Page 4 of The Harvey Girls
Two
By six in the morning, Charlotte had spent a nickel of her diminishing funds on a cup of tea at the twenty-four-hour Fred Harvey lunch counter.
She’d sipped it slowly as she waited for the wagon-wheel-sized clock to make its plodding way toward seven thirty.
She had dozed throughout the night, eyes flicking open at the sound of any approach, as she’d learned to do when Simeon was out.
Best to feign sleep but be ready to cover her head and softer spots when he came in.
There was a young girl slumped on a bench across the vast lobby of the station.
She had slowly tipped into the corner of the high wooden back and crumpled like a used napkin, with what looked like half a biscuit clutched in her hand, and lips slightly parted as if she’d recently been sucking her thumb.
The sleep of the untroubled , Charlotte thought.
Her mother often blithely referred to her own night’s rest in these terms, as if the woman hadn’t a care in the world.
Oh, but she cared. Many, many things bothered Beatrice Crowninshield, and when she wasn’t busy insisting that her life was one endless series of scones with clotted cream, she was detailing all the aspects of the world that weren’t quite right. Starting with Charlotte.
Brown eyes with a sort of melancholy behind them.
“A sparkling eye is the first thing one notices,” Beatrice would say, glowing as if she’d swallowed a lit lantern.
But how did one actually go about making one’s own eyes sparkle?
Charlotte had practiced in the mirror in her dressing room countless times until she’d given up altogether.
She was petite with an admirably narrow waist… but with shoulders on the large side for her frame, and her mother worried they might turn mannish as she aged. Her skin was pale yet “lacked a normal propensity to blush.”
Beatrice knew the value of a blush and had put her own pink cheeks to good use.
Her father had escaped the Welsh mining town of his birth by going to sea, rising from cabin boy to captain at the Crown shipping yards.
In his later years, he’d come to be a great favorite of the company owner, Wallace Crowninshield, who, against the better judgment of his wife (a Cabot, no less) and most of Boston society, had allowed his son, Casper, to marry the lovely, wealthy, but unpedigreed Beatrice.
“She’s got a lot of making up to do,” Charlotte’s brother, Oliver, would often whisper when their mother had a twist in her knickers about some small thing or another—the whiteness of her table linens, for instance, or the length of a dodo feather on one of her many hats.
The sleep of the untroubled. Charlotte wondered if she’d ever be able to sink that deep into slumber again.
Billie woke herself with a little snorting laugh.
She’d been dreaming of her brother Angus, only a year younger than she was.
He was driving their father’s truck in circles around the open field behind the brickyard, and she’d been hanging out the window, arms in the air, fingers spread wide so the wind rushed through them, screaming for the sheer joy of it.
“Miss?” A man’s voice sifted down through the dust motes shimmering in a ray of sunlight flooding in from a high window. She blinked against the brightness, trying to make the speaker’s silhouette come into focus. “Miss, are you… ah… Charlotte Turner?”
“No, I told you I’m Charlotte Turner.” This voice was softer, more refined, but somehow more commanding. “She must be the other girl.”
“Ah, right. Wilamena? Wilamena MacTavish?”
Billie struggled to sit upright. “Yes,” she croaked, then coughed to clear her throat. “That’s me, Billie MacTavish.” She raised a hand to brush the newly unbraidable hair out of her face and nearly smashed a biscuit into her cheek.
Oh, yes, Maw’s biscuit. The memory of Maw’s teary face as she’d tucked it into her hand floated before her, and it was all she could do to keep herself from bawling all over again.
“You won’t need that,” said the man. He wore a stiff cap of some kind.
“Toss that out, and we’ll get you a fresh one.
” He introduced himself with a name Billie immediately forgot as she brushed the crumbling roll into a nearby wastebasket, set her woolen hat straight on her head, and gathered up the threadbare tapestry bag that held her other set of clothes, two sets of drawers, a comb, and her sister Peigi’s pencil drawing of their house with little cameo insets of each family member.
An artist, was Peigi. Billie had vowed to buy her a real charcoal pencil and sketch pad with her wages.
The man led them to the lunch counter and waved over a Harvey Girl.
Billie had heard of the famous Harvey Girls, of course, even before she’d seen the employment ad in the paper.
But since they only worked on the Santa Fe Railway, which did not run through any part of Nebraska—not to mention that yesterday had been her first train ride ever in her whole life—she’d never seen one in person before.
The young woman wore an unfashionably long black dress that came almost to her ankles, with sleeves that puffed at the shoulders and reached her wrists.
Over this was a crisp white apron, V-necked and wide at the shoulders, narrowing to a white sash at the waist, then cascading almost to the hem of the black dress, creating an hourglass effect.
The only adornment was a little black bow tie at the neck.
“They’re going into training in Topeka,” the man told the Harvey Girl.
“Give them whatever they want.” He handed Billie and the other woman squares of stiff paper with the words I SSUED BY THE A TCHISON T OPEKA the world was so much bigger than she’d ever suspected!
Children played by the dusty tracks and waved up at them as they passed.
Billie waved back, smiling, and turned to see if Charlotte saw them, too.
The woman was fast asleep, arms crossed against her bosom, head tipped back. Her lips were slack, slightly parted, with the corners turned up just a fraction, as if, though she could not see the children, she were smiling at them nonetheless.