Cover

Title Page

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Baker

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-629-0

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Baker, Ellen.
Keeping the house: a novel / Ellen Baker.

p. cm.
1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Wisconsin—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A5863K44 2007
813′.6—dc22 2007008236

v3.0_r1

Prologue

Pine Rapids, Wisconsin
August 1896

“Well, this is it, love,” John told Wilma as he helped her out of the coach and onto the wooden platform at the Pine Rapids depot.

It was the underside of hell, she thought. Blackberry bushes and spindly hemlocks rustled in the scorching sun, interspersed with the remains of cut pines, stumps large enough to nap on. There was not a good shade tree or a lawn in sight. A grizzled, bearded man, missing an arm, spit on the platform. Another lumberjack, dressed all in dirty wools despite the heat, leered at her, missing teeth. The day itself felt parched, and the air smelled thick, bursting with the climax of blooms. She had to squint against the sun. The music that typically ran through her mind had gone silent. The train behind them belched steam.

That she had abandoned college, her piano, for this!

She drew in her breath at the sight of a man like a Norse prince approaching. His boot heels clomped on the boards. His dark suit was well cut, expensive. He doffed his hat, revealing thick gold curls, and grinned. “John,” he called.

So this was John’s brother, who, like his father, had been kept from the wedding by business concerns. Wilma’s mouth was dry. Her fingers tingled in the heat.

“Gust,” said John, when the man stopped before them. “This is Wilma.”

“Wilma,” said Gust, taking her hand and bowing to her. When he straightened, their eyes met. His were the color of a deep lake on a bright summer day.

“More beautiful than John told us,” he said.

She opened her mouth to speak, but found she could make no sound.

“Take us home,” John said. “We’re hungry.”

Once arrangements had been made for the newlyweds’ trunks, Gust led John and Wilma around the depot to a lacquered black carriage. A matched set of impatient bays snorted and stomped as though they would be off of their own accord if Gust and his party didn’t hurry. Gust climbed up first; Wilma looked away. When she looked back, he had turned, and held out his hand. She hesitated, glancing back at John, then reached up to Gust.

For a moment, she felt herself weightless; though she stepped up into the carriage, it seemed she’d been borne up by the inclination of Gust’s arm. As he let go of her hand, she sank onto the leather seat. Her corset was like a vise around her middle, and she closed her eyes, tried to take a deep breath. She felt John settle on the seat next to her, Gust on her other side. She heard Gust click his tongue. She opened her eyes, just in time to get dust in them, as the horses jerked the carriage into motion.

She had met John her first week at Lawrence College her freshman year; he was a senior that year. He swore it was love at first sight, though she didn’t believe him. He wrote her poetry all through fall term, brought her flowers daily, and listened for hours outside the practice room in Main Hall as she played piano—Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart, and scales, always the scales. He finally declared his love at a Christmas banquet. She held him off, giggling with her friends about his country accent, disparaging him as the son of an immigrant. But when she mentioned him offhandedly to her father that Christmas, her father raised his eyebrows and told her that John’s father, Knute Mickelson of Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, was not just any immigrant. As a young man fresh from Norway, Knute had started as a dockhand in Green Bay. With pennies he pinched from his wages, he had invested in land to the northwest, unsettled areas covered thick as the hair on a man’s arm with towering trees of such girth that a big man could not reach halfway around. He had logged his land himself until he could hire crews; he had sold the logs to be milled until he’d earned enough to build his own sawmill on the Bear Trap River north of Pine Rapids, which was hardly a town at all until then. Wilma’s father, who was himself a paper man, said with admiration that Knute was as smart and ruthless as any Yankee, and besides that he’d married a Yankee woman who’d been born and raised in New York, a farm woman who had relished conquering the land, and rising in social status as a result, just as much as her immigrant husband had.

When Wilma told them what her father had said, her friends suddenly agreed that John was just about the most handsome man they had ever seen. So when John proposed on St. Valentine’s Day, she turned him down, but hinted that he might persist. By March, they were engaged, and when he kissed her, she felt a jolt under her skin. There was no other explanation, she thought, but love.

