Bittersweet

by Nevada Barr

  Her voice echoed through the unfinished building. She stepped inside and called again. The room was spacious and well lighted; sawdust covered the floor, and several of the window sashes were propped against the wall waiting to be installed. The smell of new-cut lumber filled the room. Through the window openings, the river sparkled below the deep blue wall of the Sierra. A shadow fell across the rectangle of sunlight on the floor, and Imogene turned.

  “I’m Kate Sills. How do you do.” The woman in the doorway shifted the cardboard box she was carrying to her hip and thrust out her hand in the manner of a man.

  Imogene took it. “I’m Imogene Grelznik. There didn’t seem to be anyone here. I apologize for letting myself in. I was told this was to be a school for girls, and my curiosity got the better of my manners.”

  “Understandable. This may be the last time you’ll see it so quiet; we’ve forty-five girls coming in October. Do you have a school-aged daughter?”

  “I’m a teacher. I just came west…from Philadelphia. I’d like to apply for a position.”

  Kate Sills studied her with new interest, and Imogene looked back frankly. Kate was a short woman, squarely built, with a fine, strong head set solidly above broad shoulders. She was thick-middled, in her early forties, with glossy brown hair untouched by gray; she seemed a warm and capable woman.

  “I don’t expect you’ve many discipline problems,” Kate said, enjoying Imogene’s towering height.

  Imogene laughed. “Not many.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m not the one to talk to. Bishop Whitaker does the hiring. I can give you his address if you like; I’m sure he’d be amenable to talking with you if you stopped by. I think all the positions are filled, but you should give it a try.” Kate scribbled on a slip of paper with a silver pencil she wore on a chain pinned to her bodice, and handed the note to Imogene. “Would you like me to show you around?” she asked. Imogene accepted and followed her into the cool recesses of the building.

  Kate Sills led her through the maze of rooms on each floor—schoolrooms, recitation rooms, music rooms, dormitories, the receiving parlor. The harsh lines of worry carved into Imogene’s brow began to ease; she forgot herself in the halls of the school, with its fine rooms and offices, all so new they still smelled of the trees they had been built with. She took off her gloves and ran her palms over the smooth wood of the pianos. “There are five,” Kate said as she, too, admired the workmanship. “Tuned.”

  Bishop Whitaker’s school was to have everything: art, music, French, cooking, mineralogy, trigonometry, Old Testament history, astronomy, croquet, painting, philosophy, and bathrooms. Imogene forgot the Broken Promise, the bills, and Sarah Mary.

  Talking steadily, comfortably, calling each other by their Christian names, Kate and Imogene rested in the cool of the kitchen over glasses of cold tea. “My mother used to have an old cook,” Imogene said. “She was the fattest woman I had ever seen. She could eat more than any two men. I used to sit down in the kitchen with her, afternoons in winter. I remember watching her consume enormous quantities of food and follow it with half an apple pie. Then she’d lean back, pat her stomach, and wink at me. ‘I think I’ve died and gone to pig heaven,’ she’d say.” Imogene looked around the wide, windowed dining room. “That’s how I feel. I’m in pig heaven.”

  She stopped at Bishop Whitaker’s on her way back to the hotel. He was out, Mrs. Whitaker said, but she was welcome to wait. Imogene sat in the dim parlor, chatting with Mrs. Whitaker until her husband returned.

  Ozi Whitaker looked like a picture out of the Old Testament of an illustrated King James Bible: a snow-white beard cut in the shape of a spade, a fringe of white hair around a bald dome, and features as sharp and unyielding as chiseled granite. Imogene stood automatically as he strode into the parlor; he was not a large man but he dominated the room. His thin-lipped mouth opened like a trap: “Mrs. Whitaker,” he said, “we seem to have an unexpected guest.”

  Before Imogene could find voice, the bishop held out a cupped hand—a cottontail rabbit, not more than five inches from nose to tail, shivered there in his palm. Mrs. Whitaker lifted the little creature from her husband’s outstretched hand and, excusing herself, left the room. “One of the dogs had gotten it,” the bishop explained. “I’ll let it go out in the meadow when it’s old enough to fend for itself.” He smiled and gestured to the dusky green settee. Imogene sat abruptly, not quite recovered from his entrance.

