“I was,” I said. “But it didn’t keep me from making financial mistakes.”
“Oh?”
I told her then of our venture with the furs and how we might have made a profit to provide for ourselves and our family in later days, but the war had come. We couldn’t afford insurance. “I lost ten thousand dollars,” I said.
“Oh, Clara.”
“I learned a great deal about how little we really control despite how hard we plan. In hindsight, insurance would have been a good investment, but it was so expensive that even Lloyd’s didn’t want to insure the shipment.”
“Hindsight,” Mama said. “Such a fine binocular into history, so crystal-clear. But you’ve recovered.”
I cleared my throat. “Yes, I recovered. With friends and good fortune too.”
“Providence provides,” Mama said, and I agreed.
At the restaurant, Mama ordered a beef sandwich with mayonnaise and onions. I ordered tomato soup and asked for extra cream puffs to take with us, enough for Bill, Agnes, the children, and all the rest when they got home from work.
“You have a package you’ve carried with you,” Mama said.
I pushed the large square box toward her. “It’s for you.”
Mama looked pleased as she pulled the strings and lifted out the slender book. She opened the cover and gasped. “Where did you get these?”
“I hid them for a time,” I said. “Behind the cabinet in the kitchen at Mica Creek. It’s what I took with me … that day. Since then, as I traveled, I’ve stopped at newspaper offices and got copies of the interviews, a few of the photographs we sold. Not all of them.”
“The Minneapolis articles,” she said. Her shoulder rounded over the packet as though we might be arrested for looking at bad pictures.
“I thought … Well, I know Ida and Bill and maybe Lillian too don’t want you talking about the trip, but it was the defining event of my life,” I said. “Everything began with that journey. It’s something that belongs to you and me, if not to the world. I wanted you to know I will forever treasure those months we had, despite what happened while we were gone and what happened afterward. If I could bring them back—”
“I know, I know,” Mama said.
“I made a list of the signers, but the actual signatures, those I sold to Chauncey Depew. Remember him?” She nodded. “He loved memorabilia. I have the money for you, from that sale,” I said.
“Oh no, Clara, that’s yours to keep. You have ‘occupied’ well.” I looked puzzled. “We should use what we’re given and invest it. You have. Besides, the union pension said they’d found additional payments meant for me after Ole died, so I’m fine, with what the children share. Maybe you can help Ida one day, after I’m gone. But you’re the one who saved the signatures, so you keep that money for your family.”
“My family? You’re my family.”
“Your friends are too, Clara. They’ve stood with you as mine did for me.”
“If only Ole had accepted the money.” I sighed. “None of this separation would have happened.”
Mama sat silent for a time. “When I became pregnant with you, the Dorés offered my family money. They gave it to Ole to help us make the move to Minnesota. I think he always regretted that. He wanted to do things on his own.”
Dirty money. I wondered if he thought of the Dorés’ funds that way.
“After Bertha and Johnny … died,” Mama continued, “and we lost the farm, they tended me, Clara—Ole and my children. They brought me back to myself in time. They reminded me once again that all things are possible, even keeping silent about a special time in my life. Our lives, if that’s what it took to keep my children as close to me as I could.” I didn’t say it was the least they could do after beating her down. The server brought our cream puffs. “After Ole died, I thought I’d contact you. I saved the cards you sent. But the others would have seen my seeking you out as a betrayal to them, to Ole too, I think. I chose,” she said. “I hope you can forgive me.”
“Honour thy father and thy mother,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to do. I’ll always be Clara regardless of the last name I pick. I’ll always belong to you—if you’ll have me.”
Mama wiped at her cheeks. She sniffed, reached for her handkerchief.
“You’d had a terrible grief, to the bone,” I said.
“But I shouldn’t have let them send you away.”
“I couldn’t have stayed, Mama. I know that now. I thought maybe you’d write the book for yourself, for your grandchildren to have one day. What we did, it was nothing to be ashamed of. You were doing what you thought best in serving your family. That’s what I did that day I left too. I didn’t really understand then about sacrifice, but I do now. I understand why you’ve kept silent, why you did back then.”
