A Flickering Light (30 page)

She’d miss Roy and Selma and even Lilly. And yes, she’d miss her parents too. But the time had come. She needed to make a change, and she would do that even it meant sacrificing her own camera. She’d work for Mr. Bauer forever if she had to, but she wouldn’t have everything she did be constantly held against her as though she had barely turned ten.

She scanned the red lines of the ledger page to pick up from where she’d left off the day before. She decided maybe she should go down to the train station and pick up the supplies. It would keep her from feeling excluded by the goings-on in the other room.

“I’m going to the train station,” she shouted as she pulled her hat on. “The shipment is due, and our first sitting isn’t until eleven. I’ll be back by then.” She added to herself,
And maybe Mr. Henderson will be gone by then
. It simply wasn’t right that Voe had her beau right beside her while she was supposed to be working.

Voe hurried back into the room. “Not necessary, Jessie. Daniel picked it up early this morning and brought it along. It’s ready to be put into the darkroom if you want to do that.”

Now Jessie straightened her small shoulders to stand to her full height. Daniel had no right to do work that she and Voe were responsible for. Not that she minded tending to the shipments. She always checked off what was there against the invoice to be sure nothing was shorted. That happened sometimes. But to have someone not even associated with the studio signing for things, well, she’d have to speak to the railroad about that. Besides, how did Daniel even know there was a shipment? Voe rarely paid attention to things like that.

“How did you know to pick it up?” Jessie asked Voe.

“Mr. B. told me. And he said he’d call the station to be sure Daniel could do it.”

So Mr. Bauer had strength enough for that. If people were going to keep surprising her, she’d just become all the more determined to make her own way. After all she did to make this studio work too. She might have to continue working until Mr. Bauer returned, but if she moved out of her parents’ home, at least she wouldn’t be surprised there.

The visit to Rochester a few days before Jessie’s eighteenth birthday took all of them from Winona. The appointment had been moved up from the original March date. The night before, Jessie had wondered out loud why the girls couldn’t remain at home. She would take Roy to Rochester on her own if they’d like. All three girls and her father would be losing wages for the overnight journey, and it just seemed a waste of finances. But her mother said it was important for them all to go. The doctors had said so. It was one of the things the Mayo brothers did, involving everyone who might have information to help them decide what to do about a patient.

“That’s different,” Jessie conceded. “We can all help Roy. We’re not taking up space on the train.”

Old-timers said there was only one drift that winter, but it was twenty miles long and twenty feet high. Men earned extra money keeping the tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway clear. Daniel Henderson had been doing such work, hoping to get into the good graces of the freight company so he could hire on a permanent railroad crew. He cut ice on the off days, and Voe proudly talked about how he always kept busy. Jessie supposed he’d be “helping” her at the studio while the Gaebeles made their way to Rochester.

She was a little worried about Voe’s taking care of things alone at the studio, but she’d have to trust that Voe could do the job. They’d not scheduled any sittings, so Voe would be making prints most of the time Jessie was gone.

Roy, though, acted delighted to have everyone together and going on what he called an a-a-advent-t-t-ture, when he could get the whole word out. Jessie decided to make it so. She’d contributed to this journey and prayed that they would find a way to help Roy speak better. Her mother had noted that whatever the outcome, it wasn’t in their hands. Maybe the wisdom of the Mayo brothers would do what Jessie’s family could not. Maybe there’d be a way to transform Jessie’s regret.

Jessie put the final hatpin into the felt to hold it tight against her hair. She listened carefully to sounds down the hall coming from her brother’s room. He hadn’t left yet to go down the stairs. She could hear him making drum sounds with his hands on the footboard of the bed. Jessie swirled out of the door, pushing her hat onto her head, her carpetbag in her other hand. She knocked on Roy’s door to see if he was ready to go. Her sisters were already downstairs.

“B-b-better g-g-go?” he asked, putting his hat on.

Jessie hugged him and then held him at arm’s length and straightened his cap. “We’re ready for your adventure.”

