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

  Maybe she’d reconsider if Voe Henderson left to have her child and did not return. Maybe his wife would see then that she had a role to play in his life beyond that of keeping his house and looking after his children. Their house, their children. If he could engage her in his life in a meaningful way, perhaps old sparks that fired when he’d met her would return.

  That’s what he’d been thinking about when he happened to look down at the train station and saw the trunk with Jessie’s name on it, addressed to her father, sent from Milwaukee. He’d heard himself gasp. Maybe it held a few items the girl didn’t want to store in that city. Or maybe it preceded her and she’d be arriving on a later train. His heart beat a bit faster with that thought, and then he shook his head as though talking to himself. What was wrong with him? It would be best if their paths never crossed again. His arriving in Milwaukee for the convention last year had clearly been upsetting to her.

  Yet, the day he’d seen her trunk passed quickly, and he’d felt a lift to his steps. When his last appointment of the day asked that the sitting be redone as none of the contact prints were pleasing, he wasn’t even frustrated. He simply rescheduled her. After that patron left, he found himself driving toward the train station around the time the Chicago and Northwestern usually pulled in. The train already looked cavernous beside the platform, all passengers having disembarked. He got out and walked back toward the docking area just to see if perhaps more boxes with the studio name on them had arrived, giving himself a reason to be there. Jessie’s trunk still sat in the storage area.

  “Forget something, Mr. Bauer?” the clerk asked. “Thought you picked up your supplies this mornin’.”

  “I did, William, I did. I just thought I’d see if I had any more shipments.”

  “Nope, not a thing.”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked around, then pointed casually. “I noticed this trunk here this morning. Have you called for it to be picked up? Shouldn’t let it sit through the night.”

  “Thought maybe the owner of it would be getting off the train soon. It’s been here a few days.”

  “Definitely should call the addressee, then,” he encouraged.

  “I’ll do it now,” the clerk said. Fred took his hat off, brushed it against his thigh, followed the clerk into the station house. He surveyed the high ceilings. Maybe he’d photograph the interior with its marble and gilding. Yes, it would make a fine subject, though he didn’t like shots taken away from the organized setting of the studio. He eavesdropped as he evaluated the lighting and the shadows on the gilded trim.

  “That was good,” the clerk said as he hung up the black telephone receiver on its hook. “They didn’t realize it was here, thought their daughter would have brought it with her. Guess she’s coming in a few days.”

  “Always good to follow up,” Fred said. “Good business practice.”

  “That it is, sir.”

  He let himself peruse the room, considered how the marble would photograph, whether there’d be too much light reflected from it, then walked to his car. He told himself he’d only done what he hoped someone would do for him if he sent photographic supplies on ahead to an address. A call ought to go out immediately saying the item had arrived and needed to be picked up. Just caring for his fellow man. Doing a good deed gave reason to smile, which was how he felt when he picked up Winnie from her Bible school that day. That’s probably why he mentioned Jessie’s name when Winnie surprised him by asking what he’d learned.

  That had been a week ago. Since then, he’d found himself thinking often of Jessie Gaebele as he worked in the print room or while he pulled weeds from the studio’s back garden. Today, as he prepared for his first sitting, gathered the props necessary for the children he expected in this family pose, he wondered about Jessie’s time in Milwaukee. What shots had she taken? How she’d distanced herself from him at his unexpected visit to Milwaukee. Was she coming back to stay?

  Several months earlier, an ad in the photographic journal told him that Suzanne Johnson planned to sell her studio, and he wondered if Jessie could remain working with the new owners, assuming the Widow Johnson could get her business sold. He knew Jessie wanted to buy her own studio one day, and he’d considered writing to her to see if he might loan her money to purchase the Johnson business. He’d written, but it was a frilly letter, just telling her he’d seen a story that had been written up about the portrait she’d taken of a child. He hadn’t mentioned a word about the studio, and since she hadn’t responded, he hadn’t written to her again. She’d moved on, he decided. Besides, if she purchased the Johnson Studio, he might never see her again except at a photographic conference.

