The Threshold (18 page)

“The story may be legend but that woman was real in Callie’s time.”

“Let’s let her stay there.” He took her shoulders and turned her to face him. “This thing is getting out of hand. More and more people are being involved.”

“I don’t want her to come to Telluride and end up on the shady side of town. I’d bring her here if I could.”

“How would she adjust, torn from her family? God, she’s just a kid. You get her here and you say to this little girl—‘You’ll never have to worry about childhood diseases or epidemics again. If you get pneumonia a doctor can cure it and we’ll even straighten your teeth. All you have to worry about is missiles with nuclear warheads, rapists, drunk drivers, herpes, the cancer rate, and the poison in your air, water, and food. Oh, and would you like to see your own grave out in Lone Tree Cemetery?”

Aletha had continually to revise her judgment of him. He could flip off the most rude statement one minute and be sensitive the next. “Okay, Herr Professor, I agree. Your logic is unassailable.”

“Good, then let’s go up to the museum and get our history where it belongs.”

The museum sat on the edge of the sunny northern side of town and Aletha grew breathless trying to keep up with Cree’s long strides on an uphill slant. Back off Colorado Avenue, Telluride looked like most any small town with a mixture of Victorian and modern, elegant and modest. But the colossal mountain backdrop crowding in on it, hovering above its steeply pitched roofs, set this small town apart. “I don’t do anything to cause this time thing to happen. And I don’t know how you expect me to stop it.”

“You’re sure nothing like this has ever happened to you before?”

“Nothing. And I don’t understand why it should be me or Callie or even be happening here instead of San Diego. Unless this sort of thing happens more than we know and no one talks about it because no one would be believed. Or there’s something about Callie and me that connects across time somehow, and once I came here where Callie had lived, the connection opened up. But I didn’t see any sign of Callie last night when Tracy and I roamed the redlight district.”

“That’s all crazy … but well reasoned.” He stopped to study her. “Why is it I keep thinking you’re such a fluff brain?” The museum faced the end of a street—two-story, pink sandstone block, third-floor dormers and gray lightning-shaped streaks where mortar had been used to fill cracks. The entrance was through a concrete-block enclosure painted to match the building.

“In Callie’s time this was a hospital,” Cree said, his voice soft and faintly reverent. Aletha wondered how he could get almost drippy over dusty historical relics when he’d witnessed the real thing, live. But she wandered the artifact-filled rooms, listened to his mini-lectures, and had the growing urge to get snuggled.

Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange and display a wealth of donated objects, from hand tools used in the mines to utensils used in the kitchen. In a glass case sat a round cardboard token worth twelve and a half cents in trade at the Cosmopolitan Saloon, with a picture of a girl younger than Callie, but with the brown sausage curls, dimples, and plump-cheeked innocence.

It was in the old-clothing display that Aletha found the sandals she’d lost to the mud and two cowboys named Jesse and Carl the night before.

20

Mildred Heisinger did her best to eat slowly and in a ladylike manner. But she was so hungry the oyster soup, pork tenderloin, canned vegetables, and hot rolls seemed to disappear in record time.

Lawyer Barada, a small formidable gentleman with a shock of white hair and liver spots, picked daintily at his meal. “Does me good to see such appetite in a young lady. All this fasting females do nowadays just so their waists can be cinched an inch smaller is certain to bring harm to future generations,” he said over coffee and lemon torte. “But then, unquestionably, a lady of your tastes can appreciate the menu here. I’ve been all over the country and rarely found better. It’s always been my theory that a certain select few are chosen by God himself to know and appreciate the finer things. Don’t you find that to be true, Miss Heisinger?”

“Yes … yes I do.” Mildred was not at all sure where this conversation was headed. The lawyer’s daughter and grandchildren had not been mentioned. She hoped she’d not made a mistake in dining with him, but he’d hinted at nothing improper. Replete and warmed at last, she felt blessed and secure for the moment. Sun had emerged to shine golden rays through windows draped in rich material. Her thin shoes nestled in soft carpet.

Lawyer Barada rang for more coffee. “An obvious example of the opposite is some coarse miner striking gold in the hills, accruing all the manifestations of wealth but in actuality remaining the coarse miner he was to begin with.” The lawyer raised his cup to her as if in a toast. “Breeding will tell in people as well as horses, my dear, and every time.”

