Текст книги "Orphan Train"

Автор книги: Christina Baker Kline

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

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.

LIFE WITH THE NIELSENS IS CALM AND ORDERLY. EACH 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.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 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.

EVERY OTHER THURSDAY AFTER SUPPER, MRS. NIELSEN 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.

Once a month, on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Nielsen and I polish the silver. From a deep drawer in the cabinet in the dining room she takes out a heavy mahogany box that contains the cutlery she was given by her mother as a wedding present—her only inheritance, she tells me. Removing the pieces one by one, she lines them up on tea towels on the table, while I gather two small silver bowls from the living room mantel, four candlesticks and a serving platter from the sideboard, and a hinged box with her name, Viola, in spidery script across the top from her bedroom. We use a heavy, mud-colored paste in a jar, a few small, stiff brushes, water, and lots of rags.

One day, as I am polishing an ornately decorated serving spoon, Mrs. Nielsen points at her clavicle and says, without looking at me, “We could clean that up for you, if you like.”

I touch the chain around my neck, following it with my finger down to the claddagh. Reaching back with both hands, I unfasten the clasp.

“Use the brush. Be gentle,” she says.

“My gram gave this to me,” I tell her.

She looks at me and smiles. “Warm water, too.”

As I work the brush along the chain, it is transformed from a dull gray to the color of tinsel. The claddagh charm, its details obscured by tarnish, becomes three-dimensional again.

“There,” Mrs. Nielsen says when I’ve rinsed and dried the necklace and put it on again, “much better,” and though she doesn’t ask anything about it, I know this is her way of acknowledging that she knows it holds meaning for me.

ONE NIGHT AT DINNER, AFTER I HAVE BEEN LIVING IN THEIR HOUSE for several months, Mr. Nielsen says, “Dorothy, Mrs. Nielsen and I have something to discuss with you.”

I think Mr. Nielsen is going to talk about the trip they’ve been planning to Mount Rushmore, but he looks at his wife, and she smiles at me, and I realize it’s something else, something bigger.

“When you first came to Minnesota, you were given the name Dorothy,” she says. “Are you particularly fond of that name?”

“Not particularly,” I say, unsure where this is going.

“You know how much our Vivian meant to us, don’t you?” Mr. Nielsen says.

I nod.

“Well.” Mr. Nielsen’s hands are flat on the table. “It would mean a lot to us if you would take Vivian’s name. We consider you our daughter—not legally yet, but we are beginning to think of you that way. And we hope that you are beginning to think of us as your parents.”

They look at me expectantly. I don’t know what to think. What I feel for the Nielsens—gratitude, respect, appreciation—isn’t the same as a child’s love for her parents, not quite; though what that love is, I’m not sure I can say. I am glad to be living with this kind couple, whose quiet, self-effacing manner I am coming to understand. I am grateful that they took me in. But I am also aware every day of how different I am from them. They are not my people, and never will be.

I don’t know how I feel, either, about taking their daughter’s name. I don’t know if I can bear the weight of that burden.

“Let’s not pressure her, Hank.” Turning to me, Mrs. Nielsen says, “Take the time you need, and let us know. You have a place in our home, whatever you decide.”

Several days later, in the store stocking shelves in the canned food aisle, I hear a man’s voice I recognize but can’t place. I stack the remaining cans of corn and peas on the shelf in front of me, pick up the empty cardboard box, and stand up slowly, hoping to determine who it is without being seen.

“I got some fine piecework to barter, if you’re amenable,” I hear a man say to Mr. Nielsen, standing behind the counter.

Every day people come into the store with reasons why they can’t pay, asking for credit or offering goods for trade. Every evening, it seems, Mr. Nielsen brings something home from a customer: a dozen eggs, soft Norwegian flatbread called lefse, a long knitted scarf. Mrs. Nielsen rolls her eyes and says, “Mercy,” but she doesn’t complain. I think she’s proud of him—for being kindhearted, and for having the means to be.

“Dorothy?”

I turn around, and with a little shock I realize it’s Mr. Byrne. His auburn hair is lank and unkempt, and his eyes are bloodshot. I wonder if he’s been drinking. What is he doing here, in the general store of a town thirty miles from his own?

“Well, this is a surprise,” he says. “You work here?”

I nod. “The owners—the Nielsens—took me in.”

Despite the February cold, sweat is trickling down Mr. Byrne’s temple. He wipes it away with the back of his hand. “So you happy with them?”

“Yes, sir.” I wonder why he’s acting so odd. “How’s Mrs. Byrne?” I ask, trying to steer the conversation to pleasantries.

He blinks several times. “You haven’t heard.”

“Pardon?”

Shaking his head, he says, “She was not a strong woman, Dorothy. Couldn’t take the humiliation. Couldn’t bear to beg for favors. But what should I have done different? I think about it every day.” His face contorts. “When Fanny left, it was the—”

“Fanny left?” I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am.

