Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (22 page)

“Of course not,” said Jeremy.

“That’s not it,” Anna assured them. “You don’t need me when camp isn’t in session, right? I’m taking vacation days from College Food Services for the rest of August so I can work here. After Labor Day, I’ll go back to full-time at Waterford College, but I’ll come around often to supervise the kitchen remodeling. When camp resumes in March, I’ll be all yours, full-time.”

“Thank goodness for that,” declared Diane. “It would be cruel to tease us all month with fine cuisine and then disappear as soon as we become spoiled for anything else. You know what would prove your commitment to your new job? Moving into the manor.”

“Don’t mind her,” Agnes told Anna, who appeared increasingly distressed. “Diane just wants you here first thing in the morning so you can have her coffee waiting for her when she arrives.”

“So I have selfish motives,” Diane retorted. “Everything I said is still true.”

“I don’t know.” Anna took out mixing bowls and a rolling pin. “Elm Creek Manor is beautiful, but I like living downtown, and sometimes it’s good to be able to leave work at work.”

Diane shook her head and feigned bafflement. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Leave the newbie alone,” said Jeremy. “You’ll scare her off. You can’t all move into the manor. You won’t have any rooms left over for campers.”

Diane looked ready to debate the point, but she was distracted by the coffeemaker’s beep signaling that a fresh pot was ready. As she rushed forward, mug in hand, Agnes regarded her young companions with a fond smile, enjoying their customary banter. It would not be so bad to give up her own home and garden to share the manor with friends such as these, and if she did not like her own little house so much, she might consider it, though it would be a strange and wistful homecoming. What Diane had apparently forgotten, and what Anna and Jeremy probably did not know, was that Agnes had once called Elm Creek Manor home. Long ago, when she was little more than a girl, newly wed and far from her soldier husband, she passed many lonely days as an interloper among her husband’s family.

When she met Richard Bergstrom she was fifteen, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia businessman, a granddaughter of a senator, and a popular student at Miss Sebastian’s Academy for Young Ladies. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was a traditional day of service for Miss Sebastian’s girls and the young men from their brother school, Warrington Prep. More than half a century earlier, the schools’ progressive-minded founders had made service to the poor a voluntary but strongly encouraged part of the curriculum. They wanted the children of privilege to learn compassion for the less fortunate and gratitude for their own blessings, which had come to them by accident of birth rather than merit. While acts of charity were encouraged throughout the year, the schools made a concerted effort at Thanksgiving, when their students collected canned goods for food pantries, cleaned up parks, or sorted donated clothing to distribute to the poor. Afterward, Miss Sebastian’s girls hosted a social for the Warrington men, where the students’ hard work was rewarded with dining and dancing late into the night. Every year, a few of the more progressive young ladies pointed out that the women had to work twice as hard as their male counterparts since they performed community service all day and played hostesses to the men in the evening, and that the community would be better served if they canceled the party and donated the money they would have spent on food, music, and decorations to the poor instead. But most of the other girls were eager for any excuse to mingle with the Warrington men, so the dissenters never won out.

Over time, the social became the highlight of the day and giving thanks to the people of Philadelphia a necessary hurdle to surmount before the fun could begin. Many of the wealthier students took to hiring workers to fulfill their community service commitments or making large donations to charity instead. With a pragmatism that would have deeply offended both Miss Sebastian and Mr. Warrington, the administrations permitted it, noting that the less fortunate were being provided for, and that was what mattered.

Agnes’s parents, like many others, did not concur that this was all that mattered, so they never offered to pay for her or her siblings’ exemptions. They wanted their children to be mindful of their blessings so that they would work hard to keep them, and it didn’t hurt her grandfather’s standing in the polls for voters to see the Chevalier children serving meals at soup kitchens or planting vegetables in a community garden. As for Agnes, she seized any chance to experience some of the “real life” her parents endeavored to shelter her from, and she was glad that almost all of her classmates honored Miss Sebastian’s principles too much to buy their way out of the day’s work. Among the men of Warrington Prep, the ratio skewed in the opposite direction. The young men claimed to be unable to sacrifice a day of study so close to the end of the term, and by hiring workers to fill in for them, they were making an additional contribution to the community by providing a day’s wages to otherwise unemployed men.

