By mid-August, the flowers in the few hanging planters and window boxes in downtown Dalhart were scorched and leggy. Fewer merchants could find the energy to prune and water in this heat, and the flowers wouldn’t last much longer either way. Mr. Hurst waved listlessly as Elsa passed him on her way home from the library.
As Elsa opened the gate, the cloying, sickeningly sweet scent of the garden overpowered her. She clamped a hand over her mouth but there was no way to hold back her sickness. She vomited on her mother’s favorite American Beauty roses.
Elsa kept dry-heaving long after there was nothing left in her stomach.
Finally, she wiped her mouth and straightened, feeling shaky.
She heard a rustling beside her.
Mama was kneeling in the garden, wearing a woven sun hat and an apron over her cotton day dress. She set down her clippers and got to her feet. The pockets of her gardening apron bulged with cuttings. How was it that the thorns didn’t bother her?
“Elsa,” Mama said, her voice surprisingly sharp. “Didn’t you get sick a few days ago?”
“I’m fine.”
Mama pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time, as she walked toward Elsa.
She laid the back of her hand against Elsa’s forehead. “You’re not fevered.”
“I’m fine. It’s just an upset stomach.”
Elsa waited for Mama to speak. It was obvious she was thinking something; her face was drawn into a frown, which was something she tried never to do. A lady doesn’t reveal emotions, was one of her favorite adages. Elsa had heard it every time she’d cried from loneliness or begged to be allowed to go to a dance.
Mama studied Elsa. “It couldn’t be.” “What?”
“Have you dishonored us?” “What?”
“Have you been with a man?”
Of course Mama could see Elsa’s secret. Every book Elsa had ever read romanticized the mother-daughter bond. Even if Mama didn’t always show her love (affection being another thing a lady should conceal), Elsa knew how bound they were.
She reached out for her mother’s hands, took them in her own, felt her mother’s instinctive flinch. “I’ve wanted to tell you. I have. I’ve been so alone with these feelings that confuse me. And he—”
Mama wrenched her hands back.
Elsa heard the gate creak open and snap shut in the quiet that had settled in between Elsa and her mother.
“Good Lord, women, why are you standing out in this vexing heat?
Surely a glass of cold tea would be the ticket.” “Your daughter is expecting,” Mama said. “Charlotte? It’s about durn time. I thought—” “No,” Mama snapped. “Elsinore.”
“Me?” Elsa said. Expecting?
It couldn’t be true. She and Rafe had only been together a few times. And each coupling had been so fast. Over almost before it began. Surely no child could come from that.
But what did she know of such things? A mother didn’t explain sex to her daughter until the wedding day, and Elsa had never had a wedding, so her mother had never spoken to her of passion or having children, it having been assumed Elsa would never experience any of it. All Elsa knew of sex and procreation came from novels. And, frankly, details were scarce.
“Elsa?” Papa said.
“Yes,” was her mother’s barely there answer.
Papa grabbed Elsa by the arm and yanked her close. “Who ruined you?” “No, Papa—”
“Tell me his name right now, or as God is my witness, I will go door to door and ask every man in this town if he ruined my daughter.”
Elsa imagined that: Papa dragging her from door to door, a modern-day Hester Prynne; him banging on doors, asking men like Mr. Hurst or Mr. McLaney, Have you ruined this woman?
Sooner or later, she and her father would leave town and head out to the farms …
He would do it. She knew he would. There was no stopping her father once he’d made up his mind. “I’ll leave,” she said. “I’ll leave right now. Go out on my own.”
“It must have been … you know … a crime,” Mama said. “No man would—”
“Want me?” Elsa said, spinning to face her mother. “No man could ever want me. You’ve told me that all my life. You’ve all made sure I understood that I was ugly and unlovable, but it isn’t true. Rafe wanted me. He—”
“Martinelli,” Papa said, his voice thick with disgust. “An Eye-talian. His father bought a thresher from me this year. Sweet God. When people hear…” He shoved Elsa away from him. “Go to your room. I need to think.”
Elsa stumbled away. She wanted to say something, but what words could fix this? She walked up the porch steps and into the house.
