The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Mother Joe said. “Remember, patience is a virtue, Miss Lange.”

  At the end of the hall, Mother Joe stopped at an ancient-looking door with rusty hinges and an iron latch. She pulled her ring of keys out from under her scapular, unlocked the door, and led Pia into a passageway with a rock floor and hulking archways. Closed doors lined the walls, each with a square hole in the center. A cavelike odor of mold and wet stone filled the space, and cobwebs dangled from the uneven ceiling. It looked like an old part of the building, one that hadn’t been used in ages.

  “What is this place?” Pia said, her voice trembling.

  “We use it for quarantines and isolations. Over the years we’ve had outbreaks of typhoid, tuberculosis, yellow fever, polio, numerous cases of insanity. And more recently, of course, the purple death.”

  Nausea stirred in Pia’s stomach. “You keep children down here?” she said.

  “If the need arises,” Mother Joe said.

  Pia wrapped her arms around herself, goose bumps prickling on her skin. Being ill was bad enough; being kept in this cold, eerie chamber on top of that had to be torture. How many poor souls had suffered and died in this awful place? And why had she been brought down there? To take care of a sick child being kept in one of the rooms?

  At the end of the hall Mother Joe stopped in front of a black iron door. It looked like the entrance to hell. “You’ll be staying in here until you’ve learned your lesson.”

  Fear and panic clutched Pia’s stomach. She thought about turning and running, but where would she go? Back upstairs? To her ward? To the playground? There was no way out, no escape. If she tried to run and got caught again, her punishment would only be worse.

  “For how long?” she said.

  “Until it’s long enough.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t try to argue with me, Miss Lange, or your stay will only get lengthier. We have an agreement, remember? Once I feel it’s safe for you to leave St. Vincent’s, I’ll arrange it. But first, you must pay the price for your sins.”

  Pia shivered, her breath growing shallow and fast. “Yes, Mother Joe.”

  Mother Joe nodded once, then searched for the right key on her ring. When she found the one she was looking for, she unlocked the door and pulled it open, the hinges screeching like a wounded cat. An iron bed with a straw mattress sat against the back wall of the stone room, its legs bolted to the floor.

  Mother Joe motioned her inside.

  Pia edged forward, her legs like water. The musty space was no bigger than her parents’ old bedroom, with crumbling walls and a tiny, recessed window near the sagging ceiling. She’d never seen a dungeon but imagined they looked and felt like this, the sour air thick with the memories of human suffering, the walls stained with black mold and something that looked like clots of blood. How many children had been locked in this room? How many had died? She turned to look at Mother Joe, praying this was only a threat, or a warning.

  “Please, Mother Joe,” she said. “You don’t need to leave me here. I promise I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “I’ll send down your meals,” Mother Joe said. “And you can use the bucket to relieve yourself. I strongly suggest you use this time to pray, Miss Lange, to ask God for forgiveness for your sins and to help you be a better Christian.”

  Pia’s mouth went dry as dust. She tried to think of something to say, but words escaped her. Her tongue felt like stone.

  Mother Joe fixed critical eyes on her for a long moment, then left the room and slammed the door behind her, the dull clang of iron echoing in the empty passageway. Pia stared at the door, frozen and in shock. The key rattled and turned in the lock. Then Mother Joe’s footsteps banged along the stone corridor, went through another door, and disappeared. Something about the sounds—the heavy clank of iron, the clack of shoes on cold stone, the silence that followed—reminded Pia that if anyone found out about the things she’d felt and the things she’d done, she’d spend the rest of her life in a place like this, either a prison or an insane asylum. Maybe she deserved to be locked up. Being in this cramped, cold room, she imagined how Ollie and Max must have felt in the dark cubby, frightened and confused, wondering where the people who loved them had gone, why no one had come to save them. She lay down on the bed and curled into a ball on the moldy mattress. A flood of fearful tears came first, then crushing guilt and grief. She closed her eyes and tried to remind herself that Mother Joe had agreed to let her go. Then she could begin searching for her brothers in earnest. And she wouldn’t stop until she learned the truth. She owed them that at least.

