Julie

by Catherine Marshall

  “By Jove, we did it!” Our rescuer shot one hand into the air while Tim and Anne-Marie whooped in triumph.

  Dad set the hand brake and climbed from the car. “How can we thank you!”

  “No need to.” Mr. Wilkinson was looking at me again. “But I insist that you come back to the inn for a cleanup. Can’t go on as you are.”

  “Thanks so much,” Dad replied. “But I think we’re all right now.”

  “Kenneth, please,” Mother urged. “Let’s accept the young man’s offer.”

  “And Dad, don’t forget the radiator,” Tim put in.

  My father grimaced. “I’d forgotten. Our water boiled over, Mr. Wilkinson.”

  This time the Englishman climbed behind the wheel. He drove several hundred yards down the mountain to what he called the back entrance to the inn. We wound through a woodland, then crossed over the top of a tall dam. To our right was an immense lake; below, on our left, water from the spillway formed a gurgling stream.

  After we pulled up in front of a large building, the Englishman showed Mother, Anne-Marie and me to a powder room off the front entrance hall. One glance at myself in the mirror made me shudder: my wavy light brown hair was hanging in stringy ropes; mud spots on my face gave the effect of chicken pox. I stared down at my filthy saddle shoes, my rumpled skirt and blouse, and groaned. I looked more like a lumpy twelve-year-old than almost eighteen. After cleaning up as best I could, I fled outside.

  Lake Kissawha was larger than I had first thought. When we drove in, the far banks had been lost in mist. Now they were just visible, perhaps half a mile away. As I strolled down to the shore, I noticed that the steep face of the dam was a wild aggregation of loose rocks and boulders, with saplings and scrub pines growing out of the crevices.

  Odd way to construct a dam, I mused. Then I turned and walked back to our car.

  When our family reassembled by the Willys, the handsome Englishman was there to see us off. As I started to climb into the back seat he took my hand and held it for a moment. “I’m glad we met, Julie,” he said.

  Startled, I looked up into his hazel eyes. They were warm, sparked by a mischievous twinkle. Then, very slowly, he winked!

  My eyes must have shown my confusion. I reddened, murmured something unintelligible and stepped into the back seat, aware that my legs were strangely weak.

  Mr. Wilkinson then strongly urged us to go back a mile or so, where he said we would find a scenic spot called Lookout Point, which had a breathtaking view of Alderton and the whole valley. Though road weary and eager to end our long journey, we decided that a good first look at our new hometown would be well worth retracing our route.

  A few minutes later, with Mother now at the wheel, we pulled into an asphalt parking area and climbed out of the car again. The dark angry clouds were now vanishing to the east. Through breaks in the overcast we could see the narrow Schuylkill Valley spread out below, surrounded by the towering Alleghenies, with Alderton on the valley floor.

  I stood there fighting disappointment. Before leaving the flatness of Timmeton I had tried to visualize what it would be like living in the mountains. All afternoon we had been driving through glorious scenery, misty-blue peaks soaring over undulating ridges, each horseshoe bend opening a new and breathtaking vista. I could scarcely wait to see Alderton.

  But spread below us now was something very different. Alderton looked pinched, hemmed in by the mountains. In many places the hills were denuded, the slopes pocked with slag heaps. The peace I had sensed in these mountain heights was gone. A dissident note had entered in—as if men and nature were antagonists.

  We stood there in a tightly huddled family group, our eyes sweeping the landscape below us. For a moment no one said anything. I was feeling let down, betrayed, but dared not voice it.

  Still, there was beauty mixed in with the ugliness. Just below us in the twilight Lake Kissawha was like a multicolored mirror. A sparkling stream, like a glistening strand of pearls, wound down Seven Mile Mountain to Alderton. Consulting the map, Mother reported that this was the Sequanoto River, that it was joined by Brady Creek just north of Alderton, and that the combined streams flowed through the center of town.

  Father, pale and drawn, pointed out the two bridges spanning the river, including the railroad bridge built at the turn of the century. On his previous visit here, local citizens had described it as an architectural monstrosity because of its ponderous concrete arches. As our eyes searched the town, tongues of flame would leap from tall brick smokestacks, then die again. A thick sooty haze hovered above the scene.

