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.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle in August 1917 when Lyle had to deal with Emily's birthday gift. Here is the next chapter of Emily and Lyle's story:
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic: Emily's Birthday Gift)
Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 -- Part 1
Thursday, August 16, 1917 — The Shopping Trip
San Diego in mid-August was warm and bright, the kind of morning that made the city feel like a gift to anyone lucky enough to live there. Lyle arrived at Hawthorn Street at precisely nine o'clock, Liberty Pass in his breast pocket and a purpose in his step that was equal parts determination and anxiety. He had never bought a dress for a woman in his life. He had worked at Marston's Department Store for over twelve years, had known the merchandise on every floor intimately, and had helped customers select gifts for wives and daughters and sisters more times than he could count. None of that experience, he was discovering, was remotely useful when the woman in question was Emily Auble and the occasion was her eighteenth birthday.
She answered the door already hatted and ready, which he had come to recognize as Emily's way of telling him she had been watching the clock.
"You're nervous," she said immediately, studying his face.
"I'm not nervous. I'm focused."
"You get a line right here when you're nervous." She touched a point between his brows with one finger. "You had it before you enlisted. You had it the night you asked me to dance. You have it now."
"I'm buying you a birthday dress," Lyle said. "It requires focus."
Emily laughed and took his arm.
They walked to the waterfront first, as they always did, because the bay in the morning was its own kind of medicine. The harbor was already active — supply vessels moving slow and heavy across the water, a Navy destroyer at anchor in the distance, gulls banking and crying in the warm air. They stood at the seawall and watched without speaking for a while, shoulders touching, comfortable in the silence the way two people become when they've learned each other's company.
"You've been well this week?" Emily asked.
"Busy. We had a shipment of uniform items come in on Tuesday and Corporal Briggs wanted everything inventoried before shift change. Hennessey and I stayed three hours past the end of our shift counting trouser legs."
"Trouser legs."
"Individually. Briggs doesn't trust a count that isn't individual. He has a point, actually — the last shipment was short a dozen pairs and we'd have missed it with a rough count."
Emily looked sideways at him. "You like him."
"Briggs? He's impossible to like. He's also exactly right about everything, which is much more useful than being likable." Lyle paused. "I might like him a little."
"Tell me a PX story. A good one."
He thought for a moment. "Last Sunday evening, a young recruit came in — couldn't have been more than eighteen, clearly his first liberty off base. He stood at the candy counter for fully ten minutes, reading every label on every bar with the concentration of a man defusing explosives. Finally Hennessey asks him if he needs help. The boy looks up and says, very seriously: 'I have fifteen cents and I need to make it count. My mother likes chocolate and my girl likes peppermint and I can't decide who to send the candy to.' " Lyle smiled. "Hennessey told him to buy the chocolate, because mothers are certain and girls are still figuring things out."
Emily considered this. "That's either very wise or very cynical."
"Coming from Hennessey, probably both. But the boy bought the chocolate."
Emily squeezed his arm. "Wise boy."
At Marston's
The women's dress department at Marston's occupied the second floor, reached by the broad staircase that Lyle had climbed ten thousand times as a cash boy and floorwalker. He felt a peculiar double vision walking through the store in uniform—simultaneously the person he had been and the person he'd become. Several colleagues recognized him and offered greetings. He shook hands, accepted compliments on the uniform, and guided Emily toward the stairs with the purposeful air of a man who knows where he's going but is privately uncertain what to do when he gets there.
The women's dress department was presided over by a salesgirl named Frances, who had worked at Marston's for four years and had the gift of immediately understanding what any customer actually needed, as distinct from what they said they wanted.
"My friend is turning eighteen on Sunday," Lyle told her, with the earnestness of someone presenting credentials. "I'd like to buy her a dress for her birthday. Something modern. Something that suits her. I have — " he had rehearsed this, " — a modest budget and no idea whatsoever what I'm looking for."
Frances looked at Emily with the quick professional assessment of a woman who has fitted thousands of customers. "What do you like?" she asked directly.
"Something I could wear to church," Emily said, "and then somewhere nicer afterward."
"Practical," Frances said approvingly. "Come with me."
What followed was one of the more instructive forty minutes of Lyle's life. Frances moved through the racks with confident economy, pulling dresses and holding them briefly against Emily before returning most of them and reserving a few. Lyle sat in the chair provided for waiting husbands, boyfriends and fathers and attempted to be helpful by nodding at things Emily held up, which Emily told him with gentle firmness was not helpful at all.
"You have to say what you think," she said, holding a pale rose-colored dress against herself.
"I think it's very nice."
"Is that what you actually think or what you think I want to hear?"
Lyle studied the dress honestly. The color was soft and becoming, and the lines were modern without being startling. But something about it seemed somehow too delicate for Emily, who was not a delicate person, whatever her slight frame might suggest. "It's pretty," he said carefully. "But it doesn't look like you."
Emily put the dress back without argument. "That's more useful," she said.
Three dresses ultimately made the cut. The first was the rose — Emily kept it in consideration despite Lyle's reservations, because she liked the fabric. The second was a deep blue-grey with a white collar and cuffs, the cut clean and modern, the sort of dress that would look well in a pew and equally well at a table with white linen. The third was a warm ivory with small buttons down the front and a subtle embroidered detail at the cuffs, modest but beautifully made, the kind of dress that suggested its wearer had taste without needing to announce it.
Emily disappeared to try them on. Lyle looked at Frances.
"Which one?" he said quietly.
Frances had already decided. "The ivory," she said, without hesitation. "She lit up when she touched the fabric before she even looked at it properly. That's always the one."
