Compromise with Sin

by Leanna Englert

  The next morning in spite of vowing she’d not be a party to Frank’s Chautauqua scheme, Louise nevertheless wanted Marie to look her best. She dressed her daughter in her navy blue sailor dress, white stockings, and black patent leather shoes, then took extra pains with her braids to which she attached red ribbons. Beyond that, this was Frank’s project.

  Frank and Marie headed to the Methodist Church’s musty basement where the Chautauqua tour manager had his temporary office. The pair walked down a long hallway lined with posters—Jesus shepherding his flock, Jesus holding the hands of little children, Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the temple.

  They entered the office as a young man placed the telephone receiver in its stand and stammered to an impatient-looking older man, “I’m sorry, Mr. Ryder, but Mr. Henkleman won’t be in his office until this afternoon.”

  Ryder mopped his brow with his handkerchief and shook his head.

  Frank smelled opportunity. “Perhaps I can help.” He introduced himself to the Chautauqua tour manager and handed him a box of kolaches.

  Ryder glanced in the box and set it on a table. “Oh, yes, the hotelier.” His face was flushed and his speech clipped. “Decent lodging. Mattress could be firmer. This isn’t an opportune time to visit. I spent the last hour getting The Man of a Thousand Bird Songs out of jail. Got himself arrested last night for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Wasn’t too hard to get him sprung—he drove the jailer crazy with his screech owl. But now I would move mountains to see it doesn’t end up in the newspaper.”

  “You’ll find J.D. Henkleman at the barbershop at this hour,” Frank said.

  “Ring the barbershop, Conklin.”

  “No telephone.” Frank relished watching Ryder’s color deepen to crimson. “Call over to the River Rat Saloon. They’ll fetch him.”

  Marie tugged on her father’s hand.

  Frank leaned down. “What is it?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s all right, Junior,” he whispered. “We’ll get you an audition.”

  When at last the assistant handed the phone to Ryder, Frank listened briefly to the frustrated man plead his case with J.D., then motioned for the receiver.

  “J.D., Frank. Look, you know your Bible-beating readers. They get wind of this and they’ll raise hell, probably demand a refund of every nickel they spent on the Chautauqua so as not to support the devil’s work.”

  J.D. chuckled. “I have no intention of publishing that item, Frank. But I want our friend Mr. Ryder to squirm and remember the favor when we book the Chautauqua next year. This year the Committee had to personally guarantee so many ticket sales that not a one of us could sleep.”

  “I see.” Frank feigned disappointment. He picked up the slim, black telephone stand and paced until he reached the end of the cord, then turned and paced back. “But you’re the publisher, for God’s sake. Look, it’s too late for this week’s paper anyway. What’s the point of running it next week after the Chautauqua leaves? It won’t be news anymore.”

  “You rascal,” J.D. said. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but tell Ryder you’ve convinced me to look the other way.”

  Frank gave Ryder a smile and an “okay” sign. “I’m sure the Durfee Chautauqua Bureau will be forever indebted to you, J.D.”

  Even before Frank could hang up the telephone, Ryder grabbed his hand and pumped it excitedly. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’re the answer to my prayers.”

  Frank introduced Marie and told Ryder the purpose of their visit.

  “Does she know any of the great poems?” Ryder asked. “’Kubla Khan’ or ‘Charge of the Light Brigade?’”

  “I know ‘The Swing,’ by Robert Louis Stevenson,” Marie said.

  “Let’s see what you can do,” Ryder said.

  Ryder interrupted her recitation after a few lines. “That’s enough.” He turned to Frank. “Tell you what. We’ve met a couple of passable candidates in other towns, but your daughter has a special quality they don’t, if you know what I mean. Bring her to Mrs. Ryder’s elocution classes each day. Can you make it to her class today?” He looked at his pocektwatch. “Starts in a half hour.”

  Frank nodded.

  “If she measures up by the end of the week, we can talk about a contract.”

  Frank found himself the sole parent sitting in the dimly lit high school English classroom. He felt cautiously optimistic. In the front row were six children who had eyesight and two days of classes on Marie.

