Prologue
I believe in ghosts. They’re the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened.
I am 91 years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost.
Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm, like bread dough rising under cloth. My Gram, with her kind eyes and talcum-dusted skin. My Da, sober, laughing. My Mam singing a tune. The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life.
I’ve come to think that’s what heaven is – a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on.
Maybe I am lucky – that at the age of nine I was given the ghosts of my parents’ best selves, and at 23 the ghost of my true love’s best self. And my sister Maisie, ever-present, an angel on my shoulder. Eighteen months to my nine years, 13 years to my 20. Now she is 84 to my 91, and with me still.
No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn’t given a choice. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I’d lost.
The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on.
Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
Through her bedroom wall Molly can hear her foster parents talking about her in the living room, just beyond her door. “This is not what we signed up for,” Dina is saying. “If I’d known she had this many problems, I never would’ve agreed to it.”
“I know, I know.” Ralph’s voice is weary. He’s the one, Molly knows, who wanted to be a foster parent. Long ago, in his youth, when he’d been a “troubled teen,” as he told her without elaboration, a social worker at his school had signed him up for the Big Brother program, and he’d always felt that his big brother – his mentor, he calls him – kept him on track. But Dina was suspicious of Molly from the start. It didn’t help that before Molly they’d had a boy who tried to set the elementary school on fire.
“I have enough stress at work,” Dina says, her voice rising. “I don’t need to come home to this shit.”
Dina works as a dispatcher at the Spruce Harbor police station, and as far as Molly can see there isn’t much to stress over – a few drunk drivers, the occasional black eye, petty thefts and accidents. If you’re going to be a dispatcher anywhere in the world, Spruce Harbor is probably the least stressful place imaginable. But Dina is high-strung by nature. The smallest things get to her. It’s as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn’t – which, of course, is pretty often – she is surprised and affronted.
Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she’s come to expect it. When something does go right she hardly knows what to think.
Which was just what had happened with Jack. When Molly transferred to Mount Desert Island High School last year, in tenth grade, most of the kids seemed to go out of their way to avoid her. They had their friends, their cliques, and she didn’t fit into any of them. It was true that she hadn’t made it easy; she knows from experience that tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable, and she wears her Goth persona like armor. Jack was the only one who’d tried to break through.
It was mid-October, in social studies class. When it came time to team up for a project, Molly was, as usual, the odd one out. Jack asked her to join him and his partner Jody, who was clearly less than thrilled. For the entire fifty-minute class, Molly was a cat with its back up. Why was he being so nice? What did he want from her? Was he one of those guys who got a kick out of messing with the weird girl? Whatever his motive, she wasn’t about to give an inch. She stood back with her arms crossed, shoulders hunched, dark stiff hair in her eyes. She shrugged and grunted when Jack asked her questions, though she followed along well enough and did her share of the work. “That girl is freakin’ strange,” Molly heard Jody mutter as they were leaving class after the bell rang.. “She creeps me out.” When Molly turned and caught Jack’s eye, he surprised her with a smile. “I think she’s kind of awesome,” he said, holding Molly’s gaze. For the first time since she’d come to this school, she couldn’t help herself; she smiled back.
Over the next few months, Molly got bits and pieces of Jack’s story. His father was a Dominican migrant worker who met his mother picking blueberries in Cherryfield, got her pregnant, moved back to the D.R. to shack up with a local girl and never looked back. His mother, who never married, works for a rich old lady in a shorefront mansion. By all rights Jack should be on the social fringes too, but he isn’t. He has some major things going for him: flashy moves on the soccer field, a dazzling smile, great big cow eyes and ridiculous lashes. And even though he refuses to take himself seriously, Molly can tell he’s was smarter than he admits, probably even smarter than he knows.
Molly couldn’t care less about Jack’s prowess on the soccer field, but smart she respects. (The cow eyes are a bonus.) Her own curiosity is the one thing that has kept her from going off the rails. Being Goth wipes away any expectation of adhering to convention, so Molly finds she’s free to be weird in lots of ways at once. She reads all the time – in the halls, in the cafeteria –, mostly novels with angsty protagonists: The Virgin Suicides, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar. She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound: Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic …
As a newcomer Molly had liked the distance her persona created, the wariness and mistrust she saw in the eyes of her peers. But though she’s loath to admit it, lately that persona has begun to feel restrictive. It takes ages to get the look right every morning, and rituals once freighted with meaning – dyeing her hair jet black accented with purple or white streaks, rimming her eyes with kohl, applying foundation several shades lighter than her skin tone, adjusting and fastening various pieces of uncomfortable clothing – now make her impatient. She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose. Most people don’t have to exert so much effort to stay in character. Why should she? She fantasizes that the next place she goes – because there’s always a next place, another foster home, a new school – she’ll start over with a new, easier-to-maintain look. Grunge? Sex kitten?
The probability that this will be sooner rather than later grows more likely with every passing minute. Dina has wanted to get rid of Molly for a while, and now she’s got a valid excuse. Ralph staked his credibility on Molly’s behavior; he worked hard to persuade Dina that a sweet kid was hiding under that fierce hair and makeup. Well, Ralph’s credibility is out the window now.
Molly gets down on her hands and knees and lifts the eyelet bedskirt. She pulls out two brightly colored duffel bags, the ones Ralph bought for her on clearance at the L.L. Bean outlet in Ellsworth (the red one monogrammed “Braden” and the orange Hawaiian-flowered one “Ashley” – rejected for color, style, or just the dorkiness of those names in white thread, Molly doesn’t know). As she’s opening the top drawer of her dresser, a percussive thumping under her comforter turns into a tinny version of Daddy Yankee’s “Impacto.” “So you’ll know it’s me and answer the damn phone,” Jack said when he bought her the ringtone.
“Hola, mi amigo,” she says when she finally finds it.
“Hey, what’s up, chica?”
“Oh, you know. Dina’s not so happy right now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
“Well, I think I’m out of here.” She feels her breath catch in her throat. It surprises her, given how many times she’s been through a version of this.
“Nah,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” she says, pulling out wad of socks and underwear and dumping them in the Braden bag. “I can hear them out there talking about it.”
“But you need to do those community service hours.”
“It’s not going to happen.” She picks up her charm necklace, tangled in a heap on the top of the dresser, and rubs the gold chain between her fingers, trying to loosen the knot. “Dina says nobody will take me. I’m untrustworthy.” The tangle loosens under her thumb and she pulls the strands apart. “It’s okay. I hear juvie isn’t so bad. It’s only a few months anyway.”
“But – you didn’t steal that book.”
Cradling the flat phone to her ear, she puts on the necklace, fumbling with the clasp, and looks in the mirror above her dresser. Black makeup is smeared under her eyes like a football player.
“Right, Molly?”
The thing is – she did steal it. Or tried. It’s her favorite novel, Jane Eyre, and she wanted to own it, to have it in her possession. Sherman’s Bookstore in Bar Harbor didn’t have it in stock, and she was too shy to ask the clerk to order it. Dina wouldn’t give her a credit card number to buy it online. She had never wanted anything so badly. (Well … not for a while.) So there she was, in the library on her knees in the narrow fiction stacks, with three copies of the novel, two paperbacks and one hardcover, on the shelf in front of her. She’d already taken the hardcover out of the library twice, gone up to the front desk and signed it out with her library card. She pulled all three books off the shelf, weighed them in her hand. She put the hardcover back, slid it in beside The Da Vinci Code. The newer paperback, too, she returned to the shelf.
The copy she slipped under the waistband of her jeans was old and dog-eared, the pages yellowed, with passages underlined in pencil. The cheap binding, with its dry glue, was beginning to detach from the pages. If they’d put it in the annual library sale it would have gone for ten cents at most. Nobody, Molly figured, would miss it. Two other, newer copies were available. But the library had recently installed magnetic anti-theft strips, and several months earlier four volunteers, ladies of a certain age who devoted themselves passionately to all things Spruce Harbor Library, had spent several weeks installing them on the inside covers of all 11,000 books. So when Molly left the building that day through what she hadn’t even realized was a theft-detection gate, a loud, insistent beeping brought the head librarian, Susan LeBlanc, swooping over like a homing pigeon.
