The Yearbook (10 page)

She continued up the block toward where the Wrigley place should be, moving alongside what seemed to be a pasture. The light wind carried a pleasant scent that seemed so familiar. She took in a deep breath and then she recognized it, that same smoky mix of autumn leaves and acorns that clung to the pages of the yearbook. The dark was fading. Lola figured it must be nearly dawn. After about twenty minutes, she spotted the Wrigley house, first as a shadow, standing alone in a stretch of open land. Soon she could see the pale yellow of its bricks. The big house looked strange standing there alone, without the rest of the neighborhood packed around it, as if it had been cut out of a photograph with a pair of scissors and glued to an unfamiliar background.

With each step along the country road Lola found her euphoria turning into tension, and then fear. What was she doing, anyway? She stopped in the dust. She could turn around, but what was behind her? Where else could she go? At least in this direction lay a plan, however flimsy. She took a deep breath and kept going.

A heavy iron fence ran along the front of the property. She stood for a moment, looking through the bars. She touched the cold metal and felt intimidated. What kind of people, she wondered, built barriers like this? But she gathered her courage, pushed open the gate, and stepped onto the front walk. She recognized the heavy slabs of paving stone under her feet, and supposed they must have been too heavy for the county to uproot and replace with the kind of safe, dismal materials that had taken over the inside.

She tried out various opening lines as she moved toward the front door of dark carved wood, and had just settled on
How do you do?
when the rumble of an advancing motor made her wheel around. It was a truck, and it was headed in the direction of the house.
There's no reason to be afraid
, she told herself.
It's only a truck
—and then she fled in a panic across the Wrigley front lawn, slipping behind a corner of the house.

The truck stopped, and a man in a uniform got out. The police. Who else could it be? Someone in the house had mistaken her for a prowler. She had to run. But which way? She sized up the grounds. She could make a break for the meadow, with its cover of tall grass. Or was it smarter to climb a tree?

The policeman was almost at the door when she noticed that he was making a sound, like a rattling or tinkling. She took another look. He was carrying a basket of bottles. The milkman. He was only the milkman. Lola had heard of milkmen, of course, but this was the first real, live one she had ever seen. She watched him return to his truck and putter away.

She emerged from her hiding place, dusted herself off, and again inched toward the front door. She stationed herself next to the milk bottles but then couldn't decide: Should she ring the bell or use the brass knocker? Or just knock with her bare hand? As she stood struggling with the question, the front door swung open.

A man in a plaid bathrobe stared down at her through little round glasses. “My word. Have we got a new milkman?” he said. He was a robust person with a dark beard and mustache and graying hair parted in the middle.

“No, sir. I'm Lola Lundy.”

“You're an early riser, Miss Lundy. What can I do for you?”

“Are you Judge Wrigley?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Lola Lundy.”

“So you've said.”

“Oh, I did?” Lola said. She fished in the pocket of her dress and brought out the letter of introduction.

The judge took the letter. Lola watched him. What if Miss Bryant had misinformed her? What if Eunice Wrigley had no brother? What if he'd died ten years before her arrival at the Wrigleys' door and everybody knew it? What if he'd never gone to Denver but lived down the street?

The judge flung open the big front door and ushered Lola into the house. “Mrs. Wrigley,” he called toward the staircase. “Come down, my dear. It's one of your kinfolk come to stay.”

Lola heard footsteps in an upstairs hall, and then Mrs. Wrigley appeared. She was a pretty woman of about fifty with a lot of auburn hair piled on the top of her head. She ran down the stairs in a silvery-blue robe and matching slippers and took Lola's suitcase.

“Emmy-Faye from Detroit? But you're all grown up. Why didn't you write first? Don't tell me you've walked all the way here from the station. And in the dark.”

The judge held out Lola's letter. “This isn't Emmy-Faye, my dear. This is Lola Lundy, come all the way from Denver, Colorado.”

“Denver?” Eunice said. She took the letter and began to read. “Washed away in a flood? You must sit down, child. Henrietta! Caroline!”

Two uniformed maids appeared, one at the kitchen door and the other at the top of the stairs.

