Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  On that fateful Wednesday, Agnes and her best friend, Marjorie, joined eight other girls and ten young men from Warrington Prep at a group of row houses in one of Philadelphia’s most impoverished neighborhoods to do yard work, make repairs, and prepare the homes for the coming winter. Agnes and Marjorie cleaned the home of an elderly couple and their son, a marine veteran of the Great War who had lost both legs in the battle of the Belleau Wood, while two young men cut down a dead oak in the back yard, repaired a broken fence, and hauled trash from the house to the curb. The girls, watchful for any signs that their plans had been leaked, observed the young men as they worked and concluded that their rough clothes and industriousness marked them as laborers hired by lazy, indifferent Warrington men.

  “What a shame,” Marjorie whispered as the two young men passed, hauling a broken armchair down from the attic and outside to the curb. “I’d like to dance with the sandy-haired one.”

  Agnes agreed it was a pity, though she preferred the blond with the green eyes and ready smile. He seemed to be enjoying himself as he worked, and while he was friendly to Agnes and Marjorie, he was equally attentive to the elderly residents and their son. He admired the man’s war medals proudly displayed on the mantel—Agnes had not even noticed them—and mentioned that his father had served in France and two uncles had perished there. After that, the veteran joined the younger men outside and talked with them about his experiences while they tore out broken fence posts and hammered new boards in place.

  “No one ever remembers my son’s service to this country except on Memorial Day,” the elderly woman said, tearing up. “I haven’t seen him so happy in months. Your friends are kind to listen to his war stories.”

  Agnes did not correct the woman’s mistake, for she wished the hardworking young men were their friends. They were worth a dozen Warrington men who cleared their consciences with cash payments and never looked the less fortunate in the eye or listened to their stories. And they were supposed to be the future leaders of business and government! How could they understand the plight of the working man when all they knew were wealthy sons of privilege like themselves? It was unfair that the two young men outside would never have the opportunities that the students who had hired them took for granted. Her grandfather made ringing speeches about the equality of all Americans and how every man had a chance to better himself, but even Agnes knew that the wealthy students of Warrington enjoyed a head start that mere hard work could rarely overtake.

  It wasn’t fair.

  At noon the young people took a break from their labors and ate sack lunches on the front stoop, bundled in coats against the autumn chill. They talked and chatted, and Marjorie flirted with the shy one named Andrew. “I hear your father was in the service,” Agnes said to Richard. She had never really conversed with a day laborer before and she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  Richard grinned. “You heard that, did you?”

  Agnes rushed ahead, embarrassed. “I overheard a little. My father says that the army is a good place for a young man with ambition. You can learn a trade and get ahead in life, and everyone’s so sick of war that you needn’t fear being sent to fight.”

  “Eventually folks always forget that they’re sick of war,” said Richard, unwrapping a second sandwich.

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Agnes. “But for a man of limited options, it’s something to consider, don’t you agree?”

  “I’ve considered it myself,” said Richard. “But I’ll probably end up working for the family business.”

  “Of course,” said Agnes apologetically. It was probably difficult for Richard to imagine doing anything but what his father and grandfather before him had done. To call day labor a family business seemed a bit much, though. Perhaps she had damaged his pride.

  “I wouldn’t mind working for your family business,” Andrew spoke up. “Ever consider hiring outside of the family?”

  “I think we could make an exception for you,” Richard said, grinning.

  Their joking manner warned Agnes that she had spoken imprudently. After lunch, she held Richard back and waved Marjorie to go ahead without her. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to sound so patronizing.”

  Richard’s easy smile warmed her. “Think nothing of it.”

  “But I still think you could do anything you put your mind to.”

  He knit his brows in puzzled amusement. “You’ve only known me for a few hours.”

  “But I know you.” Impulsively she reached for his hand. “I want you to know that the young men who hired you aren’t going to take credit for your labors anymore. There’s a social tonight, but they won’t be having any fun at it. If there was any justice in the world, you and Andrew could come to the dance in their place, too.”

