The Year We Were Famous (17 page)

I touched my lips with my fingertips and all but swooned as I thought of Charles's hand, which had held the pen that held the ink that was on my lips. Of course I only thought of Mr. Doré as a friend—I was just grateful to him for finding a publisher for me. I felt no ill will toward Miss Fleming. She was lucky to have Mr. Doré, but what was a beau compared to the thrill of a career?

I crawled up on the bed to show Ma the check and the letters. "The five dollars is for my article about the time we camped with the Ute Indians and you showed them how to use your curling iron."

"When did you send that in?"

"I didn't—at least not to the publisher. I sent it to Mr. Doré for his newspaper and he sent it on to Street and Smith."

Ma picked up the check. "You could use another pair of shoes," she said.

I was not thinking about my thin soles then. "Ma, that's not all. Mr. Doré found out when my birthday was. The Minnesota records department had my day right, but they made a mistake on the year I was born. Mr. Doré thinks I'm nineteen, not eighteen."

Tears filmed Ma's eyes as she stared at Charles's birthday greeting.

"Oh, Ma, I don't mind that you forgot my birthday. You walked me clear across the country to meet the next president of the United States. That was the best present you could have given me." I started to hug her, but she shrank back.

She covered her face with her hands. "Newspapermen and their facts."

I
SHIFTED
sideways so I could see Ma's face. "What facts?"

The mattress jiggled as I crawled opposite her and sat tailor fashion, ready to listen. "If it's something about me, don't I have a right to know?" The only thing Mr. Doré had found out, assuming he was right, was the year I was born, and why should that cause such distress?

Oh,
du er dum, du!
I blushed. Maybe—I caught my breath just to think it—Ma had had to marry Pa, and didn't want anyone in Mica Creek to know she'd had a hurry-up wedding.

"Ma," I said, "I think I understand. Pa must have had more sweet talk in him than anybody knew, to talk you into rushing things." I smiled a worldly, woman-to-woman smile.

"No, Clara, you don't understand at all." Ma looked down at her lap and swallowed. Then she lifted her head. "Ole is not your father. Your father—your natural father—is Patrick O'Keeffe."

"O'Keeffe! How can someone I've never heard of be my father?" My voice rose to a decidedly un-worldly-wise squeak as I unfolded my legs and slid off the bed.

Ma sighed. "You've lived on a farm; I shouldn't have to explain that."

"I don't mean that part ... I mean ... I guess..." The walls of the room started to shift back and forth, like the pendulum on a clock; even when I closed my eyes I felt like the room was rocking and I had to hang on to the bedpost to keep from falling.

Ma pulled away from the headboard and sat stiffly. "Patrick ... Patrick was a young man back in Michigan. The man I loved before Ole."

The horrified look on my face prompted Ma to explain. She put one hand to her heart, as if covering a scarlet
A
beginning to sprout like Hester Prynne's on her shirtwaist. "He wasn't just any boy ... We were going to get married when he finished college."

"So why didn't you get married?"

"We would have, if his mother hadn't come down with consumption. Her doctor suggested she move to the mountains to clear her lungs. His father was dead, so Patrick planned to help her through the summer and he'd see me again before he went back to college. In July, I realized I was pregnant."

Heat radiated from my chest to my cheeks. I clung tighter to the bedpost. "My mother pregnant and no husband. I laugh to think about all your Sunday school advice. 'Don't go out walking alone with Erick; don't let him kiss you until you're engaged...' Didn't your mother give you the same advice? The rules never seem to apply to you, do they? You do whatever you want and excuse yourself with the thought that your love, your need to save the farm, your motives, are so pure, your needs so much stronger than any ordinary mortal's that whatever you do is justified." By now my cheeks felt fiery, my chest heaved, and my throat was sore from taming a shout down to a hoarse whisper.

I tried to work up steam for another rant, but it was hard to keep up momentum when Ma just sat there, immobile and expressionless. "If Pa hadn't been willing to marry you, everyone would say I was a b—" I couldn't say the word, not out loud. "Say something!" I picked up a pillow from the bed and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the window.