  A large American flag hung above Mrs. Ryder’s head where she stood at the blackboard writing out “The Owl and the Pussycat,” the chalk screeching as she added marks for emphasis and pauses. She turned and picked up the little bell sitting on her desk. Its tinkling silenced the children and stilled their squirming.

  “Now I want each child to take a turn reciting.” The clicking of ill-fitting dentures punctuated her words. “Thomas?”

  The boy walked to the front of the class. He took a deep breath, but before he could begin, Mrs. Ryder rang her bell. “Thomas Seastedt, you have jammed your hands into your pockets with such force as to risk poking holes in them, and mind you, won’t your mother be upset?”

  Thomas looked at his shoes and eased his hands from his pockets. “Yes, ma’am.” He gave a halting recitation and sat down.

  Following him, a girl in a pink dress managed to get through the first stanza before Mrs. Ryder slapped the bell. “Amanda Farragut, stop swinging your dress from side to side.”

  Frank wondered if the woman’s sour expression was a matter of uncomfortable dentures or her usual demeanor.

  Two more children gave passing recitations, but the next girl had no sooner spoken the title of the poem than Mrs. Ryder’s hand went for the bell. “Patricia Blackman, I told you yesterday and the day before that you mustn’t be so shrill. I do believe your voice could curdle milk.”

  A pall fell over the room as Patricia stumbled to her seat in tears.

  After the sixth child had recited, or attempted to, Mrs. Ryder began passing out papers. “For tomorrow’s assignment—”

  Marie interrupted. “Mrs. Ryder, may I please have a go at it?”

  Mrs. Ryder looked surprised. “I understood you would just be observing today. But if you’re ready, I see no harm in your reciting.”

  Marie stood and sweeping her cane from side to side took sure steps to the front of the classroom. Frank was glad he’d listened to Louise when she insisted Marie needed her cane in case lighting was poor.

  Frank held his breath. Marie must have memorized the poem by hearing others’ recitations. He exhaled when she got through it without hesitation. Her competent, if uninspired, presentation brought an inscrutable nod from Mrs. Ryder while classmates glanced sideways at one another.

  For the rest of the week, Frank accompanied Marie to class each morning. He carried a leather-bound notebook in which he copied the poems, complete with marks for emphasis. At night he took out his notebook, sat with Marie at the breakfast room table, and coached her on matters like projecting her voice and using pauses and drawn out phrases for dramatic effect, the very qualities Mrs. Ryder had noted in her critiques of Marie.

  Mr. Ryder’s presence in the classroom on the morning of the audition had a sobering effect on everyone present. Frank wished he’d brought the notebook to occupy his nervous hands as he sat with the hopeful parents of three other children at the audition. At the final class the day before, Amanda Farragut had delivered a polished, even heartfelt, recitation of “The New Colossus.” Her childlike, yet dramatic appeal, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .” had moved Frank and dashed his hopes.

  He’d doubled his efforts working with Marie that night, and now he worried that he’d pushed too hard. She looked exhausted.

  Frank watched Ryder making notes on each child and tried without success to read the man’s expression. Marie was last to audition. She walked to the front and fa
ced the class.

  Frank leaned forward and brought a clenched fist to his mouth. Why doesn’t she speak?

  “Please begin,” Ryder said.

  Marie took a deep breath and, to Frank’s relief, began reciting “The Raven” just as Mrs. Ryder had instructed. But seeing Ryder stop taking notes after the first few stanzas, Frank imagined the worst.

  After Marie finished the poem, Ryder stood before the class. Pressing his hands together in a steeple, he gazed thoughtfully over the children’s heads. Gesturing to Mrs. Ryder, he praised her work as evidenced by the superior quality of the morning’s audition. Then he proclaimed that the youngsters were fortunate to be learning elocution, a skill they would one day fully appreciate. In his experience, people came to the Chautauqua to be morally and intellectually uplifted, but what moved them beyond anything else was the nostalgia they felt upon hearing a beloved poem, one they themselves might have memorized, rendered masterfully and passionately by a child.

