The House on Seventh Street

by Karen Vorbeck Williams

  Winna thought back to after Juliana’s death, when the house stood empty for a number of years. Then not long before his second marriage failed, her father had taken up residence there with Ruth. It had been a terrible marriage. Ruth was demanding and ran up bills without consulting Henry—Chloe had told her that much. Finally, Ruth deserted him and moved to Phoenix, leaving him high and dry, expecting a big check in the mail every month. She lived with him less than a year and got nothing in the divorce. Winna wondered if she was dead.

  How can it be that Dad has left no mark—no impression that he had ever lived in these rooms? Except for Ruth’s contributions—the avocado wall-to-wall carpet in the kitchen and the carpets covering the tiled floors in the bathrooms—nothing of his remained. Winna had found pill bottles in the bathroom cabinet, his clothes in the master bedroom upstairs, a stack of newspapers and some unpaid bills on the kitchen table, but everything else had belonged to her grandparents. Her father had just moved in with his wife. Why? Any normal person would have had a yard sale and gotten rid of the junk, auctioned the treasures they didn’t want, ripped off the wallpaper and painted, hung their own pictures, and brought in some comfortable modern furniture.

  The parlor, now cluttered with packing boxes, had once been a sumptuous room. Winna had spent her first days in the house shooting pictures in the moody old rooms, the light wonderfully eerie as it fell through lace and stained glass over the deep long windows. The old mahogany sofa upholstered in faded coral brocade was still richly draped with paisley throws and silk pillows. A dancer twirled atop a high twisted green marble pedestal near paintings hung in elaborate gold frames—dark oils of classical landscapes and tall ships on stormy seas. Even the empty jardinières where ferns and begonias once grew were fascinating to her camera’s lens.

  The place seemed timeless to Winna, the house and the desert valley. She knew that her father had lived in the house and the town in the past more than the present. Like the visible strata in the cliff face where an ancient ocean had lapped against its shores, the place seemed to hold past, present, and future together as one timeless whole.

  Winna burst into tears. The Grumman house was a treasure trove and all hers, yet she felt sadly alone, abandoned.

  Emily came to her and gave her a hug. “Poor Mom. I don’t know how you put up with her.”

  “It isn’t Chloe,” she cried, “it’s—it’s everything.”

  “Dad?” Emily’s brown eyes searched Winna’s face.

  Through tangled emotions, Winna tried to make sense of her sadness. For the past three years, she had lived alone after her husband of thirty-five years had left her—left her with the wrinkles around her eyes, her ten extra pounds, her silvery hair. I’m old, yesterday’s news, she had believed at the time. As far as she could tell, Walt was old too. But that did not seem to matter to his new young wife. She was a lawyer—so was Walt. How sweet, she had thought bitterly at the time, they have something in common.

  Winna collapsed on the sofa. “I don’t know. I guess so. I really haven’t gotten over it—what happened with your father. I’ve been obsessed with the hurt. I’ve spent the last three years trying to convince myself that my career was enough, that my exhibits in Boston and New York are fulfilling, that having important clients means I’m loved, that being an even bigger success would make me happy. When Dad died, and the will was read, I knew I had to come here to settle everything. I felt relieved to leave New Castle for a while—to get away from all the work. I thought I’d feel better here, but I’m just hotter.”

  The sound of Isabelle’s waking echoed down the hall as Emily sat down beside her mother. “You will feel better here, Mom. You and Dad were together a long time.” Emily took her mother’s hand. “I want you to move here—to be near me.”

  Since Emily had been in diapers, she had known how to comfort. “No, honey, I can’t leave my life, my work, or my friends any more than you could leave yours. You mustn’t think I could ever live in Grand Junction again.

  “Oh, Lord.” Winna wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of one hand. “Let’s go stare at the baby.”

  4

  1910

  JULIANA GRACE SMYTHE was in love. He was her first love, but she knew she would never love anyone else. She and Adolph Whitaker—she called him Dolph—had gone to school together since the first grade, but it wasn’t until she was fifteen that she fell in love with him.

