The woman who had bought my sewing machines stood in the doorway of my sewing room with a cashier check in one hand and a cell phone in the other, and she looked as lost as I felt. She was Karin Lund, a tidy young woman in a gray coat. The room behind me was bare. The twelve machines that Olaf and I had collected in fifty years, the Singers and the Berninas and the old treadle Pfaff, were gone from their tables, and my son Gunnar was sitting on an empty crate at the window, with his hands between his knees. I held the hem gauge of Olaf up in the light.
Karin said her boss had sent her. She had paid twelve thousand dollars in cash for all twelve machines, she said, to my son, the day before, on the understanding that Mrs. Halvorsen wished to sell. Her boss collected antique sewing machines, and had long admired mine. She had not known what the real arrangement was until she walked in and saw the bare tables and heard me say, in a clear voice, that I had never agreed to sell one spool. Gunnar had told her that I was too proud to say it. Karin set the check on the table, and lowered her head.
Behind her, two more people came up the stairs of the house. One was Dale Mattson, the manager of the casino on the edge of Duluth, a stout man in a navy blazer carrying a manila folder. The other was a lean gentleman in a camel hair coat, Peter Nygaard, whose card read Northland Notions, the sewing company that had offered three million, seven hundred thousand dollars for my hem gauge patent. He was the boss of Karin. He set his hat on the empty table, and said, in a tone of grave apology, “I am afraid this has gone very wrong.”
A hem gauge held up in a sewing room gave one widow the afternoon to bring her son back to the lake in Duluth.
I gave my terms standing in the empty sewing room, the hem gauge in my hand and the winter light on my face. “Mr. Nygaard, you will return the twelve machines to this room, and I will repay Karin every dollar she paid, out of my own purse. Mr. Mattson, I thank you for the folder, and for putting my son on your list of excluded patrons. Gunnar, you will go with Pastor Aune to the program in Superior, and you will stay there until they say. I am not selling the patent to a company that bought the house of a widow from under her. We will talk again, you and I, in the spring.”
Gunnar stood up from the crate, a big fifty one year old man in a flannel shirt, and I saw his lip tremble. “Mama,” he said, “it was only the pull tabs at first. A few dollars on Friday after work. Then it was every night, and then it was the rent, and then I was selling the machines of Papa to pay a man I did not know. I told myself you would not notice for a month. I was going to buy them back.” He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. “I sat in the casino parking lot last night and I could not remember what your face looked like.”
Mr. Mattson opened his folder and set a stack of photographs on the table. They were stills from the casino cameras, forty seven nights of my son at the machines, with the times in white numerals. At the sight of them Gunnar made a terrible sound, snatched the whole stack, and ran for the back stairs of the house, intending to throw himself out into the snow. He made it to the landing. Pastor Aune, the six foot four Lutheran pastor, and four men of the Sons of Norway, who had been waiting at the foot of the stairs with their hats in their hands, simply closed together and filled the stairwell.
Gunnar stopped on the landing, and the photographs spilled out of his fingers and floated down the steps like snow. Nobody touched him. Pastor Aune looked up at him and said in his gentle voice, “Gunnar, we have a bed for you in Superior and a cup of coffee in the car.” My son sank onto the top step, put his head on his knees, and began to weep. The old men of the Sons of Norway stood in a row below him, and one by one they took off their hats.
The money consequences were simple. Northland Notions returned all twelve machines in a truck by Friday, polished, and Mr. Nygaard added a note and a check for the inconvenience, which I gave to the church. The three million, seven hundred thousand dollars for the hem gauge patent stayed on the table until the spring, when I licensed it to Northland Notions on my own terms, for a royalty, with no one but me and my own lawyer at the table. The casino banned Gunnar for life, at his own request, and returned the cash it could trace.
In the name of Olaf, who passed in 2017, I started the Olaf Halvorsen Fund. It pays for sewing machines, fabric and classes for young families recovering from addiction, in St. Louis, Carlton and Lake counties. In the first year we placed seventy three machines in homes and in the basement of a church. One went to a single father of twenty nine in Two Harbors who wanted to sew a coat for his daughter. He sat at the treadle with his tongue between his teeth and finished it in three weeks.
Gunnar came home from Superior in the spring, and he carried the twelve machines back up the stairs himself, one at a time, with Pastor Aune holding the door. He set them on their tables, and dusted them with a clean cloth. At the end he stood in the middle of the room and looked at me, and he did not say anything. I handed him the hem gauge of his father. He turned it over in his big fingers, and then he sat down at the old treadle Pfaff and began to pump, slowly, and the room filled with the sound of it.
