A Flickering Light (4 page)

Mr. Steffes had a gash on his head as wide as Jessie’s eyeglass lens, which she pushed back on her nose as she bent to him, perspiration working against her. “Mr. Steffes, what’s happened? Please wake up, please!” Her heart pounded and her hands fluttered over him, wondering where to touch him to offer help. His eyes were closed, and she looked around for a clean rag to wipe his forehead of the blood, keep it from settling in the pool of his eyes. Head wounds bled fiercely. Her father had fallen once and struck his head. But though a bucket of blood had spilled around him, making them all rush and worry, there’d only been a tiny gash when the bleeding stopped. She wouldn’t assume the worst.

No clean rags anywhere. She lifted her skirt and with her teeth tore a section from her white petticoat, then pressed the cloth against his head, wiping gently but hoping to keep his eyes clear. She rolled him to his side because that had seemed to help with her father’s pain. She wished he’d moan again or say something, anything. She’d have to leave him to go get help. The other businesses wouldn’t be open yet, but she could ride the bicycle to the hospital and tell them that Mr. Steffes had fallen. Jessie could let them rush to him while she rode off to finish her task.

Abandon him? She’d never do that.

She looked through the dirty window. There was still the right light, the dawn just now opening its eyes over the city. That moment between the darkness and when morning pulled itself up into the face of the sky made for the finest exposures.

She looked at Mr. Steffes and silenced the dawn of her desire. There’d be no photography this morning. Lake Winona would shake itself of night without her setting up her camera to capture the flames flickering and dancing their way up the slopes to Bluffside Park, burning out in a puff of snowmelt at the top. There’d be another day. Next year, she supposed. The annual bluff burn was nearly finished. She took a deep breath. She knew the right thing to do here, and she would do it.

She scanned the room, looking for some way to put pressure on the wound, to halt the bleeding while she went for help. She already had blood on her white shirtwaist sleeves, but that didn’t matter. She stood up, hands on her narrow waist, thinking. She felt her belt. She removed it, lifted his head, hooked the buckle over the cloth, and buckled it. It would have to do. She pushed against her knees, stood, rushed toward the door.

A groan and then, “Miss…Gaebele?”

She turned back. “Oh, Mr. Steffes, I’m so glad you’re awake. You’ve hit your head.”

“Someone hit it for me,” he said. He pushed to get himself to sitting, wobbled. She offered assistance. He reached to feel his face, then felt the cloth against his head, fingered the beads on the buckle.

“I didn’t see anyone here,” Jessie said. “Nor see anyone leave. I think…that is, I think you fell.”

“The floor tripped me up?” he questioned. He tried to turn his head and moaned again. “There’re the culprits,” he said. He pointed to an anvil that he must have stumbled over and the sharp corner of a bench that had broken his fall. “Them’s what did it.” He nodded toward the bench, an act that caused him to gasp again. “Came up behind me, I’d say.” He tried to smile at her then.

“Are you well enough for me to leave you to go get help?”

He started to nod, stopped himself. “Take the bicycle—oh, you needed it this morning.” He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. “I’ve ruined your adventure. I have no phone. Your mother, your clothes, all spackled with blood. What will she say?”

His words dipped and dived, flying like bats.

“Oh, she’ll find words,” Jessie told him as she straightened her hat. “Don’t you worry about that. Just sit still now, promise?”

She hated to leave him, but she had to. She noted the camera bag where she’d set it when she made her way through the cluttered shop, then stepped onto the bicycle, wishing she had a pair of those special women’s trousers lady bicyclists in the magazines wore, and pedaled off.

The doctor’s residence was closer than the hospital, so she went there and told him what had happened. He said he’d join her shortly as he pulled his breakfast napkin from beneath his chin. Jessie returned, riding over the boarded streetcar tracks, raced in to Mr. Steffes, then kept up a steady stream of conversation with the shop owner, one of his eyes seeming to float away from the center. He looked like he might doze. She buttressed him with pillows from his narrow cot, kept him sitting upright. His Thomas clock struck nine just as the doctor arrived. She waited for instructions, but when none came, she accepted the belt the doctor handed her as she told him what she knew and described what ministrations she’d performed.