Molly confessed immediately – or rather tried to say that she’d meant to sign it out. But Susan LeBlanc was having none of it. “For goodness’ sake, don’t insult me with a lie,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. I thought you were up to something.” And what a shame that her assumptions had proven correct! She’d have liked to be surprised in a good way, just this once.
“Aw, shit. Really?” Jack sighs.
Looking in the mirror, Molly runs her finger across the charms on the chain around her neck. She doesn’t wear it much anymore, but every time something happens and she knows she’ll be on the move again, she puts it on. She bought the chain at a discount store, Marden’s, in Ellsworth, and strung it with these three charms – a blue and green cloisonné fish, a pewter raven, and a tiny brown dog – that her father gave her on her eighth birthday. He was killed in a one-car rollover several weeks later, speeding down I-95 on an icy night, after which her mother, all of 23, started a downward spiral she never recovered from. By Molly’s next birthday she was living with a new family, and her mother was in jail. The charms are all she has left of what used to be her life.
Jack is a nice guy. But she’s been waiting for this. Eventually, like everyone else – social workers, teachers, foster parents – he’ll get fed up, feel betrayed, realize Molly’s more trouble than she’s worth. Much as she wants to care for him, and as good as she is at letting him believe that she does, she has never really let herself. It isn’t that she’s faking it, exactly, but part of her is always holding back. She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and stuffs in any stray unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut.
Ralph, too, has tried to see the goodness in her. He is predisposed to it; he sees it when it isn’t even there. And though part of Molly is grateful for his faith in her, she doesn’t fully trust it. It’s almost better with Dina, who doesn’t try to hide her suspicions. It’s easier to assume that people have it out for you than to be disappointed when they don’t come through.
“Jane Eyre?” Jack says.
“What does it matter?”
“I would’ve bought it for you.”
“Yeah, well.” Even after getting into trouble like this and probably getting sent away, she knows she’d never have asked Jack to buy the book. If there is one thing she hates most about being in the foster care system, it’s this dependence on people you barely know, your vulnerability to their whims. She has learned not to expect anything from anybody. Her birthdays are often forgotten; she is an afterthought at holidays. She has to make do with what she gets, and what she gets is rarely what she asked for.
“You’re so fucking stubborn!” Jack says, as if divining her thoughts. “Look at the trouble you get yourself into.”
There’s a hard knock on Molly’s door. She holds the phone to her chest and watches the doorknob turn. That’s another thing – no lock, no privacy.
Dina pokes her head into the room, her pink-lipsticked mouth a thin line. “We need to have a conversation.”
“All right. Let me get off the phone.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Molly hesitates. Does she have to answer? Oh, what the hell. “Jack.”
Dina scowls. “Hurry up. We don’t have all night.”
“I’ll be right there.” Molly waits, staring blankly at Dina until her head disappears around the doorframe, and puts the phone back to her ear. “Time for the firing squad.”
“No, no, listen,” Jack says. “I have an idea. It’s a little … crazy.”
“What,” she says sullenly. “I have to go.”
“I talked to my mother –”
“Jack, are you serious? You told her? She already hates me.”
“Whoa, hear me out. First of all, she doesn’t hate you. And second, she spoke to the lady she works for, and it looks like maybe you can do your hours there.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“But – how?”
“Well, you know my mom is the world’s worst housekeeper.”
Molly loves the way he says this – matter-of-factly, without judgment, as if he were reporting that his mother is left-handed.
“So the lady wants to clean out her attic – old papers and boxes and all this shit, my mom’s worst nightmare. And I came up with the idea to have you do it. I bet you could kill the fifty hours there, easy.”
“Wait a minute – you want me to clean an old lady’s attic?”
“Yeah. Right up your alley, don’t you think? Come on, I know how anal you are. Don’t try to deny it. All your stuff lined up on the shelf. All your papers in files. And aren’t your books alphabetical?”
“You noticed that?”
“I know you better than you think.”
Molly does have to admit, as peculiar as it is, she likes putting things in order. She’s actually kind of a neat freak. Moving around as much as she has, she learned to take care of her few possessions. But she’s not sure about this idea. Stuck alone in a musty attic day after day, going through some lady’s trash?
Still – given the alternative …
“She wants to meet you,” Jack says.
“Who?”
“Vivian Daly. The old lady. She wants you to come for—”
“An interview. I have to interview with her, you’re saying.”
“It’s just part of the deal,” he says. “Are you up for that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure. You can go to jail.”
“Molly!” Dina barks, rapping on the door. “Out here right now!”
“All right!” she calls, and then, to Jack, “All right.”
“All right what?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll go and meet her. Interview with her.”
“Great,” he says. “Oh, and – you might want to wear a skirt or something, just –
y’know. And maybe take out a few earrings.”
“What about the nose ring?”
“I love the nose ring,” he says. “But …”
“I get it.”
“Just for this first meeting.”
“It’s all right. Listen – thanks.”
“Don’t thank me for being selfish,” he says. “I just want you around a little longer.”
When Molly opens the bedroom door to Dina’s and Ralph’s tense and apprehensive faces, she smiles. “You don’t have to worry. I’ve got a way to do my hours.” Dina shoots a look at Ralph, an expression Molly recognizes from reading years of host parents’ cues. “But I understand if you want me to leave. I’ll find something else.”
“We don’t want you to leave,” Ralph says, at the same time that Dina says, “We need to talk about it.” They stare at each other.
“Whatever,” Molly says. “If it doesn’t work out, it’s okay.”
And in that moment, with bravado borrowed from Jack, it is okay. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Molly learned long ago that a lot of the heartbreak and betrayal that other people fear their entire lives, she has already faced. Father dead. Mother off the deep end. Shuttled around and rejected time and time again. And still she breathes and sleeps and grows taller. She wakes up every morning and puts on clothes. So when she says it’s okay, what she means is that she knows she can survive just about anything. And now, for the first time since she can remember, she has someone looking out for her. (What’s his problem, anyway?)
Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
Molly takes a deep breath. The house is bigger than she imagined – a white Victorian monolith with curlicues and black shutters. Peering out the windshield she can see that it’s in meticulous shape – no evidence of peeling or rot, which means it must have been painted recently. No doubt the old lady employs people who work on it constantly, a queen’s army of worker bees.
It’s a warm April morning. The ground is spongy with melted snow and rain, but today is one of those rare, almost balmy days that hint at the glorious summer ahead. The sky is luminously blue, with large woolly clouds. Clumps of crocuses seem to have sprouted everywhere.
“Okay,” Jack’s saying, “here’s the deal. She’s a nice lady, but kind of uptight. You know – not exactly a barrel of laughs.” He puts his car in park and squeezes Molly’s shoulder. “Just nod and smile and you’ll be fine.”
“How old is she again?” Molly mumbles. She’s annoyed with herself for feeling nervous. Who cares? It’s just some ancient packrat who needs help getting rid of her shit. She hopes it isn’t disgusting and smelly, like the houses of those hoarders on TV.
“I don’t know – old. By the way, you look nice,” Jack adds.
Molly scowls. She’s wearing a pink Lands’ End blouse that Dina loaned her for the occasion. “I barely recognize you,” Dina said drily when Molly emerged from her bedroom in it. “You look so … ladylike.”
At Jack’s request she’s taken out the nose ring and left only two studs in each ear. She spent more time than usual on her makeup, too – blending the foundation to a shade more pale than ghostly, going lighter on the liquid eyeliner. She even bought a pink lipstick at the drugstore – Maybelline Wet Shine Lip Color in “Mauvelous,” a name that cracks her up. She stripped off her many thrift-store rings and is wearing the charm necklace from her dad instead of the usual chunky array of crucifixes and silver skulls. Her hair’s still black, with the white stripe on either side of her face, and her fingernails are black, too – but it’s clear she’s made an effort to look, as Dina remarked, “closer to a normal human being.”
After Jack’s Hail Mary pass – or “Hail Molly,” as he called it – Dina had grudgingly agreed to give her another chance. “Cleaning an old lady’s attic?” she snorted. “Yeah, right. I give it a week.”
Molly hardly expected a big vote of confidence from Dina, but she has some doubts herself. Is she really going to devote fifty hours of her life to a crotchety dowager in a drafty attic, going through boxes filled with moths and dust mites and who knows what else? In juvie she’d be spending the same time in group therapy (always interesting) and watching The View (interesting enough). There’d be other girls to hang with. As it is she’ll have Dina at home and this old lady here watching her every move.
