The Threshold (21 page)

“I wonder if Mr. Macintosh is dead yet,” Elsie breathed. “My pa says people only come to the hospital to die.”

Callie thought of her brother and had the urge to kick Elsie, but she read the sign that warned them to be quiet. They turned the valise over to a lady dressed in starched white. Callie had expected to hear screams of pain and agony but all was as quiet as the sign suggested it should be. Back outside, Callie slowed her steps gradually, dazzled by the brilliant colors of sky, young grass, and exuberant dandelions. An enclosed school wagon pulled by two white and two brown horses bumped along the rock-pitted street. It was bigger than a stagecoach and the driver sat on the very top. Children’s elbows and heads and hats hung out the side windows. Taunts, squeals, whines, hoots, and laughter replaced the birdsong. Someone yelled, “Elsie Biggs! Hey ho.”

Elsie waved and blushed. Callie was surprised at how pretty she looked just then. “They’re from Pandora.”

“Where’s the school? I want to see it.”

“We’ll be late back … but well … only if you hurry.” They picked up their skirts and ran. Beautiful, monstrous houses—some with fences and their own sidewalks. And then the school, bigger than the hospital. It was made all of stone and sat in the center of a large piece of land. Callie counted ten arched windows across the front of the top story, and the building was longer yet going back. Wide concrete stairs led to the arched double doorway.

“Aren’t you sad to not be going there every day?” Callie asked. “They must have many books in so important a school as that.” But Elsie just hurried her back to the hotel. Callie tried to imagine the inside of that school for weeks afterward, fantasized that she and Bram attended it. She even peopled every room with a beautiful Miss Heisinger.

But Callie had to watch the summer disappearing through windowpanes. “I’m here to see you earn your way,” Mrs. Stollsteimer told her when she found the girl dreaming about the school and watching the languid dust motes in the sun at the bottom of the staircase. “Someday you’ll thank me. Now, run down and help the girls in the ballroom.”

There was to be a special dance and late buffet dinner. The girls had to rush about to clean themselves and change into fresh uniforms after cleaning up the ballroom. They helped set up the buffet tables in the dining room and then carried platters of bite-sized meats and cheeses and cakes, and tiny sandwiches without crusts, to the people standing and sitting out in a ring around the dance floor.

“… eight-hour day. Just give the lazy rascals more time to gamble, drink, and fritter away what means their labor has earned them.”

“Unions only keep the honest man who’s willing to work from selling his muscle as he sees fit.”

Threading her way through the canyons of adults reminded Callie of the snow tunnels to the privy Pa and Bram had shoveled in Alta. But the canyon sides here were dark and gave off heat, were starched and corseted, mustachioed and tuxedoed. Voices echoed over her head, useless little hand fans flapped like bird wings. Hands accepted her delicate offerings, offered on tiptoe and with outstretched arms. Eyes looked right into her eyes and out through the back of her head. Callie thought she could have made rude faces at them and they’d never have noticed.

“Timber as you go. Ignorant rednecks have no idea the cost of such a thing. Don’t have the timber or the time anyway. Damn few cave-ins for all the mining operations around here, if you ask me.”

On the dance floor the ladies looked like princesses in the ruffled skirts and high-piled hair. And the gentlemen looked like sissies, pointing their toes, bowing and scraping. Then the orchestra in the loft speeded up, the violins fiddled instead of squeaked, the older people left the dance floor, and the younger ones paired off to jump around, lady and gentleman together. The chandeliers shook and jingled. Cheering, stomping, and rough voices accompanied the music from the barroom through the slid-back panels in that wall. Cigar smoke wafted gray-blue from the barroom, over the heads of the musicians, and into the ballroom. And when the orchestra stopped to rest, the clicking of the gambling wheels from the same source formed a constant background.

There was no smoking in the ballroom, but a great many unsuccessful attempts to spit at the brass cuspidors. A steady stream of gentlemen made their way through a door to the side of the orchestra loft and into the barroom and came back smelling of something stronger than punch. There weren’t enough ladies for the dancing anyway, and only the very old and crippled were allowed to sit out.

“Aren’t having trouble hiring nonunion men up at the Smuggler, are you, Collins?”

“Running full shifts. Out-of-work men coming in on the train every day.”

