Jake fantasized about Evie coming to find him. The thought crept up on him as he kneeled to work after lunch sometimes. Her waiting on the Jeffries’ stoop that night or following him on the street. He hung around the station on weekends when trains came in. They could meet up and it would turn out all right. She’d have him back.
Evie never came to Lincoln. Nobody came to visit Jake, and that galled him. He knew then what a heel he’d been.
He was reading in his room when the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The siren from the power plant blared the moment news was wired from France, at 2:20 a.m. General Foch met a delegation of German officers and politicians in a private railcar in the Forest of Compiègne to sign at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The generalissimos maintained their flair through it all. Four years of industrialized warring, genocide, and slaughter, sixteen million deaths worldwide. Jake later read of great bonfires in Omaha that were lit to celebrate the Armistice that night. An effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm burned in Farnam Street outside the courthouse. The dummy was carried in a coffin through the streets, then laid out to be plugged through with rifle shots by the Omaha Gun Club before being set ablaze. The big whistles of the Union Pacific repair shops blew the moment it was known that Germany had come to terms with surrender. The celebration in Lincoln was more subdued. With Spanish flu at its devastating height, most people stayed home rather than risk infection dancing arm in arm with a yawping celebrant. It was much the same through the holidays. There were no Christmas pageants. Stores were mostly empty. Mail was still delivered, streetcars still ran, although all postmen and trolley drivers wore surgical masks while they worked. Some nights Jake had the run of the city.
He didn’t do much. He saved money and planned what would come next. He thought of carrying through on his plans to run, sans Evie. To California or Texas, wherever he wanted. In pamphlets and travel books he learned about the interesting life one could have in places other than Nebraska. It was all just dreaming. Jake didn’t have the money to leave. He’d been sending half of what he saved each month to Dennison’s office in Omaha. Not to make it up to Tom, nothing like that. Jake just felt it was right to send the money. He felt bad having stolen. A guy like Billy Nesselhous might think something like this was pathetic, but doing the right thing was important to Jake. Eventually, at least.
Jake thought about how things had been in Omaha.
Sometimes Evie had betrayed herself by saying she knew Jake would hurt her someday. She was afraid he’d leave, and she’d be stuck alone. “That’s the way it is,” she said, “for a girl kept in her rooms.”
Most nights he tried to be happy his plans didn’t work out. So many things could have gone wrong if they’d eloped to San Francisco. What did he know about marriage? This was a rational tack, one he rarely convinced himself of. When he was lonely, on the other hand, when he woke in the middle of the night, Jake felt different about him and Evie going separate ways.
Nights in Lincoln left ample space for regrets. Jake saw how much of his life had been blind luck. All he’d done was make an awful mess of what he’d been given.
Anna quit asking about Karel after her first year at the state sanitarium. The grounds were a few hours northwest of Omaha, but a train came through the town, Heller, to drop off passengers midmorning and returned in the evening with the reverse heading. Herr visited often, as did Maria. When they came to catch her up on news from the neighborhood, Anna stopped them if they talked about Karel, rare as news about him was anyway. “I don’t care,” she’d say. She’d carry on without him. Women from a local Presbyterian church brought string and canvas to work with. There were lunches and teas and other sick girls. Anna had all she needed to keep herself going.
The state sanitarium wasn’t so bad. She had friends. She had teachers. She had treatment. What the doctor prescribed at the home wasn’t all that different from what Maria tried already. A steady diet of cod liver oil, fresh dairy milk, mushrooms of three seasons. Anna pursued this diet in earnest at the country home, a prickly nurse pacing over the girls’ shoulders during the four daily meals to ensure they cleaned their plates and downed three pints of whole milk. No girl was allowed to leave dinner if even a single morsel was uneaten. The most notable change was an order to take three hours of sunlight in daily absorption sessions. That was what made the difference for Anna. The air on Clandish was too clogged up with industry and had only been worse in the Bowery. Anna’s illness first appeared when the Miihlsteins arrived from overseas, although insufficient nutrition on the ship over was partly to blame, Dr. Emmett surmised. Secreting Anna away in the attic had only made her symptoms worse. “Proper nourishment. Fresh air and sunlight,” Dr. Emmett told her. “That’s the only cure.” And it worked, over time. Her case of rickets wasn’t such a bad one. Under the care of a capable physician who had a sound, rational mind and was aware of modern science, rickets was usually overwhelmed.
