Indigo Christmas

by Jeanne Dams

  “But they have no proof! Who says that there was money in the billfold at all? I do not believe it! Sean did not lie to me. I can tell when people are lying.”

  “Because you’re so good at it yourself, most like. You know there doesn’t have to be proof when they take the likes of us up before a judge. The police tell their story, the accused man tells his, and who does the judge believe?”

  “It depends on the judge,” said Hilda sagely. “There are some who will believe the one who tells the story that is sensible.”

  ?There?s that,? Patrick admitted. ?And there?s this, too. Sergeant Lefkowicz doesn’t believe any of what the rest of the police do. He has nothin’ to do with the case; a man named Applegate’s in charge. Don’t think Lefkowicz has much use for Applegate. He didn’t exactly say anything against him, but he said he’s heard enough talk to know Applegate’s not dealin’ with the case right. He’s workin’ long hours these days—Lefkowicz is, I mean—’cause he’s savin’ up to get married, but he’s tryin’ to find out what he can in his hours off.”

  Patrick puffed on his pipe, then said, in a lower tone, “And I’ll tell you this, girl, but you’re to keep it to yourself. Lefkowicz reckons the farmer burned down his own barn, not knowin’ the hired man was sleepin’ there.”

  “But why would Mr. Miller burn down his own barn? A barn costs very much to build, and what would he do with his horses and cows and hay?”

  “Well, you know there’s trouble with a lot of banks, and Lefkowicz has found out Miller has a mortgage on the farm, and not a lot of cash. He has insurance, too.”

  Patrick let that sink in.

  “Oh!” said Hilda. “He would burn down the barn to collect the insurance, and then he could make the mortgage payment.” Hilda thought about that for a moment. “But then he would have no barn. I do not understand.”

  “He’s keepin’ his stock with a cousin near Lakeville for the time bein’. Maybe he plans to sell his own farm and move in with the cousin for good. Both of ’em bachelors—it’d make sense. And when he collects the insurance, he’ll be well off for cash.”

  Hilda mused. “Sergeant Lefkowicz has done a lot in just a few days.”

  “That he has. And he’s goin’ to follow up on it, too. His next day off’s Wednesday, and he says he’s goin’ out to Miller’s farm and talk to him a bit. Meanwhile, darlin’, there’s no court session till after Christmas, so there’s time.”

  “Yes,” said Hilda slowly. “But there is maybe not time for Norah. She is a little better, Patrick, but every time someone says something about Sean she cries. She will worry herself into more illness until he is cleared.”

  “And you’ll worry until she stops worryin’. I know you, darlin’ girl.”

  The doorbell rang and Hilda heard Sean’s voice as Eileen answered the bell. “And here is Sean to visit his wife and daughter. I hope he is cheerful.”

  But Sean was anything but cheerful. His head drooped and his shoulders slumped as he walked into the house.

  “What is the matter?” Hilda cried.

  “They’re shuttin’ down the bicycle factory. Somethin’ about the bank loan. We’re all of us out of work after Friday. And with Christmas comin’, and me with a new baby!”

  Can anybody remember when the times

  were not hard and money not scarce?

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Society and Solitude, 1870

  17

  THE NEWS OF Sean’s loss of employment was a shock, even though it was not entirely unexpected. Hilda had been giving some thought to the possibility. After she had sympathized with Sean, and Patrick had offered him a drink (which he refused), Hilda asked, “Can you go back to work for Birdsell’s?”

  “First thing I thought of,” he replied despondently. “They’re not hirin’ now.”

  “What about Oliver’s, then? Or Studebaker’s?”

  “Haven’t tried them. Don’t know much about plows or wagons.”

  Hilda could have shaken him. “You didn’t know anything about bicycles until you went to work for Black’s! You know how to use your hands. You can learn. I will talk to—” She came to a stop. Clement Studebaker, co-founder and first president of Studebaker’s, had been a kind man who would almost certainly have hired Sean if Hilda asked him to. But Mr. Clem was dead. His son, Colonel George, took no active part in the company. Hilda didn’t know J. M. Studebaker, Mr. Clem’s brother and current president, at all well. There was, really, no one she could talk to on Sean’s behalf.

