A Dream for Addie

by Gail Rock

  A Dream for Addie

  The Addie Mills Stories, Book Three

  Gail Rock

  For Lisa Lucas, who is sometimes more like me than I am.

  With acknowledgments to Alan Shayne, Paul Bogart and

  Pat Ross for their creative friendship.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I’m an artist now, and I live and work in the city. With all the cement and noise and cars, the coming of spring seems to pass almost unnoticed. When I was growing up in Nebraska in the 1940s, the subtle signs of spring were one of the great pleasures of my life. It was always a contest at our house to see who could spot the first robin on the lawn, and we all watched eagerly for the morning when Grandma’s daffodils would burst into bloom outside the kitchen door. To me, Easter always meant sewing a new Sunday dress and dyeing eggs until my fingers were stained like a rainbow. But the Easter I remember best was in 1948 when I was twelve years old.

  Chapter One

  Since it was Easter vacation time and I didn’t have to go to school that morning, I didn’t really have any reason to get up. But I got up anyway, because around our house if you didn’t get up, there had to be some reason. Only sick or dying or slothful people stayed in bed late. Since neither Dad nor Grandma nor I would even think of committing the sin of sloth, staying in bed late at our house meant you were probably at death’s door. Then you had to eat milk toast and get mentholatum up your nose and iodine down your throat and a thermometer under your tongue until you realized that getting up early was a terrific idea after all. That’s why I always got up early even when I didn’t have to.

  Besides, I liked eating breakfast when Dad and Grandma were at the table too. My mother had died more than eleven years ago, just after I was born, and Grandma had come to live with Dad and me then. Grandma was in her seventies and short and wrinkled. Anybody who didn’t know better might have thought to look at her that she was a frail old lady. Dad and I knew better. Grandma was a powerful, energetic little bundle. She was the first one up in the morning and the last one to bed at night, and she outworked a lot of my friends’ mothers who were half her age. She had such strong hands she could put the lid on a pickle jar too tight for even my father to remove it.

  Grandma didn’t just keep house either. She had the biggest and best vegetable garden in the neighborhood and more flowers and fruit trees than anybody in town. She did more sewing and baking and canning than anyone else and still found time to sit and read for an hour or two every day. Her favorite books were her Bible and her dictionary, and she kept them right by her rocking chair in the living room so she could look things up at any time. She loved helping me with my vocabulary and spelling lessons, and we would always give each other the word tests in the Reader’s Digest when the new issue arrived.

  Grandma was reading at the table that morning and so was Dad, so there wasn’t much conversation. It was Thursday, the day the little town paper, the Clear River Clarion came out, and they were both busy catching up on the local news. Actually there was never anything in the Clarion that everybody in town hadn’t already known for days, but somehow seeing it down in black and white made it seem more important.

  While they read, I silently finished my oatmeal with raisins and apples cut up in it. Then I got some eggs out of the refrigerator. Using one of Grandma’s hatpins, I poked holes in both ends of the eggshells and blew the raw egg out into a bowl. I had been doing this for weeks to get eggshells to decorate for Easter, and so we had been having a lot of scrambled eggs lately.

  I never believed in doing one thing at a time because it seemed wasteful, so while I was huffing and puffing into the eggshells, I decided to read the back of Dad’s section of the paper. It wasn’t easy, with my glasses sliding down my nose and my pigtails swinging precariously close to the bowl of raw egg. I pushed the bowl of egg closer to Dad and gave a particularly hard puff. The egg slurped noisily out into the bowl as I leaned in closer to his paper. He suddenly whipped the paper up over his head and looked right into my face, which by that time was practically over his bowl of oatmeal.

  “Will you get your face out of my lap, Addie?” he said, irritated. Then he looked down at the bowl of raw egg. “And don’t do that mess at the table … it’s disgusting.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. I seemed to have a talent for irritating Dad. I didn’t intend to, but it usually worked out that way. I knew we liked each other, but he wasn’t very good at showing it, and some of that seemed to rub off on me when he and I were together. Most of the time it was a friendly battle, though.

  Dad was tall and slender, and his dark hair was just beginning to gray at the temples. He had a plain Midwestern face that always reminded me of those tight-lipped cowboys in the movies. Though he was easily annoyed by me, we had some good times together, and I was slowly learning how to hold my own with him.

  I leaned in close to his paper again, and he looked over at me.

  “I don’t know what’s so important in this rag of a paper that you can’t wait till I’m finished,” he said.

  “I wanna see if there’s anything in it about our Easter Style Show contest.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh, Dad! I told you about it a million times! All the sixth grade girls are designing original fashion creations for the 4-H Club.”

  “Fashion creations!” he said, sounding disgusted. “I thought you were making dresses.”

  “Oh, Dad! You know what I mean! And we’re having a contest to see who does the best one. We’re going to model them at the Women’s Club luncheon next week, and they’ll pick the winner.”

  “Oh, well,” he said sarcastically. “Big news like that wouldn’t be in the town paper … that’s probably on the front page of the Omaha World Herald!”

