Circled Heart (9 page)

“I believe we have a hand in making our own happy endings when we make smart and thoughtful decisions.”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“I didn’t say it was simple,” I retorted, my tone too sharp. “I haven’t found much in life that’s simple, but I do believe in the power of choice.”

“Sometimes you’re at the mercy of someone else’s choice, Johanna, and then none of your fine ideas matter and none of the rules hold.” Crea spoke evenly, her only emotion a touch of bitterness as she concluded.

I wanted to continue the conversation, conscious that Crea was on the verge of sharing something with me that was private and apparently painful, but Eulalie interrupted us.

“Your driver’s at the front door,” she volunteered. “He said he’d wait, but it’s been ten minutes and I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thank you.” To Crea, I added, “I wish I knew exactly what you were talking about, but I’m not changing what I said. It’s always about choice, and just because you’re robbed of it at one moment in your life doesn’t mean you relinquish it from your future. Now go to bed, Crea. Ruthie’s probably asleep by now so you can crawl in without having to mutter a single platitude.” She rose, stretched, and trailed after me as I went down the hall to the front door, where Levi waited. As I turned to pull the door shut on my way out, I caught a last glimpse of Crea slowly ascending the steps to the second floor.

Anger there, I thought, and passion and regret and something else I could not quite put my finger on. Grief perhaps, but for whom or what I didn’t know. Only Hilda knew Crea’s story and she would not reveal it. I hoped that someday Crea would trust me enough to share her past of her own volition. She was young and bright, kind and pretty, with a future that should hold happiness, but something in life had subdued and disillusioned her. Flora and Crea, one lost and the other searching, weighed on my mind all the ride home.

Despite not getting to bed until the wee hours of the morning, I rose early on Saturday, one hand wrapped around a mug of hot coffee and the other clutching a letter that had arrived for me the day before. I did not typically go to the Anchorage on the weekends, but that morning I was there mentally from my first waking thought. I looked up as Grandmother entered the breakfast room.

“You didn’t get much sleep, Johanna,” she observed before she went to the sideboard to pour herself coffee, too.

As usual, a freshly brewed pot was waiting. Mayville Montgomery had been cook in the house well before the first day I ever stepped inside the front door. May had come to Chicago as a young Scottish woman over twenty-five years ago with six American dollars, the clothes on her back, and the good fortune to knock on my grandparents’ door asking for work. It was a heavenly match in more ways than one. Levi Montgomery worked for my grandparents at the same time, and he and May ended up marrying and settling into the apartment over the garage. Even when raising their twin sons, both now grown with jobs at a local foundry, I never knew one morning when May did not have hot coffee and crisp toast waiting on the sideboard. She was devoted to Grandmother and tolerated me as long as I brought no trouble or grief to her employer. She’d set those boundary lines years ago and I did not begrudge May the right to draw them. I was the interloper, a withdrawn girl of twelve with bad dreams and an unjustified suspicion of the city, the house, and the family. We’d all been forced to adjust to change then, even May. Now I thought she not only tolerated me but might even be a little fond of me. With May you couldn’t always tell, but I thought I caught a glimmer of affection once in a while. She worried about my being too thin and periodically plied me with pastries, so if I chose to attribute her solicitude to affection, what harm did it cause?

Grandmother sat down across from me, commenting casually, “I thought I recognized your aunt’s handwriting,” more of a question than a statement. She was always careful not to pry into my father’s side of the family.

“Yes, it’s from Aunt Mary.”

“I trust everyone is well.” My grandmother’s attitude about my father’s family and background in western Kansas was always enigmatic. Her tone became carefully bland, her voice expressionless, and her face a mask of polite interest. We never spoke of it, but I guessed she had not liked my father very much and blamed him for taking her only daughter to China. I wondered whether she feared my father’s family might somehow take me away, too, tempt me to leave Chicago for the Kansas prairie. In the years I lived in my grandparents’ house, I had resisted several invitations from my father’s sister and brother to visit Kansas. I was a city girl for sure, but someday when the time and occasion were right, I would visit Blessing, Kansas, and meet the family I knew only through periodic photographs and letters and my father’s remembrances. The time for that visit wasn’t just yet, however. I didn’t like the way my mentioning the idea drew Grandmother’s lips together and tightened the skin around her eyes, a sign she definitely had an opinion about the idea but was too well bred to share it.

