“Mr. Kennec …” Surprised, he turned at the door. “Would your horse like a carrot?”
“You bet she would, Ma’am!” Jane handed him a fat one. “Maybe your little tyke like to give it to her? She’s real gentle, my Molly. No cause to fear she’ll nip him.”
So, Michael, with a little help from the iceman, fed his very first horse, touched her velvety nose and was in seventh heaven. From then on, next to his father and Ebbely, both of whom he adored, Mr. Kennec became the man he most waited to see.
Jane had the best time with her icebox. Every day was another festive occasion. Just lifting out a bottle of milk, still pourable—not curdled to a gelatinous stinking muck—was cause for celebration, not to mention the taste of butter, not turned rancid. Now she could even keep meat for more than a few hours in summer and, after she had plucked and singed a chicken, keep it for cooking the next day! She found that just having food keep seemed to give her more time to do what before had to be neglected. Next to Hannah, Jane’s icebox became her very best friend.
Not wanting to neglect her education, once she had finished reading Mr. Emerson, whom she secretly hoped never to have to read again, she borrowed a book from Zoltan by one of his favorite Russian writers. Now, each day, she finally had the time to read it. She liked the way it was written so much, she resolved to learn Russian one day so that she could read Anna Karenina in its original form and, perhaps then, understand more clearly why emotion, particularly the one of brooding passion, seemed so terribly important.
Jane didn’t mention any of this to her husband, fearing he might discourage her choice of reading matter or, worse, replace it with another example of what he and the Boss considered suitable. She didn’t question that Henry Ford was a genius, but if that necessarily encompassed intellectual acumen, she was beginning to doubt. Jane had her eye on a book that Rumpelstiltskin owned. The rotogravure on its flyleaf, of a man standing up on a thrashing whale in a violent sea had caught her fancy. Surely that had to be an exciting story but, when she found the chance to ask if he would lend it to her, the little man shook his head, saying that Moby Dick could not be considered proper reading matter for a lady, so, very disappointed, she asked Zoltan if he would lend her one of his Russians instead.
Mornings became crisp—the smell of fallen leaves was in the air when Jane finished her Russian romance, rather sorry she had been right about its central character. Killing oneself for love was not to Jane’s taste. Suicide, on the whole, she thought was a self-indulgent act. This had nothing to do with the Church’s condemnation of it. Jane’s judgment lay in her belief that supreme egotism was necessary to execute such an act of self-annihilation, without regard to its tragic influence on those left behind.
Had someone told Jane that her intelligence did not always fit her simple origins or station, she would not have known what they were talking about, for she didn’t know that she was intelligent. Her inner need to learn that drove her, she recognized as only an appendage to her need for self-betterment which, in turn, represented to Jane the logical progression to longed-for freedom. If once achieved what form such liberation would take, what she would do with it and why this should be so all-important in the first place, she did not analyze, nor would she have been able to. In Jane’s day, one did not delve into one’s psyche. Such indulgent, mystical elitism was the private realm of poets and philosophers.
Mostly Jane came to her conclusions through instinct, completely unaware that it was her intelligence that guided it. The nuns had taught her well, but as they so often seem to do, in reverse. By their very insistence that unassailable rote, not questioning, was education, they had taught Jane to always do so.
She kept most of her arrived-at opinions to herself, devoured any book she could get her hands on and wished she, like the men, had interested friends to discuss things with. She missed those stimulating evenings spent eavesdropping in the Geiger parlor. The boarders, talking about their work, the exciting things she had listened to and learned. John rarely spoke to her of his work and, except for his precious Miss Evangeline, probably considered all women lacked the mental capacity necessary to understand things mechanical and so Jane never asked, thereby avoiding him telling her so. At most Sunday suppers, she now found herself relegated to the circle of wives busy in the kitchen whose topics of conversation centered mostly around food, children, and household costs. Sometimes there were snippets of Ford gossip but these too concerned home and family. How young Mr. Edsel, so handsome, now all grown, would soon have to marry, have sons to carry on the great name of Ford, speculations on who he would choose to be his lucky bride and how she would have to be a most refined young lady of whom the Boss and his Missus Clara could approve. The latest news of the great Ford mansion fast nearing completion, that they were always eager to discuss.
Jane was far more interested in hearing about the great power house that Ford had built for himself to operate all electrical and mechanical systems for his vast estate. This marvel was rumored to be so magnificent, its construction and design so advanced that it was said even Mr. Edison, when taken through it, had been duly impressed. Sometimes, when the talk veered towards fashion, Jane’s interest was caught but its range was limited to standard articles of clothing and what mail-order catalogs had to offer. Inquiring privately of the other Ford wives what their husbands might have told them of new and exciting things happening at the plant was useless. As Serafina was the only one who knew the art of driving, Jane had hoped she might be her best source for automotive news, but spells and potions were usually uppermost in Serafina’s mind and now that she too was expecting, her concentration was fully focused on producing a male heir worthy of his awesome Rumanian-Sicilian blood line and the name she had chosen for him, Guido Salvatore.
Of all the Ford wives, Hannah would have been the best informed, but even she believed that machines and men belonged together, needing no female interference. Jane, left to her own devices, resolved to keep her eyes and ears open, find a way to keep up with what was happening at the Ford plant, all by herself. For Jane, a little house in Highland Park was not the world nor marriage a completed universe.