  Patrick thought it was time to intervene. “Ye’ll find some-thin’ soon, me boy. Meantime we can tide ye over. Ye can move in here, if ye want. Norah’s like to be here for a while yet, anyway, and the baby. Why not stay yerself and save the rent on yer house?”

  Patrick always became more pointedly Irish when he was talking to his cousins, who, as far as Hilda could tell, were numbered in the hundreds. Usually the thick accent and the charm laid on with a trowel helped him win his point. Not this time.

  “I’m thankin’ ye kindly, but we’re not wantin’ to be beholden to anybody,” Sean said stiffly. “I’d move Norah home if she weren’t so sick, and I’ll pay the bills for the doctorin’ as soon as I can. Tomorrow I’ll go out and find work. And now I’ll be goin’ up to see me wife and daughter.”

  “Sean,” said Hilda. Patrick shook his head at her, but she ignored him. “Sean, you must not go to Norah with that look on your face. She must not know anything is wrong.”

  Sean’s face as he looked at her was expressionless, but as he left the room he straightened his shoulders, and they heard him greet Norah with a cheerful “How’s me girl, then?”

  “If ever there was a stubborn mule of an Irishman,” Patrick began, but Hilda interrupted him.

  “He is proud. I can understand that. I am proud, too.”

  “And stubborn.”

  “And stubborn, yes. I stay up for what I believe—is that right?”

  “Stick up.” Patrick began to smile.

  “Stick up for what I believe. Sean is right to be independent. But if he does not get a job soon, you must try to make him accept help. You could lend him money, ja?”

  “I don’t like lendin’ money to kinfolk. It makes for bad blood with ’em. If I pretend it’s a real loan, Sean’ll worry about payin’ it back, and start bein’ scared to talk to me. If I tell him not to pay it back, he’ll resent bein’ helped behind his back as ye might say. No, there has to be another way, but blest if I see what. It’s a pickle.”

  Sean refused to stay for dinner, and though Hilda and Patrick spent most of the evening trying to find a solution to the O’Neill family’s problems, they came up with nothing. Uncle Dan needed no one with Sean’s skills at Malloy’s, especially with business slow, and Sean would be quick to detect and resent a make-work job offered to him out of charity. Hilda stayed awake for hours worrying about him and Norah. She got up early Tuesday morning, though, so she could talk to Patrick about her job for the day.

  “It is the boys, you see. I must invite them all to the Christmas party, but I do not know how. Most of the poor boys do not go to school, so a notice in the schools will not work. Many of them cannot read, so a notice pinned up on the streets will not work. I cannot go to all the places where they might work. I do not know how to find all the boys!”

  “Churches,” said Patrick, putting down the South Bend Tribune. “Write up a notice and have them print up a lot of copies at the Tribune or the Times. Go round to as many churches as you can, and ask the priests—the pastors—whatever you Protestants call them—to tell any others they know.”

  “Patrick, you are so clever! Yes. That is the way to do it. And I will say in the notice—no, I will ask the pastors to write to me, saying how many boys they know will come to the party. Then I can tell Mr.—can tell Riggs, and he will tell them at the hall.”

  “Aunt Molly’s butler? What’s he got to do with this?” asked Patrick, bewildered.

  “I forgot to t
ell you. I went to ask Aunt Molly for help, and she was not at home, but Riggs—he told me to call him that, but it is hard for me—he said he could help find a hall for the party. He was nice, Patrick!”

  “He’d be interested in anything for boys,” said Patrick, nodding. “He lost his own son when the Maine blew up in 1898.”

  “When Maine blew up? I do not understand.”

  “THE Maine. The ship. Beginning of the Spanish-American War. Riggs’s son was a navy man. Only about our age when he was killed.”

