Page 3 of The Harvey Girls

“Oh dear, I’m sorry,” said Miss Steele. “It’s been a long day, and I suppose I’ve got a little bit of the giggles. Does that ever happen to you when you’re tired? You get the giggles?”

“Oh yes,” Billie said solemnly. “Certainly.”

“Let me explain. Fred Harvey started the company many years ago, back in 1876. He passed away in 1901, and his sons took over the business.”

“But that was twenty-five years ago!”

“Yes.”

“So why do all the railroad advertisements say ‘Meals by Fred Harvey’ if he’s not still doing the cooking?”

Miss Steele was biting her lip again. She coughed into her hand several times. “Mr. Harvey never actually prepared the meals himself, dear. It was his company, and he hired people as chefs, butchers, pastry men…”

“Are you saying he never cooked a meal even once ?”

Miss Steele smiled indulgently. Billie knew that sort of grin—hadn’t she smiled like that a thousand times when her younger sisters and brothers misunderstood something? She felt her cheeks flush for shame.

“He was no stranger to the kitchens in his many restaurants,” said Miss Steele.

“In fact there are those who might say he took an excessive interest in how every last thing was prepared and presented, right down to the butter pats.” She clasped her hands and set them on the vast expanse of dark wood. “Now, shall we commence the interview?”

Miss Steele wanted to know about her life, where she’d grown up, how long she’d gone to school.

Lorna had warned Billie that she’d have to lie and say she was older, with more schooling than she actually had.

Fifteen with a sixth-grade education would not get her that job.

They had practiced, and Billie felt she had sufficiently presented herself as qualified.

But Miss Steele was not laughing anymore, nor even smiling. “You seem a little young to me. Perhaps you might apply again in a year or so.”

Billie’s heart soared. She didn’t have to go! She could apply again in a year, and a year was a long, long time.

But then she thought of her mother waiting downstairs with only one return train ticket in her hand. They barely had enough money for that. How could Billie ever tell her they needed another?

“Miss Steele…” Billie unclenched her hands from her lap and laid them gently on the desk between them, willing them not to tremble.

“Yes, Miss MacTavish?”

“Can I just say… thank you. Thank you very kindly for giving me the chance to come here and talk with you. And that I’d be proud…

so very proud… to be a Harvey Girl. It would be a…

a crowning achievement.” (She’d read that phrase in the newspaper once and puzzled over it.

When did anyone get a crown for achieving anything? You were lucky to get a handshake.)

Miss Steele’s scrutiny, dark eyes taking in the newly cut hair and cheeks that had only lately lost their roundness, seemed to last an hour, though it was likely only a moment.

“You’re well-spoken. You say you’re a high school graduate?”

“Oh, yes.” A thought occurred to Billie, and she added quickly, “I would’ve brought my diploma, excepting it was setting on the piano for all to see when a strong breeze blew it straight out the window.” She shook her head mournfully. “We never could find it. Must have ended up in an owl’s nest.”

She’d never told so many lies in all her life! They no more had a piano than they had Charles Lindbergh sitting in his monoplane behind the clothesline.

Miss Steele’s face went quizzical for a moment, and Billie was certain she’d lost the job.

“All right,” said Miss Steele. “We’ll give you a try. You’re to report here tomorrow morning at seven thirty sharp. Does that suit you?”

“Oh, yes! Thank you, Miss Steele! I’ll be ready and waiting.”

She certainly hadn’t lied about waiting. She told her mother the news just in time for Lorna to catch the last train back to Table Rock, Nebraska. They barely had a moment to say their good-byes.

“Now work hard, and they’ll all love you,” Lorna murmured into Billie’s tearstained cheek as she clutched her daughter one last time. “And stay as good as you are.”

“Maw…,” Billie whispered. “Think of me.”

“I’ll be doing nothing else till I see you again, darling girl.” Before the catch in her throat turned to sobs, Lorna kissed her firstborn child and closest friend, pressed the half-eaten biscuit into her hand, and strode quickly toward the tracks.

