An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart) Read online

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” the Spokane-bound woman said. “In the spring, there are prairie potholes that fill with rainwater—”

  “Buffalo wallows,” her husband interjected.

  “—where birds gather. You can walk the prairie and just come upon them, not realizing there are heights and valleys. It doesn’t look like it, I know, but it’s not all flat. They plant flax south of here and grain as far as the eye can see. There are rock formations in reds and yellows. You just have to travel to see them.”

  “You know so much about it,” Jessie said.

  “Oh, you should always pay attention to a place, even if you’re only passing through.”

  Jessie watched as the porter began shouting, “All aboard.”

  Pay attention to a place, even if you’re only passing through.

  Hesitation engulfed her like the steam flowing back from the engine.

  The clouds beckoned. She wanted to take a photograph; that’s how she truly discovered a place. She wasn’t taking photographs and thinking of Fred now; she was taking them to remind herself that here was beauty, here were treasures God had given, photographs where a studio wasn’t needed. Taking such pictures could restore her wholeness, fill her empty places.

  Her mind made up, she jumped back onto the train, grabbed her valise, then pulled her trunk along the aisle. She plopped her camera bag on top, set her hat more firmly on her head, and pushed at the trunk. “Please help,” she asked the porter as she neared the steps. She jumped off, grabbing the camera bag. The throb of the engine building up steam forced her to shout.

  “There’s not much time, miss,” the porter said.

  “If we can’t get it off, can you leave it here on the return run? Here’s my name.” She fast-walked as he leaned out, handed him one of her calling cards. “I was going to Seattle, but now I’m not,” she shouted. She’d started to run. “Remember. Bismarck. Leave it here at the station and I’ll pick it up.”

  Behind him, the Spokane man pushed the trunk to the edge.

  “Just shove it,” Jessie shouted, running alongside the train now. “Push it!”

  The Spokane man and the porter did as she requested, and the trunk hit the ground, toppling over twice, then landing right-side up with the latch broken and the cover dropped back. Jessie’s dresses like rag dolls, picked up and dropped, spilled to the Dakota winds.

  Steam pillowed around her as she stared at her trunk, her sprawled clothes, then the train chugging in the distance. Before long, silence. The clouds still performed. She got her camera out. Whatever had she done?

  Out of Control into Safety

  MRS. BAUER WAITED IN HER MOTHER’S PARLOR, the heavy drapes drawn against her growing headache. FJ would take the children for the afternoon. Maybe they’d go fishing on the frozen lake if it was cold enough. Maybe he’d let Russell drive the car. Maybe Robert would beg to stay with her, as he had the last time. She’d been careful not to say disparaging things about FJ to the children, so she wasn’t sure why Robert hadn’t wanted to go. Maybe it was difficult for a man to entertain a four-year-old for an entire afternoon by himself.

  FJ had let Melba go. Of course, the girl wasn’t needed, what with them living with her mother, but he also alluded to strained expenses. He’d purchased land in Texas, he told her. Mrs. Bauer shook her head. Her husband had never met an investment he didn’t love.

  And he’d also taken over the Polonia Studio, of all things. She didn’t like the connection that studio had to the Gaebele girl. She guessed it had come up for sale shortly after the girl left town. No one seemed to know where she’d gone or why she’d left, but Mrs. Bauer knew it had something to do with her husband. It had to. The timing was too coincidental, and she didn’t believe in coincidences. It had been three months since he’d asked for the divorce and she told him that she’d consider it. He’d made his request after attending the photographer’s meeting in St. Paul. Oh yes, there were connections, she was certain of that. She didn’t want to consider how much her own emotional absence from her husband had played a part.

  Meanwhile, it was quite all right with her the way things were. She knew the children missed their rooms. They missed their father too, but he actually had more time with them now than he did before, spending every Saturday afternoon in their company. Russell said they went to the studio often, but that was all right. The boy had an affinity for photography. Winifred didn’t seem to mind either, especially if Mrs. Henderson had her child there. Perhaps that was why Robert didn’t like to go; he had to share Winifred’s attention with another child. She was quite the little mother, Winnie was. She must have gotten that from her grandmother.

