Orphan Train (13 page)

“You may choose three different fabrics,” she says. “Let’s see—three yards each?” I nod. “The cloth must be sturdy and inexpensive—that’s the only kind that makes sense for a . . .” She pauses. “A nine-year-old girl.”

Mrs. Byrne leads me over to a section filled with bolts of fabric, directing me to the shelf with the cheaper ones. I choose a blue-and-gray checked cotton, a delicate green print, and a pink paisley. Mrs. Byrne nods at the first two choices and grimaces at the third. “Mercy, not with red hair.” She pulls out a bolt of blue chambray.

“A modest bodice is what I’m thinking, with a minimum of frill. Simple and plain. A gathered skirt. You can wear that pinafore on top when you’re working. Do you have more than one pinafore?”

When I shake my head, she says, “We have plenty of ticking fabric in the sewing room. You can make it from that. Do you have a coat? Or a sweater?”

“The nuns gave me a coat, but it’s too small.”

After the fabric is measured, cut, wrapped in brown paper, and tied with twine, I follow Mrs. Byrne down the street to a women’s clothes shop. She heads straight for the sale rack at the back and finds a mustard-colored wool coat, several sizes too big for me, with shiny black buttons. When I put it on, she frowns. “Well, it’s a good deal,” she says. “And there’s no sense in getting something you’ll outgrow in a month. I think it’s fine.”

I hate the coat. It’s not even very warm. But I’m afraid to object. Luckily, there’s a large selection of sweaters on clearance, and I find a navy blue cable-knit and an off-white V-neck in my size. Mrs. Byrne adds a bulky, too-large corduroy skirt that’s 70 percent off.

That evening, at dinner, I wear my new white sweater and skirt. “What’s that thing around your neck?” Mrs. Byrne says, and I realize that she is talking about my necklace, which is usually hidden by my high-necked dresses. She leans closer to look.

“An Irish cross,” I say.

“It’s very odd-looking. What are those, hands? And why does the heart have a crown?” She sits back in her chair. “That looks sacrilegious to me.”

I tell her the story of how my gram was given this necklace for her First Communion and passed it down to me before I came to America. “The hands clasped together symbolize friendship. The heart is love. And the crown stands for loyalty,” I explain.

She sniffs, refolds the napkin in her lap. “I still think it’s odd. I have half a mind to make you take it off.”

“Come now, Lois,” Mr. Byrne says. “It’s a trinket from home. No harm to it.”

“Perhaps it’s time to put away those old-country things.”

“It’s not bothering anyone, is it?”

I glance over at him, surprised that he’s sticking up for me. He winks at me as if it’s a game.

“It’s bothering me,” she says. “There’s no reason this girl needs to tell the world far and wide that she’s a Catholic.”

Mr. Byrne laughs. “Look at her hair. There’s no denying she’s Irish, is there?”

“So unbecoming in a girl,” Mrs. Byrne says under her breath.

Later Mr. Byrne tells me that his wife doesn’t like Catholics in general, even though she married one. It helps that he never goes to church. “Works out well for the both of us,” he says.

Albans, Minnesota, 1929–1930

When Mrs. Byrne appears in the sewing room one Tuesday afternoon at the
end of October, it��s clear that something is wrong. She looks haggard and stricken. Her cropped dark bob, usually in tight waves against her head, is sticking out all over. Bernice jumps up, but Mrs. Byrne waves her away.

“Girls,” she says, holding her hand to her throat, “girls! I need to tell you something. The stock market crashed today. It’s in free fall. And many lives are . . .” She stops to catch her breath.

“Ma’am, do you want to sit down?” Bernice says.

Mrs. Byrne ignores her. “People lost everything,” she mutters, gripping the back of Mary’s chair. Her eyes roam the room as if she is looking for something to focus on. “If we can’t feed ourselves, we can hardly afford to employ you, now, can we?” Her eyes fill with tears and she backs out of the room, shaking her head.

We hear the front door open and Mrs. Byrne clatter down the steps.

Bernice tells us all to get back to work, but Joan, one of the women at the Singers, stands up abruptly. “I have to get home to my husband. I have to know what’s going on. What use is it to keep working if we won’t be paid?”

“Leave if you must,” Fanny says.

Joan is the only one who leaves, but the rest of us are jittery throughout the afternoon. It’s hard to sew when your hands are shaking.

