“I’m not going to lie to Mother and Daddy.”
“Leave them to me. Now, will you please fetch me some breakfast before I break another commandment?”
“Which one?”
He grinned. “Murder.”
The rest of our stay in St. Louis was uneventful. Chester spent the next two days holed up in his room with claims that alternated between having a headache and dyspepsia. My parents chalked it all up to late-night carousing, and I reported their displeasure to him with every meal I carried up.
Daddy spent the afternoons engaged in some sort of business or another, most of it requiring his best brocade vest and cigars, leaving Mother and Phoebe and me to entertain ourselves.
As chairman of our church’s Women’s Committee on Charities, Mother had long been envious of the St. Louis hospitals, orphanages, and asylums, which put the philanthropic efforts of any other civilized city to shame. Back in Belleville, she complained, the Catholics held an iron-grip monopoly on public benevolence, leaving the Protestant churches the occasional orphan to place. Why, if Phoebe had fallen into the hands of one of those nuns, who knew where she would be right now?
But here in St. Louis, any person of means could take her pick in doing the Lord’s work. If one were unfortunate enough to be parentless, indigent, feeble-minded, foreign, or diseased, there was no other place that held so much promise. The variety of institutions was stunning, and with the help of a map, a list generated by the city’s Ladies Aid Society, and an infinitely patient cabbie, we saw them all.
Our first visit was to a foundling home. Phoebe and I were waiting on the stoop outside the front door when Mother emerged with Mrs. Colleen Dewney, the home’s director, whom Mother had commissioned to give us a tour. Excited at the prospect of seeing so many babies, I took a step toward the front door, only to be stopped by Mrs. Dewney’s surprisingly strong little hand.
“Oh no, child,” she said in a voice that seemed tinted in bird song. “Every foundling’s story begins out here.”
She took us around the corner to the alleyway entrance, which seemed on the outside to be like any other door. Once through it, however, we saw that it led only to a solid wood panel. Mrs. Dewney gave a gentle push on the panel, and to our surprise the entire little wall disappeared—well, spun, actually—to reveal the other side of the panel, which had attached to it a shelf with a six-inch railing on all three sides.
“Imagine,” Mrs. Dewney said, “you’re alone in the city. All alone. And you’ve just had a baby, with no husband, no family of any kind. It’s a freezing cold night, and you know the child will die in your arms, since you have no home to take it to. When that time comes, you know that your child has a warm, safe place to come to. Just bring it here and place it inside.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” Mother enthused. “Before that you wouldn’t believe how many of those babies just froze to death on the front stoop.”
“There’s no sign,” Phoebe said. “How do the women know to come here?”
“They just know,” Mrs. Dewney said.
“People like that always do,” Mother said.
We followed Mrs. Dewney back around to the front of the building and up the stairs, where I cringed with each step, imagining stepping over hundreds of frozen babies. We walked inside what might have been a stately home at one time, but it was now dark, with curtains closed against the morning light. The front parlor had been converted into an office with an ornate mahogany desk and several upholstered chairs. Above the desk, the sole ornamentation on the wall was a cross-stitch with the verse: “Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name receiveth me.”
I expected the rooms upstairs to be full of fat, gurgling babies piling on top of each other in a happy heap of flannel gowns and little knit booties. Instead, the room we entered was eerily quiet and dark. I changed my step to a tiptoe and walked among the cribs—eight in all—that lined the walls of the room, expecting to see a room full of sleeping babies. To my surprise, they were all awake. As I peered over the bars of each little bed, I was greeted with a pair of staring eyes, blank and blinking, belonging to a nearly motionless child clad only in a diaper and lying flat on a thin blanket.
I clutched the railing of the crib nearest the darkened window and turned to Mrs. Dewney. “Are they sick?”
“No, dear. They are, in fact, in perfect health. They are changed and cleaned every other hour, and fed every fourth hour. The curtains are opened for two hours every afternoon to expose them to the optimum amount of sunlight.”