“Yes. Aunt Mary sent a picture of all my cousins.” I handed the photograph across the table. Grandmother took it and looked at it politely before handing the photograph back.

“The little one favors your father a great deal” was all Grandmother said before picking up the paper, an indication that she was not in the mood for additional conversation. When she was like that, stiff and uninviting, I could have kicked her under the table out of sheer frustration. Not that I ever did, of course, but that morning the temptation, although brief, was sharp. She could have told me more about my father; she had to know more. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that, couldn’t quite forgive him all these years later for robbing her of her daughter.

Later, restless, unable to occupy either my hands or my mind, and still hurt and angry about Flora, I decided to take a brisk walk. The beautiful late May afternoon promised plenty of sunshine that hinted at the coming heat of the next months. Chicago could swelter, but then China had sweltered, too, so from the beginning I always welcomed the city’s summer. For several years, until the feelings eventually lessened, the summer season always brought with it a peculiar familiarity and a consequent relief from homesickness and grief. With my thoughts dwelling on those earlier years, I hurried down the stairs, pulled open the front door, and nearly ran head on into Drew Gallagher, who stood with a hand poised for the knocker.

“Mr. Gallagher, what are you doing here?”

“Good afternoon to you, too, Miss Swan.” If he meant the words as a gentle reprimand for my inelegant greeting, the effect was spoiled by the way the corners of his mouth twitched into an involuntary smile. “You may recall that we left our last conversation incomplete,” he reminded me. “I thought I should get my marching orders before making any further plans. You were in the process of telling me what to do.” I stepped out onto the porch.

“That’s not exactly how I remember it. How did you know where to find me?”

“Your tone indicates that I have made some kind of social gaffe, but may I point out that I, at least, waited to enter your house and did not wander aimlessly through rooms, peering into closets and under carpets?”

“I never did anything of the sort,” I replied indignantly. “If you’d had your door properly closed and answered the bell in a timely fashion, I wouldn’t have had to stoop to aimless wandering. Anyway, stop trying to distract me. How did you know where to find me?”

He returned an innocent, hazel-eyed look before explaining, “You told me you lived on Hill Street. I called the Anchorage and talked to Miss Cartwright, who supplied the number. You appear to be on your way out.”

“I was going for a walk to blow away the mental cobwebs.”

“May I join you?”

I eyed his clean, light suit, polished shoes, and brushed felt hat with skepticism. Everything about his appearance was perfectly in place and fashionable, pants creased exactly right and the brim of his hat turned just so.

“Of course, but you’ll get wind-blown and be too warm with that jacket on.”

He promptly removed his coat and hat and placed each on a pointed spire of wrought iron porch railing.

“Am I acceptable now?” His falsely meek tone made me laugh.

“You’re more the fashion arbiter than I, Mr. Gallagher. Wear what you like.” We went down the steps and the front walk side by side without speaking.

After a moment he said, “I believe I have just the place for your Mrs. Stanislaw, Miss Swan. Can she cook?”

“I don’t have firsthand knowledge of it, but I’m sure she can. What do you have in mind?”

“Someone I know needs a live-in housekeeper, a woman to cook and clean and keep general order. Someone to answer the door in a timely fashion. She could keep the children with her.”

“That sounds perfect. You’re comfortable that her employer will treat her fairly?”

“Absolutely.”

Something in his tone made me stop my walk to turn and stare at him. “Where exactly will she be working?”

After he rattled off an address on Prairie Avenue, I pointed out, “If memory serves, that’s your address.”

“Yes, it is. Before Douglas left on his extended European trip, he let all of his help go except Fritz, his driver. Fritz was enough to keep an eye on the house and the grounds in Douglas’s absence. But I’m there now and Fritz and I aren’t very good with domestic chores. We’re at a loss as to what to do with all that shiny equipment in the kitchen. Your bringing Mrs. Stanislaw to my attention was timely.” We started walking again.

