Summer of Dreams (6 page)

“Oh, it’s perfect,” she said softly, a little tremble in her voice. “Thank you! I won’t need any help remembering this past summer, but I will love this forever.” When she held it up and let it dangle from the wire hanger, sunlight sparkled and flashed off the glass.

“Evelyn,” he said in a hesitant voice, “do you think you’ll ever change your mind about men who serve in the army?”

She lowered her hand, the hummingbird still cradled within. It hurt to look at the anticipation on his face, for Clyde was such a good friend, and disappointing him felt awful. She turned away, still leaning against the side of the cart but gazing out over the softly swaying barley. It would be so easy to imagine herself alongside Clyde. The idea of living with him, laughing with him, curling up with him every night—it was the most tantalizing daydream she’d ever toyed with. But it was only a fantasy. If she aligned herself with Clyde, she would end up rattling around an empty house like Aunt Bess.

She lowered her head, still cradling the hummingbird. “No, Clyde. I’m not sure what my life has in store for me, but I want more than what Aunt Bess has.”

“Then reach out and grab it!” His voice startled a pair of
blackbirds from a nearby tree, but it brimmed with hope and excitement. He grasped her arms and turned her to face him. “I’m going to be an engineer someday. We live at a time when everything is changing so fast, and it’s going to be the most thrilling ride in history. Ten years ago, no one had ever even heard of a lightbulb, and now we are stringing them up inside greenhouses for fun. Engineers are in a race to see how we can use electricity to revolutionize the world, and I’m going to be a part of that race. I can take you with me. We can run this race together.”

How desperately she wanted to let herself be carried away by the enthusiasm coiled in his voice. “How—how would it work?” she stammered. “Where would we go?”

“Wherever the army sends me.”

The tempting vision he was spinning for her collapsed. “Out West to build telegraph wires to nowhere? Why can’t you be an engineer for someone else, like Mr. Edison or Mr. Westinghouse? Why must it be the army?”

“Because if I quit the army after taking an education from West Point, they’ll throw me in jail.” He dragged a hand through his short-cropped hair in frustration. “You want to design a perfect world and fill it with handpicked people in a controlled environment like in the greenhouse. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you have to grab whatever opportunities are in your path and seize them, nurture them, make them grow and thrive. I can’t promise to deliver everything you want, but Evelyn! Give us a chance. We can do something amazing, don’t you know that?”

It felt like her chest was splitting open. “All I know is that, aside from Romulus, you are the only real friend I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to lose that. Can’t we just go on like we have been?”

“No, we can’t,” he burst out in frustration. “I’ve never learned how to give up, and I’m not going to start now. I care for you too
much to keep going on as we are. I want to court you properly. If you don’t want that, tell me to go away, and I’ll try to accept it.”

His eyes simmered with a combination of excitement and frustration. Could she risk joining her life with his? The world he painted seemed daring and adventurous, when all she wanted was a home with her own garden, her own bedroom, and children she could raise in a safe and permanent place.

“Well?” he challenged. “If you let me court you, I’d be the happiest man on earth. Otherwise, tell me to go away, because I won’t waste time fighting a losing battle.”

Her jaw dropped, completely unprepared by the gauntlet he’d just tossed down. Why did he have to be so insistent? Why did he have to keep pushing like this?

Because that was who Clyde Brixton was. She’d known it since the day he’d arrived on her doorstep convinced he could solve anything. Maybe, just maybe, Clyde would be bold enough to figure out a way to make this work for both of them. She glanced at the isolated farmhouse, sad and lonely in the middle of a barley patch. “It will be hard to court a girl so far from campus.”

He didn’t move a muscle, but his eyes lit with anticipation. “I don’t mind hard,” Clyde said. “I kind of specialize in it.”

And he did. Already in his life he’d overcome insurmountable hurdles simply because he refused to give up.

She took a step closer to him, leaned in, and kissed him on the mouth. Halfway into the kiss, he started grinning too much to kiss her back properly.

