Orphan Train (23 page)

If I am honest—which is not, of course, what Mr. Sorenson is asking of me—I will say that I simply need a warm, dry place to live. I want enough food to eat, clothes, and shoes that will protect me from the cold. I want calmness and order. More than anything, I want to feel safe in my bed.

“I can sew, and I am quite neat. I’m good with numbers,” I say.

Mr. Nielsen, turning to Mrs. Murphy, asks, “And can the young lady cook and clean? Is she hardworking?”

“Is she a Protestant?” Mrs. Nielsen adds.

“She is a hardworking girl, I can attest to that,” Mrs. Murphy says.

“I can cook some things,” I tell them, “though at my previous residence I was expected to make stew out of squirrels and raccoons, and I’d rather not do that again.”

“Mercy, no,” Mrs. Nielsen says. “And the other question—?”

“The other question?” I’m barely keeping up.

“Do you go to church, dear?” Mrs. Murphy prompts.

“Oh, right. The family I lived with were not churchgoing people,” I answer honestly, though in truth I have not been to church since the chapel at the Children’s Aid Society, and before that only with Gram. I remember clasping her hand as we walked to St. Joseph’s, right in the center of Kinvara, a small church made of stone with jewel-toned stained-glass windows and dark oak pews. The smell of incense and lilies, the candles lit for loved ones passed away, the throaty intonations of the priest, and the majestic trumpeting of the organ. My da said he was allergic to religion, it never did anybody any good; and when Mam got grief from the neighbors on Elizabeth Street about not going to services, she’d say, “You try packing up a swarm of kids on a Sunday morning when one has a fever, one has the colic, and your husband’s passed out in the bed.” I remember watching other Catholics, girls in their Communion dresses and boys in their spitshined shoes, walking down the street below our apartment, their mothers pushing prams and fathers strolling along beside.

“She’s an Irish girl, Viola, so I suspect she’s a Catholic,” Mr. Nielsen says to his wife.

I nod.

“You may be a Catholic, child,” Mr. Nielsen says—the first thing he has said to me directly—“but we are Protestant. And we will expect you to go to Lutheran services with us on Sundays.”

It’s been years since I’ve attended services of any kind, so what does it matter? “Yes, of course.”

“And you should know that we will send you to school in town here, a short walk from our home—so you won’t attend Miss Larsen’s classes any longer.”

Miss Larsen says, “I believe Dorothy was about to outgrow the school-house, anyway, she’s such a smart girl.”

“And after school,” Mr. Nielsen says, “you will be expected to help in the store. We’ll pay you an hourly wage, of course. You know about the store, Dorothy, do you not?”

“It’s sort of a general-interest, all-purpose place,” Mrs. Nielsen says.

I nod and nod and nod. So far they’ve said nothing that raises an alarm. But I don’t feel the spark of connection with them, either. They don’t seem eager to learn about me, but then again, few people are. I get the sense that my abandonment, and the circumstances that brought me to them, matter little to them, compared to the need I might fill in their lives.

The following morning, at 9:00
A.M
., Mr. Nielsen pulls up in a blue-and-white Studebaker with silver trim and raps on the front door. Mrs. Murphy has been so generous that I now have two suitcases and a satchel filled with clothes and books and shoes. As I’m closing my bags Miss Larsen comes to my room and presses
Anne of Green Gables
into my hands. “It’s my own book, not the school’s, and I want you to have it,” she says, hugging me good-bye.

And then, for the fourth time since I first set foot in Minnesota over a year ago, everything I possess is loaded into a vehicle and I am on my way to somewhere new.

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1930–1931

The Nielsens’ home is a two-story colonial painted yellow with black shutters
and a long slate walkway leading to the front door. It sits on a quiet street several blocks from the center of town. Inside, the floor plan is a circle: a sunny living room on the right leads into the kitchen in the back, which connects to a dining room and back to the foyer.

Upstairs I have my own large room, painted pink, with a window overlooking the street, and even my own bathroom, with a large porcelain sink and pink tiles and a cheerful white curtain with pink piping.

Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen take things for granted that I’ve never dared to dream of. All the rooms have steel air vents with black-painted scrollwork. Even when no one is home, the water heater is on, so that when they come home after work, they don’t have to wait for the water to heat up. A woman named Bess cleans the house and does the washing once a week. The refrigerator is stocked with milk and eggs and cheese and juice, and Mrs. Nielsen notices what I like to eat and buys more of it—oats for breakfast, for instance, and fruits, even exotic ones like oranges and bananas. I find aspirin and store-bought toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and clean towels in the hall closet. Every two years, Mr. Nielsen tells me, he trades in his car for a new model.

On Sunday morning we go to church. Grace Lutheran is different from any place of worship I’ve ever seen: a simple white building with a steeple, Gothic arched windows, oak pews, and a spare altar. I find the rituals comforting—the tried-and-true hymns, sermons by the mild-mannered, slope-shouldered reverend that emphasize decency and good manners. Mr. Nielsen and other parishioners grumble about the organist, who either plays so fast that we jumble the words or so slow that the songs become dirges, and he can’t seem to take his foot off the pedal. But nobody actually protests—they just raise their eyebrows at each other midsong and shrug.

I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other. I like the coffee hour with almond cake and snickerdoodles in the vestry. And I like being associated with the Nielsens, who seem to be generally regarded as fine, upstanding citizens. For the first time in my life, the glow of other people’s approval extends to, and envelops, me.

L
IFE WITH THE
N
IELSENS IS CALM AND ORDERLY
. E
ACH MORNING AT
five thirty, six days a week, Mrs. Nielsen makes breakfast for her husband, usually fried eggs and toast, and he leaves for the store to open for the farmers at six. I get ready for school and leave the house at seven forty-five for the ten-minute walk to the schoolhouse, a brick building that holds sixty children, separated into grades.

On my first day in this new school, the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Buschkowsky, asks the twelve of us in her class to introduce ourselves and list one or two of our hobbies.

I’ve never heard of a “hobby.” But the boy before me says playing stick-ball, and the girl before him says stamp collecting, so when the question comes to me, I say sewing.

“Lovely, Dorothy!” Miss Buschkowsky says. “What do you like to sew?”

“Clothes, mostly,” I tell the class.

Miss Buschkowsky smiles encouragingly. “For your dolls?”

“No, for ladies.”

“Well, isn’t that nice!” she says in a too-bright voice, and in that way it becomes clear to me that most ten-year-olds probably don’t sew clothes for ladies.

And so I begin to adjust. The kids know I’ve come from somewhere else, but as time passes, and with careful effort, I lose any trace of an accent. I note what the girls my age are wearing and the style of their hair and the subject of their conversations, and I work hard to banish my foreignness, to make friends, to fit in.

After school, at three o’clock, I walk directly to the store. Nielsen’s is a large open space divided into aisles, with a pharmacy in the back, a candy section up front, clothes, books, and magazines, shampoo, milk, and produce. My job is to stack shelves and help with inventory. When it’s busy, I help out at the cash register.

From my place at the counter I see longing in the faces of certain children—the ones who sidle into the store and linger in the candy aisle, eyeing the hard striped sticks with a fierce hunger I remember only too well. I ask Mr. Nielsen if I can use my own earnings to give a child a stick of penny candy now and then, and he laughs. “Use your discretion, Dorothy. I won’t take it out of your wages.”

Mrs. Nielsen leaves the store at five to start dinner; sometimes I go home with her, and sometimes I stay and help Mr. Nielsen close up. He always leaves at six. At dinner we talk about the weather and my homework and the store. Mr. Nielsen is a member of the chamber of commerce, and conversations often include discussion of initiatives and plans for stimulating business in this “unruly” economy, as he calls it. Late at night, Mr. Nielsen sits in the parlor at his rolltop desk, going over the store ledgers, while Mrs. Nielsen prepares our lunches for the next day, tidies the kitchen, takes care of household tasks. I help wash the dishes, sweep the floor. When chores are done, we play checkers or hearts and listen to the radio. Mrs. Nielsen teaches me to needlepoint; while she’s making intricately detailed pillows for the sofa, I work on the floral cover for a stool.

One of my first tasks at the store is to help decorate for Christmas. Mrs. Nielsen and I bring boxes filled with glass balls and china ornaments and ribbon and strings of sparkling beads up from the storage room in the cellar. Mr. Nielsen has his two delivery boys, Adam and Thomas, drive to the outskirts of town to cut a tree for the window, and we spend an afternoon putting swags of greenery with red velveteen bows over the store entrance and decorating the tree, wrapping empty boxes in foil paper and tying them with flocked ribbon and silk cording.