Maria stood in the archway to the kitchen, holding a silver candlestick and a rag. “Miss Wolcott, are you all right?”
“No, Maria, I’m not.”
Elsa ran upstairs to her room. She felt the start of tears and denied herself the relief they promised.
She touched her flat, nearly concave stomach. She couldn’t imagine a baby in her, growing secretly. Surely a woman would know such a thing.
An hour passed, then another. What were they talking about, her parents? What would they do to her? Beat her, lock her away, call the police and report a fictitious crime?
She paced. She sat. She paced again. Outside her window, she saw evening start to fall.
They would throw her out and she would wander the Great Plains, destitute and ruined, until it was time for her to give birth, which she would do alone, in squalor, and her body would give out on her at last. She would die in childbirth.
So would the baby.
Stop it. Her parents wouldn’t do that to her. They couldn’t. They loved her.
At last, the bedroom door opened. Mama stood there, looking unusually harried and discomfited. “Pack a bag, Elsa.”
“Where am I going? Will it be like Gertrude Renke? She was gone for months after that scandal with Theodore. Then she came home, and no one ever said a thing about it.”
“Pack your bag.”
Elsa knelt beside her bed and pulled out her suitcase. The last time it had been used was when she went to the hospital in Amarillo. Eleven years ago.
She pulled clothes from her closet without thought or design and folded them into her open suitcase.
Elsa stared at her overstuffed bookcase. Books lay on top, were stacked on the floor beside it. More books covered her nightstand. Asking her to choose among them was like having to choose between air and water.
“I haven’t all day to wait,” Mama said.
Elsa picked out The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. She left The Age of Innocence, which in a way had started all of this.
She put the four novels in her suitcase and clasped it shut. “No Bible, I see. Come,” Mama said. “Let’s go.”
Elsa followed her mother out of the house. They crossed through the garden and approached Papa, who stood by the roadster.
“It can’t come back on us, Eugene,” Mama said. “She’ll have to marry him.”
Elsa stopped. “Marry him?” In all the hours she’d had to imagine her terrible fate, this had not even occurred to her. “You can’t be serious. He’s only eighteen.”
Mama made a sound of disgust.
Papa opened the passenger door and waited impatiently for Elsa to get into the car. As soon as she was seated, he slammed her door, took his place
in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “Just take me to the train station.”
Papa turned on his headlights. “You afraid your Eye-talian won’t want you? Too late, missy. You won’t simply disappear. Oh, no. You will face the consequences of your sin.”
A few miles out of Dalhart, there was nothing to see but the yellow beams of the twin headlights. Every minute, every mile tightened Elsa’s fear until she felt she might simply break apart.
Lonesome Tree was a nothing little town tucked up toward the Oklahoma border. They blew through it at twenty miles per hour.
Two miles later, the headlights shone on a mailbox that read: MARTINELLI. Papa turned onto a long dirt driveway, which was lined on both sides by cottonwood trees and fenced with barbed wire attached to whatever wood the Martinellis had been able to find in this mostly treeless land.
The car pulled into a well-tended yard and stopped in front of a whitewashed farmhouse with a covered front porch and dormer windows that looked out to the road.
Papa honked his horn. Loudly. One. Two. Three times.
A man came out of the barn, holding an ax casually over one shoulder. As he stepped into the glow of the headlights, Elsa saw that he wore the farmer’s uniform in these parts: patched dungarees and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
A woman walked out of the house and joined the man. She was petite, with black hair woven into a coronet. She wore a green plaid dress and a crisp white apron. She was as beautiful as Rafe was handsome; they shared the same sculpted face, high cheekbones, and full lips, the same olive complexion.
Papa got out of the car, then walked around to the passenger door, opened it, and yanked Elsa to her feet.
“Eugene,” the farmer said. “I’m up-to-date on my thresher payments, aren’t I?”
Papa ignored him, yelled: “Rafe Martinelli!”
Elsa wished the earth would open up and swallow her. She knew what the farmer and his wife saw when they looked at her: a spinster, skinny as a length of twine, tall as most men, hair cut unevenly, her narrow, sharp- chinned face as plain as a dirt field. Her thin lips were chapped, torn, and
bloody. She’d been chewing on them nervously. The suitcase in her right hand was small, a testament to the fact that she was a woman who owned almost nothing.
