A Woman's Place Read online

  Virginia climbed back into bed for the third time. Her feet felt like two blocks of ice, and she buried herself beneath the blankets, pulling them up to her chin. She watched her husband putter around. He was still a fine-looking man at thirty-six, in spite of too many frown lines. His hair was still dark brown and thick, his body trim and muscular. She loved the dark evening shadow that colored his chin and the way it prickled when he held her close. She could never quite get over the fact that handsome, bright, successful Harold Mitchell had chosen her for his wife.

  She had been in awe of him from the first day they’d met—and she was still in awe of him, even though she knew all of his faults after eleven years of marriage. Her love for him had grown steadily over the years, undiminished. She felt it now as she gazed at him, a relentless ache deep in her chest. The fear of losing his love choked off her words, making it impossible to ask him about the ticket stubs or tell him about her new job.

  He was examining the shirt she’d chosen for him, holding it out in front of him with a look of displeasure. He carried it over to the bed, offering it for her inspection.

  “Did you starch this?”

  “Yes, of course I starched it.”

  “It doesn’t feel as stiff as it should. Did you use the right amount?”

  Her mistake sprang immediately to mind. “I bought a different brand last week. It was ten cents cheaper. I’ll switch back to the old brand, if you’d like.”

  “It isn’t worth saving a few cents if this is the result. It isn’t stiff enough. Can’t you feel the difference? Feel it.” She obliged, pulling her arm from beneath the covers and nodding her head as she rubbed the fabric between her fingers. But to be honest, she couldn’t feel any difference at all.

  Was she really that stupid? And if men could perceive minute differences that she was incapable of detecting, how would she ever survive in a man’s world down at the shipyard? Anxiety swelled inside her like soap bubbles in an overflowing tub. What had ever possessed her to hop on the bus this morning and ride over there? At the time, she had liked the feeling of independence, as terrifying as it had been. For once in her life she was doing something on her own, with no one to answer to, no one to order her around.

  “Can’t you feel that? The shirt isn’t stiff enough,” Harold insisted. “I don’t care for it at all.” Ginny hoped he wouldn’t ask her to rewash all of his shirts. She didn’t want to point out that he’d worn improperly starched shirts all last week.

  He finally hung it up again and walked over to the bed, pulling the blankets all the way back as if throwing open a door. His frown of disapproval worried her. If this shirt annoyed him, what would he say about her taking a job? Maybe it would be better to delay telling him until she was certain that she really wanted to work—or that she was capable of doing the work. She had never held a real job in her life.

  She wondered if what she’d done had been injudicious. That was her new word this week. It meant, “showing lack of judgment, unwise.” She whispered the word a few times, enjoying the rustling sound of it, if not the meaning.

  “Buying a cheap brand of starch was injudicious,” she said. “Do you want me to throw it out or use it up?” It should have been a simple decision, but she couldn’t seem to make it. It was Harold’s money she was wasting, after all.

  “Buy a new bottle of the regular brand,” he said with exaggerated patience, “and save the cheaper brand for emergencies—in case you run out.” He sounded irritated with her. She felt stupid for not thinking of it.

  “Oh … of course.” Then the full weight of today’s decision struck her: She’d accepted a job at the shipyard, building boats for the war effort. What on earth would Harold say when he found out? Would he lose his temper? Rant and rave? No, he would probably respond with that quiet, deadly anger of his that reminded Ginny of banked coals—innocent looking, yet filled with heat, capable of deep burns. He would speak slowly, pronouncing each word carefully as if she were too slow-witted to comprehend if he spoke any faster.

  What if he ordered her to quit?

  I won’t do it, she thought with a burst of daring. He could hardly tie her to a chair all day to keep her at home, could he? What if he took away all of her shoes or her clothes so she couldn’t leave the house? No, Harold wasn’t that imaginative. She chuckled at the thought.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” But he studied her for a long moment before picking up his book and his reading glasses from the nightstand.

  Did she look different to him? Had her singular act of bravery—or was it injudicious-ness—changed her in some barely perceptible way, like the difference between a properly starched shirt and one that wasn’t? But it hadn’t been courage that had made Ginny hang her apron on the kitchen doorknob this morning and abandon her laundry in the middle of a washday and take coins from her jar of egg money for bus fare. It had been a matter of survival. No one noticed her anymore. And Harold had two ticket stubs in his pocket.

  He began to snore. The book he’d been reading dropped to his chest. Ginny loved him, and she wanted him to love her in return, but she also wanted him to respect her, to need her for more than simply cooking his meals and finding the soap and starching his shirts. She reached over to gently remove the book from Harold’s hands. He awoke with a snort.

  “Huh? What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, smoothing his hair off his forehead. “You fell asleep. Why don’t you turn off your light?”

  He did, and as Ginny lay in the darkness, excitement mingled with fear as she thought about tomorrow and her first day of work.