But what had she known about love? About as much, she supposed, as the poor spinster poet Emily Dickinson, whose just-published volumes Wilma had devoured as a teenager. Her favorite lines: “Wild nights! Wild nights! / Were I with thee, / Wild nights should be / Our luxury!” But all Wilma had dreamed of then were ice-skating parties, bonfires, Hubert Graham sneaking his hand inside her muff to clutch her hand, pressing his shoulder against hers as the firelight flickered across his face and danced in his dark eyes. And then, years later, when John Mickelson had kissed her—one night even, daringly, pressing a hand to her breast—she had thought that was all there was, really.

The wedding night had been alarming, to say the least: a horrendous puncturing of her innards. She’d had no idea what to expect, and he had simply brazened ahead. (What could she have expected? She had no idea, now. Perhaps something more discreet? More genteel? Certainly not the heaving, painful, liquid mess it was.) Subsequent nights were less surprising, though the whole of the act was still more than she could comprehend. She bore through by focusing on one sensation at a time: his piquant smell pervading her breath; his clammy cheek pressing hers; his hand trailing over her skin; her gasp when he met the place where she parted.

The newfound knowledge clotted in her gut. Some of her turned to mist, and crept out the pores of her skin.

She blamed her father. She had counted on him to insist that she stay in school at least one more year. For as long as she could remember, he had professed that her study of the piano was his dream as much as hers. He had also always been able to construe just what she wanted, whether she told him the truth or its opposite. So, following her engagement, she hadn’t hesitated to tell him—in John’s presence—that she wanted the wedding to be this summer. To her horror, he voiced not one objection, and even offered to host the reception at his home! Of course, he had recently acquired a new family, a widow and her three adolescent sons; Wilma and her sisters might as well have been dust. She set her wedding for July, and made certain it was extravagant enough that the bills, at least, would not escape her father’s attention.

But, in the end, she knew the blame was hers to share. She was a frog, splayed out flat with a finger pressed in the middle of its back that kept it from jumping. Lighten the pressure just by a whisker and the frog squirmed to get free. Lift the finger entirely and there was no telling where the frog would leap off to. Marriage, for example!

She did try to stay still whenever possible. True, she feared falling, tripping, other graceless mishaps. But mostly, she feared that her legs would remember the joy of running, and get away from her. As a child, she had been a top pick for neighborhood baseball games, and wrinkled her nose at her oldest sister’s warnings that she was bound to be an old maid if she couldn’t behave herself like a proper girl. But then, the strange summer that she was twelve, her knees melted every time Hubert Graham winked at her, and in her heart blossomed a yearning that he would see her as more than a great leadoff hitter.With her sister’s admonitions ringing in her ears, she finally set down a list of Rules for a Proper Girl, and determined to abide by them.

Though the Rules had evolved slightly in the intervening years, she continued to rehearse them, trying to keep the frog in check. One, always be pleasant and kind; hold your temper. Two, do not exert yourself visibly. Three, do not say out loud what you really think, at least not until you have carefully considered the consequences of such a statement. Four, ignore physical discomfort; if you cannot ignore it, at least do not mention it. Five, do not indulge in licentious thoughts, especially about mill hands; they are of a lower class. Six, remember to defer to a man’s point of view, even if you know he is wrong. Especially defer to your husband.

Wilma willed the music to begin again in her mind. Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor, she told herself, and then her hands could almost touch the swelling sad phrases, as she swallowed her nausea against the jouncing of the carriage as it rolled over jutting roots and veered around stumps that littered the roadway.

They drove past a row of tiny whitewashed clapboard houses, then made a sharp left. Visible to the right, now, across a stump-studded field, were narrow smokestacks, a large clump of buildings, and sky-high piles of planks that looked from this distance like matchsticks. The mill. She could hear the clump and drone and whine of its operation even above the staccato noises of the horses’ hooves.

The carriage streamed dust as they picked up speed, approaching the town’s center. They rumbled across a plank bridge above a river the width of a street, then made a quick turn to the right. They were in the business district now. Businessmen and workingmen and lady shoppers in long skirts and shirtwaists with gigantic leg-of-mutton sleeves, traversing the boardwalks in front of wood and stone buildings, turned their heads to watch as Gust sped by. Upon a closer look at the people, she spotted Native women in simple skirts and tunics and Native men, too, which surprised her. “There’s the bank,” John shouted, pointing at a two-story red stone structure with a corner door and cupola. “For God’s sake, Gust, you’re scaring Wilma to death!”

