Montgomery - The Awakening Part 16

"I'll just wait over here for you, miss, and I'll keep watch that no harm comes to you."

"Thank you very much, uh..."

"James, miss."

"Thank you, James." She waited while the chauffeur came around to open the door for her, then she got out and walked to the back of the line.

The people in the line weren't very pleasant to her and said several unkind things about her clothes, the car she came in, and whether she needed a job or not.

"The lady's come down to us," one overpainted young woman behind Amanda said. "Think a silk dress will get you the job, honey?"

Amanda said nothing. What had made her think she wanted to do this?

"Maybe it's the handsome college professor she wants," another woman said with a smirk.

Amanda turned to face the jeering women. "How many languages do you speak?" she asked coolly.

"It's none of your business," the first woman said.

"I speak four and can write three more," Amanda said quite loudly, so that most of the people in the line could hear her. James, waiting in the car, smiled encouragement at her.

"What's that?" said a young man with a notebook who was moving down the line. "Did someone here say she could speak four languages?" He looked at Amanda and the other three women.

"I do," Amanda said.

The young man looked her up and down. "What are they?"

"French, Italian, Spanish and German. I can read and write Greek, Russian and Latin."

He was writing as she spoke but he crossed the Latin out. "Any Oriental languages? Hindu?"

"I have only a rudimentary acquaintance with Chinese but I'm afraid I'm not fluent in it."

The man gave her a quizzical look. "Any other 'rudimentary acquaintances'?"

"A bit of j.a.panese, a bit of Hungarian."

People in the line were beginning to leave as they gave malevolent looks to Amanda.

"Come with me, honey," the man said and grabbed Amanda's arm and began pulling her into the hotel.

The lobby was a mess, with people running everywhere, people shouting, people sitting on every available surface. There were bundles and suitcases piled along the walls. Children were screaming; men were smoking and frowning; women were looking exhausted and ignoring the demands of husbands and children. The air was blue with smoke; the noise was deafening and it must have been a hundred and twenty degrees in the airless room.

"Stand right there," the young man said to Amanda. "And don't leave. Whatever you do, don't leave."

Joe Testorio pushed his way past the people in the line and into the room that was supposed to be Dr. Montgomery's bedroom. Hank, in s.h.i.+rt sleeves that he'd sweated through, was interviewing one applicant after another. Reva Eiler, his secretary, stood behind him-or maybe hovered was a better word.

"I found her," Joe said, putting his head between Hank and the applicant. "She speaks four languages, can read and write three others and knows 'a little' of three more."

"Yeah?" Hank said. "So where is she? You should have tied her to the door to keep her from getting away."

Joe ran back into the lobby. Amanda had not only not walked away, it didn't look as if she'd moved a muscle. Can follow orders, he thought.

"He's waiting for you," Joe said and took Amanda's arm and began pus.h.i.+ng people aside to get her into the hotel room.

Amanda's breath caught as she saw Dr. Montgomery bent over some papers and asking questions of a nervous, dirty little man. It seemed like ages since she'd seen him.

"Here she is, Doc," Joe said.

Hank looked up and saw Amanda, resembling a spring flower growing out of a dung heap. She looked cool and fresh and pretty and oh so wonderfully desirable. "No," Hank said, then turned back to the man on the other side of the desk. "And what do you speak besides Italian and English?"

"My English not so good but my Italian is very good," the man said with a heavy accent.

"But what other languages do you speak?" Hank asked angrily, knowing too well that his anger was for Amanda. Why couldn't she just get out of his life altogether?

No, Amanda thought, he was not going to dismiss her just like that after all she'd gone through to get here. She couldn't bear the idea of facing either of her parents if she failed to get the job.

"But, Doc," Joe wailed.

Amanda stepped forward. "May I be of a.s.sistance?" she asked. She could feel Reva's eyes boring into her but she wasn't going to let herself be defeated. In perfect Italian she said to the little man, "Dr. Montgomery would like to know if you speak any languages other than Italian or English."

Grateful to at last be able to understand someone, he poured out his problems to Amanda: that he had seven children to feed and he needed a job and five dollars a day was an enormous lot and he hoped he could get the job but he only spoke Italian and English only a little bit.

Amanda thanked him and wished both him and his family well. She turned to Hank. "English and Italian and that's all. Shall I help with the Mexican family next in line?"