Molly looks at her watch. They’re five minutes early, thanks to Jack, who hustled her out the door.
“Remember: eye contact,” he says. “And be sure to smile.”
“You are such a mom.”
“You know what your problem is?”
“That my boyfriend is acting like a mom?”
“No. Your problem is you don’t seem to realize your ass is on the line here.”
“What line? Where?” She looks around, wiggling her butt in the seat.
“Listen.” He rubs his chin. “My ma didn’t tell Vivian about juvie and all that. As far as she knows, you’re doing a community service project for school.”
“So she doesn’t know about my criminal past? Sucker.”
“Ay diablo,” he says, opening the door and getting out.
“Are you coming in with me?”
He slams the door, walks around the back of the car to the passenger side and opens the door. “No, I am escorting you to the front step.”
“My, what a gentleman.” She slides out. “Or is it that you don’t trust me not to bolt?”
“Truthfully, both,” he says.
***
Standing before the large walnut door, with its oversized brass knocker, Molly hesitates. She turns to look at Jack, who is already back in his car, headphones in his ears, flipping through what she knows is a dog-eared collection of Junot Diaz stories he keeps in the glove compartment. She stands straight, shoulders back, tucks her hair behind her ears, fiddles with the collar of her blouse (when’s the last time she wore a collar? A dog collar, maybe), and raps the knocker. No answer. She raps again, a little louder. Then she notices a buzzer to the left of the door and pushes it. Chimes gong loudly in the house, and within seconds she can see Jack’s mom, Terry, barreling toward her with a worried expression. It’s always startling to see Jack’s big brown eyes in his mother’s wide, soft-featured face.
Though Jack has assured Molly that his mother is on board – “That damn attic project has been hanging over her head for so long, you have no idea” – Molly knows the reality is more complicated. Terry adores her only son, and would do just about anything to make him happy. However much Jack wants to believe that Terry’s fine and dandy with this plan, Molly knows that he steamrolled her into it.
When Terry opens the door, she gives Molly a once-over. “Well, you clean up nice.”
“Thanks. I guess,” Molly mutters. She can’t tell if Terry’s outfit is a uniform or if it’s just so boring that it looks like one: black pants, clunky black shoes with rubber soles, a matronly peach-colored t-shirt.
Molly follows her down a long hallway lined with oil paintings and etchings in gold frames, the Oriental runner beneath their feet muting their footsteps. At the end of the hall is a closed door.
Terry leans with her ear against it for a moment and knocks softly. “Vivian?” She opens the door a crack. “The girl is here. Molly Ayer. Yep, okay.”
She opens the door wide onto to a large, sunny living room with views of the bay, filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and antique furniture. An old lady is sitting beside the bay window in a faded red wingback chair, her veiny hands folded in her lap, a wool tartan blanket draped over her knees, wearing a black cashmere crewneck sweater.
When they are standing in front of her, Terry says, “Molly, this is Mrs. Daly.”
“Hello,” Molly says, holding out her hand as her father taught her to do.
“Hello.” The old woman’s hand, when Molly grasps it, is dry and cool. She is a sprightly, spidery woman, with a narrow nose and piercing blue eyes as bright and sharp as a bird’s. Her skin is thin, almost translucent, and her wavy silver hair is gathered at the nape of her neck in a bun. Light freckles – or are they age spots? – are sprinkled across her face. A topographical map of veins runs up her hands and over her wrists, and she has dozens of tiny creases around her eyes. She reminds Molly of the nuns at the Catholic school she attended briefly in Augusta (a quick stopover with an ill-suited foster family), who seemed ancient in some ways and preternaturally young in others. Like the nuns, this woman has a slightly imperious air, as if she is used to getting her way. And why wouldn’t she? Molly thinks. She is used to getting her way.
“All right, then. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” Terry says, and disappears through another door.
The old woman leans toward Molly, a slight frown on her face. “How on earth do you achieve that effect? The skunk stripe,” she says, reaching up and brushing her own temple.
“Umm …” Molly is surprised; no one has ever asked her this before. “It’s a combination of bleach and dye.”
“How did you learn to do it?”
“I saw a video on YouTube.”
“YouTube?”
“On the Internet.”
“Ah.” She lifts her chin. “The computer. I’m too old to take up such fads.”
“I don’t think you can call it a fad if it’s changed the way we live,” Molly says, then smiles contritely, aware that she’s already gotten herself into a disagreement with her potential boss.
“Not the way I live,” the old woman says. “It must be quite time-consuming.”
“What?”
“Doing that to your hair.”
“Oh. It’s not so bad. I’ve been doing it for awhile now.”
“What’s your natural color, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I don’t mind,” Molly says. “It’s dark brown.”
“Well, my natural color is red.” It takes Molly a moment to realize she’s making a little joke about being gray.
“I like what you’ve done with it,” she parries. “It suits you.”
The old woman nods and settles back in her chair. She seems to approve. Molly feels some of the tension leave her shoulders. “Excuse my rudeness, but at my age there’s no point in beating around the bush. Your appearance is quite stylized. Are you one of those – what are they called, gothics?”
Molly can’t help smiling. “Sort of.”
“You borrowed that blouse, I presume.”
“Uh ….”
“You needn’t have bothered. It doesn’t suit you.” She gestures for Molly to sit across from her. “You may call me Vivian. I never liked being called Mrs. Daly. My husband is no longer alive, you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. He died eight years ago. Anyway, I am 91 years old. Not many people I once knew are still alive.”
Molly isn’t sure how to respond – isn’t it polite to tell people they don’t look as old as they are? She wouldn’t have guessed that this woman is 91, but she doesn’t have much basis for comparison. Her father’s parents died when he was young; her mother’s parents never married, and she never met her grandfather. The one grandparent Molly remembers, her mother’s mother, died of cancer when she was three.
“Terry tells me you’re in foster care,” Vivian says. “Are you an orphan?”
“My mother’s alive, but – yes, I consider myself an orphan.”
“Technically you’re not, though.”
“I think if you don’t have parents who look after you, then you can call yourself whatever you want.”
Vivian gives her a long look, as if she’s considering this idea. “Fair enough,” she says. “Tell me about yourself, then.”
Molly has lived in Maine her entire life. She’s never even crossed the state line. She remembers bits and pieces of her childhood on Indian Island before she went into foster care: the gray-sided trailer she lived in with her parents, the community center with pickups parked all around, Sockalexis Bingo Palace and St. Anne’s Church. She remembers an Indian doll, carved out of wood, with black hair and a traditional native costume that she kept on a shelf in her room – though she preferred the Barbies donated by charities and doled out at the community center at Christmas. They were never the popular ones, of course — never Cinderella or Beauty Queen Barbie, but instead one-off oddities that bargain hunters could find on clearance: Hot Rod Barbie, Jungle Barbie. It didn’t matter. However peculiar Barbie’s costume, her features were always reliably the same: the freakish stiletto-ready feet, the oversized rack and ribless midsection, the ski-slope nose and shiny plastic hair …
But that’s not what Vivian wants to hear. Where to start? What to reveal? This is the problem. It’s not a happy story, and Molly has learned through experience that people either recoil or don’t believe her or, worse, pity her. So she’s learned to tell an abridged version. “Well,” she says, “I’m a Penobscot Indian on my father’s side. When I was young we lived on a reservation near Old Town.”
“Ah. Hence the black hair and tribal makeup.”
Molly is startled. She’s never thought to make that connection – is it true? Sometime in the eighth grade, during a particularly rough year – angry, screaming foster parents, jealous foster siblings, a pack of mean girls at school – she got a box of L’Oreal 10-Minute hair color and Cover Girl ebony eyeliner and transformed herself in the family bathroom. A friend who worked at Claire’s at the mall did her piercings the following weekend – a string of holes in each ear, up through the cartilage, a stud in her nose and a ring in her eyebrow (though that one didn’t last; it soon got infected and had to be taken out, the remaining scar a spiderweb tracing). The piercings were the straw that got her thrown out of that foster home. Mission accomplished.
Molly continues her condensed story – how her father died and her mother couldn’t take care of her, how she ended up with Ralph and Dina.
