Kathrin, Kathrin. In my head I repeated my name over and over. First with the German pronunciation. Kah-treen. Then the American way. Kath-run. It made me sound like a different person. A person who could talk back to Sepp Buchmayer in perfect American English, making him ashamed. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of a hollow mountain made of flour. Hollow mountains are full of treasure. Two hundred girls and women lived inside that mountain. Running down mineshafts with picks and shovels, searching for diamonds, searching for gold.

When I found out that the YWCA offered cheap English classes, I signed up immediately. This was what my uncle would have wanted. The teacher was a soft-spoken man in his early thirties who reminded me of him–a second-generation Swede named Peterson. I took that to be a good omen. I was determined to make him proud, make my uncle proud, too. The class was held four nights a week in a cramped room off Nicollet Avenue. There were too many students for the classroom’s forty desks, so if you came late, you had to stand in the back for the whole three-hour lesson. My classmates were mill girls, factory girls, and seamstresses. One girl sat all day in a sub-basement making cigarettes.

We came straight from work, drained and exhausted, and also hungry, because attending class meant skipping supper. I thought that learning could feed me like nothing else, and for a while, it did. I studied my grammar on the streetcar back to the boardinghouse, studied all Sunday after church. Even in the mill, I memorized vocabulary, conjugated verbs in my head as I labored away on my flour bags. I don’t know what inhuman energy was propelling me.

"Why?" Lotte kept asking me. "Where do you think it’s going to get you? Do you think anyone at the mill cares if you speak good English or not?" I ignored her. From April, 1912, when I started my English lessons, to March, 1914, when Mr. Peterson told me I didn’t need to come anymore, I was first in my class. I got a gold stamped certificate with my name penned in beautiful calligraphy. Only when my classes were over and my nights empty again did I begin to wonder if Lotte had been right.

Those spring nights in 1914, when the light stretched later and later into the evening, I began to take long solitary walks, going as far as the university. Those nights I asked myself questions, tried to answer them in my head. What is the difference between hunger and longing? On the surface the answer sounds simple enough. Hunger is a sensation of the body. Longing concerns the soul. But for me in that last spring before the war, before I became a woman and fell from grace, they were one and the same. I could not separate my hunger from my longing. I craved food, books, kindness, everything with a hunger that made me light-headed. Hunger and longing like a siren were leading me away from the straight and narrow, down the path of solitude and exclusion. My hunger drove me to ridiculous acts. By May, 1914, my hunger had grown unbearable.

Chapter Three

I still have a photograph of myself taken in the spring of 1914. I keep it tucked away in my journal. A group portrait of some of the seamstresses at the mill. I am the skinny girl in back with the faraway eyes. Those days I spent most of my time somewhere else. Building, then inhabiting castles in the air. Walking to the university every evening after work, then taking the streetcar home was my only cure for hunger and longing. By the time I got there, the campus was deserted. I wandered the vast lawns and pretended my uncle was beside me, imagining the expression on his face as he took in those buildings with their pillars and marble floors. Once I mustered up the courage to go into the foyer of Walter Library, where I spent half an hour staring at the ceiling. It was like the ceiling of an old church, finely carved, painted blue, ivory, and gold, the colors of heaven. It was like the ancient Greek temples my uncle told me about. What was it he used to say? "Beauty is not a luxury but a necessity. It feeds the soul. You can die from too little beauty."

When the rumbling in my stomach made me dizzy, I sat on one of the stone benches outside the library and opened the paper bag that contained my makeshift supper of stale bread roles and cheap waxy chocolate. Anything was better than the landlady’s stew, which still made me sick. I took a bite of chocolate and let it dissolve in my mouth, eating as slowly as possible to fool my stomach that I was getting more. I wanted this bit of food and peace to last as long as possible. Those spring evenings I came back to the boarding house later and later. Sometimes I dreamt of never going back. Lotte kept teasing me. "Have you finally found yourself a boyfriend?"

Before taking the streetcar back to my boardinghouse, I often stopped at Jelinek’s Antiquarian Bookstore, located on one of the side streets fringing the campus. In the front window they had the most beautiful goblets I had ever seen, made of brightly colored glass from Bohemia. That evening in early May when I came down the sidewalk, the last of the dying sunset was filling those goblets, making them glimmer like rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts. I stopped and stared, holding my breath, until the brilliant colors danced and wove around me. Only when the colors were embedded in my vision did I turn and venture in through the noisy wooden door. The shop was like a cave. The area near the window was washed in the ruddy bars of the setting sun, but the farther you went into the labyrinth of bookcases, the more shadowy it got. In the very back, they had electric lights burning the whole day long.

