by Carla Kelly
“Sigi,” Della repeated, enchanted. “Saul told me that when we sleep, our dreams have a way of expressing events we wouldn’t want to talk about.”
“He’s right. Sitting around in a Viennese coffeehouse, Sigi taught him well. Keep doing what you’re doing, Della. You’re on the right track. You are healing from a tragic personal loss, and you’re talking about it.”
She said a silent prayer of thanksgiving for Dr. Isgreen. “And the other matter I wrote you about?” She couldn’t help that her face went hot and red. Was there a time when a lady wouldn’t blush?
“You’re so impatient,” Emil said. “Your mind is busy healing now. You have plenty to do.” He leaned closer. “Never doubt that, Della. You’re on a good path.” He laughed again, but softly this time. “In a few years when you’re wiping snotty noses and trying to manage a brood of little ones, you’ll wonder what you worried about. Feel free to write and tell me about it. I mean, you’ll probably want to give some of them away to gypsies.”
It was her turn to laugh. “All right! I should quit worrying?”
“Absolutely.” He took his arm out from around her shoulder. “I still wish I were the lucky man, but I’ll find someone as charming as you.”
“I have no doubt about that,” she told him, and held out her hand.
He shook her hand and stood up with her. “I had better go say something to the pretty bride and give her a kiss, if I dare. Then I’m off to Tooele to visit my mother. On the way back, I’m stopping in Knightville to visit another person who is my patient. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
She kissed his cheek, grateful beyond measure for the Emil Isgreens of the world. “Emil, is it permissible for me to love you a little bit?”
“You’d better. I’d hate to think I wasted all those years in medical school if there wasn’t some adulation involved.”
“Oh, you! Do be serious.”
“I am serious. More than you know. Let me know how things go with you. Write to me if I can help you in any way.”
She watched him walk away and quietly closed a chapter in her book of life. She might have closed it sooner, but watching him cross the reception hall, Della knew she had needed Emil Isgreen precisely now.
The next chapter promised to be harder, so she softened it with a pleasant stop first. After her own hug, tears, quick words with Mrs. Whalley, and the promise to visit in a few weeks, she took Angharad to Auerbach’s, first for cream cheese and date nut bread and then to the floor with offices.
They walked slowly past the row of pictures her lovely Winter Quarters students had drawn for the good man who was her supreme boss a summer ago. Her stepdaughter paused the longest time in front of her own picture, the one Da had helped her with, showing the two of them drawing a Welsh dragon.
“Da needs a dragon,” Angharad said and put her hand in Della’s. “He needs a singing dragon.”
“Then you’d better draw him one for Christmas,” Della said, managing to speak around the lump in her throat.
“I’m all out of Magic Paper,” Angharad reminded her.
“I think a dragon for Da deserves something better than the inside paper lining in a man’s shirt,” she said. “I know just the place.”
And I had better find myself a job next week to finance my impulsive whims, Della thought as she led Angharad to Stationery and turned her over to Mr. Hovey, who presided over paper and pens and envelopes and all things artistic.
“Mr. Hovey, we need an artist’s sketchbook and colored pencils,” she said.
They left Auerbach’s two dollars lighter, buoyed up by Mr. Hovey’s assurance that nowhere, not even in ZCMI, could they have found better art supplies. Mr. Hovey took the liberty of whispering that he had applied her Auerbach’s employee discount, which told her he was going to supply the ten percent difference when she and Angharad left his department. Did a lowly, former Menswear clerk deserve such friends? She decided she did. Dr. Isgreen would have approved.
Anders, Court and Landry, Attorneys at Law. She read the discreet and utterly elegant wrought iron title, collected herself, and opened the door.
Chapter 38
L
The lobby was empty. Her heart thumping against her corset, Della sat Angharad down and pulled up a wooden chair. “You can use this as your drawing table,” she instructed.
