by Marlene Lee
“We were going to surprise you and take you tomorrow for their Easter Dance,” said Thorberg. “It’s a marvelous ceremony. Ernest went last year.” The murmur of the river was even and slow. Agnes forgave it for bringing water to the desert; such a small river, after all, barely enough for a narrow strip of green in all this rocky dignity.
“The Indians are Catholic,” said Thorberg. “They dance in rows for hours and hours before a small cross and a likeness of the Virgin Mary until they drop from exhaustion.”
“It’s as sensible as kneeling,” put in Ernest, “and better exercise.”
“What do they wear?” asked Agnes.
“Loin cloths,” said Ernest.
“Do the women dance?”
“No. Religion is for the men. The women have to stay outside.” Agnes imagined the dancers, shiny with sweat, moving in rows toward a terra cotta Virgin Mary, then back; forward again, and back. She heard the rattle of gourds; smelled the sweet smoke of a fire and the musty odor of the women’s swaying hair. She heard a soft, strange language, and looked into the eyes of people who looked back without emotion.
“… communicate more directly in a primitive society,” Thorberg was saying. Agnes listened for a while, puzzled. She heard “society this” and “society that,” and still she didn’t understand. “Society” was a section in the newspaper.
“Boas says there is no basic difference between the way a primitive man thinks and the way a civilized man thinks.”
“Who is Boas?” asked Agnes.
“Franz Boas, the anthropologist. He has made brilliant studies of societies based upon scientific measurement of their physical types and language structure, among other things.”
Maybe this Boas was doing to people what Mendel had done to peas, Agnes thought.
“Boas says a close connection between race and personality has never been shown.” Agnes marveled at Thorberg’s knowledge and Ernest’s patient listening. Thorberg never ran out of things to say. Sometimes it seemed that the woman made ideas up as she went along. Whatever she needed, she could just say it, and it was so.
“The interplay between heredity and what is learned from society … .” Agnes didn’t like the word “heredity.” Hers, she thought, was shaky. What you learned, not who you were born to, was the important thing. Then you had half a chance. She tossed on her bedroll, tired of Thorberg’s talk in which she could not participate.
“Ayahoo?” Thorberg whispered after a long silence.
“What?”
“Are you asleep?”
“Yes.”
“May Ernest and I visit you again after next weekend?”
Agnes opened her eyes. The moon had risen until it seemed straight overhead, a great, light face with vague shadows that gave it an expression.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Every weekend in April and May the Brundins came to Tempe. Agnes expected every weekend to be the last, but every weekend they made plans for the next. She began to hope they would never leave for Berkeley, California. One Saturday and Sunday when Thorberg had to stay in Phoenix, Ernest came to Tempe by himself.
“My job won’t last much longer,” he said as he and Agnes rode horseback past the town limits out into the desert. He’d ridden from a friend’s ranch, leading a mare for Agnes. “I was lucky to get work on the dam. But it’s just about finished. I’ll have to find something else soon.”
“I thought you were going to school out at Berkeley.”
“First I need a job. Thorberg’s the student.”
“What kind of job? Surveying?”
“I’ll hang around an engineer’s office until they hire me to do something. There’s lots of work in California.”
“What did you do before you came to Arizona?” A car passed by on the dirt road and Agnes’ horse danced sideways.
“She’s skittish,” Ernest said. He leaned over to smack the mare once on the rump. “General engineering. This and that. I don’t have a degree. I do whatever they give me to do.”
“I thought you went to college.”
“Thorberg’s the one with the degree,” he said without envy. “I finished Freshman year, but I had to drop out.”
“Did you run out of money?”
“No. I contracted tuberculosis. I’m well now, though.”
“A lot of the miners had tuberculosis,” Agnes said. She began to disclose her private life to Ernest. She told him about her family. She told him about the money Big Buck had given her and how it had run out. How she admired Thorberg more than anyone else in the world. How she wished the Brundins wouldn’t go away to Berkeley, California. How she would never forget them.