Rafe appeared on the porch.
“What can we do for yah, Eugene?” Mr. Martinelli said. “Your boy has ruined my daughter, Tony. She’s expecting.”
Elsa saw the way Mrs. Martinelli’s face changed at that, how the look in her eyes went from kind to suspicious. An appraising, judging look in which Elsa was condemned as either a liar or a loose woman or both.
This was how people in town would see Elsa now: the old maid who’d seduced a boy and been ruined. Elsa held herself together with sheer willpower, refusing to give voice to the scream that filled her head.
Shame.
She thought she’d known shame before, would have said it was even the ordinary course of things, but now she saw the difference. In her family she’d felt ashamed for being unattractive, unmarriageable. She’d let that shame become a part of her, let it weave through her body and mind, become the connective tissue that held her together. But in that shame, there had been hope that one day they would see past all of that to the real her, the sister/daughter she was in her mind. A flower closed up tightly, waiting for the sunlight to fall on furled petals, desperate to bloom.
This shame was different. She’d brought it on herself and, worse, she had destroyed this poor young man’s life.
Rafe came down the steps and moved in beside his parents.
Standing in the glare of the headlights, the Martinelli family stared at her in what could only be described as horror.
“Your son took advantage of my daughter,” Papa said. Mr. Martinelli frowned. “How do you know—” “Papa,” Elsa whispered. “Please don’t…”
Rafe stepped forward. “Els,” he said. “Are you okay?” Elsa wanted to cry at that small kindness.
“It can’t be true,” Mrs. Martinelli said. “He’s engaged to Gia Composto.” “Engaged?” Elsa said to Rafe.
His face turned red. “Last week.”
Elsa swallowed hard and nodded matter-of-factly. “I never thought you … you know. I mean, I understand. I’ll go. This is for me to deal with.”
She took a step back.
“Oh, no, you don’t, missy.” Papa looked at Mr. Martinelli. “The Wolcotts are a good family. Respected in Dalhart. I expect your boy to make this right.” He gave Elsa one last look of disgust. “Either way, I don’t ever want to see you again, Elsinore. You’re no daughter of mine.”
On that, he strode back to his still-running roadster and drove away. Elsa was left standing there, holding her suitcase.
“Raffaello,” Mr. Martinelli said, turning his gaze to his son. “Is it true?” Rafe flinched, unable to quite meet his father’s gaze. “Yeah.”
“Madonna mia,” Mrs. Martinelli said, then rattled off something further in Italian. Angry, that was all Elsa got from it. She slapped Rafe on the back of the head, a loud crack of sound, and then began yelling: “Send her away, Antonio. Puttana.”
Mr. Martinelli pulled his wife away from them.
“I’m sorry, Rafe,” Elsa said when they were alone. Shame was drowning her. She heard Mrs. Martinelli yell, “No,” and then, again: “Puttana.”
A moment later, Mr. Martinelli returned to Elsa, looking older than when he’d left. He was craggy-looking—his brow thrust out, tufted by sagebrush eyebrows; the bumpy arch of a nose that looked to have been broken more than once; a blunt plate of a chin. An old-fashioned cowcatcher mustache covered most of his upper lip. Every bit of bad Panhandle Texas weather showed on his deeply tanned face, created wrinkles along his forehead like year rings in a tree trunk. “I’m Tony,” he said, and then cocked his head toward his wife, who stood about fifteen feet away. “My wife … Rose.”
Elsa nodded. She knew he was one of the many farmers who bought supplies from her father each season on credit and paid it back after harvest. They had met at a few county gatherings, but not many. The Wolcotts didn’t socialize with people like the Martinellis.
“Rafe,” he went on, looking at his son. “Introduce your girl properly.”
Your girl.
Not your hussy, your Jezebel.
Elsa had never been anyone’s girl. And she was too long in the tooth to be a girl anyway.
“Papa, this is Elsa Wolcott,” Rafe said in a voice that cracked on the last word.