  Hilda said nothing, but she thought a great deal. Thought about her own ingrained prejudices, her failure to see beneath the surface. Was that at the heart of all prejudice, the inability to see anything but what one expected to see? She looked at Mr. Riggs or Mr. Williams and saw “tyrannical butler.” Other people looked at her and saw “dumb Swede,” or at Patrick and saw “drunken Irish.”

  “I am as bad as they are,” she murmured to herself.

  “Mmm?” said Patrick, absorbed again in the newspaper.

  Hilda wrote out the notice immediately after breakfast, very careful about her English. Then, after checking on Norah and kissing little Fiona, she was ready to set about her many calls. She decided to use the carriage. The gray skies threatened nasty weather, and with a choice, why should she walk and risk a soaking or worse?

  She was about to climb into her seat, with the coachman’s assistance, when she suddenly turned around and looked at him. Really looked at him, for the first time. “Mr. O’Rourke,” she said, “are you warm enough when you drive in the snow or the rain?”

  He was affronted. “I’ve never complained, ma’am.”

  “I know you have not. That is not what I asked.”

  He frowned. “Gets a bit cold now and then, doesn’t it? And wet when the rain’s drivin’ in me face, or the snow.”

  “That is what I thought. It is not fair, Mr. O’Rourke, that you should sit in front where it is wet and cold while I sit in back wrapped in a warm carriage robe.”

  “Somebody’s got to drive, ma’am.”

  “Yes. And I am not a very good driver.”

  “A lady doesn’t drive herself, ma’am!” He sounded scandalized.

  Hilda smiled. “But I am not really a lady, you know, only a Swedish maid who was lucky enough to marry a fine man. And I am happy to have you drive me, but you must have a warmer coat. After you leave me at the library, please go and buy one, and tell them to send the bill to me. Buy anything else that will keep you warmer, as well. I am sorry, Mr. O’Rourke, that I did not notice before.”

  “Anything you say, ma’am.” O’Rourke sounded grumpy as he handed Hilda into the carriage, but then he nearly always sounded grumpy. Perhaps, thought Hilda, to whom a new world was opening, perhaps one day he will be able to see me as a real person.

  Hilda dropped her notice off at the Tribune. Although the office was separated from the compositing room, the noise from several linotype machines being operated at once, and the heat they emitted, made Hilda slightly dizzy. The office girl promised Hilda she could pick up a hundred copies in two hours, and she was glad to escape to the quiet of the Public Library.

  It was a beautiful building, donated by the Studebakers and the Olivers and other wealthy families in the city. Hilda was proud every time she walked into it, proud that all those books belonged just as much to her as to anyone else who entered. Today as she asked to see the City Directory she had the sudden thought that she could buy a copy for herself. She could buy any books she wanted! It was such a glorious idea it nearly diverted her from her mission.

  Nearly, but not quite. Today was December 6. Only a week and a half before the party. She had to get the word out quickly, especially so she could concentrate on her other, more important task of solving the murder of the hired man.

  She was daunted by the number of churches listed, nearly fifty. Many of them were Catholic, of course. She would need to visit only a few of those; they would pass the word. Then there were the many Protestant denominations, including some Hilda had never heard of. Well, she would just have to visit the ones downtown and trust they would get the word out to others.

  She made a list of the churches she needed to call on. It took quite a while; the list was still very long. She looked out the window. At least nothing was yet falling, neither rain nor snow nor sleet. She hoped that respite would continue. For she had decided that she positively would not ask Mr. O’Rourke to drive her if the weather turned really nasty. New coat or not, she refused to let him get soaking wet in her service.

  He was waiting when she came out of the library, resplendent in a black coat with a shoulder cape and a new black fur cap. He jumped down to help Hilda up. “The new coat is fine, Mr. O’Rourke.”

  “You don’t need to call me Mister, ma’am,” he said. “Thanks for the coat. It’s warm, right enough. And waterproof, s’posed to be, anyway.”

  “You are welcome. And I prefer to call you Mr. O’Rourke. It is more polite.”

  He shook his head. Hilda’s new attitudes made him extremely uncomfortable. “If you say so, ma’am. I got your notices from the Tribune.”

