A Flickering Light (22 page)

Jessie overheard her parents, their voices rising through the floor vent into the girls’ room. She’d come up the back stairs to find a ribbon to tie her hair off her neck as they played Pom-Pom Pull Away in their backyard. Roy loved the game, which involved little more than him trying to touch the girls running past him. When they were “caught,” they’d belong to his team. Her hair had jostled loose, and she’d told them she’d be back in a minute.

“She does seem less dreamy eyed,” her mother said, and Jessie assumed she spoke of Selma as she pawed through the hanky drawer for the ribbon. “I was worried if she left Steffes’s job she’d lose heart.” Yes, they must be talking about Selma, but what would she lose heart about, and was Selma thinking of quitting? She hadn’t said anything to Jessie. She kept listening, wondering if they’d talk more about Roy’s trip.

“August’s camera really brought her through,” her father said. “I wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself before that.”

“It’s never easy, such a thing,” her mother agreed. “I’ll be forever grateful to him, finding the perfect diversion. I didn’t want to lose both of them.”

“August was the messenger of our prayers,” her father said.

“Well, it’s nice to see her blooming.”

Jessie sat down on the bed, shaking. She was who she’d always been, and they didn’t know it. She didn’t deserve their prayers.

Jessie handed Mr. B. the mail, putting the brochure on top. “This looks like fun,” she told him. It was August, and Mr. B. made known his plan to attend the National Photographic Association’s congress in St. Paul scheduled for the following month. The brochure listed expected exhibits, classes, and potential contacts. “I’ll bet there are all kinds of interesting classes to take there.”

“One of the necessities of owning a professional studio is attending these events,” he told her. “Tramps don’t need to worry as much about the demands of their clients, who expect impromptu sittings to have their flaws.” He read the material, turned it over in his hand. Jessie went about her work but turned when he said, “You’re too young and inexperienced to gain any benefits.”

The words hit her like a snowball to her heart. She hadn’t been contriving to go. She was an employee, nothing more. She knew that. But he’d responded to her as though she was indirectly asking for something, trying to wrangle him to spend money to send her. Or worse, to take her along with him. Her mother wouldn’t approve of either.

“I…1 know that, Mr. Bauer. I just meant it must be fun to do in addition to—”

“The only playing I allow myself is taking time on my way home to visit my younger sister, Luise, in Wisconsin.”

She’d done something to upset him, but she didn’t know what. Ever since their encounter in the retouching area, he’d been distant with her, had returned to calling her Miss Gaebele. She’d only wanted him to enjoy the congress, but he behaved as though she were a manipulating child.

FJ stared at the flier for the congress. It was best that he crush any of Miss Gaebele’s inappropriate expectations before they took bloom. He was a married man with a family. What had happened in that instant in the retouching room a few months back had occurred without guile of any sort on either part. But young girls had a tendency to fantasize. He’d left a farmer’s employ before joining the army because the man’s daughter had misunderstood his kindness. Women were drawn to those novels that suggested love was the divine ideal and could be found despite the realities of life. He was a faithful husband, and he loved his wife. He did. Jessie, Miss Gaebele, was young and naive. She was quite beguiling with those eyes that seemed to change color from brown to gray as she told of some spirited story. Young. That’s what she was. He was the adult who needed to set the borders, and that he would do.

The Fruit of the River

D
REAMS OF PALE SKIN
and flowers bursting like fireworks filled Jessie’s nights that fall. She often awoke hot, her heart pounding. She’d sink back into her pillows in the predawn darkness and listen to the branches scraping the window or stare at the pressed-tin ceiling, waiting for her heart to slow. The dreams carried longing stitched into a backing of guilt. Yet she’d done nothing wrong. She had let her emotions reach out but had not let them grasp anything firmer than sand.

The night before, she and Lilly lay awake for a time after Selma’s soft breaths began to soothe the night. “You’re so fortunate, Jessie,” Lilly told her in one of her rare reflective moods. “You’re doing what you want and moving toward something good in your life. Why would you risk it all for… a fantasy?”

“I’ve got my slippers on the floor,” she defended. “An instructor who feels at ease with his students teaches better, that’s all.”

Lilly rolled over and put her palm across Jessie’s hands, which were folded on her stomach as she stared at the ceiling, and gripped her fingers tight. “Jessie,” she whispered. “You’re telling yourself stories that only you can believe. If you mess up this chance to have a real life, you’ll disappoint us all.”

Again
.

“Uncle August gave you that camera. You’re so lucky!”

Yet she daydreamed when she ought not to. Maybe she couldn’t accept that she was as special as Uncle August claimed. Maybe she felt guilty being treated differently. “Maybe I don’t deserve a joyful life,” Jessie said. “You remember what happened. Maybe none of us does.”