The doctor told her she’d done the right things, handling the “blood without fainting,” as she backed her way toward the door. But Mr. Steffes kept saying how grateful he was and how fortunate that she had been coming so early and how he might not have lived without her, a fact he exaggerated. Jessie figured he’d later realize that he wouldn’t have been there so early nor stumbled in the dim light if she hadn’t wanted to rent the bicycle at that hour. She waited for what she thought to be a proper time, then asked if it would be all right if she left. It wasn’t just the appointment edging her toward the door; it was the accident and her part in it.

“Do you want me to call your parents?” the doctor asked. “About the blood on your blouse?”

She looked down. “No, that’s all right.”

“You run along then, Miss Gaebele,” the doctor said.

“Do what the doctor tells you,” she told the bicycle shop owner. And with that she reached for her shawl, pushed up her spectacles, grabbed her camera bag, and backed out the door.

The sun felt warm now, and the big clock on the courthouse clanged the three-quarter hour. She turned backward, holding her hand to her hat to stare at the clock. Nine forty-five? Where had the time gone? She’d have to prepare a double explanation now because she didn’t have time to make it home before her interview, and she’d barely make Mr. Bauer’s studio. She’d have to do the interview without her corset and with bloodstains on her blouse. What businessman would hire someone so disheveled?

She walked her fast pace toward Johnson Street, where she was to meet her friend Voe Kopp, all the while wondering if she didn’t need a little bit more each of Lilly’s organizational bent and Selma’s capacity to adapt if she was to accomplish her dreams. She prepared an explanation for the bloody sleeves, an account she hoped would meet her mother’s muster and the critical eyes of F. J. Bauer, the photographer. The loudest voice she heard as she raced along was Lilly’s: “How could you risk losing a necessary job the whole family needs for something as frivolous as a photograph?” Jessie didn’t have an answer for that.

A Hesitating Heart

T
HERE WERE TIMES IN
J
ESSIE
G
AEBELE’S
young life when she hadn’t thought about having a career, but those times were long ago. At thirteen, she’d been employed by the Jones and Kroeger Printing Office for two dollars a week. She had been hired to bind books, but she fell in love with the pictures. Eleven girls worked there. Once a girl had stolen Jessie’s wages from her coat pocket. The lights had gone out—they often flickered, but this time the windowless room turned black—and when they came on again, the money was gone. Jessie knew who took it. The girl was the only one who’d been in the coat closet during the blackout. Jessie’d been so angry she told the girl, “The money will burn in your pocket, and wherever you work you’ll be fired.”

She’d told her employer, but it couldn’t be proved. At Jessie’s next paycheck, though, Mr. Kroeger gave Jessie the additional wages along with her current earnings. And the girl was fired, at least from the bindery. Jessie supposed she should have held her tongue, as such loathsome words weren’t exactly Christian, as her mother would later tell her. Then earlier this winter, Jessie cried when Mr. Kroeger told her she needn’t come back the next day, and only felt a little better when he told her a man with children to support had asked for work, and the owner decided to give him the job. A man’s job mattered more, her mother reminded Jessie when she arrived home, and Jessie guessed she agreed. Lilly said maybe she’d been a poor performer and that’s why she’d been let go, but her mother hushed Lilly. Jessie had to find employment. And then there’d been this perfect opening, so maybe the worst thing—losing her job—could be converted into a good thing. When the Bauer job advertised, her mother said there were angels looking out for her.
They must have been sleeping earlier at the bicycle shop
, Jessie thought as she rushed along.

Work was what Jessie did. Even before they moved to Winona, while living on the farm there’d been chores to do—important tasks, such as taking the cows the three miles to the water each day, then herding them back up the bluff to the barn without the benefit of a dog. In the winter, before walking down the valley to the village of Cream and school, the girls cracked pond ice so the cows could drink. They wore thin leather shoes, and the drifts were deep with no trails except what their feet pressed. Her sandwiches often froze by the time they arrived at the still-chilly one-room school.

