The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [38]
“Yes, Mama,” I said.
“I read The Lamplighter, maybe Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I loved that book.”
“Our stomachs would be full, and you’d bring dried apples out to make up a perfect pie and whipped cream for the topping.”
“Yes, yes.” She silenced my talk of food. “Those stories, they were about persevering, Clara. Keeping on despite the sorrow. Justice. Family. It’s all about doing what we must for family.”
“Yes, Mama, I know.”
She stroked my arm. I pulled away.
The World editor agreed to confer with the sponsors in New York about our latest idea, and while we waited on their reply, we worked. At night, Mama wrote an article. It was in response to a letter to the editor in the New York Times about labor issues and mining. “It’ll show that I can write,” she told me when I raised an eyebrow at how she spent her time. “I might get invitations to speak,” she pointed out. “Raise our own funds. Maybe they’ll pay me.”
Another of her fantasies.
The Times didn’t use her piece, but it appeared instead in a Norwegian paper. There was no payment and we received no invitations. Then Mama sent a letter (she had to ask a stranger for a stamp) to the woman in Spokane who had helped initially make contact with the sponsors. Mama asked if she could intervene on our behalf, especially since we’d been robbed and now had no money to return home, though we’d accomplished all that had been asked. “I told her but for the sprained ankle, we’d have made it and that we hoped to write a book now.”
Mama asked her to telegraph her response, which the woman did. She had no influence, she said, and told us she didn’t want to jeopardize whatever negotiations we might yet work out by sending money.
“There is no agreement; nothing’s being negotiated,” I told Mama. “You shouldn’t have told her about the book. That’s a dream.”
“No, Clara, listen. If she doesn’t want to break the agreement that we not beg, then that means there is still hope that the sponsors will come through. Yes. Meanwhile, we’ll support ourselves here. We can do this. But we will have to walk.”
“To the charity offices? Please?”
“No, to Brooklyn. Manhattan is too expensive.”
SEVENTEEN
For the Love of Money
1897
I’ll remember Brooklyn for the pans I scrubbed while we lived there and maybe for the little flowers that grew in the window boxes. These were watered by the wet clothes we hung to dry on lines that crisscrossed between the tenement houses, where I could hear languages from a dozen different countries spoken between mothers and their children, between husbands and wives. Families, working things out together—though from the arguments we heard in the evenings, not always successfully.
I wished I could have been cheery like the other working girls, who stopped asking me if I wanted to join them after we finished our duties for a soda or a walk in the park. I didn’t recognize their offers of friendship; I worked to save every penny for tickets home. Besides, my ankle ached after standing for the day, and I found little joy in the daily grind of the labor that split my fingernails and gave me red, harsh-looking knuckles. I remembered with fondness my domestic duties in comfortable Spokane homes. The only advantage to this daily grunge was that the work required no great thoughts. I was free to daydream, to imagine a life with Forest when I got home, to speculate about my mother’s life before she married. I also had time to be frustrated and angry at the sponsors, at my mother for trusting them, at myself for getting sick and spraining my ankle. Any lessons I had to learn had occurred on the journey. New York City had nothing new to teach me, or so I thought.
Spring came to the city with no word from the sponsors about the book. Mama and I walked by the windows of the finer stores naming things we thought Bertha or Arthur or Ida might like, wishing we could buy that wooden horse for Johnny or the doll with a china face for Lillian.
“Seeing you again will be their present, Mama.” She nodded. We stopped in front of shops with