Page 2 of The Harvey Girls

One

Kansas City, Missouri

Charlotte felt the woman’s scrutiny like heat from a flame too close to her skin. She forced herself not to flinch away from it; flinching, she’d learned, only invited more trouble.

“And you’ve never waitressed before?” Miss Steele said lightly, as if to counterpoise the obvious fact that she was making far more important assessments. Charlotte could practically see the cogs turning behind the woman’s benevolent facade.

“No, I… well, I worked at a milliner’s shop, and I served people. But not food.”

A hat shop. Even now it was hard to believe. That was not the life he’d described, the life he’d promised. But becoming a shopgirl was the least of it. Promises had fallen like autumn leaves on the Boston Common, hadn’t they?

“That’s just fine. We prefer girls without prior experience. They tend to have fewer bad habits to correct.”

“Bad habits?” Charlotte was certain that if she’d had any—which she doubted—they’d been trained out of her at the highly esteemed Winsor School for Girls. “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body” was their motto, and she’d taken it very much to heart. Until lately.

“Like serving a beverage without a tray, or wearing an apron with a spot on it,” Miss Steele explained. “Or smiling a little too long at a customer.”

“Flirting.”

“Exactly.”

Miss Steele was the head of personnel for Fred Harvey, and she wore the confidence of her position plainly but without condescension.

Charlotte had never heard of a woman achieving so high an appointment in such a large company and assumed that Miss Steele was a member of the extended Harvey family.

Either that or she knew things they preferred to remain private.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” her father often said when he’d returned from a particularly trying day at his shipping company. She’d been living the “enemies closer” part of that adage for far too long now.

“I don’t flirt.” This seemed important to say. In the last two years, Charlotte had become a keen observer of what to say—and, more crucially, what not to say—at any given moment.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Miss Steele studied her face, particularly her right eye. She glanced down at Charlotte’s left hand, the one that had, until an hour ago, worn a gold band. “You’re not married?”

“No.”

Sometimes you had to fib. That was important, too. Charlotte fought the urge to touch the tender skin under her eye. She had waited a week for the swelling to go down and the car-tire black to fade to jaundice yellow.

“And there’s nothing keeping you from traveling far from home?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Charlotte almost laughed. Quite the opposite.

Miss Steele pursed her lips and looked out the window.

The office was on the second floor of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, and a cold March rain speckled the panes, obscuring the train yard and the city beyond.

Charlotte curled her toes in her best black patent leather pumps with the champagne-colored bows.

Well, the bows were gone now; one had come off, and she couldn’t go around with one bow, so she’d torn the other from its spot and tucked it away.

For what purpose she couldn’t say. A reminder of better times, perhaps, or the abysmal depth of her own stubborn foolishness.

The woman leveled a meaningful gaze. “Miss Turner, I feel I must ask about your eye. You seem to have received a blow of some kind.”

I was reaching for a book on a high shelf at the library, and it just leapt out at me! She’d say it with a self-deprecating chuckle.

But sometimes you had to tell the truth, which Miss Steele seemed to intuit anyway.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “And if you give me a job, the bruise will fade. If you don’t, it will simply be renewed.”

Billie had heard that the famous Fred Harvey food was the best in the West, but the biscuit tasted like a mouthful of flour straight from the sack.

“Now, eat that,” said her mother. The remnants of Lorna MacTavish’s Scottish brogue came out when she was tired or worried. Today she was both. “We can’t have you fainting away up there. You’re looking awfully peely-wally.”

“You have it.” Billie pushed the plate down the lunch counter in Union Station. “Or save it for the ride back.”

“We’ll be splitting it, if you don’t pull yourself together.”

Billie blinked the tears back from her pale lashes. “I don’t want to go,” she whispered.

“Och, dinna fash, now,” murmured Lorna to her eldest child. “There’s a whole big world out there! I never got to see it, but now you will.”

“Who’ll help with the kids and the washing? Who’ll get dinner on when the mending’s due for the Suttons?” Billie fingered tears out of the hollows under her eyes. “Not Malcolm.”

“Your father works hard, and don’t call him by his given name, cheeky,” Lorna scoffed. “You want to go and haul bricks for ten hours and then fetch dinner for nine squalling bairns?”

