with a tilt of her head. He sits, realizing as he does that in the four weeks of seeing Emma perhaps three or four times a week, this is the closest he has ever come to her. She pours tea, adding sugar and milk without asking his preference, and offers it to him. “Mr. Beck?”
“Thanks kindly, Miss Emma.” He holds the cup and saucer carefully, mindful not to slurp. It is a mighty fine cup of tea.
cd
They settle quickly into a pattern. He waits for her outside the Post Office’s main entrance in the afternoon and walks her home. She shows him her favorite spot, in the courtyard where the mail wagons come and go and the horses are stabled; they chat with some of the groomsmen Emma knows, who take great pride in their charges. When it becomes impossible not to, she finally introduces him to the chatty woman from that first day, to Mr. Frederickson from whom he has gotten her name—no hard feelings over a small mendacity in pursuit of romance—and a few others who can’t contain their interest at hearing of Emma’s new young man. This unexpected and improbable turn in Emma’s fortunes creates quite a stir among the clerks, many of whom regard her with a newfound respect, as though she has suddenly revealed depths they have not known she possesses.
At Washington Street, Mary Miller invites him in for tea, and, on several occasions, dinner. During the visits, Emma remains almost mute, with her mother and Charley conducting most of the conversation. Eventually, Charley fills in the gaps by telling stories from his workplace, boarding house, childhood. Sometimes he inserts ridiculous, fabricated elements to see if she is listening. He considers it a victory when he gets her to roll her eyes, and several times to fully smile. His greatest achievement comes when he tells the story from work of the huge print roller breaking loose from its packing straps and chasing a whole herd of workmen down the corridor: she laughs out loud.
Early each Sunday, he picks her up at home and walks with her to St. Patrick’s for Mass; afterward they might take a horse trolley up and go for a long walk in Rock Creek Park. It is on these Sunday outings that Emma is most engaged in their conversations, and Charley finds that she is a woman of ideas and opinions, simply rusty in sharing them. They enjoy competing to be the first to spot what’s in bloom—Emma even knows some of the Latin names—or following birdsong to its source. She takes him on a hunt through the underbrush for some of the herbs she once gathered for her father’s medical practice; she ends up on her hands and knees to get at a sarsaparilla root and uses his pocket knife to cut out a chunk for him to crush between his fingers and inhale the aroma. That she is unconcerned about the dirt or the spiders reinforces his sense of their rightness together. The day she sketches for him the device she has invented and patented, closely describing the operation of the roller mechanism now used throughout her office for assembling training pamphlets, he knows that there is no one else for him.
One Sunday they stop at the stables where he first sees her, and lean on the same railing, enjoying the warming scent of hay, horse sweat, and fresh manure. “Who taught you to ride?” Charley asks her.
“My papa. He kept horses all the time I was growing up. I did most of the stable work for him, too.” She smiles at the memory.
“He was a medical doctor, was he?” She nods. “It must have been hard for you and your mother when he died.”
“That’s when I started working at the Post Office, certainly. But you know, we were living on Washington Street when he was still with us.” She gives a baleful smile at his look of surprise. “There never was much money, and the times he was away, during the war and after, there was even less. Sometimes we were comfortable, but it was just as often we needed to move to find more affordable rent.” She pulls a long blade of grass that is growing against the fence and plays with it. “Of course I didn’t understand anything back then. For me, my father was Hercules, and I remember thinking that it must have been all Mother’s fault that he wasn’t there and we were poor.” She pauses again and smiles to herself. “It’s funny. I’ve never talked about this with anyone. I don’t think I’ve even thought about it until just now. Anyway, I finally realized later how hard Mother must have worked to keep us all together. Imagine what those horses must have cost us.”
Charley nods, able to see the picture clearly, and pleased that Emma has chosen to share so much. “Was there more than just you and your mother, then?”
“My brother John died before I was born; he was only a year-and-a-half old, and Mother said it hit Papa hard. Sister—my sister Mary—was born a few months before John died, and then I came about two years after that.”
“So, where is Mary now?”
“She’s not with us anymore.”
“Ahh. I’m sorry.”
Emma throws away the shredded blade of grass. “No, I’m sorry. I make it sound as though she’s dead. She’s not. She lives in a home in New York. It’s very well kept and the people are kind to her. Mother makes sure of that.”
Charley can see that this is not the time to ask anything more. They both lean against the fence, and Emma holds her face up to the sun and breeze. The moment passes, and they both relax again. Charley watches her as she smiles at the chestnut gelding she was riding that first day.
“Maybe you and I can go riding one of these Sundays,” he suggests.
She gazes appreciatively at an Appaloosa one of the stable hands is exercising in the yard. “No, I’m done with riding. The day you saw me I had already decided was my last time.” She reflexively touches her hair. Emma can’t bring herself to say, I’m getting too old to ride.
Charley chuckles. “Imagine: if I’d been ten minutes later, or even just five.”
Emma nods. “We might never have met.”
They both push back from the railing, and continue walking. “Happenstance,” says Charley, shaking his head, “pure happenstance.”
cd
Another Sunday in late April, Charley invites her to go up on the new electric streetcar along the Seventh Street Road to a spot above Florida Avenue. Until just a couple years ago, Florida was called Boundary Road, and marked the edge of the city. Here though, the large tracts of farmland are even now beginning to give themselves over to the radiating avenues and squares that echo the L’Enfant city plan, if only a tiny bit at a time. They alight at a stop on the section of the road that the city has lately named Brightwood Avenue, a small strip on the much longer Seventh Street Road that continues into the deep countryside of Montgomery County.
Charley guides her along the unimproved roads, grateful that the weather has been dry. At Eighth and Flint Streets, an unpaved intersection, he stops in front of a large, partially cleared corner lot, already staked with flags at the property corners. He sees that Emma understands immediately, though there has been no discussion of a formal engagement, let alone a wedding date; there is no need. He starts: “I’ve saved a good bit so far, about half enough to buy the property outright, but I’m figuring it will take another year to do the rest and have the cash to build the house...I know it’s a little out of town, but I’d like to have room for a nice farm plot.”
She turns to him. “I have some money. Mother insisted I save as much as possible so that I would be able to take care of myself.”
He is vaguely ashamed to admit that he has calculated almost exactly this scenario to figure whether there is a hope of sealing this deal; it’s her unblinking grasp of the situation and immediate partnership in it that prove he’s been right about her.
Emma’s eyes are on the property as she turns over the possibilities. “When can you sign the papers?” she asks.
Charley considers her as she considers the land. How different she is than any other woman he has ever encountered. By nature, necessity, and tutelage, she is thoroughly practical. He can clearly imagine her out on the frontier, breaking ground for crops or mixing mud to fill the chinks in the cabin walls. He has long wished to be out there, in the wide-open spaces of the endlessly possible. It will do, though, to make this half-acre of cleared farmland at the edge of the city into its own little frontier