“You’ll have a fine career in politics with that gift for rationalization,” Agnes declared when a Warrington Prep senior offered her that excuse at a meeting of the two schools’ committees planning the event. To her disgust, he took such a remark from a senator’s granddaughter as high praise and asked her to save the first dance at the social for him. She made him no promises, but smiled sweetly and returned to the task at hand—examining requests for helpers from community groups and deciding whom to assist. It galled her that on the eve of Thanksgiving, the young men of Warrington would toast themselves for a job well done and accept congratulations from the leaders of the civic organizations the service day benefited, all without lifting a finger themselves.

“You never said yes when he asked you to save the first dance for him, but that’s what he heard,” one of Agnes’s friends teased her as they walked to class after the meeting.

“I couldn’t refuse him in front of his friends,” said Agnes. “He might be lazy and ridiculous and completely oblivious to the point of community service, but I don’t need to shame him.”

“You should have promised to dance with him if he did his own work on service day. He would have been first in line to stock shelves at the food pantry.”

“I should have,” Agnes replied. “We all should have. It’s too late now.”

Or perhaps it wasn’t. There was always the next year’s service day to consider.

Thus began Agnes’s campaign to goad the men of Warrington Prep into serving their community themselves instead of through proxies.

She met a great deal of resistance at first, especially among the girls who had steady boyfriends among the Warrington men. How could they refuse to dance with their boyfriends simply because they had taken the gentleman’s way out? “A true gentleman doesn’t shirk his duty to his community,” Agnes replied. But wasn’t it cruel not to warn the men ahead of time that only those who worked that day would be dancing that night? “Of course you should encourage your boyfriends to participate,” Agnes answered, wishing that her sister students had done so regardless through the years, in which case her rebellion might not have been necessary. “But appeal to their sense of civic virtue; don’t tell them it’s a quid pro quo. Only the element of surprise will guarantee full participation in next year’s service day. I promise it will, as long as we hold together. We all have to do it, or it won’t work, and things will never change.”

Naturally Miss Sebastian’s girls wanted the Warrington men to do their share of the work instead of merely enjoying the fruits of the young women’s labor, so with a bit of peer pressure and promises that the girls would still dance the night away, only with a smaller selection of partners, Agnes and her friends swore their sister students to fidelity and secrecy.

On that fateful Wednesday, Agnes and her best friend, Marjorie, joined eight other girls and ten young men from Warrington Prep at a group of row houses in one of Philadelphia’s most impoverished neighborhoods to do yard work, make repairs, and prepare the homes for the coming winter. Agnes and Marjorie cleaned the home of an elderly couple and their son, a marine veteran of the Great War who had lost both legs in the battle of the Belleau Wood, while two young men cut down a dead oak in the back yard, repaired a broken fence, and hauled trash from the house to the curb. The girls, watchful for any signs that their plans had been leaked, observed the young men as they worked and concluded that their rough clothes and industriousness marked them as laborers hired by lazy, indifferent Warrington men.

“What a shame,” Marjorie whispered as the two young men passed, hauling a broken armchair down from the attic and outside to the curb. “I’d like to dance with the sandy-haired one.”

Agnes agreed it was a pity, though she preferred the blond with the green eyes and ready smile. He seemed to be enjoying himself as he worked, and while he was friendly to Agnes and Marjorie, he was equally attentive to the elderly residents and their son. He admired the man’s war medals proudly displayed on the mantel—Agnes had not even noticed them—and mentioned that his father had served in France and two uncles had perished there. After that, the veteran joined the younger men outside and talked with them about his experiences while they tore out broken fence posts and hammered new boards in place.

“No one ever remembers my son’s service to this country except on Memorial Day,” the elderly woman said, tearing up. “I haven’t seen him so happy in months. Your friends are kind to listen to his war stories.”