“Thorberg considers you a friend,” Ernest said. He kept his horse alongside and spoke in his slow, courteous manner. “She thinks you have talent.”
Agnes blushed, swallowed, frowned, and held back tears, all at the same time.
“Thorberg is the best friend I’ve ever had!” she burst out. The mare shuddered and wheeled. Agnes yanked on the reins but the horse broke into a gallop. Mane streaming, eyes rolling, he plunged ahead into the desert. Sage brush, rocks, cactus flashed by against a blurred background of yellow sun and blue sky. Agnes might as well have shouted “Whoa!” to the wind. Finally, when Ernest had almost caught up to her, she managed to bring the horse to a stop. She sat without moving in the saddle and kept her eye on the mare’s twitching ears.
“Would you like to trade horses?” Ernest asked tactfully.
Pride made her say no. But even though the horse obeyed her the rest of the day, nosing in scanty brush beside the walls of Indian ruins, Agnes felt shaken and unsure of both the horse and herself. In the late afternoon they started back for Tempe.
“Have you ever been to California?” asked Ernest. Agnes looked straight ahead at the Superstition Mountains in the distance.
“Nope.”
“Southern California is a desert, as dry as Arizona.” His blue eyes, keen and methodic, covered the landscape they rode. “The Colorado River has more than enough water for Los Angeles and the farming counties in the south, so they’ve started a great irrigation project.”
“Are you going to work on it?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll find work,” Agnes assured him. And you’ll both forget me, she thought. But I will never forget you.
It was long after nightfall when they neared town. Ernest was telling Agnes about New York, his parents, the University of Maine where he’d been a student, the chicken farm he’d worked on, when her horse changed rhythm, trembled, and came to a dead stop. Agnes tightened her grip on the reins and froze. For endless seconds the mare stood quivering. Then, with her ears back, she reared and broke into another frenzied gallop.
This time Agnes could not bring her to a stop. She shouted for Ernest who had already spurred his horse and was moving up alongside her, his hair swept back from his forehead by the wind, his profile sharp in the moonlight. The horses galloped neck to neck. He leaned far out, caught the mare’s bridle with his right hand, and gave a tremendous jerk.
The mare reared again and again. Her lather gleamed in the pale light. When Ernest had brought her under control, Agnes slid out of the saddle and half-fell onto the desert floor. While he tied the horses to a clump of sage and stayed by the mare until her wheezing stopped, Agnes sank into the shadow of the brush. After a bit Ernest came and sat down beside her. When he took her in his arms, Agnes cried against his shoulder.
“Ayahoo,” he whispered. “You might have been hurt. Next time I’ll ride the mare.” He continued to soothe her, as if the danger had freed him from shyness.
“There might not be a next time! You’re both going away!”
He stroked her hair. “We don’t want to leave you,” he said, and kissed her. Agnes tasted salt. They drew apart, then together again.
“All week I look forward to seeing you,” he said.
“Please don’t go away,” she whispered, and kissed hi
m back. Ernest was the only man who could treat her as an equal and teach her about love. If only they would stay in Arizona, she could be a sister to both of them. She could be a Brundin.
“Make up something about a high school diploma,” Thorberg said at the end of the semester when, like the mare, Agnes bolted from Tempe Normal to be near the Brundins in Phoenix. “Remember, you have a certificate from stenography school.”
Agnes had forgotten. She began to carry the diploma with her to interviews, and found a job. Soon after, she moved out of Thorberg’s Phoenix apartment into a boarding house near the tracks. But nothing gave her pleasure. Anxiety about losing the Brundins took over her life. In the few days before they were to leave for California, she developed a rash.
When Thorberg applied lotion and said, “You’re far brighter than most teachers, and anyway, education isn’t as important as you think it is,” Agnes emerged out of her morbid sadness long enough to snap,
“You can afford to think so! You’re educated!”
When they took her to the theatre to watch a socialistic play, Agnes waited and waited for music and dancing and jokes.
“I gather you didn’t think much of the production,” Thorberg said coolly as she and Ernest walked Agnes to her streetcar stop.