Today, as Jessie walked toward the impending interview, the cool breeze forcing her to pull her shawl more tightly around her, she remembered arriving at her school late one chilly winter day because of the snow and cold. She and Tillie, her seatmate, were always getting in trouble for chattering, and on that day the one-armed schoolteacher, Mr. Buchmuller, Tillie’s uncle, had arrived late too, so the school still felt as cold as the woodshed. While he hated gum-chewing, he hated whispering more, and when he turned from lighting the fire, he heard the
pst-pst
sound and thought it was Tillie and Jessie. It hadn’t been, but the burdens of life fall unfairly, Jessie soon learned. To punish the girls, he sent them to the boys’ side of the room and made them each share a seat with a boy for the day.

She’d been furious at the injustice, made to sit by smelly boys. But the boys had made her laugh, and she and Tillie winked at each other, and Jessie decided to enjoy her day as the room heated up and filled with the scent of drying-out woolen stockings. The burdens may fall unfairly, but one could always turn a misery into something good. Well, almost always.

She’d liked living at the upper end of the valley in Cream. Moving to the city had made them all sad, her especially, to leave behind the refuge she found in the woods among the sumacs and shallow limestone caves. At least in Winona she could look out their second-story bedroom and see Sugar Loaf. Her father called it by its old name, Wapasha’s Cap. The land formation reminded Jessie of a cone of candy like the one she’d had at the St. Louis World’s Fair. She’d let her eyes scan the treetops and the spires of St. Mary’s Academy that poked their way into the green. On Sundays after church they sometimes drove the buggy up to Bluffside Park, where one could look out over the world and even see Wisconsin in the form of bluffs on the other side of the Mississippi River. The world was full of pictures, and they were best observed from heights.

A blast of wind struck her, and she shivered despite her hurrying pace. This job as a photographer’s assistant would offer a warm place to work in winter. The pay would be adequate, she was certain, and there’d be excitement, new things happening each day. Best of all, she’d be learning about what she’d come to love. At a photographer’s studio she’d be viewing photographs as part of her job instead of having to sneak looks while she bound the books they illustrated.

She felt a stiffness as she pulled her shawl closer. The bloody sleeves would add nothing to her interview success. She had to face facts. Mr. Steffes’s plight had been the more important, and if the opportunity arose, she’d tell Mr. Bauer what had made her late and why she wasn’t dressed at her perfect best. She hoped he’d understand. At least she hadn’t fainted at the sight of Mr. Steffes’s blood. Maybe she could get a job at the Winona Hospital.

“Jessie, you goose! You nearly walked me over.” Voe stumbled in front of her like an apparition escaping from the studio wall. “I almost went in without you. It’s time, right now! What kept you?” Her eyes caught the sleeves. “Are you all right? Where’d the blood come from?”

“It’s not my blood,” Jessie said. “Mr. Steffes had an accident at his shop, and I was able to help him but—”

“The bicycle man? What were you doing there?”

“It’s a story,” Jessie said. “I’ll probably have to tell it to Mr. Bauer, to explain my appearance, so I don’t think I’ll take time now.”

“You look like dog-tossed food.”

“Is my wave piece centered at least? I can’t imagine Mr. Bauer taking me seriously if the curls have been pulled to the side.” Jessie patted at her hair.

“Your hat’s on straight. But…the blood. I can’t take my eyes from it.”

Jessie stared at her sleeves. The stains ran the length of her forearm and onto the curl of cuffs at her wrist. The shawl wouldn’t cover it. She sighed. “There’s just one thing to do then.” She set the camera bag below the bay display window. With her teeth she tore at the sleeve, ripping the cloth so it ended at the elbow’s bend. Her right arm was perfectly fine but there was nothing to be done but rip it as well. “May as well be balanced.”

