Before Dorothy

1
February 1932

The city was a colorless palette of gray as Emily Gale arrived at her sister’s South Shore row house. Even the familiar brownstone building that had once carried shades of copper and gold in its brickwork was now dulled. She paused at the foot of the steps and drew in a long anxious breath. The frigid air caught the back of her throat and made her cough.

Courage, Em. Courage.

Henry’s parting words were a distant echo, muffled by the miles she’d traveled from Kansas, and further diminished by the city’s towering skyscrapers. She had never felt so out of place, so uncertain, so entirely alone. There was no sweet meadowlark’s song to cheer her, no comforting rush of rippling ripened wheat, no trace of the purpose and renewal usually carried by the first hopeful day of spring on the prairie. This was a place of sorrow and uncertainty.

A wave of grief and guilt consumed her.

Courage.

She took a moment to compose herself, stiffening her shoulders before she walked up the steps and lifted the heavy iron knocker, letting it fall, just once, against the imposing ebony door. The sound carried the somber tone of a church bell at a funeral mass. Appropriate, in the circumstances.

A moment passed.

Silence.

Perhaps there’d been a misunderstanding, an alternative arrangement made. Guilt chided her for hoping it might be so. The child was her responsibility now. Hers, and Henry’s. How she wished he were beside her, ready to offer his calm encouragement and steady reassurance. “If I come with you, there’ll be nobody here to welcome you home,” he’d said. “I’ll make cornbread. Sweep the porch.” His attempt to lighten the mood was appreciated, but the usual crinkle at his eyes had been absent. What would home mean for them now?

A stiff breeze swirled, capturing early blossom in tiny whirling cyclones at the edge of the steps and tugging at Emily’s cloche as she caught her reflection in the beveled glass panels of the door. She practiced a reassuring smile, befitting of a kindly aunt, but all she could manage was a grimace. Her words also failed her. She’d carefully rehearsed what she would say to the child, repeating the sentences over and over in her mind, but now that she was here, everything felt wrong. There was nothing she could ever say to make this better.

She tried to relax, desperately searching in the glass for the confident young woman who’d stood here countless times before, arms full of flowers to bring a smile to her sister’s face, or laden down with newly discovered novels to press enthusiastically into her hands. “You’ll love this one, Annie! It’s all moody moors, and destructive passion!” She’d believed anything was possible back then—a world at peace after years of war, exciting new opportunities to be grasped by those brave enough to take a chance—but the woman looking back at her now carried no blooms or books or bold ambitions, only the trace of life’s cruel lessons etched into her pinched expression and tangled among the first silver hairs at her temples. They said the prairie aged folk prematurely. She was proof of it.

She lifted the knocker again. Let it fall, again.

Despite the spring day, winter still laced the Chicago air. Steely clouds smothered the sun, leaving a cold flat light as the sharp bite of the wind off Lake Michigan sent a shiver through Emily’s bones. The lining of her black mourning coat had been sacrificed for a shirt for Henry last fall, the remaining garment no match for the drop in temperature between Kansas and Illinois. A day’s journey by railroad, and yet the place Emily had left and the place she had arrived to were so entirely different that she might have traveled for a hundred years. She shivered again, the wintry day not the only cause of her rattling bones. She had good reason to be anxious.

She knocked twice more in quick succession, the dull thud thud matching the heave of her heart.

Finally, a figure approached on the other side of the glass.

Emily swallowed a swell of nerves. She smoothed the creases from her coat sleeves, pushed back her shoulders, and pinched her cheeks to summon some color there, but her fidgeting and fussing stopped abruptly as the door opened and a woman—a maid?—stepped forward.

“Mrs. Gale, is it?” The woman’s face was milk pale. Her eyes carried the unmistakable ruby hue of grief.

“Emily Gale, yes,” Emily replied. “Annie’s sister.” She hesitated a moment. “I’m sorry. We haven’t met. And you are?”

“Cora McNulty. The housekeeper.” The woman dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gale. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.”

The burst of Irish language caught Emily by surprise. Her reply to the offered condolences came naturally, but not easily. “Go raibh maith agat.”

She hadn’t heard anyone speak as Gaeilge for so many years that to hear it now summoned an overwhelming ache for her sister, for her family, for Ireland. The place she’d first called home.

Cora offered a thin smile as she reached for Emily’s small traveling case. “Now, would you ever come on inside, Mrs. Gale. That wind would slice you in two, so it would. You must be tired after your journey.”

Emily was glad to get out of the cold, but a chill lingered on her skin as she stepped into the wood-paneled entrance hall and time seemed to stand still. It was all so hauntingly familiar: the fleur-de-lis ceiling rose, the glittering chandelier, the soft light from the Tiffany wall sconces. Annie’s fur coat on the stand, John’s hat and cane beside it. But it was the trace of perfume in the air that took her breath away, the seductive scent of tobacco and jasmine, as if Annie had just that moment breezed past in that effortless liquid way of hers. Not walking, but floating. Emily could see her so clearly, spritzing a cloud of scent into the air before twirling around beneath it so that it settled on every part of her. “It’s called Habanita, by Molinard. All the flappers use it. Isn’t it delicious!” Her exaggerated French accent had made Emily laugh. There had been so much laughter back then. So much fun. So much love.

Emily stiffened as a haunting melody punctuated the silence.

A child’s voice.

A reminder of the reason she was here.

“How is she?” she asked.

Cora shook her head. “Terrible quiet. Hardly said a word since, God love her. And the dreams keeping her awake at night.”

“Dreams?”

“Nightmares really. The poor thing gets in such a state.” Cora crossed herself in the Catholic way as a distant look fell across her face.

