Joyce

Joyce’s importance in Joe Rantz’s life extends beyond their relationship: she becomes a practical and emotional support to his family, especially to the children left grieving after Thula Rantz’s death. Her story moves from the awkwardness of finding her footing in domestic work to the quieter labor of caring for Joe’s younger half-siblings, while her affection for Joe coexists with anger at the family history that shaped him.

Work and Independence

In the summer before Joe’s return from Grand Coulee Dam, Joyce abruptly left a job in Laurelhurst after the judge of the household pursued her for services beyond her duties as a maid. She quickly found work with another nearby family. The change brought a fresh test of her confidence: on her first day, her employer, Mrs. Tellwright, asked her to make duck à l’orange. Joyce knew the ingredients separately but did not know how they belonged together; fried chicken and meat loaf were more familiar to her. She tried anyway, and the result was so unsuccessful that Mrs. Tellwright set down her fork and suggested cooking lessons.

The failed dinner became the beginning of a warm friendship rather than a lasting embarrassment. Mrs. Tellwright paid for Joyce to take cooking classes and joined the lessons herself. In the years that followed, the two spent many enjoyable hours cooking together. The episode gives Joyce’s working life a specific shape: she arrives as a country girl unsure of an unfamiliar dish, but the encounter opens into companionship and a chance to learn.

A Growing Place in Joe’s Family

When Joe returned from Grand Coulee Dam in mid-September with enough money to manage another year if he was careful, he visited Sequim briefly and then returned to Seattle to be near Joyce. Their concern soon turned from her work and his finances to the welfare of Joe’s younger half-siblings. Harry Rantz told Joe that he and Thula had spent much of the summer making trips around the state, often to old haunts in eastern Washington, and planned more excursions in the autumn. At first, the arrangement suited Joe because it gave him a chance to visit the children without worrying that Thula would send him away.

That changed when Joe and Joyce stopped at Bagley Avenue and discovered that Harry and Thula had been gone for three days, leaving thirteen-year-old Harry Junior, Mike, Rose, and Polly without supervision and with little food. Their parents had taken provisions, including a pressure cooker of stewed beef, potatoes, and vegetables, and gone to Medical Lake, where they had first courted. The children had eaten through much of what was in the cupboards and did not know when their parents would return. Joe and Joyce took them for ice cream, bought basic groceries, and brought them back home. When Joe checked the following day, Harry and Thula had returned. The discovery made plain that the children’s neglect was not a single lapse: the excursions had been happening throughout the summer.

Care, Grief, and Private Resentment

Joyce’s care for the children deepened after Thula’s death. She had wanted to nurture them from the first time she saw them afterward, and the impulse came naturally: she saw four grieving children who needed comfort. She kept her anger toward Thula out of their sight rather than allowing it to shape how she treated them. Her tenderness toward the children was therefore not an uncomplicated extension of her feelings about their mother; it required her to hold those feelings apart.

The children were living with Harry in the basement of his unfinished house on Lake Washington. It was more like a cave than a home, with one garage-style entrance, a single small window facing the lake, and a woodstove that made the space at least warm and dry. One rainy Sunday, Joe and Harry hauled lumber from the road to the building site and lifted it toward the future main floor. Joyce stayed inside with the children, playing cards and making fudge and cocoa on the stove. Their grief had practical as well as emotional consequences: they had frightening dreams, Rose and Polly often cried when left alone, and their schoolwork was suffering. Joe offered a dime for every A they earned; Joyce, meanwhile, tried to find the motherly things she could do for them.

Her ease with the children stood in contrast to the difficulty of her feelings about Harry. On the surface they got along, and he treated her pleasantly, even warmly. Inside, however, Joyce remained angry about his earlier failure to stand behind Joe and about the way he had allowed Thula to cast Joe aside. The more she dwelt on that history, the angrier she became. Her role in the family thus involved both open care and concealed conflict: she could comfort Harry’s children while finding it hard to forgive their father.

Farewell and Narrative Significance

Before Joe’s departure for the Olympic journey, Joyce stood at the station with Harry and the children as the train pulled away. Joe searched the crowd from a window until he found her jumping up and down, holding a sign above her head with a large green four-leaf clover painted on it. The gesture places her among the people sending the crew off, but it also gathers the more private strands of her story: her closeness to Joe, her presence alongside his family, and the care she has taken on while he is away.

Joyce’s significance lies in this movement between intimate loyalty and difficult family circumstances. She supports Joe without erasing what Harry’s past conduct has cost him, and she welcomes the children without passing her resentment toward Thula on to them. The cooking lessons, the groceries, the rainy afternoon of cards and cocoa, and the clover held aloft are distinct acts, but together they show her becoming part of the network of care around Joe—not by resolving the family’s history, but by attending to the people who need her in the present.