  The bishop sat down opposite her, completely at ease with the silence, watching her with kindly eyes and waiting until she was ready to speak.

  “I was up at your school today,” Imogene began, and Ozi Whitaker leaned forward in his chair like a child about to hear a favorite story retold. “It’s the most beautifully thought-out school I have ever seen. Ever imagined.”

  “Ah.” He sat back, smiling.

  “I’m a teacher.”

  He thrust out his beard. “Are you a good teacher?”

  Imogene thought for a moment. “Yes.” The one word carried the weight of her life’s worth.

  The bishop seemed pleased. “I have hired six instructors and the matron.” The bishop regarded her for a minute. He was thinking. He sat across from her as solid and easy as a tree. Imogene, too, was still, but the line of her back and the set of her jaw indicated that it was more a matter of control than of nature. A pendulous ticking sounded from a dark, ornate clock on the mantel behind the bishop’s chair. Imogene did not look at it.

  “My girls will be Nevadans, most from small mining towns in the desert. Many, I hope, will be given scholarships according to need. They’ll come from all walks of life. A lot of them won’t have a primary education that’s up to our standards.” His pale eyes twinkled. “When we’re old enough to have standards,” he amended.

  “Bishop Whitaker’s is a high school. We’ll need a teacher to take these girls from the desert and bring them up to entrance level—a preparatory school the girls can attend while they’re enrolled in other classes, until they’ve caught up. I’ve not yet found a teacher for my preparatory classes.”

  “For the last three years I taught first through eighth grades in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.”

  “I’ll need your references.”

  Imogene sat like a stone. Her jaw jerked once before she spoke. “Of course.” She was overly loud. “I’ll bring the address by tomorrow, if that would be convenient.”

  Ozi Whitaker escorted her to the front hall.

  “Forgive my manners,” the bishop said as Imogene started down the porch steps. “I haven’t asked your name.”

  “Imogene Grelznik.”

  “Tomorrow then, Miss Grelznik.”

  Sarah was out of bed, sitting by the window in her nightgown, when Imogene got back to the hotel. Imogene apologized for having been gone so long, and hurried down to the kitchen to bring up a cold lunch. While they ate, she told Sarah of Bishop Whitaker’s School For Girls. Some of the light that had come into her face as Kate Sills was showing her the rooms returned as she talked. Sarah left off picking at the food and watched her intently. Imogene was laughing, telling of the bunny and the bishop when she broke off suddenly and her smile faded as she told Sarah, “He wants a reference.”

  The significance of the request slowly registered on Sarah’s face. “You want this, don’t you?”

  “Very much.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Write one myself?” Imogene smiled wryly.

  “You can’t! It’s not honest!”

  “No, I suppose I can’t. Bishop Whitaker’s going to write to Philadelphia. I’ll have to write to Mr. Utterback and tell him Mr. Aiken’s venom has done it again. I hope that he has returned from Holland, and that my letter reaches him before the bishop’s. I’ll post it this afternoon.”

  When she finished writing the letter, she read it to Sarah. The younger woman listened quietly, her eyes fixed on her folded hands. “What do you think?” Imogene asked. Sarah shook her
head without speaking.

  Imogene sat aside the letter. “I’m sorry. I’ve made you go through it again, haven’t I?”

  Sarah waved her hand, a frustrated, negative little gesture. “It’s not just that.” She looked up and the tears made her eyes seem enormous. “It’s that you’ll be teaching again and they’ll all be so bright and pretty and sure to love you.”

  The schoolteacher sat down on the bed. “You mustn’t worry. It hurts me when you do, as if you don’t believe in me. Or think so little of me you think I could forget.” She stroked Sarah’s cheek. “You can be a little jealous to flatter me, but you mustn’t ever believe it.”

  20

  WEEKS PASSED AND THERE WAS STILL NO WORD FROM WILLIAM Utterback. The money that Imogene was able to earn by teaching her adult students was inadequate and inconsistent; they paid by the lesson and often didn’t come at appointed times. Lutie and Fred, though openhearted, began to feel the financial drain; the summer months were their busy time, and a room and two places at board paying only partial rates would be felt when money got tight the following winter. They were too kind to say anything, but it showed in their faces when Imogene returned from the bishop’s with no news. They, too, were waiting for the letter.

