A Promise for Tomorrow (12 page)
Life consists in motion . . . the United States
presents certainly the most animated picture
of universal bustle and activity of any country
in the world. Such a thing as rest or
quiescence does not even enter the
mind of an American.
—F
RANCIS
G
RUND
The heavy, dank mist threatened to swallow Carolina whole. She tried to move, to run, but her legs were held fast as if in shackles.
“Help me, please!” she cried out over and over, but no one heard her and no one came to her aid.
Then, just as the darkness closed in around her, Carolina heard one of her children cry out. It was enough to give her the strength to pull free from the cryptic stranglehold. She pushed her way through the swirling fog, fighting for some handhold, something familiar that might pull her up from harm’s way.
The crying intensified and Carolina felt her heart begin to pound. This was no ordinary cry. This was the cry of a child in jeopardy. Gaining speed, Carolina pushed blindly ahead until the sound was nearly upon her. A door materialized before her eyes, and just as she reached for the handle, a huge hand clamped down on her arm and dragged her backward.
The scream that tore from her throat was enough to awaken Carolina from her nightmare. Drenched in sweat and panting heavily, she reached out to James for comfort. But James wasn’t there. It seemed he was never there.
Aching from the emptiness inside, Carolina ran her hand over James’ pillow before pulling it close. Holding it tight, she tried to steady her ragged breathing. Five years of listening to the Baltimore and Ohio argue about the routes that did nothing to move the railroad west, but did everything to steal her husband away, were beginning to take their toll on Carolina.
It wasn’t only that James was frequently absent from their home, but even when he was in residence, he was preoccupied with the routing issues and incessant arguing of his peers. It wasn’t enough when the route had finally been established to complete the B&O in Wheeling, but in choosing that location, a hundred other problems arose. And while Carolina found the entire matter quite fascinating, she seldom had a chance to join in the discussions because she was nearly always busy with the running of her household and the children.
Thinking of the children, Carolina threw off the heavy winter covers and slipped from her bed. The nightmare still haunted her. She had felt suffocated and weighed down, and there was no one to help her. Were her dreams merely playing out her realities?
She went first to Victoria’s room and found the twelve-year-old sleeping soundly. Moonlight flooded the room through the open curtains and fell across the bed, illuminating Victoria in an ethereal way. She’d only just had her birthday, and Carolina smiled to see her clutching the doll James had sent from Pittsburgh. Victoria’s special relationship with James warmed Carolina’s heart in a way that eased her worries. The years had bonded them together, and for all that James had adored having a son to carry on his name, he had reserved a special place in his heart for Victoria.
Carolina smoothed back a brown-black ringlet and let the silky curl slip through her fingers.
She’s growing up so quickly,
Carolina thought. It seemed only yesterday that Victoria had been a baby in her arms. Now she was nearly grown, and in a few short years she would be at a proper age to wed and bear children of her own. It made Carolina feel suddenly old, even though she’d not quite reached her twenty-ninth birthday.
She left Victoria to go in search of her son. The nursery was quiet and only the rhythmic sound of breathing could be heard to break the silence. Brenton, just turned five last November, lay in a gangly manner all sprawled across the bed. He had managed to lose his covers in the night, and Carolina quickly located them at the foot of the bed and gently eased them back in place.
Brenton sighed, rolled to the opposite side, and settled once again. Carolina found that he’d managed to re-expose his left leg to the chill of the night, but she gave up trying to keep him under wraps. Instead, she watched him for a moment. He was the spitting image of his father with dark brown hair and brows. For a child, he was most serious and devoted, and he loved to mimic his father. It made her laugh to watch Brenton assume James’ stance or posture. He would follow James around the house, always studying him, watching and waiting as if to learn some great secret about his father. And almost always he seemed far too serious for a little boy. It was hard on Brenton to be without his father so much of the time, but there was nothing Carolina could do to change matters. They couldn’t very well trek west after him.
