Half Broke Horses

III PROMISES

Lily Casey with Patches

THE DIRT ROAD RUNNING west from Tinnie was an old Indian trail packed down and widened over the years by wagon wheels and horse hooves. It followed the Rio Hondo through the foothills of the Capitan Mountains north of the Mescalero Apache reservation. The land in those parts of southern New Mexico was easy on the eyes. Cedars grew thick. From time to time I saw antelope standing at the riverbank or bounding down a hillside, and occasionally, a few skinny range cattle wandered by. Once or twice a day Patches and I passed a lone cowboy on a gaunt horse, or a wagonful of Mexicans. I always nodded and said a few words, but I kept my distance.

Late each morning when the sun got high, I looked for a shady spot near the river where Patches could graze on the short grass. I needed rest, too, to keep my wits about me. A walking horse could be as dangerous as a galloping one, since the easy rhythm could lull you into drowsing off just as a rattler darted into your path and your mount spooked.

When it started to cool, we moved on again and kept going until it got dark. I’d make a sagebrush fire, eat some jerky and biscuits, and lie in my blanket, listening to the howling of the distant coyotes while Patches grazed nearby.

At each town-usually a small collection of wood shacks and adobe huts, a single store, and a little church-I bought the next day’s food and chatted with the storekeeper about the road ahead. Was it rocky? Any riffraff I should avoid? Where was the best place to water and camp?

Most of the storekeepers were happy to play the expert, giving me advice and directions, drawing maps on paper bags. They were also happy to have someone to talk to. At one lonely place, the store was deserted except for the owner. The shelves were lined with a few dusty tins of peaches and bottles of liniments. After paying for a bag of hardtack, I asked the storekeeper, “How many customers have you had today?”

“You’re the first this week,” he said. “But it’s only Wednesday.”

I rode from Hondo to Lincoln to Capitan to Carrizozo, where the road wound down out of the hills into the flat, burnt stretch of desert known as the Malpais. There I headed north, the big Chupadera Mesa rising up out of the desert floor to my left. I reached the Rio Grande at a small town called Los Lunas. It wasn’t much of a river there, and a Zuni girl ferried me across in a raft, pulling us along with a rope that ran from one bank to the other.

West of the river was a bunch of Indian reservations, and one day I met up with a half-Navajo woman on a donkey. I figured she wasn’t much older than me. She wore a cowboy hat, and her thick black hair spilled out from under it like mattress stuffing. She was heading in my direction and we fell in together. She introduced herself as Priscilla Loosefoot. Her mother, she said, had traded her to a settler family for two mules, but they had beaten her and treated her like an animal, so she’d run away and now scratched out a living collecting and selling herbs.

That night we pitched camp in a grove of juniper trees off the road. I took my cornmeal from my saddlebag, and Priscilla got out some fat-back wrapped in leaves. She mixed the cornmeal and fatback with water and some salt she kept in a leather pouch, shaped a short stack of Indian cakes on a flat rock, and fried them on another flat rock she’d placed in the fire.

A lot of Navajos were quiet, but Priscilla was a real talker, and as we sat there licking our fingers while the fire died down, she went on about what a good team we’d make and how maybe we should travel together and she’d teach me how to identify herbs.

After a while we drifted off to sleep, but something woke me in the middle of the night, and I found Pricilla quietly going through my saddlebags.

The pearl-handled revolver was in my boot. I pulled it out and held it up so Priscilla could see it in the moonlight.

“I got nothing worth stealing,” I said.

“I figured you didn’t,” Pricilla said. “But I had to make sure.”

“I thought you said we made a good team.”

“We still could if you don’t hold this here against me. Thing is, I don’t get a lot of opportunities, and when one comes along, I gots to take it.”

I knew what she meant, but still, I didn’t care to wake up and find her gone and Patches with her. I stood up and gathered my bedroll. “You stay here,” I said.

“Sure thing.”

There was just enough moon to make out the road. I saddled up Patches and moved on alone.

I crossed into Arizona at the Painted Cliffs, red sandstone bluffs that rose straight up out of the desert floor. After another ten days of steady riding, I reached Flagstaff. Its hotel advertised a bathtub, and since I was feeling pretty ripe at that point, it was mighty tempting, but I kept going and two days later arrived at Red Lake.

I’d been on the road, out in the sun and sleeping in the open, for twenty-eight days. I was tired and caked with dirt. I’d lost weight, my clothes were heavy with grime and hung loosely, and when I looked in a mirror, my face seemed harder. My skin had darkened, and I had the beginnings of squint lines around my eyes. But I had made it, made it through that darned door.

