Fire by Night (18 page)
Julia nearly raced up the stairs. She changed into her traveling suit, fixed her hair in a flattering style, and packed her plain brown dress and everything else into her trunk. She would hail a cab; she would order the driver to come to the boardinghouse and fetch her trunk; she would go to the train station and purchase a ticket to Philadelphia. Her father would probably be horrified when he found out she had traveled without a chaperone—but then again, maybe he would be so happy that she had finally come to her senses, he wouldn’t care.
Outside, the day was bright and clear, the winter sun surprisingly warm, a perfect day to travel. Julia stood in front of the boardinghouse for several minutes, waiting for a carriage. When none drove past she finally decided to walk a few blocks east to one of the main thoroughfares. It was a bustling street with vendors hawking pretzels and fried dough cakes. Uniformed soldiers marched past in tight ranks, their guns and bayonets pointing to the sky. All manner of vehicles clogged the rutted streets, from Conestoga wagons and buckboards to broughams and buggies—everything, it seemed, but a vacant cab. She heard music and followed the sound to find an old Negro man playing his fiddle on a street corner. Passersby tossed coins into his hat. He was crooked and bent with age, his white hair and beard a stark contrast to his dark skin. The tune he played made Julia ache with sorrow. He played as if the fiddle were a fountain that overflowed with memories of all he had endured.
She bent and dropped coins into his hat, then quickly turned away. That’s when she saw them—two little Negro girls, no older than three or four years, silently begging with outstretched arms as thin as kindling wood. Unheeding pedestrians hurried past, and Julia remembered the cab driver’s certainty that she would learn to ignore the contrabands, too.
Julia slowly walked toward the girls, drawn by pity. The smaller child looked up at her with pleading eyes and said, “I’m hungry.” Something inside Julia seemed to break.
She could leave Washington today and return to her elegant life in a warm home with plentiful food, but these two children and dozens of others like them would still be here—shivering, begging, their stomachs as empty every night as hers had been for only one. She would lie down on clean linen sheets in her four-poster bed, leaving suffering soldiers like Private Jackson to die on bare, stained mattresses.
Julia dug two coins from her purse and crouched in front of the girls. “Do you live near here?” she asked.
The older child nodded and pointed vaguely down the street.
“I’ll pay you to show me where you live. I’d like to talk to your mama. Will you take me to your house?”
The child took the coins from Julia and nodded again.
Clutching each other’s hands, the two girls silently led her down a narrow alleyway off the main street to the shantytown where the contrabands lived. It was stuffed beneath a railroad trestle near the river, a warren of shacks made of packing crates, scraps of wood, old barrels, rags, and jagged pieces of metal. As she picked her way through the debris, following her small guides, Julia could barely distinguish the homes and personal belongings from the scattered piles of trash.
The children led her to a nondescript pile of junk where a Negro woman sat with a small baby on her lap, poking at the fire she had built in front of the shanty. She watched apprehensively as Julia approached. Julia felt just as nervous.
“Hello …I’m Julia Hoffman,” she said. A mound of rags behind the woman shifted at the sound of Julia’s voice, and a second woman sat up, clutching another infant. There was a strong resemblance between the two women, and Julia guessed that they were sisters. Neither one looked much older than she was.
“I have some work that needs to be done,” Julia said, “and I was wondering if you would like to have a job …to earn some money?”
The first woman looked at her through narrowed eyes. “What kind of job?”
“I work in an army hospital. I’d like to hire you to scrub laundry. The army will pay you good wages. Have you done that sort of work before?”
“We can wash clothes, sure enough. We used to cook meals, hoe the garden, do all kinds of work.”
“Good. Would you like the job? I could use both of you.”
The women glanced at each other, communicating silently, then the first one said, “Me and Loretta always willing to work. Lord knows we don’t want our girls begging. But who gonna mind these young ones while we work? How these babies gonna eat? Our men working for the army, and ain’t nobody to take care these children all day.”
It took Julia only a moment to decide. “You may bring the children, too. As long as all the laundry gets done, I don’t care if you keep them with you.”
The woman gave a quick, hopeful smile as she scrambled to her feet, shifting the baby from her lap to her shoulder. “This hospital very far? Can we be walking there every day?”
Julia hadn’t thought about transportation. Fairfield Hospital was too far away for the women to walk, and it would be too expensive for them to hire a carriage every day on laundresses’ wages—if they could even find a driver willing to transport Negroes. Yet Julia knew she had to make this idea of hers work. She needed their help, and these women and their children needed hers. As she edged closer to the fire, warming herself, Julia remembered that the hospital used to be a hotel. Surely there were servants’ quarters somewhere in the building. And even if there weren’t, the laundry room was clean, warm, and dry, a much better alternative than a bed of rags beneath a railway trestle. The only obstacle that she could see was Dr. McGrath. Julia decided she would deal with him when the time came.
“Pack all your things and bring them with you,” she said. “I’ll let you live at the hospital.”
The second woman had crawled out of the shanty and risen to her feet, too. She stared at Julia in astonishment. “That true? We ain’t dreaming? You give us a job
and
a place to live?”
“It’s true,” Julia assured her. “The job is yours if you’d like it.”
“I surely would rather work than see my children starve,” the first woman said. Tears shone in her eyes as she hugged one of the little girls to her side.
“What’s your name?” Julia asked.
“I’m Belle and this here’s my sister, Loretta.”
“It’s nice to meet both of you. Listen, I’m going home to change into work clothes. In the meantime, you can pack all your things. I’ll be back in an hour or so with a carriage.”