“That’s not so, Jess. ‘Desire realized is sweet to the soul,’ that’s what the proverb says. Didn’t you memorize that one? Having a desire is a good thing. We shouldn’t counter that just because we have regrets. We’re not supposed to stay locked in fear that we’ll mess up again.”

“We always mess up,” Jessie said.

“Not if our hopes come from the right place and not from our own, well, lusts.”

Jessie felt her face grow hot. “I’m not lusting.” She picked up her sister’s hand and removed it from her. “Go to sleep.”

Even while she protested to Lilly, Jessie wondered if she was lying to herself about the lust. Not about her not deserving joy though. Joy, she knew, was nothing she should claim. She had caused harm those years ago, irrevocable harm, because she’d been tending to her own wishes. To cope, she’d escaped into a photographic garden she shouldn’t have entered. Now she faced the possibility that this good place might become something she could never let go of. Her mouth felt dry as summer sand. She needed a drink of water.

She rose and turned on the gaslight, poured water from the stoneware pitcher into a glass. A moth flitted in through the window. It fluttered at the light.
Foolish thing
. If not for the glass globe, it would burn itself up, yet it flailed at the glass. Why would it do that, destroy itself?

She stared at the moth, disgusted. She’d let Lilly and Voe make more of the relationship with Mr. Bauer than what was there. What they imagined was forbidden. He was a married man, so much older than she was, and she wouldn’t act on her…daydreams. Couldn’t. Not that he was the least bit interested. There were limits there, borders. Her family and her faith must be the globe that kept her from certain fire.

So why do I put at risk what I say I want?
If her parents suspected her affections, she’d be banned from the studio. Her father might even have words with Mr. Bauer, humiliating her further. Maybe she’d end up working for the rest of her life, as Lilly did, at something she could never fall in love with.

Falling in love
. It was safer to fall in love with someone unattainable than to risk letting her heart be known by a Jerome, perhaps, or even by someone she had yet to meet, someone who might truly see into who she was. Thinking of Mr. Bauer, older and kinder like her father, and the gentle way he treated her, maybe that protected her from…something. But why did she resist caring for a young beau? And why would she risk this artistic passion of hers, the dream of a career, by entertaining something forbidden?

She cupped her hand over the moth as it fell exhausted to the carpet. Jessie lifted it to the window and set it outside on the sill, then turned the lamp out. She didn’t want to know if the moth was dead. She imagined the cool of the morning reviving it.

Jessie walked a fast pace to work through the October cool. She’d never tell Lilly, but her sister’s words had brought her daydreams into focus. She had a vocation she enjoyed. Unlike Lilly, who worked in the glove factory, Jessie spent her days feeling full, almost as though it was spring every day. She knew this was rare indeed, especially for a girl who didn’t cotton to conformity. Yet Lilly’s confrontation had spurred her. She’d decided to remove herself from the threat.

At her mother’s insistence, Jessie had memorized scripture. She’d hated the tedium of learning by rote, but her mother insisted she could then draw on encouraging words no matter her circumstances or location. She hated to admit it, but her mother had been right, and now a verse from Ezekiel came unbidden to her as she walked fast-paced along the route to work. “And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.”

Some of her favorite verses had water in them. But this morning, it was trees, and those in front of her caught Jessie’s eye. She watched red and yellow leaves drift to the ground. The bur oaks and red oaks hung on to their treasures the longest. Maybe she was like them, clinging tightly yet knowing they would eventually be torn from their branches. She’d have to rake them all this year since last year the tornado had stripped the trees and she hadn’t needed to keep her commitment to Lilly. Lilly had reminded her of that at supper the night before.

Jessie’s eye went to the sounds of chickens in the backyard pens. They were beginning to molt, and their feathers lay like large snowflakes on the pecked ground, signaling a hard winter. A wind gust picked up and tore at the pale gold leaves of the birch tree, one of the first to turn. Those chalky, peeling trunks always looked so exposed. Her eyes turned toward the sounds in the trees, where a flock of blackbirds gathered, a sign of the coming winter. A sun spot on the lawn highlighted squirrels chattering at their pile of nuts, which they worked over and then rushed off to bury. Jessie smiled. They scurried to their task just as she did.

The verse said to her that there would always be a way to survive, that there would always be provision, though not necessarily as one expected. Like the squirrels, she’d have to scramble. Healing was possible—hadn’t her father been better since they’d moved off the farm? There’d be ways to recover from pain; that’s what the medicinal leaves of the scriptural trees represented. She hoped she could count on such promises even though Roy hadn’t been healed.

Just this past week Roy had told her why he didn’t play with the children in their neighborhood anymore. “Th-th-they m-m-make fun of m-m-me.”

“They tease you?” He’d nodded. She held him, wishing she could take his hurt away. It was she who’d given it to him; she was the one deserving of pain.

