The Daughter's Walk (13 page)

I
'll telegraph the sponsors,” Mama said. “We've got to get an extension. They gave us one for your sickness. Surely a sprained ankle qualifies. You need time to heal. I'll speak to the hotel manager too.”

“Please, Mama. No talk of lawsuits. We don't have time.”

“
Ja
, you're right about that, but they're negligent. That carpet wasn't tacked down.”

“Don't … don't bring attention, please.”

Mama looked at me, a frown on her face. “I'll simply tell the manager that I'll need work, as we must remain. Any meals or other accoutrements their fine establishment cares to offer will be mentioned when I speak to the newspaper.”

“You have to go to the newspaper about this?”

“Clara. We are here. Now. On this journey. We do what we must and adapt. That's what an Estby—”

“—does. But I'm not.”

She sighed. “I've work to find.”

Mama did go to the newspaper to advertise another presentation. She added to her performance the benefits of walking, how she'd been strengthened despite her accident four years previous.

“You talked about your broken pelvis?” I couldn't believe it when she rehashed the evening. I couldn't attend. I spent my time writing letters and making sketches from memory, and I worked on a design of my own.

“No. I wasn't specific. You wouldn't have been embarrassed.” She held the quarter heart of Hardanger lace in her hands, moving it between her graceful fingers. “But there are proposed laws in states east of here to prevent women's ‘walking exhibitions.' I might not be able to speak about what we're doing. I just learned that. The intention is to protect us women. But in truth, they don't want people to hear about women who are not wasting away, not weak, who don't constantly need a helping hand. People need to see that we are enduring souls willing and able to step up both mentally and physically to help our families.” She might have given her lecture right there, but she noticed the object in my hands. “What have you made there?”

“It's … something I've designed,” I said. “Since my monthlies have stopped—”

“They'll come back as soon as we're not walking so much,” she assured me. “Dr. Latham said that might happen.”

“I used the rags to make a binder for my … breasts.” My face felt hot. “Since we've been without the corsets, I … My chest …”

She held up the strips of cloth I'd sewn together. “How does it work?”

I put it on over my blouse, showed her how the straps formed a crisscross over my shoulders and wrapped beneath my breast. “It offers support,” I said.

“Why, that's inventive,” she said. “What good thinking, Clara. Can you make one for me too?”

I lay awake as she slept. Despite my worries over arriving on time, I secretly liked my mother's company. I enjoyed her descriptions of the women in the audiences, her encounters with the wealthy, her presentation of herself as an equal. She wasn't a scared child waiting to deliver an unplanned baby; she wasn't a tired mother looking after her children and husband in the big farm kitchen; she was formidable, a woman making her way. Despite the risky wager, I found I admired her tenacity, her refusal to be a shamed woman for the rest of her life though she hadn't married for love. I liked, too, that she admired something I'd made, an idea that would ease both of us as we walked. This was an educational journey.

After two weeks, we began again and followed the Burlington rails through the unending horizon heading for Lincoln, Nebraska, where my mother walked right up to the porch of William Jennings Bryan's home, hoping for his signature. Sadly, he was off campaigning to become the president of the United States. His wife, Mary, though, bought several pictures and signed her name to the signature book, the only woman who had. “In Cambridge,” Mary Bryan told us, “they voted not to give women university degrees even though they attend classes, and then they hung a woman in effigy, on a bicycle, wearing a bifurcated skirt, right from the top of Cambridge Hall.”

“Appalling,” Mama said when Mary showed us the photograph in the
New York Times
.

That picture jogged my complacent fear. Mama had said in the
East we'd have sisters. But Cambridge represented civilization, didn't it? Our bold adventure might not be so welcomed.

Out of Omaha, we followed the Rock Island Railroad lines. In Des Moines, Mama gave two interviews, one with
Decorah-Posten
, the Norwegian paper, which gave us one sentence. With the English paper, she emphasized the wager again, and the reporter suggested we were “greedy,” trying to take hard-earned money from businesspeople, the sponsors, for our own gain. He said we were women of questionable morals for walking the rails unescorted and fraternizing with men all across the country.

My face burned with the charge that seemed half right.

The weather changed as we trudged toward Chicago, cold stings of snow hitting our faces and melting on our straw hats and shoulders though it was only October. Nothing looked worthy of sketching, so I didn't. I complained that my legs were cold despite the woolen socks, and my ankle ached by day's end. The chilly wind roared up our shorter reform dresses. “I never thought I'd miss our long skirts,” Mama said, “but I do.” It was the closest she came to a complaint.