  For a moment Richard merely stared at her, but she could tell that he was carefully mulling over what she had said. “So…you girls have something planned for the Warrington fellows, is that right?”

  She felt her cheeks flush, both from the touch of his hand upon hers and from her embarrassment at so impulsively divulging the secret she had made others vow to keep. “Yes, but please don’t ask me to say anything more.”

  “I guess you’re going to make them sorry they didn’t do their own community service.”

  “I don’t mean that they shouldn’t have hired you.” She was making things worse and worse! “I’m sure you appreciated the wages, but don’t you think you’d be better off in the long run if the future leaders of business and government understood the great need in this community?”

  “Yes,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s why they should be here.” A strange warmth seemed to travel from his hand to hers, and Agnes could not let go of it. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but next year, those Warrington men won’t shirk their duty.”

  “Not all of them do.”

  “I know that.” Two of her brothers were picking up trash at a public park on the Delaware at that very moment. “But some of them need to learn a lesson.”

  “Agnes—” He glanced across the yard to where Marjorie was watching Andrew hammer nails. “You haven’t asked me not to tell anyone, but I promise I won’t. Okay? You have my word.”

  He released her hand and joined Andrew by the fence. Strangely unsettled, Agnes hurried back inside to her work and tried to regain her composure before Marjorie returned inside. They finished their work before Andrew and Richard did, but that gave them little time for anything more than a quick farewell before they had to hurry back to school to prepare for the social. Agnes wished she were bold enough to ask for Richard’s address. Perhaps her father could have done something for him, found him steady work, anything. But Richard might have looked upon that as a handout, and she could not bear to insult him—even if it meant losing her last chance to see him again.

  Back at Miss Sebastian’s, after transforming the dining hall into a festive ballroom, Agnes and her coconspirators hastened to compile a list of which young men had performed their own community service and which had simply enjoyed a day off of school. The names of the “workers” fit on one side of a single sheet, while the “shirkers” took up three whole sheets. They distributed the lists to the other young ladies with emphatic reminders that they must all hold the line, and only then did they race off to the dressing rooms backstage of the school theater to freshen up and dress for the dance.

  Because of the last-minute details, the social had already begun by the time Agnes and Marjorie raced back, breathless and excited. Students and faculty from both schools were mingling and enjoying refreshments, and it seemed so like the previous year’s gathering that Agnes’s courage faltered for a moment. All it would take for her plan to fail was for one girl to give in to infatuation or pity and accept a shirker’s invitation to dance.

  Her plan had to succeed. It must.

  The directors of both schools came to the podium to commend the s
tudents on their hard work that day—Agnes was heartened by the indignant frowns that appeared on many girls’ faces—and speeches of thanks from charity directors followed. After a long round of applause that not all of them had earned, everyone awaited the first notes of music from the bandstand.

  Faculty members and their spouses took to the floor first, and then one by one, young men summoned their courage and asked young ladies to dance. Agnes held her breath as a young couple stepped out onto the dance floor, then exhaled in relief as she recognized her eldest brother with the prettiest girl in Miss Sebastian’s senior class. A few others followed, all of whom were on the “workers” list. Then, right beside her, a handsome “shirker” asked one of the most popular girls at Miss Sebastian’s if she would care to dance. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and she looked as if she meant it. “Since it’s the Service Day Social, I’m only dancing with young men who did their share of the work today.”

  Agnes was to hear many versions of this refrain echoed around the room as young ladies—often sweetly, sometimes sternly, occasionally with great regret—demurred when invited onto the dance floor. Certain young men were never without a partner and, as if the rules of popularity had been entirely discarded, some of the handsomest, wealthiest young men were relegated to glowering on the sidelines while scholarship students and chess club champions enjoyed the attention of one charming girl after another. Agnes was so preoccupied with maintaining the resistance that she forgot she had come to dance, too, until a touch on her elbow reminded her.

