Summer of Dreams (3 page)

E
velyn was sitting at the breakfast table opposite Romulus when a wagon of bricks was delivered to the house, along with a note from Clyde Brixton. The bricks were leftovers from a new dormitory, and he’d been granted permission to use them at the general’s house. Supplies for building the generator were also being provided by the academy, for West Point looked after the family members of officers posted on long-term assignments.

Evelyn raced outside to accept the delivery, excited at the prospect of beginning work on the generator. Romulus joined her outside as she scanned the note once again.

“Clyde’s note suggests we lay the bricks on the flat surface just south of the greenhouse,” she said. She was proud of the perfect calm in her voice, especially given the way her heart picked up pace at the prospect of seeing Clyde again. Not that it meant anything. She was simply excited to get started fixing her waterfall.

She summarized the rest of the note’s instructions for preparing a proper surface. She might have been reading lists from the West Point student directory for how bland she sounded.

Romulus’s eyes gleamed as he leaned a hip against the side
of the cart. “Did you know your cheeks just flushed a shade of crimson to rival a damask rose?” he asked. “I suspect that a West Point cadet might be responsible for your alarming surge in blood pressure.”

She lifted her chin a notch. “I have no interest in any West Point cadet and never will.”

“Are you sure? You sounded pretty impressed with him the other day.”

“Then let me clarify,” she said calmly. “The earth will stop rotating, the moon will drop from the sky, and the sun will burn to ash before a man in uniform will ever appeal to me.”

And it was true. From the time she was old enough to crawl from her crib and take notice of the world, she had witnessed army wives being abandoned by their husbands, and children raised with no fathers. As a child, there were years Evelyn couldn’t even remember her father’s face; the best she could do was recall the scent of starch from his scratchy uniform.

“No need to supply all the details of the apocalypse,” Romulus said. “Let’s get these bricks carted to the backyard.”

The rest of the morning was spent perched on a bench, giving Romulus instructions for digging a shallow trench and laying out the bricks according to the plan sent by Clyde. Being female had few compensations, but she was prepared to take full advantage of the excusal from manual labor. Romulus shed his shirt and donned a pair of work gloves as he began cutting into the sod.

As much as she adored Romulus, he was family and could never fill the hollow part of her heart that longed for a man in her life. The only men she met at West Point were in the army and destined to lead the same kind of itinerant life as her father. She wanted to meet other young men who were interested in the same things she was—men she would be free to court or someday marry.

“Could I come visit you sometime at Harvard?” she asked impulsively. “You know I love going to the lectures, and I wouldn’t mind meeting some of your friends.”

Romulus straightened, then sank the tip of the shovel firmly into the ground. He swiped the sweat off his face and peered at her through his still-swollen black eye. “Which of my friends do you want to meet? The young and handsome ones?”

Romulus could always read her like a book, and it was embarrassing. “Good looks don’t matter,” she said. “I’d like to meet someone who is intellectually curious. Someone who likes to tinker with things and likes a good challenge. Someone who’d be willing to install a generator or a waterfall to see if we can create an environment for hummingbirds.”

Romulus grinned as he started shoveling again. “Someone like Clyde Brixton?”

“Someone like Clyde Brixton without the looming army career. He’d be perfect but for that.”

“Did someone say my name?”

Evelyn gasped, for there was Clyde, standing beside the greenhouse with a bag of sand precariously balanced on one shoulder. If the earth could have split open and swallowed her whole, she would have been happy, for if the widening of Clyde’s smile was any indication, he’d heard everything she’d said about him.

Romulus saved her, tossing down the shovel and brushing the grit from his hands. “If you’re selling something, we’re not interested. If you’re the engineering cadet from West Point who is going to install an electric generator for our greenhouse, let me scatter rose petals in your path.”

Clyde grinned, leaning over to let the heavy bag of sand roll from his shoulder and thump on the ground. “I’m the guy who sent you all those bricks. And the brick pad will last longer if we add a layer of sand before you set the bricks, so I brought a bag. I knocked, but the maid said you were out here.” He
looked at Evelyn with curiosity. “What were you saying about me just now?”

The heat in her cheeks grew. She cleared her throat and nodded to his note. “I was saying how I appreciated your instructions for making the brick pallet. They were very clear.”

He beamed at her with an impossibly blue gaze. She hoped he wouldn’t challenge her, for what could she say? That she had been thinking of him almost nonstop for the past three days? That she had never met another young man she’d felt so instantly attuned to?

“Good!” he said. “Can I stay and help?”

Clyde couldn’t believe his good fortune. He’d only intended to deliver the sand and then return to Smitty’s house, but he was almost certain he’d interrupted Evelyn talking about him, and the snippets he’d heard made him dizzy with anticipation. He’d spent a few sleepless nights worrying she might somehow learn about his mortifying collection of demerits or about the desperation move he’d made to get admitted to West Point. He wanted her to see him as a hero, yet there were so many ways she could have heard about his checkered history.

But miraculously, it seemed he was already on his way to making a favorable impression. He rolled up his sleeves alongside her cousin and set to work digging the shallow trench, exquisitely conscious of Evelyn’s presence just a few yards away, watching his every move.

“So you attend Harvard?” he asked the man laboring beside him. “What are you studying?”

“Natural science,” Romulus replied. “After graduating, I’m thinking of going to Yale for another degree in animal science.”

“And what will you do with that? Become a college professor?”

Romulus shrugged. “Who knows? It’s mostly just an excuse
to avoid gainful employment for a few more years. What will you do after you graduate?”