“A regular little schedule,” Mother said, her voice full of admiration. “My little Belinda here was always quite the savage—eating, playing, sleeping at will. She nearly drove our housekeeper to tears.”
“Well, of course such a thing would never do here,” Mrs. Dewney said.
“May I pick him up?” My arms were itching to take up the tiny thing whose legs had begun to twitch a bit as I smiled down at him. “Or her?”
“Him.” Mrs. Dewney said. “These are all boys in this room. And no, I would rather you didn’t. The children do not get held until it is time for them to be fed,” she consulted a little watch clipped to her bodice, “and that’s not for at least another hour.”
“Please?” My hands were now inching within the crib, and the boy’s little kicks took on added glee as I approached. “Just for a minute?”
Mother came up beside me and put her hand on my shoulder. “No, Belinda. It’ll make it that much harder to put him back down.”
I allowed myself the quickest touch of his little knee before being ushered out the door. Phoebe hadn’t come into the room at all, never having had much of a fondness for children too young to boss around. As we walked out of the room, Mother took Phoebe’s pale face in her lace-gloved hand. “Imagine, dear, if you’d come to a place like this.”
Foundlings who weren’t adopted by the age of five were taken to any one of the other orphanages we visited throughout the day. Visited might be too generous a term, however, as Mother opted to view most of them through either the window of our cab or the iron gate of the yards. At the home dedicated to orphaned boys, we watched a feisty game of tag in a front courtyard.
“Just think,” Mother said, “that little fellow you wanted to hold might be playing in this very yard some day.”
There was no outdoor play at the Industrial Home for Girls where, according to the pamphlet, indigent and orphaned girls were brought in to learn a trade. Behind its brick walls, I pictured little girls—they had to leave at the age of twelve—sitting at long tables sewing tiny stitches or painting small toys.
“Might not be a bad idea to drop you off there for a spell,” Phoebe whispered to me behind Mother’s back. “You could learn to be useful.”
The cabbie was ordered to merely slow down as we passed the home for the criminally incorrigible (although even it bore a benign saint’s name), and by the time our tour took us to the newly constructed hospital for women with unspeakable diseases, we were too exhausted to even crane our necks out the window. I did, however, find the strength to ask Mother what kind of diseases would be considered unspeakable, but she waved my question away and simply told me that if I lived a good life, I’d never know.
Phoebe leaned over and whispered a promise to tell me when we were back at the hotel.
The next day we limited ourselves to a tour of St. Louis’s new hospital, walking its labyrinth of hallways and courtyards to the accompaniment of a solicitous administrator who apparently thought we were inclined to leave a large donation at the end of our tour. I gathered this because he was a good deal friendlier when he met us in the front lobby than he was handing us back into our cab with only two shiny new dollars in his pocket.
Even though the tour had been extensive, we were back at the hotel well before the noonday meal, which Phoebe attacked with unseemly gusto considering some of the sights and smells of the morning. Afterward, we all went to our rooms to lie down and rest—taking one
more hour’s advantage of feather mattresses and soft quilts. Soon after, the maid brought all my freshly laundered clothes from the previous days, and I carefully folded and packed them away in my little bag.
That evening, I took one last supper up to Chester’s room. His face had healed nicely, with nothing more than a bluish tint surrounding his eye—something, he said, that could easily be explained by a bump into an unfamiliar bedpost in the middle of a restless night.
“So you’ll be joining us for breakfast?” I asked.
“That depends.” He took the tray from me. “How early?”
“Daddy says five o’clock. The boat leaves at eight.”
He laughed. “You’d better tell Dad I’ll just meet you all at the dock.”
I stood there in the hallway, my nose inches from the door he’d just closed, and for the first time wondered if I would ever see him again.
