2. Going Home
Chapter two
Going Home
Following An’s advice, Clem had picked up the house key from Henry the next morning and spent the early afternoon rambling around the old home.
It didn’t feel as empty as she expected, everything still where she left it last, nothing essential had changed.
Someone aired the place out, made up her bed, and stocked the cupboard, making the place feel like home, and welcoming. She settled back in.
An was right. Having her own belongings around her, she felt rich in a way she hadn’t since leaving home.
She looked around her childhood room. There were her ice skates, the old notebooks with her first poems, skis, and boots.
Her father changed nothing. He left all her things just where she left them.
Inside the closet she found every dress, skirt, and shirtwaist left behind.
Clem would burn those, even if they were beautiful and tailored for a woman as large as a man.
Too bad she didn’t know any other women that big.
An flitted through her mind. But maybe a man just the right size to be a large woman?
Clem went through her father’s wardrobe, picking out the best pieces.
They wouldn’t suit a miner’s life, but she would need a gentleman’s clothing once she hit a rich claim and became an important businessman in San Francisco.
She bought an expensive bottle of wine, then spent an entire evening trying pants, jackets, hats, shoes, gloves, and other accouterments on in different combinations, modernizing, and creating several looks from what he had.
The next day, she went shopping with some of her inheritance and purchased fine shirts and underwear to go with them.
Books and papers lay in stacks in every room of the large house, gathered without apparent rhyme or reason.
She received a note from the Boston Library explaining that her father agreed to donate his collection of every issue of the Boston Daily Journal, which they’d like to collect as soon as possible.
But the weekly editions, like everything else, lay scattered in various rooms, his collection in serious disarray.
It took time to sort through the clutter of a human life spent writing.
She started in his bedroom and every week moved to another room, sorting the BDJ issues into chronological order.
Over twenty years of publications, only two were missing — the ones her articles appeared in. It was the ultimate insult to injury.
She threw herself across her childhood bed, lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. God damn him! Those articles were good. She shook her head. They were good. Why wouldn’t he admit it?
Clem might have completed the Tom Dennison Collection of his Boston Daily Journal, she owned several copies of the removed issues, but she left it missing the parts with her in it, just as her father left her out of his life.
She sighed as a whimsical thought hit her. She should move to France, change her name, and write about her affairs with women. With the money she banked mining gold, and her annual fifteen percent of the newspaper’s profits, she could move to Europe.
But why? She’d still be the same Clem there, no good as a woman, still hiding who she is, and doing it without speaking the language. It would be better to go home.
But where was that? Wasn’t she lying in her old room in the house she now owned, moping around like she was a teen, staring at the same spot on the ceiling, and wishing for answers she couldn’t find? Wasn’t this home?
No, this was her father’s house, where she stayed when she wasn’t at school.
He had no interest in her, never cared to know who she was.
She played sports; he hired instructors and coaches.
She competed and won, he never attended a tournament or race.
The only thing they shared in common was a love of writing, which he refused to acknowledge. He orphaned her long before he died.
Clem realized she had known the answer for a while. Her home was in California, where she was a successful prospector and author. She was going back to live and work with Barney, and visit her two favorite girls at Lady Jane’s.
She had ridden to Independence as fast as possible after reading Jim Burdock’s letter about her father’s stroke. Traveling light on horseback without a wagon, taking a six-horse stagecoach for a leg, and a newer, faster steam engine got her to Boston in half the time it took to reach California.
But she would return west by wagon train.
Sleeping on the ground around campfires surrounded by men was noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable.
Passing as a man in her own private wagon was the best way to keep her secret.
And the articles she wrote about prospectors and the other people she met along the trail during her first trip across sold well.
This time, Clem would look at the journey from a different perspective, perhaps that of a pioneer searching for a place in the wide open west to start a farm.
It would be great research for future articles, or even a novel if she could write one.
Her mind made up, Clem used the new telegraph to join a late-season wagon train leaving Independence, Missouri, for California.
After what happened to the Donner Party last winter, she would have waited until spring, but the wagon master was Jed Cushing.
After surviving together on their first crossing, she trusted him.
Cushing planned to arrive in California by Christmas and, because of time constraints, he recommended Clem purchase a Studebaker wagon constructed in Independence, ready to pack when she arrived. The last train of the year would leave mid-August, which gave her only weeks to finish up in Boston.
Telegraph lines didn’t extend past Missouri, so she sent a letter to Barney Finkle in care of Sacramento General Post, telling him of her plans to return.
She asked him to sell back her claim rights, but keep whatever he’d mined in her absence.
Clem figured they’d live together again as they had before she up and left.
In the last week of July, the house almost empty, she donated the incomplete collection of the Boston Daily Journal to the library, noting the dates of the two missing issues.
Deciding to give them the bulk of Tom Dennison’s personal library also, she gathered all of his books together, stuffing them into boxes.
To her surprise, every publication with one of her poems was among them.
She didn’t give them to him, didn’t know he had them.
Clem put them in her ‘take’ pile of personal items. It included the best of her father’s clothing, which fit her well, and her mother’s wedding dress, which did not fit her but he’d saved it all these years for her wedding.
During the first two weeks of August, she sold the rest of the household belongings, authorized auctions, and made charitable donations in her father’s name. She ordered a tombstone with this inscription:
Devoted Father and Husband of Clementine Lorelei
It was vindictive and childish, but accurate. “Here’s the same back at’cha, Dad.” She left written instructions for Jim to have a new one made and erected after a year, but until then to leave it standing as a little reflective humiliation.
When her father published her second story as Dennis Tines about finding gold in California, she thought he’d change his mind, and admit she could write as well as a man. But maybe that’s what set him against her. God damn him, and his stubborn pride.
She proved her point, but hadn’t considered how he’d take being deceived by his own daughter.
Her two articles — the first about the dangers she faced crossing the trail, and the second about hard-working prospectors risking everything to search for placer gold and the rich men exploiting their labor — caused the Journal’s circulation to soar.
But when she wrote to him explaining Dennis Tines was her pen name, instead of offering his daughter well-deserved praise, he wrote a letter she burned after reading, it was so blistering.
She never heard from him again. Clem received news of his stroke in the next post, and would always wonder if her revelation caused it.
Several times a week she received invitations to dine with Jim and An, which she never turned down. They were delightful company, stimulating conversationalists, and had a unique vision of the world, both cosmopolitan and humble.
“It was the fuming fury of that last letter, and selling the business out from under me.” Clem shook her head over an after-dinner wine, smoking a cigar.
“I cannot figure out his reasoning, or his reaction. Dad was always so distant, unimpressed by any of my achievements. This reaction was unlike any I ever provoked from him.” She blew a smoke ring.
“He never explained his reasoning to me and it wasn’t my business to question his decisions, but I will tell you he made arrangements to sell the newspaper a year ago, when the doctor first told him his heart was weak.
” Jim shook his head. “I thought it was odd at the time. He’d never mentioned the idea before, but lined up the purchaser himself, and gave me instructions to complete the sale, with the provision for your annuity, several months before his stroke. ”
“He decided to sell the newspaper so I couldn’t run it before he found out I was Dennis Tines?” Clem shook her head. “I knew he wasn’t pleased with my choices, but I never suspected his anger went this deep.”