“It was all talk,” Agnes said in a sulky tone.
“That’s what drama is!” Thorberg exclaimed. “Talk!”
“Well,” Agnes retorted, “I like some humor and singing and dancing in my drama!”
Ernest smiled. “We’ll have to take you to the vaudeville.”
Thorberg patted Agnes on the shoulder. “You’re still an innocent,” she said. “We haven’t had quite enough time to work on you.”
Even as she pulled away from Thorberg’s touch and walked ahead, hating to be laughed at, she hoped the Brundins would “work on her” for the rest of her life.
“Ernest likes you,” his sister said the day after they’d laughed at her taste in drama. Agnes felt her face redden. She liked Ernest, too, but she mistrusted men, and feared sex. She wanted to be loved, but she didn’t want to get married. Marriage wasn’t honest. It was an arrangement that benefitted men and kept women backward. Prostitution was more honest than marriage. Aunt Tillie made no bones about having sex for money, whereas Mother, a married woman, had been forced to have sex and still ended up with no money.
Agnes once admitted to Thorberg that she wished she were beautiful.
“But you are beautiful, Ayahoo,” Thorberg replied. “When you are thinking or daydreaming, your face is soft and very pretty. When you speak, your eyes are direct. You’re slender and quick and graceful in your movements.”
Agnes was amazed that anyone would find her attractive. She wondered how she could live without Thorberg’s encouragement. When the three of them walked in the park or attended a lecture, Ernest’s arm was around her shoulder. Sometimes he walked her home and kissed her in the shadows of the boarding house. At such times she felt a grateful trust that she imagined was the same as love. Once during a kiss when he pushed his tongue into her mouth, she drew away. Ernest said nothing; merely kissed her again.
When he and Thorberg waved good-bye from the train window, Agnes turned her back on them, emotionally emptied, dry-eyed. The next day when she went to clean Thorberg’s vacated apartment as she had promised, there was a letter on the hall table to Miss Agnes Smedley, forwarded by the Tempe Normal mailroom in care of Thorberg. The address was scrawled and smudged. She thought Father had written her. The thought was just another cold weight for her to bear. She put the unopened letter in her pocket and set about cleaning. Only after she returned the bucket and mop to the landlady, took the cleaning deposit money, and walked back to her boarding house did she open the envelope.
It wasn’t from Father. It was from her brother John. Big Buck had gotten word to Father about Agnes’ whereabouts. Somehow John knew to write her in Tempe. On a single sheet of paper in a dirty envelope crudely addressed to Agnes at the normal school, he told her about the farmer he, Sam, and Myrtle lived with in Oklahoma. They were whipped, he wrote in the poorest of English. They worked twelve hours a day.
Agnes wadded up the paper and squeezed it hard. While she’d been teaching and going to school, learning to write pretty sentences in cursive handwriting, her younger brothers and sister had been laboring like farm animals. By her calculation, none of them had gotten past third grade. She lay down on the lumpy couch in her furnished room and turned her face into the cheap plush. It smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. Instead of taking care of John, Myrtle, and Sam, she’d been putting on airs, pretending that somehow she could be a Brundin and forgetting she was a Smedley. She ground her face into the sofa, filled with self-loathing.
For days she went to work and returned home to lie on the sofa. She hardly ate. Mentally she drove herself to consider an unbearable course of action: take Mother’s place. Get John and Sam and Myrtle from their foster homes and be a mother to them, she who despised and feared family life and motherhood.
The next letter Agnes received was sent direct, not in care of anybody, and made her feel faint. It was a marriage proposal from Ernest. He had a job, he wrote; he could support both of them. Enclosed was a train ticket to San Francisco. He loved her, he wrote in his steady hand, without flourish. He missed her. He wanted them to be husband and wife.
Agnes laid the two letters side by side on the drop-leaf table in the corner. John’s wrinkled letter looked like wastepaper, something she’d tried to throw away but couldn’t. The letters canceled each other out. She experienced a strange moment of aloofness. Her mind hovered outside herself, watching someone called Agnes.
