Dreamers of the Day Read Free

happened to her? Something awful?
    I wanted to keep Mumma safe. Young and useless as I was, I tried to help but succeeded only in wearing out her threadbare patience. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh. “It’s easier for me to do it myself than to take the time to teach you.”
    Looking back, I am sad to realize that I never thought about keeping Papa safe; it never occurred to me to worry about that benign but absent figure. When at last he had worked himself into an early grave, the business was out of debt. Mumma took over, bereaved but eager to put her own ideas into play. “Your father was not a fool,” she told us children on the way home from the funeral, “but he had no head for business.” And Mumma certainly did.
    Her first move was to renegotiate arrangements with suppliers. “Thank you for your consideration,” she’d tell them in her small, sweet voice. “There are those who’d be happy to take advantage of a poor widow with three children to support.” Once she’d struck a bargain, her brother, John, wrote ironclad contracts to enforce the deal. “No more handshakes,” Mumma told us grimly. “Those weasels will cheat you every chance they get.”
    I gladly accepted my duties as the “little mother,” as the phrase of those times had it. I was proud to be trusted at last with household duties for which Mumma had no time. I cleaned and cooked and mended as best I could, gratified that I was less a burden to her than before and that I could sometimes make our dear mother’s life easier. If she was too tired to notice my efforts or rated them poorly done, it was only because she worked so hard for us at the factory and she had high standards for everyone.
    I was the eldest child, born a year before Ernest and three years before our sister, Lillian. Of Lillie Mumma would often say, “We saved the best for last.” And who could disagree? Strawberry blond and spritely, Lillian was like fireworks: bright and quick and colorful. She was a precocious chatterbox at two, following me around the house like a puppy and talking all the while. Once, when she was not quite three, we stood hand in hand, watching Ernest burn trash out back. I remember this so clearly! Lillie pointed at the sparks that rose skyward from stirred embers and piped, “Look, Agnes! Baby stars.”
    I adored her, but our brother was not so charmed. Lillian was fearless at four and took Ernest on in sibling squabbles, quoting from the Bible as she boldly scolded him for striking her because he simply could not think fast enough to hold his own in argument. At five, she wrote a letter to God, asking Him to take good care of Papa; her penmanship was already better than Ernest’s. She skipped first grade, sailed through second, and won the spelling bee that year, competing against her elders. When she skipped a grade again, Ernest sulked, humiliated by a younger sister who was his equal or better in all things academic, but I was grateful for her precocity. She would read aloud from my textbooks while I washed dishes or hung out laundry. Without Lillie’s help, I never could have stayed in school.
    By fourteen, I could see my life laid out before me. While Mumma ran the business, I would keep house for her and Ernest and Lillie. Later, I would become the sort of maiden aunt who lived in a spare bedroom and helped in the raising of nieces and nephews.
    Marriage seemed out of the question—even then, when I was so young. You see, Ernest and Lillie were handsome persons with Mumma’s red-gold hair and Papa’s bright blue eyes. I shared their coloring and—in favorable light, from certain angles—a similar cast of feature, but for me, you must imagine a young Eleanor Roosevelt: bucktoothed, weak-chinned, strong-minded, with a father’s bony angularity in place of a mother’s delicate prettiness.
    But Eleanor married,
you might protest.
Why, her husband became president!
    Add, then, my freckles, considered a dreadful defect in those days.