  Mrs. Bauer heard the car pull up next to the house, the door slam, and the children rush out to greet him, hopping over the snow banks, she imagined. At least FJ came on time, so the children weren’t sitting around with their mufflers and mittens, growing warmer as they waited. She pulled the curtain back. He looked up at the movement and waved his cane in the air. He looked tired. She ought to tell him about Robert’s reluctance to go with him, but as she watched, he lifted the boy and she saw Robert’s laughter. Does he laugh that way with me? Surely she wasn’t jealous of her own son’s affection for his father.

  Maybe they’d drive to Cochrane and Luise’s. Russell said they’d done that a time or two. He liked spending time with his cousins, he said. She wished her children enjoyed her sister more, but Eva didn’t make them feel welcome. She had her own problems. Mrs. Bauer sighed. It seems they both suffered from these highs and lows of melancholy. Fortunately, she hadn’t told her mother yet of FJ’s request. All that anyone knew was that she’d come home to be with her mother for a time. She’d done it before. Maybe this visit would come to the same conclusion and she’d find a way to go back to him. Only this time, he had left her first, asking for that… divorce.

  Russell leaned into the car and then back out, holding up ice skates. Ah, so they were going skating. That would be good. It was a nice day for that. Maybe she would join them. She used to like ice skating, didn’t she?

  But then the throbbing in her head began again. She closed the drapes. No, it was best if she used this time away from the children to simply rest. She wasn’t sleeping well at all since they’d come here. Even talks with Reverend Carleton brought her no relief. In fact, she’d told him the last time that she wouldn’t be seeing him again.

  “You’re feeling better?” he asked, a frown creasing his wide forehead.

  “Not better, just different.”

  “You had worried over your husband and…Miss Gaebele for a time. Is that worry lessened? Are you giving your worries to the Lord?”

  “In part,” she said. It wasn’t a total lie. “Miss Gaebele has apparently left town. Maybe you know where she’s gone?”

  He shook his head. “Once she bought her studio, I didn’t see her much.”

  “My husband is running that studio,” she said.

  “I’d heard that,” he said.

  “He and George Haas were acquainted. I imagine they worked that out when the girl left George in the lurch down there in Tampa.”

  “I imagine that was the gist of it,” he said. “Of course, if you feel strong enough now, your weakness no longer consumes you, then it’s good that you wish to spend more time with your family than dwelling on your sorrows.”

  Is he patronizing me?

  “I shall always have sorrow,” she said, stiffening her back. “I lost a son.”

  “I only meant that it is part of human nature to grieve, and then, at some point, as God sustains us and we hear His words, we are able to move forward. Never forgetting the loss—no, not ever that—but not allowing that absence in our lives to be so great that we no longer see the sunlight for its warmth or fail to notice snowflakes or forget to listen to the laughter of our children who still walk this earth, who can still put their arms around our necks, seeking comfort.”

  She wondered if he suggested she didn’t do those thi
ngs. He’d be right, of course. But she now had another absence to face: her husband’s wish to end their marriage. She hadn’t told Ralph Carleton of that, hadn’t said she was staying at her mother’s either. She wasn’t being honest with this man who only sought to help her. But then, she was barely honest with herself.

  Even without the constant strain of her marriage—without the bickering, without his evasiveness, without the guilt of locking him out of her room—she didn’t feel as though she’d won in this battle of wills with her husband. Why? She wondered about those nights when he’d been out of town and she’d felt safe. What was it that had given her all that verve to stay up late and do needlework, iron, read, and sleep like a baby without a pain? Maybe she needed to be in her own home for that to occur again. With the children by her side and FJ…absent, but on her terms.