Agnes did not correct the woman’s mistake, for she wished the hardworking young men were their friends. They were worth a dozen Warrington men who cleared their consciences with cash payments and never looked the less fortunate in the eye or listened to their stories. And they were supposed to be the future leaders of business and government! How could they understand the plight of the working man when all they knew were wealthy sons of privilege like themselves? It was unfair that the two young men outside would never have the opportunities that the students who had hired them took for granted. Her grandfather made ringing speeches about the equality of all Americans and how every man had a chance to better himself, but even Agnes knew that the wealthy students of Warrington enjoyed a head start that mere hard work could rarely overtake.

It wasn’t fair.

At noon the young people took a break from their labors and ate sack lunches on the front stoop, bundled in coats against the autumn chill. They talked and chatted, and Marjorie flirted with the shy one named Andrew. “I hear your father was in the service,” Agnes said to Richard. She had never really conversed with a day laborer before and she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

Richard grinned. “You heard that, did you?”

Agnes rushed ahead, embarrassed. “I overheard a little. My father says that the army is a good place for a young man with ambition. You can learn a trade and get ahead in life, and everyone’s so sick of war that you needn’t fear being sent to fight.”

“Eventually folks always forget that they’re sick of war,” said Richard, unwrapping a second sandwich.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Agnes. “But for a man of limited options, it’s something to consider, don’t you agree?”

“I’ve considered it myself,” said Richard. “But I’ll probably end up working for the family business.”

“Of course,” said Agnes apologetically. It was probably difficult for Richard to imagine doing anything but what his father and grandfather before him had done. To call day labor a family business seemed a bit much, though. Perhaps she had damaged his pride.

“I wouldn’t mind working for your family business,” Andrew spoke up. “Ever consider hiring outside of the family?”

“I think we could make an exception for you,” Richard said, grinning.

Their joking manner warned Agnes that she had spoken imprudently. After lunch, she held Richard back and waved Marjorie to go ahead without her. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to sound so patronizing.”

Richard’s easy smile warmed her. “Think nothing of it.”

“But I still think you could do anything you put your mind to.”

He knit his brows in puzzled amusement. “You’ve only known me for a few hours.”

“But I know you.” Impulsively she reached for his hand. “I want you to know that the young men who hired you aren’t going to take credit for your labors anymore. There’s a social tonight, but they won’t be having any fun at it. If there was any justice in the world, you and Andrew could come to the dance in their place, too.”

For a moment Richard merely stared at her, but she could tell that he was carefully mulling over what she had said. “So…you girls have something planned for the Warrington fellows, is that right?”

She felt her cheeks flush, both from the touch of his hand upon hers and from her embarrassment at so impulsively divulging the secret she had made others vow to keep. “Yes, but please don’t ask me to say anything more.”

“I guess you’re going to make them sorry they didn’t do their own community service.”

“I don’t mean that they shouldn’t have hired you.” She was making things worse and worse! “I’m sure you appreciated the wages, but don’t you think you’d be better off in the long run if the future leaders of business and government understood the great need in this community?”

“Yes,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, I do.”

“That’s why they should be here.” A strange warmth seemed to travel from his hand to hers, and Agnes could not let go of it. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but next year, those Warrington men won’t shirk their duty.”

“Not all of them do.”

“I know that.” Two of her brothers were picking up trash at a public park on the Delaware at that very moment. “But some of them need to learn a lesson.”

“Agnes—” He glanced across the yard to where Marjorie was watching Andrew hammer nails. “You haven’t asked me not to tell anyone, but I promise I won’t. Okay? You have my word.”

He released her hand and joined Andrew by the fence. Strangely unsettled, Agnes hurried back inside to her work and tried to regain her composure before Marjorie returned inside. They finished their work before Andrew and Richard did, but that gave them little time for anything more than a quick farewell before they had to hurry back to school to prepare for the social. Agnes wished she were bold enough to ask for Richard’s address. Perhaps her father could have done something for him, found him steady work, anything. But Richard might have looked upon that as a handout, and she could not bear to insult him—even if it meant losing her last chance to see him again.