The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [53]
“Haven’t I done well with it?” I said.
“It’s a man’s job,” he told me. “Now I’m good enough. I can do it. You can find work in Spokane.”
“Doing what?” I said. I guess my mother hadn’t told him about my blacklisting by the Stapletons. Had he thought I’d chosen to stay on the farm of my own accord?
“What you did before,” he said. “Service. It’s what good Norwegian girls do.”
“I’m an American girl,” I said.
“Then find something American.”
I lay awake that night annoyed that I’d become a pawn. Maybe Mama’s desire to make the walk had been more about escaping her daily routine than about serving the family. No, she’d wanted to save the farm and have an adventure at the same time. She’d been encouraged by Spokane’s reform women. There must be one or two out there who would give me a serving job. I tried to remember the name of the surgeon, the woman who’d helped Mama after her injury and the failed lawsuit.
Mary Latham. I sat up in bed. I’d pulled the name out of the air. I took it as a sign.
What I wanted from Dr. Latham wasn’t sympathy for my travails but her ability to open doors. She hadn’t wanted to interfere with our “book deal” by giving us assistance when we’d asked for help while in New York, but perhaps now she might help me find work. She was a reform woman who had railed against Washington State’s decision when it transitioned from a territory to a state to take away the woman’s vote. Dr. Latham had assumed a profession specializing in female problems and wasn’t the least shy about it. She’d even requisitioned a patented device to help in women’s surgeries. She would be an ally, I was sure. Why hadn’t I thought of her before?
I took the train to Spokane, where Dr. Latham invited me in, a woman wide where I was thin. She asked after my mother’s health and then, when I told her of my need for work, sat thoughtfully. “It’s not a domestic job, but rather a secretary or bookkeeper.”
“I’m good with figures, though I’ve had no training,” I said.
“I suspect they’d train you. Let me see what I can do,” she said. “Do you have a card to leave me?” I shook my head. “That’s a must,” she told me. “Domestics don’t need cards, but professional women do, and Clara, you will one day be a professional woman. Of that I have no doubt. You come from good stock in your mother.”
And perhaps even from my father, though that I’d never know.
The idea that she saw possibilities in me buoyed my spirits. I needed to be around people who looked forward and not always back, or worse, attempted to stay the same.
So it was that a week later I received a letter asking me to come apply for a position of secretary to a small business. The owner and interviewer was Olea S. Ammundsen.
I didn’t need to look for her card. I remembered her: the woman on the train.
I dressed as carefully as I could, grateful that the corset I wore again still fit. My hair had grown out enough to pull into a chignon that fit under my hat. I’d miss the privacy of the fields, I decided, and the satisfaction of hands in earth, the smells of horses as they nuzzled me with their velvet noses. But this is what I’d prayed for, a chance to be on my own, more than a servant, on a path to a career. I’d paid my dues for the family these past three years. The new century would be my new beginning too.
I walked from the station toward the address given, past the rushing Spokane River falls that raged through the center of downtown. I hopped across a streetcar track as the vehicle came around the corner.
A pleasant house on Sixth Avenue bore the address I looked for. The well-built home had a wide front porch and was painted white with soft green trim. A cedar tree took up much of the front yard and offered shade. I rang the bell, my heart fluttering.
“Come in, please,” a rather short, plump