“Is that your answer?” he said, still smiling.

“That’s my answer. I hope we both don’t regret this.” Letting Clyde into her heart might be a huge and painful mistake, but cutting him out would hurt even worse. He was worth the risk.

A
utumn rolled forth in its traditional glory as the mountains around West Point were blanketed in shades of scarlet, orange, and yellow. October faded into November, and the leaves dried, curled, and dropped off to scatter across the damp earth.

Evelyn had been right in predicting Clyde would figure out a way to court her. The greenhouse needed considerable preparation for winter, and it was the perfect spot for her to meet Clyde for a few stolen hours every Saturday. Plants that couldn’t survive a freeze were potted and brought indoors, while they mounded thick beds of mulch around the hardier shrubs. Evelyn drained the waterfall pipes, and Clyde dismantled the generator, moving it inside.

The koi were going to be a problem. Like many of Romulus’s ideas, they began with the grandest of intentions but collapsed under impracticality. Even Clyde wasn’t daring enough to try to build an electric heater for the water.

“Could we let them go, like we did the hummingbirds?”

“I suppose we’ll have to,” Evelyn said, and one Saturday afternoon they carted them to a park near the edge of town, setting them free in a deep lake where she hoped they would
survive the winter. After releasing the fish, they sat on the park bench, and Clyde’s hand sneaked out to hold her gloved hand in his palm. They kept their eyes fastened straight ahead at the lake. It was considered unseemly for a cadet to show signs of affection in public, but their clasped hands were disguised in the heavy folds of her skirts.

The contact was entirely chaste, but still thrilling. Clyde Brixton was the smartest, handsomest man she’d ever met, and the fact that he used his precious little free time to be with her was a compliment she didn’t take lightly.

They spent every Saturday together. When she mentioned she’d like to learn how to distill elderberries for making her own perfume, he borrowed the equipment from the academy’s chemistry lab. They made the elderberry oil together. After they distilled the oil, they didn’t have the foggiest idea how to proceed with the perfume, but neither of them really cared.

“Give some to me,” Clyde said. “I’ll wear it like it is.”

For the next two weeks, he had the wonderfully woodsy scent of elderberries on him when she met him on the steps of the West Point library.

She felt bad about Clyde spending Thanksgiving alone, but he assured her he always visited his friend Smitty Jones for the holidays.

“He’s a lonely old man,” Clyde said. “He’s got no family, and I’m on my own up here, too. It works out well.”

To her surprise, Clyde then invited her to Thanksgiving dinner at the janitor’s house. If she accepted, it would mean leaving Aunt Bess alone, and that didn’t seem right either. In the end, Clyde said both Evelyn and Bess were welcome at Smitty’s house for the holiday meal.

Evelyn brought a big shank of ham, slowly cooked and glazed with maple syrup and honey. She brought enough so that Smitty ought to be able to eat for a week after they left. The ham was
heavy as she carried it to the kitchen table, landing so hard it made the silverware rattle.

The compact kitchen was barely large enough for the four of them to squeeze around the table, but Evelyn could not help being impressed with the fully operational sink and washroom.

“I’ve got the fanciest house in the neighborhood.” Smitty preened, nodding his head to Clyde in warm approval, almost as if Clyde was his own son. Any man would be proud of Clyde’s accomplishments. Even her father would be impressed, and it took a lot to impress General Thaddeus White.

Who was returning to town soon. Although she welcomed the chance to return to her own home while her father visited, he had far more rigid standards than Aunt Bess, and the opportunity to sneak Saturday afternoon jaunts with Clyde would have to come to an end.

“My father is arriving back in West Point on Wednesday,” she announced. “He will stay until the first week of January.”

In Evelyn’s eighteen years on the planet, she had spent a grand total of three Christmases with her father, so the month-long release was highly unusual. She looked forward to the visit with a mix of anticipation and dread. She rarely saw her father anymore, and he could be such a daunting man.

