The final afternoon of school before the Christmas break, Helen had found Coach Moore in his office. He leapt from his chair to come around the desk to greet her, his eyes twinkling. “Helen, please come in. What can I do for you?”
His unabashed enthusiasm to see her made a lump rise in Helen’s throat, but she dug the fingernails of her left hand into her palm to keep from getting sappy. “I heard you and Miss Schultz are getting married.”
“We are.”
“I brought you a wedding gift.”
He accepted the small package wrapped in brown paper gently, as if handling an infant. “This is very thoughtful of you, thank you.”
“It’s nothing fancy,” she mumbled. The way his eyes crinkled kindly when he smiled reminded her of Richard Arlen from The Island of Lost Souls. “I made a lot of jars of strawberry preserves last summer. Figured you and Miss Schultz might like a jar of it in your new home. It’s good on toast.”
“I happen to know for a fact that Miss Schultz adores strawberries. Whenever she gets a milkshake, she always picks strawberry. She’ll be delighted.”
Helen swallowed and spoke quickly before she could change her mind. “I really miss the track team. I know it was just a month, but it was the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m writing for the school newspaper now, but it’s not the same.”
A look not easily identified flickered across his face. Sorrow? “We all miss you too and would be honored to have you back any time.”
That had been several weeks ago, before her father had defaulted on the deed of trust for the farm. Now any hope of returning to the team was long gone.
As she walked toward the farmhouse, her boots crunching against the layer of icy snow crusting the yard, a dark gap showed in the porch stairs where a plank had gotten loose and fallen off. The steps groaned as she stomped the snow off her boots on her way to the front door and let herself inside.
“Helen? Is that you?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t wait to see her mother but climbed the stairs, not caring that she was still in her boots, trailing mud and snow. They were in this house for only a few more days. Let the bank clean up her messy footsteps. She entered her room and collapsed onto her bed, breathing in the metallic scent of cold air rising from her coat, and she then reached for the small porcelain jewelry box on her dresser, lifting the lid to peer inside. A cluster of Doogie’s yellowed puppy teeth lay in one compartment, a locket passed down from her grandmother lay in the other. She put the jewelry box in a wooden crate on the floor. That was it. The last of her stuff. She stared at the dark rectangles tiling the wallpaper from where she had removed her newspaper clippings about Betty Robinson and Babe Didrikson. Now everything was gone.
THE NEXT DAY she worked in the barn alongside her father to clean it out. He grumbled as he tossed a manure-covered rake down next to her to wipe clean. “You have no idea what it feels like to lose something that you’ve put your blood and sweat into.”
“’Cause you didn’t give me the chance,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing, sir.”
He placed his hands on his sides. “Give you the chance to what?”
“I just meant that I was ready to put my blood and sweat into that track team, but you made me quit.”
“What’s the point of running around a track anyway? It’s a waste of time, I tell you.” He tugged at his suspenders to hitch up his trousers. “Put all that physical activity into something useful.”
“I was good at it. Coach Moore and those other boys on the team looked at me like I was important.”
“Who cares what a bunch of pimple-faced roughnecks thought?”
Helen scrubbed at the filthy rake, but then stopped. She had an idea. “You know, they weren’t all hicks. I was leaving John Harris in the dust.”
“Harris? The banker’s boy?”
“That’s right. I’ve been thinking, I’ll bet it was Harris who told all that stuff to the newspaper. I think he wanted me off the team because he didn’t like being beaten by me, a lowly farmer’s daughter.”
In truth, John Harris had been perfectly nice to her, but she had a suspicion of how to get her father’s attention.
He narrowed his eyes. “You were beating the tar out of the banker’s son?”
“Yeah, I had all of those fellas choking on my cinder.”
He grunted and headed off to the pegboard to bring her more tools that needed cleaning and oiling. They didn’t speak any more about track. That evening, he was preoccupied at supper and barely spoke. When they finished eating, Pa sat back with a pipe and played checkers with Bobbie Lee while watching Helen and Ma washing dishes out of the corner of his eye.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “This is going to be a busy spring as we get the new farm up and running. Helen, I reckon I’m going to need you to come home a few afternoons a week to help. We’ll be closer to town, though, so it won’t be a long walk. I’ve been thinking that once we’re settled, maybe next year you could go back to running on that track team, but only if you keep up with your chores.”
Ma’s hands froze in the sudsy water, and she turned sideways to look at Helen in surprise.
Helen kept her own face blank as she dried off a pan and placed it in the crate of kitchen supplies they’d be taking with them. “I’ll keep up with everything.”
Her father nodded, stood, and left the kitchen to head out to the living room to read the newspaper.
Helen lifted the crate of kitchen goods and hefted it out the kitchen door to the spot on the porch where her mother had started organizing what needed to be moved to the new farm they’d be leasing. She put the crate down and straightened, smiling into the darkness. Though the air was cold and her breath left vapor trails swirling up into the darkness, she didn’t even notice. She was already thinking ahead to the next spring.
33.
May 1934
Riverdale, Illinois
BETTY DECIDED SHE WOULDN’T RELY ON HER FATHER to pay off her medical bills. She would do it herself. Jim, her brother-in-law, helped her find a job as a secretary in an architecture firm. The straightforward nature of the work suited her. The clarity of the daily schedule. The project deadlines. The clean angles and precision of the measurements on the blueprints. She enjoyed watching the projects take shape from schematics on crisp white sheets of paper to photographs of the final structures. Even with the stalled economy, new buildings were sprouting up around the city.
Betty continued to live at home with her parents, so after a year of working, she had nearly paid off her debts. She socialized with a couple of the other secretaries from work, friends from her school days, and, of course, Caroline and Howard, who were expecting their first baby sometime the following fall.
Jim worked near her office as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and when the weather obliged, the two would meet for lunch and sit outside in the main quad. On an afternoon in late May, they sat enjoying the balmy sunshine from underneath the lacy leaves of the honey locust trees in Dan Hall Garden. Betty inhaled the sweet fragrance of the clusters of light green flowers on the trees and placed her chicken salad sandwich on its butcher paper wrapping. Her gaze traveled over the gray limestone architecture surrounding them. “I love the Gothic stonework of this place. It reminds me of Amsterdam.”