"—and the man at the garage would say, 'I'm so sorry, Dr. Thatcher, I know it's an emergency, but we just can't get the blasted thing started.'"
"Do you think so?"
"I think it's a possiblity. Now those two horses out there—" He pointed through the window to our stable. "They always start!"
I giggled. Father was right. We didn't need a Ford motorcar. Neither did the Bishops, really; it was just that Mr. Bishop loved new and astounding things.
Father locked the cabinet where he kept the medicines and put the key back into his pocket. I continued looking through the window toward the stable at the end of our backyard.
"Sometimes Jacob comes to the stable," I told Father suddenly.
"Jacob Stoltz?" Father turned from straightening his desk. He looked surprised. "Levi told me once that he'd seen him looking at our horses."
"Yes. Peggy's brother. He comes a lot. He doesn't hurt anything. He likes the horses."
Father smiled. "He has a horse on his own farm. Maybe he needs to get away from the farm now and then. What he likes is the roaming."
"And me," I pointed out. "I think he likes me. He gave Goldy to me."
"Of course he likes you, Katydid. Everyone does. Come now. Mother's waiting." He locked the office door behind us and we walked around to our front door. On the way, Father said, "The Stoltzes have some trouble in their family, Katy. Maybe you've noticed that Peggy seems upset."
I nodded. I had noticed. "Is it about Nellie?"
"Yes."
I did not understand what had happened. But Nellie had left the Bishops quite suddenly in July. Austin had told me. Austin said that Nellie had packed her things and left, and she was crying. No one would talk about it, not even Peggy. But Nell Stoltz was gone.
"Did she go to New York to be in the pictures, Father? Like Mary Pickford?"
Father frowned. "No, Katy. What ever made you think that? Nellie Stoltz won't ever be in the pictures."
"She wanted to."
"Well, it was a dream she had, perhaps. But she's gone back to the farm."
"But she doesn't like the farm! She never even went to visit!"
Father made an odd snorting sound. "Well, she's visiting there now," he said. "But, Katy? I don't want you to talk about Nell to Mother or to Peggy. They're already upset."
"The Bishops are upset, too. Last week I heard Mr. Bishop shouting at Paul, and then Paul went out the back door and slammed it hard. It woke Mary from her nap, the slam."
"You know," Father said, "it occurs to me that's why his father bought the motorcar: to take their mind off things. Mmmmm. I smell soup."
Father hung his coat in the front hall and we went in to supper. Following him to the table, I wondered what he meant by things.
14. SEPTEMBER 1911
Gram had gone back to Cincinnati when summer ended, as she did each year, though this time she said it was harder to go because of Mary. The baby had two teeth in the bottom of her mouth now, and a big, frequent smile. The day before she left, Mr. Bishop set up his camera once again to take a picture of Gram holding Mary. It was next to impossible to make the baby sit still, and at the last minute Laura Paisley insisted on climbing up as well, so that Gram's lap and arms were filled with babies. She said the weight was nothing compared to the joy of it.
School began in September, and my teacher was gray-haired Miss Moody, who sang in the choir at the Presbyterian church so that I saw her on Sundays as well, which seemed strange. Even stranger, Miss Moody had been my mother's third-grade teacher, twenty-five years before! On our very first day of school, Miss Moody looked at me and said, "You are Caro MacPherson's little girl, aren't you?" and for a moment I did not know what she meant. Then I remembered that my mother, though now she was Caroline Thatcher, had once been Caro MacPherson. So I said, "Yes, ma am" to Miss Moody, and she directed me to what had once been my mother's desk! Imagine, that she had remembered all those years! Even my mother was amazed, when I told her.
Austin, Jessie, and I were all in third grade now. We walked together each morning until we reached the corner where the school was; then Austin went off to be with the boys and to go in the boys door. Jessie and I walked around to the girls'. The three of us would not be friends again until the end of the day, back in our own neighborhood.
The Bishops had a new hired girl, a sister of Levi's named Flora. She was shy and nervous, not at all playful, which was a disappointment. Nellie had teased a lot and made us all laugh, but Flora did the housework silently, with her head down, and barely spoke. She was good with Laura Paisley, though, taking her for walks, and I saw them sometimes, hand in hand, and saw that Flora talked then, as if she felt comfortable with someone three years old in a way that she otherwise did not.
I remembered Flora from my school. She had been in sixth grade when I was in first, and I remembered that she had friends then, and gossiped with the other big giggling girls on the playground while we little ones played our recess games of tag and hide-and-seek.
But now Flora had left school to go to work and help her fatherless family.
And someone else had left school as well. Austin's brother, Paul, should have been in his last year of high school this year, but he had gone away. He hadn't wanted to. It was what the shouting, the noisy arguments with his father that I had overheard, had been about. When September came, Paul's things were packed into trunks and then the trunks were lifted into the Ford motorcar and Mr. Bishop drove him to the train station. Their faces were both like stone and they did not speak to each other. On their porch, Mrs. Bishop cried, and Austin waved goodbye. Then Paul went off by train to a boarding school in Connecticut.
"It's a very fine school, Katy," Mother said, when I asked her why Paul had been made to go so far away. "It will prepare him to go to Princeton like his father, and to become a lawyer eventually. Many boys go off to boarding school if their families have the means."
It was a school, she said, only for boys, and I wondered how Paul would feel about that, because he was quite the flirt. I knew he and Nellie had been sweet on each other, but Paul had taken another girl, one from the high school, to the spring cotillion in June, and bought her a camellia corsage. Austin had told me that Paul and the girl won the prize for the Turkey Trot, and Nellie had been very angry when she heard of it, but Paul had laughed at her.