I was fortunate in choosing Jelinek’s store as my sanctuary; any other shopkeeper would have shown me to the door. In my limp gingham dress and cracked shoes, I was unmistakably a mill girl. No matter how often I washed, I seemed to give off the odor of flour and sweat. But old Mr. Jelinek greeted me every night by name. "Evening, Kathrin." From the thickness of his vowels, I knew he was also foreign born. Night after night he greeted me, even though I never spent a penny in his store. He knew I had no money, but he let me look at his books just the same. I handled them respectfully, tenderly, as if they were infants. I couldn’t afford to take any of the books home with me. It was enough to hold them, to leaf through their gilt-rimmed pages. I loved the dense tomes of Shakespeare with the lovely but impenetrable Renaissance English, those doomed heroines with their fanciful names. Desdemona, Cressida, Ophelia. Sometimes I glanced through the more modern novels and plays. Wilde, Shaw, and Zola. I knew these books were considered unseemly, even scandalous, but I never seemed to get far enough into them to understand why. Some nights I contented myself with more pedestrian works. That particular evening I was paging through Sloan’s Handy Hints and Up-To-Date Cook Book. It was the section of etiquette that interested me most. I tried to memorize the rules of how people behaved in polite society. "A gentleman should never take two ladies on his arm," I read, "unless it is for their protection."

From the other side of the store, I heard the door jangling open, light footsteps crossing the bare floorboards. Footsteps too light to belong to a man. A funny thing, Mr. Jelinek never seemed to get many women in his shop. This must be an important customer, I thought, because he was greeting her in his most cordial voice. The stranger was asking for a book she had ordered, a book in Russian, stating her request as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. She sounded too old to be a college student. Her speech had depth and breadth to it. She spoke as confidently as a man. Never in my life had I encountered a woman like this. Uncle Peter once told me there were learned women in this country, not just female university students but female professors. Until now I had never believed him.

"Your book’s right here, ma’am. Shall I wrap it up for you?"

"Yes, please. I’ll just take a brief look around the shop if I may. I haven’t been here in ages."

Her swift footsteps were coming in my direction. I forced my eyes to focus on the page in front of me. "Your napkin is intended for your lips and beard only, not to wipe your face with." The words hardly registered in my brain. I became aware of someone standing a few feet away. Slowly I lifted my eyes from the page until I saw the lady taking a book from one of the middle shelves and skimming through it, too immersed in her task to realize she was being observed. She was wearing a tailored suit of pale blue linen, the same color as the evening sky. I had never seen a woman’s suit in that tender, fragile shade of blue. She had an elegant figure–slender, not scrawny, not broken by factory work of childbearing. Her black hair was soft and waving, with a touch of silver in it, bound to the nape of her neck with a mother-of-pearl clasp. Her face was calm, serene even, like a statue of some symbolic figure: Peace or Justice. The book she was leafing through had colored illustrations of dragons, firebirds, and knights, but just then she shut the book, glancing up and meeting my stare head on. Her eyes were gray and starlike, quietly amused. Under her gaze, my throat went tight, as if I were choking on a mouthful of dust. I hid my face in my book, my eyes moving up and down the page, the etiquette rules floating around like disembodied voices. "When finished with your soup, do not turn the bowl upside down." Behind these voices I registered the sound of the lady making her way to the front of the shop, chatting again with Mr. Jelinek. I pricked my ears, straining to follow the conversation, but it was drowned out by the back door swinging open and a clatter of wing tip shoes.

Mr. Jelinek’s nephew John came waltzing up to me with a broom in his hand. "The beautiful maiden of the mill!" he sang out, loud enough to startle the people on the street outside. I imagined the lady hearing that. Beautiful maiden of the mill. It was so ludicrous, I wanted to cover my face and burst out the door. John Jelinek was always inventing names for me. I put up with his teasing, because he reminded me so much of my dead brother. "How are you tonight, Kathrin?" he asked, a few decibels lower this time.

"Do you know that lady?" I whispered, nodding in the direction of the voices on the other side of the bookcase.

John whistled through his teeth. "The Professor’s widow."

We viewed her through a gap in the shelf. Mr. Jelinek was wrapping up the Russian book for her. She paid him the full price of two dollars without even attempting to haggle.

"She’s our best customer," said John. "If she ever moves away, we’ll go bankrupt."

"She is not a professor herself?" I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. "A widow? Are you sure? She does not look like a widow." She seemed as unlike a widow as any woman I had ever seen. There was no air of loss about her.

"Her husband died six years back. You can tell she’s lonely, all right." John narrowed his eyes and sauntered off.

