Courting Carrie in Wonderland

by Carla Kelly

  She’s going to fire me, I know she is, Carrie thought. She’s going to demand her money back. She waited for that reality to terrify her, but it didn’t. Sometimes a girl needs to stick up for a friend. Her head went up. “Maybe we all need reminders, now and then.”

  Mrs. LaMarque shook her finger at Carrie. “I’m not used to being told what to do, young lady.”

  “I am,” Carrie said. “I get told what to do all the time, and it hasn’t ruined my life. You might have to listen to me about your clothing for the park. I know a steamer trunk won’t fit in the carriage Sergeant Major Stiles has arranged.”

  Fire in her eyes, Mrs. LaMarque opened her mouth to reply. To Carrie’s mystification, she closed it and just stared at Carrie through narrowed eyes. I can play this game too, Carrie thought, and gazed back with all the kindness in her heart, which, she was discovering, seemed to be quite a lot lately. If she had the nerve, she would give Ram Stiles the credit.

  “What would you recommend?” Mrs. LaMarque finally asked.

  Carrie looked around the room. “Those two suitcases will do,” she said, pointing to two perfectly lovely matching bags. She looked closer and gasped. “Is this alligator?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. LaMarque said, trying to sound bored, or maybe she was bored. Carrie didn’t care. She wanted to touch the alligator skin.

  “Only two suitcases? That is absurd,” Mrs. LaMarque said. Even to Carrie’s ears, it sounds like a last-ditch protest. “Very well! Open the trunk and let us get this over with.” She fished around in her purse and handed Carrie a key. There was no mistaking the tremor in her hand this time.

  Carrie opened the trunk and pulled the two sides apart. She stared with real delight at the cloth-covered drawers and the neat row of shoes at the bottom of both sides. Carrie thought of her two pairs of shoes, one old and one newer, and felt almost light-headed at the sight of shoes for each day of the week. The other side of the trunk had a clever rod across the top for hanging dresses, skirts, and evening frocks. Everything was anchored in place with a criss-cross of stiff fabric. None of the dresses looked practical.

  “Let’s start with one serviceable nightgown. Do you have such a thing?” Carrie asked, after she emptied the alligator bags of mostly miscellany, as far as she could tell. ”I hope you have a warm nightgown. Something in flannel?”

  “I have a nightgown and robe for each day of the week,” Mrs. LaMarque said, sounding like a woman on solid ground again. “My maid uses flannel to wipe my shoes.”

  “Flannel is nice when the weather’s cold,” Carrie replied, thinking of the nights when she had hunkered down in a bed with too-few blankets.

  “Look in that top drawer.”

  Carrie opened the drawer and sighed with pleasure. “My goodness.”

  “Made in France at some convent or other. Nuns are skilled with lace,” Mrs. LaMarque said casually. “See if you can find anything suitable.”

  Hoping her fingers, rough from kitchen work, wouldn’t snag on so much perfection, Carrie picked up the first gown, a dream of lace and silk a color McCall’s Magazine called sea foam. She wondered what variation of The Stare Sergeant Major Stiles would use on such a flimsy bit of bedtime coverage. You’re getting wicked thoughts, she told herself, devoting her attention to the gowns until her face didn’t feel on fire.

  “See anything useful?” Mrs. LaMarque asked. “You said we had twenty minutes before that sergeant major is going to drag us out of here.”

  I don’t want to think about Ram Stiles right now, she told herself. It’s not healthy. She rummaged carefully through the drawer and finally found a long-sleeved gown, still silk, that might work. “This one, although I wish you had a flannel gown.”

  “I don’t,” the woman said with finality. “We can’t take them all?”

  “One only, if we’re going to fit what you need into those two cases,” Carrie said just as firmly.

  “I have never slept in the same nightgown two nights in a row,” Mrs. LaMarque said, that militant tone returning.

  Was she suddenly feeling brave? Did thinking about Ram Stiles in whatever context bring out the bravery in her? “Perhaps you haven’t in recent years,” Carrie said.

  Mrs. LaMarque looked at her for a long moment, eyes narrow again. The look softened, to Carrie’s relief.

  “No, not in recent years, Miss Smarty Pants,” she replied. “I like my comforts now, though. Only one gown?”