“So Terry tells me you were assigned some kind of community service project. And she came up with the brilliant idea for you to help me clean my attic,” Vivian says. “Seems like a bad bargain for you, but who am I to say?”
“I’m kind of a neat freak, believe it or not. I like organizing things.”
“Then you are even more peculiar than you appear.” Vivian sits back and clasps her hands together. “I’ll tell you something. By your definition I was orphaned, too, at almost exactly the same age. So we have something in common.”
Molly isn’t sure how to respond. Does Vivian want her to ask about this, pry into what Molly considers private, or is she just putting that out there? It’s hard to tell. “Your parents …” she ventures, “didn’t look after you?”
“They tried. There was a fire …” Vivian shrugs. “”It was all so long ago, I barely remember. Now – when do you want to begin?”
New York City, 1929
Maisie sensed it first. She wouldn’t stop crying. Since she was a month old, when our mother got sick, Maisie had slept with me on my narrow cot in the small windowless room we shared with our brothers. It was so dark that I wondered, as I had many times before, if this was what blindness felt like – this enveloping void. I could barely make out, or perhaps only sense, the forms of the boys, stirring fitfully but not yet awake: Dominick and James, six-year-old twins, huddled together for warmth on a pallet on the floor.
Sitting on the cot with my back against the wall, I held Maisie the way Mam had shown me, cupped over my shoulder. I tried everything I could think of to comfort her, all the things that had worked before: stroking her back, running two fingers down the bridge of her nose, humming our father’s favorite song, “My Singing Bird,” softly in her ear: I have heard the blackbird pipe his note, the thrush and the linnet too / But there’s none of them can sing so sweet, my singing bird, as you. But she only shrieked louder, her body convulsing in spasms.
Maisie was 18 months old, but her weight was like a bundle of rags. Only a few weeks after she was born, Mam came down with a fever and could no longer feed her, so we made do with warm sweetened water, slow-cooked crushed oats, milk when we could afford it. All of us were thin. Food was scarce; days went by when we had little more than rubbery potatoes in weak broth. Mam wasn’t much of a cook even in the best of health, and some days she didn’t bother to try. More than once, until I learned to cook myself, we ate potatoes raw from the bin.
It had been two years since we left our home on the west coast of Ireland. Life was hard there, too; our Da held and lost a string of jobs, none of which were enough to support us. We lived in a tiny unheated house made of peat in a small village in Galway County called Kinvara. People all around us were fleeing to America: we heard tales of oranges the size of baking potatoes; fields of grain waving under sunny skies; clean, dry timber houses with indoor plumbing and electricity. Jobs as plentiful as the fruit on the trees. As one final act of kindness toward us – or perhaps to rid themselves of the nuisance of constant worry – Da’s parents and sisters scraped together the money for ocean passage for our family of five, and on a warm spring day we boarded the Agnes Pauline, bound for Ellis Island. The only link we had to our future was a name scrawled on a piece of paper my father tucked in his shirt pocket as we boarded the ship: a man who had emigrated ten years earlier and now, according to his Kinvara relatives, owned a respectable dining establishment in New York City.
Despite having lived all our lives in a seaside village, none of us had ever been on a boat, much less a ship in the middle of the ocean. Except for my brother Dom, fortified with the constitution of a bull, we were ill for much of the voyage. It was worse for Mam, who discovered on the boat she was again with child and could hardly keep any food down. But even with all of this, as I stood on the lower deck outside our dark, cramped rooms in steerage, watching the oily water churn beneath the Agnes Pauline, I felt my spirits lift. Surely, I thought, we would find a place for ourselves in America.
The morning we arrived in New York harbor was so foggy and overcast that though my brothers and I stood at the railing, squinting into the drizzle, we could barely make out the ghostly form of the Statue of Liberty a short distance from the docks. We were herded into long lines to be inspected, interrogated, stamped, and then set loose among hundreds of other immigrants, speaking languages that sounded to my ears like the braying of farm animals.
There were no waving fields of grain that I could see, no oversized oranges. We took a ferry to the island of Manhattan and walked the streets, Mam and I staggering under the weight of our possessions, the twins clamoring to be held, Da with a suitcase under each arm, clutching a map in one hand and the tattered paper with Mark Flannery, The Irish Rose, Delancey Street, written in his mother’s crabbed cursive, in the other. After losing our way several times, Da gave up on the map and began asking people on the street for directions. More often than not they turned away without answering; one man spit on the ground, his face twisted with loathing. But finally we found the place – an Irish pub, as seedy as the roughest ones on the back streets of Galway.
Mam and the boys and I waited on the sidewalk while Da went inside. The rain had stopped; steam rose from the wet street into the humid air. We stood in our damp clothing, stiffened from sweat and ground-in dirt, scratching our scabbed heads (from lice on the ship, as pervasive as seasickness), our feet blistering in the new shoes Gram had bought before we left but Mam didn’t let us wear until we walked on American soil – and wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. Except for this sorry reproduction of an Irish pub before us, nothing in this new land bore the slightest resemblance to the world we knew.
Mark Flannery had received a letter from his sister, and was expecting us. He hired our Da as a dishwasher and took us to a neighborhood like no place I’d ever seen – tall brick buildings packed together on narrow streets teeming with people. He knew of an apartment for rent, $10 a month, on the third floor of a five-story tenement on Elizabeth Street. After he left us at the door we followed the Polish landlord, Mr. Kaminski, down the tiled hallway and up the stairs, struggling in the heat and the dark with our bags while he lectured us on the virtues of cleanliness and civility and industriousness, all of which he clearly suspected we lacked. “I have no trouble with the Irish, as long as you stay out of trouble,” he told us in his booming voice. Glancing at my Da’s face I saw an expression I’d never seen before, but instantly understood: the shock of realization that here, in this foreign place, he’d be judged harshly as soon as he opened his mouth.
The landlord called our new home a railroad apartment: each room leading to the next, like railway cars. My parents’ tiny bedroom, with a window facing the back of another building, was at one end; the room I shared with the boys and Maisie was next, then the kitchen, and then the front parlor, with two windows overlooking the busy street. Mr. Kaminski pulled a chain hanging from the pressed-metal kitchen ceiling, and light seeped from a bulb, casting a wan glow over a scarred wooden table, a small stained sink with a faucet that ran cold water, a gas stove. In the hall, outside the apartment door, was a lavatory we shared with our neighbors – a childless German couple called the Schatzmans, the landlord told us. “They keep quiet, and will expect you to do the same,” he said, frowning as my brothers, restless and fidgety, made a game of shoving each other.
Despite the landlord’s disapproval, the sweltering heat, the gloomy rooms and cacophony of strange noises, so unfamiliar to my country ears, I felt another swell of hope. As I looked around our four rooms, it did seem that we were off to a fresh start, having left behind the many hardships of life in Kinvara – the damp that sank into our bones, the miserable, cramped hut, our father’s drinking – did I mention that? – that threw every small gain into peril. Here, our Da had the promise of a job. We could pull a chain for light; the twist of a knob brought running water. Just outside the door, in a dry hallway, a toilet and bathtub. However modest, this was a chance for a new beginning.
I don’t know how much of my memory of this time is affected by my age now and how much is a result of the age I was then – seven when we left Kinvara, nine on that night when Maisie wouldn’t stop crying, that night that, even more than leaving Ireland, changed the course of my life forever. Eighty-two years later, the sound of her crying still haunts me. If only I had paid closer attention to why she was crying instead of simply trying to quiet her. If only I had paid closer attention.
I was so afraid that our lives would fall apart again that I tried to ignore the things that frightened me most: our Da’s continued love affair with drink, which a change in country did not change; Mam’s black moods and rages; the incessant fighting between them. I wanted everything to be all right. I held Maisie to my chest and whispered in her ear – there’s none of them can sing so sweet, my singing bird, as you – trying to silence her. When she finally stopped I was only relieved, not understanding that Maisie was like a canary in a mine, warning us of danger until it was too late.
New York City, 1929
Three days after the fire, Mr. Schatzman wakes me from sleep to tell me that he and Mrs. Schatzman have figured out a perfect solution (yes, he says “perfect,” parr-fec, in his German accent; I learn, in this instant, the terrible power of superlatives). They will take me to the Children’s Aid Society, a place staffed by friendly social workers who keep the children in their care warm and dry and fed.
