“But it isn’t a business with much certainty,” I said. “It’s hard to know which pelts will be available, and fashion changes. You’ve told me yourself: people may not want mink one year; they want raccoon instead. Seems like a lot of unpredictability.”
“We could do what the Finns are doing,” Olea said. “They’re ranching fur, have been since the nineties.”
“Ranching?” I couldn’t imagine.
“Well, it’s a long shot, I’m sure; you know those Finns. But they’re trying to breed silver foxes on their ranches and farms. That way they can control nutrition and create the best quality pelts.”
“We could come back in February,” Louise said, still with Olea’s earlier comment about missing the auction.
“Yes, we could do that,” Olea told her. “I suspect February here would be much milder than in Minnesota.”
“Who would want to spend the winter in Minnesota?” I said. “I spent a fair number of them there when I was little, and I still remember the cold.” I wiped my face with the linen napkin. The oyster soup was delicious. I hadn’t had a bowl for years. It was usually a dish my aunt Hannah made for New Year’s Eve.
“Well, I would,” Olea said. “My sister lives in St. Paul, and while we’re out and about with everything arranged at home, it’s a good time to be with them. She’s invited us all for the winter.”
I wasn’t tired of the travel, but neither was I looking forward to spending a winter in St. Paul. I would have said as much to Olea, but after all, I worked for them. They set the schedule. Still, I didn’t like the idea of spending months with total strangers or my reticence in speaking up.
“Perhaps it would be best if I returned to Spokane,” I said, building up my courage. “Let the two of you winter with family, where you’ll be comfortable and can do as you please without my interruption. I can find my own place if you’d like.” I pulled on my gloves and stood.
“Oh, Clara, don’t pout,” Olea said. She raised her binoculars to her eyes and pointed them toward a distant bird flying above the harbor. “Everything doesn’t have to always go your way, does it? You can afford to be a little more accommodating.”
“I wasn’t proposing that things had to go my way,” I said. “I.” I didn’t confront people well, didn’t have words to express how I felt. I rarely heard anyone in our family express disagreement with words that didn’t hurt. Upset was often a stony silence, and I did feel upset by what she’d said.
“Sit down.” Olea lowered the binoculars. “My sister included you when I told her we’d be traveling with our assistant. I wrote even before we left.”
I sank onto the chair, brushed lint from my linen skirt.
Olea patted my gloved hand. “A little give-and-take never hurt anyone,” she said, “and it promises that each of us can have a little, if not all of what we’d like. I think that’s what life is all about.”
I was about to find out.
THIRTY
Looking for Answers
FEBRUARY 1902
Priscilla Bakke and her husband, Inger, had two children ages thirteen and fifteen, and they all lived in a large house in St. Paul. Servants were housed on the top floor, bedrooms on the second, and a large living room, parlor, and dining room on the first floor. The kitchen was in the basement. I was given my own room in the family wing rather than in the guest quarters. Inger was a banker, and I eavesdropped shamelessly as he and Olea discussed finance, taxes, and law.
Peder, the son, was treated like royalty, it seemed to me. He went ice-skating with his friends, set his own bedtime, ate what he wanted, and was rude to the serving staff, at least in my opinion.
Clarissa had more restrictions. She was the same age as Bertha had been when she died (and who had already been working as a servant for two years). Clarissa at least made her own bed. Peder did not.
I watched as Olea made suggestions to her niece that the child accepted, though the very same words spoken by her mother resulted in a haughty exit from the room. Her words did border on the edge of sass. She was the child in this family who, like me, didn’t fit. I wondered if all families had one.
“You’re like your grandmother,” her mother told Clarissa when she crossed her arms and dropped onto the divan after being told, no, she could not go to the hayride with her friends because boys would be there. We women all sat in the living room, Louise and our hostess doing needlework, Hardanger lace like my mother’s. Olea turned the pages of a colored bird book while I read Kipling’s novel Kim about an East Indian orphan, my mind more tuned in to what these family members were saying than to anything in my book.
“Aunt Olea, you went on hayrides, didn’t you? Tell Mama it’s all right.”
“I did,” Olea said. “But my parents went with me. Chaperoned the ride.”
“We could do that,” Priscilla offered. She smiled at her daughter. “Would you like that, dear?”
“No. I wouldn’t,” Clarissa said and stomped out.
“Our parents never chaperoned a hayride,” Priscilla told Olea. “You made that up.”
“Maybe not one of yours, but they did mine.”
“Mama was much stricter with me,” Priscilla said. “I never even got to go on such events. You, she indulged.”
“Every child suffers differently,” Olea said. Her sister scoffed and returned to her needlework.
Through that winter, I spent long hours in my room reading the financial section of the Minneapolis Tribune and novels while thinking of what I wanted to do now. I was letting the women lead me, and I could feel their will sucking me under as if I were boots in a bog.
“So,” Inger said to me one evening over dinner, “Olea tells me you’re interested in investing in an up-and-coming industry. Do you have one in mind?”
I shook my head. “I’ve considered a number of things.”
“I tell her she should find a suitable husband, invest in that,” Louise told him.