6
When I was nine years old, I spent the greater part of the summer engaged in the daily trials of the tiny residents of a little mound just off the side of our front porch. Every day there was one perfect hour when the anthill would come alive in the afternoon sun, and I could watch from the cool shade of the house with a glass of lemonade and two sugar cookies as my snack. Ants would pour out of the opening and descend in a steady stream, lured by the crumbs I scattered around the perimeter of the mound. It was a straight-minded mission—to the crumb, a sharp turn, then straight back to disappear into what I imagined to be a bustling, homey world.
Once I took a cube of sugar from my drink, set it directly in the path of those marching ants, and watched it disappear, buried under a shifting solid mass of the creatures. Then one day Chester, acting with a level of cruelty reserved for older brothers, came upon me in my reverent observation of this tiny kingdom. With one swift kick, the mound was toppled, and the perfectly ordered, single-file parade was destroyed. The newly flattened earth revealed a chaotic scramble as ants clambered over each other and staggered in hysterical circles.
God must have had the same impression I had that day when He looked down at the docks in St. Louis. It seemed the line started half a mile away, mules and oxen pulling wagons full of children and barrels and furniture—all families vying for a ferry to take them up the Missouri River to Independence, where the overland journey would begin.
“You’d all better enjoy these next few days.” Daddy surveyed the masses with a distaste better suited to Mother. “I’ve booked us passage on one of the finest boats available. Once we’re back on land, it’s going to get a lot rougher.”
I couldn’t imagine anything rougher than this. The closer we got to the river, the less we saw of any semblance of order as wagons and livestock and men became a tangle covered by such a tapestry of unintelligible shouting it was a wonder anybody ever got on board at all.
Added to this frenzy was the fevered pitch of war. St. Louis, Daddy explained, was as divided as the rest of the country, and the unrest seemed especially evident on the docks. Men stood on crates, fists pummeling the air, bellowing the power of secession, urging young men to flee the city and head south to support the Confederate cause. Their pleas soon became muddled as the shifting crowd shouted over the passionate oration, professing heartfelt loyalty to the Union side. All the while, dark-faced slaves wove throughout the crowd, eyes low, backs bent, their loyalty defined by the men who owned them.
Our little family watched all of this from the comfort of our hired cab.
“It’ll be good to get away from all this,” Daddy said. “There’s no telling what amount of blood this war will bring.”
“By all means.” Mother turned from the window. “We’ll all be much safer in the wilderness with hatchets and arrows flying over our heads.”
“Don’t start with that again, Ellen. You just remember this scene when we’re standing on a little patch of land, starting trade with a brand-new civilization. Pure, untouched by all this racket.”
“Oh, I’m certain I’ll never forget it.” Mother launched yet again into her list of complaints that had grown so tiresome.
Was it possible to secede from one’s own family? I sank down in my leather-upholstered seat and caught Chester’s eye. He gave me a good-natured wink, which quelled the riot inside the carriage and made the one outside seem far less threatening.
“It’s a good thing we aren’t staying in St. Louis any longer anyway,” Chester said, stopping Mother midsentence. “I think it would make it mighty hard to decide which side to join up with—if I was to join, that is.”
The noise from the docks fell away as Mother and Daddy took one synchronized breath and glared at my brother.
“Oh, Chester,” Mother said, “how could you even entertain the thought of joining up with those … those sauvages?”
“Son,” Daddy said, “do not forget that no matter where we lay our heads, we are still citizens of Illinois, and your loyalty is owed to Mr. Lincoln and the United States of America, whether you take up arms for the cause or not.”
“The only cause Chester cares about is himself,” I said, earning a glare from Phoebe and a good-natured kick from my brother. The mood was a little lighter, though, as at least one battle had been squelched.
A steward from the steamboat Felicity was at my father’s elbow the minute we stepped onto the boat. He tipped his cap to Mother, Phoebe, and me, and shook Chester’s hand. His pristine white uniform made him an easy target through the maze of decks and corridors, but I soon gave up trying to follow his endless chatter. I didn’t care about the height of the stacks or the pressure point of the boiler room, which was a good thing because the man could barely be heard above the piping calliope. The din of the boat’s music and the teeming crowd outside receded once we reached our cabin deck. At the click of a massive pair of double doors, we were transported to a level of elegance that made even my mother catch her breath. In an instant, all of the heat and haunting fury of the docks disappeared.
