“But I need the crutches to walk,” I said politely.
Dr. Pynchon darted at me and slapped my face as if she were swatting a fly. “Sit down and take off your shoes and stockings.”
I sucked in a breath of surprise and pain, but did not cry. Everyone at the Home knew that tears fueled her anger.
“From now on, you’ll do as Mr. Ogilvie says,” Dr. Pynchon went on, “and make the Boston Home proud. If you don’t, I won’t have you back. We have a long connection with the good people of the New England Betterment Council.”
My face burned as I bent to untie my shoes and pull off my high black stockings.
Mr. Ogilvie studied my thin, pale left leg as if it were a lamb chop in the butcher’s window. Then he stood and opened his camera case, extending the camera’s accordion folds. The round headlight-like lens made it look like a steam engine. He adjusted the dials and peered into it. The clack of the shutter made me jump.
“Beautiful,” he said. “But you’ll have to braid your hair so you look younger.”
I touched my hair, pulled back in the tight bun required by Dr. Pynchon.
She handed me a wrinkled flour-sack dress printed with tiny blue flowers. “Change in my office,” she said. “Leave your uniform there. You may wear your stockings and shoes.” Biting back questions, I took the dress and went into her office.
When I came back to the parlor, Dr. Pynchon snatched one of my crutches and I almost fell. “Mr. Ogilvie will only allow you to keep one crutch,” she said. “Now pick up your bag.” She pointed to a small carpetbag. “I packed your essentials. Enough for the six weeks you’ll be traveling with the Ogilvies.”
There’s more than one of them? I thought.
“Did you pack my book?” I was halfway through Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare for the third time. Only books approved by the Home’s Board of Visitors were allowed.
“Oh, you’ll be much too busy for books,” Mr. Ogilvie said. His high-pitched voice was as annoying as squeaking chalk. “Jimmy, a friend of yours, is coming too. You can talk to him.”
I knew one boy named Jimmy at the Home, but I couldn’t imagine any situation where talking to him would be a substitute for reading.
One last hope. “Has my father given me permission to travel for six weeks?”
Dr. Pynchon sniffed. “Not your father. Your sister, Julia.” She pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her skirt pocket and waved it at me. “See?” A typewritten letter. Julia’s signature. Judas. Her betrayal swelled inside me. How could she promise to bring me home, the one thing I’ve wanted for five years, and instead deliver me to this?
“There’s no need for you to read it.” Dr. Pynchon put the letter back in her pocket. “It says that your sister and father are traveling in Europe until the end of the summer, and they agree with me that you should spend six weeks doing educational work for the New England Betterment Council.”
“What kind of educational work?” I asked.
Mr. Ogilvie and Dr. Pynchon exchanged a glance, and he touched my shoulder with a long finger. “Come along,” he said, and picked up the carpet bag. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
I struggled with one crutch but managed to keep up with him, out of the house and down the steps to the driveway. He helped me into the backseat of his black Buick touring car.
“This is Jimmy, your epileptic ‘brother.’” Mr. Ogilvie nodded at the boy sitting in the passenger seat, knees drawn up. “He’ll keep his name in the show.” He wedged the carpet bag under my feet. “But you’re not highfalutin Rowan from New York City anymore.” He paused. “From now on, you’re Ruthie, the cripple.”
And for five weeks and three days that’s who I’ve been.
It’s too dark to read now. I close my book and whisper a vow: “Tomorrow will be different.”
Chapter 7
In the first show today, I catch the baby. Someone in the back of the tent applauds. Jimmy raises his eyebrows at me. I want to twirl around, shouting, “Look, I did it!” I imagine telling Mr. Ogilvie. You told me to be myself.
Mr. Ogilvie doesn’t notice. He says the same ugly words, “unfit to care for a baby,” all day, in all four shows. But in each one, I prove him wrong and catch Polly. After the first show, no one in the audience applauds, but no one yells at me either.
“You caught the baby.” Dorchy sounds interested, not accusing, when she comes over to the stage after the last show. “The Ogress caught me clapping for you.”
