later how hard Mother must have worked to keep us all together. Imagine what those horses must have cost us.”
Charley nods, able to see the picture clearly, and pleased that Emma has chosen to share so much. “Was there more than just you and your mother, then?”
“My brother John died before I was born; he was only a year-and-a-half old, and Mother said it hit Papa hard. Sister—my sister Mary—was born a few months before John died, and then I came about two years after that.”
“So, where is Mary now?”
“She’s not with us anymore.”
“Ahh. I’m sorry.”
Emma throws away the shredded blade of grass. “No, I’m sorry. I make it sound as though she’s dead. She’s not. She lives in a home in New York. It’s very well kept and the people are kind to her. Mother makes sure of that.”
Charley can see that this is not the time to ask anything more. They both lean against the fence, and Emma holds her face up to the sun and breeze. The moment passes, and they both relax again. Charley watches her as she smiles at the chestnut gelding she was riding that first day.
“Maybe you and I can go riding one of these Sundays,” he suggests.
She gazes appreciatively at an Appaloosa one of the stable hands is exercising in the yard. “No, I’m done with riding. The day you saw me I had already decided was my last time.” She reflexively touches her hair. Emma can’t bring herself to say, I’m getting too old to ride.
Charley chuckles. “Imagine: if I’d been ten minutes later, or even just five.”
Emma nods. “We might never have met.”
They both push back from the railing, and continue walking. “Happenstance,” says Charley, shaking his head, “pure happenstance.”
cd
Another Sunday in late April, Charley invites her to go up on the new electric streetcar along the Seventh Street Road to a spot above Florida Avenue. Until just a couple years ago, Florida was called Boundary Road, and marked the edge of the city. Here though, the large tracts of farmland are even now beginning to give themselves over to the radiating avenues and squares that echo the L’Enfant city plan, if only a tiny bit at a time. They alight at a stop on the section of the road that the city has lately named Brightwood Avenue, a small strip on the much longer Seventh Street Road that continues into the deep countryside of Montgomery County.
Charley guides her along the unimproved roads, grateful that the weather has been dry. At Eighth and Flint Streets, an unpaved intersection, he stops in front of a large, partially cleared corner lot, already staked with flags at the property corners. He sees that Emma understands immediately, though there has been no discussion of a formal engagement, let alone a wedding date; there is no need. He starts: “I’ve saved a good bit so far, about half enough to buy the property outright, but I’m figuring it will take another year to do the rest and have the cash to build the house...I know it’s a little out of town, but I’d like to have room for a nice farm plot.”
She turns to him. “I have some money. Mother insisted I save as much as possible so that I would be able to take care of myself.”
He is vaguely ashamed to admit that he has calculated almost exactly this scenario to figure whether there is a hope of sealing this deal; it’s her unblinking grasp of the situation and immediate partnership in it that prove he’s been right about her.
Emma’s eyes are on the property as she turns over the possibilities. “When can you sign the papers?” she asks.
Charley considers her as she considers the land. How different she is than any other woman he has ever encountered. By nature, necessity, and tutelage, she is thoroughly practical. He can clearly imagine her out on the frontier, breaking ground for crops or mixing mud to fill the chinks in the cabin walls. He has long wished to be out there, in the wide-open spaces of the endlessly possible. It will do, though, to make this half-acre of cleared farmland at the edge of the city into its own little frontier homestead. He’s formed this vision in his head, and here is his pioneering woman, willing to pitch in and build it with him, who makes the vision complete.
cd
Mrs. Gamertsfelder sets the tray of lemonade on the small table in the kitchen garden and pauses for a moment. She loves to look at the neat rows of vegetables, thoroughly weeded, and the infant beans, sweet peas, and tomatoes already vining up the twig and twine trellises. They’ve already harvested some of the cool weather vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage. It’s still early in the prime growing season—the tomatoes have only just gone in—but she has great expectations of how it will go: the tomatoes will inflate to bursting in their skins, their appearance on the dinner table followed by their immediate disappearance, devoured by boarders who sorely miss the fresh fruits and vegetables they associate with home. She will even be able to make a few extra dollars by selling the surplus produce at the farm stand on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Mr. Schultz always welcomes her selling at his stand, since her produce is top notch and helps to keep the customers coming back. And the best part is that she doesn’t have to do a bit of it. It’s all Charley.
“Can I get you boys anything else?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. G. Your lemonade never needs accompaniment,” Charley tells her.
“Oh, go on with you,” she laughs as he winks at her.
Her boarders are polyglot. She has Swedes, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch; Germans, of course—she especially loves the boys who are fresh off the boat, who bring news and stories in the native tongue, untouched yet by the English they so desperately want to learn, from a homeland she hasn’t seen since girlhood. Every so often, she even rents to an Italian, as long as he is clean and comes with good references from an employer. But none of them are Charley, who immediately adopts her tiny garden as his own, expands it, and keeps it in sharp order. That Germanic instinct for military precision belies his easy-going cheerfulness and willingness to pitch in for her wherever he sees the need.
Mrs. G has taken in boarders since her husband died in the war, and her son in childhood from the whooping cough. So dashing as a young man, Niehls Gamertsfelder comes from a family of successful shipping merchants that builds the family home and business close by the bustling wharves of Georgetown’s port, and makes its money on a succession of high-value products: tobacco, wheat, coal, lumber. But the port of Georgetown gradually loses its shipping channel to silt and flood, and its business to the railroad and the infringing federal city; and the Gamertsfelder family loses its fortune and its sons to war, disease, and bad luck, until Hedda Gamertsfelder, nee Sheckles, a mere in-law, is the last one standing.
She rents every spare room in the big house, two and even three to a room, and only has one hired girl to help out, so it is all she can do to keep up with the cooking and cleaning. But she looks after all her boys with redirected maternal pride, and Charley has never heard her say a cross word, even when Gretchen manages to tip the whole soup pot over on the wood stove, in a single motion not only ruining dinner but ensuring that another cannot be prepared. At the time, though, even Mrs. G has to bite her lip to keep the words back.
Charley pushes back from his knees to his haunches and stands up to stretch. Joe, who has been bending over, stands upright with a groan. “I told you not to do that.”
“You always tell me not to do that.”
“Pig head.”
“Know-it-all.”
