Kat looks down at her too-small dress and then raises her head to look at me again. The child looks troubled, as if the thought of parting with the constricting dress she’s wearing is too painful a notion to consider. Perhaps Candace bought the dress for Kat before her illness sent her to her bed for good. Surely she had. Of course she had.
“You like this dress, don’t you?” I say in a more empathetic tone. Kat says nothing. “It’s very pretty. I can make some clothes for your dolly with the material from this dress if you like.” I point to the doll Kat clutches. “I can make a frock for her just like this one. My gram taught me how to sew. I can make her some pantalets to go with it. Would you like that?”
Kat gives her assent in one slight nod. I want to pull her into my arms.
Instead I tell her she can help me make breakfast. We make her bed quickly and then head downstairs.
It takes me a bit of time to familiarize myself with such a well-equipped kitchen. The meal last night I did nothing to prepare, and Martin wanted to leave the plates to soak overnight, so everything about its appointments is foreign to me. It takes me several tries to light the stove, and then I’m opening cabinets right and left to find a skillet. Martin had boxes of staples delivered, so there are eggs and sausage, but there is no bread to make toast. And no yeast or lard or vinegar. I shall have to make a list. As I find my way around, I decide we will eat at the butler’s table in the kitchen rather than in the formal dining room, and I give Kat the table settings to place at our seats. I am nearly pinching myself again at my fortune, strange as it is, as the room begins to take on the scents of cured meat and fried eggs. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been in a warm, happy kitchen making a meal that is setting my mouth to water. At the tenement there was only the hunk of bread in the morning, the watery soup at the factory cafeteria at noon, and at night, the cold sausages shared among the other young immigrant women I roomed with. There was no table and no conversations around the meal, except for when there was an occasional pilfered bottle of whisky to pass from one to another to another.
After breakfast, we take Kat to a children’s clothing store in the heart of Union Square, where Kat submits to trying on several ready-to-wear dresses in different colors and styles, some for every day and a few for special occasions, the clerk says, like aparty or for churchgoing. I ask Martin if he and Kat attend church.
“No. But if you wish to go and take Kat with you, I’ve no objections. There are plenty of Catholic churches here.”
“I’m from the North, remember? I’m... Protestant.” I say this with a light laugh, a bit surprised he’s forgotten that. I mentioned it in my letter to him.
Martins shrugs. “There are plenty of the other kind, too.” He turns to the salesclerk and points to the Sunday-best dress Kat has on. “We’ll take this one as well.”
It’s odd to me that he doesn’t care if I decide to take Kat to an Anglican service, if I can find one, but empowering, too. He trusts me with her.
Next we step inside a dressmaker’s, where I am measured and fitted for three new shirtwaists and undergarments.
We take a streetcar to the Palace Hotel on the corner of Market and Montgomery to have lunch in one of its lovely dining rooms. The multistoried palatial building has an open center entrance that until recently buggies could drive into to unload their passengers. The open court is overlooked by all seven stories and framed with white-columned balconies and decorated with exotic plants, statuary, and fountains. The American Dining Room, with its linen-topped tables and golden high ceilings, has just begun to serve the midday meal when we arrive. We lunch on consommé, duckling croquettes, and endive salad, with glazed peach tarts for dessert. It is the finest meal I’ve ever eaten and it’s a challenge to pretend it is merely an ordinary lunch on a busy day.
After our meal we make our way to the Emporium to outfit Kat’s new room with proper toys and décor for a little girl.
On the ten-minute walk to the Emporium—a multilevel department store that carries everything—I see more of the city’s bustling retail area. I take note of a shoe repair shop, a milliner, a stationer’s, a grocer, a bakery, and a hair salon.
The outside of the immense Emporium is as large as many of the buildings I’d grown used to seeing in New York, taking up nearly a whole city block on Market Street. We take an elevator to the fourth level and walk past displays of sporting goods and bicycles to the children’s toy section. The display cases are laden with dolls and doll carriages, miniature tea sets, train sets, boxes of colored wax crayons, and paints. There are dollhouses and little wooden barns with carved farm animals and books and puzzles and looms and jointed stuffed bears and armies of toy soldiers.
Kat is drinking in the sight of all those shelves, I can see that, but she makes no move to walk toward any of them. Martin just waits for her to do so. I reach for her hand and lead her to a doll carriage upholstered in robin’s-egg blue fabric, with chrome and rubber wheels and a collapsible hood trimmed in wide white lace.
“How about if we try out this carriage with your own dolly,” I say, convincing Kat to lay down the doll with the cracked cheek inside the satin-lined bed of the miniature buggy. A glimmer of a smile tugs at Kat’s lips.
“I’ll find a clerk to help us,” Martin says, and off he goes to find an employee to tally Kat’s choices.
I help Kat select a second doll so that her first one can have a friend, and some dresses for them and one of the doll-sized tea sets. We choose wooden beads with string and the wax crayons and a tablet of paper, and sets of children’s picture books andthree jigsaw puzzles meant for older children, but which Kat is clearly interested in.
“She likes figuring them out,” Martin says of these, after he returns to us. “She’s good at those. You’ll see.”
Our last stop is a grocer’s, where I am able to get the things for the kitchen that Martin did not think to buy. Martin arranges for all our purchases to be delivered to the house. The day has been a stretch of satisfying hours so foreign it is almost as if I am watching another person’s day unfold. We leave the grocer’s and walk to the cable-car stop.
“Kat is tired,” Martin says, as the cable car clacks to a stop and people start getting off and on. “And all those deliveries are coming. You need to be there to receive them. Here you go.” He lifts Kat onto the open car and then holds out his arm so that I can board. I turn to face him once I’m standing on the car’s polished floorboards. Martin’s arm is outstretched; he is handing me the key to the house. Our house. I encircle my gloved hand around it.
“I’ve got details to see to before I leave tomorrow. I’ll be home later,” he says.
I nod, draw Kat toward me, and take a seat on one of the benches. The car clangs as it grasps the cable deep in the slot, and we begin to move forward and up. Martin turns from us and walks away. I watch him until he is gone from view.
Back at the house, Kat and I explore all the cupboards and closets, discovering a great many things the doctor and his family decided to leave behind. The china cabinet still holds a good supply of dishes and glassware, and the linens closet is half-full. I imagine the doctor’s wife had to choose just her most favoriteitems to take, perhaps only those things that had been given to them as wedding gifts. I wonder if Candace was given beautiful linens and dishes when she married Martin, and if she was, where are they? Did Martin abandon everything that was theirs when she died? Did he sell them to pay for the move from Los Angeles to San Francisco? I wonder how long it will be before I can ask him a personal question like that.
In the boys’ room I take off the toy soldier bed linens as we await the delivery of the new pink bedcover and linens we purchased at the Emporium.
“Do you want that extra bed in here?” I ask Kat, who is silently watching me. Kat looks at the second bed and then back at me. She slowly shakes her head.
“That’s what I would do, too. You’ll have more room for your new doll carriage in here if we dismantle it and take it upstairs. Shall we?”
With minimal help from Kat, I drag the frame, the posts, and finally the mattress upstairs to the empty maid’s room and lean them up against one of walls. We head back downstairs, and I make tea for us—sugar tea for Kat like my gram used to make—and we sip our drinks as we await the first of the deliveries and also Martin’s return.
The groceries arrive first, then the Emporium goods, and then the undergarments and corsets and hosiery from the ladies’ clothing store. The new clothes for Kat arrive last.
