Sister Noon (14 page)

His wife had recently given birth. “A boy,” he said, “a delight to all,” which made her think of the new Putnam grandchild. But his wife was “as little as a fairy,” and the demands of the baby were wearing on her. She wished for a girl to help with the housework.

Then Mr. Finney said he feared he was giving Lizzie the wrong idea. They were not looking for a maid so much as a daughter. “What’s wanted is a girl young enough to come to feel part of the family. Mrs. Finney thought of a miss about the age of five or so.”

Lizzie had noted that parents often had preposterous expectations of children only a bit older than their own. A mother would excuse the behavior of her neighbor’s
three-year-old, having a three-year-old herself and knowing him quite a baby still. But she would expect her neighbor’s seven-year-old to behave with adult patience and charity. What might the parents of a new infant expect of a little girl of five? “I’m afraid a child that young would only make more work for your wife,” she informed Mr. Finney. “I’d recommend a girl of at least ten, perhaps even older.”

“It’s not help Mrs. Finney is after so much as company. She’s an affectionate woman, a little girl would suit her down to the ground. I don’t know how to explain it to you,” Mr. Finney said. He turned his hat in his hands; his head was bent watching this.

The sun had just reached the parlor window. A pale wand of light turned Mr. Finney’s hair the red of an autumn leaf. He looked up, smiling at her nervously, and tiny clouds reflected through the window onto his glasses. “She’s always wanted a child. She was so happy during her confinement. But she seems surprised that the baby can’t be played with, read to. ‘He doesn’t even have eyebrows!’ she says to me. I tell her it only needs a little time and baby grows up and she’s got the child she wants. But she won’t wait.”

“I see,” said Lizzie. In fact she didn’t see, and Mr. Finney knew she didn’t. It all sounded a bit whimsical. New mothers were often prey to disappointments and frivolities. You didn’t adopt a child in a mood.

“Perhaps her heart was set on a girl,” Mr. Finney offered. “Not that she’d ever said.”

Lizzie decided to let the point pass. “Still, you would want someone dependable,” she said. “Sturdy.”

“Ah, you can’t go by that. Mrs. Finney is the littlest bit of a thing herself, but placid as a cow.” Mr. Finney sat back.
“If you could just let me have a look at what you’ve got. I’ll know what I want when I see it.”

As if they were a kennel. And quick as that, Lizzie stopped liking him. It was unfair of her, unfair that good manners, which everyone understood to contain an element of artifice, should cease to be good manners the moment the artifice showed. But there it is.

The older children were taking exercise in the yard between the Brown Ark and the barn. Their voices flowed into the parlor on the sunshine, and Lizzie could distinguish no words, but the emotions carried clearly. She had no illusions about the sort of people they would grow into. She never told herself she might be helping to harbor a future president, or even a poet, much as she would have loved to think so.

But it didn’t matter, because they were children. Lizzie didn’t even like children particularly, but they went to her heart, just the idea of them. “I can’t release a child to you without references,” she said, which was only the truth and had nothing to do with her change of feelings. “And members of the board would want to meet with Mrs. Finney. I’m only the treasurer. Adoptions aren’t really my concern.”

“Look, now.” Mr. Finney’s charming voice took on an edge. The sun brightened suddenly, revealing all the disreputable aspects of the parlor, the tufts of velvet over the mantelpiece, the thready chairs. “I should think you’d want one of your orphans set up in a loving home.”

“That’s exactly what we do want,” Lizzie said.

They stared at each other. “Perhaps I could just have a look at the little ones.” His voice smoothed out. “If you’ve
not got a miss to suit, then there’s no need to trouble either of us further.”

His insistence on seeing their littlest girls was beginning to disturb Lizzie. She had an irrational conviction that he had come for Jenny Ijub. His trousers were old and faded, but in the sunlight now, she might have called them green. If he had come for Jenny, if he was the same man who had tried to grab her at Layman’s German castle, sending him away would not suffice. He must be made to believe that Jenny was no longer with them. “Very well,” she said. “Currently we have only a few girls so young. Several have left us for loving homes only quite recently.”