Something was amiss. Mildred couldn’t put her finger on just what. Her delight in this temporary comfort began to dim. The upper half of one wall in the dining room consisted of sliding panels which opened now to reveal several of Mrs. Stollsteimer’s little girls cleaning the musicians’ loft. Panels on the other side of the loft opened onto the barroom and the third side onto the ballroom. In this manner it was possible for one orchestra to entertain any one or all three rooms at the same time, depending upon which partitions were thrust aside. Mildred studied the little girls, all dressed in black like their mistress, to give herself time to think of a response to the lawyer’s inscrutable remarks.

“I would expect, then, one would be most careful in selecting a governess for one’s grandchildren,” she said, blatantly bringing him to the subject uppermost in her mind.

“Governess? Grandchildren? What … oh, I see. You thought I’d asked you here to … It’s not that at all, my dear Miss Heisinger. A governess’s lot is a sorry one indeed. I wouldn’t think of asking someone such as yourself to stoop so low. Poor things are paid a pittance and dismissed as soon as the last child is ready for boarding school. Then she must look for a position in another family, and when that is over, another. Do you know my very own governess ended her days in poverty? The most wretched poverty. I didn’t hear of it until years later, of course, or I would have done something for her. Poor old Miss Brewster.”

Mildred felt as if the ceiling and its chandeliers were lowering on her. “I should like to be independent in my life, sir. There are not many ways for a lady to—”

“Independent? A governess is at the beck and call of spoiled brats and their rude mothers, the harassment of the men in the family. The least indiscretion or mere suspicion of one sends them packing without references to ensure another such miserable position. I can’t imagine a lady like yourself considering such employment, Miss Heisinger.”

Mildred could feel the blush on her face. “Then what, Mr. Barada, did you—”

“Oh, I’ve come to offer something much grander than governess. I’m sending my grandchildren to the public school here when the time comes in any case. They need an end to the mollycoddling of a permissive mother who—” He reached across the table but did not quite touch her as she made preparation to rise. “Please hear me out and excuse an old man’s wandering. I can see what you are thinking, but at my age I had nothing of the sort of proposition you had supposed in mind. I’ve been too slow to come to the point—a lawyer’s failing. Miss Heisinger, I’ve come prepared to offer you a strictly business proposition from the town of Telluride, or at least some of its leading merchants and citizens.”

Mildred sat very straight on the edge of her chair, still prepared to leave in haste and indignation. “The town?”

“Where else were we to find such independence, breeding, and taste in one person? And with the energy of the young to boot? Most ladies are very dependent, you know, or married. Which adds the same. In fact, the town’s woefully short of the female gender altogether. And that’s why we’ve come to you. Young men arrive here by the trainloads but there’s a dearth of the fairer sex. And the town is growing—much of it on the wrong side, if you get my meaning. We are in need of young feminine persons for clerking, office work, laundresses—oh, I can’t tell you all the work going undone. And when a young man from the mines decides to take a wife, where must he go? To the sporting section and make some soiled dove respectable and his life’s companion. Now, what kind of place are we, to offer no better than that? And what can we hope to become?”

Mildred settled into her chair more comfortably. “I don’t understand what you want of me.”

“We want you to travel to the cities of the mid-continent and the seacoasts to tell young, capable ladies of the opportunities in Telluride. You’d travel only in the best accommodations and need to dress accordingly if you are to represent us. I am commissioned to offer you a handsome salary and, of course, all expenses.” Lawyer Barada handed her an envelope. “It takes more than men and sporting women to make a respectable community. Ladies are such a good influence on a rough camp like this. Their gentling natures are so needed here. And you could live again as you obviously are accustomed and deserving to do. You’d be doing the town and yourself a great service.”

He rose abruptly, as if the audience was over. Mildred stood, still clutching the envelope, and saw the gray cat in the alley through the window next to her. It lay still and stiff, its eyes and mouth open. When she turned back to Lawyer Barada he was holding out his hand to her—whether to take her elbow and guide her through the empty ballroom to the lobby, to shake her hand on a business agreement, or to take back the envelope, she didn’t know. But with the starved gray cat very much on her mind, Mildred Heisinger took the lawyer’s hand in a handshake and drew the envelope to her breast. “I should be most happy to accept your … the town’s offer of employment, sir.”

