Here is the latest chapter in the story of the courtship and early married life and times of my maternal grandparents, Emily Auble and Lyle Carringer, who married in June 1918. The background information and the list of chapters of their life together are listed at the end of this post. This is historical fiction with real people and real events, and is how it might have been.
(AI Google Notebook Infographic -- September to Early November 1918)
The Long Autumn: September to Early November 1918
September — Roads South and EastSeptember settled over 2064 Harrison Avenue like a well-worn coat. Lyle rose at half past five, six days a week, and rode the trolley to the PX at Balboa Park. Emily rode the trolley to Marston's and the gloves and accessories counter, where the fall stock was arriving and Gladys Nolan was reporting on it from the administrative offices in her usual undertone. Georgia ran the household with a precision that neither of them could have matched, and by the second week of the month she had made good on her promise to Mrs. Alcott next door: the two women spent three sweltering afternoons in the Harrison Avenue kitchen putting up tomatoes, beans, and a batch of cucumber pickles that Georgia pronounced "adequate," which from her was a rave.
"Eleven jars of tomatoes," she told Emily, setting the last one on the pantry shelf with ceremony. "Della said she managed nine."
"You asked her?"
"I inquired. Casually. On Sunday." Georgia lined up the jars so their labels faced out. "She was gracious about it."
Mondays, meanwhile, had become the best day of the week. With Austin's automobile at their disposal most weeks, Lyle and Emily had worked their way through most of the city's familiar pleasures, and in September they began pushing the edges of the map.
On the second Monday of the month, they drove south to Tijuana, the three of them with a picnic basket and Georgia's cloth bag, Austin's advice about the radiator ringing in Lyle's ears. The road ran south through Chula Vista and the flat farmland beyond, the Pacific haze lifting as the morning warmed, until the border town appeared on its low hill: dusty, colorful, and louder than anything they'd seen in San Diego.
The main street was a long run of curio shops, restaurants, and cantinas, with vendors calling from doorways and Mexican music drifting from somewhere around the corner. Emily, who had spent two years learning the art of the polite sale, found herself on the other side of the counter for the first time and discovered that she enjoyed it. She bargained for a hand-embroidered blouse with a shopkeeper who clearly recognized a professional when he saw one, and the two of them arrived at a price with mutual respect and no hard feelings.
Georgia was, to Lyle's mild surprise, entirely at ease. She examined a rack of woven baskets with an expert eye, rejected three, and bought a fourth with a lid, which she announced was for her sewing. At lunch in a small restaurant with a courtyard and a tile fountain, she tasted the chicken in red sauce, considered it for a long moment, and ordered a second helping.
"Well?" Emily asked.
"It's not trying hard at all," Georgia said. "That's the difference between this place and Coronado. They simply are what they are." She took another bite. "I approve."
Lyle wrote that down that night in the leather notebook, under the heading that was now a running feature: Georgia on Tijuana.
The following Monday took them in the opposite direction, east out of the city through El Cajon and up into the back country toward Descanso. The road climbed steadily, the coastal haze falling away behind them, the air growing drier and cooler and smelling of sage and dust. Somewhere past Alpine, on a long grade, the radiator began to steam, exactly as Austin had predicted it would.
"He said it would do that," Lyle said, pulling to the side of the road.
"Did he say what to do about it?" Georgia asked from the back seat, entirely unruffled.
"Wait. Let it cool. Add water slowly."
"Then we'll wait," Georgia said, and got out of the car to examine the view, which turned out to be spectacular: ridge after ridge of chaparral and oak falling away toward the distant haze of the coast, with the Pacific a faint glint on the horizon.
Descanso, when they reached it, was a hush of live oaks and tall grass, a handful of cabins and a small store, and a creek running low and clear under the trees. They spread a blanket in the shade and ate a late lunch with the whole valley to themselves, the air sharp and golden with the first hint of autumn. Emily lay back on the blanket and watched the light move through the oak leaves.
"Do you realize how quiet this is?" she said.
"After Tijuana, I'd noticed," Lyle said.
"I could live somewhere like this," Emily said, and then reconsidered. "No. I'd miss the trolley. And Marston's. And the bay." She turned her head toward him. "But I'm glad we came."
Georgia had wandered off down the creek with her shoes in her hand and returned with a small collection of oak galls and a handful of wild herbs, whose identity she announced with more confidence than Lyle felt was strictly warranted. "I shall try them in the stew," she said, and did, and nobody was ill afterward, which she considered a vindication.
In between there were smaller Mondays: Balboa Park on a clear day, when Lyle took the long way around the barracks so as not to find himself accidentally recruited into anything; another afternoon at La Jolla, the cove glittering below them, where Georgia found a sea urchin shell and carried it home for the windowsill.