RED LAKE WAS A small ranch town on a high plateau about thirty miles south of the Grand Canyon. The range sloped away for miles, to both the east and the west, giving you the feeling that you were at one of the world’s high points. The land here was greener than the parts of Arizona I’d passed through, with thick grass that grew so high it tickled the bellies of the cattle that grazed there. For as long as anyone could remember, the range around Red Lake wasn’t used for much of anything other than grazing, but farmers had recently discovered it, and they came in with their plows and well diggers and high hopes to do the backbreaking work that was needed to bring up crops as green as the grass that grew there. Those farmers brought big families with them, and their kids needed teaching.

Shortly after I arrived, the county superintendent, Mr. MacIntosh, rode up from Flagstaff to explain the situation. Mr. MacIntosh was a slight man with a head so narrow he reminded me of a fish. He wore a fedora and a stiff white paper collar. Because of the war, he explained, men were joining the army and women were leaving the countryside to take the high-paying factory jobs the men had left behind. But even with the shortage of teachers in rural areas, the board wanted the certified teachers to have at least an eighth-grade education, which I didn’t have. So I was to teach in Red Lake until they could hire a more qualified person, and then I’d be sent somewhere else.

“Don’t worry,” Superintendent MacIntosh said. “We’ll always find a place for you.”

Red Lake had a one-room schoolhouse with an oil stove in a corner, a desk for the teacher, a row of benches for the kids, and a slate blackboard that made me especially happy, as a lot of schools lacked them. On the other hand, a lot of one-room schools had a teacherage attached, where the teacher lived, but the one in Red Lake didn’t, so I slept on the floor of the school in my bedroll.

Still, I loved my job. Superintendent MacIntosh hardly ever came around, and I got to teach exactly what I wanted to teach, in the way I wanted. I had fifteen students of all ages and abilities, and I didn’t have to round them up because their parents, eager for them to learn, brought them to the school on the first day and made sure they kept coming back.

Most of the kids were born back east, though some came from as far away as Norway. The girls wore faded floor-length gingham dresses, the boys had chopped-up haircuts, and they all went barefoot in warm weather. Some of those kids were poorer than poor. One day I stopped by the house of one of my Walapai students, and they were cooking up beef with little bugs crawling in it.

“Careful,” I said, “that meat is full of maggots.”

“Yes,” the mother said, “but the maggots are full of meat.”

We had no textbooks, so the kids brought whatever they had from home-family Bibles, almanacs, letters, seed catalogs-and we read from those. When winter came, one of the fathers gave me a fur coat he’d made from coyotes he’d trapped, and I wore it in the schoolroom during the day, since my desk was far from the oil stove, which the kids were all huddled around. Mothers made a point of bringing me stews and pies and inviting me to Sunday dinner, when they’d even set out a white tablecloth as a sign of respect. And at the end of every month I picked up my paycheck from the town clerk.

Halfway through the year, Superintendent MacIntosh found a certified teacher for Red Lake, and I was sent on to another little town called Cow Springs. For the next three years, that’s how Patches and I lived, moving from one town to another-Leupp, Happy Jack, Greasewood, Wide Ruin-after a stay of a few months, never putting down roots, and never getting too close to anyone. Still, all those little rascals I was teaching learned to obey me or got their knuckles rapped, and I was teaching them things they needed to know, which made me feel like I was making a difference in their lives. I never met a kid I couldn’t teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day.

Then the war ended. One day not long after I’d turned eighteen, Superintendent MacIntosh caught up with me to explain that, with the men all returning home, women were being laid off at the factories in favor of the veterans. Many of those women were certified teachers who were looking to get back their old jobs. Some of the boys coming back from overseas were teachers, too. Superintendent MacIntosh said he’d heard glowing things about my work, but I hadn’t even finished eighth grade, much less earned a high school diploma, and besides, the state of Arizona needed to give priority in hiring to those who’d fought for their country.

“So I’m getting the boot?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, your services are no longer needed.”

I stared at the fish-faced superintendent. I’d figured this day might come sooner or later, but I still felt like the floor had fallen out from under me. I knew I was a good teacher. I loved it and even loved traveling to all these remote places where no one else wanted to teach. I understood what Mr. MacIntosh was saying about needing to help out the returning troops. At the same time, I’d busted my behind teaching all those wild and illiterate kids, and I couldn’t help feeling a little burned about being told by Fish Face that I was now unqualified to do something I’d spent the last four years doing.

Superintendent MacIntosh seemed to know what I was thinking. “You’re young and strong, and you got pretty eyes,” he said. “You just find yourself a husband-one of these soldier boys-and you’ll be fine.”

THE RIDE BACK TO the KC seemed to take about half as long as that first journey out to Red Lake, but that’s the way it always is when you’re heading home through familiar territory. The only adventure occurred when a rattler parked itself under my saddle one night, but it reared back and zipped off, doing those wildfire wriggles, before I could get out my gun. And then there was the airplane. Patches and I were heading east near the Homolovi Ruins, some fallen-down pueblos where the Hopis’ ancestors had once lived, when we heard the putt-putt of an engine in the sky behind us. I looked back, and a red biplane-the first I’d ever seen-was following the road east a few hundred feet above the ground.