“Maw, I don’t want to leave them. I… I don’t want to leave you.”

She had seen her mother cry only once, after her toddling sister Sorcha had fallen into the great wash barrel and drowned.

Lorna smiled hard, but the tears trickled down her face nonetheless.

She put her knobby hand on Billie’s, the fingers softer than rough work should’ve allowed.

“You’ll have your chance to see new places and have an adventure!

You’ll earn good money, and then you’ll come back to me, and we’ll all be together. ”

“Don’t make me go…”

A sob broke out of the woman’s chest. “If I had any choice in the matter, lass, you’d never leave my side.”

Billie waited in one of the chairs outside the personnel office as her mother had instructed. The letter inviting her for an interview was clutched in her hand along with a clipping of the advertisement they’d answered.

Wanted, young women, 18–30 years of age, of good moral character, attractive and intelligent, as waitresses in Harvey Eating Houses on the Santa Fe Railway in the West. Wages $25 per month with room and board.

Liberal tips customary. Experience not necessary.

Write Fred Harvey, Union Station, Kansas City, Missouri.

She didn’t know why her mother had insisted she have the ad but could only guess that Lorna MacTavish had seen more than her fair share of offers reneged, and those words indicated a contract of sorts.

Billie would supply the good moral character, intelligence, and fair looks Fred Harvey required; now he had to hold up his end.

That business about being eighteen… well…

her maw always said she was born fully grown.

Wise beyond her years and—at five feet, ten inches—taller than most of the men she knew: her father and his friends from the brick factory, her younger brothers, and even the other boys at school.

Of course, it had been several years since she’d stopped attending school so she could help her mother with her washing and mending business. Maybe those schoolboys had grown.

Billie’s mother had bobbed her long blond hair to make her look more grown-up. “It’s the fashion now,” Lorna had said. “All the flippers wear it.”

“Flappers,” Billie had corrected her. She still missed her braids.

But sitting on that hard wooden chair in the seemingly endless hallway outside Fred Harvey’s office, there was nothing she missed more than her mother.

“This one, all we did is feed her,” Lorna would say with a hint of pride when someone complimented her on her daughter’s hard work, pleasant demeanor, kindness to the younger children, or even that silky straight blond hair.

As if Lorna’s love and guidance all those years had been unnecessary, and Billie would’ve turned out well all the same.

But Billie knew plenty of girls whose mothers were too angry or worn out from hard luck to give any such kind attention to their older children, focused as they were on just keeping the younger ones alive.

Most of those girls had gone hard and mean, and Billie had to assume she would have, too.

It was on her mother’s insistence that Billie read the paper every day. “It’s your education!” Lorna would say. “The world is a damn sight bigger than this speck of sod.”

Billie herself had seen the advertisement for Harvey Girls, as they were called, and remarked on it as they took a few minutes to eat their lunch of hard bread and a bit of cheese one day.

Lorna had seized upon the idea immediately.

“It’s a fortune they’re offering, and you’ll see the country!

I wish they took tired old ladies, but I’m three years past the deadline.

” The fact that at fifteen Billie was three years below the deadline was scoffed away.

The money was, in fact, a fortune. Twenty-five dollars a month!

Her father made forty dollars, and her mother about fifteen from taking in other people’s sweaty, dirty, sometimes even bloody clothes.

With room and board included, Billie could send virtually all of that vast sum home.

It would mean her younger siblings could continue with school, her father could fix his broken-down truck, and her mother…

her mother might be able to get just a little bit of a rest from time to time.

Billie didn’t want the job.

But she knew she had to get it.

A woman with blunt-cut brown hair and a matronly but fashionable blue serge dress opened the door. “Wilamena MacTavish?” she said. Her eyes widened as Billie rose from the seat to her full height. Billie quickly slouched down just a bit, so as not to look so ungainly.

She followed the woman into the office, and to Billie’s surprise, she sat down behind a large mahogany desk. “I’m Miss Steele,” she began.

“Oh. I… I thought…,” stammered Billie.

“Yes?”

“Aren’t I supposed to talk to Fred Harvey?”

The woman smiled, and Billie could tell she was biting the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. Billie slunk a little lower in her chair.