I
T
’
S HARD TO TELL EXACTLY WHAT
’
S GOING ON
,
BUT AS THE WEEKS
pass we begin to catch glimmers. Mr. Byrne apparently invested quite a bit in the stock market, and the money is gone. The demand for new garments has slowed, and people have taken to mending their own clothes—it’s one place they can easily cut corners.

Mrs. Byrne is even more scattered and absent. We’ve stopped eating dinner together. She takes her food upstairs, leaving a desiccated chicken leg or a bowl of cold brisket in a chunk of brown gelatinous fat on the counter, with strict instructions that I wash my dish when I’m done. Thanksgiving is like any other day. I never celebrated it with my Irish family, so it doesn’t bother me, but the girls mutter under their breath all day long: it’s not Christian, it’s not American to keep them from their families.

Maybe because the alternative is so bleak, I’ve grown to like the sewing room. I look forward to seeing the women every day—kind Fanny, simple-minded Bernice, and quiet Sally and Joan. (All except Mary, who can’t seem to forgive me for being alive.) And I like the work. My fingers are getting strong and quick; a piece that used to take an hour or more I can do in minutes. I used to be afraid of new stitches and techniques, but now welcome each new challenge—pencil-sharp pleats, sequins, delicate lace.

The others can see that I’m improving, and they’ve started giving me more to do. Without ever saying it directly, Fanny has taken over Mary’s job of supervising my work. “Be careful, dear,” she says, running a light finger over my stitches. “Take the time to make them small and even. Remember, somebody will wear this, probably over and over until it’s worn through. A lady wants to feel pretty, no matter how much money she has.”

Ever since I arrived in Minnesota people have been warning me about the extreme cold that’s on the way. I am beginning to feel it. Kinvara is rain soaked much of the year, and Irish winters are cold and wet. New York is gray and slushy and miserable for months. But neither place compares to this. Already we’ve had two big snowstorms. As the weather gets colder, my fingers are so stiff when I’m sewing that I have to stop and rub them so I can keep going. I notice that the other women are wearing fingerless gloves, and when I ask where they came from, they tell me they made them themselves.

I don’t know how to knit. My mam never taught me. But I know I need to get a pair of gloves for my stiff, cold hands.

Several days before Christmas, Mrs. Byrne announces that Christmas Day, Wednesday, will be an unpaid holiday. She and Mr. Byrne will be gone for the day, visiting relatives out of town. She doesn’t ask me to come along. At the end of our workday on Christmas Eve, Fanny slips me a small brown-wrapped parcel. “Open this later,” she whispers. “Tell them you brought it from home.” I put the packet in my pocket and wade through knee-deep snow to the privy, where I open it in the semidarkness, wind slicing through the cracks in the walls and the slit in the door. It’s a pair of fingerless gloves knit from a dense navy blue yarn, and a thick pair of brown wool mittens. When I put on the mittens I find that Fanny lined them with heavy wool and reinforced the top of the thumb and other fingers with extra padding.

As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I’m not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.

B
Y
J
ANUARY
, I
AM LOSING SO MUCH WEIGHT THAT MY NEW DRESSES
, the ones I made myself, swim on my hips. Mr. Byrne comes and goes at odd hours, and I barely see him. We have less and less work. Fanny is teaching me how to knit, and sometimes the other girls bring in work of their own so they won’t go crazy with idleness. The heat is turned off as soon as the workers leave at five. The lights go off at seven. I spend nights on my pallet wide-awake and shivering in the dark, listening to the howling of the seemingly endless storms that rage outside. I wonder about Dutchy—if he’s sleeping in a barn with animals, eating only pig slops. I hope he’s warm.

One day in early February, Mrs. Byrne enters the sewing room silently and unexpectedly. She seems to have stopped grooming. She’s worn the same dress all week, and her bodice is soiled. Her hair is lank and greasy, and she has a sore on her lip.

She asks the Singer girl Sally to step out into the hall, and several minutes later Sally returns to the room with red-rimmed eyes. She picks up her belongings in silence.

A few weeks later Mrs. Byrne comes for Bernice. They go out into the hall, and then Bernice returns and gathers her things.

After that it’s just Fanny and Mary and me.

It’s a windy afternoon in late March when Mrs. Byrne slips into the room and asks for Mary. I feel sorry for Mary then—despite her meanness, despite everything. Slowly she picks up her belongings, puts on her hat and coat. She looks at Fanny and me and nods, and we nod back. “God bless you, child,” Fanny says.

