Page 24 of The Harvey Girls

Seventeen

Charlotte stumbled into the large kitchen and kept herself from falling by catching onto a wooden countertop in front of her. Still rattled by the yawning abyss lying in wait like a serpent’s maw only a stone’s throw away, she hadn’t noticed the doorsill.

“What’s all this?”

Charlotte looked up into a pink freckled face framed by a lion’s mane of orange hair. “I’m… I’m the new Harvey Girl.”

“Late of the Bolshoi Ballet, I see,” the woman said dryly, a faint lilt to her voice that Charlotte couldn’t place.

“I’m to report to Nora,” said Charlotte, straightening herself to her full, if somewhat unimpressive, height. “I speak French.”

“How nice,” the woman said without enthusiasm. “I’m Nora. I’m the head waitress here, and I’ll want to know a bit about you before we send you out onto the floor. Where’ve you come from and how long were you there?”

This caught Charlotte by surprise. Nora was far younger than Frances had been, maybe only in her late twenties. Charlotte wondered what special talent had landed the woman such high standing at a relatively early age.

“I was born and raised in—”

“Not where you lived, where you worked. Which Harvey Houses? How long?”

“Topeka, and almost a month.”

“Not even a month? Was there trouble?”

Just a bit… , thought Charlotte darkly. She forced herself to smile, which she hoped would convey confidence without conceit. “Well, my training was almost over and—”

“Training! You mean to say you’ve worked for Fred Harvey for less than a month ? In total ?”

Yes was clearly the wrong answer for this redheaded Nora, and there was no point in lying. Charlotte wasn’t sure she cared enough to lie, or to beg forgiveness for committing such a crime as being new at waitressing . She met the woman’s gaze and said nothing.

Seeing that she would get no satisfying blubbering from Charlotte, Nora let out a snort of frustration. “Are you any good at all?” she demanded finally. It appeared that the woman’s commitment to the Harvey standard was even more aggressive than Frances’s.

“Good enough to have been sent here, apparently.”

Nora narrowed her eyes. “Don’t get cheeky with me, sister. I’ll keep you on coffee service all summer, and you’ll get no tips. Comprenez?”

“Parfaitement.”

Nora did, in fact, keep her on coffee service all week, but Charlotte didn’t mind—except when she remembered how much more money she could be making.

The tips for waitresses were plentiful, especially when the customers were wealthy easterners, anxious to show their superiority in such unfamiliar surroundings as “the Wild West” as they still called it, though shoot-outs between sheriffs and bandits were generally a thing of the previous century.

More money. Not to spend or to send home, like most of these girls. Just to have in case she needed to leave quickly.

But Charlotte was fine with coffee service for now.

Nerves sometimes came on her at the oddest times, as when she’d seen that Harvey Car driver looking at her the evening she’d arrived.

Sometimes a circumstance set her off: once a Spaniard had grabbed her wrist as she’d passed by.

He’d only wanted more coffee, but the feeling of a man’s fingers closing around her startled her, and she tugged her arm away forcefully.

“Perdóname! Perdóname!” he’d begged as she’d shakily poured the coffee so that it sloshed over the lip of the saucer and onto the table. The brown spots spread into the shape of bullet holes in the fine white tablecloth.

And sometimes her nerves shook for no reason at all.

Coffee was hard enough to control. Trays of heaping plates? She’d surely lose her job.

Sensing Nora’s disdain, the other girls steered clear. There were a few, however, who took it upon themselves to give an encouraging smile or a word of thanks for keeping their customers sufficiently caffeinated.

Hendrika, a strawberry blond with skin as smooth as a baby’s belly, would give her a little wink and drop a couple of quarters into her pocket at the end of every shift.

“You keep my customers happy so they tip better,” she said.

She spoke with the flat a and hard r of her native upstate New York—just the opposite of the Boston Brahmin inflections Charlotte was used to.

But Hendrika, or Henny as the girls called her, also spoke fluent Dutch.

“Whew,” she said, a sheen of perspiration on her smooth forehead toward the end of a particularly busy lunch shift. “Not sure if I can make it through the last half hour!” Her half was as long and flat as an acre of farmland.

“Better half than whole,” said Charlotte.

“Ha, I knew it!” Henny grinned. “Boston, right? It’s the only place in America that half rhymes with cough .”

Charlotte didn’t feel this to be precisely accurate, but she stifled an urge to split hairs. “Yes, Boston. And you?”

“Utica, New York! We’re a long way from home, aren’t we?”

“Quite some distance, yes.”

Henny’s friendly smile seemed to get a little stale, as if she were waiting for Charlotte to refresh it.

Charlotte searched for something interesting to say, but her mind went blank.

There was nothing to say about pouring coffee or living in simple quarters on the edge of a chasm.

She certainly couldn’t share that her nightmares now included falling into that chasm. Or being pushed.

“Have you been to the Hopi House?” Henny said suddenly, saving the conversation from the brink of extinction. “My, they’ve got a collection over there. All kinds of Indian things. Some real live Indians, too. Are you scared of them? Indians? Because these ones seem real nice!”