Emily came out in each dress in turn. The rose was indeed pretty and indeed not entirely herself. The blue-grey was lovely and she moved well in it. The ivory—
She came through the dressing room curtain and Lyle stood up before he realized he was doing it.
It was the ivory. Frances was entirely right. The dress suited Emily the way a well-chosen word suits a sentence—precisely, inevitably, as though it had been waiting for her specifically.
"Well?" Emily asked, reading something in his expression.
"You look beautiful," he said, which was true and insufficient and everything he could manage.
Emily turned to look at herself in the glass, considering with characteristic seriousness. "It is lovely," she conceded. "Though the rose—"
"The ivory," Lyle said.
She turned back to him, a smile at the corner of her mouth. "You do have opinions after all."
"When it matters."
While Emily changed back into her own dress, Lyle found Frances and spoke to her quietly. She wrapped the ivory dress in tissue paper, boxed it, and tied the box with a white ribbon while Lyle settled the account. The price was more than modest and somewhat less than extravagant—precisely what he'd budgeted, with enough remaining for lunch and a small gratuity.
When Emily emerged, Lyle was waiting with his hands empty. The box was behind the counter.
"Shall we have lunch?" he said.
Emily looked at his empty hands and then at him with knowing eyes. "You've already bought it."
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
"You have that focused expression again."
"I'm hungry," Lyle said firmly. "Let's go."
Lunch, the Afternoon, and Dinner on 30th Street
The café on Broadway was their café now—they'd been coming often enough that the waitress who called them both "honey" knew without asking that they'd want lemonade and that he'd have the chicken salad and she'd have the soup. Emily found this evidence of routine deeply satisfying, which told Lyle something he already knew: she was a person who valued belonging somewhere.
Over lunch she described a customer at Marston's that week who had been so indecisive about a pair of gloves that Emily had eventually made the decision for her, selected a pair, placed them on the counter, and said pleasantly that she thought these were exactly right. The customer had looked startled, then relieved, and had bought them without further deliberation.
"Did she thank you?"
"She said I was very decisive for such a young girl." Emily's mouth curved. "I thanked her."
"The cheek."
"She wasn't wrong," Emily said. "I am very decisive for a young girl. I just don't usually say so."
After lunch they walked downtown for an hour, looking in shop windows, watching the street life of a city increasingly shaped by wartime—uniformed men everywhere, Navy wives managing shopping with children in tow, patriotic posters in the windows of businesses along Broadway. San Diego in August 1917 was a city fully committed to the war effort, and the commitment showed in everything from the price of sugar to the number of empty chairs in the restaurants.
They took the trolley to Lyle's parents home. The afternoon at 30th Street was warm and full. Della had made lemonade and set it on the porch, and they sat with Austin and Abbie while the shadows lengthened. Austin was animated on the subject of a new engine modification the mechanics at Rockwell Field had been working through—something about carburetor adjustment at altitude that Lyle didn't fully follow but found fascinating in the way his father's expertise had always fascinated him.
"They're building pilots faster than they can build planes to put them in," Austin said, which seemed to satisfy him as a statement of the world's current condition.
Abbie sat with her knitting and contributed occasional remarks of devastating accuracy to whatever subject was under discussion. When Emily mentioned the dress she'd tried on at Marston's—carefully not mentioning which one, since Lyle had sworn her to discretion about the gift—Abbie said without looking up from her needles: "A good dress is worth more than a bad compliment. Buy the one that makes you stand up straight."
"That's exactly the right criterion," Emily agreed.
"Of course it is," Abbie said.
At dinner—Della's roast chicken with summer vegetables from the garden—Lyle delivered his PX stories with the timing he was learning from Hennessey: the trick was not to rush the ending. He told them about Corporal Briggs's pencil, which never left its position behind his ear and was worn down at precisely the same rate as Briggs's patience with incompetence. He told them about the officer who'd come in every evening for a week asking for a specific brand of pipe tobacco they didn't carry, refusing to accept that they didn't carry it, as though a sufficiently high rank could call the tobacco into existence. He told them about the recruit who'd tried to return a candy bar because it "tasted wrong," and Hennessey's heroic struggle to keep a straight face while explaining that candy bars generally tasted the way they tasted.
Austin laughed at the stories in the way of a man who recognizes a certain category of human behavior from long experience with it. Della laughed because her son was well and happy and telling stories at her dinner table, which was all she had wanted since May.
Later, walking Emily home through the warm August evening, Lyle carried the ribboned box from Marston's, which he'd collected from behind the counter on their way out of the store. When they reached Hawthorn Street, Georgia answered the door with the promptness of someone who does not acknowledge that she has been listening for footsteps.
Inside, over tea and the gingerbread that had become Lyle's unofficial welcome, he presented the box to Georgia with the gravity of a formal handover.
"For Emily's birthday," he said. "If you'd keep it safe until Sunday morning?"
Georgia took the box, felt its weight, and looked at him with the appraising directness that he had come to recognize as her version of warmth. "You picked it yourself?"
"With a little guidance," Lyle admitted.
"From Emily?"
"From the salesgirl."
Georgia seemed to find this acceptable. She set the box on the sideboard with the air of someone assuming custodianship of something valuable.
When Lyle said his goodnights and kissed Emily goodbye at the door, she held onto him a moment longer than usual. "Thank you," she said quietly. "For the day. For—whatever's in the box."
"You'll see Sunday," he said. "Happy almost-birthday, Emily."
To be continued...
Here is the Video Overview of this post by Google NotebookLM:
This is historical fiction based on the facts that are available for the life and family of my maternal grandparents, Lyle and Emily(Auble) Carringer. It is based on my research, social history and society norms at the time and place, and it is likely realistic. It might have happened this way.
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
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