  Hopefully Mother Joe wouldn’t forget she was down there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BERNICE

  December 1918

  Watching the city slowly come back to life from the third-floor window of her new residence on Philadelphia’s West Side, Bernice squinted at the winter sun peeking over the row houses across the way, long pink rays stretching over snowy rooftops and black water towers. According to the papers, over 47,000 Philadelphians had contracted the flu and over 12,000 had died during the first four weeks after the Liberty Loan parade. By the second week in November, deaths from influenza and pneumonia were a quarter of what they had been the prior week and—against the wishes of the State Health Department—churches, schools, vaudeville houses, and saloons began to reopen. However, the end of the war caused a resurgence of the flu due to Armistice Day celebrations and the release of soldiers, so the Committee of the American Public Health Association encouraged shops and factories to stagger their opening and closing hours, and advised people to walk to work when possible instead of using public transportation to avoid overcrowding. Streetcars, doctors warned, were “seed beds” for the flu.

  Now, it seemed, many Philadelphians had taken the message to heart. On the short stretch of slush-covered sidewalk below Bernice’s room, men in long coats and black hats hurried to their jobs with newspapers and lunch pails under their arms, some still wearing masks. A beggar woman in a ratty dress stood on the corner, holding out a dirty hand. The men ignored her, giving her a wide berth.

  Astonished that the world could return to normal after everything that had happened, Bernice knew that, for her, nothing would ever be the same. Her beloved husband and son were gone, never to return, along with the naïve part of her that had believed in hope and happily ever after. For reasons she’d never understand, God had taken everything good and precious from her. Some days she still felt paralyzed by her loss, her chest filled with the sinking weight of the absence of her child. She didn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore, and wondered if she might shatter beneath the heavy burden of grief. Not one minute passed when she wasn’t aware Wallis was gone. But the twins gave her a reason to wake up every day, and she reminded herself that from now on, if she wanted life to turn out a certain way, she needed to be the one who made it come about. All the prayers and begging in the world wouldn’t get you what you wanted or deserved, no matter how good a Christian you tried to be.

  She turned and looked at the boys, asleep side by side on her bed. With regular nursing and more solid food, their cheeks had begun to fill out and a rosy glow had returned to their skin. They settled down easier at bedtime and became more content with every passing day. She had named them Owen and Mason—Owen after her late father, and Mason because she liked the sound of it. They were good names, strong and solid and true, like real American names should be. And even though it was still hard to tell the twins apart sometimes, she grew more and more fond of them as time went on.

  Their new home consisted of only one room, with just enough space for a dresser, bed, and chair. But it was far enough away from the Fifth Ward that no one would recognize her or the babies. And that was all that mattered. When she saved enough money, they would move to a bigger place, but for now it was perfect. She couldn’t believe her luck when she found it—the older couple had been putting up the Room for Rent sign on the bui
lding’s front door just as she was walking by, and it helped that they were immediately smitten with the twins. When she told Mr. and Mrs. Patterson she was a war widow and a nurse who was trying to start over, they readily agreed to give her the room without a deposit. Not only that, but they offered to watch the boys so she could go back to work. It seemed too good to be true. So far, everything was working out in her favor, which was further proof that taking the twins had been the right thing to do. It helped, too, that the Red Cross had asked “true American” women to open their homes to the many unfortunates orphaned by the epidemic. Because she certainly was a true American.

  If only she could stop thinking about abandoning Wallis. The guilt of leaving him felt like a boulder in her chest, making it hard to sleep and breathe and eat. By now someone had seen the two ribbons on her old apartment door—white for Wallis and black for herself. By now they had found him and the dead nurse and taken them to the morgue. She’d left ribbons on the Langes’ door too—four of them, black for Mrs. Lange and white for Pia and the twins. No one would suspect that the Lange children were alive unless Pia had returned and found the boys missing. Even then, there was nothing Pia could do about it, nor any way she could figure out who took her brothers. Bernice had never spoken two words to the girl. Not to mention that during and after the chaos and commotion caused by the flu, with so many deaths happening so quickly and new cases still being reported, no one would have time to look for two small boys, anyway.