  She turned around, preparing herself to let a shirker down gently, only to find Richard smiling at her.

  “How did you get in?” she exclaimed, but then she noticed his fine suit and polished shoes and realized she had made a dreadful mistake.

  He frowned thoughtfully and patted his pockets. “Sorry, I must have lost my ticket stub.”

  Agnes sank into the nearest chair. “You’re a Warrington student.”

  “You said you’d dance with me if I came,” he reminded her. “I intend to hold you to that.”

  Wordlessly she nodded, and as he held her in his arms on the dance floor, she wanted to rejoice and she wanted to die of embarrassment. She was furious that he had let her believe that he was a hired worker, and mortified that she had leaped to conclusions based upon his attire and his facility with a hammer. Of course he had worn work clothes to service day; so had she! And not all Warrington men were afraid to get their hands dirty. In her own way, she was as much of a snob as the students who had bought their way out of service.

  Next year, she was certain, there would be very few of those.

  The girls held fast, and the young men learned that the way to a Miss Sebastian’s girls’ heart was to show compassion for the less fortunate. Or at the very least, the less empathetic young men realized that they had to tolerate a bit of work first if they wanted to enjoy the dance later. Perhaps many of the young people from both schools would never pick up trash or wield a ladle in a soup kitchen on any other occasion, but Agnes hoped that some of the lessons Miss Sebastian intended the day of service to teach would linger with the students and inform the choices they made later in life.

  True to his word, Richard never divulged that Agnes had organized the dancing strike, even when some Warrington men tried to organize their own counterstrike wherein they would shun the ringleaders at all school mixers thereafter. “I almost gave up your name when I heard that,” Richard teased Agnes when they met for lunch a week later. “I wouldn’t mind having you all to myself.”

  Agnes was too modest to tell him he needn’t worry about competition from any other young man, but she was sure he knew.

  Richard fascinated her. She knew from the first day they met that he was nothing like the young men her parents considered suitable, the boys she met at dancing school or the endless society functions her parents forced her to attend. He had a careless roughness refreshingly free of all the practiced mannerisms and studied indifference of the sons of her parents’ friends. Over time she learned that although Richard had been raised in the countryside, he was near the top of his class, admired by even the most sophisticated and urbane of his fellow students, and a natural leader. She assumed her parents would adore him as much as she did, especially since he embodied so many of the values extolled by her mother’s father, the wealthy but populist senator. But when she told her parents about Richard, they heard only that he was the son of a horse farmer, of all things, probably on scholarship, with no family connections that mattered. They forbade her to see him, but she was in love and she was not under her parents’ constant scrutiny. Agnes and Richard met at cafés and school functions, and her parents were none the wiser.

  Then war came. To prove his patriotism in the face of anti-German sentiment, Richard left Warrington to enlist, and emboldened by his actions, Andrew did, too. Richard proposed, as so many young men did before they went off to fight, but Agnes was too young to marry without her parents’ consent. She spoke to her mother first, and won her consent only after she vowed to become Richard’s lover rather than wife if they forbade the marriage.

  Her father was even more furious and resistant than her mother had been. “If you marry that man,” he roared, “you leave this house forever. You will be dead to us!”

  His words shocked her into silence. She could only stare at him, the man she had always admired and loved so deeply. He thought she had betrayed him, that she would willfully destroy the Chevalier family’s good name. She knew he was wrong, but she had no time to waste, no time for him to come to know Richard, to accept him. Her darling Richard might not return from the war. She might have only those two weeks with him before he reported to basic training, two weeks in exchange for a lifetime with her family.

  She was her father’s favorite daughter, and yet he could cut her out of his life with a word.

  “I will miss you all very much,” she told him, her heart breaking. Then she hurried off to tell Richard she would be his wife.