Patches started to scutch about at the strange noise, but I held her in, and as the plane approached, I took off my hat and waved. The pilot dipped the plane’s wings in response, and as it passed us, he leaned out and waved back. I kicked up Patches and we galloped after the plane, me flapping my hat and shouting, though I was so excited that I had no idea what I was trying to say.

Never in my life had I ever seen anything like that airplane. It was amazing that it didn’t just fall out of the sky, but for the first time it dawned on me-Eureka!-what the word “airplane” meant. That was what it did. It stayed aloft because it was planing the air.

I only wished I had some students to explain all this to.

ALL THAT TIME I was teaching, I had never gone home, since the trip took so long. People say that when you return to the place where you grew up, it always seems smaller than you remember. That was the case with me when I finally reached the ranch, but I don’t know if it was because I had built it up in my memories or I had gotten bigger. Maybe both.

While I was away, I did write the family once a week and in return received long letters from Dad waxing eloquent and purple about his latest political convictions yet providing few details about how they were faring, and I wondered if the family had managed to keep it all together. But the place looked well run, the fences in repair, the outbuildings freshly whitewashed, a new clapboard wing on the main house, a big supply of split firewood neatly stacked under the porch roof, even a bed of hollyhocks and sunflowers.

Lupe was out front scouring a pot when I rode up. She gave a shriek, everyone came running from the house and barn, and there was a whole lot of hugging and happy tears. Dad kept saying, “You left a girl and you come back a woman.” He and Mom both had strands of gray in their hair, Buster had filled out and grown a mustache, and Helen had become a willowy sixteen-year-old beauty.

Buster and Dorothy had gotten married the year before. They lived in the new wing of the house, and it soon became clear to me that Dorothy was more or less running the place. She oversaw the kitchen, bossing Lupe around something fierce, and handed out the daily work assignments for Buster, Apache, and even Mom, Dad, and Helen. Mom complained that Dorothy had gotten a tad high-handed, but I could tell they were secretly glad to have someone doing what I used to do.

Mom’s biggest concern was Helen. She had reached marrying age, but pretty as she was, that girl just lacked get-up-and-go. Mom worried that Helen might be suffering from neurasthenia, a vague ailment wealthy women got that made them want to lie in a room all day with a wet cloth over their eyes. Helen was happy to sew and bake pies, but she hated any kind of work that made her break into a sweat or gave her hands calluses, and most of the Rio Hondo ranchers looking for wives wanted a woman who could not only cook and clean house but also help out with branding calves and drive the chuck wagon during roundup. Mom’s plan was to send Helen to the Sisters of Loretto-hoping that with a little polish, she’d attract a citified man in Santa Fe-but Dorothy argued that all the earnings from the ranch needed to be reinvested in machinery to raise crop yields. Helen herself was talking about how she’d like to move to Los Angeles and become an actress in the movies.

The morning after I returned, we were eating breakfast in the kitchen, Mom passing the teapot around. I’d developed a taste for coffee in Arizona, but Dad still allowed nothing stronger than tea on the ranch.

After cleaning up, Dad and I walked out onto the porch. “You ready to get back in the corral?” he asked. “I got a couple of new saddlebred fillies that I know you can work wonders with.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“What do you mean? You’re a horsewoman.”

“With Dorothy in charge, I’m not sure there’s a place for me here anymore.”

“Don’t go talking nonsense. You’re blood. She’s just an in-law. You belong here.”

But the truth was, I didn’t feel I did. And even if there was a place for me, it was not the life I wanted. That plane that had flown overhead at the Homolovi Ruins had got me to thinking. Also, I’d seen a number of automobiles in my years in Arizona, and they gave me a sinking feeling about the future prospects for carriages-and carriage horses.

“You ever think of getting yourself one of those automobiles, Dad?” I asked.

“Consarned contraptions,” Dad said. “No one’ll ever look as smart in one of those fume belchers as they do in a carriage.”

That got him going about how President Taft had taken this country in the wrong direction by getting rid of the White House stables and replacing them with a garage. “Teddy Roosevelt, now, there was a man, the last president who truly knew how to sit a horse. We’ll never see his like again.”

As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I’d been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

Another thing that airplane made me realize was that there was a whole world out there beyond ranchland that I’d never seen, a place where I might finally get that darned diploma. And maybe I’d even learn to fly an airplane.

So the way I saw it, I had two choices: stay on the ranch or strike out on my own. Staying on the ranch meant either finding a man to marry or becoming the spinster aunt to the passel of children that Dorothy and Buster talked about having. No man had proposed to me yet, and if I sat around waiting for one, I could well end up as that potato-peeling spinster in the corner of the kitchen. Striking out on my own meant going someplace where a young unmarried woman could find work. Santa Fe and Tucson weren’t much more than gussied-up cattle towns, and the opportunities there were limited. I wanted to go where the opportunities were the greatest, where the future was unfolding right before your eyes. I wanted to go to the biggest, most boomingest city I could find.

