Would my stepfather have been in a union here? Unions were never happily accepted by management, or so my mother reminded me as she cheered on William Jennings Bryan. John Doré would have likely voted with McKinley. If I could have voted, so would I, though for different reasons. I liked the unions that had rescued us when my father was injured.
The woman behind the wide counter offered me tea, which I took. I blew on it to cool it, my breath lifting the feather in my hat, the ends of the fur. My hands shook. I ought to have rehearsed more, arrived with a better sense of what I wanted. Otherwise, he’d control the interview. Maybe his secretary was right and I ought to come back later.
I stood. “I think maybe—”
A man I knew was my father opened the door. He rushed through, shouting an order at his secretary as he passed by me. My heart pounded like a woodpecker marking its territory on a tree. I was meeting him. A landowner, a corporate giant, my father.
“Your appointment, Mr. Doré,” his secretary said, partially standing. “Mrs. Gubner.”
“What?” He turned, glared.
He stood tall, over six feet. Where I get my height from. He had brown hair, blue eyes. His eyebrows, like mine, arched gracefully over the iris and narrowed toward his temple. His wide face—again like mine—wore a look of annoyance. His hair lay limp against his head. He pursed his full lips.
“Is your husband with you?” He looked beyond me.
“There is no Mr. Gubner,” I said.
He frowned. “Well, let’s get this over with. I’m a busy man.”
I followed him into his office while his secretary pulled the door closed behind me whispering, “Good luck.”
He took his place behind an oak desk, wider than the Mississippi. Paintings of landscapes and seascapes hung on the walls. His bookshelves were piled so full he’d begun placing tomes, spines out, in stacks in front of the shelved titles. Engineering books. One on architecture. The Red Badge of Courage, a novel. A Tiffany lamp with stained glass graced the desk to his side.
“Are the paintings yours?” I asked.
He looked where I stood before a painting, surprised at my interest. “That one of the lighthouse. That’s mine.”
“It’s very nice. It’s good you sign them.”
“Yes, well, I have so little time, Mrs.—”
“Do you know a Franklin Doré?” I asked as I faced him.
“Franklin Doré? No. Should I?”
“Not necessarily. I thought that with the name—”
“There are lots of Dorés around,” he said. “As common as flies. But there’s no Franklin in my family line that I’m aware of. Now, what can I do for you, Mrs. Gubner?” He motioned for me to sit.
“Actually, my name isn’t Mrs. Gubner. It’s Doré. Clara Doré.” Blood throbbed at my temples. I hadn’t asked him about his timber holdings, hadn’t eased into this conversation at all.
“My mother’s name,” he said. “She passed on some years ago. But you said your name was—”
“And your son as well,” I said. “He’s passed too. I’m sorry for your loss. I read of it in the paper.”
He squinted his eyes. “I thought you said your name was Gubner. Now you say it’s Doré? Clara Doré?”
“My people came from here, well, after arriving from Norway,” I said. “My grandparents were the Bings.” I looked for recognition on his face, some reaction. “They lived here in ’76, until moving to Yellow Medicine, Minnesota. My mother is Helga Bing.”
A slight narrowing of his eyes was the only change in his facial expression. He would have talked with my grandfather and grandmother, wouldn’t he? Maybe my mother never told him about me. Maybe her parents worked out the agreement to move to Yellow Medicine after I was born without ever giving him the chance to do right by my mother. Or perhaps his own parents intervened on his behalf. He looked to be about my mother’s age. No, older. He would have been old enough to be responsible, to do the right thing. Would his family have offered her money? Would they have taken it? Dirty money. Did Ole take such funds?
His face paled. “Why have you used false pretenses to see me?” he said. His arms crossed over his chest. “Using the name of my deceased mother.” The side of his lip quivered.
“I didn’t think you’d see me if I used my real name, which is Clara Doré. Helga Bing isn’t familiar?” I asked. “She might have gone by Helga Hauge. Bing was her stepfather’s name. She was pretty, slender, a narrow face, strong hands. A woman of high spirit.” My heart pounded like a farrier firming up a horseshoe nail, a hard yet steady throb. “What about Estby?” I asked. “Ole Estby. Surely that name is familiar. He rescued you.”
“Rescued me? Hundreds of people work for me. What’s this about?” He set his jaw and his face regained color. It turned red. “What do you want?”
I wasn’t sure where my clipped words were coming from. My stomach swirled. I took a deep breath. I suppose it wasn’t fair to spring this on him, but I’d committed to it now. “Ole Estby is my stepfather. He married my mother when she was quite young. My mother was fifteen. She was … with child.”
“What’s this got to do with me?”
“I’m Clara Doré,” I repeated. “She named me for your mother.”
He stared at me as though seeing me for the first time. “What did you say your mother’s name was?”
“Helga,” I said.
He sank into his high-back chair, his hands on the desk, knuckles white. “My family employed many domestics, you must understand.”
“This domestic, you … bedded,” I said. “And I’m the result.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he accepted the possibility of it, but he said, “You’ve read of my son’s death and you’ve come to what, make a claim on my family? You have no claim on Doré Lumber, no claim on me. I’ll have the sheriff arrest you for … extortion.”
