After the bad time with Bart Crandall, Clare limited his visits to the post office to once a week, on Saturday, when it was easy to walk into town. He would offer Bart Crandall no further information about the person they’d lost track of in Kansas. He just approached the counter, took a taffy or butterscotch, and waited for Bart Crandall to say, “Nothing this week,” or “What’s the name I should be looking for?” to which Clare just gave a friendly nod before departing, but one day in May the dreary sequence was finally undone. The moment Bart Crandall caught sight of Clare coming through the door, he raised an envelope and held it out for him.
McKenna, the return address said. Harvey House Emporia Kansas.
“Thanks,” Clare said. He tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. He bet it was in his face, though.
“Is this the relative—A. McKenna?” Bart Crandall asked.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Clare said. If he had to say something, this was the answer he’d practiced to say. He’d learned it from Mr. McNamara, and it was a good one. He grabbed a butterscotch from the saucer, thanked Mr. Crandall, and was gone.
The town’s small library was housed in the clubhouse of the Fallbrook Women’s Club. Clare went inside, took several books from a shelf, then sat at a desk removed from regular traffic. Tearing open the envelope seemed ungodly loud, but no one shushed him, and he wouldn’t have cared if they did.
Dear Clare, the letter said.
I am well and happy and I thank you for asking. I appreciate hearing all your news especially about your family. I am glad that all of you are happy in California which sounds like paradise itself. She went on in this neutral tone for several more sentences before signing, Your teacher (and friend), Aldine McKenna.
A postscript was then added. If Charlotte has taken any photographs of each of you in California I would love to have some for my scrapbook.
Clare touched his finger to the paper she’d held in her hands and written on and even brought the stationery close to his nose but there was nothing of her in its scent. It was restaurant stationery. Harvey Houses, it said at the top, Civilizing the Old West.
He read the letter three times. After that he knew it word for word, but there weren’t really any words for him. The only thing with meaning was the P.S. Aldine had never had a scrapbook, as far as he knew. And photographs of each of you. Not of all of you. A picture of his father. That’s what she wanted.
He waited three days to write back. Be cheerful, he told himself. Cheerful and chatty.
Dear Aldine,
Neva misses you but she is much better, even I can tell. This makes all of us happy especially my mother but all of us really. I might go back to school in the fall but right now my father and I pick fruit all day and can eat all we want. The strangest of our news concerns Charlotte who is dating a regular adult man about town. Doesn’t that beat all? Mr. McNamara’s tall and skinny with no hair whatsoever, forty years old at least, and he wears little gold rimmed glasses in the shape of hexagon or maybe octogon. I keep waiting for my father to put an end to it, but he hasn’t yet. Mr. McN’s taken Charlotte for 3 rides in his fancie Packard once all the way to the ocean and Ida says he’s the catch of the town, kind of like the king here. She said if Mr. McNamara didn’t have bigwiggy (her word) friends up north, Fallbrook never could have built such a fine big school. She said he got the funds because he was at Stanford U. with Congressman Somebody or Other. We all like it here, especially Charlotte and my mother who never mention Kansas except to say they’re never going back. Neva misses you, I can tell you that, and I miss Kansas a lot myself though of course not a bit as much as my father who I think will die if he doesn’t get back.
He’d written that last sentiment almost without thinking, and he knew at once how much it might mean to her, and then—he couldn’t help himself—he added, I guess you always had your heart set on my dad.
He shouldn’t have added that. It was a mistake and a sorry one at that. But he was at the bottom of a full page. He wasn’t going to rewrite a whole new letter. He was ready to be done with it. He addressed it to A. McKenna, and under Yours always, he signed his name as she’d always said it: Clarence. Then he dropped it into the drab green corner mailbox.
56
All that spring Ellie was aware of Ansel’s restlessness and disquiet. He worked steadily, resolutely picking fruit in the orchards—Hurd had told her this—and was polite but spoke only when he had to. He ate his lunch with Clare but Clare told her that he often gave him half his lunch. He wasn’t hungry, he said. He’d begun smoking cigarettes, too. In the late afternoon after his work shift, he would sit on a rock in the shade beyond the blue-bottle tree where an arroyo—that was what the locals called it—afforded a long downsloping view to the east. For hours he would sit there with the dog and smoke and look off. He couldn’t like it here. She understood this as she might understand the troubles of a bear brought to a place without winter. It was as if the rhythms of these hours and shadows and seasons were not his, and never could be. She understood this, but allowed herself not to care, just as he had allowed himself not to care when she was imprisoned by the farm.
She had been looking for a place for them to rent. While Ansel scanned the newspapers for news about rainfall and farm yields in Kansas, she browsed the House for Rent advertisements. She told Ida that she didn’t see any reason to leave a town where she only needed to dust the furniture once a week, and where if you set a cup of coffee down on the counter, you didn’t come back to find it covered with the topsoil of your neighbor’s wheat field. They ate like royalty, especially on the weekends, when she and Ida made any number of elaborate meals: fresh corn chowder, say, with pickled beets, strawberry salad, and a ham stewed in kumquats the color of the sun at twilight.