  “That’s the Yoder Iron and Steel Works,” Dad said, indicating the smokestacks. “Employs over twelve hundred men. Headed by Tom McKeever, a tough old man who runs this town, I’m told.”

  “Including the Sentinel?” Mother asked.

  My father shrugged. “I don’t think he’ll pay much attention to us.” He pointed again. “There’s the Trantler Wireworks, a Yoder subsidiary. Makes barbed wire and such. Those and the Pennsylvania Railroad yards are the town’s chief industries. See the yards on the east side of Railroad Bridge—apparently a major east-west transfer point.” From where we stood we could see two roundhouses surrounded by glittering skeins of tracks.

  “Just like a model train set!” Tim breathed excitedly.

  “Sure looks that way from here, son.”

  Dad then indicated the residential areas, mostly tucked into the hills, and a section of drab gray houses east of town. “Workers’ houses,” Dad explained. “They’re called the Lowlands.” The name fit; they were certainly the ugliest part of this industrial center of over twenty thousand people. Alderton was a stark contrast to quiet Timmeton, where our family had lived for almost nine years.

  With sudden nostalgia my mind drifted back to those last days of our uprooting . . . packing boxes, crates and steamer trunks to be sent by rail, the last visits to my favorite places, the final good-byes.

  Mary Beth. Sandra Lee. Merv, the boy down the street who was so sure I was to marry him someday. How could I start in, my last year of high school, to make all new friends?

  There had been pain in leaving the setting, too: the huge century-old oak trees that arched over Macon Street like the green-vaulted roof of a cathedral. There are precious things that you can’t pack and take with you, like the all-pervasive fragrance of the honeysuckle. Would there be honeysuckle in the North? I would miss the drapery of purple wisteria that all but smothered the old woodshed in our back yard.

  I looked at my parents as they stared silently at the town below us. My father’s tall frame was stooped, neck muscles still twitching, eyes clouded, hands clenched tightly together. In contrast were Mother’s firm, patrician features, her determined manner. How did they handle a change like this? I had no clue and could not bring myself to ask. I had always had trouble talking about whatever meant most to me. Shyness? The fear of something important to me being belittled or made fun of? I didn’t know—only that I had always kept my joys and doubts locked inside myself.

  Like my fears now for my father. Could Kenneth Timothy Wallace, prematurely gray at forty-one, who had known nothing but the Christian ministry, really turn overnight into a newspaper publisher?

  Certainly the decision to buy the Alderton Sentinel had not been made lightly. I had always known that journalism was Dad’s second love, had sometimes suspected it was his first. Dad remembered with sentimental delight his two years of college newspaper work; he had written continually for church publications and local newspapers ever since. The Timmeton Times had printed his weekly column, built around the relevance for today of a selected verse of Scripture.

  Then there had been all that trouble at my father’s church, followed by his illness. Apparently he had contracted malaria during a summer preaching mission in rural Louisiana. It became so bad that he had to be hospitalized for almost a month. Soon after that, the letter had arrived from Paul Proctor, one of Father’s college friends, who owned a weekly newspaper
in western Pennsylvania. Would Ken like to buy it?

  For weeks my parents discussed the offer, both openly and behind closed doors. It came out that we had the necessary money in a savings fund—which had providentially survived the recent bank closings—a $15,000 inheritance from the estate of Mother’s Aunt Stella. The money had initially been set aside to provide a college education for myself, Tim, and Anne-Marie.

  All of us agreed that Dad should take a week’s trip to Alderton to go over the facilities. If it seemed right, he should look for a place to live. When he returned, the decision had been made. My father felt he “had a call” to publish and edit the Sentinel.

  But questions had kept rising in me and would not be put down. How could someone who loved people as much as my father did leave the ministry? What had gone wrong at his church? Had Dad lost his faith? Why had God let so many bad things happen to such a good man? This depression year of 1934 seemed a poor time to start a new business venture. Inside me churned the suspicion that even in the best of times, my father’s skills were not really attuned to the business world.

