The Chaperone (6 page)

Louise held her gaze. “The only reason she knows how to read is because she’s so smart, because she loves books and music so much. She taught herself.” She lifted her chin. “She taught herself everything. And she knows far more than most people know.”

Cora nodded, eager to concede this point. She’d not meant to make the girl defensive about her mother. She touched her hand to her left temple. The air in the car had gotten warmer.

“Anyway.” Louise paused to pop her gum. “I’m never having a bunch of brats. Or even one. That’s for sure.”

Cora smiled. “Well. You have plenty of time to change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

They rolled on in silence, Louise looking out the window, Cora staring into the aisle. It would be wise, she knew, to let this argument go, to let the girl think what she wanted. Time would tell. But she was irritated. There was something
entitled
in the girl’s voice, something proud and unthinking.

“You’ll feel differently when you fall in love,” Cora said. “You may not think so now, but you might want to marry someday.”

“Hmm.” Louise smiled and lifted her book. “Schopenhauer writes about marriage. He says getting married is like grasping blind into a sack of snakes and hoping to find an eel.”

“Does he.” Cora gave the book a disparaging look.

“Actually,” Louise said, lowering the book again, “I think I’d like to get married someday. I just don’t want children.”

Cora almost laughed at the girl’s innocence. She didn’t yet understand about babies, and how they came through marriage, decided on or not. But then, looking into Louise’s eyes, she realized what the girl meant, what she was getting at, wasn’t innocent at all. Cora looked out the window, up at the sky, feigning interest in a blue-bottomed cloud. There wasn’t much else she could do. Just a few months earlier, Margaret Sanger had been arrested for publicly asking if birth control was moral. Obscene, she was called. And that was in New York, if Cora recalled correctly. In any case, Cora wasn’t about to attempt a similar discussion on a train in Kansas, not with anyone, thank you very much.

Certainly not with an adolescent girl.

When the conductor
called out for Kansas City, Louise looked up from her book and bounced a little in her seat. “That means we crossed the state line.” She looked at Cora, and then at the rounded ceiling of the car, her hands pressed together in theatrical prayer. “I’m out of Kansas! Thank you, God! I actually made it out!”

Cora looked out the window. Kansas City’s Union Station was like Wichita’s station grown stout, just as beautiful, but twice, or even three times, the size. That was how it was going to be, she realized. As they moved east, slow and steady, everything would get bigger.

“You’ve been out of state before?” Louise gave her a friendly, inquisitive look.

“No.” Cora leaned back against her seat. “I’ve traveled around Kansas, but that’s all.” She smoothed her hair, and adjusted a pin in back, purposefully avoiding Louise’s reaction. She didn’t need to see it. She could imagine the look of disappointment, even disgust. It would be a worse crime than not knowing about Denishawn, Cora’s openly admitting the smallness of her life.

The truth would have worked in her favor, impressing the girl, perhaps. But the old lie had moved easily through her lips—she’d told it so many times it felt true, even now, with the steady rumbling of the wheels on the track pulling up memories. She had been only a child on her other long trip, traveling with other children but also alone, headed west instead of east. She’d been hungry. Her seat, she remembered, had been hard wood, and the nights long and absolutely dark. But the sounds were the same, the whistles and the gears. So was the rocking feeling, which was what she remembered best. Then, as now, she’d been almost sick with both dread and longing, moving fast toward another world, and all she didn’t yet know.

FOUR

She didn’t recall what the building looked like.
Perhaps she never saw it from the outside. But she remembered the roof, which was flat, and covered with gravel, and long enough that if a girl called out from one end on a windy day, a girl on the other end wouldn’t hear her. On every side was a beige-brick wall that was too high for Cora, or even the older girls, to see over, even when standing on a chair. Metal hooks stuck out of the walls, but they were not allowed to use them for climbing. If you tried and you were caught, woe to you, as the nuns liked to say. The hooks were for knotting the clotheslines, stretched taut across the roof. Pigeons, and sometimes seagulls, would land on the wall, give Cora their one-eyed stare, then turn and fly away.