There followed a number of hasty and awkward arrangements. Lizzie contrived to remove Jenny from her class and settle her in the sewing room with a picture book. The nice thing about Jenny was that she asked for no explanations. Less nice was the sullenness of her submission.

Lizzie then asked Nell to take Mr. Finney to the sheltered yard where the babies took the air. She knew that Nell would discourage him in any way possible. Nell told Lizzie later that he expressed disappointment in their “selection.” Nell’s own opinion was that he wanted a child on whom he and his wife could practice being parents, a child to serve as a buffer between their inexperienced blunders and their own dear baby. “And then discard like a worn sock,” she said. “Having served her purpose.”

The gray mongrel had barked at him. Nell saw this as evidence of a canine shrewdness quite uncanny. She did not expect to see Mr. Finney again. “And a good riddance to the bad,” she concluded.

Lizzie stood at the sewing room window until she saw
him drive off. She called Jenny over. “Have you ever seen that man?” she asked, but already he was too far away, a very commonplace figure, and Jenny said she couldn’t know.

Lizzie lacked Nell’s conviction. Now that the interview was over, it seemed more than possible that she had given in to an unwarranted suspicion. The feeling nagged at her. She wondered whether it was worth trying to track Mr. Finney down, to visit him in his home, interview his little fairy wife. She pictured Mrs. Finney’s disappointment; she saw the two of them holding hands over the kitchen table, tears on Mrs. Finney’s tiny radish-red cheeks.

Perhaps his eyes
had been
blue. But San Francisco was full of blue-eyed men. How was Lizzie supposed to determine the right one? Why was she even looking? She was too distracted to enjoy the lunch. Miss Stevens proposed the Chicago anarchists as a topic, and Lizzie had strong opinions regarding them—the mere thought of handsome August Spies, the hood over his face, his own death only moments away, saying without tremor, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,” was enough to send her heart straight up to her throat—but she found she didn’t like the rules of debate. They transformed a disagreement between two or more people into an etiquette designed to obstruct rather than reveal the truth. The key was to misrepresent your opponent’s position and then attack your own misrepresentation. It was all about strategies and generally invoked just as Lizzie was making her main point.

She went home in a pet and managed not to think
about Mr. Finney again until the next morning, when she was awakened at six by Jack, a stable boy at the Brown Ark, who told her Matron wanted her at once, as Jenny Ijub had vanished in the night. The new dog, the dog who was definitely gray and not white, was also missing.

a
t that hour, the city lay drowning in a cold, dense fog that tasted faintly of salt. It sat like a tongue against Lizzie’s cheeks, licked the hair at her temples into waves. Jack drove Lizzie to the Brown Ark, and she was glad not to be the one driving, she couldn’t see the street at all. She couldn’t even see the mule clearly, only its long ears sticking up, flicking to the left and to the right when other buggies passed. A dozen kidnapped girls could have been bundled by and she wouldn’t have known. The harness broke and delayed them many minutes. The sounds of wheels and hooves continued about them, phantom carriages, audible but invisible. By the time she arrived at the Home, she was rigid from the damp cold and from fear.

It was something of a relief to hear that, among the
staff, Jenny was assumed to have run away. There had been an incident in the night. Nell was not immediately forthcoming, but apparently there had been an upset. Apparently it was not the first, though possibly the loudest.

According to Nell, Jenny was a troubled sleeper, making frequent complaints about the girls in her room. Last night had been once too often. Since Jenny couldn’t manage to sleep nicely with other girls, Nell had told her, she must sleep alone. She was removed to the settee in the cupola room.

As Jenny was taken up the stairs, however, she grew more agitated. She begged to be allowed to return to her bed; she begged not to be left alone in the dark. This was distressing for Nell. She’d not intended the punishment to be a severe one, but there was no going back; it would not do for discipline in general if she was seen to retreat. She had to carry Jenny the final steps.