“I can’t go,” I say. “My mother will need me when she gets out of the hospital.” I know that my father and brothers are dead. I saw them in the hallway, covered with sheets. But Mam was taken away on a stretcher, and I saw Maisie moving, whimpering, as a man in a uniform carried her down the hall.
He shakes his head. “She won’t be coming back.”
“But Maisie, then – ”
“Your sister Margaret didn’t make it,” he says, turning away.
My mother and father, two brothers and a sister as dear to me as my own self – there is no language for my loss. And even if I find words to describe what I feel, there is no one to tell. Everyone I am attached to in the world – this new world – is dead or gone.
The night of the fire, the night they took me in, I could hear Mrs. Schatzman in her bedroom, fretting with her husband about what to do with me. “I didn’t ask for this,” she hissed, the words as distinct to my ears as if she’d been in the same room. “Those Irish! Too many children in too small a space. The only surprise is that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more.”
As I listened through the wall, a hollow space opened within me. I didn’t ask for this. Only hours earlier, my Da had come in from his job at the bar and changed his clothes, as he always did after work, shedding rank smells with each layer. Mam mended a pile of clothes she’d taken in for money. Dominick peeled potatoes. James played in a corner. I drew on a piece of paper with Maisie, teaching her letters, the hot-water-bottle weight and warmth of her on my lap, her sticky fingers in my hair.
I try to forget the horror of what happened. Or – perhaps forget is the wrong word. How can I forget? And yet how can I move forward even a step without tamping down the despair I feel? When I close my eyes I hear Maisie’s cries and Mam’s screams, smell the acrid smoke, feel the heat of the fire on my skin, and heave upright on my pallet in the Schatzman’s parlor, soaked in a cold sweat.
My mother’s parents are dead, her brothers in Europe, one having followed the other to serve in the military, and I know nothing about how to find them. But it occurs to me, and I tell Mr. Schatzman, that someone might try to get in touch with my father’s mother and his sister back in Ireland, though we haven’t had contact with them since we came to this country. I never saw a letter from Gram, nor did I ever see my father writing one. Our life in New York was so bleak, and we clung to it with such an unsteady grip, that I doubt my Da had much he would want to report. I don’t know much more than the name of our village and my father’s family name – though perhaps this information would be enough.
But Mr. Schatzman frowns and shakes his head, and it’s then that I realize just how alone I am. There is no adult on this side of the Atlantic who has reason to take any interest in me, no one to guide me onto a boat or pay for my passage. I am a burden to society, and nobody’s responsibility.
***
“You – the Irish girl. Over here.” A thin, scowling matron in a white bonnet beckons with a bony finger. She must know I’m Irish from the papers Mr. Schatzman filled out when he brought me in to the Children’s Aid several weeks ago – or perhaps it is my accent, still as thick as peat. “Humph,” she says, pursing her lips, when I stand in front of her. “Red hair.”
“Unfortunate,” the plump woman beside her sighs. “And those freckles. It’s hard enough to get placed out at her age.”
The bony one licks her thumb and pushes the hair off my face with a wet finger. “Don’t want to scare them away, now, do you? You must keep it pulled back. If you’re neat and well mannered they might not be so quick to jump to conclusions.”
She buttons my sleeves, and when she leans down to retie each of my black shoes a mildewy smell rises from her bonnet. “It is imperative that you look presentable. The kind of girl a woman would want around the house. Clean and well-spoken. But not too –” She shoots the other one a look.
“Too what?” I ask.
“Some women don’t take kindly to a comely girl sleeping under the same roof,” she says. “Not that you’re so…. But still.” She points at my necklace. “What is that?”
I reach up and touch the small pewter Claddagh Celtic cross I have worn since I was six, tracking the grooved outline of the heart with my finger. “An Irish cross.”
“You’re not allowed to bring keepsakes with you on the train.”
My heart is pounding so hard I believe she can hear it. “It was my Gram’s.”
The two women peer at the cross, and I can see them hesitating, trying to decide what to do.
“She gave it to me in Ireland, before we came over. It’s – it’s the only thing I have left.” This is true, but it’s also true that I say it because I think it will sway them. And it does.
***
We hear the train before we can see it. A low hum, a rumble underfoot, a deep-throated whistle, faint at first and then louder as the train gets close. We crane our necks to look down the track (even as one of our sponsors, Mrs. Scatcherd, shouts in her reedy voice, “Chil-dren! Places, chil-dren!”) and suddenly here it is: a black engine looming over us, shadowing the platform, letting out a hiss of steam like a massive panting animal.
I am with a group of twenty children, all ages. We are scrubbed and in our donated clothes, the girls in dresses with white pinafores and thick stockings, the boys in knickers that button below the knee, white dress shirts, neckties, thick wool suit coats. It is an unseasonably warm October day, Indian summer, Mrs. Scatcherd calls it, and we are sweltering on the platform. My hair is damp against my neck, the pinafore stiff and uncomfortable. In one hand I clutch a small brown suitcase that, excepting the locket, contains everything I have in the world, all newly acquired: a Bible, two sets of clothes, a hat, a black coat several sizes too small, a pair of shoes. Inside the coat is my name, embroidered by a volunteer at the Children’s Aid Society: Niamh Power.
Yes, Niamh. Pronounced “Neev.” A common enough name in County Galway, and not so unusual in the Irish tenements in New York, but certainly not acceptable anywhere the train might take me. The lady who sewed those letters several days ago tsk’ed over the task. “I hope you aren’t attached to that name, young miss, because I can promise if you’re lucky enough to be chosen, your new parents will change it in a second.” My Niamh, my Da used to call me. But I’m not so attached to the name. I know it’s hard to pronounce, foreign, ugly to those who don’t understand – a peculiar jumble of unmatched consonants.
No one feels sorry for me because I’ve lost my family. Each of us has a sad tale; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. The general feeling is that it’s best not to talk about the past, that the quickest relief will come in forgetting. The Children’s Aid treats us as if we were born the moment we were brought in, that like moths cracking their carapaces we’ve left our old lives behind and, God willing, will soon launch ourselves into new ones.
Mrs. Scatcherd and Mr. Curran, a milquetoast with a brown moustache, line us up by height, tallest to shortest, which generally means oldest to youngest, with the babies in the arms of the children over eight. Mrs. Scatcherd pushes a baby into my arms before I can object – an olive-skinned, cross-eyed 14-month-old named Carmine (who, I can already guess, will soon answer to another name). He clings to me like a terrified kitten. Brown suitcase in one hand, the other holding Carmine secure, I navigate the high steps into the train unsteadily before Mr. Curran scurries over to take my bag. “Use some common sense, girl,” he scolds. “If you fall you’ll crack your skulls, and then we’ll have to leave you the both of you behind.”
***
The wooden seats in the train car all face forward except for two groups of seats opposite each other in the front, separated by a narrow aisle. I find a three-seater for Carmine and me, and Mr. Curran heaves my suitcase onto the rack above my head. Carmine soon wants to crawl off the seat, and I am so busy trying to distract him from escaping that I barely notice as the other kids come on board and the car fills..
Mrs. Scatcherd stands at the front of the car, holding onto two leather seat backs, the arms of her black cape draping like the wings of a crow. “They call this an orphan train, children, and you are lucky to be on it. You are leaving behind an evil place, full of ignorance, poverty, and vice, for the nobility of country life. While you are on the train you will follow some simple rules. You will be cooperative and listen to instructions. You will be respectful of your chaperones. You will treat the train car respectfully, and will not damage it in any way. You will encourage your seatmates to behave appropriately. In short, you will make Mr. Curran and me proud of your behavior.” Her voice rises as we settle in our seats. “When you are allowed to step off the train, you will stay within the area we designate. You will not wander off alone at any time. And if your behavior proves to be a problem, if you cannot adhere to these simple rules of common decency, you will be sent straight back to where you came from and discharged on the street, left to fend for yourselves.”
