Until We Reach Home (35 page)

The next morning Sofia was washed and dressed and waiting downstairs in the kitchen when Mrs. Olafson arrived. The cook always bought the morning newspaper for Mrs. Anderson on her way to work. Sofia saw it tucked under her arm.

“May I please read the newspaper before you take it upstairs?”

“Oh dear, no. You don’t want to do that. Mrs. Anderson will know if it’s been opened, you see.”

“How can she possibly know?” Kirsten asked as she emerged from the back stairwell into the kitchen.

“That woman doesn’t miss a thing,” Mrs. Olafson said. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave the paper just the way it is.” She set it on the kitchen table and began stoking the coals in the cast-iron range, adding kindling.

“But I need to find out if—”

“Don’t do it, Sofia.” Kirsten snatched up the paper before Sofia could. “We don’t want to make her angry.”

“Then will you at least let me take Mrs. Anderson’s breakfast tray upstairs to her so I can ask her myself?”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Olafson replied, tying on her apron. “You’ll save me a trip up those steps.” It seemed to take forever for Mrs. Anderson’s breakfast to finish cooking, but when it was finally ready, Sofia carried it up to her.

“You’ll be wanting to know what’s in the newspaper, I suppose,” the fairy queen said the moment Sofia walked into the room.

“Yes, ma’am. If you don’t mind, ma’am.”

“I’ll tell you what. If you agree to sing for my dinner guests, I’ll let you read it right now.”

Two fears battled inside Sofia. In the end, her fear for Ludwig was stronger than her fear of singing in front of a room full of strangers. “Very well. I’ll sing for your guests.”

“Good. Then take the paper and get out of here,” she said, shooing Sofia away. “Bring it back to me when you’re finished.”

Sofia began scanning the pages on her way down to the kitchen. Her breakfast plate was waiting for her on the table, and Mrs. Olafson, Elin, and Kirsten already had begun eating theirs.

“She gave you her newspaper?” Mrs. Olafson asked in surprise.

Sofia nodded. “Listen, the headline says, ‘Ellis Island a Mass of Cinders and Blackened Ruins.’” She quickly skimmed the story until she read,
All escaped alive. No lives were lost.
She sank onto her chair in relief. “No one was killed,” she murmured.

“Read it to us, Sofia,” Elin said.

She cleared the knot of tears from her throat.

“The only indication of the existence of the immigration facility on Ellis Island is the smoke arising from the ruins. The immigrants who were rescued from the fire are all thankful to be alive. ‘As far as I know, no one was seriously injured,’ reported Dr. Senner, the immigration commissioner. ‘All escaped alive. No lives were lost.’ Since all records were destroyed in the fire, a board of special inquiry will try to determine what to do with the foreigners who were under detention at the time. Newly arriving immigrants will be examined aboard their ships, for now.”

“Do you think your friend was still on the island?” Kirsten interrupted.

“I don’t know. They were going to deport him when we left.”

“Well, if they’ve lost everyone’s records,” Kirsten said, “maybe they’ll have to let him stay in the country now.”

“Do you think someone started the fire on purpose?” Elin asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll read the rest.

“The fire, which was ruled to be accidental and not arson, was believed to have originated from an electric light wire in the statistician’s office in a corner of the main building. ‘I have always been anxious about the construction of the buildings,’ the commissioner said. ‘They should have been fireproof.’ A conservative estimate of the loss is one million dollars.

“Dr. Joseph H. White directed the rescue of the patients who were being treated at the island’s hospital. The twenty men, twenty women, and seventeen children were taken to Bellevue Hospital on shore. The most severe case was a woman with typhoid fever who was carried out on the shoulders of attendants. Only one low wall of the hospital remains. All told, two hundred fifty persons were on Ellis Island at the time of the fire, including thirty-five employees. Two-thirds of those were male, and one-third were women and children. Most were awaiting deportation.”

Sofia stopped reading. She closed her eyes.

“You’re thinking about your friend, aren’t you?” Kirsten asked.

Sofia nodded. “I wonder if he was still there. It must have been awful.”