"I wouldn't undo anything I've done in my life. Even Patrick, if it meant there wouldn't be a Clara." She smiled gently.

"Why should I listen to anything you say—ever again?"

Ma massaged her temples, then let her arms drop limply to her sides. "Clara, who is better qualified than a woman who has had to live with the consequences..."

I roiled up again. "So that's what I am? A consequence of your bad judgment?"

"Oh, Clara, no..." Her face softened as she slipped off the bed and took both my hands. I tried to jerk my hands from her, but she would not let go.

"Clara, I know this must be hard for you, but let me finish. You and my other children are the best part of my life. What I meant by consequences was that I haven't seen my own parents since they sent me away with Ole. And as you know, those years in the soddy were not what I had been raised to expect for my life."

My hands were still tense in Ma's, but I did not interrupt.

"I gave up any hope of marrying Patrick to make sure you had a name and a home. I made a mistake, but I did my best to make it right for you. You mope and dither about what you should do with your life. I wish to heaven I'd still had as many choices at nineteen as you do now. You have no children, no husband to tie you to one place. You can stand on your own feet and go anywhere you want to." She waited for me to say something, but I just stood there with my mouth pressed shut.

I wanted to know—and didn't want to know—the details of how I ended up Clara Estby instead of Clara O'Keeffe. "So you were pregnant. What did you do?"

Ma looked away. "I wrote to Patrick. I didn't have a real address for him, just general delivery for the town in Colorado he thought they'd be moving to, but maybe they settled someplace else. When a month went by without a reply, I finally got the courage to tell my mother. She promised she'd think of something, and she did. A month later my mother had me married off to Ole, who worked for my stepfather. Ole had admired me, but without a farm or a business of his own, he never would have presumed to ask for me until then, when I desperately needed a husband. This was his chance to rescue me, you see? He gave his word that he would treat you as his own child. And he has been a good father to you, hasn't he?"

I was numb. "You've lied to me all my life ... about Pa, even how old I was."

"I wasn't sure you were mature enough to understand. And I was right, wasn't I? I shouldn't have told you."

"But then I wouldn't have wondered why I was so different from Ida and all the others."

"Everybody's different. Ida is a happy gadabout and Bertha is a quiet, musical one—who knows where that came from—and it isn't because they're not full sisters; they're just their own people. You don't need the excuse of a different father to be a different person."

"Maybe ... Oh, I don't know."

"Sit down and I'll brush out your hair. That used to soothe you when you were little."

Ma's face relaxed in recollection as her eyes followed a path from my hair to my eyes, nose, mouth, chin. "Your rounded cheeks and chin are his; your eyes are dotted with several colors, like his. I always thought you had his hair, too."

"Brushing my hair isn't going to make me forget that I just found out that Pa is not my pa, my father ran off to Colorado instead of marrying you, I didn't know how old I was, and my name should have been O'Keeffe—O'Keeffe? Is that Irish? I'm not even Norwegian. I don't know what's true and what's not anymore."

My eyes widened as my memory latched on what Ma had said a few minutes ago. "Colorado! You said Patrick went to Colorado. That's the real reason you wanted to spend more time there, isn't it? You thought if we tromped through those mountains and talked to enough people you'd run across someone who knew where he was."

Ma sighed. "I heard..." She stopped and cleared her throat. "I heard he did come back to Michigan for me. I imagined how Patrick must have felt; his mother just recently buried, then coming back and finding out his faithless bride-to-be had already married someone else and moved to Minnesota. I wrote a letter to explain ... I couldn't bear to have him think I hadn't loved him ... I tore it up." For a moment Ma's face went blank; then she shook her head as if to shake unhappy memories away.

"Interviewers are waiting, Clara," she said briskly. She reached toward me, but I jerked my shoulder away.

Hearing how Ma had suffered blunted my anger, but I still wasn't up to a room of strangers. "Just go. I need time to myself," I said.

Ma closed the door so carefully, it hardly made a sound.