With Luella gone to Denver with Bram, Callie and her father carried on as best they could in the cabin in Alta that spring. In some ways it was pleasant. School started again in May with a new teacher. Mrs. Traub had Callie up to the big house to play with Bertha, often sending Callie home with good things for their dinner, and Mrs. McCall next door helped when Callie’s baking or the cook stove gave trouble. Mr. Mueller up at the cookhouse always had extra pie or strudel that his “little Callie” must take home so it wouldn’t spoil.

John O’Connell, when he wasn’t up at the commissary discussing the great labor strike at the Smuggler-Union, a huge mine up out of Telluride, would sit after dinner and tell her stories of his life while she did the dishes. He’d had grand adventures, her father. He’d run away from his home in Bantry when his father beat him once too often, and had sailed on great sailing ships to Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and eventually jumped ship in San Francisco. He’d worked building railroads, driving freight wagons, and mining. John was on his way to the East Coast just to see what it looked like when he ran out of money in Ohio and stopped to work a few months at Grandfather Midden’s farm and met Luella and the baby, Bram. “And I decided right then and there to bring them back out here where a man with a family can make something on his own and not have to work for another man until he dies.”

Callie dried the soap from her hands and crawled onto his lap. She’d heard the stories before but felt a comfort in the familiar voice telling them again. “I’m lonesome for them, Pa.”

“And so am I, Callie darling, so am I. Won’t be long now and they’ll be home with us again. You’ll see.” But Callie heard the doubt in his every inflection. She knew that Mr. Talse had died on the train to Denver and some of the others since. The last word they’d had, Bram still lived.

And then one day Pa came home with a different story and different plans for them. “Callie, you’ve been a fine brave girl. Ahhh, when bad luck strikes an Irishman it don’t settle for a half-measure.” He sat heavily on Bram’s cot and felt for the hair that no longer topped his head. “It’s your mother now. She’s taken sick and had to find a warmer room in Denver. There’s only so much highgrading a man can get away with, and they don’t pay near its worth in town. Callie, we’re going to have to give up the house. I’ll be moving into the boardinghouse and I’ve found a place for you.”

“But we’re waiting for them to come home. We have to wait here.”

John gave her his big bear hug. “Bless you, it’s only for a small time. We’ll soon all be together again in a far more splendid house than this here.”

“You can’t leave me too,” Callie said desperately. “Pa, please—”

“Now, hear me out, child. It’ll not be so bad as you think. And you can do something for Bram. What do you think of that?”

“Can I go to Denver?”

“No, Callie. You’re going to Telluride. It’s a lovely place and you’ve never been. There’s this big, fancy hotel there and a lady by the name of Mrs. Stollsteimer who needs help with the cleaning of it. She’s a sister to Mrs. Fisherdicks and Mrs. Fisherdicks told her of our troubles. You’ll be working with girls your own age, wearing a fine dress and a lace cap. And your bed and board comes with the job. All you earn will be sent straight to Denver, where it’s needed bad.”

“The lady who left her drawing book here told me never to go to Telluride.”

“And will you listen to a stranger and not your own father, then?”

“Pa, when she came to the cookhouse and I gave Charles to her, her husband told Bram not to go in the mine. And Bram didn’t listen. And look what’s happened to Bram.”

“Callie, if I listened myself to all the warnings I’ve had in my life, I’d not set foot outside the door. The tommyknockers are ever telling me not to be going up a raise or to hurry and run out of a stope. We’d all starved to death if I’d listened.” He set to heating water so she could bathe. Tomorrow, he was taking her to Telluride.

Callie O’Connell had left many rented houses before, but never with the sadness and fear she did the one in Alta. Everything she owned fit easily into a small carpetbag and Callie slipped the lady’s book of drawings in it too. “I know it’ll be seeming hard, now,” John said to her as she rode in a stagecoach for the first time. “But you’ll be seeing it’s for the best. And you’ll find Alta was a dull place indeed after you’ve been to Telluride.”