Page 64 of The Harvey Girls

Fifty

She’s never talked this much in her life. The train speeds along, and so does her mouth. Every time she thinks she can’t remember one more thing, another scene tumbles into her mind’s eye like a key into a lock, click , and there it is.

The girl asks good questions.

Grandchild… Freddie’s girl… Carrie!

Billie repeats the name in her head three times as she taps the back of her hand. Carrie, Carrie, Carrie. For some reason this seems to help.

“We’re almost there,” Carrie says now, and Billie can feel the train’s engine ease, the effort needed to pull itself along releasing, slowing, surrendering to its terminus.

“Does it look the same?” Carrie asks as buildings come into view, many more of them than Billie remembered. But the depot building—that hasn’t changed a bit. Still looks just like an oversized Lincoln Log project.

“Some of it does, some of it doesn’t. But it’s been seventy years. My brain might be playing tricks on me.”

“Your brain did just fine telling me the first part of the story!”

Billie smiles. “It’s hard to forget, even for me.”

“How did you feel when you first got here?”

She’d stepped off the train with Maw’s tapestry bag, a dry wind blowing with a strange mix of smells: mules and laundry soap and pine. Tired, scared.

And so very far from home.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Carrie asks as they climb the steep road to El Tovar.

“My legs work just fine,” Billie says, lengthening her stride a little to prove it. “It’s the noodle that doesn’t always keep up.”

And there it is, the grand hotel, just as she remembers. Billie can almost see Mr. Patrillo standing on the front porch, making sure she doesn’t come in through the guest entrance again.

Let him stand there. Billie’s not ready to go in anyway. She wants to see the canyon.

The beauty—oh, the beauty of it! Even now she can feel that hunger to hike down into it, touching all the stripes, the layers of history as she descends. If she had stayed longer than four short months, would she have gotten used to it? Would it have become old hat?

Oh, yes, that thing, I barely even see it anymore.

No, she can’t imagine anyone feeling that way.

As they make their way along the rim path, Carrie urging her to continue the story, Billie notices all the improvements they’ve made in the seventy years since she last laid eyes on the place.

There are many more buildings, but most of the old ones are still here, too.

They pass the Lookout Studio with its rocky exterior made to look like a part of the cliff wall.

“Do you mind if I take your arm?” Carrie asks. “I really don’t like heights.”

Billie holds her elbow out, knowing full well it’s to keep her from falling down. Maybe she isn’t as spry as she once was, but she can still hike like a sixty-year-old.

“I can’t believe you had a park ranger boyfriend,” says Carrie.

Billie smiles. “He was handsome in that uniform.”

“But not as handsome as Farfar.”

“And nowhere near as nice.”

As they slowly stroll the mile and a half out to Maricopa Point, Billie continues the tale. When they arrive, they sit down on the rock outcropping overlooking the canyon.

“I can imagine you and Farfar lying right here,” says Carrie.

“The nights can be chilly here even in August, but your grandfather had gotten us a couple of sweaters, so we weren’t cold.”

Carrie smiles. “You snuggled.”

Billie laughs. “We were a couple of snugglers, weren’t we?” How she misses that man. It’s been five years now, but she knows she’ll long for his arms around her till the day she catches up to him.

“And you made your plan.”

“We did. As soon as we woke, I went straight to the only person I knew would help.”

“Don’t tell me…” Carrie gazes out across the canyon in thought. Then her expression goes wide with delight. “Mae Parnell!”

“You got it, smarty. She was the one who thought of telling Mr. Patrillo we were cousins. ‘You look just alike with all that blond hair,’ she said, ‘and you’re practically a couple of giants!’ That woman was on the side of love, even if you had to fib a little.

” Mae had gone to Patrillo herself, telling him quite truthfully she was worried that if Billie continued to live and work so close to the terrifying scene she had witnessed, she might break down in front of the guests.

“Can’t have that,” says Carrie.

“Certainly not. Crying in front of patrons is strictly against the Harvey standard.”

As Billie had requested, Mae had suggested that Patrillo send them to Fred Harvey’s Escalante Hotel in Ash Fork.

“Near the farm!” says Carrie. “Is that how you and Farfar started working for Great Uncle Will?”

“Oh, I never worked for Will.”