She’d heard Voe’s gasp at the first tear, and her mouth was still open at the second. Jessie plucked at the threads, stuffed the torn pieces into her bag, and straightened her small shoulders as she hiked the bag up and over her head, the strap forming half an X across her chest. “I’m ready.”

The torn sleeves were just one more thing she’d have to explain to her mother.

F. J. Bauer checked his watch. His clients had taken more time than usual to settle themselves in for the sitting. They were a young couple, recently moved from the East and wanting to reassure their families back in Manhattan that they hadn’t dropped off the face of the earth in this wild northwest country of sawmills and flour mills, steamboats and trains. But they’d bickered between themselves, made comments to him about angles and such, and he was about to suggest they reschedule when they were more certain of what they wanted to convey when they suddenly sat, stared into the camera, and said they were ready indeed. They had just gone out the back way when he looked at his watch. He clipped the clock casing shut as the bell rang. Well, at least his interviewees were prompt. This was encouraging. He opened the door expecting to see two young women, perhaps even wives, seeking work to supplement their husbands’ meager pay.

Why, they’re just girls
, he thought.
Children
. One so small she was not much taller than his Russell. He frowned. She carried a camera case that nearly outweighed her. Just the thing he’d hoped to avoid: a camera girl, someone who thought she knew photography. She also happened to have a sparkle of strength in her eyes that suggested she’d not be easily trained.

It was not what he’d hoped for, but then, life never was.

The one was much too small. She probably couldn’t manage his large cameras. But if she could learn developing, if she had an eye for such, well, maybe she could perform. If she’d take direction. She reminded him of his wife years before: warm eyes, full lips that turned up slightly as though she was always ready to smile.

The other girl was husky. She’d carry cameras without trouble. But she had dull eyes. FJ always looked at the eyes. The taller of the two would be slow, he ventured, but dutiful. The small one’s gray eyes with flecks of gold and blue held a snap to them. Too bold perhaps, wearing her bare arms exposed beneath a shawl and looking at him with curiosity, he thought. Her eyes looked as though a laugh might bubble through them. So young.

He’d been young too when he began. At thirteen he was apprenticed in carpentry, and by age sixteen immigrated to America from Kirchheim, Germany, arriving with the clothes on his back, a fifty-cent piece in his watch pocket, and a straw hat, the rest having been lost when the ship was disabled and the trunks lost at sea. The wind took his hat at the dock in New York.

A great-uncle who waited for him in Buffalo promised five dollars a day—top wages indeed in 1882—working at his icebox-building factory next door to his great-uncle’s tannery. FJ had hated the smells and, worse, his having to dress for dinner and listen to people chatter on around him in English, of which he understood not a word. He didn’t know then that his great-uncle Jacob Schollkopf had founded Niagara Falls Power Company, a bank, breweries, and other businesses he might have worked into. The constant pressure of his having to “perform” for his great-uncle, plus the pressure from workers who suggested he didn’t earn his wages but was granted into them, made him leave the safety and promise of his family.

He found another job building furniture and worked to pay back his passage costs. He taught himself English, then joined the National Guard by changing his name from Gottlieb Friedrich Bauer to Frederick John Bauer and making himself a few years older. He’d made his way in America, but sometimes he missed what other boys were able to do: play ball in the streets, learn to ice skate, go on hayrides. His life was always about work.

Now here before him were young girls likely bound on the same path as he had been: working, working. It was too bad. He wanted more for his own children, wanted them to have privilege, not so they assumed it was their right, but so they’d have a childhood, a time of joy and laughter, even if he hadn’t had much of that himself.

Well, he’d see what these young ladies had to say. He’d discover whether they’d be the type to leave when challenges arrived or stay until the job was finished.

Jessie decided that Mr. Bauer asked dull questions, though she tried to answer them politely while her eyes scanned the reception room. They were seated on a dark horsehair couch, and Mr. Bauer sat in a wingback chair, a notepad on his lap. He occasionally looked up over round eyeglasses. He wanted to know where they had worked before, if they had. Would their employer give them references? How much schooling had they completed?