We stood on a balcony, hemmed in by a gilded railing that ran along the walls of a massive room, and looked down at two dozen chandeliers suspended from a vaulted ceiling. The room below was carpeted in a rich red, and the walls picked up the same hue in a gold-leaf and velvet design. Dark young men in blue suits were setting round tables covered in crisp white cloths, and a lone violinist sat on a raised platform playing a slow, haunting tune.
“We will not be serving breakfast this morning because of launch preparations,” the steward explained, as if in apology. “But we will begin serving dinner promptly at one o’clock, which should give you ample time to unpack and settle in.”
We followed the steward down the suspended walkway until he came to the first of the two rooms booked for our passage. This is where Mother and Daddy would stay; Phoebe, Chester, and I would take the other. At supper the previous evening, Mother had questioned the propriety of Phoebe and Chester sharing a room, but Daddy had dismissed her out of hand. Chances were Chester would spend most of his nights with the rabble bunking down on the cotton deck.
Everything in the cabin was small—miniature, even—and it had more of an air of play than of luxury. Two beds hung suspended from the wall. One seemed barely wide enough to accommodate two people; another, more narrow, hung above it. There was a tiny washstand attached to the wall and a small pewter pitcher chained to the washstand. The cover on the bed was lovely, though, thick and quilted, and intricate lace curtains hung at the window to the outer deck. There was just enough space for a trunk, leaving a narrow walkway down the middle of the room. While Phoebe and I argued over which of us would sleep pinned to the wall, Chester slipped through the outer door without saying a word to either of us.
I’d never been on a boat of any kind, so I half expected some grand, lurching disorientation when we launched, or at the very least a chorus of farewells and best wishes from those gathered on the dock. But neither happened. When the steward arrived with our bags, Phoebe and I stowed our few necessities neatly away, then tossed Cheste
r’s bag onto his bunk. When I opened the door and stepped onto the outer deck, I saw the dock and the city smoothly slipping away. No fanfare, no discernible disturbance. Just quiet, irreversible motion.
I could tell that the days spent on the boat were meant to be a lover’s gift from my father to my mother. Every conceivable luxury was laid open to us, and she took full advantage of all the niceties the Felicity had to offer.
We took our meals in the dining hall, although Mother usually opted to have her breakfast brought to her on a tray. The tables were large, and we often shared ours with different passengers, dining with entrepreneurs and writers and future politicians. I was quite proud of my father during those encounters, as his accomplishments seemed to equal those of any man who joined us. Admittedly, when the conversation turned to the specifics of business, my mind refused to focus on the details. I did gather that several of our mealtime companions admired my father for managing to keep a small, thriving business in the shadowy threat of new factories, though just as many ridiculed him for selling out when war was the shortest route to fortune.
“I don’t like the thought of profit coming from the spilling of so much blood,” Daddy said, and my pride swelled all the more.
Often the conversation would divide along gender lines. The men at the table—Chester was rarely accounted for—entered a debate on the necessity of war; the women, the welcome introduction of the hoop skirt. Here I allowed my imagination to run free, amusing myself with visions of gun-toting soldiers capturing enemies and holding them captive within massive silk-lined cages, all accompanied by the lilting waltz played by the six-man orchestra situated at the head of the dining hall.
Between meals, Phoebe and I amused ourselves by prowling around the boat, picking up bits and pieces of strangers’ conversations and spinning them into tales of great adventure.
“Do you see that woman there?” Phoebe inclined her head toward a young woman, probably twenty-five and very pretty, standing alone at the railing. “Her name is Esmeralda. Her father owns a cotton plantation in Virginia. She entered into a torrid affair with an abolitionist minister who says he will not marry her until she agrees to move north and renounce her slaveholding family.”
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