Get a job with Evelyn’s father
. The best possible appointment for someone like him was to become an officer in the Corps of Engineers, but there was no need to state it so bluntly. “I’ll go wherever the army sends me,” he said. “Maybe drilling tunnels through the Rocky Mountains or working on the canals in the Great Lakes. Or a bridge somewhere. I’ve never worked on a bridge before.”

Romulus shuddered. “It sounds like the inner rings of Dante’s inferno.”

That attitude confounded him. All his life, he’d only wanted to earn a degree, start working, and make money. Anything that interfered with that was a problem.

He split the top of the sandbag with the tip of his shovel and dumped a generous amount of sand into the trench to serve as a drainage bed for the bricks. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was build things,” he said.

Romulus grabbed a rake and began spreading the sand, then abruptly stopped. “Brixton,” he said in a pondering voice as he straightened and looked directly at Clyde. “Any relation to Fleetwood Brixton and the refrigeration project?”

Clyde felt his stomach drop. There were plenty of painful details about his personal life he didn’t particularly want to share, but the final, humiliating years of his father’s technological debacle were at the top of the list.

Both Evelyn and Romulus awaited his answer, studying him with curious eyes. He looked away and raked the sand flat. “Fleetwood Brixton was my father,” he admitted, still not looking them in the face.

“Who is Fleetwood Brixton?” Evelyn asked, and Clyde winced. If all had gone according to plan, his father’s name would have been as famous as Thomas Edison’s. The compact,
insulated refrigeration boxes would have been a standard feature in every American kitchen. Instead, Clyde had to sell his father’s watch just to afford his casket.

Romulus supplied the answer. “Fleetwood Brixton developed a clever means of keeping a box refrigerated for weeks or months at a time. We had a prototype at our laboratory at Harvard to keep biology specimens fresh. I think it would have worked quite well had the drainage problem been solved.”

The drainage problem surfaced in the refrigeration boxes after about a year of operation. The slow, gradual drip in the evaporator coils was unnoticeable at first, but over time it soaked the insulation, corroded the wires, and made the refrigeration box inoperable. His father had invested his life savings into the invention, as well as one hundred thousand dollars from a slew of investors, in order to rush his invention to market and begin earning a return. After the invention failed, his father faced lawsuits from both customers and his investors, and was forced to default on a bank loan. He’d died after a bout with pneumonia three years ago, depressed, bankrupt, and with an inventory of two thousand useless refrigerator boxes filling a rented storage space.

Clyde hadn’t known what to do. He was eighteen years old and knew little of the world other than what he’d learned in his father’s workshop. His mother paid as many of the debts as she could, but it hadn’t been enough. They were left with nothing. His mother moved into the top floor of a boardinghouse in Baltimore, where she did the laundry in exchange for room and board.

And Clyde ran away. West Point was the only school that would pay the full freight for a student to receive a fine engineering degree. He didn’t want to become like his father, whose self-taught knowledge of technology was full of gaps and had led him into disaster.

Getting into West Point required connections, and Clyde had none. He needed to be nominated by a congressman, senator, member of the president’s cabinet, or higher. He had excellent grades, an aptitude for technology, and a total lack of fear. It was his willingness to boldly fight for what he wanted that prompted him to beg rides from Baltimore to Washington. It took two days of riding in the back of hay wagons, sleeping beneath the trees, and walking over twenty miles by foot, but when he arrived in Washington, he paid for a bath in a rooming house and got his hair trimmed. Then he steeled his resolve, walked up to the home of the vice-president of the United States, knocked on the door, and asked for a nomination to West Point. It had been a long shot, but Thomas A. Hendricks had an appreciation for unvarnished audacity, and after a brief interview, he’d agreed to nominate Clyde.

Evelyn looked at him with curiosity, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Evelyn White’s father was in command of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, charged with overseeing the transportation and telecommunication systems that would lead the country into the next century. His own father’s legacy was a storage shed filled with useless refrigeration boxes.

A niggling sense of embarrassment drove him to boast. “I filed for a patent on my own invention just last week,” he said. “For an electrical switch that can automatically shut off when it gets damp.” And that wasn’t the only patent to his name, although it was the only one that might someday earn money. His other three patents were mere technical curiosities with little practical application, such as the automated dispenser for feeding house cats. Even thinking about those useless patents made him feel small and frivolous beside this girl whose father was helping build bridges that spanned miles.

“Sometimes I wish that I were a man,” Evelyn said.

Romulus choked on a mouthful of water, and all Clyde could
think of was the terrific waste if this glorious woman were to be transformed into a crude, run-of-the-mill man.

“If I were a man, I could do interesting things like you,” she said. “I could study engineering and file patents and build useful inventions. I wouldn’t have to run to the superintendent at West Point for help with a hydraulic pump any plebe could install.”

“No plebe could have built that pump,” he said truthfully. Considering Evelyn was entirely self-taught, her accomplishments were extraordinary, but he hesitated to praise her too openly. He sensed a wariness in her, a natural self-restraint she hid behind like a shield, and he needed to tread cautiously. Caution was difficult for him, but he would master it in order to gain Evelyn’s trust. “I think the sand ought to be adequate for the drainage needs,” he said. “Evelyn said this generator only needs to operate until the hummingbirds have been hatched and are ready to be released back into the wild.”

Evelyn glanced at her cousin, a wealth of unspoken communication flying between them. She looked a little embarrassed as she turned back to him. “We’ve changed our minds about that,” she said. “We want to build something that will last. We never planned for this to happen, but now that it has . . . well, it is a grand experiment, isn’t it? Like Lewis and Clark setting off for the great unknown.”