Ella Maud Read online

  But prosperity did little to bring a sense of shared identity. The war was still within living memory, and an influx of entrepreneurs from Ohio, Massachusetts and New York brought tension as well as trade. It took another generation for an event that would finally heal the old divide. With the disappearance of Nell Cropsey, thirty-six years after the war’s end, the people came together at last. “Never before has the people of this community been drawn so closely together by a common feeling,” observed the Charlotte News. In blaming Jim Wilcox for the disappearance of Nell Cropsey, the good citizens of Elizabeth City were united at last.

  II.

  William Hardy Cropsey, of the old Brooklyn Cropseys, lived in Blythebourne. He was at this time a farmer without good land to farm. He supplemented his income with a job as a minor tax official, but feared his prospects for immediate advancement in city government were narrow. Brooklyn was crowded with other Cropseys, including his father Andrew, uncle Henry, brother Andrew G., the lawyer and judge. Almost all the good land was already improved, with prices spiraling above the astronomical rate of $1500 an acre. To make his way, he would have to borrow, either from the bank or from his family—prospects he loathed. For William Cropsey was not a man to suffer dependence.

  Meanwhile, the reconstructing South was bursting with opportunities. Eastern Carolina, in particular, was growing fast on the strength of timber, fishing, canning, and shipping industries. The climate was milder than New York’s, in soil so fertile it barely required much trouble to produce bumper crops, year-round. All those lumbermen and fishermen needed to eat, after all—as did the people of Norfolk and beyond. After much research, and a warm correspondence with his local contact, John Fearing, Cropsey decided that he would become a truck farmer in Elizabeth City. His family’s future would be built on potatoes, raised by his own hand.

  He announced his decision on a Sunday afternoon, at the dinner table. The only member of the family who wasn’t surprised was his wife, with whom he’d shared his hopes until firm plans were laid. When he said it, “We are moving to North Carolina next month”, the news was greeted with silence. Olive looked to Lettie, who looked to William Douglas, who stared at Nell, who gazed into her dinner plate.

  Mary Cropsey finally broke the silence: “I told you they wouldn’t like it.”

  “Children never do,” Cropsey replied, and broke off some bread. He said this with a air of finality that wordlessly seemed to add “…but it is done.”

  “We are finishing the year at school first?” asked Olive.

  “Of course,” said Mary. “Our things will be sent ahead, so the change will be easy as rolling over in bed. Our house will be much bigger, and face the water. Think about how wonderful that will be!”

  “You promised to take us hunting on Long Island,” said William Douglas, who was only eight and tended to speak out of turn.

  Cropsey frowned. “I did. And we will hunt, in the Great Dismal. There are a lot bigger things to shoot there than ducks!”

  “But you promised.”

  “William Douglas, mind your father. He knows our best interest.” said Mary.

  At the far end of the table, a fork clattered to its plate. All eyes fell on Nell, who fixed her eye on William Cropsey. And then, with the calmness of absolute certainty, she declared, “I am not moving.”

  The parents were so thrown by this utterance that they could only stare at her. Olive looked around as if planning her escape. Lettie looked at Nell with the remote pity of a spectator at a public execution.

  Mary Cropsey recovered first. “Nell, you will apologize to your father.”

  “I will apologize to his heart’s content. But I will not go to North Carolina. Nor to Florida, Panama or Patagonia, for that matter.”

  “You will not refer to your father by a pronoun.”

  “Mary, please—” William put his hand on his wife’s to silence her. “Nell, you are not setting a good example for the others.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “As long as you live in this house, you will do as you are told.”

  “I will not.”

  “Nell!” Cropsey bellowed, and pounded his fist. The force of it made the jam pot leap into the air, cartwheel and dump its contents.

  Aware of what strawberry jam could do to linen, Mary Cropsey shot to her feet. But her husband, hand still on hers, yanked her down.

  “I don’t know how we’ve failed as parents, to have raised such a headstrong girl.”

  “You told me,” Nell said, as if her father had not spoken, “that I may attend Pratt with Carrie when we graduate. How am I to do that from some town five hundred miles away?”

