He was going to say that his father had a cough but he didn’t want Aldine to write only out of concern for him. Clare started the letter over, leaving his father out of it, and the part about him loving her. He sent the letters care of the Emporia, Kansas, Harvey House, and he checked at the Fallbrook post office whenever he could to see if she had written back.
“You and your dad are the waitingest pair,” the postmaster said one afternoon in May. Bart Crandall had a lazy eye, a limp, and a twisted hand. It was quite a package, in Clare’s opinion. Little kids were scared of him even though he was always passing out candy. Butterscotch usually, but saltwater taffy today. Bart had managed to court and marry a plump woman named Florrie, who worked for Western Union, so they knew everybody’s business, just like the telephone operators in Kansas.
“Waitingest?” Clare asked, twirling open a taffy wrapper.
“Both coming in, checking for General Delivery,” Bart said. “I sure hope the money comes for you.”
“It’s not money,” he said. Bart Crandall nodded and waited and Clare said, “We lost track of somebody back in Kansas.”
“Family?” Bart Crandall asked.
“Mmm,” Clare said, nodding, while the postman smiled and studied him and waited. Clare put the taffy in his mouth as a kind of stopper. He began to chew.
“Cousin of some kind?” Bart Crandall asked.
Clare shrugged and pretended to laugh and pointed at his mouth full of taffy. Before making for the door he bawled a thank-you that resembled a sound that Yauncy Tanner might make. That seemed about right to Clare. Because in letting Bart Crandall fish facts out of him, he had been an idiot and a swell one at that.
52
The snow started falling on Emporia after passengers left on the 2:24 westbound. It fell on the lead-dark tracks, on the roofs and windows of parked cars, and on the hunched shoulders of men and women caught out in the weather. The quiet that always descended in the wake of train departures, a slow, tired cleaning of plates, tables, and floors, was deepened by the whiteness outside, as if the snow were a sleep that invited them all.
“Dreaming about Los Angeleez?”
Glynis’s raspy voice from behind. It gave Aldine a start.
“No,” she said, “not at all.” She glanced out. “Though the snow falling on the street like that puts me in mind of Ayr.”
Glynis gave a cheerful little laugh and said, “Well, kid, stop dreamin’ and get crackin’,” before heading off with a bin of dirty dishes. It was a line that Gilbert Dorado used. Mr. Dorado had been Ansel’s friend, and Mrs. Price’s, too, when she was still Eleanor Hoffman. Mr. Dorado was nice, but he moved from restaurant to restaurant and always called Aldine “our fair lass” because he had never learned her name.
In the beginning it felt odd to be called “kid” by a girl younger (and shorter!) than herself, but Glynis’s steady everyday friendship and her confident certainty in all matters of conduct had altered Aldine’s view of her, and made it more accommodating. Still, Glynis traded on confidences, both the giving, which she yielded readily, and the getting, which she sought relentlessly. She’d pointed out to Aldine the purveyor of sheet music who had last summer, by means of a note written on a coaster, suggested a riverside “rendezvous” and she told her about the railroad man who came in twice a week and after his meal would withdraw from his vest a packet of off-color postcards and then select one to leave for his waitress, “which,” Glynis said, “I will not say did not sometimes amuse me but then he left one that could not be abided.” Aldine felt obliged to ask the nature of the offending card. “Too offensive,” Glynis returned. “I cannot say.” But of course she did. “You’ve got a safari tent occupied by newlyweds. Flap’s closed, see, so it’s dark inside but a curious elephant slips his trunk inside and the bride in happy surprise exclaims, ‘Ye Gods, Charlie!’” Glynis’s tone was disapproving. Aldine wanted to laugh—it was the kind of thing that in their younger days she and Leenie might’ve laughed themselves sick at—but she couldn’t laugh now because of Glynis’s somber presentation of it all. “Next time I waited on him I told him to eat his dinner and keep his filthy cards to himself. “You see, don’t you?” she said to Aldine but didn’t wait for a reply. “If my father and mama taught me one thing,” she said, “it’s that you have to draw a line or the men will run roughshod.” This was a common theme for Glynis, who returned time and again to the tragedy of her sister.
As much as Glynis needed to tell her stories, Aldine preferred to conceal her own.
About her own sister, she had been very brief. “I lived with her in New York before I came to Kansas,” she said. When letters came for Aldine—four or five from Clare and two from Ansel—Glynis asked, “From your sister?” and Aldine just shook her head and tied them together with a pink ribbon she found left behind in one of the booths at the Harvey House. She hadn’t wanted to share the letters, but Glynis had prompted so relentlessly that Aldine finally read them aloud. She started with Clare’s letters because they required no explaining. “He sounds sweet as molasses,” was Glynis’s response after the last one, “and almost as slow.”
“No, he can recite anything,” Aldine said, and began rewrapping the letters, but Glynis said, “What about the others?” so there was nothing for it. She lifted Ansel’s onionskin page out of the slit-open air mail envelope, and tried to keep her hands from trembling.
“Dear Aldine,
If I had not kissed you or declared how I felt, there would have been no wrong in insisting that you come with us to a place where you’d be among friends. Please let me know if you get this letter because then I’ll know Gilbert’s watching over you all right.
Ansel”
“Oh, Gilbert would watch over you all right,” Glynis said with a sniggering laugh, “if he was ever here. But it’s such a sad, beautiful letter . . . Why did Ansel have to go to California?”
“Work. His farm was failing and he had work out there.”
Glynis lay silent and still for a minute on her bed opposite Aldine. Then she said, “What did he mean by ‘coming with us.’ Who’s ‘us’?”
Aldine pretended she didn’t know. She said Ansel had a brother he was close to, and to change the subject said, “I guess I should tell him that Gilbert has a different job now.”