  It began at the high school on a spring day, just warm enough to go outside for lunch. After her classics class, Juliana set out to meet her best friend, Daisy, on the side lawn. Reflecting on a passage of Cicero they had studied—“It is from nature that the sentiment of loving and the affection that springs from kindly feeling are born”—she reached their usual meeting place. To better ask Daisy about it, Juliana wanted to put Cicero’s wisdom into her own words. True friendship is everlasting because it is human nature to love and nature cannot be changed. With all her heart she believed that. She planned to ask her best friend if she agreed. In the fall term, they had studied Virgil and Juliana was most thankful that they had moved on.

  Daisy wasn’t there. Juliana sat down with her lunch pail and her copy of Laelius de Amicitia to wait under a young elm whose buds were just about to burst. She anxiously looked for her friend, then diverted her eyes across the sunny lawn up the face of the two-story stone building to the octagonal bell tower. How exciting it would be if she could climb to the top and see the view—maybe she could get permission to ring the bell one morning. She lowered her eyes to the lawn again and searched the sidewalk now lined with students finding places to sit on the stone benches and the lawn. Daisy was not among them.

  Just then, Adolph Whitaker walked by with his lunch pail. He smiled warmly and said, “Waiting for Daisy?”

  She could feel her face light up just as it always did when a boy spoke to her. “Hello, Dolph. Have you seen her?”

  “I usually see her first thing—on my way to class—but not this morning. Maybe she’s home sick.”

  “Oh bother,” Juliana said, scanning the lawn once again. She hated eating alone but was not going to get up and search for one of her other friends. “Well, it’s not as if they give us all day to eat our lunch,” she said, opening her lunch pail.

  “An hour never seems long enough,” he said. “If you’d like company, I’ll spend that hour with you, fair Juliana.”

  Juliana smiled and patted the grass. “You always sound like a poem.”

  “A poet should, should he not?” He sat down cross-legged and opened his lunch pail. Dolph was slight, only a few inches taller than Juliana. His dark curly hair parted in the middle with rows of waves heavily oiled into place. His fair skin set off the large blue-green eyes as they studied Juliana.

  “I should like to read one of your poems, Dolph,” she said, unwrapping her sandwich. As she took a bite, a little dab of mayonnaise remained at the corner of her mouth and she licked it off. “Do you write stories too?” She held her hand up, hiding the fact that her mouth was full.

  His face assumed an air of mystery. “At the moment my pen is doing a turn on a new account of the affair between the lovers of Camelot.”

  “Guinevere and Lancelot in modern dress? I’d like to do a modern version of Pygmalion and Galatea. Only I’d make him a surgeon and her a mermaid.”

  Dolph laughed. “You wicked little thing. It sounds like you’ve read Frankenstein.”

  “Yes, and I adored it—never cried so hard in my life.”

  He glanced at the book lying upside down in the folds of her skirt. “What’s that you’re reading now?”

  “Cicero. I just worship him. Virgil’s Aeneid—we read that last term—was interesting to be sure, but it took every ounce of my strength to get an A in that class.”

  “I read both last year and had the opposite impression. It must be the difference in our sex.” He left his eyes on her face too long and she looked away.

  “You are the smallest girl in you
r class. I’d guess you are also the youngest?”

  “Yes. Fifth grade was too easy and they moved me to sixth,” she said.

  “Juliana—such a bright little creature. If I were to describe you in a poem, I’d say your skin is white as cream and your eyes a dark amber honey.

  Juliana felt herself blush. “That sounds like a compliment—cream and honey?”

  Dolph was two years older, a top student, and he had just complimented her.

  He laughed. “Cicero said, ‘A friend is, as it were, a second self.’”

  She grinned, rolled her eyes, and matched his quote with another: “Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.”

  He was up to the challenge. “I like this one: ‘Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.’ Ah ha, pass the salt, Juliana.”

  So went their first real conversation. When the bell rang, Dolph reached for her hand. “Now we must part, fair Juliana, but methinks I’ve found a kindred spirit.”