They descended, his feet taking one step at a time, her being careful not to rush him. She had a moment of insight. Maybe their mother finished his words for him because she couldn’t bear the pain of loss that waiting carried with it. Maybe Jessie endured the ache of his effort and waited for the very same reason.

The morning air crisped their noses as the Gaebele family stepped up into the streetcar, rode it to within a few blocks of the train station, then walked the rest of the way, serenaded by the crunch of their boots on the packed snow. Jessie’s face felt frozen by the time they boarded the cars and found two rows of leather seats facing each other near the back, by the stove. Mrs. Gaebele and Lilly took one side; Selma and Jessie faced them. Across the aisle sat Roy and his father, facing strangers. They moved their bags into various places beneath their feet, and Jessie thought they looked liked hens settling into nests. Selma put the lunch basket beneath her feet. Jessie set her Kodak in a bag beneath hers. She’d grabbed it at the last minute, hoping she could catch some shots of the snows. She didn’t think there were any lakes around Rochester, but if there were, she might get some interesting views of the windswept snow rippling on the frozen surface or catch some of the Scandinavians fishing through holes in the ice.

Roy leaned out from the other side of her father when the train began its rumble forward, his face filled with a dimpled grin. He must have belched because his cheeks puffed, but Jessie couldn’t hear it, for the whistle blew and steam billowed down around the car like fog and then lifted as the wind brushed it away. Roy grinned and waved. Whatever else happened, he would enjoy the journey. She’d do her best to do the same. She took out her Kodak and snapped a picture of him. It would be a good way to remember the day.

Settled in and bundled up, they headed west to Rochester. The fifty-mile trip would consume several hours.

Jessie snapped a few other pictures but realized that the train’s movement would make them fuzzy. The cold would affect the camera too, so she stuffed it in her tapestry bag and just took pictures with her eyes. On either side of the tracks, snow piled up like the creamy clay bricks of the Winona library.

“I think it’s nice,” Selma told her, moving closer so they could talk more easily without shouting.

“Looking up the valleys as we pass, seeing the trees covered with snow? I think you’re right, Selma.”

“No,” Selma said. She eyed Lilly and their mother across the way. Both had nodded off, stitching in their laps. “Working for the Bauers is nice. Oh, there’s lots to do, but the house is a fine place, Jessie. It’s a lot cleaner than Mr. Steffes’s shop.”

Jessie hadn’t asked Selma about her work for the Bauer family. She wanted nothing to fuel “unnatural affections,” as her mother might call them. But Selma’s conversation drew her like the Ouija board game Voe had brought into the studio. Jessie had played it only once. She felt a kind of anticipation that she liked but then dreaded the outcome too. If her mother knew she’d indulged even once in such a thing, she’d have kept her from work for a week and made her read the Bible for hours just to remind her that the future wasn’t in some Gypsy’s board.

“They have English dishes with roses on them all along the plate rail, and Mrs. Bauer has paper on her bedroom walls, but just around the top, not all over. And—” Jessie interrupted her by putting her hand on Selma’s knee. “What?” Selma asked, but when Jessie couldn’t tell her why she shouldn’t talk of her work at the Bauers, Selma continued. “They have enough rooms for everyone to have their own and a day nursery too. Winnie and I can play in there. Well, I’m there cleaning the checkered floor, but she shows me her toys. I see why you like her,” Selma said.

“I do like the children.” Jessie looked out the window, then turned back. “What about…Mrs. Bauer?”

“Oh, she’s all right. She’s all nervous about Winnie’s party, but I told her that cake and a few games will be enough to make a five-year-old happy. I offered to sing if she wished.”

“Did she want you to do that?”

Selma shook her head. “No. I think she worries so much about Mr. Bauer and the children. She’s always asking if Russell is home yet or if Robert awoke and maybe she didn’t hear him. I think she must sleep really sound. Maybe that worries her. She does forget things, and she naps a lot.”