Mama inhaled, took a sip of her lemonade. “After Ole died, I went back to the suffrage meetings. I never told the girls. I was careful, but I loved the time with those women. I did talk about the trip then, I did.” She nodded her head. “Maybe I wasn’t honoring Ole’s death by doing that, but he was gone and my memories weren’t.” She leaned toward me, whispered. “I started writing things down. I have many, many pages. I work on it late at night in my painting room. They never bother me there. Once, when I wrote of our crossing at the Dale trestle, Thelma came in to play in my upstairs room. She likes to do that. Such a sweet child who so misses her father, just as I did at her age. I was so enthused from remembering that I put my pen down on the yellow pages and looked up and said to her, ‘Thelma, don’t ever forget my story.’
“ ‘I won’t, Grandma,’ she said, and she hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. But maybe one day she’ll get curious. Then the pages will be there in the bottom of my trunk. And this scrapbook of yours, that’ll be there too.” She reached for my hand and held it. “What a treasure! What a treasure!” She turned the pages, let her fingers scroll down the articles. “Oh, a dried sunflower. Yes. I’d forgotten that.” She read further. “Oh, and when the Indians in Utah looked inside our bags that time and we had to show them what that curling iron was for, remember that?” We laughed. “The tramp and your pepper-box gun and how the papers called our bicycle outfits Weary Waggles after the comic hobo!” She laughed outright then. “Oh, and here’s the mention of our modeling in Chicago and all the shoes and hats we went through!”
Her face lit up and I realized how much I’d missed talking of that trip. Olea and Louise listened, but it was nothing like the shared experience with one who’d participated. She read more, then said, “There’s nothing wrong with remembering our story, is there, Clara?”
“Not a thing,” I told her. “It’s how we remember what it means to be strong. You did it for your family, Mama. You served them as best you knew how.”
“Just as my mother served me when she found Ole for me to marry.”
“And me, when you made me leave my fantasy of Forest Stapleton to find a new life.”
Mama leaned back, closed the book, her eyes shining with happy tears. “Visiting all those places. Being lost. That trestle. Meeting Mary Bryan, the McKinleys. All of it. It was quite a grand adventure, wasn’t it, Clara?”
“It was.”
“We kept those reporters entertained that evening in Minneapolis. We laughed through our tears. But that’s what living looks like, I guess.”
“You kept them entertained, Mother,” I said. This was what I had to give her, a shared memory that nourished and transformed, and she received it. “Every evening that you stood on a stage and spoke, you amazed people. You were a marvel all across the country. I am so proud of you.” I put aside the rightness or wrongness of what had happened those years before and just met my mother where she was.
“Are you?” Mama blinked back tears. She reached for my hand. “Well, you amazed them too,” she said. “You were quite the trooper, my daughter. Such good wisdom shown, every step of the way.”
I leaned back and grinned. “Oh, Mama, I was just
along for the walk.”
Epilogue
APRIL 1942
They’d made the arrangements before they had to. Ida accepted Clara’s invitation to live with her in the house Clara owned on West Eighth. It was a Tudor duplex, and Bill and his wife, Margaret, already rented the upstairs. Clara and Ida would share the lower level.
Clara had lived alone these past four years in the Cleveland house, and during that time, Ida accepted her invitations to tea. They’d found an uneasy peace, simply never talking about “that time.” Olea died in 1935 and Louise in 1938. Emma Wells presided over the services for both women, held in their home on Cleveland, and led the graveside services for them as well at Fairmont Cemetery. The two women were buried side by side, and there was an additional plot purchased for Clara. She didn’t assume her family would want her buried with them at Mica Creek.
But now Clara would live again with her sister and brother. Their mother would be buried later in the week, forty-six years after she’d committed to the walk that changed all their lives.