The faint sound of sucking came to Carolina’s ear, drawing her away from her son and to the far side of the nursery. Here, not quite three-year-old Jordana, the youngest of the Baldwin clan, sucked her thumb, unaware of her mother’s presence. Where Brenton was serious and reserved, Jordana was humorous and rambunctious. She reminded Carolina of a little clown, constantly performing for an audience and always looking for a laugh. Jordana kept Carolina and Mrs. Graves too busy to worry about much of anything else. It was not at all unusual to find Jordana shinning up a tree or dangling from the wrought-iron fence that encircled their house. Carolina adored the precocious child, and often it was Jordana alone who managed to keep Carolina’s spirits up when things turned gloomy.
All was well. The children were sleeping soundly, and there was no reason to feel the despair and anxiety that Carolina felt within her soul. But the feeling haunted her nevertheless. Hugging her arms to her now-chilled body, Carolina longed for other arms to hold her. If only James were here to comfort her and reassure her that nothing was amiss. But he was gone. And Carolina wasn’t even certain where he was. Two weeks ago he had been in Pittsburgh discussing iron for rails, but the brief letter that accompanied Victoria’s gift stated he would soon be leaving on a boat that would take him to Wheeling.
Frustrated by her churning emotions, Carolina left the nursery and went back to her bedroom. For a time she sat by the window and stared out into the starry sky. The clock chimed the quarter hour, but Carolina hadn’t bothered to see what quarter it might be announcing.
“I don’t want to feel this way,” she said aloud, and yet for all she tried to reason it away, Carolina couldn’t even put a name to her emotions.
Fear seemed to rank close to the top, but then again, it wasn’t exactly fear. Anxiety was definitely a companion, but it was more than that; it was something akin to dread.
“But I have nothing to dread,” she murmured.
Cold seeping in from the window caused Carolina to get up and pull the draperies closed. Climbing into what now seemed a mammoth bed, Carolina drew the heavy quilts around her and settled back on her pillow. Even here, where she felt closest to James, Carolina could not shake her misery.
“Oh, Father,” she prayed, “what’s wrong with me? Why can I not simply dismiss this and be done with it?” She stared up into the darkness of her room. With the drapes drawn tight, the room held nothing but shadowy images and unbearable silence.
Determined to feel better, Carolina tried to focus her attention on thoughts more pleasing. She’d just received a letter from her father, and the news about her mother was more than she’d ever hoped to hear. Margaret had made tremendous steps toward recovery. She could now sit and discuss the past with Joseph, and while she often grew teary eyed, she was no longer given to spells of violence.
Carolina rejoiced in this news. Her mother was actually asking questions about the family and made efforts to send messages via Joseph to each of her children. To Carolina she sent a word of thanks for the lengthy letters that she received from her every month. Margaret delighted in the news of her grandchildren and promised that one day they would all be together and get to know one another properly. Carolina had asked her father what had stirred this miraculous recovery in her mother. For even though it had been nearly seven years since Margaret had gone to the hospital in Boston, Carolina had read a great many accounts of people who never recovered from mental illness.
Perhaps that was the curse of intelligence. In her desire to better understand her mother’s situation, Carolina had read everything available to her. Anything at all that dealt with sicknesses of the mind came to Carolina as the possibility of holding answers for her mother. There were, of course, those articles that offered such ridiculous suggestions as depriving patients of sleep, food, or water, or inducing pain in delicate parts of the body in order that the brain pain might be lessened as the body focused on pain elsewhere. Carolina had prayed that the Boston doctors would forsake those methods of treatment for methods less frightening.
In the case of Margaret, Carolina knew that there had been a great deal of sound practice on the part of the doctors and nurses. One nurse in particular, a godly woman of infinite patience, had befriended Margaret and taken her on as a personal project. Carolina credited this woman with much of her mother’s recovery. The rest was clearly credited to God, for Carolina knew that without His mercy, her mother would surely have never survived her ordeal.