Jessie wanted to ask if the Bauers argued or what sort of things they talked about. A part of her didn’t want to hear that Mrs. Bauer was worried about Mr. Bauer. She hadn’t been so worried that she’d refused to leave him alone, sick as he was, that day Jessie was there. She must have forgotten about Selma’s interview too, for it would have been more seemly for the woman of the house to make those arrangements. Why didn’t her mother consider that? Mrs. Bauer was as much to blame for Jessie’s being alone with Mr. Bauer as anyone. If only Mrs. Bauer had remembered to pay their wages, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Selma went on to talk of other things she liked about the Bauer home, but Jessie’s thoughts moved back to the day she’d been there herself, to the gentleness of Mr. Bauer. After he gave her their wages, they finished their tea and he spoke to her like her uncle August might, though in his illness-halted way. She felt like an adult sitting with him, hearing him speak of what he’d read in the paper, of Bugatti, an Italian who had founded a company to compete with Ford, only Bugatti’s cars were for racing. He was a man who noticed the world and wasn’t just stuck on Winona, like the boys she encountered at the sleigh ride last week, the one sponsored by the Ladies of Foresters.

She shook her head. These thoughts weren’t good for her.

“You’re not interested, are you?” Selma said. She crossed her arms in a pout.

“Maybe later,” Jessie told her. Selma shrugged her shoulders, took a book from her satchel, and was soon sound asleep, leaning onto Jessie’s shoulder, a soft snore lifting a tendril of her curls. Jessie didn’t need to hear about the Bauers. She wouldn’t think of anything but Roy now. The scenery zipped by the window so quickly she could just make out the white world broken by dark tree trunks and branches, an occasional red barn and log house. She’d see what they could do for Roy, go home, and before the year was out, she’d save enough to move on. She’d be an adult and on her own, working somewhere besides the Bauer Studio, away from temptations of shadow and light.

Balance

S
T
. M
ARY’S
H
OSPITAL, WHERE THE
Mayo brothers and their father practiced medicine, was held in high regard. By 1904, the team of physicians had already performed more than three thousand specialized surgeries and now employed other physicians in all sorts of new medical studies. The men traveled around the world and learned the techniques of doctors in other places, bringing in new ideas to Minnesota.

It was toward this promise that the Gaebeles took a horse-drawn cab from the train station to the hospital, where the building’s tall spires made Jessie think it looked like a church. She said that, and her mother told her she was sure there’d be a chapel inside.

Once there, Roy and their parents were taken into a room while the girls remained behind in a cavernous waiting area. “I thought they needed us all,” Selma said.

“Someone will come out later,” Lilly said. “I’m sure. Don’t be impatient.”

Selma stuck her tongue out at her older sister.

Jessie looked around. Many other families waited, and off to the side a group of Gypsies literally camped: colorful scarves hung across the backs of chairs, making an awning for the many small children who played on a thick rug placed over the cool marble floor.

Mr. Bauer had once told Jessie that he’d trained as a physician in the military and had only one more year of study to complete before he would have been a doctor. Maybe he could have diagnosed his conditions earlier. He certainly wouldn’t have had to suffer the mercury poisonings if he’d been a doctor. He also told her that it was a mistake he’d made, leaving something he enjoyed doing that would have given him a livelihood and helped others too. He wished he had found another way to deal with the horrors of war.

“I was impatient,” he’d said. “Young people often are. And I didn’t realize that I was wounded too, like the men I treated. Their pain infected me, but I didn’t know I carried that disease long years after their wounds healed. I imagine they hid wounds as well,” he’d mused. “You’ll find yourself compulsive like that sometimes too, Miss Gaebele. You must guard your heart and do what you most love, and don’t get pulled away into something…less settling.”

She wasn’t being pulled away into anything she didn’t wish. She guarded her heart. It belonged to her family first and attended to what they needed, as with Roy. She looked to her faith to help guard her heart too, though she had more questions than answers. Photography was next, and that did fill her up and make her heart sing. Photography gave her a plan and a path to pursue. Mr. Bauer had given her that path.
Mr. Bauer
.

She felt agitated, wasn’t sure why.

“I’m going to walk around,” Jessie said. “I could use the exercise after that bumpity ride.”

“Mama told us to wait.” This from Lilly.

“There’s no reason to just sit. I’ll be close enough that when they come out to get us, I can be here in a flash. I’ll take some pictures.” It would keep her from always thinking of Mr. Bauer.