She handed the child the copy of Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club that she had bought from Mr. Hovey for Owen’s Christmas present. Owen had told her once how much he loved the book, but he didn’t have a copy. “Look through these pages and copy some of the illustrations. We can use that as wrapping paper for Da’s gift. I won’t be long.”
“Where are you going?” Angharad made herself comfortable and took the sketchbook from the bag.
“I need to see my Uncle Karl for a few minutes. It might be longer.” She took her cream cheese date bread sandwich from the bag and pointed to the drinking fountain nearby with its column of pointed paper cups. “Keep yourself busy, my love. I’ll be back.”
The steps to the second floor seemed extra steep, but not steep enough to prevent her from ultimately standing in front of her uncle’s office door with the frosted window. She knocked, wincing at how loud it sounded in the silent building.
“Come in.”
She opened the door and peered through the area where his secretary ordinarily sat and into the office of Karl Anders, well-known railroad lawyer, who never lost a case and never cared one iota what happened to the only child of his black-sheep brother.
Perhaps she was too harsh. He greeted her with a pleasant smile and gestured toward his office. He went to close the door, but she stopped him, wondering where her courage came from, she who usually turned so quiet and biddable around her Anders relatives.
In fact, she walked back through the secretary’s office and opened the outside door, leaving herself a clean path if she felt like leaping up and running. To his quizzical expression, she merely stated, “Angharad needs to know where I am. I set her to drawing downstairs, but she’s just a child. You understand.” Or do you? she asked herself as he indicated that she sit. You were never around your own daughters too much. A pity. They turned out much like their mother.
“I won’t monopolize your time, Uncle Karl,” she said. “I’m only here because I’ve been thinking a lot about my father lately. Do you ever think about him?”
She hadn’t meant to ask that. At least she said it politely. “I know he was the family ne’er-do-well, but he took good care of me, and I loved him.”
Still nothing. She found the gumption to look him full in the face and saw all the uncertainty there and something else. She doubted it was remorse—maybe a second cousin to remorse. Better just forge ahead. “I never thanked you for sending me that letter you probably should have given me years earlier. It made a difference in my life. Imagine what it might have done if I had been able to look for and find my mother.”
She had memorized the letter. Even now, it lay in the top drawer of the bureau in her Provo home, nestled among her underthings. “All those years I thought, or was taught to think, that my mother had abandoned me and your brother. Imagine my surprise to learn that she had been dragged away from us by her father, who, I can only assume, had a smaller heart than even you and Aunt Caroline.”
He made a sound in his throat that sounded so jarring that it startled her. If she didn’t know him better, she might have thought it was remorse.
There. She had wanted to say that for years. Through lonely nights that turned into years in the Anders mansion, she had wanted to sob out her sorrow over her father’s death, her guilt at their final exchange of words, the shock of thinking her mother had abandoned her. No one in the Anders household had ever wanted to listen. After Aunt Caroline commanded her to be silent, Della had no choice but to bury all the hurt in her mind.
Until now. Until she stood over another hoist in another state, staring down at her own husband helping a wou
nded man to the surface. As she calmly talked to her uncle, she felt sudden liberation. It was nearly euphoric.
“Anyway, I want to ask you a few things about my father. Can you tell me something about his childhood? I’d like to know a little more, if you please. I’ll leave you alone then. I know your time is valuable. If you can just send me a little note now and then, when you remember some childhood incident, I’d like that.”
She gave him her brightest smile, because he suddenly looked so sad, so old, so beaten down. She hadn’t planned to do this, but she quickly came around his desk and kissed his cheek, amazed at how good that made her feel.
She was almost out the last door when he called to her. She turned around, already thinking ahead to getting a trolley for the ride back to the Interurban depot, her mind on a long, long letter to Owen tonight. “Yes?”
“Sit down for a few minutes. I have something to tell you.”
Probably only days ago, a sentence like that from her uncle would have churned her insides into jelly. As it was, she sat, interested but not involved.