But at the very end of September, a note appeared in the newspapers that none of them paid much attention to at first. A few cases of influenza had been reported among sailors at the naval training camp in Balboa Park, and a few more at Camp Kearny. The Sun had assured its readers that San Diego was merely full of colds.
October — Gauze and Closed DoorsThe colds turned out not to be colds.
By the first week of October, Lyle's base had gone under strict precautions. The Marines were forbidden to leave the grounds without specific permission, and men on liberty were told to avoid theaters and public gatherings. Corporal Briggs delivered the new regulations to the PX staff on a Tuesday morning with his usual economy: counters were to be wiped down hourly, men were to be served in small groups rather than crowded at the register, and everyone behind the counter would wear a gauze mask from the beginning of shift to the end.
"Cheesecloth," Hennessey said, holding one up. "We look like we're about to rob a stagecoach."
"You look like a man following orders," Briggs said. "Put it on."
The city moved faster. On the twelfth of October the Board of Health closed the schools, theaters, churches, and dance halls, and the quarantine that began soon after would run into November. The newspapers carried the weekly count in columns that crept upward: two hundred cases, then more, a handful of deaths at first and then a number that was harder to look at. Masks were urged and then insisted upon, and the Union scoffed at them in an editorial, noting that only highwaymen and holdup men wore them professionally. Most San Diegans wore them anyway when they had to, with the expressions of people who feel foolish and are not willing to take the chance.
Emily wore hers at Marston's, over the objections of nobody, since Gladys had begun the day by tying one on with a flourish and declaring that she had never looked so mysterious. The counters were quieter, the aisles thinner. The store stayed open, but the customers who came in stayed short and purposeful, and the afternoon traffic was a ghost of itself.
At Harrison Avenue, Georgia dealt with the crisis the way she dealt with everything, by assuming it could be managed if one was thorough enough. She cut and hemmed a stack of gauze masks on the kitchen table, boiled them each night, and laid them out by the door for morning like an extra set of boots. She stopped the household's visits to anyone who coughed. She scrubbed the doorknobs. She sent Lyle to work with a sprig of eucalyptus in his pocket and a lecture, and he took both.
"You don't believe the eucalyptus does anything," Emily said.
"I don't believe it does harm," Georgia said. "And I believe in being thorough."
Sunday dinners at 2105 30th Street went on, though not as they had before. Austin came by with the automobile to fetch them rather than have them share a crowded trolley, and the table at 30th Street held only the household itself: Austin, Della, Abbie, Edgar when he could manage it, and the three from Harrison Avenue. Davey and Amy stayed away, as did Matie. The dinners were quieter and shorter. But they went on, and no one suggested they shouldn't.
Austin's news from Rockwell Field was grave. The flu had thinned the ranks of the student pilots, and the instructors were working double duty. Flying schedules had been cut back and then cut back again. "You can't teach a man to fly from his sickbed," Austin said, with the helpless irritation of a man who understood engines and could do nothing about influenza.
On the sixteenth of October, Private Dowd, the PX's perpetual gloom, came down with a fever and was moved to the base hospital. Lyle noted the news in his notebook, flatly, and said nothing to anyone at Harrison Avenue for two days, until Dowd's fever broke and the news became bearable. When he finally mentioned it to Emily, she took his hand and held it for a long time without saying anything.
The Monday liberty days were quieter now too. The drives to Ocean Beach and La Jolla were out, since Lyle's pass restricted him to the immediate neighborhood, and the trips to the back country were out as well. They walked the streets around Harrison Avenue in the afternoons, masks in their pockets for the moment, taking the air and the small comforts that remained, and in the evenings Lyle sat at the kitchen table with his notebook and drew plans.
The plans were for a house on Fern Street. He'd begun sketching them in August, after Della and Austin's offer, and over the autumn the sketches had grown from rough rectangles into something resembling real floor plans: a front room with a bay window, a kitchen large enough for Georgia to rule comfortably, three bedrooms, a back porch facing the garden. Emily looked over his shoulder most evenings and made suggestions that were, he noted, always correct.
"Put the pantry on the north wall," she said, tapping the page. "It stays cooler."
"Why didn't I think of that?"
"Because you're an accountant and I'm a gloves woman. We notice different things."
"That's an unfair division of labor," Lyle said, and moved the pantry.
The Birthday That WaitedEmily had sent out the invitations on the seventh of October, before anyone knew what the following week would bring. Twenty-two small cream-colored cards, addressed in her careful hand, announcing a birthday supper for Lyle Carringer on Saturday the second of November at the Carringer home, 2105 30th Street, at six o'clock. She'd spent two evenings on the guest list: the family, naturally, and Charlie and Eddie Hartwell and the Yamamotos from the Class of 1913, Gladys and her boyfriend Boyd, and Ruth Clemens from the telephone exchange, and the Teagues, whom they had come to know since Emily's birthday. She had planned the menu with Della and the cake with Georgia, and she had bought the gift.