Clara remembered Helga’s words about her writing the story down. They’d talked about it now and then when they had lunch together and once when Clara joined her at the Mica Creek cemetery on the anniversary of Ole’s death. Helga had continued to write, though she told no one.
Clara was glad she came to the cemetery to honor Ole. He’d been there for her mother in the beginning and cared for her through the years, not in ways Clara wanted for her, but it was really not her business how others worked out their affairs. John Doré gave Clara life, but it was Ole and her mother who gave her the family of her youth; and now, as she grew older.
After Lillian gave birth to her daughter, Norma Fay, Helga and her daughters would often get together at Lillian’s house on Shannon Avenue so Lillian wouldn’t have to take the streetcar with the child. Clara would pick up pastries with maraschino cherries on top and ride with them on a cardboard tray on her lap to where Lillian lived. Clara took a special liking to her nieces and nephew—and even great-nieces, after Thelma married. In later years, Clara discovered she had a creative bent in poetry and sent Norma Fay little poems. When she forgot Norma Fay’s birthday one year she penned:
I bethought me of my promise
To teach our Norma Fay
That nickels make the dollars,
As she trudges down life’s way.
So here you’ll find another—
I have sent one on before—
And I must wait for orders,
Ere I can send you more.
And lest I should forget,
When I’m told another time, I send along as penance,
This little, shiny dime.
She signed it “With Love from Clara to Norma Fay” and always included a coin or two or a colorful stamp. Norma Fay liked to hear the stories of the countries the stamps came from. Clara hoped the poems spoke of frugality and put personal responsibility at the forefront of any young person’s mind. Her work at Merchants reminded Clara of what can happen when people overextend themselves or neglect their bills. Sadly, the collection agency thrived because of people who never learned that important lesson.
Before her mother’s death, Clara had been preparing to join Franklin on a trip to Europe, as they’d done so many times since Clara had reconciled with her family and since Sharon’s surprising death in 1929. That’s what Clara called her slow weaving of threads back into her family quilt: reconciliation. “To reestablish friendship,” her dictionary read.
Bill made little comments about her “traveling” with a man when she packed her trunks and headed east. She supposed he thought she was a courtesan, but she and Franklin were good friends who grieved Sharon’s death together and enjoyed sitting by the Aegean, watching feral cats and fishermen at their trade.
That morning in April, however, Clara canceled her plans with Franklin and made the sad journey by streetcar to the house on Mallon to help sort through her mother’s things. Clara hoped to take her mother’s manuscript for safekeeping. Maybe after Ida and Bill passed away, it could be published. Surely her sisters wouldn’t want it if they even knew of its existence. Clara didn’t know how her mother’s personal effects would be divided, but she’d ask for the scrapbook too and maybe one of her mother’s Hardanger lace tablecloths and a quilt or a painting. She’d loved how her mother used color in her floral paintings.
When she arrived on Mallon Avenue, a presentiment silence greeted Clara. She went up to her mother’s room, but her sisters weren’t there. The trunk was gone. She heard voices in the backyard and looked out through the upstairs window, pulling the lace curtain back. She smelled smoke. They were likely burning trash to clean things up before people visited after the service later in the week. Margaret, Bill’s wife, stood off to the side and looked on while Ida and Lillian leaned over a smoky barrel. Bill wasn’t there.
Clara saw her mother’s trunk beside the barrel.
The manuscript! Her heart pounded. She ran down the steps, nearly tripping on a loose tread. She swung around the banister, out through the kitchen, the glasses on her neck holder bouncing as she ran.
“Good riddance to that,” Clara heard Ida say. She stopped short. “I can’t believe Mama wrote that horrible story down after Papa begged her not to.” Clara watched as Ida tossed the last of a pile of yellow foolscap into the flames.
“What … what are you burning?”
“Mother’s story,” Ida said, turning. “She wrote about that terrible, terrible time. Who would want to know what you two did back then? It’s not right. It was private and painful, and Papa said never to speak of it, ever. Bill doesn’t want it talked about. Lillian doesn’t. I certainly don’t. And you, Clara? Do you want it talked about?”