  “Only one.”

  “A robe and slippers?”

  It was hard to overlook the sarcasm, but Carrie did her best. “Certainly. If you have perhaps three simple skirts and shirtwaists for daytime, that would work.”

  “Look on the other side.”

  Carrie unclasped the fabric that held the dresses tight against each other and searched through gorgeous fashions. Her heart in her mouth, she stopped at one evening gown labeled House of Worth. She found sensible-enough skirts and shirtwaists, plus two petticoats, and carried those to the bed.

  “I have been informed there will be dances in the hotels,” Mrs. LaMarque said, seeking for control again. “There will be room for an evening dress.”

  She walked to the steamer trunk and flicked through diaphanous bits of lace and silk.

  “It’s chilly here until August,” Carrie ventured, pretty certain her credit, never massive, was about to run out with Lady Imperious.

  The socialite stopped at a deep green dress with gold-crusted sequins on an overskirt and bodice. “This one,” she said. “Make it fit in that suitcase. Open that center drawer and I’ll show you which corset.”

  She did, and Mrs. LaMarque pulled out a low-cut corset. “These stockings too, plus this petticoat.”

  Carrie fished out the required items, wondering how it would all fit, and closed the drawer. “Underdrawers, Mrs. LaMarque?”

  “Next drawer down.”

  Carrie attempted some humor. “I suppose you will insist on one for each day.”

  Mrs. LaMarque gave her a down-at-the-nose glare and ruined the effect by smiling, to Carrie’s astonishment. “You are a rascal, Carrie McKay.”

  Carrie laughed out loud and opened the next drawer. Those same French nuns must have been hard at work. She took out six delicate drawers with lace on the legs. She stroked the fabric. A girl wouldn’t even know she had any drawers on.

  “Take out another pair for yourself,” Mrs. LaMarque said. Her voice sounded gruff, as though she didn’t want to be found doing something kind. “We’re much the same size, and there is a drawstring.”

  “I won’t argue,” Carrie said, and took out a cream-colored pair. She held it up to her waist. “Seems a shame to bury it under all my other clothes.”

  “Save it for your wedding night then,” Mrs. LaMarque said, and there was no denying the humor in her voice. “You’ll find some wild-eyed cowboy in this state to marry. He’ll probably have a heart attack if you parade around in those.”

  “Mercy on us, ladies! I’m shielding my eyes and heading back downstairs before I go blind!”

  Carrie gasped and stared at the open door, which neither of them had thought to close. “You … you … you told us twenty minutes,” she stammered, and jerked the silk drawers behind her back.

  “That was fifteen minutes ago,” Sergeant Major Stiles said. He held his lips tight together, and Carrie knew he was desperate to laugh.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” Mrs. LaMarque said. “If you don’t, you’ll probably rupture yourself.”

  That did it. Ramsay Stiles, dignified noncommissioned officer, ducked into the hall and started laughing. Carrie put her hand to her mouth, looked at Mrs. LaMarque, and started to laugh too.

  “We should have closed the door,” Carrie said, which for some unaccountable reason sent Mrs. LaMarque into another peel of laughter, which meant Carrie had to laugh too.

  “I’ll close it for you,” they heard from the hall. “Ten minutes and then I’m coming in, underdrawers or not.”

  “Mercy,”
Mrs. LaMarque said. She looked at the skirts and shirtwaists on the bed. “Bring over that suitcase. Let’s get started.”

  ‘I don’t think I can ever leave this room again,” Carrie said, her hands to her face.

  “You can and will,” Mrs. LaMarque assured her. “Let me try on your shoes.”

  Relieved to do something, Carrie took off her shoes. Mrs. LaMarque tried to appear more disdainful than ten or twelve queens, but she clapped her hands when the shoes fit. “I can outrun bears now,” she declared. “You’ll get them back in a week. Where are your other shoes?”

  “Downstairs in my carpet bag,” Carrie said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She opened the door, ready to go to the lobby in stockinged feet, but there was her carpetbag right outside the door. Thank you, Ram, she thought. I guess I’ll have to face you again.

  It took them longer than ten minutes, but even a brave man like Ramsay Stiles probably did not wish to shock himself again. The suitcases bulged dangerously, but maybe that was the nature of alligators, bagged or not.

