“He tried,” Bea said, but her youth betrayed her. Barely twenty years old and although a married woman, she hadn’t yet learned to mask untruths on her face. It still flashed every emotion, just as it had when we three sisters shared a bed and huddled under a play tent of quilts in the sting of winter mornings. How little of the world she had experienced.
“Call us,” was all else she could say.
On that morning, just after the liberation of Paris, the entire country sat perched on the sill of celebration. Laughter was louder, and in everyone’s eyes gleamed a hopeful prospect, a wish we all held on to for easy victory, despite doubting its likelihood. Inside the passenger car I rode, the air grew dense with smoke from unfiltered cigarettes held loosely between fingers, passed about, and shared. In 1944, cigarettes had become scarce, but not so on that day.
Near me, only one other woman traveled alone, a thirtyish woman with hair dyed platinum blond like Jean Harlow’s. I thought of asking her to play a hand of rummy, anything to break the monotony of the ride and divert my attention. In the university library, once I’d introduced myself to a girl named Dot who later became one of my best friends. But the blond woman seemed engrossed in reading her newspaper, and perhaps I pondered on it too long. Perhaps people traveling alone wanted to be left alone.
I studied the scenes outside the window. In the last days of summer, wood ducks skimmed over low-water ponds, and ra zored pines swayed in the hills between Denver and Colorado Springs. Just outside of Pueblo, I saw a huge pile of salvaged rubber tires, precious commodities during the war, chained and watched over by a guard. In Pueblo, a town that held an Army air base and therefore another teeming depot, I debarked from the train, following the blond woman but preceding the throng of servicemen. An hour later, I changed trains and headed east. I tried to buy lunch in the dining car but changed my mind after I found it full of people pressed in against each other.
Across the plain, the land shook free of mountain, hill, and mesa, becoming instead long and close-fit to the earth’s contours, as a sheet fits a bed. Wild sunflowers grew in patches just feet away from the tracks. They made me remember something Mother once said to me. I had everyone beat in the eyes. Mine, she had said, like her own mother‘s, were as big and as deeply brown as sunflower centers. And that memory nudged another one. Hadn’t Mother once told us a story about sunflowers? During the years of our girlhood, she had whispered to us so many fairy tales, myths, and even some stories of her own making, that it was difficult to recall them all. In her own girlhood, she had once had aims of becoming a novelist, and in my opinion, she had an imagination fresh enough to have succeeded as a writer. Once I asked her if she’d ever regretted her decision to marry and have children, but she’d only laughed and rubbed my head. “Who better to tell my stories to than you girls?”
The story had been something about the sunflower heads, about how they follow the track of the sun. With my eyes closed, I reached far back onto the shelf of distant memory, but still I could not remember it.
The train made five stops between Pueblo and my destination, including one at Nepesta, where the Missouri Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads crossed. Outside my window, occasional ranch houses, signs of modest human habitation, dotted land that seemed most suitable for gophers and field mice. Then abruptly, outside of Fowler, the untrodden prairie ended, and miles of rowed crops in the fertile bottomlands of the lower Arkansas River began. For a few moments at a time, I saw stretches of the river—a silver-blue strand of waterway that curled back on itself and braided through stands of cottonwoods and willows. Near Rocky Ford, trucks piled high with ripe honeydew melons waited to cross the tracks, reminding me that summer was still at hand.
The train stopped at La Junta, home to another Army air base, where pilots received training in flying B-25 bombers. I debarked along with still more servicemen. La Junta, Spanish for “the junction,” was probably named for its location at the convergence of the old Santa Fe and Navajo Trails, and still served as a transportation hub, only now for trains and planes instead of horses and wagons. The train station was huge compared to the buildings in the surrounding area and contained a roundhouse, docks, restaurants, and hotel rooms.
I expected to see my party as soon as I arrived; however, for a time that seemed much longer than it surely was, I stood on the platform with my large traveling case sitting upright at my side, waiting alone.
