Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
B ack in the apartment, Miss Taylor led Elsie into her new bedroom. As she’d mentioned earlier, the space looked like a whirlwind had passed through, depositing half-finished skirts to drape over the brass bedstead, and ruffling several lengths of fabric spread in the floor under the window. A large, overstuffed wardrobe gapped open. Shirtwaists of various colors hung from a long row of hooks.
“Goodness me.” Elsie glanced around, disconcerted by the mess. Her fingers itched to start tidying. Good thing Ma didn’t see this room! “Can I help you straighten up?”
“This is organized chaos.” Miss Taylor’s tone was matter of fact. “I actually know what I’m doing with everything. You neatening up would actually cause me to have to hunt for things, thus causing inefficiency.” She placed her hands on her hips and looked around. “I know it looks dreadful, and I promise my methods aren’t usually like this. However?—”
Elsie held up a hand. “You’ve been too busy and overwhelmed.” She echoed the dressmaker’s earlier words.
With a quick smile of agreement, Miss Taylor opened a drawer and pulled out a nightgown and a thick pair of stockings, handing them to Elsie. Then she moved over to the wardrobe, pushed some garments aside, and took down a well-worn, but still pretty, apricot-colored dressing gown, which she added to the pile in Elsie’s arms. “Ready for your bath?”
Thinking of bathing in a real bathtub made Elsie shiver with pleasant anticipation. “More than ready.”
With a chuckle and a tilt of her head to the doorway, Miss Taylor led the way into the main room. “Let’s see if you remember which is the bathroom key.”
“That’s easy.” Elsie took the single key from the peg.
“I don’t usually lock my apartment when I go to the bathroom and the outer door downstairs is locked. There’s no one else living here right now. Once there are more tenants, we’ll have to be more careful.”
They left the apartment, walked down the hall to the women’s bathroom, unlocked the door, and entered. “These are our shelves.” Miss Taylor brushed a hand inside one of the empty cubbyholes. “Depending on if there are other female tenants, we might only have three boxes each. But for now, you can take half and I’ll take half.
Curious, Elsie glanced at the cubbyholes holding Miss Taylor’s toiletries. She saw a bar of white soap. Several bottles of perfume. A silver comb, brush, and mirror set. A milk glass bottle with Pearl’s Lotion printed on the front. A small round container, which she knew from a similar one she’d seen at Mrs. Smithson’s, held powder.
“Leave your clothes here. You can pick one of the others to store your toiletries and such.”
"Toiletries?”
“Another French word for these items that make us neat and clean,” Miss Taylor explained. “But for now, you can use mine.”
Something else to acquire. Even with her generous wages, the thought of all she needed for this new life was suddenly daunting, especially for a young woman who’d been brought up prideful—to make do, to not accept handouts, to only owe money to the mercantile for absolute necessities.
“Here,” Miss Taylor leaned over the tub and inserted a plug into the drain hole. She twisted the right handle. Water gushed out. “Cold.” She eased back the handle, and then opened the other one. “Hot. You must wait a bit before the water comes out warm.” She glanced at Elsie with eyebrows lifted.
Elsie nodded that she understood.
Miss Taylor turned off the water. “I’ve found that moving the hot water handle this far,” she tapped one of the points, “and the cold, this far,” she touched a smaller point on the cold water handle, “makes for the perfect bath temperature. Hot enough to ease any muscle aches, but not so hot as to burn your toes. You may prefer hotter or colder.”
Elsie let out a sigh of pure anticipatory pleasure. “We have a tub that’s this big.” She made a circle with her arms. “I was about ten when I grew too big to sit in it. I kneel in a few inches of bath water that’s already been used for Pa and Ma, and Ricky. Ma pours a pot of water over me. I soap and scrub up real quick like. And then Ma pours another pitcher over me, two if I wash my hair.”
“Sounds like an arduous experience.”
“Carrying water from the well. Lots and lots of trips with the pail. Heating it in our two pots, one after another. I always like how I feel afterwards. But growing up, I dreaded Saturday bath nights, especially in the winter, which never made sense to me. Wasn’t like we were going anywhere on Sunday to need to get all cleaned up.”
“After this, you’ll no longer dread bathing.” Miss Taylor paused. “Well, maybe still in the winter.” She glanced at the small radiator. “We’ll have to see.”
“Going to feel strange to bathe on a Sunday.”
“You had a long dusty drive out here.” Miss Taylor offered her a bar of white soap taken from her cubbyhole.
Elsie stared at the perfectly formed bar, so different from the gray, misshapen lye lumps they used. “Is this Ivory soap?”
“‘All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia,’” Miss Taylor quoted from the Bible, a teasing light in her eyes. “‘Out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.’”
“Psalm 45:8.” Delighted, Elsie took the bar from Miss Taylor. “I love that verse.”
“The ivory palaces?”
“Yes. I’ve imagined them like Banker Livingston’s mansion, but all in white.”
Miss Taylor chuckled. “Palaces are much, much bigger than Mr. Livingston’s home. Depending on the place…think ten times bigger. Maybe twenty times or more.”
Elsie’s mouth gaped. Even her vivid imagination couldn’t help boggling over those immense numbers.
With a chuckle, Miss Taylor gently lifted Elsie’s chin to close her mouth. “Although, I’ve never seen a white one. However, I once attended a party at the American embassy in Rome and met a diplomat from India.”
Elsie didn’t know what an embassy was. A kind of palace, maybe. She knew India was an exotic, foreign country.
