Suitor by Design. Christine Johnson
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Pearlman, Michigan
February 1924
“It’s hopeless.” Minnie Fox stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the drugstore soda fountain, her cherry soda temporarily forgotten. Only three weeks shy of her nineteenth birthday, she should at least have a beau. Most of the girls her age were either engaged or married. Minnie had no one.
It must be her looks. She bore no resemblance to the motion-picture actresses on the covers of Photoplay. They sported glamorous bobs. How would she look with that hairstyle? Minnie pursed her lips, stained red from the soda, and rolled her long, wavy hair up to her jawline. The fat rolls of hair on either side of her face looked like loaves of bread sitting atop her threadbare brown wool coat.
She let her hair drop. “It is hopeless.”
“What’s hopeless?” Minnie’s next older sister, Jen, plopped onto the stool next to her.
“Nothing.” Minnie twirled the straw in her soda, took a sip and lingered while the bubbles fizzed against her lips. “I don’t know why I care. There isn’t a sheik within fifty miles.”
“Sheik?” Jen’s lip curled in distaste. “Stop talking like them.” She poked a thumb toward Kate Vanderloo and her college girlfriends a couple stools away. Born to wealth and privilege, Kate was pretty enough to grace the cover of Photoplay. So were her girlfriends. All were here on midsemester break and to attend the Valentine’s Day Ball.
“Shh! They’ll hear you.” Minnie scrunched a little lower. “For your information, that’s what everyone calls guys who try to look like Rudolph Valentino.” She flipped through the magazine until she found what she’d read earlier. “It says here that the college campuses are full of sheiks. It’s quite the rage.”
Jen rolled her eyes. “What do we care? None of us will ever go to college. I can’t even save enough money for flight lessons. Besides, other things are more important, like getting Daddy well.”
Minnie flinched at the reproach. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” Daddy’s heart had been weak from childhood, but last summer he’d suffered a seizure that left him even weaker. He’d recovered enough to walk her older sister, Ruth, down the aisle in October but soon after retreated to his bedroom. “I want that, too.” Minnie outlined the glamorous actress on the Photoplay cover with her finger. “That’s why I’m hoping for a rich and famous husband.”
“Sure,” Jen snorted. “Where are you going to find that in Pearlman?”
“There are a few well-off bachelors.”
“One or two, and they’re much older than you.”
“I suppose.” Minnie couldn’t give up her dream that easily. “Maybe he’ll be new to town. Like Sam. He came to town to open the department store and ended up marrying Ruthie. It could happen again.”
“That happens only once in a lifetime. Besides, Sam had to give up his inheritance to marry Ruth. They’re just as poor as we are.”
“Unless she sells her dress designs. Sam says that’ll make them rich.”
“Sam’s a dreamer. How many manufacturers have they tried? Every one has turned down her designs.”
“Maybe this time they’ll get good news.”
“Maybe.” But Jen didn’t sound hopeful. “They’re supposed to get word today.”
Rather than dwell on something she couldn’t control, Minnie watched Kate flirt with the soda-fountain clerk. Kate Vanderloo always seemed to have a new beau. Even in high school, she’d been able to capture every guy’s attention. Minnie, on the other hand, could only imagine what it would feel like to have every man’s gaze follow her across a room. She glanced again at the magazine cover. Maybe if she looked more like a movie star. “Should I get my hair cut?”
“Why?”
Minnie pointed to the cover. “So I look like a star.”
“You can’t even act.”
“I can sing. I was second soprano in the school choir.”
Jen shrugged, as if that accomplishment meant nothing. “Are you almost done with that soda? We need to close the shop. Ruth wants to go with Sam to the telegraph office. The call’s supposed to come in around five o’clock.” The telegraph office was also the telephone exchange. Since neither the dress shop nor their house had a telephone, they had to place and receive long-distance calls there. “Ready?”
“I suppose.” Minnie sucked more of the fizzy liquid into her mouth, but she couldn’t gulp down a soda, and she wouldn’t waste it. At five cents apiece, they were a rare treat.
Down the counter, the soda clerk leaned close to Kate and gave her a dazzling smile. “I’d take you to the ball.”
Kate giggled and fluttered her eyelids. “If I didn’t already have an escort, I might consider the offer.”
Now, that was ridiculous! Kate Vanderloo would rather get run over by a train than go to the Valentine’s Day Ball with a soda clerk.
Jen gave Minnie a look of disgust. “Let’s go.” She spun around to leave.
Minnie slurped up a mouthful of soda and swallowed. The bubbles tickled her nose, and she sneezed.
That drew Kate’s attention. “Oh, Minnie. I didn’t see you there. Sally tells me you are serving punch again at the ball. I hope you don’t spill it this time.”
Minnie wanted to disappear. It was bad enough that she had to dress in a maid’s uniform and wait on Pearlman’s elite, but she couldn’t bear doing it in front of her former classmates. She stared at the Photoplay cover. If only...
The bell above the drugstore door signaled a new arrival and drew the attention away from her. Tall Peter Simmons entered. He cast a quick look at the counter and swiped off his cap before stomping the snow from his old work boots.
“Oh, it’s just Peter.” Minnie turned back to her soda.
“Just Peter? What do you mean?” Jen sat back down. “I thought you were friends.”
“A little, but he’s been acting strange lately.”
“How? He seems perfectly normal to me.”
“I don’t know.” Minnie had run into him more than once in the alley that ran behind her house. He could take that route from work to home, but he seemed to always time it for when she was coming back from work. Then he wouldn’t say anything intelligent, just mutter something about the weather or ask how work had gone. “He just acts different.”
“Ahhh.”
Minnie knew exactly what her sister was thinking. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Did I say a thing?”
“You don’t have to,” she muttered low enough so no one could hear. “Between you and Ruth, you practically have us married. Stop it.”
“All right, all right. The subject’s closed.” Jen stood. “Are you ready yet?”
As Minnie drank the last of her soda, Kate snickered and whispered something to her group of friends. The giggling girls were all watching Peter, who had asked for a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s tonic from the druggist. At their laughter, embarrassment bled up his face clear to the roots of his tousled brown hair.
Minnie felt sorry for him. Peter was a decent guy. It wasn’t his fault he’d lost his parents and got sent to Pearlman by that New York orphan society. He’d gotten a good home with Mrs. Simmons, but then she lost her house and had to move in with her daughter. That meant Peter had to stay with his foster brother’s family at Constance House, the local