  Adolph Graham Whitaker would become a great writer, Juliana was sure of it. She liked the idea of marrying a writer. He was the last thing she thought of that night before she fell asleep. He is just my sort of person. I think he is handsome. His eyes—do they smolder? No, they pierce. No, I think they devour. His mouth? The lips are full and there is a little twist to his smile, as if there is something on his mind that he is not willing to reveal. I like that. He’s mysterious? No, girls should be mysterious. Boys are mystifying. I think he is just my sort. Soon Dolph called on her at home. Her mother would allow them to sit alone in the parlor for an hour, on nice days outside on the porch. They had lunch together every day at school. Juliana asked Daisy to please understand her sudden abandonment—she was in love.

  “Someday, when you are in love, you will know exactly how I feel, Daisy. Then you will forgive me.”

  The time came when she had to face the certainty that Dolph would take his full scholarship and go off to a fine school in the East. He would leave her behind in Grand Junction, in her mind a perfectly backward cow town where her father was district attorney. He dealt with all kinds of unseemly things: Indian troubles, squabbles about water rights, murders. He talked about his work every night at the dinner table. Juliana found his conversation to be either fascinatingly sordid or endlessly boring.

  Grand Junction had grown out of the desert. The hard sunbaked soil, the color of ash, nurtured little but tumbleweeds and sage on the dry plain where once Utes had hunted. In 1881, the government drove the Indians away to reservations in southern Colorado and Utah. The US cavalry escorted a long line of Ute braves on horseback—women and children on foot—out of the west end of the valley. They were barely out of sight as scores of white men on horses hastened in from the southeast to stake out the choicest land for farms. Wagons full of land-seeking families rode into the valley eager to claim acreage for a ranch or a house site in town. Two rivers, the Gunnison from the mountains to the southeast and the Colorado from the northeast, coursed into the valley. The newcomers diverted river water into ditches and later canals, turning Grand Junction into a farming paradise. Water was all that light colored soil had needed to nurture orchards and fields.

  Indians from the reservation still came into town, spreading their blankets on Main Street’s sidewalks, selling beadwork, pottery, jewelry, and blankets. The Indian school took Ute children from the reservation and boarded them outside of town, dressing the girls in white dresses and the boys in pants, jackets, and shirts. Hoping they would assimilate, they taught them a trade, English, and Christianity.

  Orchards and fields surrounded that rough-edged civilization with its nineteenth-century Main Street bordered by blocks of small bungalows and modest frame houses. On or near Main Street stately buildings rose above the valley floor: the Mesa County Courthouse, the towered bank building, the railroad station. The residents were proud of Seventh Street, one of the few choice streets where the well-to-do were building handsome houses, and ashamed of the southernmost street near the railroad tracks where nice women never walked. Everywhere—in vacant lots, along roadsides, or on the outskirts of town—swaths of alkali and the tumbleweeds reminded the residents that this was a dry, inhospitable land.

  Two things Juliana would never forget happened in the spring of 1910. Her parents took her to see the one and only Grand Junction performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Colonel William Cody, she had learned, got the name Buffalo Bill for having killed thousands of buffalo over a period of eighteen months—more than anybody else. Juliana had already dismissed that particular achievement of his as dubious. But when she saw him under his cowboy hat, wearing buckskins and riding a palomino, she could not help her feelings of awe. Even though he was an old man by the time she saw him, never in her life, or in the life she hoped to have, would there be a more striking figure. The Rough Riders of the World reenacted the Great Train Robbery and the Battle of Summit Springs. She thrilled at the sight of the mounted warriors of the world in martial array: Russian Cossacks, German cuirassiers, Bedouin Arabs, South American gauchos, English lancers, and Irish dragoons fresh from four years of European triumph. Her only disappointment? Annie Oakley was not in the show.