  That was the truth of it. And the thought of that—the thought he might never again encounter her small frame stepping across his path in Winona—made his heart ache almost as much as the absence of Donald. Guilt wrapped itself up with both pains.

  “Mr. B.? Did you hear me?” Voe asked.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t,” he told his assistant.

  “Your head was in Germany or somewhere far from here,” she said. He agreed, laid the peacock feathers on the settee in case he needed them. “I thought I’d best tell you that, well, you know Mr. Henderson and me are waiting on our child, and we’ve been thinking about me working here and all after that happens.”

  “I’ve been expecting this conversation, yes?” He folded his hands in front of him the way he did when he taught his photographic classes, looking professorial, patient, in charge. “When do you think you would be leaving? I hope you’ll give me ample time to replace you.”

  Voe frowned. “Who said anything about leaving? At least not permanent-like.”

  “Oh, I just assumed.”

  “You assumed wrong, Mr. B.” She shook her finger at him. The girl took liberties, but he tolerated it because of her good nature. “Daniel thinks I can keep working here, and we’ll get ourselves a girl, the way you and Mrs. B. have. He’s on with the railroad permanent now and says we can afford it. But I’d like a month away when the child arrives.”

  Voe wasn’t going to retire from her photographic work. He wouldn’t need to hire a replacement. Disappointment surprised him. “You’d want only a month? Well, I’m sure I can get an assistant for that amount of time. Fairly soon, from the look of things.” Voe blushed. He hadn’t meant to embarrass the woman. “Maybe Miss Gaebele would be available,” he said, the words slipping out as though he proposed a cup of coffee to replace the tea he usually drank. “I think she might be coming back to Winona.”

  “I haven’t heard that,” Voe said. “But then she didn’t write me much, and I don’t write letters so good myself.”

  “Well, just rumor then,” he said. “The studio she worked at in Milwaukee has sold. But not to worry. I’ll make a temporary arrangement while you’re off with your baby.”

  “I’m looking forward to this child playing on the outside of me instead of banging me around from the inside,” she said, rubbing her belly. “Another month and I’m home free, as they say in baseball.”

  “‘Home free’ takes on new meaning with children around, Mrs. Henderson. It seems nothing children need is ever really free.” He thought of his sons, his daughter, the absent Donald, and how much he loved them all, and how he belonged to them in ways his own parents had never remained connected to him. His parents had set him free from Kirchheim unter Teck at the age of fifteen, just three years older than Russell was now. By that time, he was already a skilled carpenter, so they’d sent him sailing across the ocean and let him lead his life far away from the vineyard and farmland of his family. His father had died eight years ago, and he hadn’t seen his mother now for thirty years. He couldn’t fathom not seeing his children for that long, couldn’t imagine setting Russell adrift at the age of fifteen. His children, living and deceased, wound themselves like a ball of thread into the full place in his heart. They were really the only tether to their mother he still had. The realization startled him.

 
“Love is free, Mr. B. I think so,” Voe told him.

  He didn’t correct her, but he knew that even love came with costs. Grief was the tax one paid for that luxury.

  Gifts Given and Received

  “OH MY, OH MY! We didn’t know you’d come today,” Jessie’s mother said. Ida Gaebele hugged her daughter tightly, then held her at arm’s length. “Your eyes look strange, more blue than gray. You’ve lost weight. Didn’t you eat properly? What kind of board did you have in Milwaukee anyway?”

  “My eyes are fine.” Jessie laughed. “It’s the light here that makes them look different to you. And I had fine food, Mama. I kept busy working and running my own photographic business, so I ran off whatever I ate.” Jessie thought of the rich meals the Harms family served and noted to herself that she was fortunate not to come away from Milwaukee having to ask Lilly to let out all her clothes. Instead, she’d be taking them in. Selma hugged her then, still holding a book in one hand as she twirled her around. They almost danced. Lilly wasn’t home from Stott’s yet, and Jessie wondered if her sisters ever considered going to a sporting dance. She guessed not.

  “Little Women,” Selma said when Jessie eyed the book she held. “It’s about four sisters. You ought to read it.”

