Love and Other Consolation Prizes

We are all a bit worse for wear, Ernest mused.

After he parked, Ernest fed the meter a dime and donned his hat. He walked briskly across the old red-brick plaza now known as Red Square, toward the old Geyser Basin, which had been remodeled and renamed Drumheller Fountain. Ernest used the reflecting pool as a compass to orient himself. The trees had added the growth of fifty summers and the view of Mount Rainier wasn’t quite as spectacular as he remembered, but if he squinted he could almost recall the grand vista, the cascading waterfalls that had now been replaced by an unadorned walkway. Now the Court of Honor, the massive Government Building, and the Grand Cupola atop Denny Hall were gone. And most of the turn-of-the-century buildings had been replaced by brick structures of a more modern era, designed to please school administrators instead of visitors from faraway countries.

Students milled about, bicycling from class to class, hurrying from building to building, kissing and making out on the wet grass.

As Ernest baptized himself in memory, he searched for the surviving buildings that he could remember from his days at the fair. A few of the big halls remained, but their Doric columns were now a patchwork of repairs. He kept walking until he finally found the marble steps of a modest building that looked like its two stories had sprouted up in a thicket of tall trees. The sign read CUNNINGHAM HALL, renamed after the famous Seattle photographer, but Ernest remembered standing atop those steps surrounded by elderly matrons of the Woman’s Century Club and the Daughters of Saint George, raffled off like the strange, peculiar novelty he was.

He stood there for a moment and looked up at the blanket of wet gray flannel that passed for a Seattle sky, sensing mist on his cheeks, the fresh smell of rain, and the sobering cold that came before the first drops of a heavy spring cloudburst. He watched the hermit sun peek out from behind the clouds, then disappear as though saying goodbye, farewell, nice knowing you. And he heard a low rumble of thunder as though timber were splitting and then falling in some faraway forest.

Then he spotted Juju, who waved and crossed the parkway. He watched her fondly, knowing that she didn’t just want to meet him at the site of the first world’s fair—she wanted to follow him into the past.

Ernest buttoned his coat and walked down the steps, as he’d done five decades earlier.

“I thought you might have stood me up,” Juju said as she met him halfway. They found a quiet, somewhat dry park bench beneath the thick canopy of a red madrona.

“I was tempted,” Ernest confessed. He sat next to her and watched Mount Rainier disappear as rain began to dapple the ground.

“To do what?” Juju teased. “Run away from your fatherly duty of giving Hanny away in marriage to Lantern Jaw Legal Services of Las Vegas, Nevada?”

Ernest nodded. “That too, now that you mention it.” He listened to the thrum of the rain on the leaves above them as the sprinkling turned to drizzle. “I take it you met?”

“I had breakfast with Rich and Hanny this morning. Interesting fellow. I get it. Hanny’s not the youngest girl on the block anymore, and her clock is ticking.” Juju rolled her eyes. “Then Han came over for a while by herself. Mom recognized her right away, which was amazing…and surprising…and wonderful. Plus Mom keeps talking to me more and more—bits of real, salient conversation. She hasn’t been this engaged in—forever. She even suggested we go out for dinner tonight, if you can believe that.”

Ernest was as delighted as he was terrified.

“So, I was thinking,” Juju said. “We could introduce her to Rich at Ruby Chow’s, which was always Mom’s hangout of choice—order all her favorite dishes. We can go a few hours early, before the dinner rush. We can sit near the exit in one of those private booths in the back. She hasn’t been there in years, but Ruby’s staff has known Mom forever, they know all about her condition.”

Not exactly, Ernest thought. “Are you sure that’s not too much for her?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Juju said as she opened a notebook and licked the lead of her pencil. “It’s more of a baby step—like you telling me what I need for my article.”

“I suppose,” Ernest said as the drizzle turned to heavier rain. “Do you know what they’d say back in my day? That it wasn’t just raining…it was raining pitchforks and mud turtles. Things were so different then…”

“That’s the understatement of the year! Especially considering they thought it was okay to raffle off a little boy.” Juju found a blank page in her notebook. “I want all the details that you can recall—no matter how small or insignificant you think they might be. Because, face it, you’re about to become the biggest story of the Century 21 Expo—no one is going to believe this actually happened. Plus my editor bet me a hundred bucks that I couldn’t get you to talk, so there’s that too.”

“Do I get half if I’m a willing participant?” Ernest asked.

“Absolutely,” Juju said. “Though we might have to split it three ways if Mom opens up tonight and starts talking as well.”

Ernest nodded. He thought about Hanny and Rich. About Maisie and the Tenderloin. “Should be a night to remember.”





PRECIOUS JEWEL


(1909)



Jewel’s coming-out party was indeed a grand affair. Ernest had experienced nothing so spectacular during his first month. Not on the normal, frolic-filled weekends, not when Madam Flora had a man from the Seattle Astronomical Society place telescopes on the roof so the girls could watch shooting stars, and not even when she’d hired a seven-piece chamber orchestra to play Vivaldi in the grand parlor to celebrate the autumnal equinox. Ernest supposed that the closest he’d come to such extravagance was reading Great Expectations, in which the wealthy and eccentric Miss Havisham had hosted such lavish parties.

Madam Flora had arranged to have out-of-town guests stay at the newly built Sorrento Hotel, where welcome baskets awaited them and a perfumed note from Jewel rested on each of their pillows. She then had the gentlemen picked up in style and delivered to the Tenderloin by 8:00 P.M. Ernest manned the door, politely greeting dozens of men who arrived in carriages and limousines dressed in their evening finery. Ernest took their top hats, made of gossamer and fur, and their polished canes and silver-handled walking sticks, and waited for the final name on the guest list, Hiram Gill, president of the Third Ward, patron of the First, and charismatic head of the Seattle City Council. He was the last to arrive, and everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know who he was as they called out his name and offered to buy him a drink or a cigar when he stepped out of a chauffeured sedan. Ladies working the street corners shouted, “Looking good, Mr. Councilman, if you run for mayor you got my vote, darling!” Though they couldn’t vote—not anymore.

Ernest held the door as Hiram Gill smiled and waved, then sauntered inside and loudly proclaimed, “The esteemed Clara Laughlin likes to say that ‘well-regulated work is the best kind of fun.’ Well, ladies and gentlemen of Seattle, I’m afraid dear Clara got it backwards. I say that well-regulated fun is the best kind of work!”

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