She clapped for me. I lean down and whisper, “Who’s the Ogress?”
“Aunt Fan Ogilvie, of course,” Dorchy says, “and he’s the Ogre. I believe in calling people by their true names.” She gives me a sizing-up look. “You’re in trouble now. She saw you do it.”
“I don’t care.” I tighten my grip on the crutch and glare at her. “It was the right thing to do.”
“I’m in trouble too.” Her grin lights up her whole face. “I clapped.”
As the audience leaves with Aunt Fan, Mr. Ogilvie comes onstage and calls Dorchy over. We actors gather round; this time we’re the audience.
He grabs Dorchy’s arm above the elbow. “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” he shouts. “I know what you’re up to, you succubus.”
I’ve never heard that word before. It sounds horrible.
“You’re the instigator,” Mr. Ogilvie rages on. “Taking advantage of a poor cripple.” He shakes Dorchy’s arm. Her face is blank, except for those blazing green eyes. “Look at Ruthie!” His voice rises, and he yanks Dorchy around so she’s facing me. “Not one defiant bone in her poor little body.”
Minnie grabs my hand, but I shake free.
Mr. Ogilvie pulls Dorchy’s arm up behind her. She squirms and tries to get away, giving me a furious look.
I find my voice. “She didn’t tell me to do it.” The words trickle out, weak and useless. Unheard.
“I should send you back to the orphanage for this,” Mr. Ogilvie says to Dorchy. “You have undermined the message of the Unfit Family show. I cannot allow that.”
“I undermined your message,” I shout, “not Dorchy.”
He drops her arm and stares at me.
The sound of my voice gives me courage. “It was my idea to catch the baby, not hers. I wish I’d done it sooner.”
Dorchy smiles her approval.
Mr. Ogilvie walks off the stage and out of the tent.
Whatever happens now, at least I told the truth. I like the way my voice cut across his anger and filled the stage. I take a deep breath of the hot, dusty air, sucking in the last echoes of my words.
As I leave the stage, Dorchy walks over to me. Her curly black hair is pulled back with a red hair ribbon. She’s wearing gold earrings with her usual uniform. A purple bruise blooms over her left eye.
“This is your lucky day.” Her green eyes sparkle as she rubs her arm where Mr. Ogilvie’s fingers left red marks. “We’re going out.”
“Out where?” How did she get that black eye?
“There’s more to the Exposition than this tent, you know.” She puts her hand on my arm. “We’re going out on the midway, Ruthie!”
“Don’t call me that,” I say. “My name is Rowan.”
“Come on, don’t stand there. We have to go now.”
I touch the coins in my dress pocket, two nickels, two pennies, and dime. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” Dorchy’s eyes flash. “You’ve got moxie. I like that. Besides I need to talk to you.” She looks ready to drag me out of the tent. “Mrs. Kohler, your babysitter over there, won’t notice. She’s as blind as a one-eyed cat.”
I don’t know what it means to have moxie, but I like the admiring look in her eyes when she says it. “What about the ‘Ogres’?”
“Don’t worry about them. He’s taking her to the dentist. It’s an emergency.”
“All right. But I have to change and tell Gar.”
“I’ll be outside.”
I tell Gar and go behind the curtain to change into my offstage uniform. I unbraid my hair and brush it hard. Curls spring out around my head, and a spark of excitement, damped down for so long, flickers inside me.
But as I leave the tent, choosing a moment when Mrs. Kohler is talking to Minnie, Gar says, “Remember, be careful what you tell her.”
Dorchy the spy or Dorchy the friend? I’ve made my decision.
“Turn your apron inside out like mine,” Dorchy says. “I don’t care to be a walking advertisement for the Council.” I reverse my apron, and we head off down a wide gravel path. Instantly my senses are flooded—popcorn, fried chicken, shouts, and the distant throb of a brass band. Red, white, and blue bunting flutters from side-by-side Republican and Democratic Party booths.
