school about the time Herbert and I came here.”
“He’s very good looking.”
“I heard somewhere—maybe at sodality—that he’s engaged to a girl from the East.”
“Boston,” Elvira said.
“You do have your ear to the ground.”
“In a dry-goods store you hear a lot. Especially about the owners.”
“I suppose.” Nell held a cup of milk to Hilly’s mouth. “Think of it. Europe. It takes my breath away.”
“Mine too. I’ve never even been to St. Bridget!”—the county seat.
Sitting on the living-room floor by the three-foot-square hot-air register, Hilly played with a spoon and pie tin while Nell and Elvira washed and dried the dishes.
“My Christmas vacation begins at the end of this week,” Nell told the girl. “If you’re planning to go home for a visit, better have someone fetch you.”
“I don’t think they can spare me from the store,” Elvira said. “It’s so busy now, Mr. George says they can use me every day till Christmas.” She added, “That is, if you don’t mind looking after Hilly.” She wrung out the dishcloth and wiped down the oilcloth.
“Are you disappointed not to go home?”
“I’ve bought little presents for everyone. Mrs. Lundeen helped me pick out nice things I could afford, and then she gave me a discount because I’m an employee. Isn’t that something?” Setting the teakettle over a burner, Elvira continued, “Everybody at home’s going to be knocked off their feet. They never get anything new-bought except, you know, like a plow. When they see those presents, they’ll never miss me.”
The little group celebrated Hilly’s third birthday on a December Sunday when the store was closed and Elvira could be present. After early Mass, Nell baked a cake and, once they’d all eaten potatoes and sausage, Elvira ran out to gather a bowl of fresh snow.
“Hilly, it snowed just for you,” she told him as she stirred a little maple syrup into the bowl and spooned some of the mix over a slice of cake that Nell had torn into pieces. “Taste that, you little dumpling.”
He dug in with both hands, stuffing cake into his mouth. “Nithe,” he mumbled.
Once Hilly was asleep, Elvira sat near Nell and said, “When I told Mrs. Lundeen we were having Hilly’s birthday tonight, she sent this home for him.” She handed Nell a book, gorgeously bound.
“Beautiful Stories About Children by Charles Dickens,” Nell read. “How will I ever repay the Lundeens?”
“They don’t seem like people who expect it.”
One day, Nell thought, maybe there’ll be something I can do.
CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT, and Elvira was still needed at the store on Saturdays. Early in February she told Nell that she was depositing a little money in the bank each week. “In the Bank of Harvester. Mr. Lundeen’s bank,” she added, as if there were another in town.
“When you marry, you’ll have money of your own. That’s always a good thing,” Nell said. Indeed.
“Maybe I won’t marry. Then I’ll really be glad I saved it.”
The subject reminded Nell. “There’s a Valentine Dance at the hotel,” Nell said, laying aside the weekly Standard Ledger. Lately, Elvira had been giving the dances the go-by.
“It’ll mostly be married people and girls with beaux,” Elvira said.
“Nonsense. There’s bound to be unattached girls at a Valentine Dance. And boys. What if this is the dance where you lose your heart?”
Wearing the rose party dress that Nell had made her at Christmas, Elvira did attend the dance. Nell waited up, now reading Pride and Prejudice, a loan from Juliet Lundeen. Jane Austen, despite being from a different place and time, well understood human frailties in their many costumes.
Elvira should be reading novels and biographies. Life could toss your sanity about like a glass ball; books were a cushion. How on earth did nonreaders cope when they had nowhere to turn? How lonely such a nonreading world must be.
But Elvira had demurred when Nell suggested sharing the books from Mrs. Lundeen. They were “too deep,” she’d said. Nell sighed now and rose to check on Hilly, tucking the quilts around his bootied feet. This room and her own were always cold in winter.
Bertha Rabel had long ago given Nell lace curtains for the living-room window and those in the bedrooms. Though kindly meant, they did not keep out the cold.
After setting the teakettle on the stove and heaving a chunk of firewood onto the embers, Nell struggled into her coat and slipped down to the street, stepping gingerly onto the snow and ice.
At each corner of Main Street, a gas lamp was lit, but the stores, robbed of the light and vitality of the business day, stood bleak and black. In a village like Harvester, the collection of stores and offices strung loosely along Main Street—with odd little intervals here and there, like gaps between teeth—were the clearinghouses of news and gossip.
Telephones were still a rarity. There were perhaps half a dozen in the town. Laurence Lundeen, with plans for the future of Harvester, had set up a telephone company, called Five Counties Telephone Communication. This involved installing a little switchboard in the office of the dry-goods store, where Anna Braun, the bookkeeper, could connect Edward Barnstable in his real-estate office with Dr. Gray in his office, one floor above.
Similar switchboards were being installed in St. Bridget and Red Berry and not a few other towns in the area. Laurence was quoted in the Standard Ledger as saying that one day soon every household would possess a telephone. The idea gave Nell pause. Wasn’t it a little frightening, everything so instant? First the telegraph, now the telephone.
She rubbed her bare hands and peered down Main Street toward the Harvester Arms Hotel. On the broad front porch, several young men huddled together, smoking or sharing a flask. Inside, all the lamps on the first floor were burning, and Nell thought she caught the strains of “After the Ball.” Herbert had been partial to that tune; its sadness fed something in him. She trembled, turning away from the sound.
“You waited up,” Elvira said when she came home around half past eleven. An air of warmth clung about her despite the cold night.
“I was reading and fell asleep. My, it’s chilly in here.” Nell’s shawl had slipped and she gathered it around her shoulders, shivering. “The fire’s gone out.” Rabel’s, downstairs, let their fire die at night, so no heat rose through the register until morning, when the shop reopened.
Elvira slipped out of her coat, hanging it on a hook by the door. “Should I start the cookstove?”
“No. We’ll be going to bed. I don’t like to waste the wood.”
“I’ll get into my nightdress, then.”
“How was the dance?” Nell asked, rising.
“Dull as dishwater for an hour, but then Mr. George stopped in,” Elvira said, returning with her nightdress in hand. “He knows so many dance steps—steps nobody around here’s even heard of.” She wandered into the kitchen to see if the stove still held any heat. “And he showed us how to do them. Things got lively then! I wish you’d been there.”
Back in the living room, Elvira went on, “There’s