As we work together, Mrs. Nielsen tells me bits and pieces about her life. She is Swedish, though you wouldn’t know it—her people were dark-eyed gypsies who came to Gothamberg from central Europe. Her parents are dead, her siblings scattered. She and Mr. Nielsen have been married for eighteen years, since she was twenty-five and he was in his early thirties. They thought they couldn’t have children, but about eleven years ago she got pregnant. On July 7, 1920, their daughter, Vivian, was born.

“What is your birth date again, Dorothy?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.

“April twenty-first.”

Carefully she threads silver ribbon through the tree branches in the back, ducking her head so I can’t see her face. Then she says, “You girls are almost the same age.”

“What happened to her?” I venture. Mrs. Nielsen has never mentioned her daughter before and I sense that if I don’t ask now, I may not get the chance.

Mrs. Nielsen ties the ribbon to a branch and bends down to find another. She attaches the end of the new ribbon to the same branch to make it look continuous, and begins the process of weaving it through.

“When she was six, she developed a fever. We thought it was a cold. Put her to bed, called the doctor. He said we should let her rest, give her plenty of fluids, the usual advice. But she didn’t get better. And next thing we knew it was the middle of the night and she was delirious, out of her mind, really, and we called the doctor again and he looked down her throat and saw the telltale spots. We didn’t know what it was, but he did.

“We took her to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, and they quarantined her. When they told us there was nothing they could do, we didn’t believe them. But it was just a matter of time.” She shakes her head, as if to clear the thought.

I think about how hard it must have been for her, losing a daughter. And I think of my brothers and Maisie. We have a lot of sadness inside us, Mrs. Nielsen and I. I feel sorry for the both of us.

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
,
IN A SOFT SNOWFALL
,
THE THREE OF US WALK
to church. We light candles on the twenty-foot tree to the right of the altar, all the fair-haired Lutheran children and parents and grandparents singing with songbooks open, the reverend preaching a sermon as elemental as a story in a child’s picture book, a lesson about charity and empathy. “People are in dire need,” he tells the congregation. “If you have something to give, give. Rise to your best selves.”

He talks about some families in crisis: hog farmer John Slattery lost his right arm in a threshing accident; they need canned goods and any manpower you can spare while they try to salvage the farm . . . Mrs. Abel, eighty-seven years old, blind now in both eyes and all alone; if you can see it in your heart to spare a few hours a week it would be greatly appreciated . . . a family of seven, the Grotes, in dire straits; the father out of work, four young children and another born prematurely a month ago, now sickly, the mother unable to get out of bed . . .

“How sad,” Mrs. Nielsen murmurs. “Let’s put together a package for that poor family.”

She doesn’t know my history with them. They’re just another distant calamity.

After the service we walk back through quiet streets. The snow has stopped and it’s a clear, cold night; the gas lamps cast circles of light. As the three of us approach the house I see it as if for the first time—the porch light shining, an evergreen wreath on the door, the black iron railing and neatly shoveled walkway. Inside, behind a curtain, a lamp in the living room glows. It’s a pleasant place to return to. A home.

E
VERY OTHER
T
HURSDAY AFTER SUPPER
, M
RS
. N
IELSEN AND
I
JOIN
Mrs. Murphy and six other ladies at a quilting group. We meet in the spacious parlor room of the wealthiest lady in the group, who lives in a grand Victorian on the outskirts of town. I am the only child in a room full of women and am immediately at ease. We work together on one quilt, a pattern and fabric that a member of the group has brought in; as soon as that one is finished, we’ll move to the next. Each quilt takes about four months to finish. This group, I learn, made the quilt on my bed in the pink bedroom. It’s called Irish Wreath, four purple irises with green stems meeting in the middle on a black background. “We’ll make a quilt for you someday, too, Dorothy,” Mrs. Nielsen tells me. She begins to save cuttings from the fabric station in the store; every scrap goes into a steamer trunk with my name on it. We talk about it at dinner: “A lady bought ten and a half yards of a beautiful blue calico, and I saved the extra half yard for you,” she’ll say. I’ve already decided on the pattern: a Double Wedding Ring, a series of interlocking circles made up of small rectangles of fabric.