  “Very funny!” I said, looking disgusted. The Omaha World Herald was Nebraska’s biggest newspaper, and we read it every day, even though it never seemed to report anything about the people in Clear River.

  “You going to school looking like that?” Dad asked, eyeing my old jeans.

  I didn’t care much for dressing up, but I was not allowed to wear jeans to school. “Dad!” I said. “It’s Easter vacation! I don’t have to go to school for two whole weeks!”

  “Well, I’ll be!” Grandma interrupted from behind her paper.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The paper says Constance Gunderson is back here from New York,” said Grandma. “Says she attended her mother’s funeral in Omaha and is out here in Clear River to sell the family home.”

  “Huh!” snorted Dad. “She’ll never unload that white elephant. Must have twenty rooms in the joint. Nobody could afford to heat it in the winter.”

  I figured I knew everybody in Clear River, but this was all new to me. “Is that the big house on Elm Street, the empty one? Who’s Constance Gunderson? What does she do in New York?” I asked.

  “What are you, the district attorney?” said Dad.

  “Well, who is she?” I asked impatiently.

  “She’s Constance Payne, the actress,” said Grandma. “That’s her stage name. I guess she didn’t like Gunderson for acting.”

  “I never saw her in any movies, did I?” I asked.

  “She’s never been in any,” said Dad.

  “She’s on the stage,” Grandma said. “She does those Broadway things.”

  “You mean real, live theater stuff?” I asked, fascinated.

  “Yeah,” said Dad
, sounding unimpressed. “Probably Shakespeare and all that highbrow stuff. Don’t know why anybody would want to sit through that after a hard day’s work.”

  I was about to go on with my cross-examination when my best friend Carla Mae knocked on the door. Carla Mae lived next door, and she was my age. She had a knack of showing up at our house just at mealtime. This amused my grandmother, who loved to feed everybody, but annoyed my father, who thought it was a conspiracy to cost him more money—the thing he worried about most. The truth was that Carla Mae just liked to eat. She would have a meal at home and then drop over and have another one with us. She was beginning to look a bit on the chubby side.

  I opened the door and yanked her inside in a hurry, so I wouldn’t miss any of the talk about Constance Payne.

  “Kid! Wait’ll you hear what I just heard!” I hissed at her.

  “What?”

  “Constance Payne, the Broadway actress, is coming to Clear River!”

  “Who?” she asked, looking confused.

  “Already had breakfast, Carla Mae?” Grandma interrupted.

  “Yeah, but I could stand some oatmeal, I guess.”

  “I thought so,” Grandma smiled. Dad gave an irritated little grunt from behind his paper.

  I shoved Carla Mae into a chair, and Grandma plopped a bowl of oatmeal down in front of her.

  “Who’s Constance Payne?” Carla Mae asked, “I never heard of her.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out!” I said impatiently, and continued with my barrage of questions to Dad and Grandma.

  We learned that the Gundersons had been one of the few wealthy families in Clear River and that they hadn’t socialized much with other folks in town. Constance was only a couple of years younger than Dad, and they had attended high school together. Then she had gone East to an exclusive women’s college and to England to study drama and had gone on the stage in New York.

  She was beginning to sound very glamorous to me. Grandma said that Constance had come back to Clear River only once before, when her father had died some years ago. After that her mother had lived on alone in the old family house, a huge Victorian monstrosity that was on the edge of town. Then Mrs. Gunderson had taken ill and was moved to an Omaha nursing home where she had died a week ago. There had been no notice of her Omaha funeral in the paper, so nobody from Clear River had attended. Now it seemed that Constance Payne was in our town between engagements and would be selling the house, never to return.

  “What was she like?” I asked Dad.

  “Oh, she was always puttin’ on airs,” he said, sounding uninterested.

  “Do you think she has her name in lights? Is she really a big star?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” said Grandma. “Her folks always said she was doin’ real good.”

  “What does she look like, Dad? Have you seen her since she became a star?”

  “Oh, she’s pretty, I guess. Dark-haired. When she came back for her father’s funeral, she didn’t stay around long enough to talk to anybody.”

  Dad wasn’t much on telling details, and at a time like this it was infuriating.

  “Well did you ever go out with her?”

  “Ha!” he snorted. “Are you kidding? She was too fancy for me!”

  “Wow!” said Carla Mae, now finally caught up in the excitement. “I wish we could go to New York and see her!”

  “Listen,” I said. “We can go see her right here!”

  “I mean in a play,” she said.

  “Yeah, but at least we could get her autograph. We’ll just go over there and …”

  “No!” said Dad. “I don’t want you going over there and pestering her.”

  “Oh, James,” said Grandma, giving Carla Mae and me a sympathetic look. “I can’t see it would hurt anything.” Grandma was always more understanding of our brainstorms and projects than Dad was.

  “I don’t want her hanging around some … actress!” He said it as though it were a dirty word.

  “Gosh, Dad. All we want is her autograph. We’re not going to move in with her!”

  “Well, you just stay away from there. Her folks were nothing but rich trash.”

  That bit of news intrigued Carla Mae and me, but we didn’t have a chance to follow it up.

  “Now, James,” said Grandma. She didn’t like to hear unkind gossip.

