Mary Beth had fallen in love with her.
What first drew Imogene to Mary Beth was her obvious intelligence and the eager way she had devoured life, wanting to know everything, to experience new sensations. At sixteen, Mary Beth knew things that Imogene, at twenty-eight, never even guessed existed. Much later she told Imogene that she had loved a black servant girl. They’d been lovers until they were found together in the back pantry of the master’s house. Half-dressed and shrieking, Mary Beth had been chased into the street by a knife-wielding cook. The fracas had brought the mistress downstairs, and Mary Beth’s lover was sent away. Both girls had been fourteen.
Imogene closed the hall door and looked back at Sarah’s slight form, hardly noticeable in the hammock of the old mattress. Sarah reminded her of Mary Beth. She was shy but pretty, and there was the same quality of need, a hunger for love and touching.
“I was infatuated with her at first,” Imogene said to Sarah’s back. “Then slowly it ripened into love. I think Mary Beth was the only person who ever truly loved me. Loved me for exactly who I am, and what I am not.” Imogene smiled unconsciously, remembering her seduction. Mary Beth had decided that they were to be lovers. “One evening, just before fall term was to start, she invited me to picnic with her on the bank of the river. When we met near the water, on the outskirts of town, I sensed a peculiar excitement in her. She was wearing a new dress, borrowed for the occasion, and she was still damp and rosy from a bath.” The scent of lilac and soap came strongly to Imogene’s nostrils and she leaned against the splintery door of the hotel in Elko, remembering.
“I took the picnic basket from her. I remember being startled at its weight; it contained more wine than food. I followed Mary Beth to a secluded clearing, close to the water and screened by trees and underbrush. There was enough breeze that the mosquitoes didn’t bother us. The night was full of stars and the murmur of the river.
“I was very naive,” she said, “though I was twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine. I had never felt the stirrings that Mary Beth did. But that night we became lovers. I was lost in her. Obsessed. I would have done anything to make her happy. That fall we were together was one of the happiest of my life. We walked for miles through the hills, watched the leaves change color and drop from the trees. Mary Beth was very bright, like you, and read. We talked about books.
“We were together all that winter, too. We’d sit by the fire in my house, doing needlework or just being quiet together. For nearly a year I was happy. We laughed a lot, and talked. And made love.
“Her brother, Darrel, the man who wrote the letter that lost me my post in Calliope, came in on us one evening. He had been drinking and had run out of money before he felt he was drunk enough. He knew she would be with me and he came to my house, came in without knocking. Mary Beth and I were on the couch in the parlor.
“He was very ugly. Mary Beth was afraid and wouldn’t leave with him. He waited for her outside, hidden in the dark. He caught her when she finally left, and beat her very badly. The next day he reported me to the school and I was let go. That is about all.” Imogene left the door and pulled a chair near Sarah’s bed. “Sarah?” Sarah lay like one dead. “Sarah, talk to me. Do you hate me now? Very much?”
“I can’t hate you, Imogene,” Sarah said after a while, but she wouldn’t look at Imogene and her voice was cold and flat. “Maybe I’ve felt it too. It’s just like Sam said, we are abominations in the sight of God!”
“No, Sarah,” Imogene began, but Sarah covered her face with the bedclothes, holding her hands over her ears like a child, as if trying to hide her feelings even from herself.
They arrived in Reno the afternoon of the following day. A cold wind blew down from the mountains to the west, but it was warm enough in the shelter of the station house. Imogene settled Sarah in a sunny corner and went to find their luggage.