Before she’d gone, she had scouted out the perfect well-lit spot for her daughter to await the dawn: between the ticket windows and the all-night Fred Harvey lunch counter. Billie sank down onto the wooden bench, pulled her wool cap low over her brow, and had herself a long, silent cry.

Charlotte chose the darkest, most untraveled corner of the cavernous train station and sat with her monogrammed suitcase tucked under the bench behind her crossed ankles.

The suitcase was fairly well battered—Simeon had seen to that.

He had a tendency to throw it when he was railing against oligarchy in its many serpentine forms, and the robber barons with their heels on the working man’s neck, etc.

, etc. She could recite it all like a many-versed poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , perhaps, which Simeon had taught to her freshman English class at Wellesley College.

A little thing like a gold-embossed monogram could set him off.

She’d taken to hiding the suitcase in various places, which had gotten harder once they’d moved from their two-room flat when they first arrived in St. Louis, to the one-room, fifth-floor walk-up.

It was there that she’d developed a fear of heights from regularly being pushed up against the window and threatened with a quick descent to the street far below.

When his presumed speedy advancement from cub reporter to city desk at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch failed to materialize, they’d taken an even smaller room at a boardinghouse, at which point it had been all but impossible to hide the suitcase, his second-favorite target.

Simeon Lister had impressed all the Wellesley College girls with the breadth and depth of his knowledge of English literature, his love of poetry, his ability to capture minds—and more than a few hearts—with his passion for words. He was not wellborn or overly handsome, but oh, how he could talk.

He could also listen. Unlike boys their own age, he asked about their lives, interests, and hopes for the future.

His gentle questioning and appearance of deep interest could unearth long-buried secrets.

This uncanny talent for exposing closet-dwelling skeletons combined with his growing disdain for teaching “the overfed, husband-hunting, vapid spawn of the bourgeoisie” led him to quit academia and pursue a career in journalism, where he planned to expose the depraved machinations of the rich.

He had been raised in a fairly comfortable middle-class family in Worcester—a family he’d rejected as “dull and incurious” as he strove for higher education.

As a successful college instructor, Simeon likely would have risen through the academic ranks, but his own hubris had derailed him.

He’d thought getting work as a newspaper reporter for an educated man like him would be easy. He’d been wrong.

The move to Missouri was Charlotte’s fault, of course.

They’d had to settle far enough from her family to make a statement about the permanence of her commitment to him, he’d said.

She learned only later, when cheap bootleg gin had made him loose-lipped, that he’d applied to every major news outlet in the country—including his beloved Boston Globe —but only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had responded.

Could he find her now, with his hound’s nose for sniffing out apparently random details that soon braided themselves into a fact trail?

She had used a false surname, that of a brave college classmate who’d been badly burned in a fire and lived with many more scars than Charlotte now bore.

She kept her first name because she was afraid of rousing suspicion if she forgot to answer to a new one.

Besides, as Simeon loved to sneer, “There are countless Charlottes.”

She had told no one of her plan to become a waitress, of all things. Not even her brother, Oliver, the sole family member who still occasionally wrote to her after she’d run off like that, sullying the exalted Crowninshield name with elopement.

She had taken nothing but her latest wages from the milliner’s shop—most of which had gone toward the train ticket from St. Louis to Kansas City—and the suitcase with her clothing and what few mementos hadn’t been tossed out various windows by Simeon over the last two years.

She had been scrupulous in her secrecy, even waiting to arrive in this unknown city to pawn her wedding ring.

He would never find her in the vast and barren frontier lands.

With his persistent disgust at her privileged upbringing, he wouldn’t think to look west, and wouldn’t expect her to last more than a week if he did.

She was safe—or would be soon enough. Safer than she’d been in years, despite being a woman alone in a public train station, at an hour favored by criminals and miscreants.

A battered suitcase was nothing to invite the interest of thieves, she reminded herself as the night passed. But no matter how many times it had sailed across a room, that monogram had a way of shining like a beacon.