The man was beginning to pass what Blair could tolerate. “Since when is this your house? My father—.”
At that moment, Blair’s sister, Houston, stepped into the room and put herself between them, giving Blair a look of anguish. “Isn’t it time for dinner? Perhaps we should go in,” Houston said in that cool, reserved voice of hers—a voice that Blair was beginning to hate.
Blair took her place at the big mahogany table and all through dinner answered Mr. Gates’s nasty-tempered questions, but her mind was on her sister.
Blair had looked forward to returning to Chandler, to seeing her sister and mother, to again seeing her childhood playmates. It had been five years since she’d been back and, the last time, she’d been seventeen, preparing to enter medical school and bursting with enthusiasm about her new studies. Perhaps she’d been too wrapped up in her own thoughts to really see the atmosphere in which her mother and sister were living.
But, this time, she’d felt the oppression as soon as she got off the train. Houston had met her, and Blair was sure that she’d never in her life seen a more perfect specimen of a rigid, frigid, unbending woman. She looked like a perfectly formed woman who just happened to be made out of ice.
There were no exuberant huggings at the train station, nor were there exchanges of gossip as they were driven back to the Chandler house. Blair tried to talk to her sister, but she only received that cool, remote stare. Even the name of Leander, Houston’s fiancé, brought no warmth to Houston’s demeanor.
Half of the short trip was made in silence, Blair clutching her new surgical bag, afraid to let it out of her hands, while they drove through Chandler.
The town had changed a great deal in the five years since Blair had seen it. There was a feeling of newness about the place, that things were building and growing. The western town was so different from cities and towns in the East, where traditions were already established.
The buildings, with their false fronts, a style someone had called Western Victorian, were either new or under construction. Chandler had been merely a pretty piece of land with a magnificent amount of surface coal when William Chandler had arrived. There’d been no railroad, no town center, no name for the few stores that were serving the scattered ranchers in the area. Bill Chandler soon remedied that.
When they pulled into the drive of the Chandler house—or mansion, as the townspeople liked to call it—Blair smiled up at the ornate three-story building with pleasure. Her mother’s garden was green and lush and she could smell the roses. There were steps from the street up to the house now because the hill in the street had been levelled for the new horse-drawn trolley cars, but it hadn’t changed much otherwise. She walked across the deep porch that wrapped around the house and went through one of the two front doors.
It didn’t take Blair ten minutes inside the Chandler house to see what had taken all the spirit out of Houston.
Standing inside the doorway was a man with a solidness that any self-respecting boulder would envy—and the look on his face matched the shape of him.
Blair had been twelve years old when she’d left Chandler to go to Pennsylvania to live with her aunt and uncle so she could study medicine. And in the intervening years, she’d forgotten just what her stepfather was like. Even as Blair smiled at him and offered him her hand, he started telling her what a bad woman she was and that she wouldn’t be allowed to practice her witchcraft doctoring under his roof.
Bewildered, Blair had looked at her mother in disbelief. Opal Gates was thinner, her movements slower than Blair remembered, and before Blair could reply to Mr. Gates’s remarks, Opal stepped forward, hugged her daughter briefly, and led her upstairs.
For three days, Blair said very little. She became a bystander who watched. And what she saw frightened her.
The sister she remembered, the one who laughed and played, the one who used to delight in the twin game of trading places with her sister, and causing trouble, was gone—or buried so deep that no one could find her now.
The Houston who used to organize games, the Houston who was always so creative, Houston the actress, was now supplanted by a steel-backed woman who owned more dresses than the rest of the town put together. It seemed that all of Housto
n’s creativity had been rechannelled into the choosing of one stunning dress after another.
On her second day in Chandler, Blair found out from a friend something that gave her hope that her sister’s life wasn’t completely without purpose. Every Wednesday, Houston dressed as a fat old woman and drove a four-horse wagon loaded with food into the coal camps that surrounded Chandler. This was quite dangerous since the camps were locked and guarded to prevent the infiltration of unionists. If Houston had been caught delivering illegal goods to the miners’ wives—goods not bought at the company store—she could be prosecuted, that is, if the guards didn’t shoot her first.
But on the third day, Blair gave up the little hope she’d found, because on the third day she re-met Leander West-field.
When the Westfields had moved to Chandler, the twins had been six-year-olds, and Blair had been confined to her room with a broken arm and so had missed meeting the twelve-year-old Leander and his five-year-old sister. But Blair’d heard all about him from Houston. Disobeying her mother, Houston had slipped into Blair’s room to tell her that she’d met the man she was going to marry.
Blair had sat there and listened with wide-eyed attention. Houston had always known what she wanted, always seemed like an adult.
“He’s just the sort of man I like. He’s quiet, intelligent, very handsome, and he plans to be a doctor. I shall find out what a doctor’s wife needs to know.”
If possible, Blair’s eyes had opened wider. “Has he asked you to marry him?” she’d whispered.
“No,” Houston had answered, pulling off her still-clean white gloves—if Blair’d had on those gloves for even thirty minutes, they’d have been soiled black. “Men as young as Leander don’t think of marriage, but we women have to. I have made up my mind. I shall marry Leander Westfield as soon as he finishes medical school. This is subject to your approval, of course. I couldn’t marry someone you didn’t like.”
Blair had been honored that Houston had given her this power, and she’d taken her responsibility seriously. She’d been a little disappointed when she’d met Leander and found that he wasn’t a man at all but just a tall, slim, good-looking boy who rarely said anything. Blair had always liked the boys who ran and threw rocks and taught her how to whistle with two fingers in her mouth. After a few initial unpleasant encounters with him, she had begun to see what people liked about Lee after Jimmy Summers had fallen out of a tree and broken his leg. None of the other children had known what to do and just stood back and watched Jimmy cry in pain, but Lee had taken over and sent someone for the doctor and someone else for Mrs. Summers. Blair had been quite impressed with him and, as she’d turned toward Houston, Houston had nodded her head once, as if to say that this episode had reaffirmed her decision to become Mrs. Leander Westfield.
Blair was willing to admit that Leander did have a few good qualities about him, but she’d never really liked him. He was too sure of himself, too smug…too perfect. Of course, she had never told Houston she didn’t like him and, too, she had thought maybe he’d change, become more human as he grew older. He didn’t.
A few days earlier, Lee had come to pick up Houston to take her to an afternoon tea and, since Opal was out and Mr. Gates at work, Blair had a chance to talk to Lee while Houston finished dressing—it usually took her an eternity to get fastened into one of those lace and silk concoctions she always wore.
Blair thought that they’d have a common ground for conversation since they were both doctors, and that he’d no longer antagonize her as he had at one time.
“I’ll be interning at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Philadelphia next month,” she began, when they were seated in the front parlor. “It’s supposed to be an excellent hospital.”