Dr. Emmett kept up a competent, starched front. In his black suit and prim Windsor knots. His bushy white mustache waxed so it extended outside his cheekbones, with matching white hair combed to the right. He kept a big office at the southeast corner of the building, what they called the lodge, furnished with varnished birchwood pieces, where he signed papers most of the day. His Model A was kept in front until he drove home in the afternoon, the residents wishing him off from their lounging chairs as they sunbathed on the lawn. Dr. Emmett sometimes gave girls rides around the grounds after lunch, particularly on icy winter days when he could make the Ford fishtail, four girls clinging to each other in the back and screaming for joy. Emmett bouncing along in his own seat up front, laughing just as loud, just as joyously, throughout what he called his automotive treatment. He claimed to have patented the technique.
A day went by fast at the home. There was so much for Anna to do. Wall-to-wall activities, the grounds to explore, a red oak forest, a stream. The absorption sessions on the lawn. The treatments and meals and chewing mint leaves if she felt nauseous and lining up to sip cod liver oil off the tablespoon a nurse held and the long soaks in zinc bathtubs. All required by Dr. Emmett. Add on what the sanitarium teacher demanded. Lessons assigned for the girls’ benefit (and mandated by the state) in the chalk-dusty classroom on the third floor of the lodge, across from where the girls slept. Elocution. English, French, and Latin vocabulary. General Math. American History. Typing. Biology and Social Problems. The girls loved speaking French after a mademoiselle from the town came to school them. Mademoiselle, not much older than the girls, married a doughboy and came over with him. After she came to teach, for the next week at least, the girls practiced their nasals nonstop, proud of the way they sounded, and tried to sway their hips like the mademoiselle did when she sauntered the halls of the girls’ sanitarium.
There was the gymnasium, built in an annex to the back of the building, where girls learned to heave a basketball toward its hoop. There were social clubs led by girls, in cliques of different ethnic groups, where cooking, sewing, and domestic science were emphasized. There was the art club, whose leaders swore in Anna as a member during her first meeting with them. In the art club’s charter was a line about “imitating and emulating great European masters,” added at Dr. Emmett’s behest, but this dictum wasn’t strictly adhered to. They gathered around tables in the cafeteria three afternoons a week and broke open crates where the supplies were stored. Oil pastels and India ink and aluminum cans of shellac and a glass jar of acetone begged off the groundskeeper and blocks of clay and wire gouges to slice the clay. Balls of yarn and twine and oddly angled patches of fabric that were donated by the Lutheran women.
Not that it was easy to make friends. It had been a long time since Anna spoke to a child she wasn’t related to. There were awkward moments. Who to sit by at meals. Sleeping in the vaulted dorming hall, where iron bed frames lined the walls and only eight inches separated her mattress from those on either side. Worst of all was Anna’s first experience in the ba
thing room.
Three nights a week, on a rotating schedule, the girls soaked in one of the large zinc tubs that were packed into the room. The experience was pretty much like it sounded, Anna supposed. Warm mineral water, a bathtub. Like any bath. Except for the three other girls who shared the room with her and the nurse who made sure each girl submerged completely and spent the requisite forty-five minutes soaking in the mineral solution.
Nurse Methfessel half pulled off Anna’s dress her first evening assigned to the baths, undid the buttons, and slipped off the shoulders before Anna objected and covered herself. “Don’t be ridiculous,” the nurse snapped. Anna held desperately to the bust of her state-issued dress. She wouldn’t budge, no matter how Methfessel hectored her.
The other girls chased out the nurse. “We’ll take care of her,” they promised.
