Hattie Ever After (23 page)

Then something stopped me. A papery whisper like those I’d heard in the morgue all those times. Not words, but a sense of words:
She is wrong. She is wrong
.

She is wrong.

I did not believe in hocus-pocus, but every bit of me believed that Uncle Chester was trying to help me one last time. Trying to help me see that Ruby had it crossways. I brushed that feather against my hot cheek.

If trusting others was foolish, well, much better to be a fool. If you didn’t trust, didn’t open your heart up to people, to one special person, that was what made you a failure. Not a summer hailstorm. Not a homestead left behind. Not a huckster in the form of a false friend.

I curled up on the chair by the window, looking out at the stars blinking bright and brave, absorbing their light and promise. Then I crawled into bed and said my prayers, closing with, “And God bless Uncle Chester. Amen.”

Taking Pen in Hand

It turned out that despite neither of us having ever seen her, Mr. Wilkes and I had both been contributing to the imaginary Pearl’s health improvement fund; he, understandably, at a much higher rate than I. When he learned of my situation, he telephoned to offer to replenish my Pond’s Cold Cream jar, but as it had been drained through no fault of his, I couldn’t accept that kind offer. I did, however, accept an invitation to be his guest when the great reporter Ida Tarbell spoke to the
San Francisco Club. To my mind, that was the better part of the bargain. Miss Tarbell’s closing words, “Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists—with it all things are possible,” not only thrilled me, they propelled me to action.

Miss D’Lacorte proved to be a trusty confidante when I approached her the morning after Miss Tarbell’s speech. I showed her the letter I’d composed, and she approved. “Looks like you’ll need a recommendation from me to C. B. Blethen,” she said.

“You don’t know what the answer will be,” I pointed out.

“Oh, there can only be one answer to correspondence like that.” She hit the carriage return on her typewriter with a flourish. “If you don’t get a yes, I’ll eat Gill’s ridiculous new tie.” We both grinned at Gill’s bemused expression.

With that vote of confidence, I sealed up the envelope containing one concise letter and one delicate object, pasted on a stamp, and headed to the post office, dodging Mr. Monson, who was no doubt bearing down on me with another gloves-and-gown assignment. “I’ll be back in a jiff,” I told him. His response was to chomp harder on that ever-present cigar.

I had my reply in less than two weeks. With trembling hands, I opened it and began to read.

Till Niagara Falls

Mine might be the only name on the front cover, but I depend on the kindness of strangers to make a book like this happen, including aviation buffs Roger Cain, Howard “Ace” Campbell, and Bill Larkins; David Coscia, archive director, Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society; Paula Becker, staff historian, and all the amazing history hot shots at
historylink.org
, who keep Washington state’s past alive and lively; Sharon Levin, who polled her writer/historian friends for an idea for a San Francisco scandal circa 1915; Ellen Keremitsis, reference staff, North Baker Research Library, California Historical Society; Mimi MacLeod and Bob Maxwell, who helped me understand those fire-breathing dragons called linotype machines; and Bill Sornsin at the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, for train schedules and routes. Tami J. Suzuki, librarian at the Daniel E. Koshland San Francisco History Center of the
San Francisco Public Library, introduced me to
San Francisco Chronicle
librarian Bill Van Niekerken, who pointed me toward the invaluable
Journalism in California
by John P. Young; Tom Carey, at the San Francisco History Center, helped verify that the Hyde Street cable car on this book’s cover would indeed have been running during Hattie’s time in the City by the Bay; Thom Hindle, camera historian, gave me the brand name of Flash Finnegan’s camera; and the very efficient, knowledgeable, and generous Lew Baer, editor of the San Francisco Bay Area Post Card Club, authenticated dates of the cards included in this book. The
postcard
in Chapter 10 appears courtesy of Lew from his private collection. I am also grateful to every research librarian who cheerfully answered my crazy and never-ending questions. Blessings on you all for extending a hand to a writer in need.

Profound thanks to my editor, Michelle Poploff, for saving me from countless literary embarrassments, and to her assistant, Rebecca Short, both of whom believed I could actually finish this book (though some months later than promised), and my agent, Jill Grinberg, who is a whole lot of fun in addition to being one very sharp cookie. I owe a glass of wine to Karen Cushman and Barbara O’Connor (my “old broads who don’t do vampires” buds) and Jenni Holm and Cynthia Lord, all of whom comforted, commiserated, and occasionally cajoled each time I hit the wall. Nothing I write happens without Mary Nethery, who never wearies of reminding me that plot is always a good addition to any novel. My husband, Neil, and Winston the Wonder Dog spent many hours listening to me talk out this story on our daily walks. Neil: for a CPA, you really know how to think outside the boxes.

