The Daughter's Walk (52 page)

Her face lit up and I realized how much I'd missed talking of that trip. Olea and Louise listened, but it was nothing like the shared experience with one who'd participated. She read more, then said, “There's nothing wrong with remembering our story, is there, Clara?”

“Not a thing,” I told her. “It's how we remember what it means to be strong. You did it for your family, Mama. You served them as best you knew how.”

“Just as my mother served me when she found Ole for me to marry.”

“And me, when you made me leave my fantasy of Forest Stapleton to find a new life.”

Mama leaned back, closed the book, her eyes shining with happy tears. “Visiting all those places. Being lost. That trestle. Meeting Mary Bryan, the McKinleys. All of it. It was quite a grand adventure, wasn't it, Clara?”

“It was.”

“We kept those reporters entertained that evening in Minneapolis. We laughed through our tears. But that's what living looks like, I guess.”

“
You
kept them entertained, Mother,” I said. This was what I had to give her, a shared memory that nourished and transformed, and she received it. “Every evening that you stood on a stage and spoke, you amazed people. You were a marvel all across the country. I am so proud of you.” I put aside the rightness or wrongness of what had happened those years before and just met my mother where she was.

“Are you?” Mama blinked back tears. She reached for my hand. “Well, you amazed them too,” she said. “You were quite the trooper, my daughter. Such good wisdom shown, every step of the way.”

I leaned back and grinned. “Oh, Mama, I was just along for the walk.”

A
PRIL 1942

T
hey'd made the arrangements before they had to. Ida accepted Clara's invitation to live with her in the house Clara owned on West Eighth. It was a Tudor duplex, and Bill and his wife, Margaret, already rented the upstairs. Clara and Ida would share the lower level.

Clara had lived alone these past four years in the Cleveland house, and during that time, Ida accepted her invitations to tea. They'd found an uneasy peace, simply never talking about “that time.” Olea died in 1935 and Louise in 1938. Emma Wells presided over the services for both women, held in their home on Cleveland, and led the graveside services for them as well at Fairmont Cemetery. The two women were buried side by side, and there was an additional plot purchased for Clara. She didn't assume her family would want her buried with them at Mica Creek.

But now Clara would live again with her sister and brother. Their mother would be buried later in the week, forty-six years after she'd committed to the walk that changed all their lives.

Clara remembered Helga's words about her writing the story down. They'd talked about it now and then when they had lunch together
and once when Clara joined her at the Mica Creek cemetery on the anniversary of Ole's death. Helga had continued to write, though she told no one.

Clara was glad she came to the cemetery to honor Ole. He'd been there for her mother in the beginning and cared for her through the years, not in ways Clara wanted for her, but it was really not her business how others worked out their affairs. John Doré gave Clara life, but it was Ole and her mother who gave her the family of her youth; and now, as she grew older.

After Lillian gave birth to her daughter, Norma Fay, Helga and her daughters would often get together at Lillian's house on Shannon Avenue so Lillian wouldn't have to take the streetcar with the child. Clara would pick up pastries with maraschino cherries on top and ride with them on a cardboard tray on her lap to where Lillian lived. Clara took a special liking to her nieces and nephew—and even great-nieces, after Thelma married. In later years, Clara discovered she had a creative bent in poetry and sent Norma Fay little poems. When she forgot Norma Fay's birthday one year she penned:

She signed it “With Love from Clara to Norma Fay” and always included a coin or two or a colorful stamp. Norma Fay liked to hear the stories of the countries the stamps came from. Clara hoped the poems spoke of frugality and put personal responsibility at the forefront of any young person's mind. Her work at Merchants reminded Clara of what can happen when people overextend themselves or neglect their bills. Sadly, the collection agency thrived because of people who never learned that important lesson.