Wilma felt her sleeve brush Gust’s, and he turned to grin at her as they raced away from downtown, following the path of the river. Looking up at her brother-in-law, she was not quite conscious of the few frame houses built upon the rising hill on the left side of the dusty street, and hardly noticed a hopeful row of maple saplings. But suddenly she saw the house upon the highest hill, overlooking a bend in the river. It was majestic: three stories tall, painted a tender dove-gray and trimmed in white. In contrast to the rugged town, this house was surrounded by an immaculate lawn, flower beds, and several small trees, including a line of firs that had been planted at the western edge of the yard. It was a house fit for a prince. Someone like Gust.

“Is that—your house?” she asked him.

He laughed. “No, it’s yours,” he said.

“It’s Pa’s,” John said, and Wilma felt her breath leave her, as Gust turned the horses up the street that ran to the side of the house. He reined them in at the bottom of the driveway that led up to the carriage house.

“Now, don’t disappoint her,” Gust said. “It’s most certainly yours. All you got to do is let Pa live on the third floor. Now that Ma’s gone, it’s what he decided.”

“Really?” Wilma said.

“And there’s a whole staff that comes with it for you—two maids and a cook and a yard man,” Gust said.

John broke in. “What about the little house he was building for us?”

“I’m living in it,” Gust said. “I think Pa took a liking to Wilma, you know, when you sent her picture.”

Wilma sensed rather than saw John climb down out of the carriage.

She looked at Gust then, caught his bright eyes. Looked away again quickly. She knew she should slide away from him now that John was gone, but she felt frozen to her seat. He isn’t a mill hand—but worse! My brother-in-law! She turned to watch her husband, who was gazing up at the house as though he’d never seen it before. Without looking back, he began walking up the hill.

Clenching her hands together, Wilma watched him go. But she could feel Gust studying her; could feel, as she turned her gaze toward him, him opening the book of her, tracing the words there. “Were I with thee—”

Steady, steady, she told herself, shrinking from him. Darn that frog!—it wanted to grab the reins and slap the horses into motion, race laughing out of this terrible town, hanging on to Gust’s arm.

“You’ll forgive me,” he said, “if I say I think my brother’s a pretty lucky fellow, then.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll forgive you.”

Ask me if I want to go for a drive, begged the squirming frog.

“Want to see your new house, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the frog, when pressed by the finger. She took a breath, squared her shoulders. Do not indulge—

She watched Gust climb down from the carriage, both admiring and envying his ease. She gauged the distance to the ground, and pictured herself falling flat on her face in the attempt to reach it.

He turned, and held out his hand to her. She hesitated.

As if he understood her reluctance, he reached up, circled her waist with his hands, and lifted her down. She was mortified that she might stink of sweat; when he released her, she stumbled. He took hold of her elbow to steady her. He smelled like cigars and peppermint. He smiled. Just one of his teeth was a little crooked.

She took as deep a breath as the corset allowed, and forced herself to turn from him. She looked up the hill. Her knees felt unwilling. You know we have to, she scolded them.

“I’ll walk you up,” he said, behind her, and she knew he was more honorable than she.

One foot then the other and don’t trip! she told herself. Though with her high button high-heeled shoes—not to mention the difficulty she was having breathing—tripping was a distinct possibility. John had already disappeared inside the back porch. “Does he always treat you with such regard?” Gust asked, beside her.

“What?” said Wilma, thinking, One foot then the other and don’t even look at him!

“Nothing,” Gust said.

They took a few more steps.

“It’s been no different, my whole life,” he said then. “He’s got nothing but himself on his mind. I had hoped that with a girl like you—”

Suddenly, she felt so dizzy that she had to clutch his arm to keep from toppling over.

“Forgive me,” he said, reaching out to steady her. “I shouldn’t have said—”

“No,” she said, needing the corset loosened; she couldn’t breathe. With all her might, she was trying to abide by her Rule. Ignore physical discomfort. At least don’t mention—

“It wasn’t my place to say nothing.”