  The last week in July, the bishop took Imogene into the formal parlor and closed the door. “I’m seeing a young man about the position today. As fond as Mrs. Whitaker and I have grown of you, I can’t in good conscience hire you without references, not when everyone else was asked to give them.”

  Imogene nodded abruptly. “I understand.” She did not tell Sarah.

  The young man was given the job.

  William Utterback’s letter came the second week in August. There was a glowing recommendation addressed to the bishop, and a sealed note to Imogene so full of un-Quakerlike denunciations of Darrel Aiken that it warmed her heart to read it.

  On September fourth, five weeks before Bishop Whitaker’s School was to open its doors, Kate Sills paid Imogene a call at the Broken Promise. There had been a gold strike twenty miles south of Reno, in the Washoe region. Rumors were stampeding the miners from older claims. It was said to be the biggest strike in Nevada’s history. The bishop’s young man had come to him full of contrition. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he had said, and he couldn’t live with himself if he passed it up. He was terribly sorry if there was any inconvenience, but he’d already bought his kit.

  He had been bitten by the gold bug and Imogene had a job. Eighty-five dollars a month. Imogene stayed up half the night, too excited to sleep, writing lesson plans by the light of a lamp turned low so that the glare wouldn’t keep Sarah from her rest.

  From then on, Imogene spent her days at Bishop Whitaker’s School, helping Kate prepare for the fall term. Sarah was alone much of the time. Most days she rose and sometimes she dressed herself, but the sickness had taken its toll and she showed little interest in life.

  Disturbed by her apathy, Imogene went to the railroad station and unearthed Sarah’s watercolors, bought two new camel’s-hair brushes that they could ill afford, and borrowed a generously upholstered parlor chair from Lutie so Sarah would be comfortable.

  On a hot day in mid-September, Sarah sat curled up in her chair. A dry desert wind blew incessantly, bringing on a fever and sawing at her nerves. Despite the heat, she had closed the window to escape the wind, and the room was airless and dull. In front of her, propped across the chair arms, was a scrap of board that Imogene had begged of Fred, with a fresh white sheet of watercolor paper tacked onto it. Beside her, on the sill, were her colors. Before Imogene had left that morning, she had set the paints by Sarah and nestled the drawing board across her knees. “You watercolor beautifully,” she’d said. “You used to find such pleasure in it. You’d spend hours in the field behind the schoolhouse, lying on your stomach in the sun, painting wildflowers.”

  Sarah had looked at the board and tiredness had claimed her. “I can’t paint anymore.”

  “Please, Sarah,” Imogene had insisted. “It would do you good. One painting. Promise me. Paint a self-portrait. That’s bound to be pretty.”

  And after a minute Sarah had promised. Now, hours later, the paper was still untouched. Wind rattled the pane in a sudden gust. As Sarah shifted in her chair, her paintbox was knocked from the sill and she looked at it for the first time since morning.

  Just then footsteps sounded in the hall and knuckles rapped lightly on the door. “Sarah, are you there?” Lutie called. “I got something for you.” Sarah pushed the board away and struggled to her feet, to open the door. “Hope you weren’t sleeping.” Lutie used hushed tones whenever she talked with or about Sarah. “A letter came for you and I thought you’d like it right off.”

  It was from Mam. Sarah tore it open before the door closed behind Lutie. Margaret’s characters, round and thick, sprawled across the page, allowing only four or five words to a line.

  Dear Sarah (& Imogene),

  Your Pa’s going to take me into town today & I’ll get a chance to mail this. Things here at home are pretty much like always. A bit emptier maybe, I miss you & I miss Davie more now you’re gone too.

  I know you’re wanting to hear news of the baby. He got sick, nothing to be scared by, and it did a good turn—Sam brought him here to stay. Gracie’s took to that baby like a cow to a calf. She takes care of him like he was her own. And he gets around some. His fat little legs are pumping all the time getting him into this or that. You’d think Gracie’d thin down with all the running after him she does but I think she’s going to be a big woman like her Mam. The other day he grabbed her around the knees & said “Mama?”

  There was more to the letter but Sarah didn’t read it. She read that last paragraph a second time. Then she stopped reading and rocked herself, Mam’s letter crumpled in one fist. Sarah set it carefully on the dresser and walked to the window.

  Her toe struck the board to which her watercolor paper was tacked. Sarah snatched it up. “A self-portrait,” she said, and started to laugh.