The younger children appear bewildered by this litany, but those of us older than six or seven have already gotten an earful of it several times heard a version of it at the orphanage before we left. The words wash over me. Of more immediate concern is the fact that Carmine is hungry, as am I. We had only a dry piece of bread and a tin cup of milk for breakfast, hours ago, before it was light. Carmine is fussing and chewing on his hand, a habit that must be comforting to him. (Maisie sucked her thumb.) But I know not to ask when food is coming. It will come when the sponsors are ready to give it, and no entreaties will change that.
I tug Carmine onto my lap. At breakfast this morning, when I spooned sugar into my tea, I slipped two lumps into my pocket. Now I rub one between my fingers, crushing it to granules, then lick my index finger and stick it in the sugar before popping it in Carmine’s mouth. The look of wonder on his face, his unalloyed delight as he realizes his good fortune, makes me smile. He clutches my hand with both of his chubby ones, holding on tight as he drifts off to sleep.
Eventually I, too, am lulled to sleep by the steady rumble of the clicking wheels. When I wake, with Carmine stirring and rubbing his eyes, Mrs. Scatcherd is standing over me. She is close enough that I can see the small pink veins, like seams on the back of a delicate leaf, spreading across her cheeks, the downy fur on her jawbone, her bristly black eyebrows.
She stares at me intently through her little round glasses. “There were little ones at home, I gather.”
I nod.
“You appear to know what you’re doing.”
As if on cue, Carmine bleats in my lap. “I think he’s hungry,” I tell her. I feel his diaper rag, which is dry on the outside but spongy. “And ready for a change.”
She turns toward the front of the car, gesturing back at me over her shoulder. “Come on, then.”
Holding the baby against my chest, I rise unsteadily from my seat and sway behind her up the aisle. Children sitting in twos and threes look up with doleful eyes as I pass. None of us knows where we are headed, and I think that except for the very youngest, each of us is apprehensive and fearful. Our sponsors have told us little; we know only that we are going to a land where apples grow in abundance on low-hanging branches and cows and pigs and sheep roam freely in the fresh country air. A land where good people – families – are eager to take us in. I haven’t seen a cow, or any animal, for that matter, except a stray dog and the occasional hardy bird, since leaving Galway County, and I look forward to seeing them again. But I am skeptical. I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you’ve been fed don’t match up with reality.
Many of the children on this train have been at the Children’s Aid for so long that they have no memories of their mothers. They can start anew, welcomed into the arms of the only families they’ll ever know. I remember too much: my Gram’s ample bosom, her small dry hands, the dark cottage with a crumbling stone wall flanking its narrow garden. The heavy mist that settled over the bay early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the mutton and potatoes Gram would bring to the house when Mam was too tired to cook, or we didn’t have money for ingredients. Buying milk and bread at the corner shop on Phantom Street – Sraid a’ Phuca, my Da called it in Gaelic – so-called because the stone houses in that section of town were built on cemetery grounds. My mam’s chapped lips and fleeting smile, the melancholy that filled our home in Kinvara and traveled with us across the ocean to take up permanent residence in the dim corners of our tenement apartment in New York.
And now here I am on this train, wiping Carmine’s bottom while Mrs. Scatcherd hovers above us, shielding me with a blanket to hide the procedure from Mr. Curran, issuing instructions I don’t need. Once I have Carmine clean and dry, I sling him over my shoulder and make my way back to my seat while Mr. Curran distributes lunch pails filled with bread and cheese and fruit, and tin cups of milk. Feeding Carmine bread soaked in milk reminds me of the champ I often made for Maisie and the boys – a mash of potatoes, milk, green onions (on the rare occasion when we had them), and salt. On the nights when we went to bed hungry all of us dreamed of that champ.
After distributing the food and one wool blanket to each of us, Mr. Curran announces that there is a bucket and a dipper for water, and if we raise our hands we can come forward for a drink. There’s an indoor toilet, he informs us (though, as we soon find out, this “toilet” is a terrifying open hole above the tracks).
Carmine, drunk on sweet milk and bread, splays in my lap, his dark head in the crook of my arm. I wrap the scratchy blanket around us. In the rhythmic clacking of the train and the stirring, peopled silence of the car, I feel cocooned. Carmine smells as lovely as a custard, the solid weight of him so comforting it makes me teary. His spongy skin, pliable limbs, dark fringed lashes – even his sighs make me think (how could they not?) of Maisie. The idea of her dying alone in the hospital, suffering painful burns, is too much to bear. Why am I alive, and she dead?
In our tenement there were families who spilled in and out of each other’s apartments, sharing childcare and stews. The men worked together in grocery stores and blacksmith shops. The women ran cottage industries, making lace and darning clothing. When I passed by their apartments and saw them sitting together in a circle, hunched over their work, speaking a language I didn’t understand, I felt a sharp pang.
My parents left Ireland in hopes of a brighter future, all of us believing we were on our way to a land of plenty. As it happened, they failed in this new land, failed in just about every way possible. It may have been that they were weak people, ill suited for the rigors of emigration, its humiliations and compromises, its competing demands of self-discipline and adventurousness. But I wonder how things might have been different if my father was part of a family business that gave him structure and a steady paycheck instead of working in a bar, the worst place for a man like him – or if my mother had been surrounded by women, sisters and nieces, perhaps, who could have provided relief from destitution and loneliness, a refuge from strangers.
In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn’t know until we left how much we took those things for granted.
New York Central Train, 1929
Four days. Three nights. As the hours pass I get used to the motion of the train, the heavy wheels clacking in their grooves, the industrial hum under my seat. Dusk softens the sharp points of trees outside my window; the sky slowly darkens, then blackens around an orb of moon. Hours later, a faint blue tinge yields to the soft pastels of dawn, and soon enough sun is streaming in, the stop-start rhythm of the train making it all feel like still photography, thousands of images that taken together create a scene in motion.
We pass the time looking out at the evolving landscape, talking, playing games. Mrs. Scatcherd has a checkers set and a Bible, and I thumb through it, looking for Psalm 121, Mam’s favorite: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth …
I’m one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York she’d make me read to her, anything with words on it – crates and bottles I found in the street.
“Donner brand car-bonated bev – ”
“Beverage.”
“Beverage. LemonKist soda. Artifickle – ”
“Artificial. The ‘c’ sounds like ‘s’.”
“Artificial color. Kitric – citric acid added.”
“Good.”
When I became more proficient Mam went into the shabby trunk beside her bed and brought out a hardback book of poems, blue with gold trim. Francis Fahy was a Kinvara poet born into a family of 17 children. At 15 he became an assistant teacher at the local boys’ school before heading off to England (like every other Irish poet, Mam said), where he mingled with the likes of Yeats and Shaw. She would turn the pages carefully, running her finger over the black lines on flimsy paper, mouthing the words to herself, until she found the one she wanted.
“‘Galway Bay,’” she would say. “My favorite. Read it to me.”
And so I did:
Had I youth’s blood and hopeful mood and heart of fire once more,
For all the gold the world might hold I’d never quit your shore,
I’d live content whate’er God sent with neighbors old and gray,
And lay my bones ‘neath churchyard stones, beside you, Galway Bay.
Once I looked up from a halting and botched rendition to see two lines of tears rivuleting Mam’s cheeks. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. “We should never have left that place.”
Sometimes, on the train, we sing. Mr. Curran taught us a song before we left that he stands to lead us in at least once a day:
From the city’s gloom to the country’s bloom
Where the fragrant breezes sigh
From the city’s blight to the greenwood bright
Like the birds of summer fly
O Children, dear Children
Young, happy, pure …
We stop at a depot for sandwich fixings and fresh fruit and milk, but only Mr. Curran gets off. I can see him outside my window in his white wingtips, talking to farmers on the platform. One holds a basket of apples, one a sack full of bread. A man in a black apron reaches into a box and unwraps a package of brown paper to reveal a thick yellow slab of cheese, and my stomach rumbles. They haven’t fed us much, some crusts of bread and milk and an apple each in the past twenty-four hours, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re afraid of running out or if they think it’s for our moral good. Mrs. Scatcherd strides up and down the aisle, letting two groups of children at a time get up to stretch while the train is still. “Shake each leg,” she instructs. “Good for the circulation.” The younger children are restless, and the older boys stir up trouble in small ways, wherever they can find it. I want nothing to do with these boys, who seem as feral as a pack of dogs. Our landlord, Mr. Kaminski, called boys like these Street Arabs, lawless vagrants who travel in gangs, pickpockets and worse.