But the moment of dispassionate peace ended. She broke into a sweat and left for the bathroom down the hall where she was sick again and again. The basin of her body could not hold its fluids. Her stomach emptied and then her bowels. Heaving, cramped, she crawled about the bathroom cleaning up after herself. Finally she stood and began the return trip to the sofa where she slept as if she had died.
When she awoke it was dark. She sat at the window and took some water and dry bread. A sliver of moon hung in the black sky. If she concentrated, she could not only imagine but actually see the full moon, a phantom, not shining, but there, nevertheless. As the earth moved out of the way, Professor Irish had said, the sun’s light would illuminate more and more of the dead moon until it seemed a live and glorious body in the night sky.
Strange, she thought as she lay back down, that something so beautiful could not give off its own light and heat. Strange, too, how sad the thought of Professor Irish made her.
Before dawn she rose and walked to the edge of town and out into the desert. She would, she knew, marry Ernest. He would help her out of her dilemma and she would come to love him. He would teach her how to be married. Once again she would abandon her brothers and sister. She could see no way to mother them. She could never be Mother.
It wasn’t just book learning she longed for. She wanted to succeed in the world; she wanted enough freedom to succeed. Waking from a sleep so deep that it obliterated all pretense, she knew she loved her ambition more than she loved her sister and brothers. If she returned to a mining camp, a tenant farm, she would never advance herself. She would never go to another school or meet another Thorberg and Ernest.
She would rather be successful than good. The knowledge made her ill.
As she walked, the desert engulfed her. It lay beneath the night sky, too vast to have personality. In the darkness she imagined she saw John, Sam, and Myrtle; in the desert wind she heard the whip of their beatings. Her misery was so profound that it was almost a kind of peace. A bird, awake before the others, called. At the horizon there was a loosening of night, like a knife inserted under the edge of the dark.
As she walked, she gathered strength from the desert and from the almost luminous misery that lay at the foundations of her family; at the portals of her very self. In this amplitude of grief, of guilt, she be
gan to see her way. With Ernest working and her working, there would be extra money for her brothers and sister. Perhaps some day they could come to California.
She turned back toward Phoenix. She walked faster. The sky was a glorious red by the time she reached the boarding house. She sat down at the drop-leaf table and wrote four short letters.
To Father she wrote that John and Sam must come back to Trinidad. He must see that they go to school. He was their father, and they had no other.
In John’s letter she enclosed money, all she had, and told him to buy three tickets for Trinidad; that he, Sam, and Myrtle would be better off with Father than with a stranger who beat them.
To the farmer who beat them she wrote a short, passionate promise. She would find him one day and kill him.
And to Ernest she wrote an acceptance. She would leave for San Francisco in two days. She would not let him support her, she wrote. She would find a job and the two of them would live, work, and study together as equals.
John’s letter remained on the table, a reminder to Agnes that happiness is ephemeral and difficulty is what sustains.
11
San Francisco 1912
The first thing Agnes noticed in San Francisco was the white faces. She was used to Mexican and Indian faces lacing the white populations of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. In the Southwest, even whites were suntanned. But not here. When she arrived at the Southern Pacific depot in San Francisco, the lean man—no longer tanned but still sinewy and strong-jawed—who loped toward her on the platform was Ernest Brundin. He smiled one of his rare, brilliant smiles, so unexpected in a gaunt face, and won Agnes to him and to California. He picked her up and whirled her two full revolutions until her flying feet caught the suitcase of a stout man who stood reading his timetable. On the streetcar all the way down Townsend and then Van Ness, he held her hand. It embarrassed Agnes but she permitted it.
“Everyone’s so pale,” she said as they climbed down at the Hayes Street stop. “You wouldn’t know it was July.” Already tatters of fog were blowing in from the ocean, now hiding, now revealing Hayes as it climbed west. It was early afternoon in summer but she shivered. “Folks look pale and puffy and cold.”
