Whiter Than Snow (2 page)

That summer, she stayed in Denver, still living with her aunt Alice, who had softened a little. The old woman had come to depend on Lucy, not just to clean and cook but to provide a bit of company. And on her part, Lucy had become fond of the old woman. That summer, the two sat on the porch of the little house, shaded by trumpet vines, and listened to the evening sounds of children playing hide-and-seek or to that of the trolley as it rumbled along the next street. In the evenings, while the light was still good, Aunt Alice mended while Lucy read aloud from a poetry book. Sometimes the two popped corn or made divinity candy and shared it with their neighbors. Or they walked to the creamery, where Lucy spent her tips on ice cream for the two of them. Once, as they walked home in the darkness, stopping to smell the honeysuckle next door, Aunt Alice said, “I expect you miss your sister. I wouldn’t complain if she came for a visit.”

Lucy was so tickled that she wrote a letter to her sister that night, enclosing twenty dollars for the train fare. A week later, Dolly wired that she’d be arriving the next day. Lucy met her at the depot, met three trains that day, in fact, because Dolly had not told her which one she’d chosen. Although Lucy was exasperated, she had to admit that one of her muddled sister’s endearing qualities was that she assumed everything would turn out all right. And for Dolly, it always did.

The two girls had not been together in ten months—the price of a ticket to go home at Christmas had been too dear—so now they were overjoyed at seeing each other. Dolly said college made Lucy look smarter than ever, and Lucy observed that her sister was as plump as a ptarmigan and even prettier than she had been when Lucy had bid her good-bye in the fall.

“I thought you’d be spoken for by now,” Lucy said.

“Oh, there’s plenty that’s spoke to Papa about me, but they don’t do to suit me. However, I ever remain hopeful I will meet a management man, even though they are mostly married. Of course, that wouldn’t stop them from foolery, but I won’t have it. If I slept on my rights and had an illegal baby, Mama would cry her eyes out, and Papa would bust out my brains.”

Both girls laughed, because each knew that while Gus himself had led a corruptible life, he did not intend to let his daughters stray.

“I refuse to marry a man who will give me the life I’m accustomed to, and a hoistman or a cager won’t do,” Dolly continued. “I want someone who has more than two pair of britches to his name.”

“Do you have your eye on anybody?”

“Mr. Bibb, who is the second-level boss at the Fourth of July.”

“You mean Henry Bibb, the one who’s bald and straddly-legged? He must be more than thirty.”

Doll shrugged. “Mr. Bibb’s not so bad. He’s solid as granite, although I can’t follow him when he talks about books and learning. There’s not so many to choose from as you’d think, and I can’t wait around too long. I’m in my eighteenth year, and there’s wrinkles starting around my eyes. Mama says it’s time enough I was married.”

Lucy looked but could see nothing but perfection. “Don’t sell yourself too cheap, Doll.”

“I won’t. I don’t expect a man as rich as cream, but he’s got to earn more than a mucker does. Besides Mr. Bibb, there’s a couple of men who work the gold boats I’ve got my eye on. They come into the Prospector and leave me twenty-five-cent tips, sometimes fifty, even though they order only a five-cent cup of coffee. Imagine that! One of them’s a bounder, I expect, but there’s another—he said he’s been to college—and he thinks I’m swell. I have hopes.” She turned to Lucy suddenly. “What about you, Lucia?” she asked, using the childhood name. “You have any sharp luck meeting boys? You won’t find anybody in Swandyke smart enough for you.”

Lucy shook her head. “There’s nobody—not that I’m looking. You know I made that promise to Papa to go back to Swandyke when I’m done here, and where am I going to find somebody who’ll move up there with me? I never knew of a person to live in Swandyke by choice.” In fact, Lucy had given the subject a certain amount of thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t care to marry one day. She did, but, like Dolly, she didn’t want a penniless miner for a husband, a man who stank of dynamite and mine mud and who’d grab at her at night with hands that would never wash clean of grease and black grit. Nor did she care to live in a cabin that smelled of cabbage and dirty diapers. No, she, too, hoped to marry a management man who’d build her a house with an indoor bathroom and a dining room so that they wouldn’t have to eat in the kitchen. But if Dolly hadn’t found such a man in Swandyke, how could she? And it was sure she wasn’t about to meet a boy in school who’d agree to live at the top of the world. “I don’t think I’ll ever marry.”

“Doesn’t that bother you awful bad?”

