Private Way by Ladette Randolph

Author:Ladette Randolph [Randolph, Ladette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Nebraska

18

Road Trip to Catherland

By the end of October, I’d convinced myself the situation with PIE was only temporary and that whatever was happening there could be made right after I returned. I’d been helping Mary Garlic with the little kids for two weeks, going over early each weekday morning to oversee breakfast. After my shift on Friday, I felt like I’d been freed from jail. I decided to take Ivan’s advice and make a trip to Red Cloud.

The only things that remained as evidence from the storm in Lincoln were the damaged and now missing trees. As I drove out of the city, I felt sick with sadness at seeing street after street of those disfigured trees. Once I was on the highway, though, I felt almost joyful as I drove through the countryside, green again with a last burst of life before winter. The fields of corn and soybeans lay unharvested under a cloudless, blue sky, though I’d heard reports the soybeans had been damaged in the storm and the harvest would be lower this year because of it.

Like most other small towns in Nebraska, Red Cloud had a modest main street lined with mostly one-story buildings, a few two- and three-story brick buildings left over from the town’s heyday in the late nineteenth century. Among them was the restored opera house that had contributed to shaping Cather’s aesthetic. Her early exposure to opera played a major role in her brief career as an influential music and theater critic beginning when she was only nineteen. I’d learned this and other surprising things about her in the biography I’d read. A small grid of residential streets surrounded the downtown, but from what I could see, the only game in town appeared to be the Cather industry.

As I parked on the main street, near the Cather Museum, I noticed several other out-of-state license plates, making my own California plates less of a novelty than they usually were on my visits to small towns. A group of people milling around the entrance finally headed into the gift shop. I guessed they were all associated with the tour bus I’d seen on an adjacent street.

If I hadn’t read Cather’s biography before going to the museum, I would have had no idea how unusual she’d been. Even then I was still surprised to see photographs of her as a teenager with a shaved head, cross-dressed, during the period when she called herself William Cather and sometimes signed her name Dr. William Cather. The biography softened this somehow, but now as I thought about it, it seemed radical for a girl growing up in the 1880s in a little town in Nebraska. The biography hadn’t mentioned anything about how her straight-laced, Virginia-born Victorian mother had handled it, though it seemed clear she hadn’t tried to stop it. As I wandered through the museum, I wasn’t sure my own relatively open, downright disinterested mother would have been all that cool with me cross-dressing when I was fourteen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.