The Shadow Catcher

The Curtises, now only four, seemed to fall off the map. Washington Territory was far away, as far away in her family’s imagination as China or Rome. Amelia sent a steady stream of energetic newsy letters because that’s the sort of person that Amelia was but Ellen’s replies were grim and slim and never more than one page long. She had, indeed, found a Christian community armed and ready to embrace her out in Washington Territory (Latter Day Saints? Seventh Day Adventists? Amelia couldn’t tell the differences among the tribes) and she was entreating a reluctant God to help find Eva a prospective husband. “I imagine Clara has young wolves aplenty huffing at your door,” she speculated. “Such a pretty thing.” Pretty, yes, Amelia agreed, herself, on reading this. There were wolves, certainly, on Clara’s trail but she wasn’t interested in them. Her “engagements” were of a different kind — one month the study of Dutch still-life artists, one month the Florentines, another month the history of ancient glass, two months believing she should pursue a career in nursing. There were many St. Paul girls of Clara’s age among the people they knew who evidenced this flittiness, an energetic brief commitment to a cause, girls who seemed to bat the air in optional directions as butterflies bat the air to stay alive. They would do this, they would do that — it was fatiguing to observe. But what passed for a joyous exercise, a struggle to be free of conventional constraints and expectations, was really only the final throes of a struggle to the death for most of Clara’s contemporaries. Matrimony clipped their wings. Marriage was to be their grand career. Childbirth their creative act. But Clara took her parents’ marriage for her own ideal — a lifelong flirtatious conversation, a prolonged engagement — and the young men she had met in St. Paul all seemed to lack the necessary humor, the off-handed heroism required by a life forged between two besotted equals. She would have forgone the equality of a prospective match, the balance in the equation, if there had been some Zeuses at her door disguised as bulls or swans but all she got were eager boys with knobby throats whose idea of a life “in commerce” meant not a life in married harmony, but working at a bank. She wanted what her parents had — the loving touches, the mutual obeisance, the lingering in bed in morning, the open door to friends whose married lives were less than perfect, less ideal than her own parents’, to whom everybody turned in times of conjugated crisis. Why should she look beyond her home for happiness when happiness was there? Why should she marry? It seemed neither perverse nor unreasonable that she should choose to stay at home at an age when other girls were courting futures for themselves. And if it took her an extra year or two to determine what was right for her — it would be nursing, she had finally decided — why should she hurry toward decisions that could, ultimately, alter the shape of her entire life? But she should have seen the signs. In hindsight, she should have seen the shadow of a worry on Amelia’s face when Clara announced she would seek acceptance at St. Paul’s Women’s Nursing Academy in September. Of course you must, darling. You must, Amelia had enthused. Never asking about cost, as other parents might have done. Waving off discussion of tuition. Letting every talk of money go unspoken.

Clara had enrolled in the Academy in September of the year following the Curtises’ departure. Amelia still sent letters but any thought of Ellen and her strange brood and stranger fate had long ago sailed from Clara’s sphere of attention until Amelia prompted her to sign a family Christmas card early in December. Write something to Eva, darling. Something heartfelt. She’s out in Washington Territory. Unmarried.

Clara had drawn a picture of a snowman.

Beneath, she’d written,

HO peful

HO mespun

HO liday.

Draw a heart around it, Amelia urged. Something cheerful.

Clara had drawn a sun above the figure.

Which would, she knew, never really offer solace to a snowman.