"Thank you very much." It was the lady’s voice, smooth and clear as a church bell. The door squeaked open, then shut after her. I put Sloan’s Handy Hints back in its place on the shelf. I’ll go now. But before leaving the store, I sidled over to the exact spot where the lady had been standing and hunted the spines of the books until I found the one she had been holding in her gloved hands. It was, of all things, a book of fairy tales. That explained the beautiful pictures. I leafed through them, one by one. A brooding knight was riding off into a purple forest of tangled trees. A mermaid was weeping, her salt tears falling into the salty waves. Then there was a picture of a woman in a meadow, her long dark hair sweeping down to touch the flower-starred grass. The woman was so stately, she reminded me of the lady. Her eyes were the same shade of gray. The lady was holding a wand, and from the tip of that wand, a river of silver was flowing, a river of silver turning into gold.

"You’re so skinny, Kathrin." John came up to me again. "I bet I could lift you off the ground with one arm."

I snapped the book shut, then put it carefully back where I had found it. He’s just joking, I told myself. He means no harm.

He was holding something behind his back. "Close your eyes and hold out your hands."

"I must catch my streetcar."

"C’mon, Kathrin. Have some fun for once."

Feeling like a child, I shut my eyes and held out my hands. I felt him putting something into my outstretched palms. Bread. I recognized the texture and weight. Opening my eyes, I saw a sandwich made of jagged slices of pan loaf with thick yellow cheese in the middle. My mouth filled with saliva. Before I knew what I was doing, I was bolting it down. There was sweet butter inside of the bread. Butter and not margarine. John hung by my side, eyeing me with an air of satisfaction. "Who feeds you when you’re hungry, Kathrin?"

"Thank you," I said when I had swallowed down the last mouthful. Something about the way he was looking at me made me blink and glance away. "I must go. Your uncle will want to lock up."

"I’ll walk you to your streetcar stop. You know you shouldn’t be going around the city on your own after dark. Especially with those fraternity boys running around." He made a face. "Mama’s boys with soft white hands who never had to do a day’s work. They’re the worst. Hey, Jan!" he yelled to his uncle. "I’m walking Kathrin to her streetcar."

Old Mr. Jelinek looked up from the ledger book. "You do that, John. Good-night, Kathrin." He smiled at me in such a way, I wished I were his kin, too. I imagined being John’s sister, working in this forest of books. A grateful apprentice. I said good-night to Mr. Jelinek and followed his nephew out the door, treasuring their kindness, which was like an invisible shawl I could take home with me, a shawl shielding me from the cold stares I got on the street, the rude shouts at the mill.

"How are the flour bags?" John asked as we crossed to the streetcar stop.

"They are the same," I said.

"Don’t you ever get tired of the mill?" He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered me one. I shook my head and watched him strike a match against and lamppost and light up. He smoked thin elegant cigarettes, the kind the college boys smoked. How could he afford them? They didn’t make that much money at the bookstore. Maybe he filched them from the tobacconist on the corner. I wouldn’t put it past him. He was so confident, he could get away with anything. Even in his faded shirt with the celluloid collar, he managed to look smart, managed to make the college boys walking up and down the street look like overdressed buffoons. He was five years older than I was but so full of life, he made me feel old. That’s why I liked to think of him as a brother, teasing me and buoying me up. Not letting me sink too deep inside myself.

"That lady who came in tonight," he was saying. "You should see if you can work for her. Ladies like that have secretaries and assistants."

Sometimes John’s sense of humor took me a while to grasp, but I made myself laugh anyway. "Oh, yes. She will hire a mill girl."

"I’m serious." He sounded annoyed. "With all your schooling, you could do better than the mill. Or do you want to sew flour bags your whole life like some peasant?"

I turned my back to him. Teasing was all very well, but he had gone too far. The streetcar was coming around the corner. "Here it is," I said. "Good-bye, John." Across the street, Mr. Jelinek turned off the lights in the bookstore. Something dimmed inside me, as well. Why did John have to spoil everything, spoil my vision of that lady with his crazy talk, and fill my head with longings that could never be granted?

"Wait." He grabbed my arm before I could walk away. I flinched a little. I wasn’t used to being touched anymore. Lotte and I never touched. "I’m dead serious," he said, his hand on my arm, just above the elbow. "I’ll talk to her and see if I can arrange something, but you’ll have to get yourself a decent dress. That thing you’re wearing now looks like an old tablecloth."