Olina Svendt wore her pale hair in one neat braid that she could sit on if she wanted. It trailed down her back and over the bow of her apron strings. She was approaching Callie with a tray of cut-glass punch cups when a gentleman reached over to give the braid a quick, forceful tug. Then he looked back to the man speaking to him; except for the good-natured sparkle in his eyes, the man went on as if nothing had happened.

Callie caught the smart of tears the gesture had brought to Olina’s eyes and determined she’d not aspire to become a maid no matter how fine the hotel. Perhaps she’d be a teacher like Ma’am and Miss Heisinger. She’d never known anyone but her brother to take such advantage of a teacher.

“WFM, Western Federation of Miners, they call themselves. Wastrels, Foreigners, and Misfits is more like it.”

“Insurrectionists is what they are. Country’s going to the dogs when these scalawags get in power. Owners ought to band together and get the Pinkertons in here. Infiltrate and investigate these socialist buffoons before we have another Coeur d’Alene on our hands.”

An elderly lady sitting bolt upright, her old-fashioned bustle holding her at least six inches from the chair back, motioned to Callie with little eyeglasses on a gold rod. She took two wafers from Callie’s platter, never taking her eyes from the dance floor, and Callie moved down the wall to offer the platter to Mr. Macintosh, who had recovered from his hospital stay despite Elsie’s misgivings. He was also elderly and he didn’t look at her either, but took a wafer with one hand and began kneading Callie’s bottom through her skirts with the other. Mr. Macintosh made her skin creep up her bones. For a moment she worried she’d throw up her supper all over the gruesome-smelling, sludge-colored liver mixture smeared across the wafers on her platter.

“Building their own hospital to avoid health deductions. Wait till they see the cost of that and they’ll change their song.”

“What about that Barney chap that’s missing? Nonunion man, wasn’t he, and a shift boss to boot?”

“Probably just the heel-itch. You know these miners—always moving about. If he’s the one I think he is, he’s got carrot-red hair.”

“Shift bosses don’t move around so much. Union’s done away with him.”

Callie, sick and angry, reported Mr. Macintosh to Mrs. Stollsteimer. She expected the formidably moral housekeeper to march out and confront him, but found herself hushed instead.

“Don’t say such nasty things about poor old Mr. Macintosh,” Mrs. Stollsteimer whispered, and took Callie off to a corner of the dining room. That was the first Callie knew the woman could whisper. The words “discreet” and “ladylike” hurried from the housekeeper’s lips, and the admonition for Callie never to place her backside within reach of a gentleman. Callie came away with the feeling that she was the nasty one.

When the girls lay exhausted in their darkened room, Callie asked Olina about the right and wrong of the matter. Gentlemen and men in general, Olina explained none too patiently, had certain urges in their natures that caused them to do things a lady did not discuss and did not entice a gentleman to do in the first place. Men could only control these urges if a lady behaved herself. Olina then promptly fell asleep, leaving Callie wondering if the ladies flopping themselves around on the dance floor enticed trouble for their backsides. And what about
them
, those gorgeous creatures who paraded with her Aunt Lilly after three o’clock in the afternoon?

The ball had set off the three-day July Fourth holiday. But Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls and the rest of the staff at the hotel did not have a holiday. The work load doubled on Colorado Avenue when the merrymakers streamed into town. Callie worried her father wouldn’t be able to find her as she gulped gluey oatmeal under the housekeeper’s impatient eye. And she’d saved up so much to talk to him about. First she’d confront him with the presence of a live Aunt Lilly in Telluride, then tell him about the wonderful big schoolhouse here and ask if she could go there as soon as Bram left the hospital and didn’t need her wages. Callie still did not like cleaning things. And she wanted to write to her mother and brother, but had no money for paper and postage. And her shoes were too small, causing her toenails to turn back into her flesh to fester and bleed.

When John O’Connell did find her, Callie was on her hands and knees scrubbing around the battered cuspidors in the ballroom. She stiffened in his embrace, remembering Mr. Macintosh’s hands, and knew she’d never be able to tell him about it. But Pa was just as eager to be away as he had been to hold her. “The stiffs are marching,” he said mysteriously. “And it needs doing. I love ya, Callie darling, and here’s a letter from your Bram that came inside one to me.”

Callie couldn’t understand why the miners would be marching today since the parade wasn’t until tomorrow. She bent listlessly to the gruesome floor, Bram’s letter unopened in her pocket. She’d save it as something to look forward to, to help her get through the terrible tedium of her day.

“Eight-hour day,” Mrs. Stollsteimer remarked at supper, “even my girls work longer than that.”