***

I shuffled to the bathroom to scrub off travel grime and neaten my hair, but I stopped in midscrub when my eyes met the eyes in the mirror. I was nineteen years old. Nineteen, with the eyes, full cheeks, and hair of a father I never met. What else did I inherit from him? Everyone had always said I was like Pa. My head ached, as if all the bits of memory in my brain were breaking loose from their old moorings and rearranging themselves to fit the new version of my history.

Hairpin by hairpin, I loosed my hair. Mrs. McKinley said she got headaches from the weight of her hair. I tipped my head back until I was looking at the ceiling and my hair brushed my skirt at the back of my knees. It was heavy, my hair that was the color of Patrick O'Keeffe's. Whether it was his fault or not, he left Ma when she needed him. How could Ma and Pa bear to look at me, knowing how much I looked like him?

A leather sharpening strop hung by a hook on the wall, but the hotel had not provided a razor to go with it. I dashed to the bedroom. A drawer in the desk had a postcard of the hotel and a letter opener, but the blade was not sharp enough. I threw the letter opener back in the drawer and dumped out my satchel on the bed, scrabbling through the pencil stubs, a flattened toothbrush, the last of a tin of toothpowder, a sliver of soap, and a bottle of iodine until I found Arthur's penknife.

I'd seen Pa use a strop and I used it now on the penknife. I stared into the round mirror. My pupils were so large that my eyes looked almost black instead of speckled blue and green. How bold was I? Short, like Mrs. McKinley's? Chin length? What a mugwumping ditherer—I couldn't even decide how short to cut my hair.

I pulled a tress taut toward my shoulder and started sawing until the first clump came off in my hand—more than three feet of it. Oh, glory! What had I done? Courage; no turning back. I kept at it, pulling hunks of hair around from the back, bringing them to the same point on my shoulder, and hacking away. Each cut pulled at my scalp as I worked at it with the knife. Tears blurred my image in the mirror. I'd never get my hair into a braid now. It had taken eighteen—no, nineteen—years to grow it and now I was chopping it off in minutes. I was as impetuous and foolish as Ma.

I was left standing in a puddle of hair. Getting rid of the hair on the floor was like getting rid of a dead body. I opened pages of the complimentary copy of the newspaper and wrapped the hair in batches and put it in the wastebasket, nearly filling it. I ran a small strand through my hands. Near the tips, it was still baby blond, but at the upper end where I had cut, the hair had reached the sparrow-brown color I supposed it would be until it turned gray. I had cut off my past, whatever that was. For old times' sake, I coiled this one last strand and carried it back to the pile of belongings on the bed, opened my battered compass, and snapped the lid shut on the last of my long hair.

My stomach growled. Ma was probably getting dinner downstairs and talking to whoever had shown up at this late hour to see her. I wanted food, but didn't want to hear Ma rant about my hair, so I pulled it into a lump at the back and anchored it any which way with a dozen hairpins, then covered the mess with the Tyrolean hat I'd earned in Chicago.

As I left the room I looked back toward the bed and Mr. Doré's letter and the check. Did he have any idea what he had started with that inquiry to the Vital Statistics Bureau?

I followed voices through the lobby, the dining room, and through swinging doors into the kitchen, where a dozen or so hotel guests and town dignitaries had gathered. The hotel manager made introductions. I made myself smile.

Ma had saved a chair next to her at a long oblong table. She must have anticipated that hunger would drive me downstairs eventually, because there was plate of food in front of my chair to match her own.

Ma was answering questions between bites of roast beef, potatoes, and peas. I tried to eat, but my throat closed against food.

As I looked around the room, I wondered what secrets lurked in the hearts below every starched collar and prim cameo. I tried out my would-have-been name again. Clara O'Keeffe. How would Clara O'Keeffe be different from Clara Estby? Which parts of me were from Ma and the father I had never met and which were the result of how I had lived and the choices I had made?

"How many pairs of shoes have you worn out?" someone asked.

"Have you ever been lost?"

"Do you think you'll make it to New York in time to win your bet?"

Over the last one hundred interviews, Ma had developed scripted answers to entertain our listeners and make herself look intelligent and resourceful. I had heard it all.

I guess she hadn't completely forgotten about me, though, because at the question "What did you bring with you?" she reached over to hold my hand before she enumerated the contents of our satchels.