  Still, she had nightmares about what she’d done—dragging the nurse’s corpse into her bedroom and putting her in the bed she’d shared with her late husband, struggling to put one of her own nightdresses over the nurse’s head. She could still see the woman’s blood-clotted nose and twisted mouth, her blue face and staring eyes rimmed with blood. She could still picture Wallis lying motionless and cold beside her, a woman who was not his mother. Did he know his real mother had deserted him and left him alone with a stranger? Would he and the nurse be buried together as mother and son? The thought was almost more than she could bear.

  She pushed the image away and wiped her eyes. She had done what was necessary, to save the twins and to save herself. The nurse would have died from the flu, anyway. A little rat poison hadn’t made a difference one way or the other. And Wallis would be reunited with his real mother in heaven someday. That was all that mattered, not where his body lay. Right now she needed to take Owen and Mason over to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Patterson. It was time to put on the nurse’s uniform and go to work.

  * * *

  In the middle- and upper-class neighborhoods of northern Philadelphia, Bernice’s plan to collect donations for the city’s orphanages had turned out to be more profitable than she’d hoped. Perhaps surviving the epidemic had made those left behind more willing to help the less fortunate, or maybe her story about the orphanages and asylums being overcrowded with children who had lost parents during the flu tugged at their heartstrings. Whatever the reason, people’s generosity, even if they could spare only a few coins, felt like more proof that taking the twins had been the right thing to do. Between that and the nurse uniform, she felt practically invincible.

  Naturally there were times when the sight of her outfit filled people with fear and they told her to go away. But she understood they were scared of the flu, not her. More often than not, people seemed pleased and grateful to see her. Sometimes they asked her to come inside for tea and biscuits, or to check in on a sick loved one, more than a few with the flu or pneumonia. At first, she was reluctant to give medical aid, but once she realized those visits resulted in larger donations, she readily agreed to check for fevers, wipe brows, and recommend elderberry or peppermint tea for sore throats and stomachaches. In some cases, she dispensed drops of laudanum from the bottles she’d found in the dead nurse’s bag, for earaches, the vapors, gangrene, measles, syphilis, epilepsy, and insomnia. On days when grief was the only thing she could feel, she prayed to God she’d catch a deadly illness so she could be with her son again. She loved Owen and Mason, but not like she loved Wallis. Something was missing that she couldn’t quite put her finger on when it came to them, like a disconnect of the natural bond mothers felt so deeply for their children, or the savage maternal instinct that would have made her petrified of dying and leaving them behind. She wasn’t willing to die for them, like she was for Wallis. She tried to feel the same way about the boys, wanted to feel it more than anything, but it couldn’t be forced. If something happened to her, the twins would be fine with Mr. and Mrs. Patterson.

  And after everything she’d been through and everything she’d lost, she had no remorse about using the donations to pay rent and put food on the table for Owen and Mason, especially money from those who were not native born. The number of immigrants living in big houses and nice neighborhoods both surprised and angered her. They had stolen jobs from real Americans and didn’t deserve to be living the American dream. And according to the papers, the poorer sections of the city had been hardest hit by the epidemic, so it seemed only fair that the rich, no matter where they had been born, should help the poor. She just had to keep knocking on doors.

  While canvassing a new neighborhood ten blocks south of the one she’d visited the previous day, she turned off the main thoroughfare and made her way past a barbershop and pool hall, then hurried along the sidewalk toward the residential area two blocks over. Feeling strong and enjoying the warmth of the sun in the winter sky, she couldn’t help thinking about everything she wanted to buy the twins for Christmas: new clothes and shoes, wooden blocks, and Teddy bears. And if things kept going the way they were, they’d be able to move into a larger apartment as soon as one opened up in the building. Moving to another city so no one could find them had crossed her mind, but it’d be nearly impossible to find someone else to take care of Owen and Mason, especially for free. Right now she needed Mr. and Mrs. Patterson’s help, at least until the twins were old enough to go to school. Besides, Philadelphia was her home. She belonged there more than most.