Lucy shrugged. “I’ll be just frank. I’m not like you, Doll. There’s things worse to me than not having a husband. And I’ll have you. I think I can stand Swandyke if you’re living there.”

“Well, where place else would I live?” Dolly replied.

The girls had taken the trolley to the university so that Lucy could show her sister the campus. Dolly had never ridden in such a conveyance, and she slid on the hard seat each time the streetcar came to a stop. When they reached the school, Lucy reached up to pull the cord, but Dolly said she wanted to do it and yanked on the cord until the big yellow car came to a stop, its steel wheels screeching against the steel rails.

Holding on to her skirts, Dolly stepped off the car. “Imagine that, paved streets and a cement walk. I wonder wherever does the water go when the snow melts if there isn’t any dirt for it to go into.” She stood on the sidewalk a moment and looked around, her mouth open, a little like Lucy had been just ten months before.

But Lucy was used to the city now and felt herself worldly next to her countrified sister. “It goes into the sewer,” Lucy replied, about to explain how the storm-sewer system worked, but Dolly wasn’t listening.

“Will you look at that.” Dolly pointed at a woman whose dress was inches above her ankles. “Is she a slut?”

The woman heard the remark and gave Dolly a hard look, while Lucy shushed her sister.

“Well, she’s dressed naked,” Dolly said. “You could put all the clothes she has on into your pocket.”

“There’s lots that dress like that here.”

Dolly watched the woman walk away. “I might could try it. I’ve got good legs, but nobody knows it. Of course, Papa would be killing mad and slap me down for a hooker.” She thought for a moment. “Do you dress like that?”

“Living with Aunt Alice? What do you think?” Lucy laughed.

“You have to admit it would be nice not to wear long skirts that drag through the snow and dirt. I get awful tired of sewing strips of material around the bottom of my hems to keep the muck from ruining them.”

Lucy led the way across the campus, and Dolly forgot her hems when the sisters passed a trio of boys. Eyeing Dolly, the young men stepped off the sidewalk to let the two girls pass. One bowed as he took a pretend cape from his shoulders and threw it across the muddy walk in front of the girls. Dolly was confused, although Lucy understood the gesture and smiled.

“Are they fresh?” Dolly whispered, and when Lucy shook her head, Dolly gave the boys a brilliant smile.

“You a freshman?” one asked.

“What?” Dolly replied.

“She’s visiting,” Lucy said.

“Just our luck.” The boy pretended to pick up the cape and put it back over his shoulders.

The two girls walked along silently, Lucy thinking nobody had ever done a Sir Walter Raleigh impression for her. “Doll, why don’t you go to college, too?” she asked.

Dolly looked up at her sister, startled. “Why would I do that? I never even liked high school.”

Lucy didn’t hear the reply, because the thought, which had come upon her suddenly, now took hold. It was a splendid idea. “In three more years, I’ll be finished. You could enroll then. Despite what Pa says, Aunt Alice is a dear, and I know she’d let you live with her. You could study anything you wanted, maybe home economics, and you’d have your pick of boys here. You wouldn’t ever have to go back to Swandyke.” For Lucy, the idea was perfect. Because of the promise made to her father, she herself was tied to the mountains, but her sister would get away, and such was Lucy’s nature and the affection the girls had for each other that instead of being jealous, she was glad for Dolly. One of them would have a chance.

“But I’d want to go back to Swandyke. I wouldn’t live anywhere else on God’s earth.”

Lucy stared at her sister.

“I wouldn’t be happy where there weren’t mountains. You think they’re a cage, but they make me feel safe, like they’re putting their arms around me. If I lived out here where it’s flat, I’d be afraid I’d blow away.”

“But Doll, you don’t know that. You’ve been here hardly two days. You’d grow to like it.”

“That’s a thing you know in your bones.”

“You could try it, sign up for just one quarter of college. I know you’d change your mind about Swandyke.”

Dolly shook her head. “I don’t care about learning, and besides, I’d never be happy anyplace but home. It’s a thing I know about myself.”

And then Lucy understood. She hated Swandyke, but to her sister, the town was home. Dolly had never been ambitious, never wanted to leave, and where Lucy did indeed think of the high mountains as prison walls, Dolly took comfort in them. While Lucy thought of Swandyke as endless mountain winters and the cold and the mud, Dolly saw the town for its short, sharp summers, so hot that you could get sunburned walking to the privy. Dolly reveled in the wildflowers, like bright jewels, and the wind in the jack pines, which sounded like running water. “You could meet dozens of boys here,” Lucy said in a last attempt to change Dolly’s mind.