  CHAPTER 2

  * Helen *

  Miss Helen Kimball glanced up at the factory’s ugly brick walls as she steered her bicycle into the parking lot. Goodness, how this place had grown. In a mere nine months’ time, the modestly sized Stockton Boat Works, which had manufactured motorboats in the drowsy village of Stockton, Michigan, for years and years, had transformed into the gargantuan Stockton Shipyard, producing landing craft for the war effort. The air around the building had a greasy, electric smell to it, and she could almost sense the throbbing of machinery, hissing and clanging inside.

  What on earth was she doing here? A woman from her station in life had no business working here. She considered turning around and pedaling home again, but she was too winded at the moment to make the return trip. It had been farther than she’d bargained for. And there were more hills on this side of town than she had recalled. The trip would be impossible by bicycle in the wintertime, especially for a fifty-year-old woman such as herself.

  The brakes squealed as she halted her bicycle in front of the factory. She wasted several minutes searching for a place to park, but the factory didn’t seem to have a bicycle rack. Helen would have to speak to someone about that. She hopped off and smoothed her skirt, then poked at her graying brown hair to rearrange it. The plant manager had advised her to wear slacks, but Helen Kimball had never worn men’s clothing in all her born days and didn’t own a pair. Wearing the drab, shapeless coveralls they’d promised to give her would be horrid enough.

  What am I doing working at a factory? she asked herself again. Then she remembered: trying to stop the walls of the huge Victorian mansion on River Street from closing in on her. She couldn’t bear to remain in that house one more day now that her parents had passed away. She could have applied to teach as a substitute, she knew that. But it wasn’t the same as having her own students, doing things her own way. After twenty years, Helen Kimball knew a thing or two about how to teach. She wouldn’t go back to Lincoln Elementary School until she could have her own class and teach them proper behavior from the very first day. There was just no telling how these younger teachers ran their classes, and Helen wouldn’t put up with wild behavior or slipshod teaching, even if she were a mere substitute.

  The last time she had substituted, she’d begun the day by reading from the Psalms, as she used to do before she�
�d stopped believing in God, and some wise-aleck boy in the back of the room had called out, “Our teacher never reads that.”

  She had given him a withering stare and asked, “Do I look like your teacher?” Her icy response hadn’t fazed him. In fact, the boy continued speaking out in that same irritating manner all day, telling Helen how the “real” teacher did things. No, she had no desire at all to be a substitute.

  She wheeled her bike into the scraggly bushes that served as landscaping and leaned it against the front of the building for lack of a better place. If someone stole it she would just have to take public transportation—another first for her. But maybe it was time to take another step down the social ladder and see how other people lived. She had never asked God for wealth and social stature, so what did it matter now if she threw it all back in His face? Being a Kimball had been a curse, not a blessing, and Helen was ready, at long last, to prove to God and everyone else that she could live a simple working-class life.

  The air felt cooler inside the building, out of the glaring sun, and she paused for a moment to get her bearings before making her way to the same office where she’d applied for a job two days ago. She nodded a silent greeting to the lone woman in the waiting area, then sat down and pulled a handkerchief from her purse to delicately wipe the perspiration from her brow.

  The other woman looked vaguely familiar—and very nervous. The mother of a former student, no doubt. She was in her early thirties, attractive, but round shouldered and timid looking. She sat huddled over her purse, her white-gloved hands gripping it as if it contained state secrets. Helen had to bite her tongue to keep from telling her to sit up straight. Good posture was so important. Then their eyes met and the woman smiled.

  “Excuse me … Miss Kimball?” she asked. “I don’t know if you remember me or not, but my son Allan had you for his teacher in second grade?”

  “Yes, of course—Allan Mitchell, I remember. A bright boy. Well-mannered.”

  “Why, thank you. His father insists on good manners—and so do I!”

  Helen remembered Mrs. Mitchell’s husband. Firm yet fair, not much warmth, rarely allowed his wife to say more than a peep. But obviously intelligent, articulate, and well-educated. He had reminded Helen of her own father.

  Mrs. Mitchell, on the other hand, had struck Helen as a typically dull wife and mother, the sort of woman who does charity work in her spare time, who always buys purses to match her shoes and goes to the hairdresser regularly to refresh her permanent wave. In fact, Mrs. Mitchell was probably the last person on earth that Helen would ever imagine working in a defense factory. She was surprised that Mr. Mitchell had allowed her to. He didn’t strike Helen as the sort of man who would embrace nontraditional roles for women. In that regard, he definitely resembled Helen’s father.

  “What brings you here, Mrs. Mitchell?” Helen asked.

  She hesitated, blinking in doe-eyed wonder as if asking herself the same question. “I … I’ve taken a job here.” Her voice had a tremor of excitement—or perhaps it was fear. Mrs. Mitchell seemed ready to bolt for home at the slightest provocation. “Now that I’m here,” she continued, “I’m wondering if my decision was injudicious. Why are you here? Surely not to work?”

  Helen nodded. “Yes, to work.”

  Mrs. Mitchell was too polite to ask why, but Helen saw the unasked question in her eyes. It took Helen a moment to recall the reason herself. Five days ago, as the walls of the house had begun to close in on her, she had seen an advertisement in a magazine from the Office of War Information calling for defense workers. The slogan read, His Life Depends on You. She had thought of Jimmy.

