The Daughter's Walk (31 page)

L
et's stay here a few days. Weeks even,” Louise said when I arrived back in Ludington, where I'd left the two of them while I investigated.
Investigated
. What had I gained? Nothing. All I'd done was waste my time and the time of the women with me as well.

“It's a lovely place,” Louise insisted. “Perfect climate with lake breezes. Nice hotels—”

“It's time to move on,” Olea said.

We ate supper in the hotel dining room in Ludington. They didn't pry, but I eventually told them what had happened. “I even found where my mother once lived,” I said. The house was run-down now, but once it would have been considered modest with its wide porch sweeping around the front. An orchard groaned for attention in the back. It was a nicer place than what I remembered in Yellow Medicine. They'd left it all. Sacrifice. That's what family was about, doing what must be done despite the agony.

Tears welled up in my eyes. “It's … the time. Meeting him. It's been more difficult than I thought it would be.”

“We don't always get what we're after,” Olea said, not unkindly.

“I'm not at all sure I knew what I wanted.”

“That's a problem too. If you don't know, then all those around you who do will likely get their hungers met, and you'll find yourself serving them while you starve. You'll be on your deathbed wondering where the time went and why you never got to Europe as you'd always planned or never spent an entire afternoon at the aquarium lazily watching fish.”

It sounded like experience talking.

“I hoped he'd open his arms to you and say how much he longed to have done the right thing all those years ago and then sweep you into his chest.” Louise wrapped her arms around herself and sighed. “I hoped he'd ask about your mother and say he would leave his entire estate to you, his only daughter.”

“You read too many of those dime novels,” Olea told her, patting her shoulder. “Family inheritance is never so easily given.”

“I like your version of our meeting,” I told Louise. “But Olea's right. It is pure fantasy.” I looked at Olea. “Meeting him wasn't about an inheritance. I wanted to know … who I belonged to.”

“Why, you belong to God, Clara, no matter where you set your feet,” Louise told me.

“Will you keep his name?” Olea asked. She added extra sugar to her tea, as was her way. “Now that you've met him?”

“I always wondered why you kept the Stone name,” Louise said to Olea.

“That's none of your affair,” she said.

Louise dropped her eyes. “I'm sorry. I go too far.” She glanced at me.

Olea's harsh response surprised me. I found important interest in my fingernail. I'd seen the “Stone and Bostwick” name as furriers on invoices, and then “Stone” in Detroit and “Bostwick” in St. Louis. The women did business with both. Olea's middle name was Stone. Perhaps
there was a connection there, but both women had once said they'd never married.

Or had Olea only said she hadn't married the love who never returned from the sea?

“We're talking about Clara now,” Olea continued. “Your name?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll keep the Doré name. I'm not an Estby anymore. My stepfather was clear about that.”

“You could become Clara Gubner or Clara Ammundsen,” Louise said. “We'd be honored, wouldn't we, Olea? You belong with us.”

Olea nodded.

I hadn't told them I'd requisitioned
Gubner
for an hour or so. “It's a nice offer,” I said. “We're sisters in spirit. But I think we can keep our separate names.”

They could absorb me, these women who knew what they hungered for and acted on it: running a business, traveling as they wished, hiring and educating and gifting a young woman who could easily give in and let herself be shaped by their lives alone. I'd have to be clear about what I wanted.

I'm ashamed to say that I did once wonder if Louise and Olea were the kind of women whose companionship was questionable, women my mother pointed out to me at her presentations in New York, women more attached to each other than to men. The concept had left my mouth open in astonishment. Once, outside a lyceum presentation in Ohio, my mother and I had even been cursed as such, though my mother always introduced me as her daughter Clara, perhaps to make our relationship clear. People often thought we were of the same age, my mother looked so young and fit on that trip. We were women not afraid to live contrary to the dictates of custom, politics, or fashion, and that threatened. So I had wondered about these two women since I had come to care about them as more than my employers.

But though I looked for signs, nothing sensual ever passed between them, no lingering fingertips on fingertips, no eyes that invited falling into. I saw kindness blended with occasional irritation, the fitting of sisters—if not the cousins they were. I envied their shared history. It made me miss Bertha's laughter even more; long for days when Ida and I had walked barefoot, arms around each other's waists, to school or whispered during recess about whatever boy had caught our fancy even though they hid behind the outhouse and shouted “snake” as we entered.

This was family: people who shared griefs and joys and didn't let the love of money set the tone, people who accommodated each other, stepped aside at times without saying, “It's my way or no way at all.” I didn't have a family now. John Doré promised nothing. I was at the end of
that
investigation. I looked across the table at these two women. I vowed to be myself but do what I must to limit any discord with them. I needed no more painful separations or rejections. I'd had enough of both.

That summer of 1902, Olea and Louise introduced me to the New York end of the furrier trade. I visited their leased shop. I stepped into the large cooler where people brought their furs during the hot months to be cleaned and stored. During winter months, the store window showcased brocaded gowns with fur trim, beaver hats and sable muffs, mink and ermine coats. We visited designers with drawings of future fashion clamped to boards that lined the walls.