“Henrietta, set another place for breakfast. Caroline, make up the blue room, no, the yellow room. Cousin Lola has come to stay.”

They ate in a sunny parlor with pink-and-white wallpaper facing the rose garden, a room that in the group home had stood up against the auto dealership and was used for storage.

Lola buttered her toast with a tiny silver knife and looked out the window. Paths of white stones meandered among several hundred rose bushes, the late-blooming varieties still brilliant yellows and pinks. Heavy trees in their fall colors lined the boundaries of the garden, and beyond, in the meadow, several horses grazed.

“We were surprised to hear from Wally after such a long while,” the judge said. “Frankly, we thought something had happened to the old fellow.”

“Wally?” said Lola.

“Waldron. My brother,” Eunice said. “It is a comfort to me to have those few lines from him.”

“Still in the mining game, is he? Stubborn so-and-so. You'd think he'd have given it up by now,” the judge said. “He ought to come back. There's plenty of work right here in Ashfield.”

“I know, dear. But when Wally puts his mind to something, he doesn't give up,” Eunice said. “He's a very determined man.”

“Especially with his physical limitations,” the judge added, peeling his boiled egg. “He ought not to engage in such taxing work.” The judge turned to Lola. “How's he doing with his ailment?”

“Well, he has good days and he has bad days,” Lola said.

Both Wrigleys nodded knowingly.

“Do you hear that, dear?” Eunice said. “Good days and bad days. Let's send for him. Today.”

“Blast, Mrs. Wrigley, you know the fool won't come,” the judge said.

Eunice sniffed and her lower lip trembled.

“Oh, all right,” the judge said. “I'll send a cable this afternoon.”

The judge drew a small notebook and pencil from a pocket in his vest. “What's the address, Lola?”

“I don't think I can remember it,” Lola said.

“It's too much travel. You're exhausted,” Eunice said. “Let me show you your room.”

Lola followed Eunice's trailing robe up a grand staircase, following a path she knew well but at the same time didn't know. They arrived at a door she did not recognize. Eunice opened it, revealing a yellow room flooded with morning light. In the center stood a large brass bed, plump with yellow quilts and pillows, and against one wall a polished mahogany chest of drawers and matching wardrobe. In a corner, near the fireplace, stood a rocking chair with a seat embroidered in blue morning glories. The stained drop ceiling was gone, and Lola looked up at a blue glass chandelier.

Lola struggled to get her bearings. It seemed that several of the dormitory rooms, including the one she shared with Danielle, must have been made by cutting up this one perfect room. Caroline had thrown open the windows to give the place an airing, and the long white curtains billowed at the windows. Lola soon realized that the difference in the light had to do with the absence of her escape tree. She glanced out the window and spotted it far below, just a sapling, barely taller than the rose bushes.

“Shall I unpack your things, Miss Lundy?” Caroline asked.

Lola noticed that Caroline had meddled in the suitcase. It lay open on the bed. A skirt sat on the top, concealing the yearbook that would not be published for a few more months but was antique-yellow and flaking with age.

“That's all right,” Lola said, planting herself between the suitcase and the maid. “I'll do it.”

In her concern over the suitcase, Lola didn't notice Eunice scrutinizing her clothes. Eunice reached out and felt the material of Lola's sleeve between thumb and forefinger.

“Your dress. It's the latest fashion, but it, pardon me for saying this, Lola, it looks so old. Even the buttons, they're faded, aren't they? Cracked, even.”

Eunice was examining the whole dress now, from collar to hem. “What happened to this dress, Lola?”

Caroline, meanwhile, had reached around Lola and pulled the skirt from Lola's suitcase. Lola winced, then exhaled with relief. A blouse was still covering the yearbook.

“And this frock?” Caroline said, shaking out the skirt. “If I didn't know better I'd say it's been stuffed in a cedar chest for a good seventy-five years.”

Caroline sniffed at the fabric. “It even smells a little mothy, don't it, Miss Eunice?”

“Caroline, please,” Eunice said.

Lola laughed lightly. “Oh, this happens all the time out west. The sun is hotter, and the air is drier, and the wind is windier. And it's mothy. So mothy. Clothes don't last out west.”