  “Well, Mother, neither one of them ever did a day’s work in their lives,” said Dad.

  “You can’t blame her for the way her folks behaved,” said Grandma. “She was always a nice girl in school. You used to say so yourself.”

  “Oh, I hardly knew her,” Dad grumbled, and he got up to get his lunch pail.

  Carla Mae and I grabbed the paper Grandma had been reading and leaned our heads together over the table to read the article about Constance Payne.

  “When does she get here?” Carla Mae whispered.

  “According to this, she’s here now!” I hissed back. We gave each other one of our looks that said we were darn well going to see Constance Payne the actress if we had to go all the way to New York City and buy a ticket to Shakespeare.

  Carla Mae was having a slumber party at her house that night so she and I and Gloria Cott and Tanya Smithers (my worst friend in the sixth grade) could work on our Easter Style Show dresses. I didn’t really want to participate because I hated sewing, but it was the big yearly project of our 4-H Club, so I had to do it. The Women’s Club cooperated by letting us present our creations at their luncheon and then awarded a prize for the best dress.

  As long as I had no choice about being in the show, I was determined to do something creative. I had selected a simple dress pattern and was adding my own artistic details to it. The other three girls laid their dress patterns out on the floor so they could work as we talked, but I was still sketching in some of the artistic details I was adding, and I was going to keep it a secret until the day of the show.

  We cracked our gum loudly as we worked because Tanya had recently revealed that she hated to hear people crack gum, and since then we had been doing it a lot.

  Carla Mae had a lot of brothers and sisters—three of each in fact—so we all took our own blankets and pillows along and planned to sleep on the floor in her room. Actually, we didn’t plan to sleep at all, as that was the whole point of slumber parties. Another point was eating, and we always cooked our favorite stuff. Our usual combination was fudge and french fried potatoes. It made my dad sick just to hear the two things mentioned in the same sentence, but we loved it.

  There was always an argument over whether to put walnuts in the fudge. I hated them because I thought fudge should be enjoyed in its pure state. Tanya and Carla Mae liked the crunch of walnuts between their teeth, and Gloria, who never liked to argue about anything, just didn’t care. So we always made one fourth of the pan pure fudge, and that was for me. We were eating it with our french fried potatoes while we talked about the style show.

  Tanya’s mother was about the only woman in town la-de-da enough to read Vogue and Bazaar, and Tanya had brought along some old copies for us to use as inspiration. Tanya was studying them carefully and writing something down.

  “What are you writing?” asked Gloria.

  “I’m copying some of my style show narration out of Vogue,” said Tanya.

  We all groaned.

  “How come?” asked Carla Mae.

  “I want to make sure it fits in with our theme, High Society Steps Out,” Tanya said.

  We had worked for weeks to find just the right, sophisticated theme idea.

  “Ugh!” said Gloria. “I hate the whole thing. It’s so embarrassing to walk up and down in front of all those people!”

  I felt about the same way, but I didn’t let on. I always hated to admit I was afraid of anything.

  I leaned back on the bed with my sketch pad and put a few more touches on my design. “Oh, I don’t know if I’m ever going to get the details right on this dress!” I said, trying to build up the suspense for the ot
hers.

  “Let’s see it,” Carla Mae said, and reached for my pad.

  “No!” I said. “I told you it’s a secret design until the show!”

  “OK,” she said, annoyed. “Who cares?”

  The three of them studiously ignored me, pretending to be interested in Tanya’s copy of Vogue.

  “Oh, this is so complicated!” I sighed, trying to tantalize them. “It really is the most elaborate thing I’ve ever designed!”

  Tanya turned and gave me a dirty look. “For somebody who hates to sew, you’re sure making a big deal out of this,” she said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t even be in the dumb style show if I didn’t have to,” I said. “But if I have to do it, I’m going to be creative, and believe me, this is creee-ative!”

  “Oh, come on, let’s see what you’re doing,” said Gloria. “You’ve seen all of ours.” She reached toward me.

  “No!” I said, pulling the sketch pad away.

  Suddenly Carla Mae lunged across the bed at me. “Lemme see it, Mills!” she shouted, and dived for the sketch pad.

  “No! You rat!” I screamed, and scrambled to get away.

  Then Tanya and Gloria jumped across the bed too, and we were in a wild free-for-all. I rolled into a ball, clutching the pad to my stomach, and they pinched, tickled and clobbered me with pillows, trying to get it away. I screamed as loud as I could, which was ear-splitting.

  “Shhhh!” said Carla Mae quickly, and pulled off the other two. “You’ll wake up my folks, and they’ll kill me!”

  “OK,” I said. “Get away from me then. Truce!”

  They backed off, giving up. I had kept my secret design from them.

  “Immature!” I snarled at them, as I readjusted my glasses and settled myself on the bed again.

  “It better be some fancy dress when we see it,” said Gloria.

  I retrieved my gum from the bedpost, where I had put it when I was eating my fudge and french fries, and Tanya glared at me and turned up her nose. Tanya imagined herself to have the most refined manners of the four of us. I put my sketch pad safely away and started leafing idly through Vogue.