  “Good. now, I do not need you to drive me to the first few churches. They are very near. I will go to the First Christian Church, and then the First Baptist. You can pick me up there.”

  Her errands took Hilda longer than she expected. Some of the churches had adjacent parsonages where she could speak to pastors, but many did not, and on a Tuesday morning church doors were locked up tight. Hilda pushed several notices under those doors, with scant hope that any attention would be paid to them, until she got a better idea.

  “Take me to the factories, please, Mr. O’Rourke. First the ones on the river, because they are near, and then Studebaker’s and Oliver’s.”

  The coachman was shocked. “No place for a lady, ma’am, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so. Dirty places, factories, and some of those men are none too polite.”

  “I am not a lady,” Hilda said for the second time that day, as patiently as she could. “I worked hard for many years, farm work and housecleaning. Dirt will not kill me. And I can deal with rudeness. Birdsell’s first, please.”

  At each factory she asked to speak to the owner or president. Many of the factories in town were run by men like Clement Studebaker, men who took a benevolent interest in their employees and in the community. “Fine idea, a club for the boys,” said Joseph Birdsell when the idea was presented to him. “I’ll see to it that the men know about it.”

  “And please, if we could know how many will attend the party?”

  “Hard to throw a party when you don’t know how many guests you’ll have, eh? My secretary can give you a count. Just give her your address.”

  “Thank you, sir—Mr. Birdsell.”

  Mr. Birdsell grinned, and Hilda had a feeling he knew very well she was the same woman who had often taken his hat at Studebaker dinner parties, but he bowed as he showed her out.

  She met with the same reception almost everywhere she went, until the noon whistle sounded and she was swept out of Oliver’s on a tide of workmen seeking their dinners.

  “Home, ma’am?”

  “Yes, please. No!” she corrected herself. “No, I must go and talk to the boys at the Oliver Hotel.”

  O’Rourke sighed. He had been a boot boy when he was young, then a gardener, and of recent years a coachman for many wealthy families. He and his wife had thought this new situation would suit them, because they could be together and had a pleasant little set of rooms on the top floor of the Cavanaugh house. Nor was the work onerous. But never had he had a mistress who insisted on visiting factories and talking to bellboys. She meant well, he supposed—the new coat and hat were welcome—but she didn’t understand the way gentry were supposed to behave. Mrs. O’Rourke said she turned up in the kitchen at all hours, even serving food on the kitchen table when the cook was busy elsewhere!

  If Mrs. Cavanaugh didn’t become more conventional, they might ha
ve to rethink their employment. Scowling, he clucked to the horses and turned the carriage in the direction of the Oliver Hotel.

  “Shall I wait, ma’am?” he asked sourly when they arrived.

  “No, thank you, Mr. O’Rourke. Go home and tell Mrs. O’Rourke that I will have my dinner here, and I will make my own way home. If the weather becomes unpleasant I will telephone for you.”

  O’Rourke didn’t hold with telephones. Grumbling to himself, he made off.

  Hilda shook her head. Clearly the O’Rourkes did not understand the way a former-servant-turned-lady behaved. If they couldn’t be trained in her ways, she might have to try to find a more adaptable couple.

  Dear Santa, please bring me a train

  of cars a toy steam engin. A little barn

  with toy anemals in it… Some nuts

  and candy. I go to school when I can.

  —Earl A. Carr, 9 years old

  South Bend Tribune

  December 1904

  18

  ANDY WAS ON duty in the front lobby. He saluted when he saw Hilda and rushed to her side. “Help you, ma’am?” he asked, and winked at her.

  “Yes, please. Will you show me where the restaurant is?” She waited until they were climbing the grand staircase to the dining room and had escaped the oversight of the doorman, and then whispered to Andy, “Are you allowed to eat with me?”

  The eager light faded out of his face. “No, ma’am. It’s my dinnertime in a half hour, but we have to eat in our office. Can’t never eat in the dining room.”

  “Cannot ever. Not even if a guest asks for you?”

  “Don’t think so, ma’am. I got things to tell you but—we’re in uniform, y’see.”