  One would think that after all these years she would have forgotten Jimmy long ago. Heaven knows all the other things Helen seemed to forget at her age, such as people’s names or even what day of the week it was. So why was Jimmy’s face still as vivid to her today as on the day he left for France in 1917?

  She knew perfectly well why. It was this horrid war. And there would be lots of Jimmies, truth be told, who would fight on foreign battlefields far from home. Come to think of it, if America had to fight another European war, then what on earth had the first one accomplished? Helen hadn’t wanted to think about any of those things, but the magazine advertisement had forced her to. The soldier in the drawing had even looked a bit like Jimmy with his dark, curly hair and brown eyes.

  His Life Depends on You, the caption insisted. If Helen could have gone to work during the Great War, taking a job that would have saved lives, she certainly would have done it. So why not do it during this war? Heaven knows she was weary of visits from the angel of death. He seemed to be working overtime these days, making sure Helen remained alone in the world. She knew it sounded silly, but she wanted to fight back—to give that angel a piece of her mind.

  Helen came out of her reverie as Mrs. Mitchell leaned toward her. “Excuse me again, Miss Kimball. But I just wanted to say how sorry I was when I read in the paper that your father had passed away.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It seemed such a tragedy after losing your mother only a few weeks before. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Helen hated sounding so prim, but as much as she disliked her tone of voice she couldn’t seem to help it. What had been considered proper manners when she was a girl made people call you “prim” or “stuffy” nowadays.

  “And I was sorry when I heard that you’d resigned from teaching last year to take care of them,” Mrs. Mitchell continued in her breathless, nervous manner, “because I was hoping that my son Herbie would have you for his teacher. That’s selfish of me, I know, but Herbert is my youngest, and Harold says I spoil him too much. Anyway, he’s more high-spirited than Allan and could have used a firm teacher such as yourself to keep him in line.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Mitchell. I hope to return to teaching someday when there is an opening. For now, I’ve accepted employment here.”

  “Please, call me Ginny,” she said with a smile. “Mrs. Mitchell sounds like my mother-in-law.” Virginia Mitchell laughed, and Helen tried to smile in return.

  How weary she’d grown over the years, listening to married women complain, even in a joking manner, about their in-laws and their husbands and moaning about how tired they’d grown of picking up dirty socks. They should try living in Helen’s shoes for a while, waking up alone day after day, living in an empty house that stayed neat as a pin but was vacant and loveless, always wondering what it would have been like to be married. Sometimes Helen thought she would willingly pick up entire rooms full of stinking socks if only she had someone beside her to love.

  To her horror, Helen felt tears burning in her eyes. She simply must stop this foolishness! She despised self-pity in others, and here she was indulging in it herself.

  “Of course, Ginny,” she replied. “Thank you.” But she didn’t offer to let Virginia call her Helen in return. It didn’t seem right. Ginny couldn’t be more than thirty-two or three, and Helen was fifty—old enough to be her mother.

  The door to the personnel director’s office opened suddenly, and a young, dark-haired woman emerged with him. “You may take a seat with the others,” Mr. Wire said. “We’ll be getting started in just a few minutes, ladies.”

  Helen recalled Mr. Wire’s doubtful expression as he’d interviewed her for the job, as if he didn’t expect her to last a week. Why did everyone seem to doubt that she could be ordinary and do menial work, simply because she’d been raised with wealth? Helen lifted her chin, resolved to succeed, determined to prove everyone wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  * Rosa *

  The persistent knocking on her bedroom door awakened Rosa Voorhees from a sound sleep long before she was ready. Her head hammered along with the pounding, and at first she couldn’t recall where she was. Not in her apartment in Brooklyn, that’s for sure! For one thing, it was much too quiet—except for the knocking. She rose to her elbows and looked around the darkened room. Even wit
h the curtains drawn she recognized the blond-wood furnishings of her husband’s boyhood bedroom, his high school pennants on the wall, his baseball glove on the dresser top, his books and comics arranged neatly on the shelf beside his desk.

  She remembered standing before a Justice of the Peace with Navy Corpsman Dirk Voorhees—who had looked dazzlingly handsome in his U.S. Navy whites—and becoming his wife. She recalled their brief month of married life before his transfer to Virginia. She remembered the long train trip alone from New York to Michigan in the overcrowded rail coach. And she remembered the looks of dismay on his parents’ faces when she’d arrived at their home one week ago yesterday. Rosa sank back on the bed again and closed her eyes. The knocking continued.

  “Rosa …” her mother-in-law called. “Are you awake?”

  She licked her lips before replying. The bitter remnants of too much gin had left a sour taste in her mouth. “Yeah … I’m awake … .”

  “The water is now hot for doing the laundry. You can do yours with me. … No sense in wasting the water.”

  Even if Dirk hadn’t told her that his parents were immigrants from Holland, Rosa would have figured it out by their funny accents. But Dirk hadn’t told her how blasted picky and old-fashioned they were about everything. Rosa’s head throbbed. She pushed her dark hair out of her eyes and turned to look at the clock that was ticking loudly on the nightstand. Ten minutes to six in the morning! Was the woman crazy? Rosa had been asleep for less than four hours!