A month later, I was on the train to Chicago.

THE RAILROAD RAN NORTHEAST through the rolling prairie to Kansas City, then on across the Mississippi and into the farmland of Illinois, with its green fields of closely planted corn, tall silos, and pretty white-frame houses with big front porches. It was my first train trip, and I spent much of it with the window down, sticking my face out into the onrushing wind.

We traveled through the night, and even with stops for refueling and to pick up and let off passengers, the trip lasted only four days, whereas it had taken Patches, packer though she was, an entire month to go less than half that distance.

When the train pulled into Chicago, I took down my little suitcase and walked through the station into the street. I’d been in crowds before-county fairs, livestock auctions-but I’d never seen such a mass of people, all moving together like a herd, jostling and elbowing, nor had my ears been assaulted by such a ferocious din, with cars honking, trolleys clanging, and hydraulic jackhammers blasting away.

I walked around, gawking at the skyscrapers going up everywhere, then I made my way over to the lake-deep blue, flat, and as endless as the range, only it was water, fresh and flowing and cold even in the summer. Coming from a place where people measured water by the pailful, where they fought and sometimes killed each other over water, it was hard to imagine, even though I was looking at it, that billions of gallons of fresh water-I figured it had to be billions or even trillions-could be sitting there undrunk, unused, and uncontested.

After gazing at the lake for a long while, soaking up the sight of it, I followed my plan: I found a Catholic church and asked a priest to recommend a respectable boardinghouse for women. I rented a bed- four to a room-then I bought the newspapers and looked at the help-wanted ads, circling possibilities with a pencil.

The next day I started searching for a job. As I walked the streets, I found myself staring at people’s faces, thinking, So this is what city folk look like. It wasn’t so much their features that were different, it was their expressions. Their faces were shut off. Everyone made a point of ignoring everyone else. I was used to nodding when I caught a stranger’s eye, but here in Chicago they looked right through you, as if you weren’t there at all.

Finding work was considerably harder than I had expected. I had hoped to get a position as a governess or a tutor, but when I admitted that I didn’t even have an eighth-grade education, people looked at me like they were wondering why I was wasting their time, even after I told them about my teaching experience. “That may be fine for sod busters,” one woman said, “but it won’t do in Chicago.”

The sales jobs at department stores all required experience, and mine was limited to my penny-an-egg deals with Mr. Clutterbuck. Businesses were advertising for clerks, but even as I stood in the long lines to fill out the forms, I knew I wasn’t going to get the job. With all the soldiers returning home and all the girls like me pouring in from the countryside, there was too much competition. My money started running low, and I had to face the fact that my options were pretty much limited to factory work or becoming a maid.

Sitting in front of a sewing machine for twelve hours a day didn’t strike me as much of a way to get ahead, whereas if I worked as a maid, I’d get to know people with money, and if I showed enough initiative, I might be able to parlay that position into something better.

I found a job pretty quickly working for a commodities trader and his wife, Mim, on the North Side. They lived in a big modern house with radiator heat, a clothes-washing machine, and a bathroom with a sunken tub surrounded by mosaic tiles and faucets for hot water, cold water, and icy drinking water. I got there before dawn to make their coffee by the time they woke, spent the day scrubbing, polishing, and dusting, and left after I’d cleaned the dinner dishes.

I didn’t mind the hard work. What bothered me was the way that Mim, a long-faced blond woman only a few years older than me, treated me as if I didn’t exist, looking off into the distance when she gave me the day’s orders. While Mim seemed very impressed with herself, acting terribly grand, ringing a little silver bell for me to bring in the tea when she had visitors, she wasn’t that bright.

In fact, I wondered if anyone could really be such a dodo. Once a French woman with a toy poodle came for lunch, and when the dog started barking, the woman spoke to it in French. “That’s a smart dog,” Mim said. “I didn’t know dogs could speak French.”

Mim also did crossword puzzles, constantly asking her husband the answers to simple clues, and when I made the mistake of answering one, she shot me a short, sharp look.

After I’d been there two weeks, she called me into the kitchen. “This isn’t working out,” she said.

I was stunned. I was never late, and I’d kept Mim’s house spotless. “Why?” I asked.

“Your attitude.”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing. But I don’t like the way you look at me. You don’t seem to know your place. A maid should keep her head down.”

I got another job as a maid pretty quickly, and although it was against my nature, I made a point of keeping my mouth shut and my head down. In the evenings, meanwhile, I went to school to get my diploma. There was no shame in doing hard work, but polishing silver for rich dunderheads was not my Purpose.

