The Chaperone (9 page)

“I suppose we could,” she agreed. Still meeting Cora’s gaze, she smiled.

“I’d rather not take such measures.” Cora scratched her neck and turned away. She could smell her own dried sweat on her blouse. “But if you force me to, I will. Your parents have entrusted me with a great responsibility.” She turned back to Louise. “To be clear: I’ve come along not just to watch out for you but to watch out for your reputation. Do you understand? I’m here to protect you, even from speculation. My very presence on this trip ensures that no one could even suspect a compromising situation.”

“Oh.” Louise waved her hand. “Then you can relax. I don’t care about that.”

Cora had to smile. For someone so bookish, Louise certainly came across as naive. Had her mother really never explained any of this to her? This simple concept of damage? It was no wonder she seemed annoyed to have Cora along for the trip—she truly didn’t understand why she needed a chaperone at all.

“Louise, those men were from Wichita—they live where we live. And so do many people on this train. You may not know them, but they might know who you are. They could go back and tell stories about your behavior. They could even embellish, not that they would have to, with you lunching on your own with firemen. And then when you come back to Wichita at the end of the summer, your reputation would be compromised.”

“So?”

Cora took a breath, summoning patience. “So you’ve told me you might like to marry someday. You’d like to be a bride.”

Louise looked back at her beneath lowered brows, seemingly still confused. Cora sighed, fanning herself with her book. She didn’t know how to be clearer. She’d talked to the boys about this sort of thing, but it was a different conversation. She’d simply warned them to stay away from a certain kind of girl, the kind who had a dismal future, the kind who might compromise theirs as well. Whether her sons had listened to this advice, she didn’t know. They’d each had steady girlfriends, as well as girls who seemed less steady, who’d shown up for a while and then disappeared. She knew there were a few she’d never met. But there hadn’t been any trouble, not that she knew of, and both Howard and Earle would go to college unfettered.

But Cora felt a girl needed a stronger warning—if only because the world was unfair. There were some inequities that wouldn’t change. Maybe they couldn’t. In any case, it was simply the way things were.

She glanced over her shoulder before leaning in. “Louise, I’ll put it to you plainly. Men don’t want candy that’s been unwrapped. Maybe for a lark, but not when it comes to marriage. It may still be perfectly clean, but if it’s unwrapped, they don’t know where it’s been.”

Louise stared, her lovely face absolutely still. Finally, Cora thought, she had gotten through. She’d had to use a crude analogy, and one she hadn’t thought of or heard in years.

Louise put her hand to her mouth, clearly trying not to laugh. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Unwrapped candy? Oh, that’s dreadful. Really, Cora. You sound like some old Italian mama. Who in the world taught you that?”

Cora stiffened. “I can assure you I’ve said nothing funny.”

Louise leaned against her window. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. No matter how she shifted in the window’s light, it seemed to love her face, its angles and its softness, her pale skin framed by the black hair. Cora stared at her grimly. Louise could afford to laugh. She was the beautiful daughter of indulging parents. She believed she was above everyone. Rules didn’t apply to her.

“Go ahead and make fun if you want.” Cora picked her book up off the seat. “But it’s not just tedious morals from history, or whatever you want to call it. That’s the way it is, the way it always has been, and the way it will be for a very long time.” She was surprised by the anger in her voice. “You don’t know what a slippery slope you’re on, young lady, but I can assure you it has an edge.” She stopped, embarrassed. She lowered her voice. “I only tell you this because I care.”

With that, she stood, steadied herself, and eased into her own seat. She didn’t look at Louise, but she was aware that the girl was still watching her. Cora opened her book to her marked place and did her best to look untroubled. She wasn’t going to take back her words or hear any more backtalk. That wasn’t what was needed now. Louise was well on her way to becoming the kind of girl she’d warned her own boys to stay away from. She was doing the girl a favor, coming down so hard.

She tried to calm her breath, focusing on the words on the page. But she heard crinkling, and she sensed movement on the other side of the table. She didn’t look up. She heard the unfolding and opening of a paper bag. More rustling. The loud and pointed smack of lips.

Cora looked up warily.