  “There will be a hatbox,” Mrs. LaMarque said. She looked around the room, her hands on her hips. “What do you suggest we do with this steamer trunk? It’s not going to disappear.”

  “We can store it here,” Carrie said. “My boss, Mr. Wylie, reserves a room downstairs for steamer trunks.”

  “I am not with the Wylie Company,” Mrs. LaMarque assured her. “Camping is vulgar.”

  “No it’s not. It’s fun,” Carrie said.

  “Ask the desk clerk, and then tell Sergeant Major Stiles we are ready.”

  Suddenly shy to face him again, Carrie went down the stairs and saw Ramsay hiding behind a newspaper in the lobby. She sat down beside him, and stared straight ahead. “We’re done upstairs.”

  He rolled the newspaper into a tidy stick, looked around to make sure the lobby was empty, and tapped her on the head with it. She couldn’t help smiling.

  “There’s a quartermaster wagon headed back to Fort Yellowstone,” he said, all business, but with a bit of lurking humor in his voice. “I’ve arranged for two privates to haul that monstrosity to National Hotel in Mammoth, where she, and I imagine you, will be staying tonight. I’m certain the manager will trip all over himself to store it somewhere until she returns in all her splendor.”

  “I’ve cut down on the splendor,” she said, still too embarrassed to look him in the eye.

  The sergeant major took care of her shyness by turning her cheek toward him with one finger. “I’m glad to know you two are laughing. We might survive this ordeal yet.”

  She nodded, unsure of herself and wishing she were in Bonnie Boone’s kitchen making pies, or singing Stephen Foster songs at the campfire. “I’m wishing I hadn’t agreed to this,” she admitted.

  “I know you are,” Ram said. “I also strongly suspect that you have more backbone than you think you do.” He couldn’t help smiling. “And a smashing pair of silk drawers.”

  Carrie took the newspaper from his hand and hit him on the head with it. “Go get those privates and wrestle that trunk downstairs,” she said, laughing now. “This had better be the fastest six days in the history of the universe.”

  “Chronology doesn’t work like that,” he said as he went to the door and motioned to the soldiers outside. “By the way, I meant it about dinner at my commanding officer’s house tonight.”

  “You and Mrs. LaMarque?”

  “And you.”

  “All I have are skirts and shirtwaists. Not me.”

  “It’s an order.”

  “I don’t work for Major Pitcher,” she said, feeling her courage dribble away.

  “I do, and you’re my guest,” he said. “Caroline, just be yourself. It’s too late to start worrying about what you’re wearing.”

  “Just once I’d like to impress people,” she said.

  “You already do.”

  She wanted to brain him with the newspaper this time. “Do you have an answer for everything?” Carrie asked, exasperated.

  “Nah, just the important stuff. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that your eyes will get stuck if you roll them like that?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  If the dinner at the Pitchers’ house was a success, Carrie gave all the credit to the amazing, infuriating, domineering Mrs. Louise LaMarque, formerly of the Broadway musical stage.

  If Carrie hadn’t known better, she would have thought Mrs. LaMarque went out of her way to be charming and deflect all attention from her temporary maid, who wanted to sink beneath the floorboards because she felt more at home in kitchens. All her recent dancing partners, Jake Trost among them, had commented how light on her feet she was. Now Carrie wondered why she felt like she wore clown shoes, accompanied by hands too large and out of proportion.

  One bright moment was her introduction to Mrs. Chittenden, an angular-looking woman with bright eyes. Ram introduced them, and Mrs. Chittenden held out her hand immediately, even though it was obvious to Carrie that the engineer’s wife was several rungs up the social ladder from anyone who ever cooked in the Railroad Hotel and scrubbed floors to help pay her tuition.

  “Mrs. Pitcher suggested I bring along some of my sheet music,” Mrs. Chittenden confided. “Sergeant Major Stiles says you sing at the Wylie Campground fire each evening.”

  “Mrs. LaMarque is the singer,” Carrie reminded her, feeling a wave of dread march up her spine.

  “That’s true. What was I thinking?” Mrs. Chittenden said, and introduced Carrie to other officers’ wives.

