Summer of Dreams (2 page)

She passed by a cluster of hydrangeas in the far corner of the greenhouse. “Here is where I’ve installed the hydraulic pump, but the pressure to the fountain usually fails after only a few hours.”

“That’s not a fountain, that’s a waterfall!”

She grinned. “Isn’t it amazing? My cousin helped find the boulders from an abandoned quarry near Rochester. They are the same kind of quartzite used in the Sistine Chapel. Romulus never does anything halfway.”

Clyde picked his way across the smaller rocks at the base of the waterfall to examine the pump concealed behind a cluster of peonies that had just begun to bloom and fill the space with their heady fragrance. He scanned the network of pipes she had
installed to shoot trickles of water through the rocks at three artfully selected spots. When working, the waterfall looked entirely natural, but she could see by the anemic dribble of water that it was already losing pressure and would fail again soon.

“Your pump is too small for a fountain of this height,” he said. “If you lower the pipes a few feet, it will work better. What are they now, ten feet?”

The fact that he could assess the fountain’s height so accurately made him even more interesting to her. “Yes, but I’m afraid a small fountain won’t do. I want a real waterfall. Ten feet tall, at the very least.”

It might sound a little spoiled to issue such an audacious request, and she was about to explain their need for proper humidity control when his smile made her lose her train of thought.

“Then you shall have one,” he said confidently. “I can get a higher-powered pump working for you within the week.”

“I don’t need any help,” she countered. “I’d much rather accomplish this on my own.”

“Not with that undersized pump, you won’t. You need something at least twice that size for a waterfall this high. No wonder it’s been failing.”

She lifted her chin a notch. Pump capacity was probably something students learned in their first year of engineering studies, but she’d never been to college and probably never would if her father had his way. She glanced at the pump. The last thing she wanted to do was accept help sent by her father, but she was hungry for information. And she needed to make this pump work, for more than her pride rested on the results.

“What size pump do I need?” she asked reluctantly.

“It depends. How many hours do you want it to operate each day?”

“Twenty-four hours. All day, every day. Until August.”

He looked at her in confusion. “Pumps ought to rest for a few hours each day. They can overheat otherwise.”

She shook her head. “I need it to operate continuously.” She hoped she didn’t sound too petulant and demanding. She couldn’t pinpoint why his good opinion was so important to her, but perhaps it was because she recognized a tiny sliver of a kindred spirit in him.

“Come over here, and I’ll show you why,” she said, skirting a cluster of calla lilies and heading toward the ficus trees grouped near the other side of the greenhouse. She padded softly up the slate terracing that raised the beds several feet in the air and gently pulled aside a frond of the tree to reveal a small bird’s nest. The cadet looked hesitant to approach, but she gestured him closer to peer down into the nest, where three tiny eggs lay clustered in the bottom. Each egg was no larger than a marble.

“They are hummingbird eggs,” she said. “My cousin fancies himself a naturalist, and he captured the hummingbirds a few weeks ago so we could study them. We had no idea they would . . . that they would so quickly . . . well, we didn’t expect
this
.”

At first she had been charmed at the prospect of watching baby hummingbirds emerge from the nest, but Romulus had been appalled. “Do you know how fragile hummingbirds are?” he had said. “The conditions have to be perfect . . . temperature, humidity, nutrition.”

“Can’t we let them go?” she had asked. “Set the nest outside?”

But Romulus warned that birds often rejected nests that had been tampered with and said he thought it would be better to make the greenhouse a suitable environment for hummingbird hatchlings. Hence the waterfall and its ability to provide a proper amount of humidity.

As she explained this to the young cadet, his eyes narrowed in concentration, and she was relieved that he seemed to be taking her seriously.

“You will need a more sophisticated setup for that kind of pump,” he said as he scanned the interior of the greenhouse. “What you’ve got here is all wrong. You need electricity to make your pump function the way you want.”

“I don’t know anything about electricity,” she said. It was one thing to tinker with hydraulics, quite another to risk electrocution merely to prove a point to her father. “I’ll add another pump. Or buy a larger piston unit.”