“Well, you are of an age,” he said, too polite to ask for specifics. “What do your parents do?”
“My stepfather felled trees in Michigan, then came here to Minnesota, near Canby, where they farmed before moving to Spokane. Now he’s a carpenter.”
“Ah, the trades,” he said as though he’d eaten a pickle. “The bank is always the safest place to invest,” he said.
“Spoken like a true banker,” his wife chided.
“They pay so little interest,” I said.
He grunted. “What sort of return are you expecting?”
“I want to be able to provide for myself. Perhaps make enough to assist my family, send my younger brothers and sisters on to school.” I had only recently come to that thought, but in the face of Olaf’s refusal to go, it seemed a wise one. Mama had insisted we all learn English as children, had even prohibited us from speaking Norwegian so my stepfather would learn English more quickly once we moved to Spokane. If I offered her money for Arthur and Billy and Lillian for schooling, would she refuse it because it came from me?
“Have you considered importing European furniture?” Priscilla asked.
Again her husband grunted. “It can be quite a lucrative business if the cost of furnishing this house is any indication.”
“You’d get to travel,” Louise piped up.
“Not a very tried-and-true business though,” Inger said. “Too many unknowns. I’d suggest railroad shares. Transportation will grow mightily in the years ahead. Thank you, Else,” he told the servant girl, who replaced his soup bowl with a clean plate and set the platter of meat in front of him. “Timber is still huge. And of course wheat. The Cargill Brothers built one of the world’s largest grain-storage facilities right here in Minneapolis ten years ago, and the business has done nothing but grow. The hold stores grain from the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa. I suspect the plains states will ship here as well if the cooperatives will stay out of it. Railroads are attached to that industry. Great potential.”
“What have you invested in?” I asked.
He sat a little straighter. Whether flattered or offended, I couldn’t tell. He cleared his throat. “I’m diversified,” he said. He took a bite of beef. He chewed. “But coal is my main interest. I expect the demand to grow, and there’s an unlimited supply. I’m certain there are mines in your region of the country, assuming you want to return there, of course. I hear you’re headed to New York next? Be sure to visit the investment houses there,” he said. “They’ll have quite a number of options for you.”
“New York?” I said. Olea combed her long blond hair with highlights of gray, the braids making kinky waves that flashed like gold in the gaslights of her room. I stood behind her, watching in the mirror. We wore wrappers, waiting to finish our undressing and put on nightclothes after the light was out. She had perfect skin, pale as milk, the spoils of a life of leisure.
“We’re halfway to New York,” she said. “It would be an opportunity for you to see the city in a different light than when you were there last. Louise and I can check on our interests, and we need to confer with Franklin as well.”
“But we’ve already been gone nearly six months.”
She shrugged. “What would you have done if you’d been in Spokane all this time?”
I’d have been Olea and Louise’s secretary, which I continued to be; I’d have worried about encountering my family, half hoping I’d see them, half afraid I might not. I might have visited with Olaf again.
“I suppose I’d have spent time at the library or talked with my professors about what they thought would be a good investment for a young woman. Maybe I’d have gotten to know my banker better.”
“So come with us to New York. See how the fur fashion industry really works. Personally, I think it has a better future than coal or railroads. People have to dress, and they have to stay warm all around the world, and fur provides for that. Designs change, so there’s natural challenge but also the excitement of new seasons with young designers. As Louise would say, fur fashion is much more romantic than hard coal. Deal with soft, beautiful pelts, coats and muffs. There’s your investment.”
These women supported themselves well with fur and could afford to pay me and their agent, and live a good yet simple life.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s head to New York.” And then I decided to exert a little independence. “But we’ll make a side trip first to Michigan.”
“Whatever for?”
“It’s where my father’s from. I want to see if I can find him.”
THIRTY-ONE
Namesake
I began my investigation the afternoon I arrived in Manistee, Michigan, a small city on the state’s western coast. I presented myself at the newspaper office as a woman of means researching a business connection rather than anything personal.
“What’re you looking for? Maybe I can help,” the editor said as he chewed on an unlit cigar.
“I’d like information about the Doré Lumber Company.” I’d seen the sign with the announcement “position available” when I came into the town.
“Looking for work, are you?”
“To invest,” I said. He smiled and shook his head as though such a thing would be impossible for a woman.
“Where are you from?” He cocked his head in curiosity.
“Spokane, Washington,” I told him.
“Oh, well, that’s big timber country. It’ll be years before we harvest the replant here. It’s been over thirty years since the big fire. Stick with the West,” he said. “That’s my advice. Don’t waste your money here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, “though I suspect your local boosters wouldn’t like to hear you say it.” I turned to the newspaper piles he’d laid out for me, removing my white gloves so as not to rub the ink onto their tips.
I left two hours later with tired eyes, an address, and an obituary. The next morning, I’d make my move.
I was alone in the hotel in Manistee. The curling iron didn’t sizzle. Not hot enough. Each time I waited for it to heat on the kitchen Monarch or over the small burners in the marbled train stations of the larger cities we’d traveled to, I thought of my mother. I recalled how she heated a curling iron in Idaho or Nebraska and even Pennsylvania, heated it over the lantern, then lifted a width of hair no wider than Lillian’s palm and rolled the strands around the curling rod. She was ever careful not to burn my scalp, holding the iron and hair until she could feel the heat against her palm. Then she’d ease the strands free.