“You just tell them they’ll have to deal with me,” she told him. “Tell them your sister is bigger than they are and she’ll set them straight.”

“I—I—I c-c-can’t say all th-th-that.” He burped his famous deep frog sound.

“I know, Frog,” Jessie’d said. She felt the tears come. She blinked them back. “And some of those kids are as big as me, aren’t they? I’ll ask Papa to drive you to school.”

“P-P-Papa does.”

So it wasn’t in the morning the bullies got to him.

“Remember the story of David and Goliath?”

He nodded.

“Well, I don’t want you throwing stones, but I want you to remember that the first thing David did was thank the Lord for his success even before he lifted his stones. You just act like you’re going to walk right through their words, because you will. Let them bounce off you like popped corn.”

He grinned at the image.

“And when you get home, you can tell me about it, okay? I’ll come right home from work. I’ll help you forget those mean old chums.”

“P-p-popped corn w-w-words.” He pretended to pop a kernel into his mouth and burped his frog burp again. She wanted to stay and play with him, but her feet shuffled uneasily beneath the table. Regret stuck in her throat; her glasses were smudged from wiping at her eyes.

She needed to look for healing trees on the bank, for Roy and for herself, expecting they would reappear because the waters flowed from “the sanctuary.” All the creative joy and sustenance and healing flowed from that sanctuary. She had to remember that, find ways to spend more time in that place of refuge instead of in the field of risk.

As strange as it was, the verse spoke to her of photography too, of how her eye and her art could bring healing to others through what they saw in a picture. She could find encouragement in art, put salve on her wounds. But Roy was another matter.

That they hadn’t included her in the family plan to take him to the new clinic in Rochester saddened her. Despite what they said, she knew why she’d been excluded. She was fully capable of contributing, and she would. Her mother had said that Jessie would’ve gotten Roy all excited if she had known. They feared she’d have told Roy, yet it was Lilly who let the peanuts roll out of that bag. No one was certain anything could help his stuttering, and they didn’t want his hopes raised. “Besides,” her mother had said, “it will take some time before the money will be available to make the trip and the stay required for the evaluation.”

So her working for months without pay had been a sacrifice for Roy as well as for her. He hadn’t deserved that.

Once she’d been allowed in on the plan, Jessie insisted on adding to the savings, knowing that her plan to purchase her own Graflex camera could be put on hold. She would do the right thing.

It was also the right thing to quit working for the Bauer Studio and find employment that would allow her to develop her interests on her own too. She felt a little disloyal going to work for another photographer, but another studio would hire her without thinking of her as someone in need of instruction. They might pay her more as a certified photographer. She could hold her own, she felt, in all aspects. She could have gone to that photographic congress if she’d had the money, if she’d wanted to, though her mother might have intervened. She still had things to learn, she knew. She would have to learn by trial and error, by reading the photographic magazines, and without Mr. B. leaning over her. Yes, getting out, that’s what her dreams had taught her.

Or perhaps it was that moth that had warned her.

As she approached the studio, her stomach tightened and she took a deep breath. After the incident in the retouching room, some of the easy comfort she’d felt with him had vanished. She nearly always felt mixed up, sometimes wanting Voe to be with her whenever Mr. B. was around and sometimes wishing Voe would be sent to the train station to pick up more dry plates and chemicals so Jessie would have time with him alone.

That was the troubling thought that Lilly’s warning highlighted. These things probably happened at other establishments where people spent more time with fellow workers than with their own family members. But she’d been around her father’s friends, knew some of the church elders, and they were fine, upright men too; her heart never pounded so when they were around.

She’d never been aware of any feelings for any of the young men at the Youth Alliance who went on the sleigh rides and certainly not for Voe’s brother, Jerome. The only feelings she had for him were like those that cropped up with spiders in the root cellar: they came with the territory, but she didn’t have to like them.

She needed to get on that river and float away, not just because of thoughts about Mr. Bauer but because of opinions about his wife as well. She thought Mrs. Bauer ought to be more helpful to her husband’s work. She could have done the retouching as she had before, and Jessie never would have had the opportunity to spend so much time alone in the retouching room with Mr. B. Mrs. Bauer rarely came by the studio. She didn’t honor the hard work he was doing to support his family. Mr. B. brought the children more frequently than he had before, and while Jessie loved having them around, it couldn’t have been easy for him. He’d said once when she ventured to comment on how often Winnie was coming by that “Mrs. Bauer has been ill of late.” Yet she saw in the paper that she was busy being social, planning events for good causes, yes, but nevertheless away from her family. Wasn’t a wife’s first duty to her husband and children? When Mr. B. came in looking more tired than usual, a part of Jessie wanted to just prop him up, make tea for him, and look after him the way her mother did her father.