My father’s old friend from seminary, the Reverend Willard Case, was to meet me and introduce me to the man who would become my husband. I had not seen the reverend in almost twelve years and wondered if I would recognize him. But as the depot finally began to clear of uniformed men and family members bustling about, I saw him striding toward me down the platform. He looked much as I had remembered him—wire-thin with a brisk walk. He removed a felt hat, the kind men found fashionable to wear with their suits during the war years, and I saw that since I’d last seen him, his once dark and unruly hair had turned into ribbons of silver strung away from his face.
As Reverend Case laid eyes upon me, recognition lit his face. “Ah, Olivia,” he said as he approached me with an outstretched hand. “We were late in arriving.” He took my hand in both of his. “And how was the journey?”
“Fine, fine,” I answered, glancing up not at him but instead at the man who accompanied him. He had a face that wasn’t unpleasant. No feature was too big or too small, but the resulting mixture was one that couldn’t be called distinctive or handsome, either, and he had thinning red-brown hair that made him appear older than the thirty years I had been told was his age. He was tall and broad and appeared strong, as I would’ve guessed a farmer to be. Dressed in a brown suit with faded knees and elbows, he held himself a step back, completely still, his hat in one hand.
Revered Case followed my eyes. “Yes, let me make the introductions. Mr. Ray Singleton, this is Miss Olivia Dunne.”
“Livvy,” I said as we shook hands. “Most everyone calls me Livvy, for short.”
I saw the lift of a smile in one cheek, but for only the slightest second, and then it was gone. Mr. Ray Singleton, who would become my husband as of this day, provided neither of us changed our minds, simply nodded in my direction. Then he stood back again, and holding his hat with both hands now, he shuffled it about in a circle.
He allowed Reverend Case to take the lead in conversation. “Any problems getting here?” the reverend asked me.
“Just a crowded train,” I answered.
He pointed to my bag. “Is this it?”
Funny how I had fit what was left of me into that one case. “For now, yes,” I answered.
Reverend Case directed our next moves. “We have the car parked nearby. Quite a little drive ahead of us,” he said with the smile that now I remembered. Although they shared the same profession, Reverend Case’s face and expressions lacked the hard edge that marked my father. While in Denver for the yearly conference, he had stayed in our guest room and had tolerated the spying games and antics of three young girls. Twelve years ago, even then I had wondered how this gentle man could have once been a close friend to my father. Or had my father perhaps been softer in his youth?
“Do we need to use the station services?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Please pardon me.”
In the ladies’ room, I removed my hat and pinned away feathers of hair that had escaped from the French twist hairstyle Bea had assisted me to put up for my special occasion. I checked my suit jacket from neck to waist, straightened my skirt, and smoothed out the lines that had creased my hem from hours of sitting in one place. And I regretted that because of rationing, I hadn’t been able to purchase nylons to wear.
This man, Ray Singleton, didn’t look anything like my sisters’ husbands, but then again, I didn’t look like my sisters. My body was lean and firm over the bones, not the sort that had ever lent itself to wolf whistles or men’s admiring comments.
I pulled out my compact and powdered my nose. I ran the puf
f three times over the birthmark above my upper lip, which softened its color. But until I started to pin the hat back in place on my head, until I began dropping hatpins that clinked and bounced on the concrete flooring, until I crouched down to retrieve the pins, I hadn’t noticed what I’d done to my shoes. On the train, I’d crossed the heels of my pumps over each other so many times that I’d worn ruts into the leather.
Two
Upon my return, Reverend Case advised Mr. Singleton to carry my suitcase, and then he led us to his aged DeSoto motorcar, a square-looking vehicle with balding tires and torn seats. I sat on the front bench seat beside Reverend Case, and Mr. Singleton sat directly behind me.