“Well, that's the first I've heard of it,” Caroline said. “My sister lives out in San Francisco and she sent me her old wedding gown for my youngest girl and it was just good as new and—”

“Thank you, Caroline,” Eunice said. “You may run Lola a bath now, and after she's had a rest, I'll take her shopping.”

By evening, Lola had a closet and drawers full of new clothes, including two garter belts that she wasn't sure how to work, as well as two lipsticks and a box of loose powder with an oversized pink satin powder puff. Eunice had delighted in taking her up and down Main Street, from hat shop to dress shop to shoe shop, trying things on her like she was a doll. Lola felt so unlike herself, she was glad to have store mirrors to look into to confirm she hadn't changed into another person. The clothes, hats, shoes, and bags were beautiful, but her face was still her face. She wasn't, however, exactly herself. The Lola Lundy she knew could never have had a day like this.

Long, heavy cars, Packards and Nashes and Buicks of the sort Lola had seen in movies, were parked end to end all the way up and down the brick street, polished to car-show intensity, and the sidewalks were alive with dressed-up families on Sunday strolls.

“Why do you stare so, my dear?” Eunice had asked her as they moved through the crowd.

“Everyone's so dressed up,” Lola said. “No jeans. No sweats.”

“Different than the mining camp, isn't it?” Eunice answered. “But why should anyone sweat on a cool day like this? Oh, here's Mrs. Downing's shop. Let's stop in and look at hats.”

It was the same Main Street Lola knew, and although the building facades were recognizable, she had to keep reminding herself she was still, somehow, in Ashfield. In the hat shop, Lola had tried on a dozen models before she noticed that this bright place with walls like a wedding cake was, in fact, that dingy pawnshop with the tarnished trumpets in the window. Later they passed the Grand Theater, no longer (or not yet) Miss Bryant's musty Yesterday Boutique but a social vortex, bright and blinking. A long line of people trailed away from the ticket booth, waiting to see a movie called
The Extra Girl
. In the crowd, Lola thought she recognized two of the musicians from the dance in the gym, but she couldn't be sure.

On the way home in the Wrigleys' big Hudson, Lola tried to get her bearings, but huge swaths of Ashfield, entire neighborhoods, were missing from this new, old landscape. On the east side of town, yellow grass stretched for miles to the flat horizon, where Lola believed a stinking paper factory would one day stand.

“Tomorrow we'll visit the high school. Would you like that?”

Lola thought of her lost necklace and of Peter, but not in that order. “I was a junior. I'd like to go back to school.”

“Of course you would,” Eunice said, patting her knee. “That's good thinking. A girl must finish her education. So many girls nowadays run off and get married without even a thought for graduation, much less college. Have you ever thought of college?”

“Not exactly,” Lola said.

“You'll like Ashfield High. It's very modern. They have a wonderful chorus, and the Girl Reserves are quite active in town.”

After a big roast beef dinner with the Wrigleys, Lola was overcome by a strange, intense drowsiness, yet she resisted sleep. Sleep had led her to this faraway place, and it stood to reason that it could just as easily carry her away again. But the feather bed pulled her in, deeper, deeper, until her worry yielded to a long, profound sleep in her second-floor room on Quarrier Street.

Eunice Wrigley drove Lola to Ashfield High on Monday morning, October 22, 1923, and walked her onto the campus. They passed the mermaid and her pool of wishing pennies, and Lola felt, despite the corny sound of it, lighter than air.

That morning she had awoken in the fluffy bed with a strange tingling through the middle of her, almost a burning, and she knew beyond any doubt that the tug-of-war had been won. She had been flung hard in one direction, slightly singed in the process, but the tangled rope was gone now. She missed no one, nothing, and went forward into the bright fall day of a new life.

She saw the students, so formal in their suits and dresses and long coats, chattering and laughing in little groups as they went into school. They looked so grown up, so enthusiastic, that she could hardly believe they were teenagers on the way to school on a Monday morning. But catching her reflection in the glass she could see that in her new clothes, hat, and T-strap shoes, she appeared just as grown up.