  “It’s not ‘some town’. It’s a handsome, remarkable town, that will do your brothers and sisters a world of good.”

  “Such selfishness!” grumbled Mary. “Thinking only of yourself, when the welfare of the entire family is at stake.” And her eyes were still fixed on the spilled jam as it spread and stained and filled her head with Boschian visions of chaos and oblivion.

  “I don’t see how anyone’s welfare is at risk,” Nell replied. “We have a perfectly fine life here.”

  Olive hid her hands under the table because they were trembling.

  “Should I get the switch, papa?” asked William Douglas.

  “Hush!”

  “Yes, should he get the switch, papa?” Nell mocked. “Would you like to whip my hands red, until I give in to this…arbitrariness?”

  William Cropsey planted his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. “I beseech you, Lord, to tell me what I’ve done to deserve such a hateful daughter.”

  The charge of “hatefulness” had an effect on Nell. Her calm melted. Tears stood in her eyes, and she rose out of her chair. “The father who raised me,” she said, voice quavering, “taught me to oppose injustice, no matter the source of it.”

  “Arrogance is what you have learned,” replied Mary.

  With that, Nell fled the table, toppling her chair behind her. The rest of the Cropseys listened as her footsteps ascended the stairs and the door of her bedroom slammed.

  Of course, this protest had no effect on William Cropsey’s plans: the lease with John Fearing was signed, and the packing of their belongings proceeded in anticipation of their move in April. But there was one surprising consequence. Instead of punishment for her outburst, Nell got a promise that she could return to Brooklyn in a few years to attend school. Nell told Olive about the arrangement as they were rolling bedsheets through the mangler on wash Monday.

  “He came to me the next day, and made the promise. I will be a college girl after all! I didn’t even have to apologize.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is. And I’d lie if I said I wasn't ashamed. He’s more just than he knows.”

  “Funny that he never told the rest of us about it.”

  Olive was always thankful for a spirit of compromise in their home, but something bothered her about the incident. For she was sure that if it had been any other of the Cropsey daughters who had so openly defied their father, the consequences would have been far worse. If it had been one of the older boys, the switch would certainly have come out, and the rest of the children forced to watch. But Nell the beautiful child, lovely to look at and a delight to hear, got a promise instead of a beating. The double standard bounced in the pit of Olive’s stomach, and made the edges of her ears burn.

  That wasn’t even the worst of it. What was worse was how oblivious Nell seemed to her favored position. If she owned up to it, perhaps expressed bewilderment, it would have been easier to excuse her, to chalk it up to the inherent unfairness of the world, and have a laugh together. But she showed no such awareness. Instead, she only seemed to grow more lovely, more entitled. Eyes flashing, she soaked up all good fortune. She sucked it out of every room, out of the very air, because she was fit by nature to take the lion’s share of the blessings. Or so she must have believed.

  Olive shared none of these thoughts wi
th Nell. Instead, she continued to smile as she fed the sheets into the rollers for her sister to crank though the machine. Smiled, as she imagined the welts her father should have raised on Nell’s porcelain skin. Smiled as she envisioned comforting her sister, her head on Olive’s lap as Olive stroked those glossy locks. Ever gracious, she would lean down to Nell’s ear, and pour comforting words into them. But she knew how the marks should have burned, and the quality of humiliation they would yield over the days they needed to heal beneath her skirts.

  And in a secret place, Olive would have been glad.

  III.

  One of Elizabeth City’s northern transplants was R.O. Preyer, who arrived from Cleveland in 1891. Preyer was a businessman who saw much potential in the timber business around Albemarle Sound. He soon became one of the top executives at Kramer Brothers & Co., and soon after that, built a fine house on 1109 Riverside Avenue.

  Kramer Brothers was known for solid product. One of their regular customers at century’s turn were another set of brothers, the Wrights of Dayton, Ohio. The bicycle mechanics purchased wood from Kramer Brothers to construct a camp at Kitty Hawk, just across the Sound on the Outer Banks. Some of their wood also went into a series of contraptions they were building, but the exact nature of their experiments were none too clear to the locals.