  One thing was certain: the Wallace family was being plunged into unknown adventure in this unappealing town, Alderton.

  I awoke the following Saturday morning in my still-strange bedroom in our new home to the sound of rain drumming on the roof. No matter. For over two years now I had enjoyed waking up early when there was no school, so that I could write down my thoughts.

  Something about the hour of dawn intrigued me, drew me. In Timmeton it had been the quietness—silence so intense as to be almost palpable. Here in Alderton, the early morning calm was shattered by the distant clanging and screeching of engine whistles in the railroad yards.

  My Timmeton classmates, all of whom slept late on Saturday, had made fun of my early morning rendezvous. This taught me that a person who is different can also be rejected. After considering this fact carefully, I decided that I liked being different and would accept the cost.

  Five days in Alderton found me dazed by a kaleidoscope of first impressions—the ancient high school . . . new faces . . . the steep streets . . . the grime and soot on everything . . . the changeable weather. I turned on the bedside lamp and reached into the drawer of my nightstand for the lined notebook I had dignified with the name Journal. Propped up in bed, a robe around my shoulders, I wrote at the top of a fresh page: Alderton, Penna. Saturday, September 15, 1934. My pen went speeding across the page as I described the three-story white frame house Dad had rented for us on a short dead-end street called Bank Place, west of Alderton’s business center. The house towered over a street so narrow there was barely room for two cars to pass. I wondered why the builder had decided on a ten-foot, postage-stamp-size front yard, leaving an outlandishly long hundred-foot lot at the back. In Timmeton, broad front lawns had been the rule. Perhaps northerners expected snow and wanted to be close to the street.

  The long back yard, however, did provide plenty of space for vegetable and flower gardens. There was also an old wooden garage sandwiched between a cherry tree on one side and a walnut tree on the other. The back of the lot ended in a gradual drop-off of stone ledges, leading to a narrow street below. Tim, Anne-Marie, and I had christened this area The Rocks. From there stretched a panoramic view all the way down the valley.

  Next I tried to describe the disorder inside our house. Paul Proctor had arranged for the unloading of the moving van that delivered our furniture two days before we arrived; he had seen to it that our beds were set up and the basic furniture uncrated and positioned. Yet most of our things were still in barrels and boxes.

  I got on paper the picture of our tall, willowy mother with her head almost buried in a barrel of china—brown hair disheveled, bits of excelsior clinging to it, beads of perspiration on her lined forehead, in her eyes a constant look of worry.

  We were all scared about Dad. The long trip and the cloudburst episode seemed to have completely unnerved him. Not until our third day in Alderton did he make it to the Sentinel office.

  I turned to a fresh page, a fresh subject: putting out a newspaper. Would I have a chance to make my oldest dream come true—to write something other people would read? Something that might change the world . . . no reason to think small! The world certainly needed to be changed. The man they called Il Duce in Italy and that new leader in Germany, Adolf Hitler, believed force was the way to do it. Could the League of Nations find no better way?

  Finally I struggled to put down something about our near-disastrous entrance into Alderton last Sunday and that truly awkward meeting with Randolph Wilkinson when I tumbled into the mud almost at his feet.

  Was that the most embarrassing moment of my life to date? Surely it was! More so than the night I lost my place while playing piano accompaniment for Tibbe’s solo—and before the whole school assembly. Or the evening of my first double date when, like a two-year-old, I knocked over the whole glass of chocolate soda into Smithy Jordan’s lap.

  Randolph Wilkinson excites me . . . not so much his good looks as that British charm . . . I love the clarity of his speech . . . And that good-bye wink . . . There’s something magnetic in this man that I felt through my whole body. I wish I could have impressed him . . .

  I climbed out of bed, removed my bathrobe and pajamas and looked at myself in the oval mirror over my dresser. The glass reflected large eyes—blue, almost violet—and an upturned nose, near-shoulder-length wavy light brown hair, fair complexion. But too little color in my face. I turned sideways and grimaced. Some nice curves—and some unnecessary ones. Why had I allowed an extra ten pounds to creep up on me? As a defense? Against what? I am going to lose weight, I resolved.