When the train pulls out of the station one of these boys lights a match, invoking the wrath of Mr. Curran, who boxes him about the head and shouts, for the whole car to hear, that he’s a worthless good-for-nothing clod of dirt on God’s green earth and will never amount to anything. This outburst does little but boost the boy’s status in the eyes of his friends, who take to devising ingenious ways to irritate Mr. Curran without giving themselves away. Paper airplanes, loud belches, high-pitched, ghostly moans followed by stifled giggles – it drives Mr. Curran mad that he cannot pick out one boy to punish for all this. But what can he do, short of kicking them all out at the next stop? Which he actually threatens, finally, looming in the aisle above the seats of two particularly rowdy boys, only to prompt the bigger one’s retort that he’ll be happy to make his way on his own, has done it for years with no great harm, you can shine shoes in any city in America, he’ll wager, and it’s probably a hell of a lot better than being sent to live in a barn with animals, eating only pig slops, or getting carried off by Indians.
Children murmur in their seats. What’d he say?
Mr. Curran looks around uneasily. “You’re scaring a whole car full of kids. Happy now?” he says.
“It’s true, ain’t it?”
“Of course it ain’t – isn’t – true. Kids, settle down.”
“I hear we’ll be sold at auction to the highest bidder,” another boy stage-whispers.
The car grows silent. Mrs. Scatcherd stands up, wearing her usual thin-lipped scowl and broad-brimmed bonnet. She is far more imposing, in her heavy black cloak and flashing steel-rimmed glasses, than Mr. Curran could ever be. “I have heard enough,” she says in a shrill voice. “I am tempted to throw the whole lot of you off this train. But that would not be –” She looks around at us slowly, dwelling on each somber face – “Christian. Would it? Mr. Curran and I are here to escort you to a better life. Any suggestion to the contrary is ignorant and outrageous. It is our fervent hope that each of you will find a path out of the depravity of your early lives, and with firm guidance and hard work transform into respectable citizens who can pull your weight in society. Now. I am not so naïve as to believe that this will be the case for all.” She casts a withering look at the blond-haired older boy, the troublemaker. “But I am hopeful that most of you will view this as an opportunity. Perhaps the only chance you will ever get to make something of yourselves.” She adjusts the cape around her shoulders. “Mr. Curran, perhaps the young man who spoke to you so impudently should be moved to a seat where his dubious charms will not be so enthusiastically embraced.” She lifts her chin, peering out from her bonnet like a turtle from its shell. “Ah – there’s a space beside Niamh,” she says, pointing a crooked finger in my direction. “With the added bonus of a squirming toddler.”
My skin prickles. Oh no. But I can see that Mrs. Scatcherd is in no mood to reconsider. So I slide as close as I can to the window and set Carmine and his blanket next to me, in the middle of the seat.
Several rows ahead, on the other side of the aisle, the boy stands, sighs dramatically, and pulls his bright-blue flannel cap down hard on his head. He makes a production of getting out of his seat, then drags his feet up the aisle like a condemned man approaching a noose. When he gets to my row he squints at me, then at Carmine, and makes a face at his friends. “This should be fun,” he says loudly.
“You will not speak, young sir,” Mrs. Scatcherd trills. “You will sit down and behave like a gentleman.”
He flings himself into his seat, his legs in the aisle, takes his cap off and slaps it against the seat in front of us, raising a small cloud of dust. The kids in that seat turn around and stare. “Man,” he mutters, not really to anybody, “what an old goat.” He holds his finger out to Carmine, who studies it and looks at his face. The boy wiggles his finger and Carmine buries his head in my lap.
“Don’t get you nowhere being shy,” the boy says. He looks over at me, his gaze loitering on my face and body in a way that makes me blush. He has straight sandy hair and pale blue eyes and is 12 or 13, from what I can tell, though his manner seems older. “A redhead. That’s worse than a bootblack. Who’s gonna want you?”
I feel the sting of truth in his words, but I lift my chin. “At least I’m not a criminal.”
He laughs. “That’s what I am, am I?”
“You tell me.”
“Would you believe me?”
“Probably not.”
“No point then, is there.”
I do not respond and we three sit in silence, Carmine awed into stillness by the boy’s presence. I look out at the severe and lonely landscape drifting past the window. It’s been raining off and on all day. Gray clouds hang low in a watery sky.
“They took my kit from me,” the boy says after a while.
I turn to look at him. “What?”
“My bootblack kit. All my paste and brushes. How do they expect me to make a living?”
“They don’t. They’re going to find you a family.”
“Ah, that’s right,” he says with a dry laugh. “A ma to tuck me in at night and a pa to teach me a trade. I don’t see it working out like that. Do you?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it,” I say, though of course I have. I’ve gleaned bits and pieces: that babies are the first to be chosen, then older boys, prized by farmers for their strong bones and muscles. Last to go are girls like me, too old to be turned into ladies, too young to be serious help around the house, not much use in the field. If we’re not chosen we get sent back to the orphanage. “Anyway, what can we do about it?”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a penny. He rolls it across his fingers, holds it between thumb and forefinger and touches it to Carmine’s nose, then clasps it in his closed fist. When he opens his hand, the penny isn’t there. He reaches behind Carmine’s ear, and – “Presto,” he says, handing him the penny.
Carmine gazes at it, astonished.
“You can put up with it,” the boy says. “Or you can run away. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and live happily ever after. Only the good Lord knows what’s going to happen, and he ain’t telling.”
Union Station, Chicago, 1929
We become an odd little family, the boy – real name Hans, I learn, called Dutchy on the street – and Carmine and me in our three-seat abode. Dutchy tells me he was born in New York to German parents, that his mother died of pneumonia and his father sent him out on the streets to earn money as a bootblack, beating him with a belt if he didn’t bring enough in. So one day he stopped going home. He fell in with a group of boys who slept on any convenient step or sidewalk during the summer, and in the winter months in barrels and doorways, in discarded boxes on iron gratings on the margin of Printing House Square, warm air and steam rising from the engines beneath. He taught himself piano by ear in the back room of a speakeasy, plunked out tunes at night for drunken patrons, saw things no 12-year-old should see. The boys tried to look after each other, though if one got sick or maimed – catching pneumonia or falling off a streetcar or under the wheels of a truck – there wasn’t much any of them could do.
A few boys from Dutchy’s gang are on the train with us – he points out Slobbery Jack, who has a habit of spilling on himself, and Whitey, a boy with translucent skin. They were lured off the street with the promise of a hot meal, and here’s where they ended up.
“What about the hot meal? Did you get it?”
“Did we ever. Roast beef and potatoes. And a clean bed. But I don’t trust it. I wager they’re paid by the head, the way Indians take scalps.”
“It’s charity,” I say. “Didn’t you hear what Mrs. Scatcherd said? It’s their Christian duty.”
“All I know is nobody ever did nothing for me out of Christian duty. I call tell by the way they’re talking I’m going to end up worked to the bone and not see a dime for it. You’re a girl. You might be all right, baking pies in the kitchen or taking care of a baby.” He squints at me. “Except for the red hair and freckles, you look okay. You’ll be fine and dandy sitting at the table with a napkin on your lap. Not me. I’m too old to be taught manners, or to follow somebody else’s rules. The only thing I’m good for is hard labor. Same with all of us newsies and peddlers and bill posters and bootblacks.” He nods toward one boy after another in the car.
***
On the third day we cross the Illinois state line. Near Chicago, Mrs. Scatcherd stands for another lecture. “In a few minutes we will arrive at Union Station, whereupon we will switch trains for the next portion of our journey,” she tells us. “If it were up to me, I’d send you in a straight line right across the platform to the other train, without a minute’s worry that you’ll get yourselves into trouble. But we are not allowed to board for half an hour. Young men, you will wear your suit coats, and young ladies must put on your pinafores. Careful not to muss them now.
“Chicago is a proud and noble city, on the edge of a great lake. The lake makes it windy, hence its appellation: ‘The Windy City.’ You will bring your suitcases, of course, and your wool blanket to wrap yourself in, as we will be on the platform for at least an hour.
