The Awakening Read online

  Taylor looked up at J. Harker. “Invite the man to come here,” he said.

  “Here? To Kingman?” J. Harker’s face was getting red. He hated the concept of the government telling him how to run his ranch. It was his land, wasn’t it? And the pickers were free people, weren’t they? If they didn’t like what was going on, they could leave, yet the governor seemed to believe he had a right to tell J. Harker how to run his own ranch.

  “No,” Taylor said, “I mean, invite him here to this house.” Before Harker could protest, Taylor continued. “Think about it. He’s a poor college professor, makes perhaps twenty-five hundred, three thousand a year. I wonder if he’s ever seen a ranch like this or visited a house like this. Bring him here now, weeks before the pickers arrive, and let him see that we aren’t monsters, let him see—” He broke off to turn his gaze on Amanda, who had put her hand out for the jam jar. “No,” he said simply, and Amanda withdrew her hand guiltily.

  “A college professor?” J. Harker said. “Who’ll take care of the old guy? With the hops about ripe, I can’t spare a minute and I need you to—”

  “Amanda,” Taylor said, making Amanda start.

  She’d been only halfheartedly listening to the conversation since it didn’t pertain to her and now Taylor had caught her daydreaming.

  “Amanda will entertain him,” Taylor said. “She can discuss several different aspects of economics with him and, if she doesn’t know enough, he can teach her. She can also show him Kingman. You can do that, can’t you, Amanda?”

  Both Taylor and her father were staring at her with the intensity of hungry hawks watching a rabbit running across an open field. These were the two people she most wanted to please, but she knew she wasn’t very good with strangers. She didn’t meet too many people—rarely was meeting someone put on her schedule—and when she did, she didn’t have much to say to them. People didn’t seem to want to discuss what had made the Nile flood. They liked to talk of dances (something she’d never attended) and clothes (Taylor chose her clothes) and moving pictures (she’d never seen one) and baseball (never seen a game but she knew all the rules; she’d made 98 on that exam) and cars (she rarely went anywhere and then only with Taylor and a chauffeur, so she knew little about automobiles). No, she wasn’t good with strangers.

  “Amanda?” Taylor said louder.

  “Yes, I will try,” she said sincerely. Perhaps a college professor would be easier to talk to than other people.

  “Good,” Taylor said and seemed disappointed in her hesitancy. He glanced at the tall clock at the end of the dining room. “You are three minutes off schedule. Now go and study.”

  She rose immediately. “Yes, Taylor.” She glanced at her father. “Good morning,” she murmured before leaving the room.

  Alone in her room, she sat down at her little desk, opened a drawer and took out her notes on French irregular verbs. At ten A.M. she worked on her essay on Puritan ethics. Twice she miswrote a word and had to start over again. Taylor insisted that each of her papers be in perfect form, with no errors.

  At eleven A.M. Mrs. Gunston was waiting for her in a basement room. Amanda wore a blue serge gymnastic dress that reached only to mid-calf. Taylor had said this dress was necessary but he had designed a modest, long dress to be worn over it while Amanda walked down the back stairs—not the front stairs where she might be seen—to the basement.

  For thirty minutes, Mrs. Gunston put Amanda through a rigorous program using heavy Indian clubs and weighted pulleys attached to the wall.

  At 11:30, faint with hunger and fatigue, Amanda was allowed seventeen minutes in a tub full of cool water (Taylor said hot water aged a person’s skin). According to her usual schedules, then she had to dress, study for tomorrow’s exam and be at luncheon at one sharp.

  But today was different.

  When Mrs. Gunston appeared in Amanda’s room at 12:45 with a tray of food, Amanda was immediately concerned.

  “What has happened to Mr. Driscoll?” she asked, fearing that only death could make Taylor upset the schedule.

  “He is with your father,” Mrs. Gunston said, “and he has given you a new schedule.”

  With her eyes wide in wonder, Amanda took the new schedule.

  From 1:17 to 6:12 read the following: Veblen’s Instinct of Workmanship Hoxie’s Scientific Management Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty Montgomery’s Labor and Social Problems

  6:00 P.M. Dress for dinner. Wear the blue chiffon with the pearls.

  6:30 P.M. Dinner: two steamed vegetables, broiled fish, skimmed milk, a one-inch piece of chocolate cake.

  7:30 P.M. Discuss what you have read

  9:30 P.M. Prepare for bed

  10:00 P.M. Bed

  Amanda looked up at Mrs. Gunston. “Chocolate cake?” she whispered.

  A maid walked in, set the four books on a table and left the room. Mrs. Gunston picked up one of them. “This man, this Dr. Montgomery, he wrote this one and he’s coming here. You’re to know something to talk to him about, so you better stop dreaming of cake and get to work.” She turned away with an officious bustle and left the room.

  Amanda sat absolutely rigid on a hard little chair and began to read the book by Dr. Henry Raine Montgomery first. At first it seemed such an odd book that she didn’t understand it. It was all about how the strikes of laborers were actually caused by the owners of the mines and factories and ranches.

  Amanda hadn’t thought much about the men who worked in the fields. Sometimes she’d look up from her book and see them, far away, looking like toys, moving about under the blistering sun, but she’d always looked down at her book again and never given them another thought.

  She read all afternoon, making her way through two of the books on the list, and by dinner time she felt confident she could discuss labor management with Taylor.

  She was unprepared for his anger. It seemed she’d read the books incorrectly. She was to read the books from the management’s point of view.

  “Have I taught you nothing?” Taylor had said to her in a cold voice.

  She was sent to her room without the chocolate cake and she was to write a long essay on why the books of Montgomery and the others were wrong.

  At midnight Amanda was still writing and she was coming to greatly dislike the name of Dr. Montgomery. He had turned her calm household upside down, made Taylor angry at her, cost her many hours extra work, and worst of all, cost her a slice of chocolate cake. If this was what his book did, what in the world was the man going to do?

  She smiled in weariness and told herself she was too fanciful. Dr. Montgomery was merely a poor, old college professor who knew nothing about the economics of the real world, only the economics of a paper world. She imagined a gray-haired man bent over a desk, a dusty pile of books around him, and she wondered if he’d ever seen a moving-picture show. Perhaps the two of them could go into Kingman and…She stopped that thought. Taylor said moving pictures were mind-deadening and people who went to them were lower-class buffoons, so of course this college professor wouldn’t want to do something so unworthwhile.

  She turned back to her essay and continued to write about how wrong Dr. Montgomery’s book was.

  Chapter Two

  It was the sixth day of the Los Angeles to Phoenix Harriman Derby and the two men in the Stutz were growing weary. What time there was for rest had been used for repairing the stripped-down racer. This morning they had hit mud, and the red racer—and the men—were now covered in dried, caked earth, only their lips clean, licked clean, and their eyes under their goggles not covered.

  It had been a grueling race, with the path of the race unmarked and the citizens of the towns on the course not warned of the approaching speeding cars. The towns that were forewarned were worse, because the people stood in the middle of the road awaiting the approach of the cars. They had never seen autos that could do sixty miles an hour and had no understanding of how fast that was. Many drivers had been given the choice of hitting a tree and dying, or hitti