Just as a troop train was steaming into the station, we pulled away and headed east on the two-lane dirt and gravel road out of La Junta toward Las Animas, passing through the rural, nearly flat farmlands of the Arkansas River Valley. I’d come here once before, on a field trip to the old Bent’s Fort, arguably the most important trading post in U.S. history, but hadn’t taken much notice of the surroundings. With the windows down and the wind taking those loose hairs out from underneath my hat again, I gazed out at land that appeared more akin to Kansas than to the state that boasted the highest mountains on the mainland. We passed by straight rows of fields irrigated by canals, herds of cattle in numerous shades of brown and black, and shallow livestock ponds. How different from the clipped campus of the university where I had spent so much of my time before leaving to care for my mother. Reverend Case kept up a running description of every well, farm, and outbuilding we passed along the way.
“Now, Olivia, you should know this. The Singletons,” he said, nodding toward the man in the backseat, “have some of the best acreage in all of Otero County. Held it in the same family since the homesteading days. Isn’t that right, Ray?”
“Yes, sir.”
The reverend smiled and nodded to himself as he continued. “Out here we grow sugar beets, vegetables, and a bit of grains. And what with the war going on, farmers are held in highest regard.” He tapped the steering wheel with the heel of one hand and glanced my way. “No gasoline shortages for farmers. They get all they want. Right, Ray?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Farming,” the reverend said. “Feeding hungry mouths.” He wrapped his hand around the steering wheel now and nodded. “It’s a good life, Olivia.”
Outside my window, locoweed growing along the side of the road made me recall the story of Johann Gottfried Zinn, an explorer who wandered the mountains of Mexico. When he discovered some purple flowers he had never seen before, admiring them, Zinn pulled the flowers and put them in his bag. When thieves later attacked him, they tore open his sack and found the wilted flowers. Assuming he was a simpleton, they let him go, believing it to be bad luck to harm the dim-witted. Perhaps if I bolted from the car and dove out headfirst into the wild grass, maybe they’d deem me unfit for marriage. Maybe they’d let me go, too.
We came to the town of Wilson, which lay along the Fort Lyon irrigation canal. North of the Arkansas River and surrounded by farms and ranches that ranged from modest to impoverished, the town consisted of a church, cemetery, school, and post office. The reverend parked in front of a wood-framed church building covered with red peeling paint and topped with a narrow steeple complete with belfry. As Reverend Case showed us inside the church building, I again found it difficult to envision the friendship between my father and this man. Reverend Case had once studied alongside my father at one of the finest seminaries in the country. Certainly he could have served in many churches, but it seemed he focused his ministry out here by choice. After ushering us into the kitchen, the reverend said he would leave Mr. Singleton and me to ourselves for a spell, that he would await our decision in his office.
Before the ceremony, it was one final chance to change our minds.
Ray Singleton poured lemonade from the icebox and sat down across from me at a long table where I could easily imagine the church buffets spread out on Sunday after services. He cleared his throat but seemed unable to speak.
“Mr. Singleton,” I began.
His cheeks reddened before he spoke. “Ray, please.”
“Ray, then.”
I hoped he wasn’t too bashful to answer the question that had plagued me ever since first mention of this arrangement. Since the beginning of the war, the pressure on women to marry soldiers had been as powerful as the pressure put on men to enlist. It was everywhere: in the newspapers, magazines, songs, and movies. After all, the soldier was often heading to war to risk it all—his health, his body, his youth, even his life. A good girl didn’t have sex before marriage, so if a soldier wanted her, the best choice was marriage. In the popular movie The Clock, Judy Garland agreed to marry a serviceman within hours of meeting him. Women had been marrying soldiers they barely knew out of some patriotic code, but I wondered why a single man would agree to a union such as this one, sight unseen, and for no apparent benefit of his own. “I was wondering ...” But I was having trouble asking it. “I was wondering why you have agreed to this marriage.”
He shifted his weight in the chair, and one deep line sank into the center of his forehead. “When the pastor come out to see me and told me about your situation, I thought ...” He paused and swallowed hard. “I thought, maybe it’d be God’s will.”