“We can't take you to the dressers,” Olea said.

“They keep the formula and procedures under lock and key,” Louise whispered to me. “Much of the work is done in Europe. America is only now developing.”

At the manufacturers', I recognized unique handwork as men cut through the buttery soft leather backs of the pelts to make strips, then sewed them back together, forcing the pelt to lie flat like fabric. Then they joined the pieces according to form and lined the garments with silk and satin, all stitched with flawless seams to make the finished work drape with perfection around elegant shoulders. I felt myself attentive to the smells and sounds and sights in new ways.

At the library I read about the fur business, ideas forming in my head.

The women provided more detail about Franklin Doré's role, about his lifting his tall hat at the fur auctions in Montreal or Copenhagen to indicate his bid, his exquisite evaluation of pelts that would one day warm the bodies of society men and women. He was nearly as good as the auction house graders, Olea announced. “If he buys a lot, we know we'll be getting the perfect pelts for that stole or that coat we have orders for. He always goes days early so he can check the pieces over at his own pace.”

The women reminded me of his need to travel abroad to visit leather markets in Turkey, Italy, and Greece, furriers in Russia and China. More than once, he'd traveled with otter skins used for the oriental rituals that marked transitions into adulthood.

“People have to be warm,” Louise repeated, touting the trade as we stepped from the streetcar and walked the short distance to the hotel. “It's a business that will last forever. What would we do without fur?”

“There's wool,” I said. “That's competition.”

“Yes, but wool will only keep you warm to about thirty degrees, and it has real trouble standing up to mud. Nothing keeps one as warm or wrapped in luxury as fur,” Olea said. “Mud just dries up and flakes right off of it.”

They were open and honest about the pitfalls and demands, but in my analysis of their business, I felt they missed something, a part they might have more control over than they did, a venture that would make any investment—my investment—show greater return.

The infamous Franklin Doré stood in the center of our hotel suite in New York City, bookended by the beaming Olea and Louise. The noises of Manhattan's drayage firms making daily deliveries and the occasional honk of one of those new Ford automobiles rose up to our seventh floor rooms through the open windows. I'd left this city with my mother five years before. This view of Central Park was a far cry from the scene she and I'd had from our small Brooklyn room. I didn't let myself think of that pain. Olea and Louise had been out of the country when all those choices were made.

“I'm pleased to meet you at last,” I said to Franklin. I put out my hand to shake his.

“And you're the infamous Miss Doré,” Franklin said. His eyes were the color of sable and just as warm. Instead of shaking my hand, he lifted it to his lips, soft as mink when they brushed my fingertips. His own hands remained gloved. “It's my pleasure to meet you after all this time. My women give you many compliments,” he said, his voice slightly accented as though he'd spent time in the Canadian provinces. He dropped my hand and bent to kiss Louise, then Olea, on the cheek. He removed his fine camel coat, with the collar trimmed in the soft underhairs of skunk.

“I thought we were going out to lunch,” Louise said.

“Oh, let's get acquainted here before I go out on the town with my
women,” Franklin said. He'd entered the room like a dancer, lithe and agile. I had expected Franklin Doré to be large, muscled, with dark hooded eyes squinting from years of trapping and blinking against frozen snows piled up along cold northern rivers. Surely he'd done all that before he graduated to brokering, bargaining, traveling with pelts to France, speaking foreign languages as he bowed over tea tables at auction houses in Hong Kong. I had not imagined he would turn heads with his good looks. I didn't think he'd turn mine.

Louise fluttered around us now, urging us to sit, taking Franklin's coat. Judging by the lines flowing out from his eyes and the hint of gray streaking the sable-colored bangs he brushed back with his fingers, he was a good fifteen years older than I.

“My women,” Louise said. “How you talk.” He tweaked her cheek and she grinned.

Olea said, “Proprietary men claiming they own women puts you out of touch with this modern time, Franklin.”

He feigned shock. “Not possessive,” Franklin said. “ ‘My women' is a term of endearment, nothing more.” He pulled tight leather gloves one finger at a time from his wide hands. They were red and marked with scars. Two fingers on his right hand, the ring and little finger, were shortened. “Frostbite,” he said to me as he noticed my stare. Then returning to the subject of his women, he added, “Mere terms of endearment that allow me a smidgen of authority working for two women who are flames to my buttery soul.”

“You see, Clara,” Louise said. “You'll have to watch him; he's such a charmer.” She giggled like a schoolgirl. I thought of my father and of Olaf's warning about Erik Elstad, and I wondered for a moment if there were safe men.

“Fortunately for us, he puts most of that charm to use with manufacturers,
and thus he keeps us in coin,” Olea said, “as well as in compliments.”

“You're my family,” he said.

“Clara wants to talk business,” Louise said.

“Yes, but it's always best to separate family from finances if one can,” Olea said. “Porous borders are weak ones.”

“Never fear, Clara,” Franklin said. “I may call you Clara, may I?” I nodded. “Good. You must never fear that what my women set their hearts on will come to be. One always wants to be on the side of their kind souls. If they're with you, I'm sure I will be.”