Busy as I was, and pretty exhausted most of the time, I loved Chicago. It was bold and bawdy and very modern, though bitterly cold in the winter, with a wicked north wind that blew in off the lake. Women were marching for the right to vote, and I attended a couple of rallies with one of my roommates, Minnie Hanagan, a spunky Irish girl with green eyes and luxurious black hair who worked in a beer-bottling plant. Minnie never met a topic she didn’t have an opinion on or heard a comment she couldn’t interrupt. After working all day as a zip-lipped maid, keeping my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the ground, it was great to unwind with Minnie by arguing about politics, religion, and everything else under the sun. We double-dated a couple of times, factory boys squiring us around to the cheaper speakeasies, but they were usually either tonguetied or loutish. I had more fun talking to Minnie than I did to any of those fellows, and sometimes the two of us went off and danced by ourselves. Minnie Hanagan was the closest thing I’d ever had to a genuine friend.

Minnie asked me what my birthday was, and when it rolled around- I was turning twenty-one-she gave me a tube of dark red lipstick. It was all she could afford, she said, but we could make ourselves up to look like real ladies and go to one of the big department stores, where we’d have fun trying on all the things we’d be able to buy one of these days. I’d never been one for makeup-few women were in ranch country-but Minnie applied it for me, rubbing a dab into my cheeks as well, and darned if I didn’t look a bit like a stockbroker’s wife.

Minnie led me through the department store. It was as big as a cathedral, with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, pneumatic tubes that whooshed the customers’ money from floor to floor, and aisle after aisle after aisle of gloves, furs, shoes, and anything else you could possibly imagine buying. We stopped at the hat department, and Minnie had me try on one after another-little hats, big hats, hats with feathers, hats with veils or bows, hats with artificial flowers arranged along the wide brims. As she sat each one on my head, she’d evaluate it-too old-fashioned, too much brim, hides your eyes, this one belongs in your closet-and as the hats piled up on the counter, a salesclerk came over.

“Are you girls able to find anything in your price range?” she asked with a cold smile.

I felt a little flustered. “Not really,” I said.

“Then maybe you’re in the wrong store,” she said.

Minnie stared at the woman square on. “Price isn’t the problem,” she said. “The problem is finding something up-to-date in this dowdy stock. Lily, let’s try Carson Pirie Scott.”

Minnie turned on her heel, and as we walked off, she told me, “When they get high-handed, all you have to do is remind yourself that they’re just hired help.”

AFTER I’D BEEN IN Chicago for almost two years, I came home from work on a July evening to find one of my other roommates laying out Minnie’s only good dress on her bed.

Minnie, she said, had been at the bottling plant where she worked when her long black hair got caught in the machinery. She was pulled into these massive grinding gears. It was over before anyone nearby even had time to think.

Minnie was supposed to wear her hair up in a kerchief, but she was so proud of those thick, shiny Irish tresses-they made every man in Chicago want to flirt with her-that she couldn’t resist the temptation to let them down. Her body was so badly mangled that they had to have a closed-coffin funeral.

I loved that girl, and as I sat through the service, all I could think was that if I’d been there, maybe I could have rescued her. I kept imagining myself chopping her hair off, pulling her back, and hugging her as we sobbed happily, realizing how close she’d come to a gruesome death.

But I also knew that even if I’d been right there-and somehow happened to have had a pair of scissors in my hands-I wouldn’t have had time to save her once her hair got tangled up in the machine. When something like that happens, one moment you’re talking to the person, and then you blink and the next moment she’s dead.

Minnie had spent a lot of time planning her future. She had been saving her money and was confident she’d marry a good man, buy a little house in Oak Park, and raise a boisterous brood of green-eyed kids. But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.

There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.

I didn’t expect to like my new short hair, but I did. It took almost no time to wash and dry, and I didn’t have to fuss with curling irons, hairpins, and bows. I went around the boardinghouse with the scissors, trying to talk the other girls into cutting their hair, pointing out that even if they didn’t work in a factory, the world today was filled with all manner of machinery-with wheels and cogs and turbines-that their hair could get caught up in. Long curls were a thing of the past. For us modern women, short-cropped hair was the way to go.

Indeed, with my new haircut, I felt I looked the model of the Chicago flapper. Men took more notice of me, and one Sunday while I was walking along the lakefront, a broad-shouldered fellow in a seersucker suit and a straw boater struck up a conversation. His name was Ted Conover, and he’d been a boxer but now worked as a vacuum-cleaner salesman for the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. “Get a foot in the door, toss in some dirt, and they gotta let you demonstrate your product,” he said with a chuckle.

I knew from the start that Ted was a bit of a huckster. Even so, I liked his moxie. He had quick gray eyes and a lumpy nose-a souvenir from his boxing days. He also had a ruddy-faced vitality and, as Minnie would have put it, the gift of gab. He bought me a snow cone from a street vendor, and we sat on a bench by a pink marble fountain with frolicking copper sea horses. He told me about growing up in South Boston, catching rides on the backs of trolley cars, stealing pickles from the pickle man’s wagon, and learning to throw a knockdown punch in street fights with the dagos. He loved his own jokes so much that he’d start laughing halfway through them, and you’d start laughing, too, even though you hadn’t heard the punch line yet.