This book would not exist without the women who made headlines, like Nellie Bly and Ida Tarbell, and the women who deserved to, including some of my relations. The more I read, the more I realize our foremothers kicked butt, and it’s a crying shame that too few of their stories are out there.

When I left Hattie at the end of
Hattie Big Sky
, I had no intention of writing another book about her. But so many readers have emailed or written to find out what happened next—I was even once collared in the grocery store!—that I began to wonder about it myself.

I initially envisioned Hattie taking a road trip, a concept inspired by the delightful book
Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West
by Joanne Wilke. Trust me, I tried to send Hattie on the road, but she dug in her heels. It turns out that all of those Honyocker’s Homilies gave her the writing bug, big-time. She wanted to be a reporter and needed to get to a newspaper, not behind the wheel of a Model T.

When I taught writing, I used to promise my students that their first draft would contain everything they needed to complete a story. Though it is certainly not a first draft, rereading
Hattie Big Sky
brought that home to me in the guise of an uncle who’d called himself a scoundrel. Many books start with a writer asking “What if?” So I asked myself, “What if Hattie set out to solve the mystery of Uncle Chester’s life?” He’d gone to Montana from somewhere else, but where? When I realized he could have been in San Francisco around the time of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, I knew that was where Hattie was going to end up. A chance encounter with an article about love tokens fashioned from old coins (learn more at
lovetokensociety.com
) paved the way for Ruby Danvers and a delicious dilemma for Hattie.

Being the prima donna that she is, “Empress of Emotion” Vera Clare swept to the center stage of this novel early on. She initially garnered a starring role, and is not pleased that most of her story ended up in a computer file labeled “deleted scenes.” Though vaudeville was waning by the 1920s (it couldn’t compete with films), that traveling troupe lifestyle seemed the perfect vehicle for transporting Hattie from Montana to California. Issues of
Theater
magazine from 1919 educated me about Hamlet traps, second boys, and other theater lore and terms.

Historic San Francisco came alive for me through three resources: my treasured copy of the 1921 edition of
The New World Atlas and Gazetteer
, published by P. F. Colliers and Sons,
Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915
by Jessica Ellen Sewell, and the 1919 Crocker-Langley San Francisco directory, which is where I found the listings for the Hotel Cortez, Clinton’s Cafeteria, and Praeger’s department store. These books helped me confidently move Hattie around town. Places like the Fairmont Hotel and Lotta’s Fountain still exist; you can visit them yourself. The Chronicle
Building is privately owned but still standing and ready for a photo op. And that famous Golden Gate Bridge? Hattie never saw it. (In
Chapter 11
, Hattie flies over the Golden Gate
channel
.) Construction on the bridge didn’t begin until 1933, fourteen years after she lived in San Francisco.

If you wonder what life was like for early women reporters, do read
Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly
by Sue Macy and
Ida Tarbell: Pioneer Investigative Reporter
by Barbara A. Sommervill. To further satisfy your craving for newsprint, check your local library’s online database to see if you can access the historic
New York Times
. Besides learning the news and opinions of a particular time period, you can also sleuth out business names and locations, as well as prices of food and clothing. The
Times
is where I found out that Campbell’s made twenty-one varieties of soup in 1919, each selling for twelve cents a can. And the room in which Hattie heated all those cans of soup on a hot plate would have cost $2.50 a week, a detail I uncovered by reading old classified ads in the
San Francisco Chronicle—
the same paper Hattie worked for. Warning: Reading old newspapers is addictive!

One of the things that struck me as I read the newspapers from 1915 to 1920 was the number of reports of people taking advantage of others. This time period is sometimes called the Golden Age of the Con, and now I know why. Whether it was a crooked card game, a scam to sell fake souvenirs from the Panama Pacific International Exposition, or a bad check, there was at least one reference to crime and corruption in every issue I read. In some ways, that more innocent age made it easier for crooks. Information traveled slowly, and this was well before the days of any CSI units. In addition, banking practices like
making blank counter checks available to department stores (see
Chapter 5
) provided opportunity to cheaters who merely had to write fake account numbers on those counter checks. There really was a Cassie Chadwick, whom I encountered in
The Incredible Mrs. Chadwick: The Most Notorious Woman of Her Age
by John S. Crosbie, and she is the inspiration for Ruby Danvers. The con Ruby tried to pull on Mrs. Bliven is based on one I read about in the pages of the
Chronicle
.