When Mary and Mrs. Byrne leave the room, Fanny and I watch the door, straining to hear the indistinct murmuring in the hall. Fanny says, “Lordy, I’m too old for this.”

A week later, the doorbell rings. Fanny and I look at each other. This is strange. The doorbell never rings.

We hear Mrs. Byrne rustle down the stairs, undo the heavy locks, open the squeaky door. We hear her talking to a man in the hall.

The door to the sewing room opens, and I jump a little. In comes a heavyset man in a black felt hat and a gray suit. He has a black mustache and jowls like a basset hound.

“This the girl?” he asks, pointing a sausagey finger at me.

Mrs. Byrne nods.

The man takes off his hat and sets it on a small table by the door. Then he pulls a pair of eyeglasses out of the breast pocket of his overcoat and puts them on, perched partway down his bulbous nose. He takes a piece of folded paper out of another pocket and opens it with one hand. “Let’s see. Niamh Power.” He pronounces it “Nem.” Peering over his glasses at Mrs. Byrne, he says, “You changed her name to Dorothy?”

“We thought the girl should have an American name.” Mrs. Byrne makes a strangled sound that I interpret as a laugh. “Not legally, of course,” she adds.

“And you did not change her surname.”

“Of course not.”

“You weren’t considering adoption?”

“Mercy, no.”

He looks at me over his glasses, then back at the paper. The clock ticks loudly above the mantelpiece. The man folds the paper and puts it back in his pocket.

“Dorothy, I am Mr. Sorenson. I’m a local agent of the Children’s Aid Society, and as such I oversee the placement of homeless train riders. Oftentimes the placements work out as they should, and everyone is content. But now and then, unfortunately”—he takes his glasses off and slips them back into his breast pocket—“things don’t work out.” He looks at Mrs. Byrne. She has, I notice, a jagged run in her beige stockings, and her eye makeup is smeared. “And we need to procure new accommodations.” He clears his throat. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nod, though I’m not sure I do.

“Good. There’s a couple in Hemingford—well, on a farm outside of that town, actually—who’ve requested a girl about your age. A mother, father, and four children. Wilma and Gerald Grote.”

I turn to Mrs. Byrne. She is gazing off somewhere in the middle distance. Though she’s never been particularly kind to me, her willingness to abandon me comes as a shock. “You don’t want me anymore?”

Mr. Sorenson looks back and forth between us. “It’s a complicated situation.”

As we’re talking, Mrs. Byrne drifts over to the window. She pulls aside the lace curtain and gazes out at the street, at the skim-milk sky.

“I’m sure you have heard this is a difficult time,” Mr. Sorenson continues. “Not only for the Byrnes but for a lot of people. And—well, their business has been affected.”

With a sudden movement, Mrs. Byrne drops the curtain and wheels around. “She eats too much!” she cries. “I have to padlock the refrigerator. It’s never enough!” She puts her palms over her eyes and runs past us, out into the hallway and up the stairs, where she slams the door at the top.

We are silent for a moment, then Fanny says, “That woman ought to be ashamed. The girl is skin and bones.” She adds, “They never even sent her to school.”

Mr. Sorenson clears his throat. “Well,” he says, “perhaps this will be for the best for all concerned.” He fixes on me again. “The Grotes are good country people, from what I hear.”

“Four children?” I say. “Why do they want another?”

“As I understand it—and I could be wrong; I haven’t had the pleasure to meet them yet, this is all hearsay, you understand—but what I have gleaned is that Mrs. Grote is once again with child, and she is looking for a mother’s helper.”

I ponder this. I think of Carmine, of Maisie. Of the twins, sitting at our rickety table on Elizabeth Street waiting patiently for their apple mash. I imagine a white farmhouse with black shutters, a red barn in the back, a post-and-rail fence, chickens in a coop. Anything has to be better than a padlocked refrigerator and a pallet in the hall. “When do they want me?”

“I’m taking you there now.”

Mr. Sorenson says he’ll give me a few minutes to collect my things and goes out to his car. In the hall I pull my brown suitcase from the back of the closet. Fanny stands in the door of the sewing room and watches me pack. I fold up the three dresses I made, one of which, the blue chambray, I haven’t finished, plus my other dress from the Children’s Aid. I add the two new sweaters and the corduroy skirt and the mittens and gloves from Fanny. I’d just as soon leave the ugly mustard coat behind, but Fanny says I’ll regret it if I do, that it’s even colder out there on those farms than it is here in town.