There’d been a clamor in the street—yelling, with gunshots for emphasis, and occasional powder blasts that shook the hotel. Callie had assumed it all part of the festivities until there were wild scurryings among the more genteel in the hotel.

“The bastards have shut down the Smuggler-Union!” a gentleman cried to another, and almost tripped over Callie, again on her hands and knees. Apparently some union men who’d struck in May had surrounded the Smuggler-Union and forced the scabs hired to replace them to stop work. The first report was that a hundred lay dying, but the figure kept coming down all day. By supper the hotel staff learned that union men forced the scabs to march over thirteen-thousand-foot Imogene Pass to Ouray without shoes and told them never to come to Telluride. Callie hoped these union men weren’t the stiffs her pa was marching with and that he hadn’t joined the union with Ma’am too far away to stop him. She didn’t see why he should; they already had an eight-hour day at Alta

The next morning Mrs. Stollsteimer surprised the girls by letting them watch the July Fourth parade from a third-story window. There was a subdued expectancy instead of the boisterousness this holiday usually generated. The governor of the state of Colorado was sending the lieutenant governor to try to talk the union and the management of the Smuggler-Union into a peaceful settlement of their dispute. It was rumored that Arthur Collins, manager of the Smuggler-Union, had asked the governor to send troops. The latest tally of the results of the disturbance of the day before was three dead and three hurt.

Even up above it all now Callie could feel the tension in the air. For one thing the fashionable ladies and gentlemen stood on the hotel side of the street. Miners, some with families, crowded the other side. She looked among them for Pa but didn’t see him.

Boys darted about setting off firecrackers, horses whinnied in terror, dogs barked and ran around in confusion while men cursed them. Babies cried and giant powder exploded at unexpected intervals on the mountainsides. But the red-white-and-blue flags stuck in the storefronts and the small ones held in hands fluttered halfheartedly. Someone had even shoveled up the street, and only a hint of blotchy stains from the horse traffic showed on its dirt surface.

A brass band marched by in straight lines, tooting mightily with only a few squawks, and for a while tension eased. A fire wagon pulled by huge horses followed, and then a team of barefoot men in their long underwear pulled the hose cart. Wagons rolled beneath her, festooned with pine boughs and young ladies in lovely white dresses. They looked like floral bouquets sprinkled amidst the green of pine needles and made Callie hate her old-lady black dress even more. Men sat ramrod straight on prancing, shying horses. Others walked in uneven rows and some wore strange robes and hats or gaudy costumes or uniforms. All were faceless under their hats from her vantage point above.

“Knights of Pythias, Order of Redmen, the Masons,” Opal Mae identified each group in a tone of wonder Callie couldn’t fathom. Half Were tripping on their skirts or couldn’t keep their swords hanging straight.

The sound and panoply moved away down Colorado Avenue and the flags went limp and the smell of fresh horse droppings rose in the mountain sunlight to Callie’s window. And the people shuffled and stared at each other across the street once more.

24

Mildred Heisinger absently pressed and pushed at wrinkles in her white gloves, licked a finger to brush at a smudge on one of them. Two engines pulled the train straining around a mountain curve so convoluted she could see the engines across a ravine out the window of her car. The lead engine billowed gray-black smoke that obliterated all sight of the mountainside on which it traveled. The second engine did the same with white steam, and the two vapors mixed to twine through pine and aspen and looked like a grounded thundercloud. The trip back had been long and tedious for Mildred. She looked forward to the suite at the New Sheridan for which she’d wired ahead. And a deep hot bath to cleanse away the grit of the train cloud blowing through open windows. The air had cooled as they’d gained elevation, but the scented pads shielding her travel suit from her armpits gave off unpleasant reminders of the tax one paid to travel.

The young ladies with her were agog, fluttering among empty seats to catch the vistas on either side, gasping and chattering at what they saw when looking down, holding on to their hats and leaning far forward to look up. They were seven in all. A discreet advertisement in a Kansas City newspaper had netted twelve applicants from which she’d selected nine, and at the last minute two had grown faint of heart at the thought of leaving home. Still a goodly number considering the commission she was to receive from the town for each, in addition to her salary and expenses. And they were all young, of good moral character, and every one had at least a year of work experience. Her prize, Audrey Cranston, settled across from Mildred now, excitement sparking in her eyes like the sparks from the engine stacks. Audrey had worked three years as a bookkeeper for a foundry and came highly recommended.