The older girls carried wet clothes up the stairs in baskets, each attached to a tag with the owner’s name. Cora and the other younger girls would pin them up, sometimes standing on chairs. She couldn’t read the names on the tags, but the nuns had shown them how to keep each basket at the head of each line, so the clothes wouldn’t get confused. All items had to be pinned with care as they belonged to paying customers. If the wind blew a pair of trousers or a skirt down into the gravel, it had to be washed again, and the older girls would get sore. They already worked hard enough. Most of them had scars on their hands and forearms, burns from flatirons or scalding water. Imogene, who was almost fourteen and nice, had let Cora touch the burn on the back of her hand. It didn’t hurt anymore, she said. The skin had healed over, a lopsided heart of brownish red, rough under Cora’s fingers.

On Sundays, they got to go out to the backyard, as long as they were careful of the garden. There was a tree, Cora remembered. They were not allowed to climb it. The older girls would sit under it and talk, or braid one another’s hair. They all jumped rope, using a clothesline with a knot in the middle to weight it down. Some girls played blindman’s bluff. When it snowed they played fox and geese.

Inside, there was a sleeping room, Cora’s bed one in a row of many. In the winter, you got a sweater, and you slept in it, not just because it was cold but because if you lost your sweater, woe to you. They ate downstairs in a big room with long tables and cross-barred windows. They were not to speak unless spoken to. Some of the nuns were kind, and patient, but some were not, and they all wore habits, making it difficult to distinguish one from another until one was close and looking right at you. Sister Josephine might turn and become Sister Mary, or Sister Delores, who was young and pretty, but who also carried a wooden paddle. It was best to always follow the rules, and show respect at all times.

It was the New York Home for Friendless Girls. Mary Jane, who knew how to read, said the words were painted on a sign out front. This name made no sense to Cora. She wasn’t Friendless. Mary Jane was her friend, and so was Little Rose, and Patricia, and Betsy, all of the younger girls and even Imogene if Cora didn’t bother her too much. It means no parents, Mary Jane said. Orphans. But that didn’t make sense, either. Rose’s father came by almost every Sunday. Rose said he would be coming for her and her older sister soon. He would take them home. And Patricia’s mother was in the hospital, sick with tuberculosis, but alive.

Cora herself did not have parents, none that she knew. She had only a flash of a memory, or a memory of a memory, or maybe just a dream: a woman with dark hair, curly like her own, and wearing a red knit shawl. It was her voice Cora remembered, or imagined, most clearly, saying unknown words in a strange language, and also, clearly, Cora’s name.

“Am I an orphan?” Cora asked.

“You are,” said Mary Jane. The older girls called Mary Jane Irish, because of the way she talked. “We all are. That’s why we’re here.”

The nuns said grace before every meal.
Because you rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist them.
The girls only had to wait and then cross themselves and say,
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
and
amen.
They ate oatmeal for every breakfast and every dinner. The nuns ate oatmeal, too. They put raisins in when they had them, and when they did, Cora ate with an elbow on each side of her plate, because some of the older girls had long fingers. For supper, there was bean soup with vegetables, and if anyone was stupid enough to complain, what they got was a lecture about gratitude, and about how many thousands of children on the very streets of New York would give anything to get three meals a day, not to mention a roof over their heads. If the complainer wasn’t happy, a nun would suggest, she might leave, and make room for a truly hungry child who would be glad to take her bed and her place at the table. She could be sure there were plenty waiting in line.

That seemed to be true. Whenever a new girl came in, she was almost always bonier and far dirtier than Cora and the other girls. The nuns had to shave new girls’ hair off because so many of them came right from the slums or even the streets and lice were always a concern. New girls ate their oatmeal fast, spoons scraping the bowls, and the nuns would give them seconds and even thirds until they caught up and lost the dead look in their eyes, their hair finally starting to grow back. Only Patricia had come in plump, her pretty blond hair never shaved, and she was the one who sulked about the food, who made faces when the nuns weren’t looking. Patricia told Cora that even when she was awake, she dreamed of pie and cheese and smoked meat. Cora knew about smoked meat, because sometimes the air on the roof smelled so good she wanted to bite at it, and another girl said this was the smell of meat cooking on a stove. But she’d never tasted the other things Patricia said she dreamed of, at least not that she could remember, and so she, unlike Patricia, wasn’t tormented by their loss.