"You can't help at all. Joe, take Miss Caulden out of here."

"Caulden?" Joe gasped and looked at Amanda as if she were the devil himself. "Come on, let's go."

Amanda moved away from Joe and put her hands on Dr. Montgomery's desk. "I thought you needed help. I thought you believed in equality and fairness, but I guess you have to be poor to deserve fairness. One set of laws for the rich and another for the poor. Pardon me, I didn't understand." She straightened. "I wish you luck, Dr. Montgomery, in whatever you're trying to do." She began to make her way through the crowd to the door.

Hank watched her go and he was torn between wanting someone to help him translate and never wanting to see Amanda again. He'd thought of nothing but her since he'd left her house. He could see her, feel her, smell her.

"You're right, Doc, we don't need no Caulden working for us," Joe said. "She'd probably give away all our secrets to her old man."

"What secrets?" Hank muttered and then he was running after her. He caught up with her before she left the hotel, grabbed her arm and pulled her into the first door he saw, which happened to be a tiny, smelly broom closet with one bare, weak light bulb overhead.

"Dr. Montgomery," Amanda said, rubbing her arm, "I would have known your grip anywhere."

"What do you want, Amanda?" Hank demanded.

"A job. I saw your ad in the paper and I do have some knowledge of languages. I've always been rather good at languages. Of course I probably should have spent my life learning the latest dances instead of wasting it learning what's inside books, but now I seem to be cursed with knowledge, so I thought I might put it to use."

"And help me start a union? Do you realize that I'm trying to get the people to join the ULW? I want them to join together to demand better working conditions. The enemy is people like your father."

"Is that what you tell them? To personally hate anyone who owns land? They wouldn't have jobs if it weren't for my father."

Hank hated her att.i.tude. She didn't have any idea what poverty was. Except for self-imposed hunger, she didn't know what it meant to go without a meal. "Did Taylor give you permission to apply?"

"I didn't ask him," Amanda answered truthfully. "Dr. Montgomery, do I have the job or not? If not, I'd like to go home."

"You won't last a day," Hank said.

"And what sort of wager do you want to make that I will last, and that I'll do a good job?"

"Amanda, you make it through today and you can have anything of me you want."

"Oh?" she said, one eyebrow raised. "I'll take you up on that, but you should worry that what I want will involve guns and knives and incendiary bombs."

He opened the door to the broom closet. "I'll chance it," he said softly. "But you won't last past noon."

He was almost right. Many times during the day Amanda wanted to go home. She was given fifty jobs at once. She was to write translations and do oral translations at the same time. Every hour more people arrived on trains into Kingman, and Dr. Montgomery had hired people to meet the trains and tell them to come to him so he could explain what a union was.

At eleven a.m. they moved out of the Kingman Arms and into a house that Joe had rented. There were big signs in front saying that this was the union headquarters.

All day long Amanda told people that they had rights, that if they bonded together they could peacefully make changes. Peace was the key word, she began to realize. Taylor and her father had said that the unionists wanted to burn and kill, but nowhere did she hear mention of violence.

By three o'clock she was very tired and she wanted a bath and a cool drink, but she kept going. Twice she looked at Dr. Montgomery and he looked more tired than she did.

The people were making her feel awful. Their eyes were hungry and tired. One woman's baby cried from hunger, and Amanda opened her purse and gave the woman the little bit of pocket money she had. She gave another woman the enameled comb in her hair. At four o'clock she sent Joe to get her chauffeur, then sent James to the diner to order three hundred sandwiches and distribute them-and to send the bill to her father.

Repeatedly, she felt Dr. Montgomery's eyes on her but she looked away.

The children were what upset her the most. How could toddlers be expected to pick in the fields? How could she bear to see them hungry? The children wanted to touch her because she was so clean and pretty, and several times Amanda held a baby in her arms while she explained to a father what a union was. Two babies wet on her, one threw up on her shoulder.

By eight p.m. the house began to clear out. The workers were beginning to find campsites along the roadsides or wherever they could.

Amanda just sat in her chair behind the little table that was littered with papers and pencils and stared dully around her. She didn't seem to have any thoughts at all. Today she had been through h.e.l.l and back-or maybe she wasn't fully back.