“But like you said, what one of them’s ever going to live in Swandyke? No, I’ll find a husband at home.”

Dolly went back to Swandyke after a week, saying she had had a fine time, but as they got off the trolley at the depot, Lucy saw her sister turn a moment to the far range of mountains, just a thin ridge of blue, still dotted in spots with white snow, and Doll’s eyes lit up. Lucy knew her sister’s heart was glad to be returning there.

Doll promised to visit again, and Lucy promised to go home at Christmas, and the two girls separated, Dolly boarding the coach, then waving from a window as the train pulled out, waving until Lucy could no longer see her.

That night when Lucy went to bed, she found a note on her pillow. “Here’s your $20 back. I make my own money now.” But there were twenty-five one-dollar bills in the envelope. “Papa doesn’t know how much I make in tips. I’d be glad for you to spend it on books—gladder than if Papa gave it away.”

After that, whenever Dolly wrote to Lucy, she enclosed a dollar or two. She never returned to Denver.

Lucy went home at Christmas, as she had promised, happy to see her family. She loved Dolly, as well as her father and mother and all the little ones. But she was happier yet to return to school. The cold and the ugliness of the mountains affected her, made her gloomy. She would get used to all that again when she had to. She might even be happy there, since her childhood had not been an especially harsh one by mountain standards and she could force herself to look at the bright side of things. But she didn’t want to think about Swandyke until she had to, and she concentrated on her studies, making top grades, and once again, she was awarded a scholarship. When she began her third year at DU, she realized that she was half-finished with college. She was on the downhill side of her education.

In the fall of that third year, Lucy met Ted Turpin. They did not get acquainted on campus, and in fact, Ted was not even a student at the university. He attended the Colorado School of Mines in nearby Golden, and he came into the drugstore to buy a bottle of Mercurochrome. Then he sat down on a stool at the soda fountain and ordered a Coca-Cola.

Ted reached for the glass that Lucy set down in front of him, and she saw an angry cut on the back of his hand and said, “I can get you some cotton if you want to swab that thing with the Mercurochrome.”

“Pretty ugly, isn’t it?”

Lucy shrugged. She’d seen worse.

“I got it on a gold dredge. I’ll bet you a dollar you don’t know what a gold dredge is.”

Lucy put the tip of her tongue on her upper lip and cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at Ted. She’d never cared for boys who assumed they knew more than she did, and she thought to show up this one. He was tall and thin, with a lean face and sandy hair, and appeared so sure of himself. “And I’ll bet you two dollars I can name the dredge. It was the Liberty, wasn’t it? The other two are shut down for repairs, and there’s not but three gold dredges in Colorado.”

Ted stared at her, then reached into his pocket for the two bills. “How’d you know that?”

“I lived in Swandyke in my growing-up years.”

“Well, aren’t you the lucky one!” Ted grinned so broadly that Lucy softened a little.

“You work on the dredge?” she asked.

“No, at least not yet. I’m majoring in mining engineering. I went up to the Swan River with a class that’s studying gold mining. We wanted to see how a dredge worked.”

“It’s noisy,” Lucy told him.

“That’s for sure. But it’s a fine way to mine gold. Besides, you can’t beat the location. I never saw a thing as pretty as those mountains. I’d sure like to climb them one day—you know, with ropes and all.”

Lucy studied Ted a moment to see if he was joking. She’d never known anyone who’d climbed the mountains for fun. You just climbed them because they were in the way.

“You ever done that?” he asked.

“I never wanted to.”

“Maybe if you’d grown up where it’s flat, you would.”

Maybe not, she thought, but she said, “You want that cotton?” Ted nodded, and Lucy pinched off a piece from under the counter, then opened the bottle of Mercurochrome and swabbed the cut herself with the orange stuff. She blew on the medicine, not that she needed to dry it, but she liked the touch of Ted’s hand.

Business was slow that day, and the two young people talked for an hour, Lucy leaning her elbows on the counter. When the owner of the drugstore frowned at them, Ted ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and, later on, a soda. But finally he said it was time to go, and he picked up his bottle of medicine and swung around on the stool, then swung right back. “Say, would you like to take in a moving picture on Saturday night? There’s a theater downtown that shows them, you know.”