A Fireproof Home for the Bride (13 page)

Emmy’s cheeks burned harder with the pointed change of subject, but she was even more concerned by the simmering silence she felt from Mr. Brann’s stillness and closed eyes.

“That’s okay, son, we’re as likely to stay tonight.” Christian seemed amused by Emmy’s discomfort and she stared at his plate as he continued to meticulously mix the beef, potatoes, and turnips into a kind of stew. He then reached for a slice of bread from the stack on the table and after smearing it thickly with homemade butter and currant jelly, he used it to push his dinner bite by bite onto his fork. Emmy wiped at her lips with her napkin, and everyone but Mr. Brann fell back to their meals until he opened his eyes, at which point all eating stopped.

“My dear child,” he said to Emmy, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder. “When my grandparents left Troborg and traveled first by boat and then train, and lastly a horse-drawn cart up the side of the Mississippi, they broke the soil of this territory and with it their bond to a foreign land. They became Americans. They changed their last name from Brannveld to Brann, and they spent hours studying the language of their chosen country by reading aloud from the Constitution and the King James Bible. In Norway they had been little more than slaves. In America, they were their own lords, the landowners, and they did their own work instead of stealing life and blood from others.”

He paused, waiting for something, and Emmy nodded her head to show that she was listening. No one else moved.

“The United States government gave our people what they needed to make their own way, and to in turn create a place where our children could be safe from unwanted worldly influence. It’s with God-grateful humility that we chose to become Americans, and so when any immigrant refuses to learn our language, or carries his former heritage with pride, or, in the case of the Catholics, chooses to serve a master in Rome above our president, it tears at the fabric that our founders knit with their very blood, so that we could come here and practice the good Christian faith of this country. It’s unpatriotic and flies in the face of all that America just did to save the blasphemers from Hitler’s evil.”

He lifted his hand from Emmy’s shoulder and picked up his fork. “The roast is indeed good.”

“Thank you,” Emmy said, her voice barely a whisper. “I should start the coffee.” She left the table and walked to the kitchen with her head down, a pain in her chest pressing darkly at the edges of her vision. For the second time that day, she drew the tin marked
COFFEE
from her grandmother’s shelf, spooned the right amount of grounds into the top of the already water-filled percolator, and secured the lid with a practiced twist. Tightly bridled exasperation churned through her movements, her breath coming in shallow gasps as she felt emotion pinch her shoulders until a calm settled thinly enough for her to raise her chin level and return to the table with the brewed coffee, her eyes dry and clear.

The room was as she had left it, with one exception: Birdie had moved to Emmy’s chair and was relating a story that held everyone’s attention.

“And then I showed Mr. Haarsager that neat little trick with the chisel that you taught me, Ambrose,” Birdie said, lightly touching his arm. “He’d never made a joint in that fashion, and had me show the rest of the class.” Birdie wore a tight-fitting pearl pink sweater dotted with tiny white beads across the shoulders. Her manner was likewise confectionary, and Ambrose smiled down at her.

“You must be quite a sight in that woodshop,” he said with an admiring laugh. “Not many girls interested in the craft.”

“I’m very interested,” Birdie said. “And there are a few other girls like me who would rather know how to make things than stick around a hot kitchen cooking.”

“How’s the calf?” Emmy asked Ambrose, and Birdie jumped to her feet.

“Oh, tell Emmy what we named her,” Birdie said as she returned to her place.

“We named her Emmaline,” Ambrose said. “After you.”

“How sweet,” Emmy said, pouring a cup of coffee for Mr. Brann before setting down the pot and moving the sugar bowl within his reach. She started clearing the dishes, but Karin stilled her with an upturned hand.

“Birdie, please help me clear.” Karin’s voice was not exactly pleasant, and it gave Emmy a small rush to feel like the favored child. Emmy sat stiffly next to Mr. Brann, watching him swirl excessive amounts of sugar into his coffee before moving his spoon back and forth, clinking in rhythm with the clock on the wall behind them. This would, over time, likely drive her mad.

With a shriek of wood on wood, her father pushed his chair back.