Louise smiled. “Lollipop?”

On the girl’s side of the table, spread out on a long sheet of wrinkled wax paper, were several uneven squares of hard, translucent candy, with a toothpick stuck in each.

“They’re homemade.” She gave Cora the same patronizing smile she’d given her father on the platform. “So they’re a little uneven. But I’ve got such a sweet tooth. I made a big batch before I left.”

Cora looked at the candy. She wouldn’t have thought Louise would be interested in baking. But of course, she would have needed to learn to make her own treats, having distracted, unhappy Myra for a mother.

Louise put her elbow on the table, leaning in. “And since I made them myself, I can assure you I know where they’ve been.” Her voice was stage-whisper loud. “I’m absolutely certain they’re clean.”

Cora stared back at her. She was being mocked. She was being mocked, and there was nothing she could do.

“Suit yourself.” Louise slipped a candy into her mouth, so just the toothpick showed through her spit-shined lips, and closed her eyes with what seemed honest pleasure.

SIX

Cora had first been told that a girl
was like candy, either wrapped or unwrapped, when she was in Sunday school, and still too young to understand. The church outside McPherson only had one classroom, and because the boys had been sent out to the sanctuary for their own lesson that Sunday, there was no means to further separate the younger girls from the older. Or perhaps it was simply decided that even the younger girls were better off learning about unwrapped candy too soon rather than too late. In any case, Cora, around seven at the time, was confused enough by the candy lesson to ask what it meant that very night, when Mother Kaufmann was tucking her in.

“Oh, goodness,” Mother Kaufmann said, her small blue eyes widening before she looked away. “They’re already teaching you that?” Cora’s room was almost dark, the candle in its holder far from the bed, and still, in just that faint, flickering glow, reflected in the mirror over her bureau, she could see Mother Kaufmann was embarrassed, pink blooming on her pale cheeks. She smoothed the hem of the cotton quilt under Cora’s chin, finally meeting her gaze. “They mean you girls need to save yourselves for marriage. That’s all they mean by that.”

Cora didn’t want to further embarrass Mother Kaufmann, or herself, by asking any more questions, but she stayed awake for a long time that night, even more confused than before. How did you save yourself for marriage? How could you get used up? If you got used up, did it mean that you died? If not, what was left over? Could other people tell you’d been used up? How would they tell? Most importantly, how could Cora stop this using up from happening to her? Because she understood that not letting it happen, saving herself, was important. The lesson about the candy had been more somber, and more sternly presented, than the regular Sunday lessons when the boys were mixed in with the girls. And the other girls, all of them, appeared to have listened more attentively than they did during the regular Sunday lessons about loving their neighbors and doing unto others and such. But then, Cora considered, that wasn’t saying much—neither the girls nor the boys seemed to have taken those lessons seriously at all. For these were the same girls and boys that Cora went to school with, and though Cora was their neighbor, they did not pretend to love her. They did not do unto Cora as they would have Cora do unto them.

During the week, she was one of fourteen, aged six through fifteen, nine girls and five boys, all of them sharing one room, one teacher, one stove, and not enough readers or slates. In so many ways, Cora was just like them. They all missed school during planting, and then again during harvest. They all did chores in the morning and tried not to fall asleep at their desks. Their mothers sewed them each a new outfit every school year, no nicer or worse than the new dress Mother Kaufmann sewed every year for Cora. They walked the same main road into school. And yet not one of them would walk with Cora. It was an older girl who finally told Cora the reason, and she seemed sad to be the one to have to bear the unfortunate news. It was as simple as this, the girl said: their parents knew Cora had come in on the train, and that she’d come from New York City. Cora likely had unmarried parents—her mother could have been a prostitute, or an imbecile, or mad, or a drunk. And maybe someone just off the boat—Cora had, after all, dark eyes and dark hair. In any case, if her parents had to give her up, she probably came from bad stock.