Lena was already at the hospital when they arrived and had just finished building a fire in the stove. She looked completely overwhelmed by the mountain of work she faced and greatly relieved to see help arriving. Belle and Loretta didn’t waste a minute. They saw right away what needed to be done and began hauling water, sorting laundry, and setting up the wooden tubs. In no time, they had fearlessly attacked the mound of soiled sheets, working so quickly and efficiently that Lena seemed to be standing still in comparison. The two little girls Julia had found begging now ran errands for their mothers, fetching wood, shaving soap into the tubs, tending the babies when they fussed.
Julia watched in amazement as the women bustled around. It was as though they’d been working here for years. She hardly dared to move, knowing she was probably more of a hindrance than a help. But when the two women began to sing while they labored, Julia was so astounded she couldn’t speak.
“My Lord delivered Daniel from the lion’s den, Jonah from the belly of the whale…”
The joyful sound shivered through Julia, bringing tears to her eyes. She had done the same work they were doing all day yesterday, yet the last thing in the world she had felt like doing was singing. But Belle and Loretta were so grateful for what they had—a warm place to stay, a job that would earn a living for themselves and their children—that they couldn’t help bursting into song.
“He delivered the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, then why not every man?”
The work went smoothly all morning, the little girls helping, the babies napping in empty laundry baskets near the stove. But when the three laundresses went outside to hang the sheets out to dry, one of the babies woke up and began crying loudly for his mother. Julia had no experience with small babies. She picked him up as if he were made of glass and jiggled him in her arms, trying to soothe him.
“Shhh. It’s all right. Your mama will be back in a minute. Shhh.”He wailed louder still.
Suddenly the laundry room door burst open and Dr. McGrath filled the doorway. “Why do I hear babies crying?” he thundered.“What is going on out here?” His face was so pale and angrylooking that he might have caught Julia giving aid and comfort to a troop of Rebel soldiers instead of tending a helpless baby.
“He belongs to one of my laundresses,” she said, trying not to let the doctor see her fear. “He’s crying because he wants his lunch.”
“Get that thing out of here! Now!” He pointed to the back door as if the baby were a burning stick of dynamite that she needed to toss outside before it exploded. “This is an Army hospital, not a charity.”
“I will not,” she said bravely. “It’s cold outside. Besides, he has no other place to go while his mother works. Do you want your hospital to have clean sheets or don’t you?”
“Of course I want clean sheets. And kindly lower your voice. There is no need to shout.”
“I’m not the one who is shouting.” She gave the baby her knuckle to chew on, and he quieted for a moment. The doctor massaged his temples, looking visibly relieved.
“Now,” Julia continued, “I believe you made me supervisor of the linen room, Dr. McGrath, and this is how I’ve chosen to run it. If you force my laundresses to quit because they can’t keep their children with them, then I will be forced to quit, as well.”
“Don’t tempt me. … ” he growled. But Julia sensed that he was backing down. She summoned her courage to continue.
“I know how to manage servants, Doctor, and I know from experience that they are most productive when their own needs are adequately met. Since it’s impossible to support a family on what the Army pays them, I’ve told my laundresses they may stay here in the servants’ quarters.”
“You did
what
?”
“You put me in charge of this laundry room, didn’t you?” she asked, sounding braver than she felt. “Look, these are probably the best laundresses the hospital has ever had. Your linen room is running smoothly, and the shelves will soon be filled with plenty of clean sheets. Are you sure you want to fire these hard-working women and let everything go back to the way it was before, just because I’m allowing Belle and Loretta to live in the attic?”
Dr. McGrath glared at her for a long moment, then turned and stomped off. Julia smiled at his retreating back. “I’ll take that as a no,” she said.
When Julia arrived at the hospital one morning a week later, she was surprised to find Dr. McGrath already at work in his office, seated behind his desk as he had been on the first day they’d met. He had his curtains drawn tightly closed, and he sat in the dark, writing with one hand, supporting his head with the other. His face was pale and pinched with pain. Hangover or not, she had no wish to speak with him and was trying to slip quietly past his office without being seen when he called to her.
“Mrs. Hoffman, would you come here, please?”
She slowly backed up, stopping in his office doorway. If he felt half as ill as he looked, he was certainly suffering.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Have you ever had the measles?” he asked without looking up.
His question was so unexpected that for a moment she couldn’t reply. Julia remembered how she and Rosalie had lain sick in bed together, covered with spots. Dr. Lowe had come twice a day to check on them, while their mother had hovered nearby, wringing her hands and ordering compresses and sponge baths. Julia felt her heart wrench with homesickness the way a stomach twists with hunger, and she suddenly longed for her mother, for her room, and even for her prickly sister.
“Yes,” she said, struggling to compose herself. “I had the measles when I was ten years old.”
He dipped his pen into the inkwell and continued to write as he talked. There was a trail of ink spots across his blotter from his trembling hand. “Good. Go see the ward matron on the second floor. What’s her name? Nicholson…?”
“It’s Nichols. Lucy Nichols.”
“Whatever. Go see her. Your services are needed as a nurse.”
Julia’s heart began to race with excitement. She hoped this wasn’t another one of the doctor’s mean tricks. “Um …what about the linen room?” she asked.
He looked up at her, rolling his eyes at her stupidity, then spoke in a slow, condescending tone, as if talking to a simpleton. “Can’t they do without you for a few days, Mrs. Hoffman? Are you completely indispensable?”
“Of course not. My new laundresses are excellent workers.”
“All right, then. Promote one of them to supervisor and get your dainty little rear end upstairs. We’ve got a measles epidemic on our hands.”
Phoebe stood at the ship’s rail beside Ted, gazing at Virginia’s wooded shoreline as they floated downstream. The deck of the river steamer, jam-packed with soldiers, artillery shells, and U.S. Army shipping crates, rose and fell beneath her feet as if it were a living, breathing beast.