Two women in white straw hats trot by, their white lace-up shoes kicking up swirls of dust. A wave of dance music washes out of a big pavilion. We’re swept along in a river of people, more than I’ve seen in one place in five years.
It’s too much. I stop moving forward. I have to get back to the tent. People flow around me. Dorchy keeps going. A man bumps into me and shouts, “Watch where you’re going!” I’m not going anywhere. I can’t move.
Dorchy comes back to see what’s wrong. I whisper, “I want to go back.”
She pulls a cigarette and a long match out of her pocket. “Come on, buck up. Where’s that spitfire who broke the Ogres’ rule and caught the baby doll?”
The fierce ache in my throat expands. I can’t speak. Five years ago, when I was lying paralyzed in my hospital bed, Dr. Friedlander told me to never define myself by what I can’t do. But that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Dorchy strikes the match on the sole of her shoe. She lights her cigarette and gestures at the people shoving past us. “Don’t mind them. They’re rubes. We’re carnies.” She blows a smoke ring. “Remember that.”
When I find my voice, it comes out as a squeak. “What are rubes and carnies?”
“Don’t you know anything?” She blows a smoke ring. “Rubes are ignoramuses; carnies know everything. Rubes come to the fair with their eyes starry and their pockets full; carnies take them for all they’re worth.”
“That sounds…illegal.” The word makes me wince. I sound like Julia.
“Come on, let’s walk,” Dorchy says. “Carnies run the concessions and games and sideshows. We take the rubes’ hard-earned money. But they ask for it.” She stops to point at a man in a booth selling tickets to Fred Fatherly’s Fantastical Flea Circus. “Your Unfit Family show does the same thing. You trick rubes into paying money under false pretenses.”
“We’re not a flea circus.”
A boy in a straw hat and farmer overalls reaches into his pocket, but his well-dressed friend—white shirt, corduroy pants, bowler hat—says something and they both turn around to stare at us.
Dorchy ignores them. “I’m not saying you don’t give value,” she says, “but you’re not a family. Or unfit. At least the flea circus has real fleas.”
“Afternoon, miss,” the well-dressed boy says, tipping his hat to Dorchy. “Come on now. Give a fellow a smile.”
As we walk past them, I think about what Dorchy said. It has never occurred to me that I’ve been in a sideshow for five weeks.
The boys follow us. “What about your gimp girlfriend?” This has to be the farm boy. He sounds younger, almost scared. “I bet she’d say yes to a spin on the Ferris wheel.”
“Don’t turn around,” Dorchy says. “My parents were carnies before they died. I was born in a tent at the Ohio State Fair. Mama was a snake handler and Daddy was a talker.” She touches her earrings. “Real gold. Mama put the holes in my ears herself.”
That can’t be true. She’s making up a story to distract me from the boys.
She starts walking faster.
“Gimp girl, what’s that crutch for?” Farm Boy yells.
“What’s a talker?” I ask Dorchy.
“It’s the other one who’s got it, you numskull,” says Townie. “We can have some fun with Miss Gold Earrings.”
Dorchy says, “The talker stands outside the tent and gets the rubes excited about the show so they’ll pay to go inside. I’m a pretty good talker myself.”
“You?”
She grins at me. “I got you to come out here with me, didn’t I? Those stupid boys are trying, but they couldn’t get a hungry squirrel to eat a nut.”
We walk past the carousel with its painted horses bounding in place to calliope music. I take a deep breath of roasting peanuts and fried sausages, then dig my crutch into the dust and swing along faster. After five years of being observed, criticized, and told what to do and when to do it, I’m free. The last time I felt this way was at Bellevue when I met Dr. Friedlander.
Chapter 8
Bellevue Hospital,
New York, 1917
For the eight weeks I lay in quarantine in Bellevue Hospital, my world was a white bed with barred sides. It looked like a crib, and in it I felt as helpless as a baby. Nurses banged the rails down to tend to me and banged them up when they were done. “We have so many children to care for,” a nurse said, accusing me of—what? Not being cared for at home, I guess. Only six blocks away, “home” might as well have been on the moon.