The gift had taken her three weeks of thought. Lyle was a man of few material wants. He didn't smoke, which ruled out the usual masculine presents, and he already owned a perfectly good watch. But in August, on a Monday at the beach, Emily had watched him look at a small group of sailors photographing each other with a folding camera, and she had noticed that he watched with more attention than the scene deserved. She remembered that he had taken a photograph at the road race in 1915, and the pictures of the Exposition he'd mentioned, and the way he always studied the light on people's faces as if working out how it might be fixed on paper. She had said nothing. But she had gone to Marston's camera counter and asked a great many questions, and in late September she had bought a Vest Pocket Kodak, the little folding model that servicemen carried in their breast pockets, and two rolls of film. It cost her a good part of a month's savings, which she did not mention to anyone, including Georgia.
On the fourteenth of October, when the quarantine took effect, she sat down at the kitchen table with her pen and wrote twenty-two notes: The supper for Lyle is postponed, with great regret, until the health authorities permit it. Gladys wrote back that the cancellation was an outrage and she intended to hold it against the influenza personally. Charlie wrote that he would be there whenever it was, if he had to walk.
So Lyle's twenty-seventh birthday, a Saturday, passed quietly.
He worked his full shift behind the mask, came home on the trolley at dusk, and found the front room of Harrison Avenue lit by a single lamp, a covered tin on the table, and Emily and Georgia waiting with the expression of two people who have conspired and are not sorry about it.
"Happy birthday," Emily said.
Georgia lifted the cover from the tin. The lemon cake sat inside, three layers, perfectly iced, with twenty-seven small candles that Georgia had counted out herself twice.
"We couldn't have the party," Emily said. "But we could have the cake."
Lyle looked at the cake, and then at the two of them, and was for a moment without any words at all. Then he blew out the candles in one breath, and Georgia cut the first slice and handed it to him.
"Lemon," he said, after tasting it.
"Obviously," Georgia said.
"It's perfect."
"I know."
The gift came out after the cake. Emily had wrapped it in brown paper tied with string, and she watched his face as he opened it with the same careful attention he gave every package now. He lifted the lid on the small box and went still.
"It's a Kodak," he said, in the voice of a man naming something he'd been afraid to want.
"The Vest Pocket model. The soldier's camera, the clerk called it." Emily's voice was brisk, but her eyes weren't. "It fits in a pocket. You can carry it anywhere. And I thought, you notice things. The way people look. I thought you might like to keep some of them."
Lyle turned the little folding camera over in his hands, working the latch, opening the bellows, looking through the finder at the lamp and the room. He didn't say anything for some time. Then he set it down, crossed the room, and kissed her.
"Come outside," he said. "There's still light on the porch."
He loaded the first roll himself, with his hands only slightly unsteady, and he stood Emily and Georgia on the porch steps in the last of the October dusk. Georgia objected. She said she did not require her picture taken. She said photographs were for people who had something to prove. Emily said, "Mother," in the particular tone she used on exactly one person in the world, and Georgia sighed, lifted her chin, and held perfectly still.
It was the first photograph Lyle took with his own camera, and when it was developed two weeks later, it showed two women on a porch step in the failing light: one young, laughing, her hair coming loose; the other upright and formidable, her hands folded in her lap, with just a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth that she would have denied was there if asked. He kept it all his life.
To be continued ...
Here is the Video Overview of this story by Google Gemini Notebook (also on my YouTube channel here):
Stay tuned for the next chapters in this family story.
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The AI-assisted biography of my maternal grandmother is in ABC Biography of #7 Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977) of Illinois and California. I wrote a story about her life in 1916 in Ask AI: Describe Emily Auble's Life After the Death of Her Father In 1916.
The AI-assisted biography of my maternal grandfather is in ABC Biography of #6 Lyle Lawrence Carringer (1891-1976) of San Diego, California. I wrote a story about Lyle being a young working man in 1916 being teased about being boring in Lyle's Story: Finding Courage in 1916-1917.
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Dance.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: A San Diego Romance In 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Promise Made.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 1, May 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 2, May-June 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 3, Weeks 5 and 6, June 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 4 (Weeks 7 and 8), Late June to July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Coming Home -- Lyle’s Leave, July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle Carringer Starts Work at the PX
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s First Liberty Day -- August 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Holiday Season, Thanksgiving to Christmas 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: New Year’s Eve, 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Ordinary Days, January and February 1918
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 1 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 2 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: Wedding Preparations in April and May 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Wrapping Up the Remaining Tasks – Early June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Parental Counsel – Mid-June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Wedding of Emily and Lyle – June 19, 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Honeymoon and Back To Work, June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Georgia Moves In, Late June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Monday People -- July and August 1918
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