“Before he went to the Colorado Plateau, your father did a singular thing for me.” He sat down, or rather seemed to fall into his chair, as though his legs were suddenly strangers.
“Uncle?” she asked, worried.
He waved a hand at her. “I’m fine. No, no, I’m not. I should have told you this years ago, and what’s more, I should have done something about it.”
How bad could it be? Della knew she could handle whatever venom or vitriol he had stockpiled somewhere. She gave him her interested face.
“I always wanted to go to law school,” he began, and glanced at the elaborate diploma from the University of Pennsylvania, with its fancy calligraphy, elaborate scrollwork, and Latin phrases. He managed a smile. “Your father thought that was vaguely unmanly. He was a freight hauler then, from Salt Lake to where Fort Duchesne is now. He worked hard and I know he played hard, to your grandfather’s distress.”
“Aunt Caroline told me years ago he was the black sheep,” Della said, remembering all the venom.
“That’s not strictly true, Della. Let me tell you what he did.” He leaned forward, folded his hands in front of him on the desk, tried to make eye contact, and failed.
As she watched him struggle, she slowly began to realize that of the two brothers, Frederick was not the weak one.
“Father and Fred had a flaming quarrel one night. Fred ran upstairs to pack.” Karl managed a self-deprecating laugh with no humor in it. “I was cowering in my room, the good son. Before he left, never to return, he pushed an envelope full of greenbacks under my door. He wrote on it, ‘For Law School. I’ll send it every year.’ There was one hundred dollars in that envelope, Della. He sent it every year until I passed the bar and returned to Utah Territory.”
Della stared at him, unable to speak. Her heart breaking, she thought of her own experience with Aunt Caroline, who informed her over breakfast one morning that there was no money for her to go to the University of Utah, and she would have to do it by herself, if at all. Reared in the hard curriculum of Aunt Caroline University, Della hadn’t expected any help, but her porridge went down hard, because she was sitting with her cousins, who had elevated the smirk to a fine art. That did hurt.
She had only been able to afford a one-year teaching course, and she earned her way through by working summers and after class and on weekends at her old library job. Sitting there in Uncle Karl’s office, she realized, to her surprise, that she had managed quite well.
Uncle Karl had to have known what she was thinking. His face had gone pale and he looked away from her.
“I owed Fred four hundred dollars. When I could afford to pay it, I told Caroline I was sending it to him. She said your father would only spend it on liquor and bad women.” He bowed his face to his desk. “I listened to her and kept it. I promised myself that you would have it for college someday, if you wanted to go. You were probably about eight then.”
There was nothing to say to that, and no force compelling her to sit there and hear more. She got up quietly and left the office. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard Uncle Karl call her name. She looked up at the landing to see him silhouetted there, not quite a man, not quite a shadow.
“Della, come to my house. You and … I can’t pronounce her name … can spend the night. Maybe even visit with Caroline, if she feels up to it.”
Quite possibly when Hades freezes over, Della thought. Why yes, that’s when I’ll visit.
“I think not, Uncle Karl,” she heard herself say, sounding so kind. “I would only upset her. You two have a Merry Christmas, though.”
Angharad had saved Della half of the date bread sandwich, which Della ate as they strolled along toward the depot. The afternoon shadows announced the end of another December day, but there wasn’t any breeze and the brisk air felt good after Uncle Karl’s office.
On the train, she admired Angharad’s Pickwick drawings. “We can glue them together and have more than enough to cover the box for Da’s book,” she said.
“I’ll draw him a dragon after I practice a bit more. I want to get it right.”
“You will. I think we should roll it up and mail it to him,” Della said and found herself unprepared for the worried look Angharad gave her. “Dearest, what’s the matter?”
Oh goodness, what to do now? She felt suddenly helpless and stupid when Angharad started to cry. Was this how Frederick Anders and Owen Davis felt, when left to manage a little girl’s tears? Being a parent was not for the faint of heart, evidently. She gave her own father a silent round of applause as she worried about this child.