“Delmar,” he said. “I’d like to go look at that calf if you care to.” Emmy gave her father a nod of thanks as the older men went to the door without their coats, Mr. Brann starting in again on Eisenhower. She and Ambrose were suddenly alone, and his nearness caused in Emmy a feeling of hundreds of small birds trying to take flight within her. Ambrose took her hand and she closed her eyes, seeing Bobby’s face lit in the sweet-smelling pickup cab, his soft, full lips slightly open in a partial smile. It had been a week since her big night out, a week since she’d felt possibility instead of place. She drew a long breath, testing the netting she felt holding back her better sparrows, and found her lungs slowly gaining capacity. She squeezed Ambrose’s hand; gathered her will.

“It’s not that I disagree with your father,” she said. “But if we are Christians, then we need to help those who have come here to make a better life. Not treat them as criminals.”

Ambrose stroked her palm. “As you get older and have more experience with the world, it will make more sense,” he said.

Emmy sat straighter, opened her eyes wider. “I can only hope you’re right,” she said, her back teeth clicking together. “Because right now, I find no sense to it at all.” Her head shook from the effort it took not to speak her mind more fully.

“You have four months, Emmaline,” Ambrose said, his face as impassive as his voice. He stood and let his napkin fall to the floor, where she stared at it as though it were a thing given and refused. “If you are to live in his house, you will manage to do so with respect.”

Six

A Reflection of Human Frailty

The Nelson family slept in the farmhouse on Saturday, and then Emmy and her father drove to Moorhead on Sunday night. She was relieved to be returning to the less complicated demands of high school and homework. In the wake of her maddening conversation with Ambrose, Emmy had applied her logic to the disappointing realization that her hopes of finding ownership in her soon-to-be household were no more than the idle dreams of a sheltered girl.

By the time she opened her locker at the end of school on Monday, she began to think that maybe this was just how all marriages were entered into, and like a garment cut for sewing, each rule had to be laid out, pinned, and adjusted until everything came together to create something whole. If she could picture Ambrose’s warning as merely a sleeve or a placket, then perhaps she could find a way to set down a stitch or two of her own. Emmy was staring into the metal hull as though she might find the diaphanous tissue patterns of matrimony somewhere deep inside of it when she felt a quick poke to the ribs.

“Hey!” Emmy said, turning her annoyance on the prankster. Her anger disappeared at the sight of Bev, the one person she’d been looking for all day. “Bev! Where have you been?”

Bev shook her head in wonder. “Never mind about me, you little minx. You want to explain how you managed to fall into the arms of the dreamiest boy who ever lived?”

Emmy shrugged into her coat as the crush of jabbering students jostled past them. “What boy?”

Bev whistled low. “You really know how to get lost, don’t you? Bobby Doyle!”

“I wasn’t lost,” Emmy said, closing her locker and shouldering her bag for the walk home, a hopeful chord of muted possibility sounding in her chest. “How do you know Bobby?”

“This is a small town, you unborn.” Bev rolled her eyes and latched firmly to Emmy’s upper arm, marching her down the hall toward the exit while passing a small, neatly folded slip of paper into Emmy’s hand. “He gave me this after church. I don’t know how you did it, but that boy is snowed!”

Emmy tucked the white square into her glove, where it stayed until she got safely home and in her room with the door tightly closed behind her. With a hand pressed to her damp forehead, Emmy read Bobby’s unfurled words from the distance she felt safe enough to take them in: an arm’s length away in the other hand.

Dear Miss Nelson:

Please forgive the un-invited note, but ever since we met last week I have racked my brain to figure out how I could find you again without actually pulling up to your door and knocking, which I finally did, tonight, Saturday, but you weren’t home. Then it occurred to me that you must go to school with my friend Bev, and so I am taking the chance on sending a note through her, if I’m lucky enough to see her at Mass tomorrow morning.

I am thunderstruck by you. That’s all.

Please let Bev know whether I can call.

Robert (Bobby) Doyle Jr.

Emmy sat down. The note fell to her lap and then to the floor. She stared out the window toward the east, toward Ambrose. The clock ticked. She calmly pulled off her school clothes and on a pair of dungarees and an old sweater. The weather had warmed considerably and most of the snow that had fallen two days before was reduced to black dirt-mottled puddles of ice. It was four o’clock, time to do her homework. But to what end? She was to finish school and then marry Ambrose. What could she possibly learn in the next four months about world history and Shakespeare, and, for heaven’s sake,
geometry
that could make a bit of difference to her life going forward? She tried to pull her study books out of her bag, but dropped it all listlessly onto the bed, and, kicking the note out of her way, went downstairs to find something, anything, to clean.