  They had a simple civil ceremony, with Andrew and Marjorie serving as witnesses. Agnes had wanted her brothers and sisters present, but she could not ask them to defy their parents and share her banishment. Later that day, Richard’s brother-in-law, James, and Richard’s eldest sister’s beau, Harold, arrived, having learned too late of Richard and Andrew’s plans. James decided to enlist so that he would be in the same unit as his brother-in-law, and Harold did as well.

  Agnes was not comforted by the knowledge that James and Harold would be looking after Richard on the battlefield. Their selflessness and courage would not stop a bullet. They should have tried to free Richard from his enlistment, not join him in it. It was utter madness, and she alone seemed able to see it.

  They returned to Elm Creek Manor together, for a few bleak days of grievous good-byes. The men’s last days before they were due to report for basic training flew by swiftly. Harold asked Richard’s eldest sister, Claudia, to marry him, and she accepted, but they did not rush off and marry as Agnes and Richard had done, as so many other young couples had done. Agnes marveled at their certainty that they would be granted the chance, later, to have a proper wedding celebration. She wished she shared their confidence, and she hid her fear as best she could. She could not bear to send Richard off to war believing anything but that he would return, safe and sound, to raise a family with her, to grow old with her. Believing anything else might bring the worst down upon them.

  All too soon, the men departed. Agnes settled into a strange new life, a bride without an adoring husband by her side, disowned by her family, an unwelcome stranger in an unfamiliar home, caught between two bickering sisters, all of them fearing for the men they loved. In time she won over all of the Bergstroms except Sylvia, who was jealous that Agnes had captured her beloved baby brother’s heart. Sylvia had concluded early on that Agnes was a flighty, spoiled, pampered child, and nothing Agnes said or did could persuade her otherwise. Agnes resolved to win over her reluctant sister-in-
law with time and patience, for Richard’s sake.

  Knowing how proud Sylvia was of her quilts, Agnes asked for lessons, thinking that a shared interest might draw them together and that quilting would help distract her during the lonely weeks between letters from the men. Flattered, Sylvia agreed and suggested that Agnes choose a simple pattern or a sampler as her first project. As Agnes paged through patterns, selecting a variety of blocks she thought she could manage with Sylvia’s guidance, Claudia took her aside and told her she would master the skills more quickly and thoroughly if she chose a more challenging pattern. With no reason to question the advice of the sister who actually liked her, Agnes chose to make a Double Wedding Ring quilt, for the name seemed to promise that she and Richard would have many happy years together. Sylvia tried to convince her to stick to the sampler, a suggestion Agnes later wished she had followed. The bias edges and curved seams of the Double Wedding Ring proved too difficult for her inexpert stitches, and her first half ring buckled in the middle and gapped in the seams. She might have done better on a second attempt, but before she could cut another piece or sew another seam of her wedding quilt, the news came that Richard and James had been killed, victims of friendly fire in the South Pacific. In shock and grief, Sylvia lost James’s unborn child and kindly Mr. Bergstrom was felled by a stroke.

  So much loss, so much pain, so much grieving. Agnes would not have survived it except for Claudia, who forced her to keep going, who gave her work to do caring for Sylvia as she recovered. Gradually Sylvia grew stronger, but she was never the same. None of them could be, but Sylvia had lost a child. In compassion for her, Agnes found the strength to keep going.

  If only she could return to Philadelphia, resume her studies at Miss Sebastian’s Academy—but she had closed the door to that life, and at Elm Creek Manor she must remain.

  The war ended. Harold came home, and Claudia threw herself into preparing for their wedding as if to deny all the loss, all the suffering the family had endured. She expected Sylvia to help, but Sylvia seemed unable to summon any interest and had difficulty remembering the tasks Claudia assigned to her. Exasperated, Claudia turned to Agnes, and in a futile attempt to keep peace between the sisters, Agnes took over Sylvia’s duties, thinking to relieve her of an unwanted burden.