"Let's get something to eat," she heard Reva say to Dr. Montgomery.

Dully, without conscious thought, Amanda stood. Home, she thought, home to a hot bath and a hot meal.

Hank was watching Amanda and he knew what she was feeling. The first time he'd worked with field workers he'd felt the same way. The poverty was stunning, and he had been as ill prepared for it as Amanda. Maybe this is what he'd first sensed about Amanda, that she was a person who cared. She cared about Taylor; she cared about her father, about her mother. She didn't stand up for herself because she believed that other people were more important than she was.

"You go with Joe," Hank said to Reva. "I have something I have to do."

Reva knew he meant he had something to do with Amanda. "I could have sent sandwiches if I had a rich father," she said bitterly. "She just has the money to do what we all want to do."

"I don't see any kids' vomit on you," Hank said and walked toward Amanda. He put his hand on her arm. "Come with me."

"I have to go home," she whispered, not looking at him. "James will be waiting for me."

James, he thought, not "my chauffeur" or "my car."

"I'll tell him to go. I owe you an apology and I want to give it."

She looked up at him and she saw understanding in his eyes. She nodded. "I want to go somewhere clean and quiet," she whispered.

He took her hand in his, not the formal taking of her arm, but the more intimate palm and fingertips entwining, and led her to his car. He told her chauffeur, who'd spent most of the day sitting in the car waiting for her, to go home and that Miss Caulden would be returning later.

Chapter Thirteen.

Hank drove Amanda to the secluded area inside the trees around the little pond where he'd taken her on a picnic. He had to almost pull her out of the car, then she just stood there.

"Amanda," he said, but she didn't respond, so he took both her hands in his. "Talk to me, Amanda. You've never seen poverty like that, have you? You've been isolated in your pretty house and you never knew people like them existed. They're the people who pick the crops that put food on your table. It's the sweat of these people that puts silk on your back and diamonds on your fingers."

She tried to pull away from him but he held her hands. "I want to go home and burn my clothes and I want my schedule back." Tears were coming to her eyes. "Let me go, I said! I want to go home!"

As she struggled, he pulled her into his arms. "Go ahead and cry, Amanda. Cry all you want. You deserve it."

She fought against him. She didn't want to cry and she didn't want to ever see him again. "Let me go. I want to go home!"

"I think maybe you are home," he said, holding her to him, pinning her arms as she struggled. She didn't have the strength to fight, and after a while she clung to him. He seemed so healthy. She'd seen sick people today, people who couldn't afford a doctor. She began to cry in his arms, and he sat down, his back against a tree, and held her.

"I worry about test scores while they have no food," she said through her tears.

He unpinned her hair and stroked it as it hung down her back. "You can't blame yourself."

"But my father-"

He touched his lips to hers to quieten her, and to the astonishment of both of them, it was like the setting off of a bomb. Amanda opened her mouth under his and pressed her body against his. Neither of them thought as Hank's hand sought her breast and found it, and as Amanda felt his hand, her body went limp in his arms, opening herself to him.

"Amanda," he whispered against her lips, "we have to stop or I won't be able to."

"Please don't stop," she said desperately. "I couldn't bear it if another man turned me away. Make love to me. Make me feel whole and clean and as if I'm worth more than a test score."

Hank started to say no. She was upset and emotionally spent and she might regret this in the morning.

"Please, Hank," she whispered. "Please."

He had once thought that if Amanda ever asked him "please," he might do anything she wanted. He'd guessed right. He couldn't deny her anything, and all rational thought fled.

He stood with her in his arms and walked toward the spring-fed pond. "How about a bath, baby?" He moved with her into the pond, clothes, shoes, wallet and whatever else was on their persons and all.

The cool water sobered Amanda. "Dr. Montgomery," she said nervously, "regarding what I said a moment ago-"

He kissed her. "You can fight me or help me, but the result will be the same. You won't be the same when you leave here tonight, Amanda."

She was standing on the bottom, the water to her waist, and she knew by the look in his eyes that he was telling her the truth. She wondered if she'd wanted him from the first moment she'd seen him. Tonight she was going to do what she wanted to do. Tonight she wasn't going to rely on a schedule or someone else to tell her how to act.

"Yes," she whispered and began unb.u.t.toning her filthy dress.