  “M-m-mama will f-f-fatten you up like a r-r-rooster,” Roy said. He stuttered nearly as much as he always did, Jessie thought, but he was more courageous trying out this longer sentence, and no one finished it for him. She squatted to be eye to eye with him.

  “You think so, do you?” He nodded, and she kissed his cheek as he pulled her to him. They tumbled backward, putting Jessie into a sprawl that twisted her skirt.

  “Ach,” their mother said. “Stop that now, Frog. Jessie. Someone will get hurt.”

  But Jessie laughed and Roy laughed too, his eyes sparkling as he brushed bowl-cut hair from his forehead. The joy she felt at being able to tumble like a puppy with her own littermates was unequal to anything she’d felt in Milwaukee. She loved these people and hoped she’d never have to be so far away from them for so long again.

  At Roy’s insistence, Jessie opened her trunk, which Roy hauled in from the porch. “Though I think we should wait for Lilly before I give you your gifts,” Jessie said. “Roy, one of yours you’ll have to wait for anyway. But I’ll show you a few pictures.” She brought up a print of the Marquette girls and explained as Roy frowned over what the girls were pointing at. Selma wondered if the women were her friends, and Jessie said no, just patrons. She showed them a print of Mary and Marie Harms in their living room along with a shot of a rose from the Harmses’ garden and a lake scene or two. “I think this is the tallest structure in all of Milwaukee,” Jessie said, pointing to a picture of a flour mill stack that seemed to scratch the sky.

  “Wh-wh-who’s this?” Roy asked, pulling several other prints out on his own. “A M-M-Marq-q-quette g-g-girl?”

  “No, a girl who worked for a Milwaukee family,” Jessie told him. “There are several photographs there, of domestics and young women who make their living in the candy and sewing factories.”

  “Did you go to the factories to take these?” Selma asked. “It doesn’t look like a studio pose.” She held one of the small prints in her hand.

  “They were…ah…”

  “I’d love to work in a candy factory,” Selma continued, rescuing Jessie from more detail. “Imagine breathing in chocolate all day long.” She swooned as she said it.

  “And these are students at a school for stammerers.” She looked at Roy. “I had this idea that you’d go to Milwaukee and attend it one day and—”

  “He’s not going away from home,” her mother said. “Goodness. What are you thinking putting such a thought into his head, Jessie?”

  “I-I-I might like to g-go t-t-to M-M-Milwaukee.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jessie’s mother said. “You’re much too young to be away from home, whether with your big sister or not.”

  “These are of friends of Mrs. Harms,” Jessie said. “And a few of their daughters.” She brought out other prints, careful not to show any more of those taken at the dances, cotillions, or sporting hall.

  “They look like Roman goddesses,” Selma said, “in those long dresses.”

  “It’s all the rage in Milwaukee,” Jessie said. “I hope to introduce it to Eau Claire.”

  “Eau Claire?” her mother said. “When are you visiting Eau Claire?”

  Jessie bit her tongue as she looked at her father, who frowned now.

  “I have work there, Mama. I start next week. I planned to wait until after supper to tell you, but it just slipped out.”

  “But I thought… We all thought you’d be moving back home,” her mother said. “Reverend Carleton was hoping you’d come by. He might have work for you right here. At home.”

  “I have work in Eau Claire, Mama,” Jessie affirmed.

  Lilly arrived then, and the sisters gave measured embraces while Roy fluttered about the presents and Selma mentioned Jessie’s new job.

  “In a photographic studio,” Jessie said. “Mr. Everson has mercury poisoning. I’ll run the studio with his wife just as I did for Mr. Bauer when he was ill.”

  “Funny you’d mention him,” Lilly said, removing pins from her hat. “His wife called today and asked if I’d sew up dresses for Winnie. You remember Winnie, don’t you, Jessie? Their youngest child?”

  “We share a birthday,” Jessie reminded her. She wondered why Lilly goaded her, or maybe Jessie read emotion that wasn’t there.

  “Ah, yes, that’s right. You share a birthday.”

  “Pr-pr-presents,” Roy said.