“I’ll take everything you say at face value because it’s what I want to hear. Thank you. You won’t be alarmed if Mr. Stanislaw shows up at your door, will you?”

“I didn’t know there was a Mr. Stanislaw.”

“I doubt he’ll make an appearance, even if he could find Yvesta, but take it from me, he’s easily cowed. Just stand up to him and he runs like a rabbit.”

“You know that for a fact.” A question in his tone.

“Yes,” I replied grimly, “I do. He showed up at the Anchorage recently, hardly any taller than I but a beefy man with large hands and shoulders. When I thought of him taking a swing at his wife and children, it was all I could do to keep from punching him myself. My tolerance for bullies is nonexistent.”

“So the two of you had a face off? I don’t need to ask who won.”

“I don’t think you ever really win with men like him. They show up like bad pennies when you least expect them, but I refused to let him frighten or intimidate me, and I told him I wouldn‘t hesitate to send him to prison on trumped up charges if that’s what it took to keep him from hurting his family. I meant every word I said.”

After a small silence Drew Gallagher commented, “Something in your tone made you sound remarkably like Katherine Davis just then. New women of the new century, I suppose.”

I wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment and didn’t know how to respond. Being compared to that beautiful, elegant woman I had once viewed from afar robbed me of a retort.

When it became apparent I wasn’t going to reply, Gallagher went on, “When I last saw you, you were rushing off to help with a birth. Are you a doctor?”

“No, not a doctor. That never appealed to me. I’ve always been more interested in social ills than physical ones. My first chosen profession is social work, but I’m also a nurse. I was coming back on the Titanic from two years at the Nightingale School of Nursing in London.”

“To what end?”

“An excellent question for which I have no answer. There was nothing beckoning on the horizon, so when the opportunity at the Anchorage appeared, I couldn’t refuse. I had given thought to staffing a free clinic for poor women, so the Anchorage seemed like good training ground.”

“Have you always felt compelled to save the world?” I detected a touch of something not quite kind in his voice, something close to mocking. We approached a corner bench, where he sat down abruptly, forcing me to stop and look down at him.

“Not always,” I answered lightly. “Have you never felt compelled to save at least one little corner of it?”

“Never.”

“What have you done all your life then?”

“For several years I made it my goal to do nothing useful ever. I considered it a sacred duty to worry my parents and frustrate my brother. That is the sum total of my accomplishments.” I didn’t believe he was joking.

“I seem to detect a vague past tense in your comments. Have you changed your personal goals?”

“An excellent question for which I have no answer.” He mimicked my own earlier reply but this time with no unkindness in his tone. “Life was much simpler when I was spending my inheritance on riotous living, and Douglas was constantly deploring my conduct. I inherited Gallagher Enterprises, which generate a great deal of money without my doing anything, and I suppose I could continue to squander the profits, but now that seems wrong somehow. It’s Douglas’s money and meant more to him than it will ever mean to me.”

“Perhaps you could actually do some good with it.” He stood abruptly without responding to my comment.

“I should be getting back. I have plans for the evening. When should I collect Mrs. Stanislaw?”

“Give me Monday to talk to her and come Tuesday.” We walked companionably back the same way we’d come.

“By the way, did you bring a boy or a girl into the world last night? I should have asked.”

“A healthy boy.”

“That must have gladdened the mother’s heart.”

“The mother died,” I said bluntly. “She was fourteen years old and she hated the idea of being a mother. Given the opportunity, she’d have swept that baby from her body and her life. Flora wanted to live. She had plans.”

“I’m sorry.” I turned my head to look at him as we walked.

“Are you? I wonder. Flora made a mistake and listened to a charming man. Then she paid for it with her life. We should all be sorry.”

“Why does it sound like you’re scolding me?”

“I’m not scolding you. Perhaps your conscience is just sensitive to my words. But it’s hard to argue with one of the girls who said, ‘It ain’t like we make these babies all by ourselves so why should it just be us that runs the risks?’”