Despite her efforts, her legs crumpled. He held her elbows and they sank to the ground in tandem.

“It’s just that—I was—going to faint,” she said. “The—heat.”

“You’re awful pale,” he observed, and his hands slipped from her elbows to her waist.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide.

“Godsakes,” he said, and sprang to his feet. He turned from her, removed his hat, ran his hand through his hair, jammed the hat back onto his head. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’ll help you up to the house, then. You’ll be all right?”

“Yes,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t true. She had never been the type to faint at a little heat. She realized she’d been feeling peculiar for a couple of weeks now. And she should have bled five days ago. Until this moment, she had attributed the delay to the strain of the wedding, or to what she supposed might be her body freezing up with fear of the unfamiliar attacks upon it. The unsettledness of her stomach could be explained the same way. The tenderness of her breasts?

And now this man.

She could not have anticipated such a sudden conglomeration of disasters.

“Help you up?” he said, reaching out his hand.

Do not, she told herself, and she let him help her to her feet. She didn’t dare to look at him when she linked her arm with his.

They resumed their climb uphill just as John stuck his head out the back door, wondering what was taking her so long. “The cook has coffee for us, and I want to show you the place,” he called.

“Don’t tell him,” Wilma whispered. One foot then the other and don’t even look at him. “Please.”

“I—”

“Please.”

Gust said nothing more. She could feel him like a storm beside her.

He released her at the back stoop, and faded away with a call that he would see them later. John swept her up off her feet and into his arms; Wilma’s stomach lurched and she let out a whoop of surprise. John began to laugh, and soon Wilma was laughing, too. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. He carried her up the steps and inside.

Part One - Making Marriage Work

The bride who wants to do her full job will plan from the start to create the kind of home her husband wants, and to do it with no more assistance than he willingly offers.

—“Making Marriage Work,”
Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1950

Chapter 1

HOME OF MRS. CECILIA FRYT,
412 W. First Street, Pine Rapids, Wisconsin
Tuesday, June 13, 1950

Dolly, her brand-new sewing basket hanging from the crook of her arm, set out for Cecilia Fryt’s bearing a fresh plate of Lacy Raisin Wafers, clutching a note in her fist that read “412 W. 1st.” It was a perfect June day, and Dolly, having breezed through her ironing and the rest of her chores this morning, would have preferred to stay at home sunbathing in her backyard with a good book, but she hadn’t dared turn down the invitation she’d received Sunday at church. Having grown up in a small town, she knew in her bones the Herculean efforts that newcomers had to make to get accepted into the best circles, and she wouldn’t have her yet-unborn children suffer because she hadn’t had the sense to help out the Pine Rapids Ladies Aid.

Dolly didn’t know Pine Rapids very well yet, though she knew that the Bear Trap River carved a rock-stippled, elongated S through it, with a babbling rapids punctuating its eastern bend. (Everyone who was anyone, she had been told, lived south of the Bear Trap, but not too far south.) And to find the address on the note, she knew enough to walk straight up Jefferson Avenue to First Street, where the busy downtown hugged the south side of the river’s S.

She turned left onto First Street at Holman’s Market, hurrying along the sidewalk that ran between the storefronts and an unbroken row of Fords, Chevrolets, and Buicks that were nosed up to it. She nearly bumped into a man who was transfixed in front of the lawn mowers in the window of Wasserman’s Hardware, and he turned as though angry, but once he saw her he just raised his eyebrows and smirked, tipping his hat back on his head. She blushed and walked faster, watching that she didn’t collide with anyone else, though it was hard to avoid some of the women who were so intent on their shopping.

It was only three blocks before she left downtown behind, and she was grateful for the shade of the tall maples that lined the sidewalks. Scanning the house numbers, she wondered if Mrs. Fryt could possibly live in the house that Dolly had fallen in love with the day that she and Byron had driven into town in their Chrysler, pulling the trailer loaded with their belongings. She could see the house up ahead, sitting high atop the hill above the river like an aging queen on her throne, three stories of disintegrating dove-gray clapboard and melancholy stained glass, trimmed in an aged white, with a stately front porch and third-floor windows on the side and in front that poked up like pointed caps.

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