God’s will. Hadn’t I been damning God and His will of recent? And had the reverend imposed some kind of religious pressure on Ray, similar to the patriotic pressure that had been placed on so many girls?
Ray waited long enough to take one deep breath. “And seeing as how my folks are passed on, and my brother got killed over there at Pearl Harbor ...” He cleared his throat again, raised a loose fist to his mouth, and half coughed into it. “Out there at my place, it’s been right lonely lately.”
Lonely, he said. Loneliness was a reason to marry I could accept. After all, marriages of convenience had inked the scrolls of history far back into earliest recorded time. Politics, power, greed, and graft, not to speak of family honor, had spurred on many a union between man and woman, but how many marriages had come to pass simply because of a need for human companionship ? Out of simple loneliness? And how many more arranged marriages had come to fruition than those of personal choice? I remembered back to my study of Bent’s Fort. One of the Bent brothers had married Owl Woman, the daughter of a Cheyenne priest, to keep the peace with Plains Indians, upon whose land the post was located. I found it fitting that I, who had always rev eled in learning the history of humankind, would now be participating in one of its longest, time-honored traditions: a marriage of convenience.
But in our modern days, I felt that no one should enter marriage without free will. I said to Ray, “Now that you’ve had a chance to meet me ...” I tried to get him to look at me. “To see me in person, Ray, have you any doubts?”
“Oh, no, mah‘m,” he said, finally looking up at me with soft eyes. “You’re so fine, I can’t believe no man would ever do this to you.”
I had to look away, down to the linoleum flooring. No man would ever do this to you?
I fought against it, but the pressure started building in my face. My inappropriate reaction to overwhelming emotion was about to begin. I sneezed once—a painful explosion that came from within my cheekbones instead of my nose—then I sneezed again. From out of his chest pocket, Ray handed over a handkerchief as white as new paper. Within minutes, I had sneezed several more times into it. The pressure in my cheekbones made tears well into my eyes, but I could bat them away. I covered my nose with Ray’s handkerchief and waited for it to pass.
Words of kindness had always been more difficult for me to handle than the harsh reprimands handed out by my father. Ever since I had been quite young, I could resist those who went against me, had been able to deny their opinions. I had handled my father’s perfectionism, the criticism of my aunts, and the resistance to women’s higher education, even by some at the university. And going through those battles I belie
ved had formed me into a body a bit more solid and a mind a bit more fierce than those who grew up easy and mild. My inner strength came from an ability to handle, then separate myself from, adversity. Compassion, however, brought up more raw emotion than judgments could ever stir.
At that moment, I remembered the story of the sunflowers. And as it came to me, I also remembered the circumstances of its telling and felt again the magic only Mother could create. Mother first told us the Greek myth about the origin of sunflowers in the midst of a midwinter night, as we snuggled up together in our long nightgowns, spellbound by her every word and dreaming of summer to come.
“The sunflower is the visage of Clytie, a water nymph who died of a broken heart when her love for the sun god Helius was not returned.”
“What happened, Mother?” Abby had asked.
“Why did she die?” asked Bea.
Mother plumped up the covers about our necks. “Clytie pined away for Helius until she died. Then her arms and legs dissolved and took root in the earth. Her body metamorphosed into a stalk, and her face changed into a sunflower that followed the path of the sun, day after day.”
I shook off the memory, closed my eyes, and willed away the urge to sneeze, then sniffed myself back under control. This wasn’t the first time I’d sneezed in taxing situations and for reasons even I couldn’t understand. It had started in grade school. Mother had once assured me that I would outgrow it, but instead, the problem had followed me into adulthood. I had even sneezed at the funeral.
Looking down, I could see that my face powder had soiled Ray’s handkerchief with flesh-toned smears. “I’ll launder and press this for you tomorrow,” I said and crumpled the cloth inside my fist.
“It’s no bother.”
I found his eyes. “Do you think you’ll be able to love the baby?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I do.”
“Have you always been kind?”
The Magic of Ordinary Days Page 2