  Frank fidgeted, waiting for the man to get to the point.

  Finally Ryder said, “I predict,” and here he paused for dramatic effect, “that the next time you see and hear your fellow classmate Marie Alouette Morrissey, she will be gracing the Chautauqua platform, and the audience will be waving white handkerchiefs in the Chautauqua salute.”

  Marie gripped Frank’s arm. Amanda Farragut ran crying to her mother while the other children slouched in their chairs and glared at Marie. Frank did not care. Fame would elude him no more. His little girl would be a star. Louise would warm to the idea.

  “When will you leave?” Louise asked her husband, who was sitting on the edge of the bed and buttoning his nightshirt. She picked up his socks where he’d dropped them.

  “End of March. We’ll report to Lawrence, Kansas, for orientation.”

  “Promise me you’ll go for just one season.”

  “She’ll have three seasons before she’s too old.”

  “Have you considered the consequences?” She turned a sock right side out. “Marie can’t afford to take that much time from her piano studies. That’s her future. There’s no future in reciting poetry.”

  “This will do her good.” Frank swung his feet onto the bed and laid his head on his pillow. “Stage presence. She’ll need stage presence for a concert career.”

  Louise sighed. Frank was making up arguments as he went along. She placed his socks in the clothes chute, then picked up his shoes and deposited them in the closet. Then she sat at her vanity. “Promise me you’ll arrange for her to practice the piano. It’s her life, Frank.”

  “Promise.” He was already breathing heavily, the sound of a man nearly asleep.

  Louise began brushing her hair, which had turned to frizz in the humidity. As she counted strokes, she strived to find merits in Frank’s scheme. The Chautauqua would broaden Marie’s experiences. She’d be appreciated. And she’d have her father all to herself.

  Her hairbrush caught a snarl, stinging her scalp.

  Nothing good can come of this.

  13

  August 1904

  If the S-corset were available anywhere in Omaha, it would be the ladies’ foundations department at Wilson’s Mercantile. The week after the Chautauqua left Riverbend, Louise and Dovie pressed through the store’s narrow entrance. A barefoot boy in overalls shoved past them. Two stylish matrons, one young and one striving not to be old, strutted and scowled, jostled by some people chattering excitedly in a foreign tongue. A gaggle of giddy young women, no doubt flush with a week’s wages in their pockets, scurried toward the perfume counter.

  Odors of cheap toilet water hung in the air. Overhead, giant fans hummed, and metal canisters stuffed with shoppers’ payments clankety-clanked through a labyrinth of pneumatic tubes to a caged cashier who removed the cash and returned the canisters with change to the clerks.

  Louise called Dovie’s attention to a girl wearing bloomers. “You never wear bloomers anymore.”

  “I liked wearing them, if nothing else to needle Madge. But, just between us, J.D. has political ambitions, and my attire mustn’t be a distraction.”

  The women reached the back of the store where a huge wall clock overlooked the natural segregation that occurred beneath it. The masses walked down creaking wooden stairs, wavy from years of being trod upon, to bargains below, and the women of means, or those so aspiring, took elevators to the mezzanine and second floor.

  When the elevator doors rattled open the operator cautioned Louise and Dovie to watch their step. Louise remembered Marie’s first time riding this very same elevator, asking what keeps the elevator from going through the roof and where would they end up if it did.

  Louise and Dovie got off on the mezzanine and went directly to the ladies’ foundations where they were greeted by a clerk with a long measuring tape around her neck.

  “Please tell us you carry the new S-corset,” Dovie said.

  “I’m sorry, madame.”

  “Perhaps you could tell us when you might have them in stock,” Louise said.

  The clerk looked around, then leaned in and spoke in a conspiratorial voice. “We won’t. Mr. Wilson’s orders. He told our buyer that the S-corset offends the modesty of our respectable clientele.”

  Dovie threw back her shoulders and snapped, “Well, I never. Someone needs to inform Mr. Wilson that two respectable ladies are very disappointed.”