Maybe it was because I was missing Minnie and I needed someone in my life, but I fell hard for that fellow.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, TED took me to dinner at the Palmer House hotel, and after that we started seeing each other regularly, though he was often out of the city for days at a time because his sales territory stretched all the way to Springfield. Ted always liked to be in a crowd, and we went to ball games at Wrigley Field, movies at the Folly Theater, and prizefights at the Chicago Arena. I smoked my first cigarette, drank my first glass of champagne, and played my first game of dice. Ted loved dice.

Late in the summer, he showed up at the boardinghouse with a bathing suit he’d bought for me at Marshall Field’s, and we took the train down to Gary, where we spent the afternoon swimming in the lake and sunbathing in front of these big sand dunes. I didn’t know how to swim, since I’d never been in anything much deeper than the puddles left by the flash floods, but Ted taught me how.

“You’ll have to trust me,” he said. “Just relax.”

And he held me in his arms as I floated on my back. It was true, I could do it. When I relaxed my body, I stopped sinking and rose up toward the surface until my face broke through and the water actually supported me. Floating. I’d never known what it was like.

About six weeks after I met Ted, he took me back to the fountain with the sea horses, bought me another snow cone, and, as he gave it to me, planted a diamond ring on top. “A piece of ice that I’m hoping will make you melt,” he said.

We got married in the Catholic church I’d visited when I first came to Chicago. I wore a blue linen dress I borrowed from one of the girls at the boardinghouse. Neither of us could take time off for a honeymoon, but Ted promised me that one day we’d go to the Grand Hotel, this spectacular resort on Mackinac Island at the top of Lake Huron.

That afternoon we moved into a boardinghouse that took in married couples, and we celebrated in our room with a bottle of bathtub gin. The next day I went back to my job as a maid, and Ted hit the road.

I didn’t wear my diamond ring to work, keeping it instead in a little silk pouch under our mattress, but I worried about it being stolen. I also worried that Ted had paid more for it than he could afford.

“Relax and learn to enjoy life a little for a change,” he said.

“But it’s such an extravagance,” I said.

“It would have been if I’d paid retail,” he said. “Truth is, it’s got a little heat on it.”

Ted assured me he hadn’t actually stolen the ring, he just had connections who had connections who knew how to get things through the right channels. In this world, he liked to say, connections were all that mattered.

I HAD NEVER WANTED someone to take care of me, but I found that I liked being married. After so many years on my own, I was sharing my life for the first time, and it made the hard moments easier and the good moments better.

Ted always encouraged people to think big, to dream big, and when he found out that my great ambition had always been not just to finish high school but to go on to college, he told me I might even want to think of getting a Ph.D. When I told him of my dream to fly a plane, he said he could see me becoming a barnstorming stunt pilot. Ted was full of plenty of schemes for himself, too-how he was going to manufacture his own line of vacuum cleaners, build radio antennas out in the prairie, start a telephone company.

We decided we’d put off having kids and squirrel away money while I finished night school. When the future came into better focus, we’d be ready for it.

Ted was away a lot, but that was fine with me because I was busy with work and night school. To save money, we ate a lot of saltines and pickles, and reused tea bags four times. Busy as we were, the years passed quickly. When I was twenty-six, I finally got my high school diploma. I began looking for a better job but was still working as a maid when, one summer morning, crossing the street while carrying an armload of groceries for the family whose house I kept, a white roadster with wirespoked wheels came tearing around the corner. The driver slammed on the brakes when he saw me, but it was too late. The grille upended me, and I went rolling across the hood, scattering the apples, buns, and tins that I’d been carrying.

I instinctively went soft as I tumbled off the hood and onto the street. I lay there for a moment, stunned, as people rushed over. The driver jumped out. He was a young man with slicked-back hair and two-tone shoes.

Slick started insisting to everyone that I had stepped out into traffic without looking, which was a darned lie. Then he knelt down and asked if I was okay. The accident looked worse than it was, and lying there, I could tell I had no serious injuries, only bruised bones and some nasty scrapes on my arms and knees.

“I’m fine,” I said.

But Slick was a city boy, not used to seeing women take hard spills, then get up and walk away. He kept asking me how many fingers he was holding up and what day of the week it was.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I used to break horses. One thing I know how to do is take a fall.”

Slick insisted on taking me to the hospital and paying for the examination. I told the nurse at the emergency room I was fine, but she told me I was a little more banged up than I seemed to believe. While filling out her forms, the nurse asked if I was married, and when I said yes, Slick told me I should call my husband.

“He’s a traveling salesman,” I said. “He’s on the road.”

“Then call his office. They’ll know how to get in touch with him.”

While the nurse put mercurochrome on my scrapes and bandaged me up, Slick found the number and gave me a nickel for the pay phone. As much to put his mind at rest as anything else, I made the call.