  The finest quality wood in Kramer’s stock went into the Preyer house. The design was Queen Anne, but with an eclectic hand. Onlookers admired its asymmetric but balanced impression, with the fine gabled section on the left, the notched, west-facing gable on the right, and the three-story tower anchoring the center, topped by a spire. There was a fine, double-story porch—alternatively known as the “piazza”— that extended across the front, adorned with intricate verge boards in the geometric style of Charles Eastlake. Another double porch caught the afternoon light on the west side. The gathering of dentils, spindles, beads and fish-scale shingle-work struck the contemporary eye as distinguished, demanding the kind of careful maintenance that betokened affluence. It was universally thought to be a fine addition to the row of handsome residences on the Pasquotank Narrows.

  Preyer called the house Seven Pines. He and his family lived there for only a few years, until they decamped for Greensboro and the opportunities of the North Carolina Piedmont. The house came into the possession of the Fearing family, who rented it in turn to another family of newcomers.

  The Cropsey children found their father’s promises fulfilled at Seven Pines. They were indeed mere steps from the water, and there was a boathouse from which they could take a rowboat on the river. Summer lasted deep into September, and autumn lingered close to the holidays. There was a tropical closeness to the air that was strange to them, but also faintly exotic. Sometimes, when Olive stood on the balcony and the breeze came onshore, she thought she smelled the scented bowers of the Indies.

  Cropsey seeded his first crop of Irish potatoes, and looked forward to reaping early in ’99. While they waited for the crop to come in, the younger children wandered the pastures behind the house, and fished off the docks, and threw rocks in the river. The older ones attended a steady schedule of dances and revues at the theater. There was also rollerskating, and trips for ice cream, and races at the Fairgrounds, and promenades up and down Main Street in the evenings. And when the children turned homeward, they would find their parents on the house’s magnificent porch—mother with her needlework, and Cropsey with his newspaper, rocking.

  Olive and Nell took a rowboat out on the water some evenings. They would go out into the middle of the stream, cast in the rusty anchor with plenty of slack, and let the current play out as far as it went. The rocking from the gentle current was pleasant to read by, or to idle away the time watching the stars come out.

  The river was unlike anything Olive had known up north: where the East River was brackish, and the North River seemed to flow cold from the heart of some glacier, the Pasquotank seeped black and oily. Though only a few feet deep, its opacity revealed nothing of what lay beneath. Rising from the vast swamp, it was like the black blood of some buried creature, bleeding from a perpetual wound. Years of hand-laundering had made the Cropsey girls keen judges of the qualities of water—soft or hard, sweet or salt, light or dark. When Olive slipped her hand in the water, the Pasquotank felt thick, a broth of soil and pine needles and decaying leaves. When she kept it there for a few minutes, her skin would come out faintly blackened, the color of weak tea.

  The entente between Nell and her father spared the family further drama. Nell slipped into the domestic life on Riverside Avenue as well as any of the others—perhaps better. Olive asked her, “You seem happy for someone who never wanted to come here!” To which Nell replied, “I am happy because I know I’m going back.”

  The young men of Elizabeth City wasted no time noticing the attractive newcomers. Sometimes, in the evenings, the sisters would hear hoofbeats on the road. Looking out, they would see some local swain in his Sunday best, flower in his lapel, galloping his rig past their door.

  The girls drew their share of glances during services at the Presbyterian church, which they noted but, of course, ignored. This had never been a problem in Brooklyn, but as there was no Dutch Reformed sanctuary in town, William Cropsey opted for this one instead. All the flirting, however, made him wonder at the morals of these Presbyterians.

  It was only a few weeks into their residency when Nell met Jim Wilcox. She was with Olive, who had met her at school to walk her home. As they came up Riverside Avenue, they encountered Annie Mae Wilcox—a classmate of Nell’s—chatting with a young man in his work clothes. Closer, and they could see the resemblance between the pair.