  The second thing she would never forget came the following Saturday. Juliana was certain she would never again have such a remarkable, eventful week. She and Dolph had run off alone, away from the Peach Blossom Festival. Hand in hand they had sneaked down a narrow lane, through someone’s vegetable garden. Breathless, excited by their daring, they dodged into a small orchard unseen. Dolph kissed her and pulled her down in the tall grass. The sky was azure, the grass green and fresh. She lay there under pink blossoms letting him kiss her all he wanted. She knew she shouldn’t, but he tasted delicious and her heart beat with delight at his touch. Neither spoke, but they looked deeply into one another’s eyes. His hand grazed her breast, then he lifted her skirt. Before she came to her senses, she let his warm hand move gently up the inside of her thigh. She let out a little embarrassed cry and sat up, smoothing her skirt, afraid to look Dolph in the eye.

  “It’s all right, Juliana,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I’m overcome with love for you.”

  She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it now,” she said. “You mustn’t tell.”

  “No, I would never—” he said, kissing her again.

  She did not want to talk about what he had done or what she had felt, but she would think about it again and again, until she could think of nothing else.

  They were not away from the festival for long and no one had missed them, but Juliana and Dolph had traveled a million miles together. As far as Juliana knew, no other girl had ever done things like that or felt the way he had made her feel. She was almost right about that. Girls from good families did not have such adventures. She knew that. Juliana had always been precocious.

  That summer Dolph worked at the grocery store where he would filch a pint of strawberries for Mrs. Smythe or a chocolate for Juliana. He would sneak them outside behind the store to his bicycle and hide them in the basket under the jacket his mother made him carry. After work, he took the treats to the Smythes.

  Juliana expected him as she waited in the gazebo. Through the lattice and the vines she saw him ride up on his bicycle, lean it against the fence, and walk up the front steps. Almost like a game of hide and seek, she wanted him to find her in that leafy bower. Now Dolph was out of view. She wanted to run to him, but knew enough about romance to not appear over-eager. Right now, she guessed, he was ringing the doorbell and her mother was answering. Mrs. Smythe would welcome him with a smile, and when she saw what he brought—a jar of jam, maybe, or oranges shipped all the way from California—she would thank him.

  How he could afford to buy these lovely things, Juliana did not know. He couldn’t and the fact that he did proved how very much he loved her and wanted her mother’s approval.

  Dolph came down the front steps and hurr
ied to the garden path toward the gazebo. She knew her mother had told him where she was. He carried something in his hand—something for her.

  Juliana spent that late afternoon side by side with Dolph on the gazebo’s wooden bench. He had presented her with a chocolate and she could tell that he delighted in watching her slowly nibble it away.

  “Would you like a bite?” she teased.

  “No, it’s just for you. Tomorrow I will bring you a lollipop so I can watch you devour it with that dear little tongue.”

  Juliana was quite aware that her mother kept watch on them from the kitchen window. Sometimes she could see her standing there or at the window of an upstairs bedroom. She could, in fact, appear at any one of the windows on that side of the house. Juliana knew that her mother could not spend all day on alert and, when the coast was clear, she would grab Dolph by the hand and take him next door, behind Mr. Osgood’s tool shed where they found a secluded spot perfect for a kiss and a long embrace.

  Mrs. Smythe stood at the dining room window. From there she usually saw her daughter with her beau studiously huddled together reading a book or a manuscript. Sometimes they scribbled in their notebooks. She wondered what on earth they had to talk about. Their conversations never seemed to end. Today the gazebo was empty and she hurried out to the porch to see if they had decided to favor the porch swing. They weren’t there.

  I must tell that child again that if she wants to be free to entertain her beau at home, she is required to stay in sight.

  Mrs. Smythe hurriedly crossed the porch, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked across the street to see if Mrs. Partridge was in her garden. Thankful that she was not—ashamed to have her neighbors see her so humbly attired—she untied her apron and dropped it on the porch swing before she put a foot on the front steps. Taking the path to the other side of the house where the cutting garden grew, she found them there, walking among the flowers like two innocent children full of summer wonder. She marveled at how her daughter was growing up, so small and lovely in her afternoon dress with the puffed sleeves. The upswept hair and chignon made her look grown-up, but a pale blue ribbon tied in her strawberry blonde hair reminded that she was still a child. Mrs. Smythe had not won the argument about whether or not Juliana was old enough to wear a chignon.