Daughters of the Lake(11)
Many of Wharton’s grandest old houses were now bed-and-breakfast inns, catering to tourists who came to shop for local artwork, to explore the islands by ferry, to kayak or row out to the “sea caves” hewn into the rocky cliffs, or to simply wander hand in hand through town with one’s beloved, marveling at the romance of this charming village, set in the middle of nowhere. Visitors said the town radiated a sense of peace unlike anything they’d ever experienced. Kate came here often because of it.
As Kate pulled into town, summer tourist season was rapidly evaporating with the falling temperatures. Which was not to say that Wharton was closed up tight with the coming of winter. On the contrary. The town’s unusually warm climate drew people all year long, and although tourists couldn’t enjoy the lake itself in the winter, they came for quiet weekends at the inns, long walks in the temperate air, and hours of sitting outside under a blanket with a book and a glass of wine, grateful for the odd respite from the harsh winter that surrounded the town but somehow didn’t penetrate it.
Kate loved this quaint harbor village. By design, no building was taller than two stories—with the exception of the grand old mansions that lined the residential streets. Visitors were always surprised to find no fast food restaurants, no big department stores, no discount retailers, no strip malls. Unlike the downtown areas of many small communities, which had devolved into ghost towns, Wharton’s downtown was still thriving with the everyday business of people’s lives. Residents visited their family doctor in her office on Main Street and got their prescriptions filled at the local pharmacy two doors down. They bought everything from light bulbs to window cleaner at Frank’s Hardware, which had been owned and operated by the same family for three generations. They got their fresh produce at the market across the street, exchanged town gossip at the diner, and congregated at the coffee shop, all of which were located within three blocks of each other.
The myriad upscale galleries and shops surrounding those core businesses existed mainly for tourists, but everyone, tourist and local alike, loved the restaurants, which were welcoming the first of their dinner guests for the evening as Kate drove through town. She passed Antonio’s, which served Italian fare. Just down the block was the Flamingo, an eclectic place with a long mahogany bar serving fine wines and microbrews and a decidedly American menu including big salads and burgers. Kate saw a crowd gathering at The Dock, located right on the water and offering local specialties like lake trout, wild rice, and Cornish pasty, and the best lake view in town.
Kate turned from the main street and made her way up the hill toward her destination, one of the grandest old homes in town. The building had begun its life more than a century earlier as the home of Harrison Connor, a young, self-made millionaire who had been savvy enough to position himself in the right place at the right time during the shipping boom at the turn of the last century. The history of the place always swam in Kate’s mind whenever she came here. It was her own family history, after all.
She knew that Harrison’s opulent lifestyle in Wharton was a far cry from his upbringing as a farm boy. His father, Claus, a German immigrant, had built a farm—forced it into being with the sheer power of his determination—out of a rocky, windswept field near the border of North and South Dakota. His land wasn’t filled with the rich soil that turned the region into the breadbasket of the world and, as such, it didn’t take well to the wheat and sunflowers he grew, but he owned it outright, along with a few cows, chickens, and pigs.
Survival on those unforgiving, desolate plains was a constant struggle, no matter the season. The intense heat of summer punished farmers in the fields who had not so much as a tree for relief. The harsh winds of winter stirred up blinding blizzards that confused and consumed men who knew the land as well as they knew their own souls. By the time Claus was thirty years old, he looked decades older, hardened by the effort of exerting his will against the land, day after backbreaking day.
Harrison, so elegantly named for his English maternal grandfather, knew he wouldn’t be on the farm for long. When he was through cleaning the horses’ stalls and feeding them for the night, he would sink into the fresh straw in the barn’s loft and open his schoolbooks. Education was the only way to escape a life as brutal as the one his father had endured, and so he plunged into his schoolwork with a fever. Shakespeare tonight, then.
Inside the house, his mother, Gloria, was where she always was at that time of day, standing in front of pots simmering on the stove. She and her son talked about his schoolwork, books, literature, and history—things they both loved.
Gloria was determined that her son get a good education, and because of that, she had struck a bargain with her husband years earlier, a bargain she knew was destined to crumble like the lie that it was. The boy would do his chores and help out as much as possible during his school years, she told her husband. After that, he would join his father on the farm full time. She told her husband this although she knew it to be untrue, putting off the inevitable explosion when Harrison’s real intentions, and Gloria’s dreams for him, were finally revealed.
Claus had come in from the fields one evening not long after his son had graduated from high school to find the boy standing in the kitchen with a suitcase. Off to college, just as his mother had planned.
The enormous Claus leaped on his son then, inflicting blow after blow. He was awakened from this all-consuming violence by his wife, who stopped the beating by grabbing her husband’s rifle that hung above the fireplace and firing two shots into the air. Gloria was fully prepared to shoot to kill if necessary. Luckily for Claus, it was not. Harrison left the farm that evening and never returned.