“There is nothing you have that I want except your time,” I said. “And you’ve already given that. I only wanted to meet the man who changed my mother’s life and to see what I might have carried in my blood from him.”
“I think you’d better go.”
He moved around to the side of the desk, his hands rubbing at his chin. Being flummoxed must have been new for him.
I stood. Surely my mother was a better judge of character than to believe whatever this man might have promised her. Maybe we are all of us gullible at times. I would have to guard against it. “You don’t remember her at all? Were there so many?”
A flicker of pain moved across his face.
I wanted my mother to be distinctive to this man, to feel there’d been something more than opportunity that passed between them, giving me my life.
“I really have nothing to tell you.” His words came out softer, and he looked at me with greater intensity, as though seeing himself mirrored in my face or frame. “I’m sorry for any confusion you may have about your parentage,” he added. “There are many Dorés, as I mentioned before.”
“Only one in Manistee, Michigan, however,” I said.
“I’ll see you out,” he said. At the door I hesitated, wanting to look once more straight into his eyes to see what I could see of myself reflected there, to imagine what my mother might have seen that drew her to him. He didn’t look angry now, more preoccupied, as though remembering.
He said to his secretary, “Give her one of our … brochures. Have her leave her card. I’m sorry,” he said. “I never …” The last thing I saw was the confused eyes of his secretary and the back of my father as he closed his office door in my face.
How would he have finished that sentence? I never knew of her plight? I never meant to hurt her? I never would have abandoned her had I known? Or maybe, I never wish to hear from you again.
THIRTY-TWO
Hunger
Let’s stay here a few days. Weeks even,” Louise said when I arrived back in Ludington, where I’d left the two of them while I investigated. Investigated. What had I gained? Not
hing. All I’d done was waste my time and the time of the women with me as well.
“It’s a lovely place,” Louise insisted. “Perfect climate with lake breezes. Nice hotels—”
“It’s time to move on,” Olea said.
We ate supper in the hotel dining room in Ludington. They didn’t pry, but I eventually told them what had happened. “I even found where my mother once lived,” I said. The house was run-down now, but once it would have been considered modest with its wide porch sweeping around the front. An orchard groaned for attention in the back. It was a nicer place than what I remembered in Yellow Medicine. They’d left it all. Sacrifice. That’s what family was about, doing what must be done despite the agony.
Tears welled up in my eyes. “It’s … the time. Meeting him. It’s been more difficult than I thought it would be.”
“We don’t always get what we’re after,” Olea said, not unkindly.
“I’m not at all sure I knew what I wanted.”
“That’s a problem too. If you don’t know, then all those around you who do will likely get their hungers met, and you’ll find yourself serving them while you starve. You’ll be on your deathbed wondering where the time went and why you never got to Europe as you’d always planned or never spent an entire afternoon at the aquarium lazily watching fish.”
It sounded like experience talking.
“I hoped he’d open his arms to you and say how much he longed to have done the right thing all those years ago and then sweep you into his chest.” Louise wrapped her arms around herself and sighed. “I hoped he’d ask about your mother and say he would leave his entire estate to you, his only daughter.”
“You read too many of those dime novels,” Olea told her, patting her shoulder. “Family inheritance is never so easily given.”
“I like your version of our meeting,” I told Louise. “But Olea’s right. It is pure fantasy.” I looked at Olea. “Meeting him wasn’t about an inheritance. I wanted to know … who I belonged to.”
“Why, you belong to God, Clara, no matter where you set your feet,” Louise told me.
“Will you keep his name?” Olea asked. She added extra sugar to her tea, as was her way. “Now that you’ve met him?”
“I always wondered why you kept the Stone name,” Louise said to Olea.
“That’s none of your affair,” she said.
Louise dropped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I go too far.” She glanced at me.
Olea’s harsh response surprised me. I found important interest in my fingernail. I’d seen the “Stone and Bostwick” name as furriers on invoices, and then “Stone” in Detroit and “Bostwick” in St. Louis. The women did business with both. Olea’s middle name was Stone. Perhaps there was a connection there, but both women had once said they’d never married.
Or had Olea only said she hadn’t married the love who never returned from the sea?
“We’re talking about Clara now,” Olea continued. “Your name?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll keep the Doré name. I’m not an Estby anymore. My stepfather was clear about that.”
“You could become Clara Gubner or Clara Ammundsen,” Louise said. “We’d be honored, wouldn’t we, Olea? You belong with us.”
Olea nodded.
I hadn’t told them I’d requisitioned Gubner for an hour or so. “It’s a nice offer,” I said. “We’re sisters in spirit. But I think we can keep our separate names.”
They could absorb me, these women who knew what they hungered for and acted on it: running a business, traveling as they wished, hiring and educating and gifting a young woman who could easily give in and let herself be shaped by their lives alone. I’d have to be clear about what I wanted.
