snippets of conversation, drawers opening and closing, pipes and radiators clanking echoed around us. Clarence stopped at the last door on the right. “Here you are. She’ll be surprised to see you, I think.”

  He turned to go. “Clarence,” I said, and he looked back at me. “It’s not going to fail. She won’t let it.”

  He gave me a dim smile and started down the hall. Over his shoulder he said, “Well, either way, I’ll be here.”

  I smiled back. “I have no doubt of that.”

  “Come in,” Ruth said when I knocked on her door. She was sitting on the bed, half lying down, really, like a fallen mountain climber pinned by the boulder that was her enormous belly. I had only seen her the one time back in the summer, but I remembered her face, the weathered skin that made her look far older than her years. Her limp hair was caught up in combs above her ears; she had deep creases around her eyes.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Johnson,” I said, keeping to the doorway. “I’m Lorena Hickok. Do you remember me?”

  She clapped her hand to her chest in surprise, as she tried to wriggle upright. She reached to smooth down a skirt she could barely see. “Oh Lord. Of course I do. I had no idea you were coming.”

  “Well, here I am,” I said, with a little trepidation. “I hope it’s okay that I came. I wanted to see how you and your family are doing.” I stepped over to the bedside and offered my hand to help her sit up. “You look like you are about to burst, my dear.”

  She moved closer to the headboard and rested her back against it. “I wish I could say it’s going to be any day now, but I think I have at least a week or so. And I swear I don’t usually lie down in the middle of the day like this. It’s just … they have the children occupied downstairs at the moment, and I was feeling so tired.”