We stepped out behind the curtain onto a stage inside a Chicago department store to stares and scattered applause. Modeling the reform clothes available in the store helped us to earn funds, publicity for our photographs, and advertisements for Mama's speeches. Best of all, the store had heat. We needed warm jackets, which we'd get as part of our modeling pay. I looked with envy at the women in their fur stoles and muffs. A few sniffed at us, and one even covered her daughter's face with her gloved hands, she thought we were so provocative.

Mama was her performing self, quoting the
Chicago Tribune
in an
article advocating reform clothes, decrying the suffering of tight corsets and the filth that long skirts picked up. She wove a good story, that was certain, embellishing what I would have reported as just facts.

“One hundred and ninety-five dollars so far,” I said that evening. We splurged after our modeling job and stayed at a hotel. Mama asked for an accounting of our expenses.

“We'll get that all back once we reach New York and pick up our prize money,” she said.

“You did get the extension, didn't you, Mama?” My ankle ached as I stood to dab a wet cloth on stains on our dresses.

“Nothing to worry about.” Mama put the accounting book back in the grip. She didn't look at me.

“You got them to go to January 1, didn't you?” By my calculations, we'd need every bit of that time to make even that date. We couldn't possibly make December 13, the date she'd negotiated when I got sick from the stew.

She turned to me, took a deep breath. “December 13. They wouldn't accept your ankle injury as an illness.”

“Mama!”

“I argued. I did my best. I don't get to talk to the sponsors, though. Everything goes through the editor at
New York World
, and men don't understand. If I could talk to them … It'll all work out,” she said patting my shoulder. “We'll make it. Have a little faith.”

“Taking this detour is not right, Mama.” After walking for nearly a month more, we traveled yet another side trip, which took us close to Canton, Ohio. “Can't you see our problem, Mama? We have to keep going east.”

“Sometimes you have to put goodness over rightness,” she told me. “We're visiting a cottage. You'll like it. It's only a few miles out of our way. And we don't have to get signatures anymore in these more urban areas. But this one will be worth it. It'll be our last.”

This distraction bothered me more than the silver mine episode or the time we spent talking to Wyoming ranchers or Nebraska wheat farmers and their wives. All that talking took time from walking, and that was what mattered most. I couldn't imagine what made Mama so certain we'd be successful when the facts didn't support it.

The “cottage” turned out to be a large Victorian home with a picket fence and bare elm branches framing the charming white house. “It's the president-elect's home,” Mama said.

“President McKinley?”

“Don't look so surprised. Surely you didn't think I'd pass up an attempt to let you meet your hero.”

“And get that one last famous signature.”

“It will add to the story,” she said, bumping my hip.

“You can't just walk up to the door and knock. Maybe he won't be here,” I said. I hoped he wouldn't be. My hair looked a fright. And yet when William McKinley came to the door and Mama introduced me and herself, I could barely say his name. Mama congratulated him, said she hoped he'd remember the women's vote one day, and then showed him our picture and a newspaper article we'd brought with us, the most recent one from the
Ohio State Journal
of November 24. “I'd like your signature, for the sponsors,” Mama said.

“Certainly. Come in,” he said. “If you'll wait in the parlor.” He pointed after he signed Mama's book. “I'll wheel my wife in to join us and ask Lotty to set up for tea.”

A satin flowered settee, the pictures of a young girl and an infant, frames with gold flourishes, mirrors (which revealed the decrepit state
of my hair), a coal stove, and a grand piano marked the parlor of a home both modest yet elegant. Distinguished, orderly, not too opulent, and pleasant—the way life ought to be, I thought, just the way McKinley had campaigned.

“Mrs. McKinley has fainting spells,” Mama whispered. She fingered the fringe on the lamp. “They're devoted to each other. That's why he didn't campaign away from home very much and answers his own door. Both of their children died; so tragic. The story is that they met when Mrs. McKinley worked as a financial manager and ran the bank when her father traveled. The president-elect had his accounts there.”

The mention of banks made me think of Forest. I wondered what he was doing now. Might I one day live in such an elegant home, loved by a devoted husband like Forest?

“A woman as a financial manager? You mean like a banker?” I said.

“Like a banker.”

“Who would never be caught less than three weeks away from a deadline that's nearly five hundred miles ahead.”

“Clara,” Mama sighed. “It's your birthday present, meeting him. You'll please me if you simply accept it.”

My birthday
. I'd forgotten. I'd lost a year of my life on this trip. I thought I'd be turning nineteen, but instead I'd be turning twenty, with my mother giving me the only birthday present I could remember that she hadn't sewn herself, at least not with thread.