A man answered. “Sales. This is Charlie.”

“I’m wondering if there’s any way you can help me track down Ted Conover on the road. This is his wife, Lily.”

“Ted ain’t on the road. He just left for lunch. And his wife’s name’s Margaret. Is this some kind of prank?”

I felt like the floor was tilting underneath me. I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up.

SLICK WAS BAFFLED BY the way I rushed out of the phone booth past him, but I had to get away from him and out of the hospital to clear my head and try to think. I kept fighting panic as I made my way to the lake, where I walked for miles, hoping the still blue water would calm me. It was a sunny summer day, and lake water lapped at the promenade’s stone wall. Had I misheard Charlie or imagined what he’d said? Was there an explanation? Or had I been two-timed? There was only one way to find out.

The Electric Suction sales office was in a five-story cast-iron building near the Loop. When I got to the block, I fished a newspaper from a trash can and took up a position in a lobby across the street. As five o’clock approached, people began pouring out onto the sidewalks, and sure enough, my husband, Ted Conover, joined them, walking out the door of that cast-iron building wearing his favorite hat-the one with the jaunty little feather-tilted at a rakish angle. He’d clearly fibbed about being out of town, but I still didn’t have the full story.

I followed Ted at a safe distance as he made his way through the crowded streets over to the El. He climbed the stairs and so did I. I stood at the far end of the platform with my nose in the newspaper and boarded the train one car behind him. At every stop, I stuck my head out to watch and saw that he got out at Hyde Park. I followed him a few blocks east to a shabby neighborhood with walk-up apartment buildings that had sagging wooden staircases in the back.

Ted went into one of them. I stood outside for a few minutes, but he didn’t appear at any of the windows, so I went into the vestibule. None of the mailboxes had names on them. I waited until some kids came out, then slipped through the open door into the hallway. It was dark and narrow and reeked of boiling cabbage and corned beef.

There were four apartments on each floor, and I stopped at every door, pressing my ear against it, listening for the sound of Ted’s South Boston accent. Finally, on the third floor, I heard it booming out over a couple of other voices.

Without knowing exactly what I was going to do, I knocked. After a couple of seconds, the door opened, and standing in front of me was a woman with a toddler on her hip.

“Are you Ted Conover’s wife, Margaret?” I asked.

“Yes. Who are you?”

I looked at this woman Margaret for a moment. I figured that she was about my age, but she seemed tired, and her hair was going gray before its time. Still, she had a wan, careworn smile, as if life was a struggle but she managed from time to time to find something to laugh about.

Behind her I could hear a couple of boys arguing, then Ted’s voice saying, “Who is it, honey?”

I had an almost overwhelming temptation to push past Margaret and gouge out that lying cheater’s eyes, but something held me back- what it would do to this woman and her kids.

“I’m with the census,” I said. “We just wanted to confirm that a family of four is living here.”

“Five,” she said, “though sometimes it feels more like fifteen.”

I forced myself to smile and said, “That’s all I need to know.”

I WAS ON THE El going back to the boardinghouse, trying to figure out what in the blue blazes to do now, when I suddenly thought about our joint bank account. I stayed up all night, sick with worry about it, and was waiting in front of the bank when the doors opened. Ted and I had salted away almost two hundred dollars in an interest-bearing savings account, but when I got to the teller, he told me there were only ten dollars left.

I got back to the boardinghouse and sat down on the bed. I was surprised by how calm I felt. But as I packed my pearl-handled revolver in my purse, I noticed my hands were trembling.

I took a bus to the Loop and walked up the stairs of the cast-iron building to Ted’s office. I pushed open the frosted glass door. Inside was a small, dusty room with several old wooden desks. Ted and another man sat at two of them, their feet up, reading newspapers and smoking.

As soon as I saw Ted, I lost every bit of ladylike decorum my mother had tried to instill in me. I became a wild woman, lighting into that two-timing thief, cursing and screaming-”You no-good low-down dirty lying scum-sucking son of a bitch!”-and whaling him with my purse, which, since I had my six-shooter in it, meant I was giving him a pretty good pistol whipping.

Ted had his arms up, trying to defend himself, but I got in some solid blows, and his face was bleeding by the time the other guy pulled me off. I then turned on him with my purse and whacked him good once before Ted grabbed me. “Calm down or I’ll drop you with a roundhouse punch,” he said, “and you know I can.”

“You go ahead, buster, you hit me and I’ll charge you with assault as well as robbery and bigamy.” But I stopped struggling.

The other fellow grabbed his hat. “I see you two have a few things to discuss,” he said, and slipped out the door.

Everything came exploding out of me then: why had he lied to me, why had he married me when he already had a wife and three children, why had he taken the money that we were supposedly saving for our future together, were there any other lies I hadn’t discovered, why hadn’t he just left me alone that day he first saw me beside the lake?