“I doubt you’ll be happy with the results,” the cadet warned. “The pump you have isn’t going to work. It’s completely inadequate for the task. Totally wrong.”

Each time he criticized her design, it was another dart to her pride. This man was the recipient of one of the world’s finest engineering programs all because he had been born male, while she had to learn by plundering her father’s library and sitting at the back of lecture halls on the rare occasions members of the public were allowed onto the hallowed campus of West Point. It was unfair and annoying.

It also wasn’t his fault she was in a snit over her father’s stubbornness, but her battered pride needed to complete this task on her own. If her father believed the cadet he sent to her rescue was responsible for making the fountain work, it would reinforce his antiquated belief that women were incapable of participating in the renaissance of modern technology.

“Thank you, but I’m confident I can correct the matter on my own. I won’t keep you from your responsibilities on campus any longer.”

The young man acted as though he hadn’t heard, squatting down to tilt the back of the pump, disconnecting the relief valve from the cistern to get a better view.

“Your house isn’t wired for electricity, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“That won’t be a problem,” he said. “I can install a small
generator out here and get your pump working in short order. It will power your fountain with enough energy to shoot an arc of water that can hit the ceiling of the greenhouse if you want.”

The prospect of an ugly, noisy generator in her idyllic greenhouse was appalling. “I
don’t
want an electrical generator. And I don’t want any help fixing my pump, so please, don’t let me stop you from the rest of your day.”

The way he flinched at her brusque dismissal was a little upsetting. She didn’t like being so curt, but he had ignored her more subtle suggestions. He placed the pump back in its original position, stood, and brushed the grit from his hands, his gaze darting around the interior of the greenhouse.

“It’s no bother, ma’am. I’d truly enjoy helping you get this waterfall working properly.”

It would be embarrassing to reveal her father’s disdain for her intelligence, but it seemed that was the only way to get him to leave. “I’d like the opportunity to show my father that I am capable of installing a simple hydraulic pump. Accepting help from you would undermine that objective, so please . . . let me solve this on my own, all right?”

His shoulders sagged a little. “Oh,” he said. Oddly, he seemed a little queasy as he fidgeted before her. “Here’s the thing, ma’am. I need to work off some demerits, and it was suggested that helping you with this problem was my best shot for making that happen.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the collar of his uniform. “It’s pretty much my only hope.”

Understanding dawned. Having been born and raised within the shadow of West Point, Evelyn was well aware of the awesome set of rules and responsibilities heaped on the cadets. They were destined to become army officers. Judging a cadet’s academic abilities was easy, but it was much harder to assess their potential for leadership. The demerit system was a time-tested method of winnowing out students who lacked the self-
discipline to be a good officer. A single demerit was used for minor offenses, such as poorly polished shoes, but more serious offenses, such as missing classes or insubordination, could be assigned ten, twenty, or even more demerits. There were no exceptions to the rules. Originally, popular or well-connected cadets could pull strings to remove demerits from their record. All that was a thing of the past. There was no favoritism, no exceptions. The only way to remove a demerit was to work it off, and it was much harder to erase demerits than it was to have them assigned.

The young man who had entered her house with laughing eyes and a confident air was gone, replaced by an ill-at-ease cadet whose clenched fists revealed his anxiety. She wished the academy had not seen fit to snatch her project away and give it to a cadet to work off demerits. She had so few opportunities for intellectual challenges . . . but the deed was done, and it would be horrid of her to refuse this man a chance to redeem himself.

She glanced at her pump. Her inadequate, underpowered, failing pump. Soon she was going to have a set of baby hummingbirds on her hands, and the pump needed to be operating reliably before then. She glared at the pump, then back at the sweating cadet.

“Oh, all right,” she grumbled. “You can help with the electricity, but I want to do all the hydraulic work myself. I need to show my father that I am competent.”

The relief on his face was humbling. “Thank you, ma’am!”

“You’d better call me Evelyn if we are going to work together.”

His smile grew even wider as he agreed and asked her to call him Clyde in return.

“I dread the prospect of an ugly, noisy generator in here,” she said.