Before her mother's death, Clara had been preparing to join Franklin on a trip to Europe, as they'd done so many times since Clara had reconciled with her family and since Sharon's surprising death in 1929. That's what Clara called her slow weaving of threads back into her family quilt: reconciliation. “To reestablish friendship,” her dictionary read.

Bill made little comments about her “traveling” with a man when she packed her trunks and headed east. She supposed he thought she was a courtesan, but she and Franklin were good friends who grieved Sharon's death together and enjoyed sitting by the Aegean, watching feral cats and fishermen at their trade.

That morning in April, however, Clara canceled her plans with Franklin and made the sad journey by streetcar to the house on Mallon to help sort through her mother's things. Clara hoped to take her mother's manuscript for safekeeping. Maybe after Ida and Bill passed away, it could be published. Surely her sisters wouldn't want it if they even knew of its existence. Clara didn't know how her mother's personal effects would be divided, but she'd ask for the scrapbook too and maybe one of her mother's Hardanger lace tablecloths and a quilt or a painting. She'd loved how her mother used color in her floral paintings.

When she arrived on Mallon Avenue, a presentiment silence greeted Clara. She went up to her mother's room, but her sisters weren't there. The trunk was gone. She heard voices in the backyard and looked out through the upstairs window, pulling the lace curtain back. She smelled smoke. They were likely burning trash to clean things up before people visited after the service later in the week. Margaret, Bill's wife, stood off to the side and looked on while Ida and Lillian leaned over a smoky barrel. Bill wasn't there.

Clara saw her mother's trunk beside the barrel.

The manuscript!
Her heart pounded. She ran down the steps, nearly tripping on a loose tread. She swung around the banister, out through the kitchen, the glasses on her neck holder bouncing as she ran.

“Good riddance to that,” Clara heard Ida say. She stopped short. “I can't believe Mama wrote that horrible story down after Papa begged her not to.” Clara watched as Ida tossed the last of a pile of yellow foolscap into the flames.

“What … what are you burning?”

“Mother's story,” Ida said, turning. “She wrote about that terrible, terrible time. Who would want to know what you two did back then? It's not right. It was private and painful, and Papa said never to speak of it, ever. Bill doesn't want it talked about. Lillian doesn't. I certainly don't. And you, Clara? Do you want it talked about?”

Clara stood speechless. Then, “It was her story.”

“Just an old woman's reminiscing,” Ida said. “And she had no right to any joy from that time, no right at all.”

Ida turned back to the fire and Lillian gave Clara a hopeless look. With a stick, Ida poked the pages free to be thoroughly licked by flames.

She'd come too late!

At least her mother had had the joy of writing the story for herself. She had perhaps found comfort in remembering how her life changed
by setting forth on that long-ago walk. Maybe she wrote down how she was acknowledged with an occasional smile and head nod by suffragette women when she met them later on the streets of Spokane. Honored by strangers though not by her family. Maybe she had written about Clara; she was sure her mother would have. And she'd have written of her grief, her losses, and the things that mattered most to her—family.

The scrapbook! Clara looked around. It was the only other evidence of what they'd done together. Her sisters might have burned it first. She looked at the trunk.
Empty!
Maybe her mother had hidden it separately from the manuscript. She sped by Margaret toward her mother's room, when Bill's wife reached out and touched her sleeve. Clara stopped. Margaret put her finger to her lips for silence. She moved her eyes toward a box resting on the porch.

With Ida and Lillian engaged in watching the flames devour their mother's story, Margaret spoke quietly to Clara as they moved to the steps. “I thought Thelma or maybe Norma Fay might want some of Mother Helga's lesser things one day.
The Lamplighter
book your mother read to Thelma, a few other trinkets.” She moved aside one of Helga's quilts, the one with squares from the reform dress. Beneath it Clara saw two little red shoes Helga had brought with her from Norway, and Clara could see the edge of the scrapbook. Margaret looked into Clara's eyes, patted Clara's shoulder. “I'll keep them safe,” she said. “You never know what stories will interest children when they're older.” Then she pulled an envelope from the book with Clara's name on it, and handed it to Clara. “Your mother must have meant for you to have this,” Margaret said.