Anna was fifteen, although she hardly looked ten, the hollow look around her eyes, her chest sunken between the arrested buds of her breasts. The thought of exposing her deficiencies was stultifying. Anna was aware of her absurdity. But the other girls didn’t make demands like the nurse had. They let her alone in the corner while they disrobed and got in the water. Anna watched the three girls tiptoe over dewy tile and climb in without peeking. Anna had yet to discover that she could trust these girls. “Go on,” one of them said. Her name was Mina. “We won’t watch.” The three turned their heads, their bodies, so Anna could uncover in peace.
It had been a long time since she’d been naked in front of anyone. And now it was required in front of these girls. Mina with her hair tied with ribbon so her ears stuck out. Her large eyes made her look nervous. She was the tallest, the most developed, and you couldn’t tell anything was wrong except for her hips, her giant rump, and the flab around her knees. None of them were perfect. Kate’s left elbow jutted severely, and her long body could twist nearly all the way around like a contortionist. Sylvie was stuck crooked in the shoulders and hips, like she was posing on a pageant stage, and all that hair under her arms and on her privates. These girls had been residents longer than Anna. There was meat on their bones. They lay submerged up to their chins and stared blankly at the ceiling.
Anna peeled her undergarments over her flange of hipbone, her knobby knees, and crawled over the high side of her zinc tub to sink into the mineral water then float back to the surface. The water was amniotic and warm.
“There you go,” Mina said. “We told you. Listen to us. We’ll take care of you.”
Visits to the bathing room soon became the best part of living at the lodge. Four girls floating with water over their ears, long hair adrift around their heads. It was sort of quiet. Anna heard pipes clank inside the walls. How there was someone clacking down the hallway outside, back and forth, Nurse Methfessel with the towels. These noises louder to Anna with her ears under the water. Subterranean and baritone noises. She imagined being someplace else, her ears under the water, in that enveloping white noise of the state sanitarium for girls.
They lined up on the cedar bench after, the bathing room opaque with steam, crisp towels wrapped around their frail, tanned bodies. It took a while to come back from wherever they’d gone under the water. Until one of them said something, “It’s hot in here,” and broke the spell.
The treatments worked. Anna was getting better. Her family saw this each time they visited—how she stood straighter, how she moved more natural, her steps more fluid and assured. If not strong and lively, she was stronger, livelier. Even Karel saw how she improved. He came in September 1918, the only occasion he visited.
They rented bicycles at the train station and arrived around lunchtime. Herr, Karel, Theresa, and Silke. Anna met them on the veranda and led a tour. First around the lodge, the lobby with its green upholstered sofas and shelves of paperback books, a pitcher of lemonade asweat with condensation. Then to the dining room, a cook setting out places for lunch. Up to the classroom and the hall where the girls slept. Back to the lawn until lunch was served. Anna didn’t know what else to say. All but Karel had visited before, several times. Her sisters didn’t need the tour and were bored walking the halls, mocking admiration at the woodwork, how clean everything was. Karel didn’t care either. He straggled behind, waited in doorways, chewed a hangnail in his thumb the whole time. He was too busy looking at the other girls. Girls who whispered to each other and giggled when Karel stopped to see them. It wasn’t very often a real live boy was up in the hallways of the lodge. One who was tall and swept wild hair off his forehead with his hand.
At least on the veranda they could sit in rocking chairs and stare out into the woods. There were katydids to listen to. Anna didn’t need to speak. They breathed deep because the air was fresh way out here. The aroma of walnut trees was strong this time of year, and it was cool on the veranda, where ceiling fans spun above them, the blade mechanisms connected to a single motor by a long rubber belt. They could smell trees. They could investigate how a ceiling fan worked. They didn’t have to talk.
Karel was much bigger. Broader in the shoulders, his voice deeper. He didn’t hardly look like Karel, except he did, of course. He was dark, hollows under his eyes, like always. His hair long, down past his ears, and undercut on the sides. He was just older. He’d grown.