“A few weeks after you did. Came in one morning and said her daughter up in Park Rapids wanted her to live with them, and she’d decided to go. We’d lost everyone else, you know, and I think Lois just couldn’t bear the thought . . .” He wipes his hand across his whole face, as if trying to erase his features. “Remember the freak storm that blew through last spring? Late April it was. Well, Lois walked out into it and kept walking. They found her froze to death about four miles from the house.”

I want to feel sympathy for Mr. Byrne. I want to feel something. But I cannot. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I suppose I am sorry—for him, for his tattered life. But I cannot muster any sorrow for Mrs. Byrne. I think of her cold eyes and perpetual scowl, her unwillingness to see me as anything more than a pair of hands, fingers holding a needle and thread. I am not glad she is dead, but I am not sorry she is gone.

At dinner that evening I tell the Nielsens I will take their daughter’s name. And in that moment, my old life ends and a new one begins. Though I find it hard to trust that my good fortune will continue, I am under no illusions about what I’ve left behind. So when, after several years, the Nielsens tell me that they want to adopt me, I readily agree. I will become their daughter, though I never can bring myself to call them Mother and Father—our affiliation feels too formal for that. Even so, from now on it is clear that I belong to them; they are responsible for me and will take care of me.

AS TIME PASSES, MY REAL FAMILY BECOMES HARDER AND HARDER to remember. I have no photographs or letters or even books from that former life, only the Irish cross from my gram. And though I rarely take the claddagh off, as I get older I can’t escape the realization that the only remaining piece of my blood family comes from a woman who pushed her only son and his family out to sea in a boat, knowing full well she’d probably never see them again.

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1935–1939

I am fifteen when Mrs. Nielsen finds a pack of cigarettes in my purse.

It’s clear when I walk into the kitchen that I’ve done something to displease her. She is quieter than usual, with an air of injured aggravation. I wonder if I’m imagining it; I try to remember if I said or did anything to upset her before I left for school. The pack of cigarettes, which my friend Judy Smith’s boyfriend bought for her at the Esso station outside of town, and which she passed along to me, doesn’t even register in my mind.

After Mr. Nielsen comes in and we sit down to supper, Mrs. Nielsen slides the pack of Lucky Strikes toward me across the table. “I was looking for my green gloves and thought you might have borrowed them,” she says. “I found this instead.”

I look at her, then at Mr. Nielsen, who lifts his fork and knife and begins cutting his pork chop into small pieces.

“I only smoked one, to try it,” I say, though they can clearly see that the pack is half empty.

“Where’d you get it?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.

I am tempted to tell them it was Judy’s boyfriend, Douglas, but realize it will only be worse to drag other people in. “It was—an experiment. I didn’t like it. They made me cough.”

She raises her eyebrows at Mr. Nielsen, and I can tell they’ve already decided on a punishment. The only thing they can really take away is my weekly Sunday-afternoon trip to the picture show with Judy, so for the next two weeks I stay home instead. And endure their silent reprobation.

After this, I decide that the cost of upsetting them is too much. I don’t climb out my bedroom window and down the drainpipe like Judy; I go to school and work in the store and help with dinner and do my homework and go to bed. I go out with boys now and then, always on a double date or in groups. One boy in particular, Ronnie King, is sweet on me and gives me a promise ring. But I am so worried I might do something to disappoint the Nielsens that I avoid any situation that might lead to impropriety. Once, after a date, Ronnie tries to kiss me good night. His lips brush mine and I pull back quickly. Soon after that I give back his ring.

I never lose the fear that any day Mr. Sorenson could be on the doorstep, telling me that the Nielsens have decided I’m too expensive, too much trouble, or merely a disappointment, and they’ve decided to let me go. In my nightmares I am alone on a train, heading into the wilderness. Or in a maze of hay bales. Or walking the streets of a big city, gazing at lights in every window, seeing the families inside, none of them mine.

ONE DAY I OVERHEAR A MAN AT THE COUNTER TALKING TO MRS. Nielsen. “My wife sent me in here to get some things for a basket our church is putting together for a boy who came on that orphan train,” he says. “Remember those? Used to come through a while ago with all those homeless waifs? I went to the Grange Hall in Albans once to see ’em. Pitiful lot. Anyhow, this kid had one misfortune after another, got beat up pretty bad by the farmer who took him in, and now the elderly lady he went to after that has died, and he’s on his own again. It’s a scandal, sending those poor kids out here on their own, expecting folks to take care of ’em—as if we don’t have our own burdens.”

“Ummhmm,” Mrs. Nielsen says noncommittally.

I move closer, wondering if he might be talking about Dutchy. But then I realize Dutchy is eighteen now. Old enough to be on his own.