“Well, if he was still planning to swim ashore,” Kirsten said, “maybe he was able to escape during all of the commotion. How would they know how many were detained, if all of the records were destroyed?”

The idea gave Sofia no consolation. She cleared her throat and continued reading.

“The fire was discovered when a night watchman making his rounds detected smoke. Upon further investigation he encountered thicker smoke and flames. He immediately notified the other watchmen and they hastened to get the inmates out of the building. The immigrants were all asleep, and when the men raised the cry of fire, a scene of indescribable confusion ensued.”

“I can well imagine!” Kirsten said. “With so many languages and no one to translate, those poor people wouldn’t have known what was going on.”

“So great was the confusion and excitement that the rescuers met with great difficulty in getting the immigrants out. Some of them had to be forcibly ejected. One unnamed immigrant assisted with the rescue of five children, two of them clinging to his neck, one under each arm and one holding onto his coat. Many of the women had to be carried out bodily. Several became hysterical. All were transported safely to boats anchored nearby. In the immigrants’ haste to escape, all of their possessions were abandoned and lost to the flames.”

Sofia stopped again. “If Ludwig lost all of his belongings, he might have lost my address, too. How will he ever find me? He would remember my name, but Uncle Lars’ last name is different from ours.”

“I don’t know,” Kirsten said, “but it’s a good thing he gave you his violin or it would have burned up in the fire, too.”

“
Ja
. . . good thing . . .” Sofia murmured. She tried to picture Ludwig sneaking away during the commotion and escaping to shore, but she couldn’t do it. More likely, he was the unnamed immigrant who rescued the five children or who carried one of the hysterical women to safety. Ludwig would think of others before himself.

“Sofia? Are you all right?” Elin asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, folding the newspaper into a neat rectangle. “I’d better take this upstairs to Mrs. Anderson.”

“Sofia, wait,” Elin said. “You never told us why Mrs. Anderson asked to see you yesterday.”

“She . . . um . . . she asked me to sing for her dinner guests.” The thought of doing it made Sofia’s heart race with fear.

“What did you tell her?”

“I . . . I told her that I would.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A
FTER LUNCH THAT
day, Kirsten pushed the coin Elin had just given her back into Elin’s hand. “No, keep it all. I don’t want it.”

“Are you sure?” Elin asked. Every payday she let her sisters keep twenty-five cents for themselves before sending the rest of their earnings to the men in Wisconsin. Today Kirsten’s refusal worried her. Kirsten hadn’t been her usual feisty self for several days. And she had been the one who had pleaded for spending money in the first place.

“I don’t need anything this week. Send all of my money to Wisconsin.”

“I guess I don’t need anything, either,” Sofia said. She dropped her coins back into Elin’s hand.

“Then we’ll all go without,” Elin decided. “I’ll send all of mine, too.”

Uncle Lars had showed Elin how to wire the money to Wisconsin at the Western Union office, and she walked there each week to send it on her afternoon off. She and her sisters owed $120 for their tickets. After sending $11.25 the first week and twelve dollars this week, they now owed $96.75. At this rate, Elin calculated that they would need to work for at least eight more weeks. But with more than a dozen rooms left to clean in the mansion, not to mention the enormous ballroom on the third floor, she knew they would be busy for at least that long.

It was a long walk, but Elin took her time, enjoying the warm June day. She hardly knew what to do with the luxury of an afternoon off, all to herself, but she loved strolling in the fresh air after being cooped up in the mansion all week battling dust and cobwebs.

Elin wired the money, then walked to the boardinghouse to see if any mail had arrived. “Make sure you ask Aunt Hilma about my German friend,” Sofia had reminded her before she’d left. It seemed odd that Kirsten no longer begged to run over there every chance she got, looking for mail.

“There is just one letter,” Aunt Hilma told Elin when she arrived. She gestured in the direction of the hall table with a tilt of her head, never pausing from her task of peeling potatoes. “And before you ask, no one has come from Germany.”