After a while Herr and Silke and Theresa went inside to see what was holding up dinner. They hadn’t brought anything to eat on the train and then that bike ride. Now lunch was late. What had they been thinking? It was a Sunday, and lunch was often late on Sundays. There were no treatments either. Most of the staff was at home or at a church picnic, besides a cook and Nurse Methfessel. What was the rush? The girls who lived here looked forward to a lazy day.
The two of them alone, Karel asked Anna how she liked it at the sanitarium.
“It’s fine,” she told him, so quiet she wasn’t sure if she’d actually spoken or just moved breath over her lips and thought the words. “I feel better up here. It’s the truth.”
“Yeah? That’s good.”
Karel was quiet too. He looked exhausted, the way he slumped in his rocking chair, one close to the railing, where the sun angled in to wash over him. His words sounded forced out, his voice straining to civility. Anna supposed he was trying to be nice to her.
“I didn’t get to say good-bye,” he said. “I was a little sore about that for a while.”
“You were mad at me?”
“Yeah. But don’t worry. I forgave you for it. Herr told me it wasn’t your fault.”
“Of course it wasn’t my fault. They took me. How on earth could you be mad at me?”
“Don’t get angry. We didn’t say good-bye. That’s all.”
He bit at his hangnail and stared into the trees.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s factual.”
“Well. I’m happy to see you. I missed you.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“And I felt bad. I promised to buy you an overcoat. Purple. Just like the other one. I’ll still get one. I’ll get you one for winter.”
“Don’t,” Anna said. “They tossed out that ratty thing when I got here. Some ladies from the town make sure all the girls have coats. It’s nice of you. But don’t bother.”
Anna let herself get worked up for a moment. She breathed deep the attar of walnut bouquet and made herself sound bored talking to her brother. She didn’t know how she was supposed to respond to what Karel told her, his impossible promises. His trying to get her excited for what would turn out to be nothing. She didn’t know at all what to say to him. That he looked like a hoodlum? That hair. That she was embarrassed? That she didn’t approve of his habits? What she’d heard about him anyway.
She’d already accepted that he wasn’t going to visit. He shouldn’t have come.
And then Theresa put it to Anna at lunch. “What’d you say to him? I’ve never seen him so upset.” “There’s no reason to be rude,” Silke said. “He takes how you treat him so hard.”
But Karel didn’t look upset to Anna. He
looked fine. Some girls wanted to sit by Karel. They grabbed his arm and bade him to their table. He shook them off and sat next to Anna instead. Anna didn’t think he was upset. He didn’t care about her. She knew this. How could he be mad? Anna didn’t need to counteract all that, not like Theresa said. She wasn’t being harsh to Karel, she didn’t think. They didn’t say much while eating, but it wasn’t being rude. They had nothing to say. Anna was polite. She passed the salt when asked. Buttered a slice of bread for Karel. If she was short with him she didn’t mean to be.
There was more sitting on the porch in silence after lunch. There was Dr. Emmett pulling his Ford behind the school, a new girl with him, the nurses rushing through the halls to find out what had brought him in on his day off. Emmett busy with the new girl all evening in the infirmary, which wasn’t all that uncommon, Anna explained. There were more snide comments from Silke and Theresa, until they were too bored sitting on the porch to even complain. There were more girls who came to talk to Karel, asking if he’d been for a stroll in the woods yet, twisting blond curls around their fingers, and would he like to stroll with them. Girls who tossed their heads and whinnied when they laughed. Silke and Theresa were tickled about the way those girls acted around Karel. Their train didn’t leave until dusk.
Maybe she shouldn’t have given Karel the cold shoulder. Anna considered that as she tried to fall asleep. All those iron beds in a row. The girls tossing because it was hot up there, even with the windows at each end propped open to catch a breeze, when there was a breeze. This attic was not much different from the attic at the Eigler house in that respect. A group of them lined up to sleep. She couldn’t help but listen to the others. Their sighing, the way some of them got upset at how they were still awake, like they could conquer wakefulness with more intense exertion. Karel was frustrated so easily as a little boy, and always preoccupied. He wasn’t much different now, Anna thought.
Kings of Broken Things Page 22
