Until We Reach Home (44 page)

“I would like to help you . . . really I would. But I’m afraid that finding a job for any of you is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. Domestic servants are usually hired by word-of-mouth—the same way that gossip spreads. Unfortunately, everyone in our church community has heard the gossip about Silvia Anderson’s jewelry. The stigma of theft will likely follow you.”

“But we’re innocent!” Kirsten said. “We didn’t steal anything!”

“I know. But Bettina Anderson doesn’t see it that way. Her mother-in-law named the three of you as beneficiaries in her will—”

“She did?” Elin said. “She named
us
? Her lawyer didn’t tell us that.”

“Well, it seems she did, and so Bettina still feels that you have stolen from her in a sense. She is going to make things very difficult for you, I’m afraid.”

“That’s not a very Christian way to act,” Sofia said. “How can she attend church every Sunday and then turn around and treat people that way?”

“Very few of us act the way Jesus would like us to, Miss Carlson. I can preach the truth, but I can’t enforce it. God gave everyone a free will.”

“Tell her she can keep all of the money,” Elin said. “We don’t want it, if that’s the way she feels. We just need jobs and a place to live.”

“I don’t know what else I can do for you,” he said, lifting empty hands. “Chicago is filled with new immigrants looking for work. It’s challenging enough for a man to find a good-paying job and a place to live, but it’s especially difficult for young, unmarried women to find housing and the means to support themselves.”

Something in the way he emphasized
unmarried
made Elin wonder if he knew about their refusal to marry the young men in Wisconsin. She could well imagine Aunt Hilma telling the pastor’s wife and everyone else how she and Lars had done their best for their ungrateful nieces, but they’d scorned her help.

“You may have to go outside our Swedish community for work,” Pastor Johnson continued. “Chicago is a big city, and if you can speak a little English it will certainly help.”

“We don’t know how to find a job,” Kirsten said. “That’s why we came to you.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not in the business of helping people find work. I have enough to do shepherding this flock.” He rose to his feet and began sidling toward the door as he spoke, as if eager to show them the way out. “But I’ll try to think of someone else who can advise you.”

“I don’t believe him,” Kirsten said when they were outside in the bright sunshine again. “He isn’t going to find someone to help us. His loyalties lie with Bettina Anderson. She probably donates money to his church.”

“Our own family isn’t helping us,” Elin said, “so why should he?”

“Now what?” Sofia asked.

Elin had awakened long before dawn that morning, asking herself the same question as she’d stared into the darkness. She could think of only one other person who might be able to help them.

“Let’s go talk to Mrs. Olafson. She needs to find a new job, too. Maybe she can help us.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t be surprised if she turned against us, too,” Kirsten grumbled as they started walking away from the church. “I’m beginning to see that the community here is just like our village back home—taking sides, spreading gossip and lies . . .”

“Then let’s not do the same thing,” Sofia said. “Let’s try to see people the way they really are from now on, not colored by what others say about them. Remember all the bad things everyone said about Mrs. Anderson? But once we got to know her, she wasn’t so terrible after all.”

They halted at the street corner, waiting for the traffic to clear before crossing. “Do you really think she left us some money in her will?” Kirsten asked. “I wonder why her lawyer didn’t mention it to us.”

“Probably because he didn’t want us to get our hopes up,” Elin said. “It turned out he was right not to mention it.”

“How much money do you suppose she left us?” Kirsten asked. They were passing a storefront with dresses and hats on display, and Elin noticed that Kirsten’s steps had slowed as she gazed through the window.

Sofia tugged on her arm, pulling her forward again. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll never see a penny of it.”

They walked another full block with the hot summer sun blazing down on them like a stove on a winter day. “Where does Mrs. Olafson live?” Kirsten asked as she mopped her brow with a handkerchief.

“She has an apartment above the Swedish bakery.”

Elin found the bakery easily enough, but it took a few minutes to find the apartment’s entrance in the rear of the building. The aroma of fresh bread filled the stairwell, bringing tears to Elin’s eyes. The longing she felt wasn’t for homemade bread, but for a home.