I’m ashamed to say that I did once wonder if Louise and Olea were the kind of women whose companionship was questionable, women my mother pointed out to me at her presentations in New York, women more attached to each other than to men. The concept had left my mouth open in astonishment. Once, outside a lyceum presentation in Ohio, my mother and I had even been cursed as such, though my mother always introduced me as her daughter Clara, perhaps to make our relationship clear. People often thought we were of the same age, my mother looked so young and fit on that trip. We were women not afraid to live contrary to the dictates of custom, politics, or fashion, and that threatened. So I had wondered about these two women since I had come to care about them as more than my employers.
But though I looked for signs, nothing sensual ever passed between them, no lingering fingertips on fingertips, no eyes that invited falling into. I saw kindness blended with occasional irritation, the fitting of sisters—if not the cousins they were. I envied their shared history. It made me miss Bertha’s laughter even more; long for days when Ida and I had walked barefoot, arms around each other’s waists, to school or whispered during recess about whatever boy had caught our fancy even though they hid behind the outhouse and shouted “snake” as we entered.
This was family: people who shared griefs and joys and didn’t let the love of money set the tone, people who accommodated each other, stepped aside at times without saying, “It’s my way or no way at all.” I didn’t have a family now. John Doré promised nothing. I was at the end of that investigation. I looked across the table at these two women. I vowed to be myself but do what I must to limit any discord with them. I needed no more painful separations or rejections. I’d had enough of both.
That summer of 1902, Olea and Louise introduced me to the New York end of the furrier trade. I visited their leased shop. I stepped into the large cooler where people brought their furs during the hot months to be cleaned and stored. During winter months, the store window showcased brocaded gowns with fur trim, beaver hats and sable muffs, mink and ermine coats. We visited designers with drawings of future fashion clamped to boards that lined the walls.
“We can’t take you to the dressers,” Olea said.
“They keep the formula and procedures under lock and key,” Louise whispered to me. “Much of the work is done in Europe. America is only now developing.”
At the manufacturers’, I recognized unique handwork as men cut through the buttery soft leather backs of the pelts to make strips, then sewed them back together, forcing the pelt to lie flat like fabric. Then they joined the pieces according to form and lined the garments with silk and satin, all stitched with flawless seams to make the finished work drape with perfection around elegant shoulders. I felt myself attentive to the smells and sounds and sights in new ways.
At the library I read about the fur business, ideas forming in my head.
The women provided more detail about Franklin Doré’s role, about his lifting his tall hat at the fur auctions in Montreal or Copenhagen to indicate his bid, his exquisite evaluation of pelts that would one day warm the bodies of society men and women. He was nearly as good as the auction house graders, Olea announced. “If he buys a lot, we know we’ll be getting the perfect pelts for that stole or that coat we have orders for. He always goes days early so he can check the pieces over at his own pace.”
The women reminded me of his need to travel abroad to visit leather markets in Turkey, Italy, and Greece, furriers in Russia and China. More than once, he’d traveled with otter skins used for the oriental rituals that marked transitions into adulthood.
“People have to be warm,” Louise repeated, touting the trade as we stepped from the streetcar and walked the short distance to the hotel. “It’s a business that will last forever. What would we do without fur?”
“There’s wool,” I said. “That’s competition.”
“Yes, but wool will only keep you warm to about thirty degrees, and it has real trouble standing up to mud. Nothing keeps one as warm or wrapped in luxury as fur,” Olea said. “Mud just dries up and flakes right off of it.”
They were open and honest about the pitfalls and demands, but in my analysis of their business, I felt they missed something, a part they might have more control over than they did,
a venture that would make any investment—my investment—show greater return.
The infamous Franklin Doré stood in the center of our hotel suite in New York City, bookended by the beaming Olea and Louise. The noises of Manhattan’s drayage firms making daily deliveries and the occasional honk of one of those new Ford automobiles rose up to our seventh floor rooms through the open windows. I’d left this city with my mother five years before. This view of Central Park was a far cry from the scene she and I’d had from our small Brooklyn room. I didn’t let myself think of that pain. Olea and Louise had been out of the country when all those choices were made.
“I’m pleased to meet you at last,” I said to Franklin. I put out my hand to shake his.
“And you’re the infamous Miss Doré,” Franklin said. His eyes were the color of sable and just as warm. Instead of shaking my hand, he lifted it to his lips, soft as mink when they brushed my fingertips. His own hands remained gloved. “It’s my pleasure to meet you after all this time. My women give you many compliments,” he said, his voice slightly accented as though he’d spent time in the Canadian provinces. He dropped my hand and bent to kiss Louise, then Olea, on the cheek. He removed his fine camel coat, with the collar trimmed in the soft underhairs of skunk.
“I thought we were going out to lunch,” Louise said.
“Oh, let’s get acquainted here before I go out on the town with my women,” Franklin said. He’d entered the room like a dancer, lithe and agile. I had expected Franklin Doré to be large, muscled, with dark hooded eyes squinting from years of trapping and blinking against frozen snows piled up along cold northern rivers. Surely he’d done all that before he graduated to brokering, bargaining, traveling with pelts to France, speaking foreign languages as he bowed over tea tables at auction houses in Hong Kong. I had not imagined he would turn heads with his good looks. I didn’t think he’d turn mine.