I AM NEARLY SIXTEEN WHEN I LOOK AROUND THE STORE AND REALIZE that it has barely changed in all the time I’ve been here. And there are things we can do to make it nicer. A lot of things. First, after consulting Mr. Nielsen, I move the magazines to the front, near the cash register. The shampoos and lotions and balms that used to be at the back of the store I shift to shelves near the pharmacy, so that people filling prescriptions can also buy plasters and ointments. The women’s section is woefully understocked—understandable, given Mr. Nielsen’s general ignorance and Mrs. Nielsen’s lack of interest (she does wear an occasional coat of lipstick, though it always seems to have been randomly chosen and hurriedly applied). Remembering the long discussions about stockings and garters and makeup rituals at Mrs. Murphy’s, I suggest that we increase and expand this section, purchasing, for example, a hosiery carousel with seamed and unseamed stockings from one of the vendors, and advertise it in the paper. The Nielsens are skeptical, but in the first week we go through our entire stock. The following week Mr. Nielsen doubles the order.

Recalling what Fanny said about ladies wanting to feel pretty even when they don’t have much money, I convince Mr. Nielsen to order small inexpensive items, sparkling costume jewelry and gloves made of cotton velvet, Bakelite wrist bangles and colorful printed scarves. There are several girls I watch avidly at school, a grade or two above me, whose well-to-do parents take them to the Twin Cities to buy clothes. I notice what they wear and what they eat, what music they listen to, the cars they dream about, and the movie stars they follow. And like a magpie I bring these scraps and twigs back to the store. One of these girls will wear a new color or style of belt or a button-plate hat tilted to one side, and that afternoon I’ll pore through our vendors’ catalogs to find similar designs. I choose mannequins out of a catalog that look like these girls, with pencil-thin eyebrows and rosebud lips and soft, wavy hairstyles, and dress them in the latest styles and colors. I find out the perfumes they favor, like Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, and we stock those as well as standard ladies’ favorites such as Joy by Jean Patou and Vol de Nuit by Guerlain.

As business grows, we push the shelves closer together, erect special displays at the ends of the aisles, crowd the lotions. When the shop next door, a jeweler’s called Rich’s, goes out of business, I convince Mr. Nielsen to remodel and expand. Inventory will be in the basement instead of in the back, and the store will be organized into departments.

We keep prices low, and lower them even more with sales every week and coupons in the paper. We institute a layaway plan so people can buy more expensive items in installments. And we put in a soda fountain as a place people can linger. Before long the store is thriving. It seems as though we are the only business doing well in this terrible economy.

“DID YOU KNOW YOUR EYES ARE YOUR BEST FEATURE?” TOM PRICE tells me in math class senior year, leaning across my desk to look at them, first one and then the other. “Brown, green, even a little gold in there. I’ve never seen so many colors in a pair of eyes.” I squirm under his gaze, but when I get home that afternoon, I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and stare at my eyes for a long time.

My hair isn’t as brassy as it used to be. Over the years it has turned a deep russet, the color of dead leaves. I’ve had it cut in the fashionable style—fashionable for our town, at least—right above my shoulders. And when I begin to wear makeup, I have a revelation. I’ve viewed my life until now as a series of unrelated adaptations, from Irish Niamh to American Dorothy to the reincarnated Vivian. Each identity has been projected onto me and fits oddly at first, like a pair of shoes you have to break in before they’re comfortable. But with red lipstick I can fashion a whole new—and temporary—persona. I can determine my own next incarnation.

I attend the homecoming dance with Tom. He shows up at the door with a wrist corsage, a fat white carnation and two tiny roses; I’ve sewn my own dress, a pink chiffon version of one Ginger Rogers wore in Swing Time, and Mrs. Nielsen loans me her pearl necklace and matching earrings. Tom is affable and good-natured right up until the moment the whiskey he’s tippling from a flask in the pocket of his father’s too-big suit coat makes him drunk. Then he gets into a scuffle with another senior on the dance floor and manages to get himself, and me, ejected from the dance.

The next Monday, my twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Fry, takes me aside after class. “Why are you wasting time with a boy like that?” she scolds. She urges me to apply to colleges out of state—Smith College in Massachusetts, for one, her alma mater. “You’ll have a bigger life,” she says. “Don’t you want that, Vivian?” But though I’m flattered by her interest, I know I’ll never go that far. I can’t leave the Nielsens, who’ve come to depend on me for so much. Besides, Tom Price notwithstanding, the life I’m living is big enough for me.

AS SOON AS I GRADUATE, I BEGIN TO MANAGE THE STORE. I FIND that I am suited to the task, and that I enjoy it. (I’m taking a class in accounting and business administration at St. Olaf College, but my classes meet in the evenings.) I hire the workers—nine in all, now—and order much of the merchandise. At night, with Mr. Nielsen, I go over the ledgers. Together we manage employees’ problems, placate customers, massage vendors. I’m constantly angling for the best price, the most attractive bundle of goods, the newest option. Nielsen’s is the first place in the county to carry upright electric vacuum cleaners, blenders, freeze-dried coffee. We’ve never been busier.

Girls from my graduating class come into the store brandishing solitaire diamonds like Legion of Honor medals, as if they’ve accomplished something significant—which I guess they think they have, though all I can see is a future of washing some man’s clothes stretching ahead of them. I want nothing to do with marriage. Mrs. Nielsen agrees. “You’re young. There’ll be time for that,” she says.