Lilly stitched a blouse she’d brought with her, and Selma had her book. As Jessie walked past the Gypsies, she made eye contact with an old woman, who motioned her to come over. Jessie shook her head. Mama wouldn’t like that. But a child crawled onto the woman’s lap and put a finger in the old woman’s mouth. Neither had teeth, and the old woman laughed. The baby cooed as the woman motioned for Jessie to join them. There was a photograph here. What could be the harm?

“I tell your fortune for you,” the woman cackled.

“No one can do that,” Jessie said.

“Ah, the soul speaks in mysterious ways. Give me your hand.”

“I don’t think so,” Jessie said. She was glad she still had gloves on.

“It hurts nothing. Come. Enjoy. You’re a pretty young girl. It is for fun. To entertain the children and an old woman.”

Jessie turned back to look at her sisters. They hadn’t noticed that she’d paused. “May I take your pictures?”

“First, your fortune.”

She set the camera down, removed her glove, put her palm out for the woman.

“Ah…you will live a long time for such a little person.”

“Where do you see that?”

The woman pointed to a line bisecting Jessie’s palm.

She sniffed. “It doesn’t say old age to me,” she said. “But I do see a few grains of lint in there from my glove.” She brushed at it. The woman held tight.

“And five children. Five. All healthy, all living long lives too. You’re a fortunate woman.”

“Five? I should get started then.” Jessie laughed.
This is ridiculous
. She pulled her hand free, or tried to.

“No. I see eight. Yes, eight.”

Jessie shook her head and laughed again.

“Your time will come. And here, here I see that you will travel far. There will be many hills to climb and many valleys, but you will keep going and arrive back to where you began.”

“With my eight children,” Jessie said.

The woman folded Jessie’s fingers into her palm and smiled. “It is a pleasure to meet so enduring a young woman.”

Enduring? That was a strange word to use with her in mind, Jessie thought. It was a silly thing. Her mother wouldn’t like that she’d indulged in it even in jest. But then, hadn’t she read that God uses many people to fulfill each person’s purpose? Even a Gypsy might be a prophet of some sort. At least she hadn’t asked her for money or threatened to put a curse on her if she’d didn’t give it.

“Now your picture.” Jessie said. She removed her Kodak and took the photo, the baby still cooing with his finger in the woman’s mouth. Maybe she’d take a series of baby photographs, Jessie thought, of people who could afford to pay her with more than strange fortunes.

A few people stared as Jessie walked the halls, swinging her camera. She stopped to photograph a statue of Mary and the baby Jesus in the lobby. A skylight gave the artwork depth, and Jessie thought she had enough light for a closeup of the Virgin’s hands. She’d have to wait to find out. Large paintings of landscapes and the sea hung on the walls, but Jessie saw no photographs until she took a side hall, carpeted and not quite so wide but with high-back chairs pressed every few feet against the plaster. There she found framed oil portraits of the famous Dr. William Worrall Mayo and his two doctor sons, Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie. She evaluated the posing and thought the backgrounds were a little dark and somber for men who had such generous smiles on their faces and brought joy to so many. She thought she’d take a photograph of one of the portraits, held the Kodak up, but the light wasn’t good. And besides, she hadn’t had much luck in retaking pictures. She still owed Mr. Bauer money for the plates used to make prints of the baptized girls. Her only hope was to have a camera that allowed her to develop her own plates and prints.

She’d save the pictures she had left for the ride home tomorrow. Maybe someone interesting on the train would pose, but if not, she’d be more selective about what she photographed, truly frame the picture before she ever took it. If she couldn’t see what she wanted to see, she’d wait. She’d be more patient. She could do that. She felt tears well up. She felt so grateful to have discovered this love of capturing a moment in time and sometimes making it even more perfect than it might otherwise be—a fragile moment retained as it really happened.

A side hall beckoned her, and she turned into it. A series of statues cast fascinating shadows on a carpeted floor that led to an office. She pretended to frame a practice shot of a statue of a large bird when the door opened. A man wearing a suit and a shiny tie held securely by a gold pin stepped out. “What are you doing?” he asked her just as Jessie heard her name called.