“I couldn’t live here,” Kirsten said, inhaling deeply. “This smell would make me hungry all the time.”

“Maybe you’d get used to it,” Sofia said.

Elin knocked on the apartment door, and when it opened, there was Mrs. Anderson’s cat, circling Mrs. Olafson’s feet, rubbing his flattened head against her legs.

“Tomte!” Sofia cried.

“We were so worried about you,” Elin said as she crouched to pet him. The huge cat began to purr from all their attention, rumbling like a landslide. “We didn’t know what happened to him.”

“
Ja
, the poor thing mourned terribly after she died,” Mrs. Olafson said. “The other Mrs. Anderson ordered the gardener to tie him up in a burlap sack and toss him into the river. Well, I couldn’t let that happen, so here he is.”

“I promised Mrs. Anderson that I would take care of him,” Elin said. “I felt terrible for breaking my promise.”

“Take him with you, if you want him. But come in, come in,” she said, beckoning them inside.

“I will take him as soon as we’re settled,” Elin said. “But right now we don’t have a job or a place to live. Were you able to find another job?”

“Oh, I got another offer right away. They can’t pay me as much as Mrs. Anderson did, you see, and it’s farther away from home, but it’s the best I can expect at my age. I start working tomorrow, in fact.”

Mrs. Olafson’s tidy little apartment was as small as the main room of their cottage in Sweden had been and very hot inside, even with all of the windows open. The copper kettle on the cast-iron stove and the embroidered linens and pillow cushions on the white-painted furniture all reminded Elin of Sweden. She longed to find a home for her sisters, even if it was as simple as Mrs. Olafson’s humble room.

The little woman gestured for them to sit at her table and brought out a pot of coffee and a plate of
lefse,
dusted with cinnamon and sugar. She talked while she worked. “I heard about your troubles with the missing jewelry, you see. I told my husband that I didn’t believe you stole it from her. You girls would never do a thing like that.”

“We didn’t. But Bettina Anderson has a lot of influence in the community, and now no one else will hire us, even though the truth came out about the jewelry.”

“Poor things. I’ll keep my ears open for something—although it might be hard to place all three of you together, you see, working for the same family.”

“It doesn’t have to be together,” Sofia said.

“And I’ll take care of this poor cat in the meantime.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Olafson. And God bless you.”

They dragged their feet on the walk back to the boardinghouse. “I guess we’ll have to look for work in a factory,” Elin said. “We have to do something to finish paying for our tickets.”

“Which factory? Where?” Kirsten asked, gesturing helplessly. “How do we go about it?”

“And where would we live?” Sofia added.

These were questions Elin couldn’t answer. It was bad enough that she was in this predicament herself, but the fact that she was also responsible for her sisters—and for bringing them to America in the first place—made matters worse. She couldn’t leave them destitute and homeless.

“I’ll figure something out,” she murmured.

All three of them worked in the boardinghouse that afternoon, trying to earn their room and board, at least. Once again, they slept on the floor in their cousins’ cramped bedroom at night. The room was above the kitchen and as hot as a steam bath.

Another letter from Gunnar Pedersen arrived in the mail, but Elin waited to read it until her work was finished, wanting to savor his words and the pictures he always painted of life on his farm. He made it sound so nice—with plenty of hard work, to be sure—but at least he didn’t live in this terrible city, where nobody wanted her and her sisters. Once again, Gunnar’s letter made her homesick for their farm in Sweden.

Maybe moving to Wisconsin really was the best answer for them. There didn’t seem to be any other solution. On the journey to America, Sofia had said she wanted to live on a farm again. Kirsten said she missed the trees and the stillness of the forest. Elin had wanted only to be safe from Uncle Sven. Maybe if she agreed to marry one of the bachelors, it would be the best way to give her sisters a home.

Elin took out a sheet of stationery and began to write:

Dear Gunnar,

So much has happened since I wrote my last letter to you. I’m sorry to say that our employer, Mrs. Anderson, has passed away. The days since her passing have been very sad ones for me, because I had grown very fond of her. But my sorrow is increased because once again, my sisters and I are without work and without a home. We spent much of today trying to find work in order to finish paying you and your friends the remainder of our debt. Unfortunately, we had no luck.