“He’s not coming home for Christmas?” Angharad managed to say.
Della pulled her close on her lap as the train swayed on through the darkness. “I know he is coming, my love. I want you to send him that dragon early, as a reminder. He must know how badly we need him.” Was it true? Was it wishful thinking? How could she know? Still, there was a child needing comfort, and Della Davis was the duly appointed adult.
She felt Angharad nod against her breast, grateful from her hat to her shoe tops that they could cry and worry and hold each other and never, never be left alone to cry in the darkness.
At that precise moment, she realized she would never think of Angharad as her stepdaughter ever again. They were bound together in this life, and together they would manage whatever came. “Stepdaughter” was for sissies. She closed her eyes against the sight of Uncle Karl sitting in his expensive office with the fancy diploma, paid for by her father, one freight load at a time, and later, one ton of ore at a time.
Papa, you were the best, she thought. I couldn’t be more proud of you if I tried, from now until I die.
Chapter 39
L
Her letter to Owen that weekend felt heavy enough to require block and tackle to get to the post office on Monday morning. She drew a Christmas wreath at the bottom of her letter, not to call undue attention to the holiday rapidly approaching but more of a gentle reminder from a wife.
Angharad had covered the kitchen table with dragons: big ones, little ones, dragons with music bubbles and notes coming from fiery maws, the kind of dragons that had probably kept the weaker English away from Wales for centuries, or so Angharad reckoned as she picked one for her teacher and set off to school.
Della reminded her daughter not to be alarmed if she came home and the house was empty. “Uncle Jesse has some scheme he wants to tell me about, and I do not know what to expect.”
In Sunday school yesterday, Uncle Jesse had whispered for her to visit him in his new digs in the Knight Building. It had snowed the night before, so she picked her way carefully down Center Street to the red brick building on the corner and inquired within at Knight Investment Company.
No question about it: Uncle Jesse knew how to design an office for maximum effect. He had the corner tower with a view, plus a comfortable sofa—probably to lull would-be investors into somno
lence—and a fireplace giving off welcome warmth. He smiled and gave an abracadabra wave of his hand, which made her laugh and put her entirely at ease. She knew this man.
He didn’t waste a minute. “Della, I need a typist. You are elected at thirty dollars a month. There is no answer but yes, or aye, as your husband would say.”
“Aye then,” she said promptly. “When do I start?”
“I could use you right now. I visited with Owen last week in Silver City, and he assured me you can read any handwriting on the planet, as long as it is not composed by orangutans.”
That sounded just like her man. “I can try. How is he doing? I get two letters a week, sometimes three, but I haven’t laid eyes on him and I miss him.”
That was blunt enough, but she knew this marvelous man well.
“He’s determined to finish shoring up Level Two—what a mess that was—and completing Level Three before Christmas. He has hired four more carpenters, and he is training them for world domination, or so he tells me. Do all Welshmen have the gift of tongues?”
“I believe they do. And then?”
Uncle Jesse’s eyes were full of sympathy as he shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s playing his cards close to his vest.” He set his hands down on his desk and gave her a level appraisal. “And we will let him, eh, Mrs. Davis? Give me a smile, if you have one, and I’ll show you where you’ll be working.”
L
She spent the afternoon practicing on the brand new Underwood Number Five typewriter on the second floor where the company lawyers and Jesse’s son William presided. She went to work happily, wishing only that Saladin lay at her feet, his long nose resting on her shoe as often as not. She never minded a little slobber.
The end of the day came almost too soon because the work was interesting, with correspondence going to Canada mainly. Will Knight had come out of his office at the end of the day to chat and hand her another letter for tomorrow. She looked at the mailing address. “My goodness, the prime minister of Canada?” she asked and squinted at the paper. “Sir Wilfrid Laurier?”
