Love and Other Consolation Prizes(99)

“I can’t believe you finally married me, young Ernest.”

“And I’d do it all over again,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, or yesterday.”

A week after their impromptu tea ceremony, their daughters had found a simple wedding gown, and done their mother’s hair and makeup. Pascual had stood at Ernest’s side, his best man, in a modest service held at Kobe Terrace Park, with a handful of old friends from the neighborhood. Ernest didn’t care what anyone thought about his spur-of-the-moment nuptials. Nor did Gracie as she proudly carried a bouquet of roses—white and lavender—when she strolled down a simple aisle of silk and gave herself away. Ernest had beamed with happiness as he did the same.

Pascual had finally won the neighborhood lottery, Ernest thought, but he was the one who felt like the luckiest man alive.

“It’s almost time,” Gracie said. “I can’t wait to see her.”

Ernest blinked and looked up the avenue, searching for Maisie, who’d been unable to attend their wedding. But she’d told them that she would meet them here, tonight. That she’d be able to leave the closing ceremonies and join them as soon as she’d made a final appearance, shaken the governor’s hand, introduced some dignitaries.

Madam Flora would be pleased, Ernest thought.

Then he saw Maisie turn the corner. A long-lost love. A living, breathing embodiment of what might have been. She stood apart from the remaining tourists in an elegant dress. He watched as she and Gracie embraced, without hesitation, or restraint, or regret. They held each other, smiled and laughed, wiped the corners of their eyes.

Then the three of them lay on the cool grass and waited, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, children again. They watched the crackling, cascading fireworks as a band played Tchaikovsky, as another twenty-one-gun salute boomed. As bells rang, bagpipers piped, and a light rain began to fall, gently washing away the past.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


Someone recently asked, “Do you have a muse who inspires your writing?” This immediately conjured images from the movie Xanadu, where Olivia Newton-John played a glittering, roller-skating, disco-singing muse who falls in love with a struggling artist on the verge of giving up.

Needless to say, I wish I had a glittering, roller-skating, disco muse.

Instead of Terpsichore, the goddess of dance as played by Olivia, my de facto muse seems to be a never-ending appetite for lost history—the need to constantly turn over rocks and look at the squishy things underneath.

One of those metaphorical rocks happened to be the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909—Seattle’s forgotten world’s fair. I stumbled upon an old article about race and the AYP and how China had declined to sponsor an exhibit because delegates had been harassed at previous world’s fairs, and how ethnographic displays were immensely popular, like the Igorrote exhibit, a mock village of grass huts, which was basically a human zoo.

As I kept digging, I was intrigued to learn that 1909 was also the height of Washington State’s suffrage movement. Both the Washington Equal Suffrage Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association held conventions in Seattle to take advantage of the publicity of the AYP. And a large group of suffragists climbed Mount Rainier. Led by Dr. Cora Smith Eaton, who flew a “Votes For Women” pennant atop the 14,409-ft. summit, alongside an AYP flag.

But curiously, 1909 was also the peak of Seattle’s social evils—described as “dance halls, bagnios, crib houses, opium dens, and noodle joints…openly advertised in the full glare of electric light”—a major concern for the host city.

But what haunted my imagination more than anything, among articles about a “world of wonder” with a wireless telephone, incubators for premature babies, and a machine that could butcher salmon (patented as the Iron Chink) was finding a Seattle Times clipping that proclaimed SOMEBODY WILL DRAW BABY AS PRIZE and a sad 1909 follow-up in the Kennewick Courier, where a man who was in charge of the giveaway said, “No one had claimed the baby (yet).”

Much to my authorly delight (and parental mortification) that story turned out to be true.

The Washington Children’s Home Society did indeed donate a baby boy to be raffled off. And yes, his name in all the newspapers was Ernest. Ironically, he was offered up under the auspices of then-director L. J. Covington, who fought tirelessly against the moral plagues of his time but apparently had no problem giving away a child.

Oddly enough, I also found a letter in the Leavenworth Echo from July 10, 1910, with the headline WANTS TO ADOPT UGLY BOY. A woman named Anna M. Sampson wrote, “You may send me the ugliest, biggest, most ungainly looking boy you have. I think I know how to bring out the best that is in such a lad.”

The letter was received by M. A. Covington, superintendent of the Spokane district of the Washington Children’s Home Society, who responded: “I have a boy who is not the ugliest and who is only ten-years-old, but I believe he will suit.”

This begs the question: Were there two different Covingtons giving away children? Were they related? Or was this perhaps the same person, confounded by a typographical error? I’m still not sure.

But what I am certain of is that all of this happened during the tail end of the orphan train era, when children were given away with aplomb. And while it’s clear that a baby boy was offered as a prize at the AYP, it’s likely that no one claimed him, and his subsequent fate is unknown. And I like the unknown.