She looked toward Selma’s voice, looked back at him. “I was just… I’m not really photographing.” She realized how ridiculous that response must seem with a camera pointed his way and a bag slung over her shoulder.

“Jessie!”

“We don’t allow pictures here,” he said. He sounded angry, upset. “It’s to protect the patients.”

“I didn’t… No patients, just interesting things.” She pointed the camera at the bird statue. She remembered the Gypsy and the child, but they had agreed to pose.

She stepped away from him, her glasses slipping down her nose. She turned and saw Selma waving her arms at the end of the corridor. “They want us now,” her sister shouted.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t think anyone would mind. I was just—” She walked backward. He took a step toward her. She turned, moving quickly around the corner.

“What were you doing?” Selma asked when she caught up with her. “Who is that man?”

“Is he following us?”

He’d stopped, any threat she posed apparently diluted, and Jessie breathed relief that she’d escaped without consequence. As they hurried, she told Selma about the pictures while attempting to put her camera into the bag she’d taken from her shoulder, then at the intersection where the carpet met the smooth surface of the marble, Jessie stumbled. She should have secured the Kodak. That thought fleeted through her mind just as Jessie lost her grip on the camera. Like a ball, her precious Kodak bounced from one hand to the other, catching on the bag and forcing her off balance further, until, like a bad dream she ran from slowly, Jessie watched her camera crash to the stone floor. Behind it, Jessie sprawled out like a cat on an ice pond, watching her spectacles fly.

It’s what I deserve
, Jessie thought.
It’s what I’ve deserved all along
.

Selma helped her sit, then retrieved her glasses. Jessie hooked the wire rims around each ear, feeling foolish and sad all at once.

Jessie listened carefully to Miss Jones, as the woman sitting across from them had introduced herself. Jessie’s glasses were smudged, but she didn’t remove them to clean them. Her knees were sore from her fall, but she put that discomfort from her thoughts. Miss Jones had been gathering information from their parents and talking with Roy, she told them. The sunlit room held all sorts of things a child would like: wooden horses and wagons, iron train engines, dolls, and books, lots of books. Roy held a book of buildings with rounded domes and spires and elephants wearing colorful strings of beads draped across their foreheads. He looked up and waved when the girls came in and then returned to his story. Jessie ached for him.

“The doctors will see him before long,” Miss Jones said. She wasn’t a nurse, because she wasn’t wearing a blue-striped dress with a white apron and white hat as so many others wore as they fast-walked through the high-ceiling halls. She looked like a working woman, dressed as Jessie and Voe did when they met the public, except her linen suit molded to her slender frame more perfectly. She looked chic.

“They like me to talk first with everyone, to see how each of you sees your little brother,” Miss Jones explained to the girls. “We’ve had a nice chat already, haven’t we, Roy?” He nodded and smiled, those dimples sinking into his round cheeks like toe tracks in wet sand. “What do you notice about Roy’s speech?” She looked at Lilly first. “You’re Lilly, correct?”

Lilly had the same olive skin as Roy did, and really, those two looked more alike than either she or Selma, Lilly’s thick dark hair doing what she wanted it to do. “He talked a lot as a baby,” Lilly remembered. “Sometimes too much.” She laughed and fussed with her perfect hair. “Not that we minded. He asked lots of questions, little ones like, ‘What’s that?’ and, ‘Why?’ He still asks, but the questions take a long time for him to get out. It’s like a motor getting started in one of those new cars,” Lilly said. “Yes, that’s what it’s like. Only he never gets going any faster.” She laughed again and touched her hair.

“Does he get frustrated when people don’t understand him? Lose his temper?”

“Oh, we can always understand him,” Lilly said. “We just have to wait for him to finish.”

“Y-y-you d-d-don’t,” Roy said.

Lilly turned to him. Jessie thought Lilly would disagree, but she didn’t. She nodded. “I guess that’s true enough,” she said. “I don’t wait.”

“J-J-Jessie w-w-waits.” He finally got those words out.