  FJ should move out; he needed to find another place to be. But that might push him toward other women, might encourage him to find comfort in the arms of someone other than Miss Gaebele. Then everyone would know that he had left her rather than that she had left him.

  The scandal. Without anyone to blame for it, there was no way to hold her head up as the wronged woman, the way Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright could in the midst of biting newspaper reports of her husband’s infidelities. His lover had left her husband and her children just to be with him. How Mrs. Wright must be suffering, and yet she had someone she could point to as the cause; Mrs. Bauer had nothing like that. She could blame her husband, but she believed that he had not acted, that he had only wanted to respond to that girl’s allure. But if she told people that he had been unfaithful with the Gaebele girl, Mrs. Bauer could hurt herself. She wondered about Mrs. Wright, what would make her husband take up with that woman. She’d seen Frank Lloyd Wright when he worked in Winona on a home, and for a moment then she wondered if that woman might be traveling with him. Maybe her own husband knew of this affair and thought it sanctioned his own bad behavior, and—

  She stopped her thoughts. It was one good thing Reverend Carleton had taught her, how to stop a few thoughts before they ate her entire day.

  She drank a glass of water. The coldness hurt her teeth and then made her head feel worse. What would Reverend Carleton tell her? She didn’t yet have the knack of knowing how to replace these worrisome thoughts with others less damaging.

  Skating. She’d think of skating. She hoped the children wouldn’t get hurt. Maybe they should have taken the streetcar instead of FJ trying to drive. Had she pinned Robert’s mittens to his sleeves? His hands would freeze if he wasn’t careful.

  She heard her mother’s snores; she napped in the next room.

  Mrs. Bauer needed to go home, surround herself with the familiar. That’s what she needed. That would get her thinking under control, and that was what mattered now. Being in control.

  Virginia Butler and Jessie worked side by side in the developing room of Bismarck’s Butler Studio. Virginia, a graceful, stately woman, demonstrated good business sense but never failed to listen to new ideas either. It was just one of the things Jessie admired about her. Jessie hadn’t revealed her secrets to the woman and likely wouldn’t. But here she felt safe, able to put her past into perspective and find pleasure without thinking too far ahead about her future. She’d spent too many years thinking, planning, saving, worrying, trying to control her life, and for what? It had all been a distraction. In Bismarck she’d found respite.

  “We should expect a Christmas rush,” Virginia Butler told Jessie. “I imagine you had that sort of thing in Milwaukee too.”

  “We did,” Jessie told her employer. “We advertised for it. I went to a conference…earlier this year and heard a lecture about promoting businesses using photography and how to apply it to our own profession.” Jessie didn’t want to mention St. Paul. “Promoting in studios, of course. It wasn’t about turning out more camera girls.”

  Virginia nodded. “Personally, I find no problem with camera girls,” she said. “Their Kodak pictures just remind people that for special occasions they might want a more professional look.”

  Jessie smiled. “I suppose you’re right. That’s how I got started, and I wanted something better myself once I saw the possibilities.”

  “You began in Milwaukee, right?” Virginia asked.

  “Something like that. Could I have more of that solution?” Jessie asked, then bent to her work.

  A little over three months had passed since Jessie’d stepped off the train in Bismarck, North Dakota, and stuffed her dresses back into the trunk. She’d sat on it for a moment, worried, but then the skyline captured her again. She’d taken a photograph of those clouds that day, arranged for her trunk to be stored at the depot until she found employment. The hawker advertising hotel rooms, she learned, facilitated residence for those applying for divorces. People rented a hotel room, put their bags inside, then got back on a train to return home. Thirty days later they arrived again, proved their “residence,” and were thus able to achieve their divorce and a new marriage if they chose. Jessie didn’t want to stay at any place like that!

  And yet, the little money she’d taken from her savings—the small amount she hadn’t turned over to the bank in payment for interest—wouldn’t last long. She knew she had to find work.