  “Nell…and Nell’s sister—sorry, what’s your name again…?” asked Annie Mae.

  “Olive. Call me Ollie.”

  “Nell and Ollie, this is my brother Jim. He works at the docks here.”

  Jim Wilcox was short, scarcely taller than Annie Mae, but broad in the shoulders. His hair was the blond of a sheaf of wheat—like his sister’s—and his mustache framed a pair of full lips that curled at the tips. He was dressed in denim overalls smeared in tar. But when he reached out his hand to shake Nell’s, his fingers and nails were utterly clean. Around his neck was a checkered kerchief that was likewise spotless.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, eyes flitting over her face and hair and bosom.

  Nell, blushing, briefly touched his hand. But Olive could detect none of the coldness she showed at unwelcome male attention.

  “Miss Olive,” Jim turned to Ollie. When she touched his hand, his fingers were coarse. His eyes rested on her only for a second before they shifted back to Nell.

  “Jim’s going to take me roller-skating tonight,” said Annie, in a tone of great accomplishment.

  “I am indeed. And I’m happy to invite your friends too.”

  Nell glanced at Ollie, whose presence would be required at any such meeting. Ollie kept her face a mask.

  “That’s very tempting,” she told him, “but we are engaged this evening.”

  “Engaged, heh? That’s too bad,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Well, don’t be surprised if I ask some other time.”

  When they were out of earshot, Ollie remarked “What a lot of confidence in such a small package!”

  “He’s not so short,” replied Nell.

  “Goodness, he comes up only to my nose.”

  “He may have some qualities.”

  He soon showed one of those qualities: he didn’t waste time. Just a few days later, he sent a note to Seven Pines requesting permission to call on Nell. She wrote a brief reply—“Yes, the gentleman might,” and sent it back the next day.

  The following Sunday, Jim showed up after they returned from church. He wore a suit of plaid wool, a pressed white shirt with starch collar, and work-boots, albeit shined to a high finish. His hat was already off, his blond hair appeared wet and dark from the pomade in it. When Nell opened the door, she was struck in the face by a wave of rosewater co
logne.

  “Miss Cropsey,” he said.

  “Mister Wilcox.”

  She invited him into the inner hall, and pretended not to notice a trio of eavesdroppers—May, Frederick, and William Douglas—tripping over each other to get out of sight.

  “May I take your topper?”

  “Please.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “That would be very nice.”

  She showed him to the right, into the sitting room. There she made him wait until she fetched her mother and Ollie. When they returned Nell bore a tray of tall lemonades and a sugar bowl. They found Wilcox seated comfortably on the sofa, arm slung over the back, legs crossed at the ankle.

  “What a lovely trio of ladies!” he declared.

  The ensuing interview lasted twenty minutes. In it, Wilcox was courteous, charming, confident, and perhaps a bit too familiar. He helped himself to three spoons of cane sugar for his lemonade, and informed them he was twenty-two years old. He lived with his family in town. When Mary Cropsey made the requisite inquiries into his profession, Jim did not dwell on his manual job at Hayman’s. He did mention that his father, Thomas P. Wilcox, had once been sheriff of Elizabeth City.

  “On what ticket?”

  “The Republican.” And when she made no answer, he added, “And now I think I’ve done it!”

  Mary Cropsey laughed. “Oh, we won’t hold that against you.”

  His father’s prominence in the community seemed recommendation enough. When Mary Cropsey rose to leave, she gave Nell a look that, if thoroughly unpacked, would have said, “This gentleman is acceptable. But you may see him only under supervision.”

  Ollie stayed in the room but did nothing to fill the awkward silences. To her, it was not just that Jim Wilcox seemed common; there was something unserious about him, as if he was content to waste his time and Nell’s on a courtship he knew would go nowhere. His interest in Nell was not odd in itself—she was, of course, a handsome girl—but the age difference did not sit well with Ollie. Louise at twenty-one or Lettie at nineteen would have been more appropriate choices. Or Ollie herself—if she had felt comfortable with a young man so much shorter than herself.