Clyde met her eyes across the small table. “So General White is coming home?” The eagerness in his voice was as though he was asking after Santa Claus.

She finished swallowing a bite of ham. “Yes, for a month.”

Smitty leaned across the table to cuff Clyde on the shoulder. “That will be a good opportunity for you, won’t it, laddie?”

Clyde locked eyes with her. “It would, Evelyn. It really would.”

She set down her fork. The last thing she wanted was for her father to meet Clyde. She’d become very protective of Clyde, and her father could be so blunt and cutting. “My father is a
terribly intimidating man. When I was seven years old, I wrote him a letter to his post in Texas. He sent it back with my spelling errors marked and asked me to resubmit.”

“My spelling is perfect,” Clyde said with a grin, and she had to laugh at his buoyant confidence.

“Even so, I don’t think there is much point in it,” she said. “My father doesn’t have anything to do with the initial assignments of graduating cadets. I think that’s handled entirely by the superintendent.”

“It would still be good to make the connection,” Clyde said. “There are thirty of us graduating with engineering degrees and only a fraction get assigned to the Corps. I’d give anything for one of those slots. That is my goal. It’s
always
been my goal.”

Clyde watched her with fierce anticipation on his face. In the past, she’d always been suspicious of West Point cadets who paid special attention to her in hopes of getting close to her father, but after the past months it was impossible to believe that of Clyde. Every Saturday they clicked along in perfect mutual harmony, so why should she block access to her father? She wanted Clyde’s career to soar and did not doubt his motives.

“All right, you can come to dinner,” she conceded. Clyde leapt into the air and reached out to give Smitty a tremendous hug. The two of them looked like they’d just struck gold.

“Thanks, Evelyn.” Clyde grinned when he finally took his seat again.

Evelyn could only clasp her hands and pray this wasn’t the biggest mistake in Clyde’s professional career.

Evelyn peered out the front window into the darkening gloom, twisting her hands and wondering when Clyde would get here for dinner with her father.

Thank goodness Romulus had agreed to come, as well.
Romulus had returned for the Christmas holidays, and she’d begged him to come tonight because he could be counted on to keep the conversation moving. She dreaded having her father and Clyde come face-to-face, but Romulus promised to bring a bottle of cherry brandy, which was her father’s favorite drink in the world.

She spent the afternoon baking her father a warm vanilla soufflé, something he complained he could never get army cooks to master. But for all her planning, this evening’s dinner was already turning into a disaster, and Clyde hadn’t even arrived yet.

Her father had been surly ever since this afternoon, when he’d read about the election of the nation’s first female mayor in Kansas. Mrs. Susanna Salter had won the election on a temperance ballot, further enraging her father.

The newspaper trembled in his hands. “Are we to be ruled by a petticoat dictatorship?” he growled. “Who is this woman to suggest a man can’t have a drink of wine with his meal?”

Evelyn knew a rhetorical question when she heard one and went about setting the table without commenting, which was good, because her father was on a roll. The deeper he read into the newspaper account, the angrier he became.

“She’s pregnant!” he roared. “The woman has the gall to assume a man’s duties while about to give birth. And what kind of husband would permit it? Has this nation lost all sense of decorum? Of decency? This is ten kinds of disgraceful, irreverent, reckless, and irresponsible!”

“Is someone speaking about me?” Romulus asked, still standing in the front doorway, wrapped in a greatcoat and carrying the bottle of cherry brandy in his hands.

Her father crumpled the newspaper into a ball and flung it aside as he stood to greet Romulus with a condemning stare. “Close the door before we all catch galloping pneumonia. What
kind of man wears a plaid scarf? And those shoes! Don’t they sell boot blacking at Harvard?”

The grousing continued even after Romulus poured her father a snifter of brandy. Cherry brandy was impossible to get here, and Romulus had carried it all the way from Boston, but her father didn’t even notice as he took a swig.

