Until We Reach Home (30 page)

“It’s such a shame to see this beautiful home so run down,” Elin said. “How could she let it get this way?”

“The truth is, Mrs. Anderson doesn’t want to sell the house and move,” Mrs. Olafson said. “She wants everything to look cluttered and shabby and dusty, you see, so that no one will buy it. If you do too good of a job, she’ll find a reason to fire you. And if you’re lazy and don’t work, she’ll fire you for that, too. You’re really in a difficult place, you see.”

“But she’ll pay us for the days we do work, won’t she?”

“Yes . . . but . . .” Mrs. Olafson stared at the floor, wringing her gnomelike hands.

“Please tell us,” Elin said.

“You seem like such nice girls . . . so I must warn you to be careful. Mrs. Anderson accused the last maid of stealing from her, you see. She made a terrible scene, and of course the poor girl will never be able to get another job as a domestic. She’ll be off to the sweatshops for certain—or maybe someplace worse. And so will you if the old lady manages to destroy your reputation.”

“Thank you for warning us,” Elin said.

“Why does she need a nurse?” Kirsten asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

“From what I’ve observed—nothing. She is sick when it’s convenient to be sick and well when it’s convenient to be well. Likewise, she speaks perfect English when it’s convenient and not a word of it when it isn’t. . . . Anyway, I’ll show you where the uniforms are—although they’re such shabby old things I can’t imagine anyone wanting to wear them. Then I need to get back to my kitchen.”

Sofia noticed that her sisters were quiet as they walked back to the boardinghouse to get their trunk. Elin paused before going inside. “Do you think we should take the job?” she asked.

“We don’t really have a choice, do we?” Kirsten asked. “Everyone keeps telling us not to work in a factory. What do you think, Sofia?”

There was no doubt at all in Sofia’s mind. “I think this job is an answer to our prayers. God found it for us—and He will be with us.”

Elin gently cupped Sofia’s cheek in her hand. “You sound so much like Mama.”

It didn’t take Sofia long to gather her belongings, but she had one very important thing she needed to do before leaving the boardinghouse for good. While her sisters were still upstairs, Sofia carried her satchel down and went outside to talk to Aunt Hilma, who was pinning clothes on the line. She pulled out Ludwig’s Bible and showed it to her.

“Aunt Hilma, a friend will be coming here to get this Bible. He gave it to me for safekeeping. His name is Ludwig Schneider, and—”

“A German man?”

“Yes. He doesn’t speak Swedish, but he will be asking for me by name, so will you please tell him where I am so I can return this to him?” She held up the Bible, then quickly stuffed it back into her bag. Her sisters would be coming downstairs any minute. “It’s very important that he finds me and gets his Bible back. Please?”

“I don’t like the idea of a strange man—”

“He isn’t a stranger. He’s a friend. And a good Christian man.” The back door opened and Elin and Kirsten came out, carrying the trunk.

“Thank you, Aunt Hilma,” Sofia said. “Thank you for everything.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“I’
M SORRY, BUT I
need to rest again.” Elin set down her end of the heavy trunk and leaned against it for support. Her illness had left her feeling weak and wrung out. She and her sisters had decided to take turns carrying the trunk on the walk back to the mansion, and it bothered her that she was unable to carry her fair share of the load. “I wish I didn’t tire so easily.”

“I don’t mind stopping,” Sofia said, flexing her fingers. “My hand keeps cramping around the leather handle.”

“I thought we were finished lugging this thing around,” Kirsten said, giving it a kick. “Too bad it didn’t fall overboard in the middle of the ocean. Do we really need all the stuff that’s inside?”

“Maybe not now,” Elin said, “but someday we’ll have our own home again.”

She thought of all the items she had carried for so many miles. The copper coffee kettle brought back memories of Mama. So did the book of hymns. Mama’s fingers had embroidered the linens, every stitch a labor of love. Papa’s carved wooden utensils helped her picture his work-hardened hands. The silver candlesticks had belonged to their grandmother, and Elin had fought with Aunt Karin over who would keep them. The items in the trunk were not very costly. Their value was only in the memories they evoked.

Elin had stopped to rest in front of a shop on one of the Swedish neighborhood’s main thoroughfares, and she saw Kirsten gazing longingly at the items on display in the window. “Wouldn’t you love to go inside and look around?” Kirsten murmured.