*   *   *

Tuesday was home economics, and though she preferred the exotic stories of her comparative literature class, or the world of ideas that Mr. Freydahl’s history lectures had packed into her head, she knew that learning how to balance a kitchen budget and sew a French seam would probably be the best use of her remaining high school time.

The day’s assignment was to plan and cook a fancy dinner menu, keeping frugality in mind while preparing an appealing meal. Each pair of girls was responsible for one dish, and Mrs. Hagen had passed out a stack of colorful cookbooks to help them choose. Bev and Emmy were in charge of the salad course, and they were picking their way slowly through
The Essential Homemaker,
stopping to laugh at some of the more outlandish photos.

“Would you look at those wieners,” Emmy said as casually as if the note from Bobby had never happened, which she had decided was the best way forward. She had given Ambrose her word and knew that no one had made her do so. It was time for her to stop acting as though she was disappointed at the prospect, and begin accepting it for what it was: a fortunate match. Emmy showed Bev the picture, which featured a pot full of baked beans with about a dozen sausages sticking as straight up as any tube of meat could out of the mess. Surrounding the dish were the torsos of swell-dressed people, holding cocktails in their hands and no doubt having a gay old time.

“Forget about the salad, for crying out loud,” Bev whispered, leaning in close. “Do you have a note for Bobby or not?”

“Not,” Emmy said, and turned the page. “I’m committed.”

“To be circled?” Bev yelped. Mrs. Hagen gave her a sharp look and Bev calmed her voice. “Tell me, when did this happen, and how could you not call me?”

“If by ‘circled’ you mean married, then yes, it happened last week, and no, I could not call you. It didn’t seem worth mentioning.” Emmy flipped ahead to the salad section, which featured the headline: “Molds and Other Delights.” “Holy Christmas, look at this one.” It was a shimmering tower of aspic topped with gelatin, the bottom of which encased sliced cucumbers and chunks of salmon, the top of which was crowned with a lemony-looking pile of goop, studded with small marshmallows and maraschino cherries.

“Emmy, we must!” Bev’s green eyes sparkled mischievously. “It’s perfectly awfully dreadful, don’t you think?”

“Perfectly awfully so. Let’s do it.” Emmy opened her notebook and started writing down the ingredients they would need to accomplish the two-course monstrosity. She could feel Bev’s stare.

“Ambrose?” Bev asked.

Emmy laughed through her nose. “Of course.”

“But that’s good, right? Make your parents happy?”

“I suppose so,” Emmy said, closing the cookbook. She knew as much as she needed to execute the salad tower. “How’s your cousin Howie?” A look of mild despair colored Bev’s features as she took Emmy’s hand and led her to the pantry next to cooking unit one, using the large door to shield their conversation from the rest of the meal-planning girls.

“Howie is my second cousin, once removed, if you must know,” Bev whispered. “The keepers said we can’t see each other anymore. They figured out that we’ve been fooling around.”

“Are you in love?” Emmy asked, a large round copper mold shaped like a fish eating its own tail in her hand. Bev took it from her.

“Desperately,” she said. “You know, there’s hardly any chance of genetic mutations; they’ve done studies.” Bev took more molds out of the cupboard, stacking them one at a time on the fish. “Besides, it’s the sort of thing that royalty relied on to keep lands in the family, with no worse results than the occasional hemophilia.”

“I’m sorry,” Emmy said, shaking her head at the crown mold Bev tried to balance on the top of the heap.

“Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were cousins.” Bev put her hands on her hips. “King Richard the first and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Albert and Elsa Einstein. Josephine and Raymond Randall.”

Emmy set the copper pans on the preparation counter. “Who?”

“Josephine Randall, the writer,” Bev said, opening the pantry and handing Emmy the tin of sugar and a box marked
KNOX
. Something about the way Bev was looking at the floor as she spoke was odd. “It’s kind of a famous story, she even wrote about it in her novel
The Family We Keep.
”