“Then I’ll install it outside and tunnel the cable beneath the greenhouse frame.”

“We’ll still be able to hear it, won’t we? Generators make quite a racket.”

“I’ll figure out sound-proofing,” Clyde said quickly. The spark of excitement in his eyes was familiar. It was exactly how she felt at the beginning of a daunting technical challenge. “I can insulate the casing with cotton batting. And maybe transplant some shrubbery to screen the unit. You’d be amazed at how much landscaping can disrupt sound waves.”

She nodded in agreement. “I read an article in last month’s
Journal of Science
about acoustics and sound disruption in natural settings like farms and orchards.”

“I read the same article! It was what gave me the idea. I’ve never tried it, but I’ll bet between the two of us, we can get it done.”

Her heart skipped a beat. The way he automatically included her in his plans was heartening. All her life, her cousin Romulus had been the only person to ever take her ambitions seriously, and her sphere of people who respected her abilities had just doubled.

They were grinning stupidly at each other when a loud buzz sounded behind Clyde’s left ear, making him startle and almost trip. A blur of green and scarlet zoomed past him and headed toward the vine of honeysuckle behind him. He stared in drop-jawed wonder at the hummingbird hovering near his shoulder as it drained the blossom of its nectar. Just as quickly, the bird rocketed out of sight.

“That was a ruby-throated hummingbird,” she said. “A male. The females don’t have that patch of red. They are quite lovely, aren’t they?”

“I couldn’t tell,” he said. “He came and went so quickly, I’m still not sure what I saw.”

She followed his gaze to the cluster of palms the bird had disappeared into, a faint whirring noise coming from where she
suspected he was happily feeding away. “Are you sure you’re willing to do all this?” she asked. “It seems rather extravagant to add electricity all so three baby birds can be hatched. These hummingbirds are in no way rare or valuable.”

Clyde only smiled. “I don’t want to do it because it’s a life-or-death issue . . . I want to do it just to see if we can.”

Another chink in her armor dropped away. The unabashed pursuit of an engineering challenge was what gave meaning and purpose to her life. Suddenly, she felt as if these next few weeks of discovery were going to open an entire new world for her.

E
velyn had hoped to spend the evening telling Romulus about her plans for solving their problem with the greenhouse. Romulus was her official chaperone for the rest of summer, having returned from Harvard three weeks earlier. His willingness to move into her father’s house meant Evelyn was finally able to leave her aunt’s home, where she had been sleeping in the guest bedroom for a year. She truly loathed being a visitor in other people’s homes, but as the general’s unmarried daughter, it was unthinkable that she should live alone while her father was stationed out West. Most of her life had been spent bouncing between the guest rooms and trundle beds of various family members, but Romulus was now twenty-two and old enough to serve as her chaperone, so they were spending the summer at her father’s home.

So far, they had stocked the greenhouse with orchids imported from Peru, shepherded a dozen swallowtail caterpillars to the butterfly stage, and were in the process of perfecting the waterfall. It was Romulus who had alerted her to the extraordinary needs of the hummingbirds, and their inability to get the hydraulic pump working had been weighing on both their
minds. She was looking forward to telling him of Clyde’s visit and the plan to install an electric pump, but that was before Romulus stumbled through the front door with a tremendous bruise swelling his right eye shut.

“What on earth happened?” she gasped out. “It looks as if you ran smack into a speeding train!”

Romulus flashed a pained smile. “I ran into a second lieutenant’s right hook during a boxing match.” He gingerly lowered himself onto the bench in the front hall, wincing as though every muscle in his body had taken a pounding . . . which it probably had.

“Stay right there while I fetch the ice.” There was an icehouse out back, and her hands shook as she wielded the ice pick to knock a chunk free.

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d tended Romulus after a bout in the boxing ring. Why a man of his intelligence and effusive charm enjoyed leaping into a boxing ring was beyond her, but Romulus was now captain of Harvard’s boxing team and loved challenging the West Point officers to impromptu matches whenever he was home.