  Less than two long blocks from the depot, she came upon Main Street. The afternoon air felt warm as she purposed through the downtown. Not a very big town, she’d thought. But a bakery might have need of a woman to bake biscuits; there might be a milliner advertising for a saleswoman to sell gloves… not that she had either of those skills. Maybe an evangelist could use her secretarial skills. She visited the newspaper office, the Tribune, to look at ads and noted a couple of promising places where she might apply. She still wasn’t certain why she didn’t get on the next train west, but something about the place—maybe it was the openness, the absolute newness and distance from Fred—appealed to her.

  Just before five, she found 311½ Main Street and saw a woman putting a sign in the window. Photographic assistant wanted. Will train.

  She walked in, showed Virginia Butler her camera, and talked about the photographs she’d just taken. “You have experience,” Virginia said. “And a good camera, it appears.”

  “I’ve worked in Milwaukee and Eau Claire,” Jessie said. She didn’t mention the Bauer Studio or her very own in Winona. “I’m a good learner. I understand about the hazards.”

  “I had thought about employing a man,” Virginia said. “My husband, William… He carried the heavy camera, and of course, men like dealing with men. One of my biggest contracts is taking photos at the prison. They haven’t been too keen on having me do it. I’m not sure how they’ll feel about an attractive young woman …”

  “I’m much stronger than I appear,” Jessie said. “I’ve hauled equipment all over Win… Wisconsin, and I’ve posed many men. I know how to handle myself. I’m sure I can convince the warden too. It is the warden who’s concerned, right?” Virginia nodded. “I really can do this.” Virginia’s eyes pooled with tears. “I’m sorry. Did I say something?”

  Virginia dabbed at her eyes. “No. It’s just, I’m missing William.” She sighed. “We were a good team. Every time there’s a change, I have to face it all again.” Virginia explained that she had tried to run the studio on her own but just couldn’t and so had finally decided to hire someone. “My husband was especially helpful at the penitentiary.”

  Jessie had no idea what a photographer would do at a penitentiary, but she persisted, telling Virginia that she’d worked with two different women photographers and could provide references if needed.

  “Well, I could wait to find a man, but frankly, you’re already trained and that’s worth a great deal to me. Let’s give it a go.”

  She showed Jessie the small house behind the studio, off the alley, where Jessie could stay. Virginia’s quarters were upstairs in the studio. “I’m sorry it isn’t more,” Virginia said when she opened the musty door to the cabin. “It�
�s hardly better than a homesteader’s soddy. It might not even qualify if you had to prove up.” She laughed. “I didn’t think a man would mind so much. It comes as a part of your wages. I hope that’s agreeable.”

  “It’s real nice,” Jessie said. It only needed a cat.

  It wasn’t all smooth sailing in Bismarck. Jessie didn’t like being close to a dark alley at night, where feral cats she failed to tame congregated near the garbage container. Sometimes she heard men who’d been drinking too much step out from one of the saloons beyond. But she liked a place to call her own. Not that she had much time to spend alone there. She worked hard, knowing that what she did could make a difference for Virginia Butler. She wasn’t working to save money for herself now, nor to capture her illusive dream. What extra money she might spare, she would send home to her family. Once she decided to let them know where she was, at least. She still worried that if they knew, somehow Fred would discover it. He had a summer studio somewhere in the state, but she couldn’t remember where. She didn’t trust that he would stay away if he knew where she was.

  She had interesting photographic experiences in Bismarck, a town that had been known by other names until someone decided to support the immigrant population and name it for the German chancellor Bismarck.

  “We’ll make just one trip out to the penitentiary this month,” Virginia told her.

  “Because of the snow?” The state had paved the road two years before, from Mandan to the penitentiary, but most of the other roads were dirt and not easily cleared of the drifts.

  “The snow too,” Virginia said. “But mostly because they don’t transfer people much over the holidays, which is good. It leaves us more time to photograph community people.”

  They finished up the current project, and Virginia turned on the lamps and opened the door. “Whew. These chemicals do hurt my nose sometimes. Do they bother you?”