“The good citizens of Chicago no doubt view you as ruffians, thieves, and beggars, hopeless sinners who have not a chance in the world of being redeemed. They are justifiably suspicious of your character. Your task is to prove them wrong – to behave with impeccable manners, and comport yourselves like the model citizens the Children’s Aid Society believes you can become.”
The wind on the platform rushes through my dress. I wrap my blanket tight around my shoulders, keeping a close eye on Carmine as he staggers around, seemingly oblivious to the cold. He wants to know the names of everything: train. Wheel. Mrs. Scatcherd, frowning at the conductor. Mr. Curran, poring over papers with a station agent. Lights – which to Carmine’s amazement turn on while he’s gazing at them, as if by magic.
Contrary to Mrs. Scatcherd’s expectations – or perhaps in response to her rebuke – we are a quiet lot, even the older boys. We huddle together, complacent as cattle, stamping our feet to stay warm.
Except for Dutchy. Where did he go?
“Psst. Niamh.”
When I hear my name, I turn to glimpse his blond hair in a stairwell. Then he’s gone. I look over at the adults, occupied with plans and forms. A large rat scurries along the far brick wall, and as the rest of the children point and shriek I scoop up Carmine, leaving our small pile of suitcases, and slip behind a pillar and a pile of wooden crates.
In the stairwell, out of sight of the platform, Dutchy leans against a curved wall. When he sees me he turns without expression and bounds up the stairs, vanishing around a corner. With a glance behind, and seeing no one, I hold Carmine close and follow him up, keeping my eyes on the wide steps so I don’t fall. Carmine tilts his head up and leans back in my arms, floppy as a sack of rice. “Yite,” he murmurs, pointing. My gaze follows his chubby finger to what I realize is the enormous, barrel-vaulted ceiling of the train station, laced with skylights.
We step into the huge terminal, filled with people of all shapes and colors – wealthy women in furs trailed by servants, men in top hats and morning coats, shop girls in bright dresses. It’s too much to take in all at once – statuary and columns, balconies and staircases, oversized wooden benches. Dutchy is standing in the middle, looking up at the sky through that glass ceiling, and then he takes off his cap and flings it into the air. Carmine struggles to free himself, and as soon as I set him down he races toward Dutchy and grabs his legs. Dutchy reaches down and hoists him on his shoulders, and as I get close I hear him say, “Put your arms out, little man, and I’ll spin you.” He clasps Carmine’s legs and twirls, Carmine stretching out his arms and throwing his head back, gazing up at the skylights, shrieking with glee as they turn, and in that moment, for the first time since the fire, my worries are gone. I feel a joy so strong it’s almost painful – a knife’s edge of joy.
And then a whistle pierces the air. Three policemen in dark uniforms rush toward Dutchy with their sticks drawn, and everything happens too fast: I see Mrs. Scatcherd at the top of the stairwell pointing her crow wing, Mr. Curran running in those ridiculous white shoes, Carmine clutching Dutchy’s neck in terror as a fat policeman shouts “Get down!” My arm is wrenched behind my back and a man spits in my ear, “Trying to get away, were yeh?”, his breath like licorice. It’s hopeless to respond, so I keep my mouth shut as he forces me to my knees.
A hush falls over the cavernous hall. Out of the corner of my eye I see Dutchy on the floor, under a policeman’s truncheon. Carmine is howling, his cries puncturing the stillness, and every time Dutchy moves he gets jammed in the side. Then he’s in handcuffs and the fat policeman yanks him to his feet, pushing him roughly so he stumbles forward, tripping over his feet.
In this moment I know that he’s been in scrapes like this before. His face is blank; he doesn’t even protest. I can tell what the bystanders think: he’s a common criminal; he’s broken the law, likely more than one. The police are protecting the good citizens of Chicago, and thank God for them.
The fat policeman drags Dutchy over to Mrs. Scatcherd, and Licorice Breath, following his lead, yanks me roughly by the arm.
Mrs. Scatcherd looks as if she’s bitten into a lime. Her lips are puckered in a quivering O, and she appears to be trembling. “I placed this young man with you,” she says to me in a terrible quiet voice, “in the hopes that you might provide a civilizing influence. It appears that I was gravely mistaken.”
My mind is racing. If only I can convince her that he means no harm. “No, Ma’am, I –”
“Do not interrupt.”
I look down.
“So what do you have to say for yourself?”
I know that nothing I can say will change her opinion of me. And in that realization I feel oddly free. The most I can hope for is to keep Dutchy from being sent back to the streets.
“It’s my fault,” I say. “I asked Dutchy – I mean Hans – to escort me and the baby up the stairs.” I look over at Carmine, trying to squirm out of the arms of the policeman holding him. “I thought … maybe we could get a glimpse of that lake. I thought the baby would like to see it.”
Mrs. Scatcherd glares at me. Dutchy looks at me with surprise. Carmine says, “Yake?”
“And then – Carmine saw the lights.” I point up and look at Carmine, and he throws his head back and shouts, “Yite!”
The policemen aren’t sure what to do. Licorice Breath lets go of my arm, apparently persuaded that I’m not going to flee.
Mr. Curran glances at Mrs. Scatcherd, whose expression has ever so slightly softened.
“You are a foolish and headstrong girl,” she says, but her voice has lost its edge, and I can tell she’s not as angry as she wants to appear. “You flouted my instructions to stay on the platform. You put the entire group of children at risk, and you have disgraced yourself. Worse, you have disgraced me. And Mr. Curran,” she adds, turning toward him. He winces, as if to say leave me out of it. “But this is not, I suppose, a matter for the police. A civil, not a legal, matter,” she clarifies.
The fat policeman makes a show of unlocking Dutchy’s handcuffs and clipping them to his belt. “Sure you don’t want us to take him in, Ma’am?”
“Thank you, sir, but Mr. Curran and I will devise a sufficient punishment.”
“As you say.” He touches the brim of his cap, backs away and turns on his heels.
“Make no mistake,” Mrs. Scatcherd says gravely, staring down her nose at us. “You will be punished.”
***
Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy’s knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a half-hearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly, there isn’t much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery – our mere existence is punishment enough. Though she threatens to separate the three of us, in the end she leaves us together – not wanting to infect the others with Dutchy’s delinquency, she says, and apparently having decided that taking care of Carmine would’ve extended my punishment to her. She tells us not to speak to or even look at each other. “If I hear as much as a murmur, so help me …” she says, the threat losing air over our heads like a pricked balloon.
By the time we leave Chicago it is evening. Carmine sits on my lap with his hands on the window, face pressed against the glass, gazing out at the streets and buildings, all lit up. “Yite,” he breathes, as the city recedes into the distance. I look out the window with him. Soon all is dark; it’s impossible to tell where land ends and the sky begins.
“Get a good night’s rest,” Mrs. Scatcherd calls from the front of the car. “In the morning you will need to be at your very best. It is vital that you make a good impression. Your drowsiness might well be construed as laziness.”
“What if nobody wants me?” one boy asks, and the entire car seems to hold its breath. It is the question on everyone’s mind, the question none of us are sure we want the answer to.
Mrs. Scatcherd looks down at Mr. Curran as if she’s been waiting for this. “If it happens that you are not chosen at the first stop, you will have several additional opportunities. I cannot think of an instance …” She pauses and purses her lips. “It is uncommon for a child to be with us on the return trip to New York.”
“Pardon me, Ma’am,” a girl near the front says. “What if I don’t want to go with the people who choose me?”
“What if they beat us?” a boy cries out.
“Children!” Mrs. Scatcherd’s small glasses flash as she turns her head from side to side. “I will not have you interrupting!” She seems poised to sit down without addressing these questions, but then changes her mind. “I will say this: There is no accounting for taste and personalities. Some parents are looking for a healthy boy to work on the farm – as we all know, hard work is good for children, and you would be lucky to be placed with a God-fearing farm family, all you boys – and some people want babies. People sometimes think they want one thing, but later change their minds. Though we dearly hope all of you will find the right homes at the first stop, it doesn’t always work that way. So in addition to being respectable and polite, you must also keep your faith in God to guide you forward if the way is not clear. Whether your journey is long or short, He will help you as long as you place your trust in Him.”
I look over at Dutchy, and he looks back at me. Mrs. Scatcherd knows as little as we do about whether we’ll be chosen by people who will treat us with kindness. We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.
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