“No. No. No,” Mrs. Martinelli shouted. Her hands slammed onto her hips. “He’s going to college in three days, Tony. We’ve paid the deposit. How do we even know this woman is in the family way? It could be a lie. A baby—”
“Changes everything,” said Mr. Martinelli. He added something in Italian, and his words silenced his wife.
“You’ll marry her,” Mr. Martinelli said to Rafe.
Mrs. Martinelli cursed loudly in Italian; at least it sounded like a curse. Rafe nodded at his father. He looked as frightened as Elsa felt.
“What about his future, Tony?” Mrs. Martinelli said. “All of our dreams for him?”
Mr. Martinelli didn’t look at his wife. “It’s the end of all that, Rose.”
 |
ELSA STOOD SILENTLY BY. Time seemed to slow down and stretch out as Rafe stared at her. The silence around them would have been complete but for the chickens squawking from the pen and a hog rooting lazily through the dirt.
“I’ll get her settled,” Mrs. Martinelli said tightly, her face a mask of displeasure. “You boys go finish up for the night.”
Mr. Martinelli and Rafe walked away without a word.
Elsa thought, Leave. Just walk away. That was what they wanted her to do. If she walked away now, this family could go on with their lives.
But where would she go? How would she live?
She pressed a hand to her flat belly and thought about the life growing in there.
A baby.
How was it that in all the maelstrom of shame and regret, she’d missed the only thing that mattered?
She would be a mother. A mother. There would be a baby who would love her, whom she would love.
A miracle.
She turned away from Mrs. Martinelli and began the long walk down the driveway. She heard each of her footsteps, and the cottonwoods chattering
in the breeze. “Wait!”
Elsa stopped. Turned back.
Mrs. Martinelli stood directly behind her, hands fisted, mouth set in a hard line of disapproval. She was so small a good breeze might topple her, and yet the force emanating from her was unmistakable. “Where are you going?”
“What do you care? Away.”
“Your parents will accept you back, ruined?” “Hardly.”
“So…”
“I’m sorry,” Elsa said. “I didn’t mean to ruin your son’s life. Or dash your hopes for him. I just … it doesn’t matter now.”
Elsa felt like a giraffe looming over this petite, exotic-looking woman. “So that’s it? You just leave?”
“Isn’t that what you want me to do?”
Mrs. Martinelli stepped closer, looked up, studying Elsa intently. Long, uncomfortable moments passed. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
Mrs. Martinelli did not look pleased by that. “Will you convert to Catholicism?”
It took Elsa a moment to understand what was happening. They were negotiating.
Catholic.
Her parents would be mortified. Her family would disown her. They already had. You’re no daughter of mine.
“Yes,” Elsa said. Her child would need the comfort of a faith and the Martinellis would be her only family.
Mrs. Martinelli nodded crisply. “Good. Then—”
“Will you love this child?” Elsa asked. “As you would have loved one borne by Gia?”
Mrs. Martinelli looked surprised.
“Or will you just put up with this puttana’s child?” Elsa didn’t know what the word meant, but she knew it wasn’t kind. “Because I know about growing up in a household where love is withheld. I won’t do that to my child.”
“When you are a mother, you will know how I feel right now,” Mrs. Martinelli said at last. “The dreams for your children are so … so…” She stopped, looked away as tears filled her eyes, then went on. “You cannot imagine the sacrifices we made so that Raffaello could have a better life than we’ve had.”
Elsa realized the pain she’d caused this woman, and her shame intensified. It was all she could do not to apologize again.
“The baby, I will love,” Mrs. Martinelli said into the silence. “My first grandchild.”
Elsa heard the unvoiced remainder loud and clear: You, I will not, but just that word, love, was enough to steady Elsa’s heart and shore up her fragile resolve.
She could live among these strangers unwanted; invisibility was a skill she’d learned. What mattered now was the baby.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, thinking, You, you, little one, you will be loved by me and love me in return.
Nothing else mattered.
I will be a mother.
For this child, Elsa would marry a man who didn’t love her and join a family who didn’t want her. From now on, all her choices would be thusly made.
For her child.
“Where should I put my things?”