“Go ahead,” Elin told her. “I’ll stay out here with the trunk.”

Kirsten looked at her in surprise. “Do you really mean it?”

“Yes. You can go inside, too, Sofia.”

The three of them were about to begin a life of hard work in a difficult situation, and Elin wanted to give her sisters a few moments of pleasure. Sofia and Kirsten had changed since beginning their journey, so perhaps it was time for Elin to change a little, too. After all, she wasn’t their mother. The giddy excitement she saw on her sisters’ faces as they opened the door and disappeared inside made Elin smile.

She sat down on the trunk to wait, watching the traffic go by. Once again she was struck by the city’s energy and vitality, almost as if it were a living thing. Life here in Chicago was so different from the life she’d left behind—and so different from the one she had imagined.

“You should see all the things they have for sale!” Sofia said when she and Kirsten came out of the shop a few minutes later. “And the variety! In one display alone, they had a dozen different styles of hair combs.”

“And they have an entire counter full of things that only cost five cents,” Kirsten said. “The shop girl says that the five-cent coin is called a nickel. And since there are 100 cents in a dollar and we earn four dollars a week, I figure we can buy—”

“We can’t spend any money until we pay back what we owe,” Elin said.

“Not even a little bit?”

“We can’t take a chance, Kirsten. We don’t know how long we will be able to keep this job.”

“But we’re going to need some spending money, Elin,” Sofia said. “We’ll need to buy things like soap and—”

“Writing paper and stamps,” Kirsten added.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t want to end up like Aunt Hilma, worrying about money all the time.” She lifted one end of the trunk and waited for Sofia to lift the other. They started walking again.

“The women in America dress so beautifully, don’t they?” Sofia said as they made their way through the crowds. “Everyone looks like one of the rich ladies back home.”

“And the gowns are so colorful,” Kirsten said. “You should see the ones that were for sale in that store back there. You can buy them already made. Nobody has to sew it for you.”

“But if it isn’t sewn for you, how do you know it will fit?” Elin asked. “People come in all different sizes—look how different the three of us are.”

“Small . . . medium . . . and large,” Kirsten said, smiling as she pointed first to Sofia, then to Elin, then to herself.

“You aren’t large,” Elin said, laughing. “You’re . . . buxom. I could use a few more curves like yours.”

“I love all the fancy hats the women wear,” Sofia said. “I wish I could buy one with flowers on it.”

“I hate wearing a hat,” Kirsten said, making a face. “But I do wish we could dress like the American women do. We look so old-fashioned!”

“Mrs. Anderson said she’s going to give us clothes to work in, remember?” Sofia said.

“Don’t get your hopes up. They won’t be like the pretty ones in these windows, I’m sure.”

Elin felt exhausted by the time they returned to the mansion, and she still hadn’t even done an hour’s work yet. She dreaded the prospect of dragging the trunk all the way up to the third floor. But just as they reached the back door, a bedraggled-looking man who had been digging weeds out of one of the flowerbeds hurried over to them.

“Here, let me help you with that. It looks heavy.” Like nearly everyone else Elin had met in Chicago, he spoke Swedish. With his raggedy clothes and shaggy beard, it was difficult to tell how old he was, but Elin guessed he was in his fifties.

“We could use some help,” she said, “but you may change your mind when you find out that this trunk has to go all the way up to the third floor.”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” he said, tipping his cap to all three of them. And it wasn’t. He hefted it onto his shoulder with ease and followed Elin up the back staircase to their room.

“I’m Mr. Lund,” he said after he’d set it down.

“And we’re the new servants. I’m Kirsten Carlson, and these are my sisters, Elin and Sofia. We’re so grateful for your help.”

“Nice to meet you. Young Mr. Anderson hired me to clean up the yard. It’s very overgrown, as you can see, but I can tell that it was beautiful once. I’m afraid it’s going to take more than one man to make it look that way again, but I’ll do my best. So, I guess I’ll get back to work now.”

“We should start working, too,” Elin said as Mr. Lund clomped down the back stairs.

Kirsten collapsed on one of the narrow beds and pulled off her shoes. “Why? What’s the big hurry? I think we should take our time so we can stay here longer.”