The singing came again, a little louder this time, beckoning Emily toward a room on the right of the entrance hall.

She remembered her niece only in thin fragments and wispy memories: a bawling newborn, pink as a prairie rose in her crib; the barely-there sensation of the infant in her arms; the sweet nutty scent as she’d whispered goodbye; the way the child had looked at her, as if she already knew how their story would end.

“Does she know why I’m here?” Emily asked. “Or where she’s going?”

“I’ve tried to explain as best I could, but who knows what’s going through her mind. It’s so much for the wee cratur to take in.” Cora dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Emily recognized the delicate Connemara lace. “Here, let me take your coat,” Cora continued. “Then I’ll take you to her.”

“I’ll keep it on, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. That wind gets into your bones when it blows from the east. I’ve a fire lit inside. You’ll soon warm up.”

Emily nodded; her reluctance to remove her coat was nothing to do with the weather, but from a sense of shame at the tired black dress beneath it. Being back among such opulence made her feel more like a farmer’s wife than the prairie ever had, suddenly conscious of her dry, wind-reddened skin and the seam of Kansas dirt embedded beneath her cracked fingernails.

“Come along so. She’s just this way.”

Heart in her mouth, Emily followed Cora to the dayroom, where a fire crackled in the grate and a gold carriage clock ticked and whirred on the mantel. The cushion fabrics and wallpaper were still in the Art Deco style Annie had so admired and which Emily had helped her choose. Her gaze flickered quickly across the room, taking in everything that was so familiar before settling on a chair beside a sash window and the one thing that wasn’t.

Dorothy.

Her back was turned to the room but a slight falter in her singing indicated that she sensed she was no longer alone. In an admirable act of defiance, she continued her song as she swung her stockinged legs, pendulum-like, beneath the chair, her feet not yet able to reach the floor. She looked so small. So dreadfully alone.

Emily stood as stiff as the porcelain figurines in the glass cabinet beside her and watched, numbly, as Cora walked to the girl, crouched down next to her, and spoke softly for a moment.
The child nodded and turned slowly on the chair until her eyes met Emily’s.

For a moment, Emily could hardly breathe. The little girl looking back at her was so remarkably like Annie: soft curls in all the colors of a New England fall, emerald-green eyes full of sorrow, heart-shaped face, rosy apples in her cheeks. Smart red shoes with gleaming silver buckles offered a defiant burst of color amid the permeating air of grief. They reminded Emily of a favorite pair of red shoes she’d once owned. It was hard to believe that she’d ever worn anything so pretty.

Cora coughed lightly to catch Emily’s attention, tilting her head toward the girl, encouraging Emily to do something; say something.

Emily put her purse on the settee and stepped forward, approaching the child as if she were a skittish colt, or some other nervous creature. Animals, Emily knew. Seven-year-old girls, she did not.

Following Cora’s example, Emily crouched down beside the child.

“Hello, Dorothy.” Should she shake her hand? Touch her arm? A hug felt too intimate, too presumptuous. “I’m your Auntie Emily, your mother’s sister.”

“Hello.” The child’s voice was barely a whisper.

For someone so slight, the child’s impact was immense. Emily faltered as a wave of emotion washed over her. “You can call me Auntie Em if you like. Or Aunt Em. Whichever you prefer.” The crack in her voice betrayed her uncertainty. “You’re going to come and live with me and your uncle Henry, on a farm in Kansas. We have a cow and horses, hens and pigs, and the sweetest little chicks.” Her heart lurched as she glanced at the toy lion in the child’s hands. She’d kept it, all these years. “Your lion can come too, if you’d like. What’s his name?”

“Lion.”

“Of course.”

Dorothy turned back to face the window and continued her song. “They say there’s bread and work for all, And the sun shines always there, But I’ll not forget old Ireland, Were it twenty times as fair.”

It was a lament Emily recognized, a mournful tune her mammy used to sing whenever she was missing Ireland. “Do you remember, girls?” she would say. “The apples in Connemara? Do you remember?”

Emily closed her eyes and listened to Dorothy’s song, summoning courage from the gentle memories it stirred: a perfect coil of apple peel on the old oak table, the damp smell of the turf fire as she and her sisters had watched, transfixed, while their mammy worked the paring knife, the peel expanding in shades of russet and green until Emily was sure it would break. But still the knife turned until, finally, the single coil dropped onto the table and they all clapped. But even more mesmerizing was the way the peel formed the shape of the apple when Emily placed it in the palm of her hand, as if it held the memory of the fruit it had come from.

“You’ll remember this, girls,” her mammy had said as she’d sliced the apple into thin circles and shown the three sisters the shape of apple blossom formed by the imprint of the pips in the center of each slice. “The same way the apple remembers the blossom it grew from, and the way the peel remembers the shape of the fruit it was attached to, you’ll always remember this little cottage in Connemara on the edge of Ireland, and that the three of ye ate slices of apple while the autumn sun turned Annie’s hair to flames, and Nell got a fit of the giggles when your da took to snoring, and Emily was after playing the fiddle like a banshee.”

Emily remembered it all: the heather-bruised hills reflected in Lough Inagh, the whispered secrets of swaying rushes along the shoreline, mackerel clouds drifting in shoals above, the peeping cry of a kestrel carried on the breeze. Such simple treasures, such happy memories, conjured by nothing more than an apple.

That was all it had taken to anchor her to a time and place where she’d felt loved and safe.

She opened her eyes. “Cora, would you have an apple handy?”

“An apple?”

“Yes. There’s something I’d like to show Dorothy.”