“Ah.” He sat back, smiling.
“I’m a teacher.”
He thrust out his beard. “Are you a good teacher?”
Imogene thought for a moment. “Yes.” The one word carried the weight of her life’s worth.
The bishop seemed pleased. “I have hired six instructors and the matron.” The bishop regarded her for a minute. He was thinking. He sat across from her as solid and easy as a tree. Imogene, too, was still, but the line of her back and the set of her jaw indicated that it was more a matter of control than of nature. A pendulous ticking sounded from a dark, ornate clock on the mantel behind the bishop’s chair. Imogene did not look at it.
“My girls will be Nevadans, most from small mining towns in the desert. Many, I hope, will be given scholarships according to need. They’ll come from all walks of life. A lot of them won’t have a primary education that’s up to our standards.” His pale eyes twinkled. “When we’re old enough to have standards,” he amended.
“Bishop Whitaker’s is a high school. We’ll need a teacher to take these girls from the desert and bring them up to entrance level-a preparatory school the girls can attend while they’re enrolled in other classes, until they’ve caught up. I’ve not yet found a teacher for my preparatory classes.”
“For the last three years I taught first through eighth grades in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.”
“I’ll need your references.”
Imogene sat like a stone. Her jaw jerked once before she spoke. “Of course.” She was overly loud. “I’ll bring the address by tomorrow, if that would be convenient.”
Ozi Whitaker escorted her to the front hall.
“Forgive my manners,” the bishop said as Imogene started down the porch steps. “I haven’t asked your name.”
“Imogene Grelznik.”
“Tomorrow then, Miss Grelznik.”
Sarah was out of bed, sitting by the window in her nightgown, when Imogene got back to the hotel. Imogene apologized for having been gone so long, and hurried down to the kitchen to bring up a cold lunch. While they ate, she told Sarah of Bishop Whitaker’s School For Girls. Some of the light that had come into her face as Kate Sills was showing her the rooms returned as she talked. Sarah left off picking at the food and watched her intently. Imogene was laughing, telling of the bunny and the bishop when she broke off suddenly and her smile faded as she told Sarah, “He wants a reference.”
The significance of the request slowly registered on Sarah’s face. “You want this, don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Write one myself?” Imogene smiled wryly.
“You can’t! It’s not honest!”
“No, I suppose I can’t. Bishop Whitaker’s going to write to Philadelphia. I’ll have to write to Mr. Utterback and tell him Mr. Aiken’s venom has done it again. I hope that he has returned from Holland, and that my letter reaches him before the bishop’s. I’ll post it this afternoon.”
When she finished writing the letter, she read it to Sarah. The younger woman listened quietly, her eyes fixed on her folded hands. “What do you think?” Imogene asked. Sarah shook her head without speaking.
Imogene sat aside the letter. “I’m sorry. I’ve made you go through it again, haven’t I?”
Sarah waved her hand, a frustrated, negative little gesture. “It’s not just that.” She looked up and the tears made her eyes seem enormous. “It’s that you’ll be teaching again and they’ll all be so bright and pretty and sure to love you.”
The schoolteacher sat down on the bed. “You mustn’t worry. It hurts me when you do, as if you don’t believe in me. Or think so little of me you think I could forget.” She stroked Sarah’s cheek. “You can be a little jealous to flatter me, but you mustn’t ever believe it.”
20
WEEKS PASSED AND THERE WAS STILL NO WORD FROM WILLIAM Utterback. The money that Imogene was able to earn by teaching her adult students was inadequate and inconsistent; they paid by the lesson and often didn’t come at appointed times. Lutie and Fred, though openhearted, began to feel the financial drain; the summer months were their busy time, and a room and two places at board paying only partial rates would be felt when money got tight the following winter. They were too kind to say anything, but it showed in their faces when Imogene returned from the bishop’s with no news. They, too, were waiting for the letter.
The last week in July, the bishop took Imogene into the formal parlor and closed the door. “I’m seeing a young man about the position today. As fond as Mrs. Whitaker and I have grown of you, I can’t in good conscience hire you without references, not when everyone else was asked to give them.”
Imogene nodded abruptly. “I understand.” She did not tell Sarah.
The young man was given the job.
William Utterback’s letter came the second week in August. There was a glowing recommendation addressed to the bishop, and a sealed note to Imogene so full of un-Quakerlike denunciations of Darrel Aiken that it warmed her heart to read it.
On September fourth, five weeks before Bishop Whitaker’s School was to open its doors, Kate Sills paid Imogene a call at the Broken Promise. There had been a gold strike twenty miles south of Reno, in the Washoe region. Rumors were stampeding the miners from older claims. It was said to be the biggest strike in Nevada ’s history. The bishop’s young man had come to him full of contrition. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he had said, and he couldn’t live with himself if he passed it up. He was terribly sorry if there was any inconvenience, but he’d already bought his kit.
He had been bitten by the gold bug and Imogene had a job. Eighty-five dollars a month. Imogene stayed up half the night, too excited to sleep, writing lesson plans by the light of a lamp turned low so that the glare wouldn’t keep Sarah from her rest.
From then on, Imogene spent her days at Bishop Whitaker’s School, helping Kate prepare for the fall term. Sarah was alone much of the time. Most days she rose and sometimes she dressed herself, but the sickness had taken its toll and she showed little interest in life.
Disturbed by her apathy, Imogene went to the railroad station and unearthed Sarah’s watercolors, bought two new camel’s-hair brushes that they could ill afford, and borrowed a generously upholstered parlor chair from Lutie so Sarah would be comfortable.
On a hot day in mid-September, Sarah sat curled up in her chair. A dry desert wind blew incessantly, bringing on a fever and sawing at her nerves. Despite the heat, she had closed the window to escape the wind, and the room was airless and dull. In front of her, propped across the chair arms, was a scrap of board that Imogene had begged of Fred, with a fresh white sheet of watercolor paper tacked onto it. Beside her, on the sill, were her colors. Before Imogene had left that morning, she had set the paints by Sarah and nestled the drawing board across her knees. “You watercolor beautifully,” she’d said. “You used to find such pleasure in it. You’d spend hours in the field behind the schoolhouse, lying on your stomach in the sun, painting wildflowers.”
Sarah had looked at the board and tiredness had claimed her. “I can’t paint anymore.”
“Please, Sarah,” Imogene had insisted. “It would do you good. One painting. Promise me. Paint a self-portrait. That’s bound to be pretty.”
And after a minute Sarah had promised. Now, hours later, the paper was still untouched. Wind rattled the pane in a sudden gust. As Sarah shifted in her chair, her paintbox was knocked from the sill and she looked at it for the first time since morning.
Just then footsteps sounded in the hall and knuckles rapped lightly on the door. “Sarah, are you there?” Lutie called. “I got something for you.” Sarah pushed the board away and struggled to her feet, to open the door. “Hope you weren’t sleeping.” Lutie used hushed tones whenever she talked with or about Sarah. “A letter came for you and I thought you’d like it right off.”