Clara held the envelope, opened it. Inside was a piece of Hardanger lace, not yellowed though it was old. Clara recognized it as the piece of the heart her mother had carried on their walk. No note, but Clara knew: Helga had made certain Clara would always hold a piece of her mother's heart.

This story could not have been written without Margaret Estby's careful saving of the scrapbook bearing bits of history of a grand walk across the continent in 1896. Margaret kept the secret until her husband, Bill, died, knowing that he too harbored resentment from that time of quarantine and loss.

The memories also would have been lost without Thelma Estby Portch's choice to dance with her grandmother through the stories. She didn't know what story her grandmother Helga wanted her to take care of, but years later, Margaret gave Thelma the scrapbook, and at last, Thelma knew the story that had meant so much to her grandmother. Darillyn Bahr Flones, great-niece of Clara, first wrote the story for a school paper in 1979. In 1984, Doug Bahr, Helga's great-great-grandson, chose to write an essay on Washington history for a contest. He based the piece on the clippings and interviews with his grandma Thelma.

Linda Lawrence Hunt's rag-rug history, which pieced together fragments of newspaper accounts, social history, and descendants' memories also kept the story alive. She filled in many of the missing pieces about the walk, Helga's life, and the social context in which the walk was made. Her award-winning account,
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America
(Random House, 2003), celebrated the often-overlooked stories of women's journeys and applauded
the extraordinary trek this mother and daughter made in service to their family. It was when reading this book prior to publication that I had the privilege of meeting Linda Hunt and her husband, Jim, both professors then at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Jim had been the judge in that essay contest and first alerted Linda to Doug Bahr's captivating account.

The book fascinated me, especially a brief reference stating that after their return, Clara changed her name and separated herself from the family for many years. I wanted to know what happened to Clara, how the journey might have affected her. As I began to research Clara's life, I wondered how she'd found a way to go on to business school while the Estby family perched on the cliff of foreclosure. Why did she change her name when she did and why to the name she chose? Where was she those twenty-plus years, and how might she have felt separated from her family?

I've often said that like good scientists, writers find something strange and then want to thoroughly explore it. Biography is one path to exploration. It tells us what and when and who; social history sets the context, and in this case,
Bold Spirit
set the stage for understanding the power of story and grief and what happens when one attempts to silence both. As Shakespeare so wisely noted in
Macbeth:
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak, whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.” Without the witness, grief sinks us into depths only love can pull us from. But neither Helga's biography or social history can tell us why the family separated as it did. Only fiction allows us to explore the truths and turmoil inside the landscapes of Clara's heart and soul, about whom the present-day family knew so little and who was described by one descendant as having “abandoned” the family.

So with the blessings of descendants Mary Kay Irwin, Dorothy
Bahr, Stephen Portch, and Norma Fay Lee, and with Linda Hunt's encouragement and shared research, I began my pursuit to discover the what and why of the daughter's story.

My journey took me to Olea Stone (sometimes called Steen) Ammundsen and Louise Gubner, the latter in partnership with Clara while they lived in Coulee City, according to the 1910 census. Olea lived down the street. Both Olea and Louise came from Norway and held links to the New York furrier industry prior to their arrival in the Spokane area around 1900, about the time the Estbys struggled with the final throes of foreclosure. This linkage to the New York fashion industry let me find them in New York in 1897 (when Louise changed her name from Gulbrandson to Gubner), and so I speculated how they might have found their way into Clara's life. I wondered if they might have had something to do with the “eastern parties” in the fashion industry who sponsored the original walk and whether disagreement tied to that journey ultimately caused the family severing. One family story indicated there were “two Norwegian women who helped Clara go to school” and finding their names linked through property and census records gave me license to make those women be Olea and Louise.