Elin pushed through the swinging door into the hallway and was surprised to see that the envelope was addressed to her. The stamp in the corner was an American one. Who did she know in America? According to the return address on the back flap, the letter came from someone named Gunnar Pedersen in Wisconsin. He must be one of the men who had paid for their tickets. Elin carefully slit open the envelope and read the letter, written in Swedish.

Dear Miss Carlson,

Thank you for your letter. We were all very disappointed that you and your sisters will not be coming to our village here in Wisconsin. It means we will be lonely that much longer. To be honest, my four friends were angry and did not accept your apology so well. But I do accept it because I think I can understand why you and your sisters would hesitate to come so far to meet five strangers. So I will divide the money you sent last week among the angry ones first, so they can look for new brides right away.

But I also want you to know that you are still welcome to come up and see for yourself what our community is like. Maybe you will like it, and maybe you will like one of us. But if not, it would be nice if we could write to each other once in a while. Not because I will expect anything—but just because I am lonely, and it would be so nice to have your letters to read.

If you don’t mind, I will tell you what I am like, and the next time you write you can tell me what you are like. I am twenty-one years old and I also have two sisters, but they are older than I am and are already married. I came to America with my family when I was ten years old and helped my father homestead our land. My father and I have sixty acres, but we may buy more land when we are able to. Our cows do very nicely in this climate, which is much like home. On one section of our land there is a beautiful little valley surrounded by hills that are covered with trees. This is the piece of land that I picked to build my own little house. Everyone in the community helps each other build houses out of timber, but as our farms prosper, we are able to make the houses bigger and add more rooms and put on shingles and paint them a nice color. That is my dream for my house. I would like it to be big and warm and filled with children.

For a pastime I enjoy making things out of wood. People say I am pretty good at it—although I know that might sound like I am bragging, and I don’t wish to do so. But I have made furniture for my family, including a cradle for my sister’s first baby. Always, people are asking if I can make a cradle like that for one for their babies. So even though you won’t be coming to our village, I will have plenty of things to occupy me this winter. I am saying this so you won’t feel bad for not coming.

I would like to continue to write to you, if you are willing, because you sounded like a very caring person in your letter. I would be interested to hear what things you enjoy doing and how you are living and if you like America as much as I do. Also, what things you miss from back home and what things you like about America so far.

I will close now, since I have filled up this piece of paper, but I hope you won’t mind that I am writing to you. And I hope we can become friends. Please know that I expect nothing else. It’s just so nice to get a letter in the mail once in a while.

Sincerely,
Gunnar Pedersen

For some reason, the letter made Elin smile. She could picture Gunnar Pedersen’s house nestled below the tree-covered hills and imagine how wonderful it would be to live on a farm near a forest again, in a place where it was quiet and peaceful, away from the noise and stench of the city.

It would be no trouble at all to write a short letter to him every week when she sent the money. But what would she tell him about herself? There was really nothing much to say. Maybe Kirsten or Sofia should write to him instead. Who knew? Maybe the correspondence would lead to romance for one of them. Gunnar Pedersen had asked Elin to write, saying that she seemed like a very caring person, but he didn’t know the truth about her past.

Elin refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope. She arrived back at the mansion long before her afternoon was used up, but she had no place else to go. She found her sisters upstairs cleaning one of the many bedroom suites. Sofia was chasing dust balls from beneath the bed with a mop. Kirsten was washing the windows with a vinegar solution and crumpled newspapers. The tart smell made Elin’s eyes water.

“
Hej
, I’m back,” she told them. “Sorry, Sofia, but your German friend still hasn’t arrived. And there was only one letter today. It was from one of the bachelors in Wisconsin. Shall I read it to you?”

“No thank you,” Kirsten said. She continued to work without bothering to turn around. Kirsten’s deepening depression worried Elin. She had noticed tears in her sister’s eyes several times when she thought no one was looking, and Kirsten had all but stopped talking to them while they worked. She seemed as despondent as Sofia had been on the voyage to America.

“Is something wrong, Kirsten?” She shook her head. “I hope you would tell me if there is.”