  The delicious aroma of our customary Saturday breakfast—buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup and sausage—was wafting upstairs. “Some things do not change,” I thought. “Mother will see to that.” But I had taken too long writing; I should have been down there helping her.

  The kitchen was large, with a big pantry on one side and on the other, narrow back stairs leading to the second floor. An icebox sat on a screened-in back porch.

  “’Morning, Julie,” Mother greeted me. “What held you up? You’re almost too late to help.”

  Tim bounded in, with Anne-Marie, fourteen months younger, trailing him closely as usual. Tim had a cowlick on the crown of his blond head and a pug nose liberally sprinkled with freckles. Anne-Marie, a tomboy with cropped straight hair, was dressed in coveralls for Saturday. Father stood waiting for us; he was dressed in his dark blue serge suit, the one he had worn every Sunday during his last year in the Timmeton church. It was his good suit; the two others were threadbare.

  After blessing our food, he turned to me. “So, Julie, are you ready for your first trip to the office?”

  Mother frowned. “Kenneth, I could use Julie here today. There’s no way I can do all the unpacking myself.”

  “I know, Louise.” Dad seemed to be struggling for composure. “But to keep food on the table, I’ve got to get the Sentinel going. And Julie can help.”

  “Can I help too?” Tim piped up. “Will you pay us?”

  “Me too, Dad?” Anne-Marie enthused.

  Deliberately, my father took a sip of coffee. There was still a tremor in his hands, I noticed. “With our financial situation,” he rejoined quietly, “we may all have to pitch in. And without pay.” Mother said nothing more.

  The decision of what to wear to the office was not very hard for me. With money so scarce, I made do with a wardrobe of three skirts and five blouses in mixable colors, a blue taffeta dress for Sundays, a rose-colored silk one for parties, several sweaters, and an old playsuit for dirty work around the house. Everyone wore saddle shoes to school—mine were brown and white. One pair of good shoes, assorted hats, gloves, belts and underwear completed the wardrobe. I needed more winter clothes, especially a coat, but could get by with my blue leather jacket.

  It was a downhill trek to the drab gray business section. Since Dad was still a bit t
rembly, we walked the sixteen blocks to the Sentinel office slowly, stopping to look into store windows. I’d never lived in a town this large and was shocked at the untidiness: the sidewalks and gutters littered with bubble gum and candy wrappers, squashed Dixie cups, popsicle sticks, torn bits of old newspapers. At the Five and Ten Cent Store loud hillbilly music was pouring forth from a scratchy phonograph, penetrating the street in gasps as the doors swung to-and-fro. Against the building sat a beggar with both legs off at the hips, balancing himself on a platform on wheels and selling pencils.

  Between the stores, dark entrances led up narrow metal-edged stairs to offices on the upper floors: Dentist, Chiropractor, Insurance, Attorney-at-Law. All surfaces were encrusted with the accumulation of years of soot. About seven feet up from the sidewalk there was a brown line on all the buildings—the high-water mark of the 1932 flood Dad informed me.

  Unsteady on his feet Dad might be, but still he missed no opportunity to introduce himself and me to the people we passed. “You are Sam Gaither, are you not? I am Kenneth Wallace, new publisher of the Sentinel . . . my daughter Julie.” Warmed by my father’s manner, the owner of Gaither’s Clothing Store asked us to drop by some time.

  Dad gave an equally hearty greeting to some chambermaids going to work at Haslam House, Alderton’s main hotel. They giggled as we shook hands.

  We stopped to talk a minute with Mr. Ted Gillin as he opened Gillin Auto Supply.

  Then there was stout Mr. Salvatore Mazzini, who owned the shoe repair shop. Mr. Mazzini’s response was a hearty handshake that made the corners of his handlebar mustache twitch. What a way my father has with people, I thought. In no time at all he’ll know everyone in town.

  As we turned the corner from Main Street onto Canal, I asked him, “Dad, you haven’t told me what I’m to do at the Sentinel.”