The Reno station was immense; three sets of tracks cut a swath between rows of shed-roofed warehouses. The constant wind sent eddies of dust like small waves over the rails. Nearly twenty shiplike freightwagons, with eight to twenty-two mules in the traces, were scattered amid the storage sheds. Men scurried to and fro like ants, with great weights on their backs, transferring goods from wagon to storehouse and storehouse to freight car. The town itself stretched away to the north and south along a wide main street bordered by wooden walks. Stores lined the sidewalks, one snug up against the next as though the valley were not large enough. Each had its sign hanging over the door or painted on the false front above the wooden awning: V. MILATOVICH GROCERIES AND LIQUORS; PIONEER HALL BREWERY; BATHS; TOBACCO; J. B. PHILLIPS STATIONERY & MUSIC STORE; STOVES & TINWARE; DRUGS. At the southern end of the street, a silver ribbon streaked across where the Truckee River ran through town. Beyond, the sharp ragged blue mountains rose like a wall circling the meadow to the south and west. Lower, dun-colored desert mountains completed the circle to the north and east.
Imogene located their belongings on a far platform in front of one of the storage sheds. The warehouses were open to the weather, the roof on the open side sloping down above a raised platform and out over the tracks. Imogene ducked under an angled support beam and climbed the steps.
The men who were working there stopped what they were doing and eyed her askance, clearly undecided what the occasion of a woman visitor called for, not to mention the visit of a woman of Imogene’s stature. One of them spat decorously over the side of the platform, two pulled their hats off. Two others, fortunate enough not to be confined to the platform, scurried off, leaving their companions to fend for themselves.
Imogene had no difficulty procuring storage space for her furnishings. She promised to call for them as soon as she had found permanent lodging, and offered to pay a rental fee in the interim, but the man in charge refused, insisting that they took up no more room than a cat.
On her return she found Sarah huddled on top of the suitcases, hunched almost double. Vomit stained the front of her dress. “Oh, my poor dear,” Imogene murmured, ineffectually dabbing at the dress with her pocket handkerchief.
Sarah looked at her listlessly. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ll get you someplace you can lie down,” Imogene promised, and hurried into the shadowy recesses of the station.
Behind a long counter partitioned off into several working areas, three men, wearing collars, their sleeves held up with garters, went about the business of the railroad. A knot of men at the counter were arguing vehemently over a missing shipment of harness leather. Imogene skirted them and located the clerk who seemed least concerned with the fray.
“Pardon me.” She raised her voice to get his attention. “I am just arrived with another lady. She’s ill. Is there a place nearby that would be suitable? We’ll be staying here indefinitely.”
The young man she addressed was absorbed in the argument. “Where’s your menfolk?” he said absently.
“We’re traveling alone.”
“They ain’t come to meet you?”
“We are not expecting to be met.”
His face crinkled into a practiced leer and he turned his eyes to her for the first time. Immediately the half- smile disappeared with all thought of fancy ladies. He was all repentant respect under the unflinching gaze of the definitive Schoolteacher. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was woolgathering. Expecting those fellas might come to blows. Two lone ladies, you say. I expect the Broken Promise’d be the place. Fred and Lutie run a nice clean house, and nobody’d think the worse of you for staying there. Lutie’d see to that. It’s just down the main street to your right. Everything’s on Virginia Street, pretty much.”
Imogene thanked him and left the hand luggage in his car. With Sarah leaning heavily against her shoulder she set out for the Broken Promise. It was about a quarter of a mile from the station, set back from the street behind a white picket fence. A weathered rocking chair graced the narrow veranda, and an ample woman with faded brown hair and a friendly, fleshy countenance was stooped over, planting bulbs along the lattice skirting. The woman straightened up and pulled off her gardening gloves as Imogene opened the gate.
“The mite looks a bit poorly,” she clucked, and without further ado she shored up Sarah’s other side and bustled them in out of the wind. She settled them in the second room off the top of the staircase, saying, “I only got a couple of rooms at present, and this’n is the nicest.”
Sarah’s skin was hot to the touch and she shook with chills. The two older women stripped off Sarah’s soiled outergarments and put her to bed. The stocky innkeeper was Lutie Bone; she and her husband, Fred, owned and ran the Broken Promise. Lutie sent a boy to fetch their luggage and went down herself to find a cot that Imogene had requested.
Imogene looked at her watch. It was just half past four. Sarah was dozing. For a few moments she regarded