  As she hurried past a recessed stairwell in front of a brick workshop, a flash of movement caught her eye. She stopped and looked over the iron railing, down the stone steps. A boy in a worn jacket and ripped pants sat at the bottom of the stairs, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked to be about seven years old, with a headful of greasy dark hair and dirty hands. It’s just another homeless immigrant, she thought. The city was full of them. She started walking again, then had an idea. She turned around and went to the top of the stairwell.

  “What are you doing down there?” she called to the boy. “Are you lost?”

  The boy stood and spun around to look up at her. Anxiety furrowed his dirt-smudged brow.

  She started down the steps. “Do you speak English?”

  He moved backward, nodding. “Some.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He frowned.

  She stopped halfway down the stairwell and pointed at him. “Your name?”

  “Nelek,” he said.

  “Are you hungry, Nelek?” Using her hands, she pretended to eat.

  He nodded again, harder this time, a hollow desperation widening his eyes.

  She motioned for him to come up the stairs. “Follow me, then,” she said. “I’ll take you someplace safe, for a hot meal and a fresh change of clothes.”

  He shook his head, confused.

  She smiled to prove she meant no harm. “It’s all right. You’re not in trouble. I’m going to help you.” She waved him toward her. “I can get you food.”

  After a long hesitation, he finally followed her up the steps.

  They walked for over thirty minutes, until she stopped in front of a brick building with row after row of curtainless windows. She’d noticed the building a while ago, during one of her donation outings, and she was relieved she’d remembered how to get there. To her surprise, Nelek had followed her the entire way without stopping or complaining. A painted sign above the double doors read: St. Jos
eph’s Orphan Asylum.

  The first time she’d seen the building, the horrible stories her brother had told about orphanages had come flooding back, and she crossed to the other side of the road. Now she couldn’t believe she was going inside. Pushing away her fears, she took the steps up to the porch and smiled back at the boy. Suddenly, she froze, certain she couldn’t follow through with her plan. Then she reminded herself that the city’s problems were a direct result of too many immigrants; the overcrowded tenements filled with foreigners had contributed to the intensity of the flu epidemic—and ultimately the death of her son. She owed it to Wallis to do what she could to keep things from getting any worse.

  Nelek stopped at the bottom of the steps and gazed warily up at the sign, his brows knitted.

  “Come,” she said, waving him up on the porch. “They will feed you here.” She opened the door and waited for him, trembling with fear. What if the nuns could tell she wasn’t a nurse? What if they called the police or tried to keep her there? What if they turned Nelek away? Maybe she should have taken him to an almshouse or an asylum instead. “It’s all right. No one is going to hurt you.” She wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself or Nelek.

  He put his hands in his pockets and scuffed a holey shoe against the sidewalk, then finally clambered up the steps. They went through the entrance into a short hall lined with straight-backed chairs opposite a closed door. The musty smell of old wood filled the air, along with a powdery fragrance similar to lavender or talc, but tinged with the hint of something sour, like sweat or rotten fruit. At the end of the hall, a nun sat behind a desk. She looked up when they entered.

  “May I help you?” the nun said.

  Bernice cleared her throat and approached the desk on wobbly legs. She couldn’t help but imagine starving children locked in back rooms, their skin thin and white, their desperate eyes sunken in their shriveled faces. An image of the nun forcing her to stay there with Nelek flashed in her mind and she almost turned and ran. Then she gritted her teeth, glanced down at her nurse uniform, and reminded herself why she was there. Except she had no idea what the procedure was for dropping off a child at an orphanage, or if they accepted immigrants. Maybe they’d lock her up for even trying.