“He described the Taj Mahal to me.” Miss Taylor used both hands to make a bulb shape. “A huge, ivory —” she smiled at Elsie “—palace, with roofs shaped like this. An emperor…a type of king, built the palace as a memorial to the wife he dearly loved who died. They’re both buried there.”
Miss Taylor took a folded terry cloth towel and a small terry cloth square from the shelves and handed them to Elsie. “I’ll leave you to enjoy your bath.”
Relief flowed through Elsie. She hadn’t wanted to disrobe before the woman and expose the poor condition of her undergarments, gray and frayed from numerous washings, in spite of drying them in the sun.
Elsie held the towel to her chest. “I’ll enjoy every minute. I’ll soak till my fingers and toes wrinkle.”
With a laugh, Miss Taylor left the room.
For a moment, Elsie stood motionless, letting happiness flood her body. This day was better than any dream she’d had about working.
If Ma and Pa make me leave this job, I don’t know how I will bear it.
Despite relaxing in the bathtub, so much happened today that Elsie’s thoughts remained awhirl. Foremost among her musings was earning money and buying what she wanted and her family needed, as well as the primary drive to pay back Miss Taylor as soon as possible. Not being beholden to anyone was too firmly engrained into Elsie for her to be comfortable with the debt, necessary as it was.
While soaking in the bath, Elsie had come up with at least twenty things she wished to purchase—she’d put the idea of a Sunday best dress for herself into far future possibilities—and figured she’d better tidy up her mind by writing everything down. The idea of using a sheet of paper for an indulgence such as a list, instead of going over and over the items in her mind until she’d memorized them, felt so extravagant as to be almost wasteful.
Once dressed and back in her new bedroom, Elsie walked over to the small table under the window, with the decorative box holding stationery, an inkwell, and writing implements, and took a seat. Earlier, Miss Taylor had told her to feel free to use both.
Taking the top off the box, she searched among the pens and nibs for a pencil, to no avail. That left only a pen and ink, something she’d never used before. For a moment, she wished for the family slate and a piece of chalk, and then dismissed the idea. Even if Mary didn’t need them for her studies, keeping a list on a slate, not being able to use the surface for anything else, just wasn’t practical.
She lifted out the heavy cut-glass inkwell, opened the brass cap, and peered inside to see what looked like enough ink. She searched for a pen with the nib already inserted and pulled it from the box.
Gingerly, Elsie dipped the tip of her quill into the opening of the inkwell and began to write. The nib made a scratching noise on the paper. When she paused the pen, the ink pooled into a blot.
Oh, no. I’ve ruined the pristine paper. But she couldn’t be wasteful and take another sheet. Probably would mar that one, too. Hastily she lifted the pen, resting the nib on the interior edge of the inkwell, and glanced into the box at a black-spotted cloth, wondering if she should wipe off any excess ink. Deciding not to, she finished the sentence.
1. Pay back Miss Taylor for the new clothes.
She stopped for a few minutes to gaze adoringly at her new shirtwaist and skirt, hanging on hooks near the door and then started adding up hours and her rate of pay. Six weeks . She hoped her guess was correct.
2. Buy boots for Pa. One month for the cheapest pair. Six, seven weeks for ones of better quality. She wavered. Better quality would last longer. I’ll decide closer to the time.
Elsie paused her pen, thinking a sudden anxious thought. What if Ma and Pa don’t let me keep working when my month is up? I won’t be able to buy Pa’s boots!
She perked up, remembering that a month wouldn’t be long enough for her to repay Miss Taylor for all her new clothes. With their dread of debt, her parents would, at least, let her keep working until all was repaid. And by then, maybe they’ll have become used to my absence.
Another drop of ink slithered off the nib to splat on the paper. She let out an unladylike growl of frustration. Writing this list with a pen is harder than I thought.
Elsie debated which to add next, new shoes or a second shirtwaist. People will probably notice my waist more than my feet. Although she was reluctant to choose, she wrote down,
3. Make a second, frillier, shirtwaist .
Elsie figured she could sew a shirtwaist using one of Miss Taylor’s patterns in about a week.
She glanced at the sentence again, pleased she’d managed to write without making a blot. Looking down at her stocking feet, she added:
4. Buy new shoes. She thought of the shoes she’d seen in the mercantile and the price of her favorite pair. She sighed and wrote, One month after I buy Pa’s boots .
5. Make Ma a new dress, with puffed geego sleeves, (regardless of if she’ll scold.) Since Elsie would be fashioning the dress, the cost was merely the expense of the fabric and trimmings. She made a mental note to ask Miss Taylor how to spell geego .
6. New winter coat.
Elsie paused to think about her shabby, too small coat, and then added up her timeline so far. Almost five months. “Perhaps I’d better move purchasing a winter coat up to number four and change Ma’s dress to number five,” she said to herself. “Then Mary, who’s also outgrown her coat can have mine.”
I can give Ma the dress for Christmas. She stopped to daydream a bit about what Christmas could be like if she could afford gifts for everyone and let out a happy sigh. Extravagant Christmases had come to an end when she was ten. Her last grandparent died and there was no one to send them a box of presents.
Since then, Christmas usually meant a candy cane for Ricky, Mary, and her, and as special a meal as possible, complete with a pie. Sometimes, Ma had secretly managed to knit mittens or stockings for them all.
“Even if I can’t provide extravagance,” Elsie said aloud. “I can buy or make something for everyone, and that will be special enough.”
With another happy sigh, Elsie leaned back in the chair, satisfied with her list. A vision of wearing the gown on the statue in the shop came to her. But she firmly closed the mental door of her daydreaming. Practical new clothing was still more than she’d ever bargained for.
The months between now and Christmas are going to be so exciting.