  Carrie shook hands, wished herself elsewhere, then found herself drawn into conversations about Yellowstone in the summer, rumors of excellent pie at Willow Park, and bears. Always wary of slights because of her social status, she found none. She stopped looking and enjoyed herself.

  Dinner was simple fare—government beef, tinned beans, potatoes on the venerable side, and a custard with peaches to sum it up. All the while, she kept up conversation, watching for cues when to turn the discussion to the person on the other side of her. She silently thanked Miss Janeway of Montana Ag’s Domestic Science Department, who had insisted her students would need this information someday. “You won’t always live on isolated ranches,” Miss Janeway had assured her pupils, even though most of them would probably do precisely that.

  Thank goodness it was Ramsay on one side and Captain Chittenden on the other. The engineer wasn’t above drawing on the linen tablecloth with the blunt edge of his knife to demonstrate the challenge of the corkscrew road at Sylvan Pass to the officer’s wife next to him.

  Her only mistake was to stand up when Mrs. Pitcher asked if anyone wanted after-dinner coffee, rising out of habit to serve as she would have done in the Wylie dining hall. She started to sit down, red-faced, when Mrs. Pitcher gestured to her.

  “My dear, you are kindness itself to help me,” the major’s wife said. “My cook has a hip complaint, and the maid just married to a teamster in Gardiner. Poof, gone.”

  The way the other wives laughed told Carrie all she needed to know about the precarious nature of domestic help in Yellowstone Park. She excused herself and hurried into the kitchen. She saw the major’s wife talking to the cook, who suddenly sat down and rubbed her hip as though it ached.

  Carrie felt tears well in her eyes at Mrs. Pitcher’s kindness in creating an instant excuse for her rising inadvertently, as though she had planned the whole thing. She thought of slights and gossip at her lower-than-low status and realized she had an ally. She couldn’t fathom why, but it was enough to know.

  Under Mrs. Pitcher’s directions, Carrie filled the silver coffee pitcher from the enamelware on the range. “I’ll be right behind you with the custard,” the major’s wife said.

  Serving coffee put Carrie further at ease, because she was efficient and skilled in something so simple but satisfying to her. She watched Ramsay as he spoke to Captain Chittenden across her empty space, seeing animation she hadn’t noticed when he talked to others at the ta
ble. Her heart went out to him as she realized he was probably no more comfortable in this setting than she was.

  She suspected the sergeant major would rather be sitting at his own table in his kitchen, eating something simple. I prefer it too, she thought, as she served coffee. She couldn’t deny the wisdom in learning how to better herself, and then have the freedom to choose how her life went. She knew she owed the Wylies an unpayable debt for taking in a terrified girl, weeping at the back of the First Presbyterian Church.

  Mrs. Pitcher served custard in cut glass bowls. Before she sat down, she thanked Mrs. Chittenden for the loan of her own dessert bowls. “Mrs. LaMarque, that’s how things are in the army,” she said, singling out her august guest. “My bowls broke on this most recent return to Fort Yellowstone. Share and share alike, ladies?”

  Everyone laughed at this apparently common facet of army life, and the major raised his coffee cup in an impromptu toast: “To the ladies of the army, who make do, from broken dishes to husbands who are never home when they are needed.”

  Carrie raised her cup too, and caught Mrs. LaMarque’s eye. The socialite beamed on the assembly of ladies and gentlemen in rugged circumstances, enjoying the novelty of her rustic surroundings. And may we survive six days together, she added silently.

  In a matter of minutes, Carrie wondered if she would even survive the rest of the evening. As the table talk declined, the major ushered all of them into the parlor, nodding to Ramsay to bring in some of the dining room chairs.

  “I choose a back seat any day,” Ramsay said as he sat beside her on the chairs closest to the dining room they had just vacated. “I am never going to get used to so many officers in one room.”

  “You’d rather be anywhere but here too?” she whispered.

  “Give me a log by a campfire,” he replied.

  Mrs. Pitcher asked Louise LaMarque if she would favor them with a song. The parlor grew silent in anticipation. With a glance at her husband, she said, “John had the pleasure of hearing you on Broadway once. We don’t often have a treat like this. Nettie Chittenden told me earlier she would be happy to accompany you. Would you humor us?”