The teacher, who wasn’t much older than a girl herself, who said “it don’t matter none” when someone asked a question she couldn’t answer, seemed to like Cora just fine. She told Cora she was a good girl who never caused any trouble, and that she had excellent penmanship. And so the learning part of school was fine. But in the play yard, Cora sat by herself while the boys roughhoused and the other girls played a game where they each held two wooden wands, using them to toss and catch a wooden circle the size of a hatband, with a ribbon wrapped all around it. Graces, they called the game, because it made you graceful. The girls only had two rings between them, and so they had to share, but they played every day, keeping track of who could catch the ring ten times first, the winner going on to play a challenger. They would not let Cora play, and sometimes when she was sitting in the play yard, her loneliness as sharp as thirst, she wished she were back in New York, still jumping rope and playing blindman’s bluff with girls who were no better than she was, even though since she’d come to Kansas, almost every day, she ate beef or chicken or pork and buttered corn and Mother Kaufmann’s fruit pies with real whipping cream; even though she was tucked in bed under a soft quilt every night with a kiss; and even though on Sundays, she rode to church in the wagon between the Kaufmanns, and when they walked inside the church, the Kaufmanns, both of them so tall and fair and not looking anything like her, each held one of her hands, with no care of what anyone thought.

•   •   •

One morning in October,
Cora told Mother Kaufmann she no longer wanted to go to school. They were sitting back-to-back, each of them milking a Jersey, the air in the barn cold enough that Cora could see her breath by the light of the lantern. She said she would be happier at home, helping with the work. At first, Mother Kaufmann was irritated. She told Cora that her education was important, and a privilege, and that she didn’t want to hear that kind of foolish talk again. But then Cora told her why she hated going to school: how the others knew she’d come on the train, and how she had to sit by herself and watch the girls play graces. For a while, there was only the sound of the milk hitting the sides of the buckets, and Lida shuffling in her stall, and then Mother Kaufmann said, “Graces. I remember that game. Well, it’s good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace. Theirs, too, I suppose.” She turned then, her wet fingers and thumb gently tugging Cora’s ear. “Hear me, love? We’ll show those girls more grace than they’ve ever known.”

At first, Cora worried Mother Kaufmann meant to go down to the school and scare the other children into being nice. She likely could have. Mother Kaufmann was thin all over; still, she could look very serious with her pointy nose, and she was tall enough to wear her husband’s trousers under her calico skirts on the days she helped him in the fields. But she never came down to the schoolyard. Instead, just a few days later, Mr. Kaufmann presented Cora with her own graces ring. He had carved it to Mother Kaufmann’s specifications, using the sharp knife he called his Arkansas toothpick and a piece of wood from the big branch of oak that had fallen the previous summer. Mother Kaufmann had wound a red ribbon around the ring, leaving the knotted extra hanging, just like the rings of the girls at school.

“And here are the wands,” Mr. Kaufmann said, his pale eyes bright, clearly pleased with the bewilderment on Cora’s face. She still didn’t know him so well. Except on Sundays, he only came in for meals and sleep, even when there was snow. At the table, he frequently talked about rain—when it would rain, how long it would rain, how hard. When it was cold, he worried aloud about frost and frozen ground. Cora understood, on some level, that his preoccupation with weather and work was as necessary to her well-being as anything Mother Kaufmann did or said. But she also understood, with the same intuition, that he didn’t need her the way Mother Kaufmann did, and that Cora had been, in a sense, his present for his young wife. Mr. Kaufmann had children from his first marriage. His wife, the first Mrs. Kaufmann, died of pneumonia, but three of their children, two sons and a daughter, were still alive. The sons were doing well out west, and the daughter was married, a mother herself, and living in Kansas City. Every year, just after harvest, Mr. Kaufmann took the train to Kansas City to visit this daughter while Cora and Mother Kaufmann stayed behind to look after the animals. The daughter had never come to visit them. They shouldn’t judge, Mother Kaufmann said. It would be hard to come back to your childhood home, and find your father’s new wife and child.

“Thank you,” Cora said, holding the ring and wands out in front of her. She was anxious about how much time Mr. Kaufmann had spent carving the ring, and what, exactly, they expected her to achieve with it. It wouldn’t be enough for her to just take the ring and the wands to school. Was that what they were thinking? That it would be so easy? The problem was where she had come from—and the ring and wands wouldn’t help with that.