A long, meandering crack in the ceiling was my escape. I imagined it was a road, and I followed it—away from the ugly smells and loud sounds of the hospital, away from my body that ached and could no longer move, away from Father who had left me here and Julia who wasn’t allowed to visit.
No one spoke my name—not the nurses, not the aides, certainly not the doctor, an impatient man with icy hands. While he poked and lifted and twisted my arms and legs, he talked about me, never to me.
Everything changed one morning when a tall, white-coated doctor with smiling eyes came into my curtained cubicle holding an orange. “Hello, Rowan,” he said, and sat down next to my bed. “I’m Dr. Friedlander, your ‘knight in shining orange.’” He peeled the orange, and the sharp scent filled my nose and drove away the overcooked food and medicine smells. “Have a piece,” he said, offering me one.
At the first bite, my heart expanded from walnut-size.
He had sandy hair and kind gray eyes. Not movie-star handsome, but by far the most interesting person I’d met at Bellevue—and he knew my name. “Now let’s get some light in here and sit you up,” he said, wiping his hands on his coat. “You’ve been flat as a flounder long enough.” He went to the window and snapped up the shade. In the shaft of sunlight, I saw galaxies of dust motes. Then he cranked the handle at the foot of the bed, raising me to a sitting position. “Reminds me of starting a car,” he said. “Now don’t drive off anywhere, OK?”
Sitting up, I felt liberated, no longer a baby in a crib.
“Rowan,” he said, lowering the bars on the bed. “I want to talk to you about your illness—polio. I used to call it infantile paralysis, and some doctors still do, but between you and me, I prefer the shorter name. All right? Or are you a traditionalist?” He grinned.
I shook my head no. Everyone else acted as if “my illness” was a tragedy too awful to mention, let alone give a name to.
“Polio,” I said and smiled.
“Good, that’s settled.” He rubbed his hands together. “Now let’s see if your right leg has improved a bit. No problem if it hasn’t.”
He lifted the sheet off my right leg. As he bent my ankle and knee, I felt a surge of relief. His hands were warm, not icy.
“Very good, very good,” he said. “Now the left leg. I’ll be taking over your care from the Frozen Herring as soon as you’re out of quarantine.”
“Dr. Frozen Herring?”
“You know him! I call him that because I heard through the
grapevine that his hands are always cold. I’m glad you can confirm it.” He winked at me.
“When will I be out of quarantine?” My voice trembled. I wanted him to be my doctor now.
He looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes ago,” he said. “Your sister will be allowed to come tomorrow. Let a nurse know what you would like her to bring you.”
My relief turned to confusion. “But I thought she could take me home after quarantine.”
He patted my hand. “We have a lot of work to do before that, if you want to walk again.” His eyes bored into mine. “You do want to walk, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, here in the hospital you will learn how to do that. Not in this cell, of course, but in the ward. Starting tomorrow. Now, do you have any more questions?”
They whirled in my head like blowing leaves. “May I read? Do you have any books for someone my age?”
“You may read. And you may read aloud to others. Ask your sister to buy new books that you can leave here when you go home. We always need books. I’ll telephone her myself, so she can come with books tomorrow. What would you most like to read?”
“Little Women,” I said immediately, my heart racing. I could read.
“Now I’ll answer the questions you didn’t ask,” he said. “The paralysis has worn off in your right leg. Now we’ll put it to work helping Lefty do the same.” He patted my left leg. “And when I say we, I mean you and me.”
The next morning he came back after breakfast.
“Rise and shine, Rowan.”
My heart raced. I closed my eyes. As long as I sat perfectly still, anything was possible.
“We start today, remember?”
The nurse swung me around so my legs dangled over the side of the bed.
“That’s right,” Dr. Friedlander said. “Now on the count of three, lower your right leg to the floor.”
He waited. The nurse waited. I sat still. One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three…
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