  “I wonder what Jessie’s done that she needs to bribe us with gifts,” Lilly said, a smile lifting the corner of her lips.

  “Presents can wait,” her mother cautioned. “And Lilly, that’s no way to greet your sister.”

  “I brought this handkerchief for you, Lil. It has fine embroidery that made me think of you when I was far from home.” They’d finished supper and sat now outside on the porch trying to cool themselves in the sultry June evening. Black bugs the size of her thumb dotted the grass—June bugs, named for the month they most often appeared. Crickets chirped. Jessie hadn’t sat on a porch for months. She’d always had tasks to attend to in Milwaukee, tasks meant to take her closer to her own studio. While the Harms family wanted to treat her as family, she knew she wasn’t.

  “It looks…foreign,” Lilly said, holding the handkerchief. Lilly’s natural waves framed her face, and Jessie thought how beautiful her sister was even in her most judgmental moments.

  “It is. From Poland. A woman paid me with it. I never used it. It was too beautiful and the work so intricate. I thought of you whenever I looked at it.”

  “Thank you,” Lilly said. Her eyes softened, and for the first time since Lilly had entered the house, Jessie felt a thawing.

  “What did you bring me?” Selma sang. “Something pretty I hope.”

  “Something practical. I know you might have one of these to use at Lottie’s, but I thought you’d like one of your own.” She handed her younger sister a rectangular carton bigger than a hat box.

  “A glove press!” Selma said as she pulled the contraption out. “I can press my own gloves now and yours and Lilly’s and Mama’s too. I love it!” Selma hugged her and handed the metal hand-shaped object to Roy, showing him how it would be set upon the box and the gloves stretched down over it. “It’s electric,” Selma continued when she noticed the cord. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  “One of the Harmses’ friends got a new one, and she gave it to Mary Harms, who gave it to me. I thought you’d be the perfect person to have it and you wouldn’t mind a used one.”

  “Don’t leave it plugged in,” Lilly said. “You could burn the house down.”

  “Won’t you need it to press your own gloves?” Selma asked.

  “I still have the one I heat on the stove,” Jessie said. “You’re the modern girl.” She almost said “modern
Gibson girl,” but her mother would have fainted if she’d compared innocent Selma Selena to one of those provocative cartoon drawings of curvaceous women. Jessie had seen a Gibson drawing on fans used for advertising St. Paul city’s Hamm’s beer. She hoped one day she’d take a photograph that might be used in an advertisement that would bring new customers to her studio. Her fantasy studio at the moment.

  Jessie presented her mother with a half apron in a windowpane cotton weave with rows of rickrack and lace trim. “I’ll keep this one for good,” her mother told her as she stood and tied it on around her waist. She lifted the ecru cotton, sending a small breeze through the otherwise still evening.

  “For my birthday,” Selma said. “Wear it then.”

  “For you, Papa, I brought a packet of herbs. My former employer, Mrs. Johnson, said her husband had problems like yours with his stomach, and these packets helped.”

  “I thank you for thinking of me,” her father said as he turned the packet over and over between his fingers.

  “She got them from a gypsy,” Jessie said. “But Mama, before you protest, Mr. Johnson used them all along, and they did help his side without having any other effects. Suzanne wouldn’t tell me that if it wasn’t true. It’s just herbs. Things you grow in gardens, she told me, gardens in faraway places.”

  “M-m-mine?” Roy said.

  “This one will have to do until you get your real gift,” Jessie said. She handed him the small whistle. “It’s made from the bone of a bird,” Jessie told him. “I got it at a market. Milwaukee has all kinds of markets in the open air.”

  “Where’s it from?” Selma asked.

  “Wisconsin. It was made by a Chippewa Indian. Blow on it, Roy.”

  Her brother blew on the tiny whistle, and the haunting sound reminded Jessie once again of hawks that dipped below the bluffs. In an effort to help Roy slow his stutter, she’d once told him to imagine wind slowly sifting over his words. Roy grinned up at her. “The bird whistle is related to the present we’ll get in a couple of days,” Jessie said. “But for now, this will have to do.”