After wrapping a chunk of ice in a towel, she sat beside Romulus on the bench, wincing along with him as she pressed the ice to the side of his face. Although one side of his face was bruised and swollen, the other side looked as though it had been sculpted by a Renaissance artist seeking to create the perfection of a fallen angel. With chiseled cheekbones, a strong jaw, and flashing black eyes that matched his ebony hair, Romulus was appallingly handsome—and he knew it, too.

“You’ve spent three years stuffing your head with arcane knowledge, then you come home and let some stranger at West Point pummel it all out of you.”

He grinned. “There is always more where it came from. Lugging all this brilliance around is my burden in life.”

But he wasn’t brilliant enough to get that hydraulic pump working. In short order, she told him of Clyde’s visit this afternoon and the prospect of a new and better waterfall. She feared he might fuss over the noise of a generator and had been marshalling her arguments in support of it all afternoon. To her surprise, Romulus not only endorsed the idea of the generator, his flamboyant mind already had additional plans for it.

“Moon lighting,” he said. “I saw it at a public garden in Boston. We can string light bulbs in the trees. When turned on at night, they emulate the moonlight streaming through the leaves. It will be as if Monet himself has designed the garden.”

Honestly, sometimes Evelyn suspected she had been put on this earth to reel in Romulus from his excessive ambitions. “Let’s not get carried away again,” Evelyn said. “All we need is to create a suitable environment until the baby hummingbirds are hatched and weaned. Then we can dismantle it.”

Romulus looked appalled. “Did King Arthur destroy the Round Table after he assembled his knights? Will Paris dismantle the Eiffel Tower after the World’s Fair? If we are to install electricity, I want a waterfall and moon lighting and landscaping to rival the gardens of Versailles. And for once, I want you to snap out of that hidebound practicality that sucks all the joy out of life. Were you an Indian, your spirit name would be Dream Killer.”

She lifted a brow, giving her best General White impersonation. “Because I don’t believe a greenhouse needs simulated moonlight, it makes me a dream killer?”

Although now that he had planted the idea in her head, it did seem rather appealing. Already she could imagine the sound of water trickling over rocks while the lighting created dappled patches of moonlight on the ground. It would be both a technological and artistic challenge, but a fun one.

In a perfect world, she would be allowed to go to college and
have the chance to participate in the burgeoning technological revolution. That dream was already fading and disappearing into the horizon, but that wouldn’t stop her from experimenting in her own backyard. Her greenhouse would never earn her fame or fortune, but that was okay. She didn’t hunger for that sort of acclaim, she did it for the sheer joy of discovery.

Dreams had always been hard for her. In the still of night, she’d harbored spectacular dreams, only to watch them wither in the practical realities of daylight. But this summer she would savor working alongside Clyde Brixton and learn all she could from him. He had the dreams and ambitions to go after exactly what he wanted, and for a few weeks, it would be a wonderful adventure to work right beside such a man.

“Tell me everything you can about Evelyn White,” Clyde said as he tightened the top hinge on the newly installed screen door to Smitty’s modest three-room house. Smitty sat on the front stoop, still wearing his janitor’s uniform and handing Clyde tools as needed.

“Why do you want to know about Evelyn White?”

Because she’s a stunner. Because she’s smart and funny
and I’ve never met a girl whose good opinion I’ve craved as much as hers.
“I’ll be doing a bit of work at General White’s house over the summer,” he hedged, reluctant to reveal how deeply he had already fallen for the general’s daughter. When she’d opened the door to him this afternoon, the sight of her had driven the oxygen from his lungs. She had glossy dark hair and high cheekbones that set off her intelligent eyes. Despite her calm demeanor, she seemed the most alive, intense girl he’d ever met. And when she’d spoken about the properties of hydraulic pumps and atmospheric pressure, he’d fallen for her swiftly, plunging inescapably down like an anchor flung overboard . . .
but he had no desire to save himself. Rather, he wanted to fulfill her every request. If she wanted electricity in her greenhouse, he’d bring it to her like Prometheus carrying fire down from the mountaintop.

He didn’t have much to offer a girl like Evelyn, so he needed to know everything about her, from her family background to the kind of tea she liked to drink. Knowledge was power, and there was no better source for information than Smitty Jones.