  It was after supper when Imogene came home. An untouched tray of food blocked the door outside the room. Imogene pushed it aside and went in.

  On the windowsill a candle flickered in the draft, burning unevenly, a pillar of wax towering over the wick. Sheets of paper littered the floor. Pages hastily scrawled with paint, the water curling them into phantom leaves, were scattered over the bed and made piles on the chest of drawers. In the midst of this macabre scene was Sarah, bent over the parlor chair, her drawing board propped against the back. Her color box rested on the chair arm in a dark stain, with a cup of dirty water balanced precariously beside it.

  Imogene lit the lamp. “Sarah?” Sarah looked over her shoulder at the sound and fixed Imogene with a blank stare, then turned back to her painting. In the lamplight her dress showed stains where the bodice and skirt had been used to wipe her brush. Lutie’s parlor chair was similarly streaked. Imogene watched Sarah for a moment, the little hairs on the back of her neck prickling with fear. She picked up one of the paintings from the floor, a picture done in purples and blacks. She held it to the light. It was a crude watercolor of a naked woman.

  Imogene snatched up several more. All were depictions of women. Some were missing arms or legs or features. Most were nude.

  Oblivious of everything, Sarah went on painting. Imogene quietly left the room and ran downstairs on tiptoe.

  Everyone was gathered in the parlor, close to the fire. Lutie and Fred were engrossed in a game of checkers, and Evelynne, her party manners pitching her voice higher than usual and her thinning hair piled in a particularly intricate nest, was spinning her web for a distinguished-looking guest from San Francisco.

  Imogene slipped by the open door unnoticed and, feeling her way through the darkened kitchen, lit the lamp on the pantry shelf. Back behind the applesauce she found the whiskey. Wrapping it carefully in a dishtowel, she hurried back up the stairs.

  Sarah had finished another painting; she was trying
to affix it to the mirror over the washstand with soap. The glass banged against the wall as she jabbed at it with the bar.

  Imogene poured several inches of the whiskey into a tin cup. “Sarah?” She crossed the room and laid her hand on Sarah’s shoulder. The girl jerked convulsively, cracking the corner of the mirror.

  “Sarah, put that down now, it’s time to stop.” She worked the soap bar out of Sarah’s hand. “Put the painting away,” she said gently. “We’re done with painting for today. I want you to drink this.” Imogene pressed the rim of the cup against Sarah’s lower lip. Most of the whiskey ran down her chin, but Imogene managed to get her to take a few mouthfuls.

  “That’s the girl. We’re done with our work for today. Can you take a little more? Here, drink a little more.” Imogene spoke soothingly, pouring the whiskey down Sarah until nearly a quarter of the bottle was gone. The collar of Sarah’s dress was soaked and the room stank of whiskey, but at last the rigid muscles in the young woman’s face and back began to let go.

  Imogene set aside the bottle and eased Sarah onto the bed. Sarah rolled her head on the pillow and smiled lopsidedly. “I been watercoloring.” Sudden tears drowned her eyes. “Don’t look,” she pleaded. “Promise me you won’t look. I think I’ve been crazy,” she confided. “I’ll be okay now. Don’t look.”

  Imogene promised.

  “A self-potrit,” her words were slurred. “Potrit-potrit-potrit.” She made a little song of it, wagging Imogene’s hand in time with the music.

  “Gracie’s Matthew’s mamma now,” she murmured when she was near sleep. “Mam said.”

  Imogene said nothing; the words came as nonsense to her, and she sat grim-faced and scared, her eyes never leaving Sarah’s face until the girl slept.

  The wind buffeted the hotel, pawing at the eaves and setting the house to howling. Dry clouds raced across the sky, making ghostly shadows under a gibbous moon. Imogene spread the coverlet over Sarah and crossed to the window, taking the whiskey with her. With a chemist’s precision, she poured the cup one-quarter full and set the bottle on the sill. The ruined parlor chair still carried its share of Sarah’s artwork; pale legs and blood-black breasts leered obscenely in the silvery light. Imogene turned her back on it and, sipping her whiskey, watched the night. The dusty streets rolled away like white velvet, the trees silver and black. In the distance, a lone man leading a mule walked in from the sage. The desert hills behind him were stark and mottled in the moonlight.