The tensions brought on by her nightmare were now lessened somewhat, but still the oppressive feelings lingered, and Carolina was hard pressed to know what else she might do to cast them off.
“The children are well. Mother is recovering. Father is happily back home at Oakbridge,” she recited. “James is making a way for the B&O and, God, you know better than I how much he enjoys his work. There’s no reason for me to feel this way. None at all.”
She shifted in the bed and rolled to her side. Once again she caressed James’ pillow and wondered where he was sleeping on this cold February night.
“If you were here,” she whispered, “you’d tell me I was being silly. Then you’d hold me close, and I would see the folly in giving myself over to such things as bad dreams.” She paused and shook her head. “But you aren’t here, and I miss you, and I resent that you’re gone, and I resent even more that I’m not with you, sharing in the building of our dreams.”
There, she thought. She’d said the one thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t ever think on. She was envious of James’ dealings with the railroad, and she longed to be at his side, immersing herself in the growth and transformations of the line. But she had three children, and travel to the wilderness was no easy matter. Even with the train established to Cumberland, it was no small feat to travel with children in tow.
But she loved her children. She adored them. And while it was true that she had never expected to have them quite so soon, Carolina knew that she’d never have traded a single one of them, even if it would have meant being able to work on the railroad for herself. She sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t find it rewarding to be a wife and mother. Nothing gave her more comfort than to hold her children, and nothing pleased her more than to be in James’ arms. But she’d wanted so much more. She’d planned an entire future around her education and her love of trains. She had married Blake St. John in order to adopt Victoria and provide the child with a real mother, but even then she had seen herself moving forward with her plans. Blake had gifted her with a large portfolio of railroad stock, and when he died prematurely, Carolina found herself with a vast fortune in stocks and cash. Of course, the depression had devalued most of her stock, but even so, there had been more than enough money for her to purchase up stock at half the original price from desperate men seeking to dump their unwise investments. The investments themselves had not been unwise, but the future had seemed so uncertain at the end of the last decade. Now prices were rising nicely, and Carolina held major portions of stock in several small New York lines, as well as a good portion of stock with the Baltimore and Ohio. And there was still the Potomac and Great Falls Railroad on which they had finally broken ground and begun to build.
Carolina felt a twinge of guilt as she contemplated the matter. She was a woman, and as such, she was unwelcome in board meetings and anywhere else where opinion was offered for the future of the railroad. Only her father and James seemed to consider her ideas as having merit. But even they found their hands tied when it came to others. Why, Carolina wasn’t even allowed to come and vote her stock on the B&O. She had tried once, but it raised such a ruckus that Thomas Swann, her ever-faithful attorney, suggested she allow him to represent her. Carolina had no choice but to agree.
Then the previous fall, Thomas had taken on the position of president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Carolina had been pleasantly surprised, but James had shrugged it off, saying that everyone had known for some time that Swann was being groomed to replace Louis McLane in the position. Carolina remembered the feeling of betrayal that she had somehow been left out of this news. James had never mentioned it to her, and even though she’d been very busy with the children, she knew he could have made an effort to keep her informed.
With Thomas at the helm, Carolina thought this would be the perfect opportunity to assert herself as a stockholder, but even James thought it unnecessarily foolish for her to stir up the other members. He laughingly told her that she’d find the meetings as boring as Sunday tea with the Baltimore Ladies Mission Society, but Carolina wasn’t convinced. Most women very well might have been bored, but not her. She knew she would have thrilled to the talk of proposed lines and routes. She would have been fascinated with the suggestions for repairs and purchases of new equipment. But what hurt most of all was that she knew James recognized the truth of the matter, as well. He knew her better than anyone, save her father, and he knew that such a meeting would be just the thing to keep Carolina on the edge of her seat.
And now he was gone, as always. Away with the railroad—working at a future that should have been her own. She pounded the mattress with her fists and tried not to feel the frustration that poured over her once again. This was doing nothing to ease her mind from the strangling hold of her nightmare.