The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [72]
“I’ll find my own fellow,” I told her as we prepared for bed one night in our sleeping car. The train crawled slowly through the mountains, and the sway of it had calmed so I could brush my teeth without hanging on to the door to steady myself.
“I know that,” Louise said. “But you’re so shy. They have no way of knowing if you’re interested.”
“Because I’m not,” I said.
“I can’t understand why. You’re what, twenty-four years old?”
“I’ll be twenty-five,” I corrected.
“The perfect age for marriage.”
“Marriage is not an investment that’s of interest to me,” I said. Relationships couldn’t be researched, checked for possible flaws and errors, and assessed for probable risk—all requirements of good investments if my Blair Business College professors were to be believed.
“Love can’t be managed like a bank account, Clara,” she told me.
“How else does it earn interest?” I said.
She looked at me, then smiled. “You’re teasing me. But I’ll tell you how love earns interest: two people have to make a deposit, pay attention, make adjustments over time. Then they see a return on what they’ve invested, a return that sustains them as they grow older. It might be closer to finance than you realize.”
“You never married,” I said.
“Not because I didn’t want to,” Louise said.
“Why not find another love?”
She looked thoughtful as she sat on the lower bunk, her head bent low. “If that door appeared, I’d open it. But I’ve been blessed with a great friendship in Olea … and now you. My Ladies Aid Society gives me reasons to knit baby booties for young mothers and hear about their children’s lives and even help a little when I can. It’s a full life, Clara. By God’s grace that’s been enough.”
“Maybe it’s enough for me too,” I said, “being with the two of you, having work.”
“No. There’s an emptiness in you,” she said. She wagged her finger at me. “I can see it in the way you hold back.”
She was right, and her knowing me like that frightened me, until I realized she also didn’t know what might fill me up. Until I knew, she’d keep trying by plying me with special cakes and cookies and introducing me to young men. I guess that was love too.
In view of Mount Rainier with its majestic white cap, we chugged into Seattle. The town bustled with its ferries, which were needed to get from here to there across saltwater sounds to freshwater lakes. It was a town anxious to become a city no longer defined only by timber but by other kinds of commerce, including ship building, a railroad terminus, fishing fleets, and service to the Klondike gold fields. “Maybe I could stake a prospector,” I said as we watched a mule string board a boat headed north. We ate a leisurely lunch near a busy wharf on the harbor.
“That would be a low-risk investment,” Olea mocked.
“But a romantic one,” Louise added. “Nearly everyone in the gold fields are men. Well, except for … entertainers.”
“I wouldn’t go there myself,” I said. “I’d have my own agent, like you have Franklin Doré.”
“It’s too bad we’re here in the fall,” Olea sighed. “The largest fur auction on the West Coast is held here in February. Seattle Fur Exchange. We don’t usually buy through them, with our business primarily in the East. Franklin attends the auctions in Canada. But it would be fun to see how they operate here, what sorts of pelts predominate. I know they charge a four percent commission on lots of over a thousand dollars. Five percent on smaller lots.”
“You’ve done well in the business,” I commented.
“We’ve had our ups and downs, as you know,” Olea agreed.
“But it isn’t a business with much certainty,” I said. “It’s hard to know which pelts will be available, and fashion changes. You’ve told me yourself: people may not want mink one year; they want raccoon instead. Seems like a lot of unpredictability.”
“We could do what the Finns are doing,” Olea said. “They’re ranching fur, have been since the nineties.”
“Ranching?” I couldn’t imagine.
“Well, it’s a long shot, I’m sure; you know those Finns. But