  Louise gave the clerk an apologetic glance. She was actually far less disappointed than Dovie. Wearing the S-corset would probably produce a backache. “Come on, Dovie. Let’s go look at shoes.”

  Dovie’s mood brightened.

  The two women took the elevator to the second floor where the doors opened to the distant sound of babies crying. One by one people exited and were greeted by the impeccably dressed floorwalker, whose ingratiating welcome suggested nothing was out of the ordinary. But the shoppers ignored him and looked intently toward the crying.

  Louise started to go the other way in the direction of the shoe department, but with Dovie’s nudging she relented. Nearing the infants department, Louise remembered the time Marie threw a tantrum, thankfully one of the only times she behaved so badly in public, over being fitted for her first hard-soled shoes.

  On an easel stood a sign reading: “Baby Giveaway Saturday, sponsored by Wilson’s Mercantile and the Good Shepherd Orphans Home.” On the floor sat a basket of baby things—bottles, diapers, gowns, and blankets—along with a sign that read “FREE Layette.”

  Louise looked toward the crying and saw two oversized cribs, each of which held several babies. Blue and pink ribbons festooned the cribs, but there was no hiding their stark institutional design. Next to the cribs, toddlers squirmed on a bench. Behind them sat older children, their stiff comportment suggesting their awareness of being in a competition. A lump arose in Louise’s throat, and she choked back tears.

  A woman cradling a baby in her arm pushed her way past Louise to get to the free layette display. She stopped every few steps just to look down at the infant. Her face radiated joy.

  “Oh, Louise, aren’t you glad we came shopping?” Dovie asked. “Getting to see unwanted babies get loving homes? Could anything be more uplifting?”

  Two onlookers were leaving, and the opening they left in the throng provided Louise and Dovie a good view of the spectacle. The woman in front of Louise had a bearing that matched the severity of her tailored navy blue suit and cloche. Her companion, wearing a peach-colored hat bedecked with silk roses and netting, was sniffling.

  In the girls’ crib two babies stirred without waking while a third—an olive-skinned beauty with curly black hair—amused the crowd by pulling herself up and shaking the crib bars. A dark-skinned woman with black, straggly hair and a soiled gingham dress approached the crib. A tap-tapping sound interrupted the pin-drop hush.

  Dovie leaned her head toward Louise. “Look. That’s her boot sole flapping. And that hair—why, rats could nest in it.”

  The baby held out her arms. The
nurse plucked the baby from the crib and handed her to the woman.

  “I can scarcely believe my eyes,” Louise said. “Apparently anyone who wants a baby just points, and it gets wrapped up and handed over like a pot roast at the butcher shop.”

  The woman in the showy hat standing in front of Louise dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “Poor motherless babe.”

  “Don’t you wonder what happened to the mother?” Louise asked Dovie.

  “Could be she died in childbirth,” Dovie said. “More likely she was an unwed girl who found herself in the family way.”

  “You look at these little innocents and wish their mothers had exercised restraint instead of yielding to temptation.” Suddenly Louise was struck with her own hypocrisy. How could she judge these mothers? She considered the curious workings of her mind. Somehow having been a woman who yielded to temptation had not altered her fundamental convictions.

  After a few moments, the nurse took the baby girl back and pushed several papers toward the new mother, who signed them, though she could hardly keep her eyes off the baby.

  Dovie glowered with righteous indignation as she whispered, “I hate to think of that cute baby girl going home with that slovenly woman.”

  “Probably a better home than an orphanage,” Louise said. “If there were an abundance of good homes, they wouldn’t be giving away babies in a department store. Besides, Dovie, look at that baby’s Mediterranean coloring. As cute as she is, what are her chances of getting adopted into a white family?”

  The nurse led the new mother to the bench and pointed to a dark-skinned little boy, about three years old, in a corduroy suit. The woman took a couple of steps toward him, and the baby bounced and squealed.

  The little boy jumped out of his chair. “Sissie! Sissie!”

  The woman stopped. The baby reached out for the little boy, but the woman shook her head and turned away.