“I probably shouldn’t be drinking,” he grumbled. “Gout, you know. This cold weather is murder on the joints, and alcohol makes it worse.”

Oh dear. If her father was in pain, this evening was going to be excruciating. “Why don’t I make you some willow bark tea?” she suggested. “Or perhaps I can warm some towels and wrap your feet?” Anything to soothe the raging beast. Clyde was about to walk into a lion’s den, and it was all her fault for inviting him when she knew how volatile her father’s temper could be.

Before her father could respond, the doorbell rang. Romulus sent her a look of sympathy, then went to answer the door. He and Clyde hadn’t seen each other in months, and there was a good deal of backslapping and laughter as they greeted each other.

Clyde had arrived in full dress uniform and looked outrageously handsome in the form-filling swallowtail coat with its triple rows of gilt buttons. It also appeared he’d just had a haircut, and his boots were polished to a high shine. Even her father would be unable to fault Clyde’s appearance.

“Father, this is Clyde Brixton, class of 1887 at West Point.”

With surprising alacrity, her father strode across the parlor, hand outstretched. “Welcome, young man! Good of you to brave the weather on such a freezing night.”

“The honor is all mine, sir.”

Evelyn held her breath, waiting for the inevitable negative comment from her father, but all he did was gesture Clyde into
the parlor, offer him a drink, and ask about the rumor that West Point had plans to field a football team.

“I think it is still in the planning stages, sir.”

“Just so long as they can beat the Naval Academy, I’ll be happy.”

At first, Clyde looked a little dazed at the general’s warm welcome. Frankly, she was stunned, too, but she dared not intervene because it seemed the two of them were getting along well. By the time they moved to the dining room for dinner, her father and Clyde seemed like old friends. General White took his seat of honor at the head of the table, laughing as he cut into the roast beef. Platters of herbed potatoes and buttered peas circulated, and the tension in Evelyn’s spine relaxed a tiny bit. Only a fraction, though, for her father’s irritability could emerge quickly.

When everyone had been served, Clyde asked her father’s opinion on the Washington Monument, which was scheduled to open to visitors next year. The Corps of Engineers had helped design and install the steam-driven elevator inside the monument, and Clyde and her father carried on a fascinating discussion about the challenges of housing steam-powered turbines in a tower of that size. The technical issues flew entirely over her head, but she tried not to interrupt.

“What are the possibilities of converting the elevator to run on electric power?” Clyde asked. “It seems a more elegant solution to the problem than steam.”

Her father set down his fork, and Evelyn cringed. Here it came. For Clyde to question her father’s judgment on such a prominent building was poking a hornet’s nest. Her father finished chewing, took a long, slow drink of water, then set down the glass while Evelyn held her breath.

“Excellent question,” he said. “The problem is that electrical design is evolving so fast, we dare not convert too quickly. Within
the next decade, I expect electric motors to be slim enough that we won’t need to redesign the shaft. But you’re thinking along the right lines. The future belongs to electricity, not steam.”

Evelyn was so dazed she felt light-headed, and the evening only got better. She prompted Clyde to talk about the generator he’d installed behind the greenhouse this summer, and how smoothly it powered the waterfall. They’d even had enough power remaining to string up Romulus’s light bulbs.

“We need men like you in the Corps,” her father said once they all retreated to the parlor to enjoy plates of warm vanilla soufflé. Clyde and her father sat in the two chairs flanking the fireplace, while she sat beside Romulus on the settee, thrilled her father had been so receptive of Clyde.

“In the next decade, the government plans on a wholesale rebuilding of Washington, D.C.,” her father said. “They’ve got plans for a new Library of Congress, a separate building for the Department of Justice, and an annex added to the Capitol for congressmen’s private offices. There are decades of work ahead, and we’ll need good men on the job. Men who understand electricity.”

“Yes, sir!” Clyde said, flush with excitement. “It makes sense to wire for electricity from the outset, rather than trying to add it later.”