By now Jenny was hysterical, ungovernable, like an animal, Nell said. She was forced to stand at the door, holding it shut, while Jenny screamed and pulled at the handle and threw herself against it. Fully an hour passed in this manner, an hour at least; Nell had heard the clock. Finally Jenny quieted. Nell had waited, assuring herself the girl was asleep before tiptoeing down the stairs and back to her own bed. She had then spent a sleepless night herself, yet heard nothing more. “It didn’t occur to me she might leave,” she told Lizzie. “I never even thought. Seeing as she’s got nowhere to go.”

Nell was apologetic, but she had given Lizzie her first hopeful moment. Lizzie was afraid to share it, afraid someone would take it away again, show her that such a little girl could not walk so far alone in the dark. She put her
coat and gloves back on, commandeered the mule, and told the staff only that she was going out to look for Jenny. She dismissed Jack; she wanted no witnesses. She drove herself to Octavia Street, stopped at the trees, which she could barely see, in front of the house, which she could not. Fog ran down the eucalyptus leaves and onto her straw hat with the gentle popping sound of rain. She secured the mule and made her way through the gate and up the brick walk. Sure enough, the dog came off the porch to meet her, the white tufts of its whiskers dripping with fog, its gums showing pink, its tongue limp with the pleasure of seeing her. This was a pleasure she fully returned.

Teresa Bell answered the door herself, in a silver dressing gown. She nodded politely and for a moment too long. It was clear she didn’t remember Lizzie’s name. “I’m looking for a little girl,” Lizzie told her. “I’m Miss Hayes?”

“She’s yours? I couldn’t think what to do with her. Another hour I’d have sent for the police.”

Lizzie began to cry. This was the final result of her mother’s impatience with tears, that after a dry-eyed childhood, she was likely to cry at almost anything, and especially at the wrong times, her weeping matched forever to the wrong emotions—joy, relief, exultation. Mrs. Bell pretended not to notice.

“You’ll come in, then.” She gestured vaguely, brilliantly; in Lizzie’s liquid gaze Mrs. Bell’s rings flickered like tiny darting fish. “I thought she was one of Mrs. Pleasant’s. So she said. Butter wouldn’t melt.”

Lizzie wiped her nose, leaving a wet smear on the back of one gloved hand, removed her hat, and let Mrs. Bell lead her into a dark paneled library. A chandelier of rock
crystal dripped from the ceiling, though the light was poor. On the floor by the sofa was a metal bird, a canary with painted feathers and a green hinged beak. It was a music box, turned with a key, and Lizzie guessed the beak would open and shut when it played. The bird’s eyes were inset rather than painted. Obsidian beads, they had the dead, dull depth of taxidermy.

She looked about for Jenny, but there was no one else in the room. She remembered how beautiful she’d thought the house before. Now it seemed cavernous, poorly lit, a place of whispers and echoes. She had never seen a library with so few books.

“Join me in a cordial,” Mrs. Bell suggested. There was a decanter on a table by the door. “To settle your nerves.”

“Where is the little girl?” Lizzie asked.

“Sleeping.”

“Will you take me to her?”

“I had such a time getting her to sleep, I couldn’t bear to wake her just yet. Let’s uncurl here with a glass.”

“Is Mrs. Pleasant at home?”

“The whole house has fled to the country.” She nodded in a reassuring way. “We’re
quite
alone.” She gave the word a disquieting emphasis. Lizzie was not at all sure she wished to be quite alone in the House of Mystery with Teresa Bell, and certainly not
quite
alone.

Teresa Bell was rarely seen outside. She belonged to no church, held no at-homes. Some thought she was frightened of something. Some said Mary Ellen Pleasant allowed her no friends. Some said it was Thomas Bell. Some of the latter said Thomas Bell valued his wife’s innocence so highly that he kept her shut away from the
contamination of society. Others said he could never trust her, she being no better than a whore when they met. Still others thought she had tricked him into marriage and he’d retaliated by going into society without her, as if she didn’t exist, for more than a decade.