The streetcar screeched to a halt in front of us, silencing him and sparing me from having to think up an answer. I yanked my arm free and jumped in the back, clutching the rail. John was still standing there, looking at me. The expression on his face was somewhere between impatience and solicitude. He meant well, but he didn’t know that he’d struck me where it hurt the most. That my education had been for nothing, that I’d spend the rest of my life at the mill.

An hour later, as I lay in bed beside my snoring cousin, I tried to picture my mother’s face. I had no photograph, only memory. All I could see was the closed coffin in the muddy pit. When I tried to open it, I saw dirt, earth, a blank. It was hopeless. But I could conjure up the woman with the black hair. I could see her clearly as an image on a billboard. She was standing in a sun-drenched meadow with a wand in her hand, a branch of hazel, the wood used by diviners to find hidden springs, buried wells. I stared at the lady until she felt my stare, until she turned to me with those gray eyes like the Mississippi in November, but then I blinked, and she was gone. I remained alone in the meadow, except now I was holding the wand. It hummed in my hand like electricity, like a prayer.

I never expected to see that lady again. I even stayed away from the bookstore the next week, because I didn’t want to break the spell, didn’t want to hear any more of John’s meddling, however well intentioned. I wanted that evening preserved forever in my memory. The dying sun gilding the Bohemian glass and the scholarly lady’s voice echoing through the shop. The illustrations in the book of fairy tales, the colors as rich as if they had just been painted. And then John’s outburst: beautiful maiden of the mill. In retrospect, I relished the sound of it. My life was bearable if I could think of myself as the maiden of the mill. I pictured myself mistress of an old-fashioned water mill, the big wooden wheel revolving with the tug of the stream. In my fantasy, I did not work in the mill but just sat beside it looking picturesque, wearing a red dress, the kind worn centuries ago, the kind I had only seen in books. My apron was full of soft white bread, which I tore into pieces and threw to the swans, who curved their graceful necks to devour it before the millpond current swept it away. My daydreams grew so ornate, I sewed one jagged seam after the next.

After work I went walking. I headed over the bridge and across the river, past the mills and factories on the West Bank, past the North Star Blanket Factory with its big upside-down star. I went downtown toward Hennepin Avenue with the elegant buildings, the motor cars and delivery wagons, the businessmen bustling past shoeshine boys, the ladies with their powdered faces veiled against the sooty air. The smell of flour carried all the way downtown on hot and humid days. There was no escaping it. I tried to take comfort in the knowledge that even the rich had to breathe the same flour-smelling air as I did.

I walked as far as the downtown public library, but by the time I reached it, it was closed. They locked their doors at seven every night to keep out the derelicts. So I made my way back to the river, back across the bridge. Looking out over Nicollet Island, the big houses with their tidy lawns, the trees leafing out after the long winter, I watched the sun sink behind the smokestacks on the West Bank, the darkness falling over the river, the white walls of the Pillsbury Mills going russet in the sunset. If I hadn’t had to work there, I would have thought they were beautiful.

That night my room had never seemed dingier. I couldn’t lock or even close the door properly. The mildewed ceiling, the dirty pink wallpaper, the threadbare carpet, even the air was heavy and sour, smelling of the landlady’s stew and Lotte’s cigarettes. I sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress springs squeaking under my weight. As I leaned forward to unlace my shoes, I noticed an envelope lying on the bedside table, my name and address penned in a sloping, unfamiliar hand. The envelope was so crisp and perfect, I gave my hands a good wash before opening it.

Dear Cathrin,

When are you coming to the bookstore again? Did you forget what I was telling you? I have good news. The Professor’s widow will be expecting you at her house on Sunday morning, eight o’clock sharp, for an interview. I told her Sunday was the only day you have off from the mill. She has some things in German she needs translated. Here is her name and address:
Mrs. Violet Waverly
155 Summit Avenue
St. Paul
Get yourself something decent to wear.

Yours,
John Jelinek

My eyes froze on the lady’s address. Summit Avenue in Saint Paul. Wasn’t that were the rich people lived? I couldn’t believe any of this. John had outdone himself. I should have been ecstatic with gratitude, but I couldn’t help feeling that it must be some fluke, that I would only end up humiliating myself. Elegant ladies do not hire mill girls to do translations.

I slept fitfully that night. The next day I jammed the thread in my machine and had to spend nearly half an hour fiddling with it before it would run again. This did not escape Sepp Buchmayer, who came to stand behind me and breathe down the back of my dress. "Heiliger Birnbaum!" he screamed. "Stupid cow. If you don’t shape up soon, I’ll give your job to someone else." I straightened my spine and went on with my work. My eyes were glued to my sewing, but what I really saw was the woman with the wand.

Back to top.