Clara stood speechless. Then, “It was her story.”
“Just an old woman’s reminiscing,” Ida said. “And she had no right to any joy from that time, no right at all.”
Ida turned back to the fire and Lillian gave Clara a hopeless look. With a stick, Ida poked the pages free to be thoroughly licked by flames.
She’d come too late!
At least her mother had had the joy of writing the story for herself. She had perhaps found comfort in remembering how her life changed by setting forth on that long-ago walk. Maybe she wrote down how she was acknowledged with an occasional smile and head nod by suffragette women when she met them later on the streets of Spokane. Honored by strangers though not by her family. Maybe she had written about Clara; she was sure her mother would have. And she’d have written of her grief, her losses, and the things that mattered most to her—family.
The scrapbook! Clara looked around. It was the only other evidence of what they’d done together. Her sisters might have burned it first. She looked at the trunk. Empty! Maybe her mother had hidden it separately from the manuscript. She sped by Margaret toward her mother’s room, when Bill’s wife reached out and touched her sleeve. Clara stopped. Margaret put her finger to her lips for silence. She moved her eyes toward a box resting on the porch.
With Ida and Lillian engaged in watching the flames devour their mother’s story, Margaret spoke quietly to Clara as they moved to the steps. “I thought Thelma or maybe Norma Fay might want some of Mother Helga’s lesser things one day. The Lamplighter book your mother read to Thelma, a few other trinkets.” She moved aside one of Helga’s quilts, the one with squares from the reform dress. Beneath it Clara saw two little red shoes Helga had brought with her from Norway, and Clara could see the edge of the scrapbook. Margaret looked into Clara’s eyes, patted Clara’s shoulder. “I’ll keep them safe,” she said. “You never know what stories will interest children when they’re older.” Then she pulled an envelope from the book with Clara’s name on it, and handed it to Clara. “Your mother must have meant for you to have this,” Margaret said.
Clara held the envelope, opened it. Inside was a piece of Hardanger lace, not yellowed though it was old. Clara recognized it as the piece of the heart her mo
ther had carried on their walk. No note, but Clara knew: Helga had made certain Clara would always hold a piece of her mother’s heart.
AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This story could not have been written without Margaret Estby’s careful saving of the scrapbook bearing bits of history of a grand walk across the continent in 1896. Margaret kept the secret until her husband, Bill, died, knowing that he too harbored resentment from that time of quarantine and loss.
The memories also would have been lost without Thelma Estby Portch’s choice to dance with her grandmother through the stories. She didn’t know what story her grandmother Helga wanted her to take care of, but years later, Margaret gave Thelma the scrapbook, and at last, Thelma knew the story that had meant so much to her grandmother. Darillyn Bahr Flones, great-niece of Clara, first wrote the story for a school paper in 1979. In 1984, Doug Bahr, Helga’s great-great-grandson, chose to write an essay on Washington history for a contest. He based the piece on the clippings and interviews with his grandma Thelma.
Linda Lawrence Hunt’s rag-rug history, which pieced together fragments of newspaper accounts, social history, and descendants’ memories also kept the story alive. She filled in many of the missing pieces about the walk, Helga’s life, and the social context in which the walk was made. Her award-winning account, Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America (Random House, 2003), celebrated the often-overlooked stories of women’s journeys and applauded the extraordinary trek this mother and daughter made in service to their family. It was when reading this book prior to publication that I had the privilege of meeting Linda Hunt and her husband, Jim, both professors then at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Jim had been the judge in that essay contest and first alerted Linda to Doug Bahr’s captivating account.
The book fascinated me, especially a brief reference stating that after their return, Clara changed her name and separated herself from the family for many years. I wanted to know what happened to Clara, how the journey might have affected her. As I began to research Clara’s life, I wondered how she’d found a way to go on to business school while the Estby family perched on the cliff of foreclosure. Why did she change her name when she did and why to the name she chose? Where was she those twenty-plus years, and how might she have felt separated from her family?