Cora didn’t remember being anywhere but the home. Big Bess, who was almost thirteen, said she remembered when Cora arrived, and that she hadn’t been a baby but a toddler, chubby, and already walking and looking up when she heard her name. But that was all she knew. Cora once asked Sister Josephine who had brought her, and where she had been before, and even Sister Josephine, who was the nicest nun by far, her missing teeth plain to see when she smiled, the only one who never even threatened to use the paddle, even she had told Cora firmly that such questions were impertinent, and that she should consider herself a child of God, and a fortunate one at that.

One day,
not long after she had lost her first tooth, Cora became even more fortunate. At least that was what she was told at the time. Sister Delores would be taking her on a little trip, along with six of the other younger girls. They would need to be on their best behavior, leaving quietly while the other girls were in the laundry. They would need to leave right away. They would need to button their sweaters, as there was a chill in the air.

Cora, holding Mary Jane’s hand, assumed she would be back in time for supper. She felt only excitement, a thrilling break from the routine, as she and Mary Jane followed Patricia and Little Rose and the other lucky girls, who followed Sister Delores, down the steps and through the big front door, and finally, out the front gate onto the street, which Cora had only seen from the upstairs window. Even Mary Jane, who’d already lost all her baby teeth and grown new ones back, who could do a perfect backbend, seemed afraid. They followed Sister Delores around a corner, and all at once, there were people everywhere, some walking, some in carriages, the horses going
clip clop clip clop
, everyone moving quickly. They had to take big steps to avoid piles of filth that came from the horses. Cora pulled the collar of her sweater against her nose, breathing through the wool. Sister Delores had to lift her habit from time to time, and Cora saw her black stockings. They were torn above each heel, the white of her skin showing through.

At the next corner, Sister Delores stopped walking, and told them they would wait there for an omnibus. None of them knew what an omnibus was, but they were all too afraid of Sister Delores to ask. On the omnibus, she said, they were to sit quietly, as close to her as possible. They were not to talk with any strangers or try to make any friends. She wanted them to know that there would be a rope stretching the length of the omnibus, and that it was attached to the ankle of the driver. She knew they would be curious about the rope, and so she would tell them now it was to let the driver know when to stop. If someone wanted to get off at a certain location, he or she pulled the rope, and the driver would stop the horses. Sister Delores hoped all the girls understood that she would be the only one in their group who would touch the rope, as she was the only one who knew where they were going. If one of the girls thought it would be clever to pull the rope and make the driver stop with no reason, that was fine. But the clever girl should understand that when the omnibus stopped, the clever girl would, in fact, be getting off, and getting off alone.

On the omnibus, which turned out to be a covered cart with benches, pulled by a sad brown horse, the girls were very quiet, their hands clasped in their laps. No one touched, or even looked at, the rope.

Their destination
was a redbrick building with high windows and a cod-liver smell. As they walked in, Sister Delores said hello to a woman in spectacles who was not a nun and told her she and her girls would need a private moment. The woman with spectacles smiled and showed them into a room with a cross and a painting of Jesus and a flag of the United States. There were wooden chairs, most of them sized for children. When the woman who was not a nun left, Sister Delores asked the girls to sit, and then she sat in a bigger chair, and smiled at them with her pretty face, and told them they were not on a little trip at all. In fact, she said, still smiling, they were about to be sent on a great adventure, courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society, which had raised great sums of money to help girls just like them.

“You’re being placed out,” she told them, looking kinder and happier than she ever had, her blue eyes large and, for the first and only time Cora could remember, twinkling. “In just a few hours, you’re going for a train ride. You’re going to go very, very far away, because there are good people in the Middle West, in places like Ohio and Missouri and Nebraska, who want to bring a child into their home.” Still smiling, she pressed her palms together. “You’re each going to find a family.”