“But I thought…”

“Your grandfather went to the farm when I left the Escalante.”

“Wait, you left him there?”

Billie gingerly pushes herself up and slowly rises to stand. “Come on, doll, we don’t want to miss why we came.”

Carrie gets up and takes her grandmother’s arm again. “But you told him you always wanted the two of you to be together!”

“Listen. I know I said that, and I meant it. But after six months at the Escalante, things between your grandfather and me were getting a bit… heated,” she says with a sly smile.

The girl’s eyebrows go up in mock shock. “Grandy!”

“Farfar wanted to marry me, but I was sixteen years old. I wasn’t ready.

As a Harvey Girl with a free train ticket wherever I wanted, I had the whole Southwest at my feet.

So, every six months or a year, I moved to a different hotel, a different town, sometimes a different state.

I worked at the Alvarado in Albuquerque; the Casa del Desierto in Barstow, California; the Cardenas in Trinidad, Colorado; and La Posada in Winslow, Arizona. ”

“You went from a weepy little homebody to a great traveler!”

“Oh, I was still a homebody. The first thing we did when we left here was head straight for Table Rock.”

Carrie’s eyes twinkle mischievously. “You took a boy home?”

Billie smiles. “You can imagine the looks on my parents’ faces.

I explained that we were just friends, but my maw saw through that quick as a fortune teller.

She made sure there were always a couple of siblings with us wherever we went.

Of course, my brothers were in awe of him, and my sisters were all sweet on him inside of an hour. ”

“Was he overwhelmed by your enormous family after living alone so long?”

“Oh, Lord, no, he was like a pig in slop! Should have seen him chopping firewood for my da and hauling laundry baskets for my maw. Tripping over himself to make them love him as much as he loved them.” Billie’s heart fills with the memory of it.

“That was the first time he asked me to marry him. But I said no, you just want to marry my family.”

“Heartbreaker.”

“It was true! I knew he loved me, but we were too young. Besides, Maw didn’t like that he wasn’t Catholic.”

“What about your da?”

Billie laughs. “The man nearly had to be dragged to church every Sunday. He saw how hard Farfar worked and how much respect he had for me and all of the family, and he said, ‘He’s a braw laddie. Whit’s fer ye’ll no go by ye.’?”

“I’m going to need a translation.”

“He’s a good man, and if it’s meant to be, it’ll be.”

“What made you finally say yes? What was it—four years after you’d met?”

“Yes, it was 1930. He was managing the farm by then, and he already had my brothers Angus and Duncan working for him. Maw had finally given up caring that he wasn’t Catholic.

I was serving at the new Harvey House in Winslow—La Posada—and it was a relatively quick train ride to Ash Fork, so I visited on my days off.

Peigi was working with me by then—all my sisters became Harvey Girls at some point.

Maw and Da eventually came to live on the farm when the brick factory closed.

Little by little, the MacTavishes all became southwesterners.

“Anyway, one day Farfar just said, ‘I miss you.’ Your grandfather was never one to put his own needs ahead of anyone else’s, so I recognized it for what it was.”

“Pleading?”

“More like ‘fish or cut bait.’ I gave Fred Harvey my notice the next day.”

“ Fred Harvey Fred Harvey?”

“Goodness, child, the man had been dead almost thirty years by then. But Harvey Girls always said ‘I work for Fred Harvey’ till the day the company was sold in the 1960s.”

They climb the steps onto the El Tovar porch and head through what used to be known as the Rendezvous Room, now just the lobby.

It looks almost the same, with its log cabin walls and mounted heads of bison, moose, and deer.

They pass by the registration desk where the old built-in key cubbies still line the back wall.

When they get to the restaurant, Billie stands for a moment to gaze at the place she worked for four of the most pivotal months of her life.

There are no Harvey Girls in their spotless white uniforms and little black bow ties—in fact, there are even a couple of male waiters.

But other than that, it’s much the same.

As the hostess leads them to their table, Carrie breaks her grandmother’s reverie with a question. “But where did Great Aunt Charlotte go after she left here?”

“Well, doll, why don’t you ask her yourself?”

There at the best table in the house, with the closest view of the canyon, sits Charlotte Crowninshield Lister (Turner) Rosser. Naturally, she has chosen a chair with her back to the window.