Tonight, I am very disillusioned with life in America. We can’t seem to find the new start we were looking for when we decided to leave Sweden. And so, if it isn’t too late, I would like to do what I should have done last May. I would like to accept your kind offer and come up to live in your settlement in Wisconsin. I will agree to marry whichever one of you will have me.

But please explain to your friends that I am the only one of us who is accepting your offer. It’s my hope that you will consider my debt to be canceled if I do get married, and that you will apply the money we have already paid to my two sisters’ fares. I’ll find a way to finish paying for their tickets so that they won’t be obligated to marry anyone. What my sisters need most of all right now is a home. I promised them when we left Sweden that they would have a home again someday, and you make life up in Wisconsin sound so nice. I hope that whoever agrees to marry me will make my sisters welcome in our home for as long as they need one. I can’t promise that they will stay in your settlement and marry one of you, but I will stay. I promise to marry whichever one of you will have me. And I’ll stay.

I’m very sorry for not accepting your offer right away, but my sisters were weary after the long journey to Chicago and didn’t want to travel any further. I didn’t want to force them to go. I hope you will write to me as soon as you can and let me know if I am still welcome, and if the offer of marriage still stands. If so, I will purchase our train tickets from our final week’s pay at the mansion, and my sisters and I will come right away.

Yours truly,
Elin Carlson

Elin reread the letter, then folded the paper in half and slipped it into an envelope. When she looked up and saw Sofia reading her Bible, Elin recalled a verse in which Jesus said,
I go to prepare a place for you.
That’s what she was doing: preparing a place for them, a home where she could take care of them. She doubted if they would believe this was the best answer for all three of them, but Elin knew from reading Gunnar’s letters that it was. In time, Kirsten and Sofia would find husbands and settle down happily in homes of their own.

She licked the envelope shut and printed Gunnar Pedersen’s address on the front.

She hoped sleep would come easier for her that night, having made this decision. It didn’t.

“I’m going out to mail a letter,” she said the next day after helping Aunt Hilma with the breakfast rush. But before dropping the letter in the corner mailbox, Elin first went to the Western Union office, where she had been wiring the money to Wisconsin. The clerk knew her by now, and he spoke Swedish.

“If I wanted to take a train to this place in Wisconsin someday, could you advise me how I would do that? I don’t know my way around Chicago very well, and I don’t speak English.”

“You would have to go to Union Station, downtown. They’ll let you purchase a ticket in advance, and you can use it whenever you’re ready to go.”

Elin had no trouble following the clerk’s directions to the train station, and since it was too far to walk, she rode on a streetcar for the very first time. She stood in line at the ticket window, then showed the agent Gunnar’s address in Wisconsin when it was her turn.

“How much would it cost to travel to here?” she asked in Swedish, pointing to the address and holding out a handful of change.

The ticket agent jabbered in English. Elin shrugged and shook her head, wishing she had been as wise as Sofia and had studied English. He looked up something in a fat book, then jabbered again.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Could you write down the amount?” She mimicked holding a pen and writing. He finally seemed to understand and tore off a scrap of paper. He wrote $1.50 on it.

Elin quickly added it up in her head. Three fares would come to $4.50—her entire pay for the last week she had worked at the mansion, plus another fifty cents from her dwindling spending money. The ticket agent asked Elin something else—probably if she wanted to buy the ticket. She nodded and held up three fingers.

She would convince her sisters to go with her. She would make them understand that this was what they needed to do. Elin should have realized when they arrived in Chicago that this was the best choice and saved everyone a great deal of trouble. If she hadn’t been so suspicious of everyone, as Mrs. Anderson said, perhaps she would have.

The thought of marrying a stranger made Elin shiver. But she would make this sacrifice for her sisters. At least they would have a place to live for now, until they were old enough to decide what to do next. They might choose to leave Wisconsin someday, but Elin would stay. She would keep her promise and marry whomever would have her.