As the janitor for three decades at West Point, Smitty had his ear to the ground and knew more about the happenings on campus than any officer or cadet. Nothing escaped Smitty’s attention, and he was the first person to notice when a cadet with nowhere to go over the long Christmas holiday had taken to hiding in the library overnight. It had been Clyde’s plebe year. When the dormitories had closed in mid-December and all the other students headed home, Clyde hadn’t known what to do. He would eat nails before confessing he had nowhere to go and no money for lodgings, so he holed up the library, hoping no one would notice the lone student who lingered in the book aisles after closing.

Smitty noticed, and he invited Clyde into his home until the dormitories reopened in mid-January. Clyde didn’t have a dime to compensate Smitty for his hospitality, so he offered to install gutters on the janitor’s modest clapboard house. While on the roof, Clyde had spotted some rotting shingles and replaced those, too.

The arrangement worked well for them both. Smitty was a childless old widower who welcomed a younger man’s company over holidays and summer break, but no matter how kind he was, Clyde refused to accept Smitty’s hospitality for free. The summer of his plebe year he’d painted the house and repaired the crumbling front porch. The following summer, he’d installed running water to the kitchen and washroom, making Smitty’s house one of the finest in the neighborhood. Today he was
working on adding a new screen door while Smitty handed him tools and filled him in on Evelyn’s background.

“Her mother died when she was only a toddler, and General White wasn’t in a position to care for a child. The girl was farmed out to other family members around the state. She seems bright. I see her at all the public lectures on campus, and she must have fifty books checked out from the library.”

“Is there anyone special in her life? A man?”

“She won’t look twice at a cadet,” Smitty warned him. “Plenty have tried, but rumor has it she is chillier than an arctic wind. Any man who approaches her risks frostbite, hypothermia, and certain failure.”

“She didn’t seem chilly to me.”

Smitty gave an ironic smile. “I’ll bet you weren’t flirting with her in hopes of cozying up to her father. That girl has no interest in any man in a uniform.”

Being as she was the daughter of a powerful general, Clyde suspected plenty of cadets and army officers were eager to court Evelyn. She was right to be cautious, and given Clyde’s ambition to rise within the Corps of Engineers, she’d be doubly suspicious of him.

And why was he even thinking of her like this, anyway? His sole ambition in life was landing a solid job as an engineer so he could start earning a decent income. Anytime he lost sight of that goal, the memory of his mother’s hands, cracked and bleeding from the harsh lye soap she used at the laundry, snapped him back on track. He couldn’t afford to aspire to someone like Evelyn White. Someday he would wear an officer’s uniform. He would have money and prestige and the ability to get his mother out of the rooming house where she’d lived ever since his father had died and left them with nothing but debt.

“How many demerits are they going to scrub from your record for working at the general’s house?” Smitty asked.

“It will be enough.” But he was sweating as he said it. He’d been stupid to rack up so many demerits during his early years, mostly over trivial pranks. He’d never imagined his jaunt to Washington would result in such a steep penalty, and it imperiled everything for which he’d worked so hard. With luck, the patent he’d filed for last week would someday earn good money. At the very least, it ought to earn enough so he’d never have to pawn his old textbooks for money to buy soap, the only item West Point did not provide for free. It was embarrassing to be poor as dirt, and even more so to be on the verge of expulsion over those stupid demerits. There was no need for Evelyn or Smitty or anyone else to know of his precarious position at the academy.

Clyde squatted down on his haunches to drill the next holes for another door hinge. The scent of fresh sawdust prickled his nose as he wound the hand crank, grinding forward into the wood and wishing he could talk about anything other than how close he was to being kicked out of school.

Smitty must have read the tension in his voice. “Try to walk a straight line this year. I’ve seen plenty of lightweights get booted out of West Point over demerits, but you’ve got what it takes to be one of the great ones. Don’t let your impulses get the better of you.”

Clyde swallowed hard as he finished drilling the final hole. “I’ll do whatever it takes to graduate,” he said firmly.

Because if he lost his appointment at West Point, he’d have nothing in the world.