As Ted listened, his expression went from defiant to hangdog to downright mournful, and finally, his eyes welled up with tears. He’d taken the money because he’d run up some gambling debts and the dagos were after him, he said. He’d hoped to be able to pay it back before I even noticed. Margaret, he said, was the mother of his children, but he loved me. “Lily,” he said, “lying was the only way I could have you.”

The louse was acting as if he expected me to feel sorry for him.

“It’s my fault,” he said. Then he reached out and actually touched my hand, adding, “By loving you, I’ve destroyed you.”

The bum sounded like he was about to blubber up. I pulled my hand away.

“You have a mighty high opinion of yourself,” I told him. “The fact is, you don’t love me, and you haven’t destroyed me. You don’t have what it takes to do that.”

I shoved past him, slamming the door on my way out, then turned and swung my purse against the frosted glass pane, shattering it, and all the broken little pieces fell in a shower to the floor.

I TOOK ANOTHER WALK along the lake. Sometimes I felt I could see into the future, but I sure as shoot hadn’t seen this coming. Things looked pretty bleak right then, but I’d survived a lot worse than a brief marriage to a crumb bum, and I’d survive this, too.

A wind was up, and as I watched it lash the water, I got to thinking how sometimes, as had happened with Minnie, something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person’s life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body’s life. If that car hadn’t hit me and that driver hadn’t insisted on taking me to the hospital and hadn’t found out I was married and hadn’t insisted on my calling Ted, I’d still be happily and obliviously going about my life. But now that life was dead.

I gazed out at the lake, and one thing became crystal-clear. It was over between me and Chicago. The city, for all its beautiful blue water and soaring skyscrapers, had been nothing but heartache. It was time for me to get back to the range.

That very day I went over to the Catholic church where I married that heel and told the priest what had happened. He said that if I could prove my husband had been previously married, I could apply to the bishop for an annulment. With the help of a clerk at city hall, I dug out a copy of Ted’s other marriage certificate, and the priest said he’d set the wheels in motion.

I thought Ted’s wife needed to know what had happened, and I wrote her a letter explaining it all. I decided, however, not to file criminal charges against Ted. It had not been illegal for that weasel to take the money, since it was a joint account; it was just stupid of me to trust him. And if he was sent off to prison as a bigamist, his wife and kids, who had it tough enough already with that Ted Conover in charge of their family, would be worse off than their dad. I also figured the peckerhead had taken up enough of my time and energy, and if he had to wait to get his just deserts from the good Lord himself, that was all right by me.

After mailing the letter, I took the ring Ted had given me in to a jeweler. I wasn’t going to keep it, but I certainly wasn’t going to do something melodramatic, like throw it in the lake. I figured it would fetch a couple hundred dollars, and I was thinking I’d use the money to take some college courses and maybe even splurge on a new dress at Marshall Field’s, but the jeweler looked at the diamond with his eyepiece and said, “It’s fake.”

So I threw it in the lake after all.

ONCE I STOPPED SMACKING myself in the head for being so gullible about that crumb bum, I focused on the future. I was twenty-seven years old, no spring chicken. Since I obviously couldn’t count on a man to take care of me, what I needed more than ever was a profession. I needed to get my college education and become a teacher. So I applied to the Arizona state teachers’ college in Flagstaff. As I waited to hear back-and waited for the annulment-I did nothing but work, scrimp, and save, taking two jobs during the week and another on weekends. The time flew by, and when both the dispensation and the acceptance letter arrived, I had enough money for a year of college.

The day came for me to say good-bye to Chicago. I packed everything I had into the same suitcase I had brought with me. I was leaving the city with about as much stuff as I had arrived with. But I had learned a lot-about myself and other people. Most of those lessons had been hard ones. For example, if people want to steal from you, they get you to trust them first. And what they take from you is not only your money but also your trust.

The train left from Union Station, a spanking-new building with marble floors and hundred-foot ceilings that framed wide skylights. The mayor thought the new station showcased Chicago as a city of the future, the very epitome of technological modernity. I had come to Chicago wanting a slice of that modernity, loving the city for it, but Chicago hadn’t loved me back.

The train pulled out of the station, and in a short time we were heading into the countryside. I walked to the back, and from the caboose I watched those massive skyscrapers growing smaller in the distance. Not a single soul in Chicago would miss me. Aside from getting my degree, I’d spent these past eight years in thankless, pointless drudgery, polishing silver that got tarnished again, washing the same dishes day after day, and ironing piles of shirts. Ironing was a particularly galling waste of time. You’d spend twenty minutes pressing one shirt front and back, spraying starch and getting the creases sharp, but once the man of the house put it on, it would wrinkle as soon as he bent an elbow; plus, you couldn’t even see whether the danged shirt was ironed or not under his suit coat.

Working in those little desert towns during the war years-teaching illiterate ragamuffins how to read-I had felt needed in a way that I never had in Chicago. That was how I wanted to feel again.