Charlotte had heard there was a shop over on the east side of the hotel that sold local knickknacks and curios, but it was a little too close to the canyon for her liking.

When she walked, which she liked to do in the early evening, it was always south, away from the canyon.

Certainly not toward. The Hopi House was even closer to the edge than the El Tovar dining room, for heaven’s sake.

“Oh, that seems quite interesting,” she said now, searching for her lost manners. “I’ll have to go someday.”

“Someday?” Henny was laughing now, a pretty little trill. “Why, it’s next door! I’ll tell you what. We’ll go after our shift. We’ll get freshened up and take a stroll before dinner. You and me! What do you say?”

What could she say?

As planned, they went back to the dorm and changed, and then set off for the Hopi House.

But instead of walking behind the hotel, as Charlotte preferred, Henny set her long legs on the short path toward the canyon.

Charlotte’s heart began to tap like a woodpecker desperate for a meal.

She lagged slightly behind in hopes of shielding her vision from the enormity of all that… enormity.

Henny glanced over her shoulder. “Look at me, dashing ahead when I should let you get the view first!” She waited, then hooked her arm through Charlotte’s, the difference in their heights making the configuration a bit ungainly.

Not to mention that Charlotte was hardly the arm-hooking type.

She hadn’t done such a thing since childhood, and only with Oliver, who’d been born silly and overly affectionate.

Ah, Oliver. Sometimes she missed her brother so very… hard. Hard was the word. It was a very dense and difficult sort of missing.

As much as she couldn’t wait for the first opportunity to unhook from Henny, there was something reassuring about being grasped by another person when one was at the brink of a terrible abyss. Charlotte allowed the connection until they were down the path and the Hopi House came into view.

She had never seen anything like it and stopped to take in such an unconventional structure.

It was quite large, with multiple floors and flat roofs that seemed to cascade down from the top like giant steps.

The walls were built of reddish-brown stone; rustic wooden ladders ran from one level up to the next.

“The lady built it to look like a real Indian house,” said Henny.

“Lady?”

“The lady architect. A real stickler, they say. Had to have everything authentic.”

A lady architect! Charlotte had never heard of such a thing, and nearly scoffed her doubt aloud.

But then she remembered the female manager in Williams and Miss Steele, the head of personnel.

The Fred Harvey Company certainly played by a different set of rules from her father’s, or really any business that she was familiar with.

Tourists milled about in front of the building, gazing up at it, chatting amiably.

An intermittent but steady stream of them unloaded from Harvey touring cars in the roundabout that separated El Tovar from Hopi House and made their way over.

The drivers emerged to stretch their legs and have a smoke, one or two wandering toward the gathering crowd.

“Will!” Henny exclaimed suddenly. “Hey there!”

Charlotte turned to look up into the face of the driver whose services she’d resolutely rejected upon her arrival the week before.

His brows rose in memory of the small woman tugging her suitcase up the hill, and then his dark eyes— abysmal eyes, really , thought Charlotte, so dark you can’t see the bottom —crinkled in humor.

“Hello, Hendrika,” he said, though he was looking at Charlotte.

“I keep telling him he can call me Henny, but will he listen?” the girl teased. “No, he won’t.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” he said simply.

“Will, this is my friend Charlotte Turner, and she doesn’t have any nickname that I’ve discovered, so you’ll be happy about that.”

“Pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand to her, not quickly, but not slowly, either. A perfectly moderate offering of courtesy. And yet instinctively she flinched and took a step back.

His eyes, bottomless as they were, remained upon her, the soft crinkle replaced by concern. Or was that anger?

“Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said quickly, suddenly feeling the need to assuage him in some way, expertly smoothing down any feathers she had unwittingly ruffled.

He nodded, tucked his unshook hand back into his pocket, and stepped back himself.

“Here they come!” said Henny.

A drumbeat started up, a low and steady thumping that Charlotte felt in her breastbone.

Then several brown-skinned men emerged from the Hopi House dressed in fringed leather leggings and muslin shirts, crowned with feathered headdresses.

They began to dance slowly, purposefully, in front of the drummer, a sound emerging that seemed a cross between humming and chanting, melodic but also communicative. Intimate and yet public.

Charlotte was transfixed.

After a few minutes, the song ended, and the crowd erupted in applause. A woman leaned down to a little girl standing beside Charlotte. “Those are real savages, honey. And you got to see ’em up close!”

There didn’t seem to be anything remotely savage about the singing or dancing to Charlotte.

In fact she’d been impressed by their reserve, surrounded by a gawping crowd like exotic birds in an aviary.

She wondered what it felt like to reveal something so clearly personal—and obviously misunderstood—in front of people who considered one barely human.

“Why do they do it?” she murmured to herself.

“Because they’re Indians,” said Henny. “That’s how they dance.”

“Because they’re paid to,” said Will.

Ah , thought Charlotte. Paid to serve at the pleasure of others. Just like me.