Once in Minneapolis, when Louise touched her fingers gently to my scalp, she said, “Oh, honey, you have the softest locks, like rabbit down.” She kissed my temple as though I were a child, as my mother had, the memory so vivid that my eyes watered. Later that same day, Louise introduced me to hairpieces that gave lift and marked the styles of 1902. Extensions, she called them, though I think they had a more formal name. Imagine, wearing hair someone else grew then sold! But I still had to curl my own hair in order to wrap it into the extensions and look civilized. A daughter ought to look her best when meeting her father for the first time.
Through the Ramsdell Hotel window, I watched as the eastern sun slanted against the shingled roof of the North Pierhead Lighthouse on the Manistee River. If Olea and Louise had come with me, they’d have said the hotel could have been transported from London, with its carved stonework and Victorian design.
I made up the bed and imagined my mother working in this hotel before she went to work for the Doré family. I didn’t know if she ever had, but it was possible. I could see her mending torn sheets or adding lace to the edges with her fine stitching skills, maybe laughing with other domestics, speaking Norwegian when they were alone and good English when addressing the American guests coming to broker lumber in this town. My mother was fifteen. What passion must have roiled inside her and how frightened she must have been to discover herself with child. Her own mother would have been devastated, having prepared for her a more sophisticated life only to have shame scrape away the luster of a hopeful future.
What might my mother’s life have been like if she had not allowed this man to take advantage of her? Was she letting Ole take advantage of her now, silencing her?
For a moment I thought my search was foolish, not well thought out, with more potentially negative outcomes than positive ones. John Doré might have moved, left the name of his company behind. He might refuse to see me. It was a fluke I’d even learned his name, spoken in anger. And yet I wanted to see where I’d come from, to imagine what he might have given me that made me so different from my brothers and sisters, made me more Doré than Estby.
I finished with the curling iron, dressed, then slipped out of the suite, my gloved hand running smoothly over the glass doorknob. I walked down toward the shoreline where the Manistee River ran into the lake. The lighthouse sat on the north side of the river, and as I stood on the opposite shore, I thought of my mother waiting for me across the Dale Creek trestle. I always seemed to be on the opposite shore waiting for someone to call me to them. I listened for an inner voice, heard nothing, so moved forward on my own.
John Doré’s office nestled among trees, which struck me as fitting. Only one small window opened toward the street. Modest and quiet. I smoothed my skirt, pulled at threads, adjusted the collar of my linen jacket. For this occasion I’d worn my finest suit trimmed with female mink—light and soft pelts perfect for a spring morning in Michigan. Dignified, that’s the impression I wanted to leave with this man. Dignified and sufficient unto myself. Well, almost all of myself. I wore those hair extensions.
I stood for a time as the cab pulled away. I’d rehearsed various phrases. “I’m your daughter.” Much too direct, and yet that’s the line that came to my head first, followed by, “Why did you abandon my mother?” But I also wanted to see what my mother might have seen in him. Was he a vain man and she’d overlooked it? Was he a charlatan who fooled her into thinking that he loved her? Was he even aware of her circumstance? Would he deny any involvement at all? My
throat felt sore.
I planned to ask about the timber holdings, make it sound like I was interested in investing in a business rather than in history that could transform my future.
I opened a door made of clear cedar, not a knothole in sight.
“May I help you?” A young woman’s voice came from behind a high desk. When she stood, I could see her head and bodice, but the wide plank counter still dwarfed her.
“I called earlier, to make an appointment to speak with Mr. John Doré,” I said.
She looked at her appointment book. “Gubner. I have it written here. You called for a Mr. Gubner.”
I’d borrowed Louise’s name, thinking not to put Mr. Doré off by seeing the name Clara Doré.
“I must not have been clear,” I said. “The appointment is for me.”
“Oh well.” She looked over her glasses at me. “Mr. Doré will be back shortly. He’s having a meeting with the shingle-weavers’ union.” She gazed at me, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Do I know you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m from Spokane, Washington.”
“Spokane. Well, you look familiar. Must have one of those faces like a rubber ball, shaping as it goes.”
“I guess I must,” I said.
“I don’t envy you your meeting time.” She fussed with papers on her desk. “I doubt Mr. Doré will be in a good mood when he returns, just so you know. He finds the union taxing. You might want to come back another day so you won’t have double stitches to unknot in him. He doesn’t often meet with females.”
“I’m only in town for a short time,” I said taking a seat.
“These unions are a stick in Mr. Doré’s eye.”
I knew the shingle-weavers’ union was one of the oldest in the country. My mother had talked of it as we walked the rails. Boys and girls worked side by side in the lumber mills, sorting the shingles as they came from the sawyer, bundling the roofing material so the roofers could lift them easily and place them wide end over narrow end as they worked to keep rainwater from seeping through roofs. Children worked twelve-and-a-half hours a day, until the union changed this in Muskegon in 1886.