“Isn’t that deceitful?” Sofia asked. “We’ll be cheating Mrs. Anderson if we don’t work as hard as we can every day.”

“But if she doesn’t want to move, then the longer we take to finish, the longer she can stay here. We’ll actually be helping her.”

“But she is paying us to work, and—”

“Listen,” Elin said, stepping between them, “this house is so big and there’s so much work to do, it’s going to take us forever no matter how hard we work. Let’s change into our uniforms and get started.”

The closet that Mrs. Olafson had shown them smelled strongly of camphor—as did the men’s and women’s uniforms hanging inside it.

“The Andersons must have had a lot of servants at one time,” Sofia said. “Look at all these clothes.”

Kirsten pulled out one of the long, gray gabardine skirts and held it up in front of her to test the length. She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh! They smell old. I don’t want to smell like this.”

“With all the cleaning and dusting we have to do,” Elin said, “we’ll smell worse than this once we start working. We can launder them on the next wash day, but we’d better change into them for now. Mrs. Anderson told us to.”

They took a few minutes to sort through the closet, looking for skirts and bodices that might fit them. The wrinkled aprons that were worn on top might have once been white but were now limp and yellow with age. When Elin and her sisters had each found garments in their sizes, they went back into their room to change.

Elin grabbed her satchel to look for a kerchief to tie over her hair, but when she opened her bag she found a book lying on top. She had never seen it before. She lifted it out and saw another strange shape beneath it, wrapped in a gray flannel cloth. She pulled out the wooden lump and, much to her surprise, found a violin and bow beneath the cloth.

“Where did this come from?” she asked.

Sofia’s eyes grew wide. “Be careful! That’s mine! That’s my bag.” She took the violin and bow from Elin, then snatched up the book.

“Yours?”
Elin asked in disbelief. “But—but where did it come from?” She knew that Sofia hadn’t brought a violin with her from Sweden.

Kirsten stopped buttoning her blouse and came over to look. “Sofia! That belongs to the German man. Why did you take his violin?”

“What German man?” Elin asked. Fear raced through her.

“I didn’t take it, Kirsten. He gave it to me. He asked me to take care of it for him.” The tender way Sofia handled the instrument baffled Elin.

“Why did he give it to you?” Kirsten asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Elin was standing right beside her sisters, but they were both ignoring her. “Sofia! Whose violin is that?” she asked, raising her voice.

Sofia seemed reluctant to answer. “It belongs to a friend of mine named Ludwig Schneider. I met him on Ellis Island and he . . . we . . . we became friends.” She carefully rewrapped it in the flannel cloth, handling it like an infant.

“But why do you have it?”

Sofia took a moment to reply, and when she did her chin jutted stubbornly. “The immigration officials weren’t going to let him into the country because he has a crippled leg, so he decided he would swim—”

“Oh, Sofia,” Kirsten said. “He can’t be serious. It’s much too far to swim. Besides, there are so many ships on that river that it would be dangerous—”

“That’s why he asked me to take care of it for him. I gave him Uncle Lars’ address, and he’s going to find me when he gets to Chicago to get his things back.”

“You trusted a stranger with our address?”

“It’s the other way around, Elin. He trusted me with his violin. I wish you could have heard him play. He’s a very gifted musician. But America has a stupid rule that you can’t immigrate if you’re crippled, and Ludwig has an injured leg. It isn’t fair, because there are plenty of jobs he could do if they would just give him a chance. I’m sure he could make lots of money playing his violin.”

Elin stared at her, wondering what to think. Sofia held up the strange book. “He also asked me to take care of this. It’s his Bible. He’s a good man, Elin. And besides, you had no business looking in my bag in the first place.”

“It was an accident; I mistook it for mine. I’m sorry.” Elin was surprised to see tears in Sofia’s eyes as she tucked the Bible back into her satchel and set it on her own bed.

Elin was keeping a secret from her sisters, so why should it surprise her if her sisters kept secrets from her? But what if this German man was scheming to take advantage of Sofia’s innocence and vulnerability? Maybe she and her sisters weren’t safe here in America after all. She hoped Sofia’s chance meeting wouldn’t end in disaster.

“I think we’d better get to work,” Elin said, summoning her strength. “We don’t want to give Mrs. Anderson an excuse to fire us.”