by Janet Benton
“Take her.” Anne reached with the other crying infant toward Nancy. “We’re calling her Mabel.”
A tremble passed through Nancy as the infant applied herself to a nipple with eagerness. Nancy turned her face toward the shuttered windows. Reaching to her, I brushed tendrils of brown hair from her forehead and wiped away the perspiration there.
So this was how Nancy would spend her three weeks before giving William to an adoption agent and finding her next domestic situation. Nursing every hour! I hadn’t known we might be put to such a use. Of course a motherless babe does need a nurse, but must it be Nancy? Must her troubled, lonely soul be interrupted in this brief chance it has to love its own?
In his bassinet on the floor, William gave up his protest. His eyes closed; his chest began to rise evenly. As the unknown infant drank, Nancy dozed, too. She looked as if she’d fallen from a great height into the bed, so thoroughly was her weight surrendered. I stared at Mabel; if she carried syphilis from her mother, then Nancy would catch the disease through her nipples, and so would William. Anne was neatening up the room’s effects, so I gave a cough to gain her attention.
She turned to where I sat, impatient.
“How did Mabel come to be here?” I asked—for someone had to think of Nancy.
Anne turned her palms up in a gesture of unknowing. “An old woman brought her. She claimed the mother handed the child over in the street, saying she’d return shortly. The mother never returned.”
“Would that be untrue?”
Anne focused her gray-blue eyes on me. “We’ve heard that explanation a thousand times. It could as well be that an unscrupulous person had the mother pay a hefty fee to get the baby adopted—then kept the fee and passed the baby to that old woman, with no intent of returning.” She walked to a corner and dropped herself to a wooden chair. “Or the old woman herself might have promised the mother, for a fee, to find the baby a family, then brought it here instead.”
“Why is it that falsehoods and babies so often go together?” I asked.
Anne gave me a baleful look, as if to say she was too occupied with the resulting problems to answer such a question. Her foot tapped the wood floor like the tail of an overstimulated cat.
“I wonder how thee knows Mabel is free of disease,” I said. “The women in our Meeting would nurse an infant only if they knew the mother’s condition.”
Anne flushed. “I examined the baby.”
I said nothing.
“Doctor Stevens taught me her methods. Lilli, this baby would die without a mother’s milk. Would you have me let her perish?”
I wouldn’t, not at all; yet I prayed silently for Nancy’s safety.
Anne stood. “Nancy,” she called.
The girl opened her eyes.
“Miss Partridge will bring a second bassinet, since Mabel will stay in this room until you go.”
Nancy nodded slightly.
Turning to me, Anne said, “I suggest you leave her to her work.” Then she adjusted the folds of her skirt and left the room.
I rose to shut the squeaky door and pulled the chair closer to Nancy. I patted her leg through the blanket. “It isn’t right,” I whispered. “A new mother needs rest!”
“I don’t know what’s right.” She stifled a sob. “I feel weak.”
I took her large hand in my smaller one. “Was thy confinement very bad? We feared for thee.”
Nancy’s face crumpled; her tears dropped to Mabel’s flannel wrap. “They cut me with the forceps when they pulled him out. I’ve been sewed, but I can’t stand without passing blood. I can’t sit, either. There’s swelling down there. Doctor Stevens says it’s normal, but…” Her words stopped; her mouth opened. As I stroked her leg and aimed to keep calm, she moved her hand to feel her own forehead. “I’m warm. Should I be warm?”
“I should think so, after such a struggle.” In truth I had no idea.
“My milk has only started coming in.” She sniffed. “That’s what Doctor Stevens said this morning. And William is hungry. I haven’t got enough for two!”
“If only I could help”—for once more I was unable.
She looked at my belly and gave a slight smile. “You’ll have your own soon enough.”
I shivered. “If only I didn’t have to get it out first. How did thee manage for so many hours?”
Nancy’s shadowed eyes regarded me gravely. “What choice did I have?”
A sensible answer to a fatuous query. The supper bell pealed in the hall, and Nancy frowned. “You have to go.”
I leaned and kissed her cheek, then shuffled from the room. As I pulled the thick door shut behind me, I felt that I was sealing her into a vault. The metal hinges squeaked the entire way, so that by the time the door clicked shut, William was awake and wailing.
In the chilly hall, breathing in smoke from the parlor’s fire and the earthy, yeasty odors of our next meal, I leaned my tired bulk against the cold plaster wall and tried to endure William’s protest.
I couldn’t endure it. I opened the door and stepped back into the room. As Nancy nursed Mabel, I lifted William. His lightness surprised me. With his bundled body warming my chest, I swayed side to side and started to sing. In my head I heard Mother’s clear voice joining mine in the one hymn she’d allowed herself, despite the frivolity of singing, because it used Friend Whittier’s words:
O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
My chest ached like some gaping hole. William stopped his wails, softening against me. I lowered his tiny form into the bassinet, and he made no protest.
“Now sleep,” I whispered to Nancy.
She looked up, bleak with fatigue, and nodded.
I’m too tired to write more—except to say that I’m still here, one person holding another inside.
NOTEBOOK TWO
The hour is late. All the others are asleep. I’m seated in the second-story bath, on frigid tiles beside a window, for between the cramps and the baby’s kicking, I cannot sleep.
I asked Anne after supper if I might place a sealed letter in my folder here, in case my child should one day seek its origins. She warned me against caring too much for my offspring.
“It’s best to consider the baby like a tooth that must be extracted,” she advised. “An infected tooth you’re better off without.”
“I’d like there to be some words from me, if the child should ever come here,” I said.
“You’re headstrong,” she scolded. “Don’t be a fool. I’m certain no other girl here would even consider leaving a clue to her identity behind.” She said my use of thee and thy alone would give away that I’m a Friend—and did I want my bastard, as she put it, “to roam from Meeting to Meeting in search of its mother”?
I reminded her of what I’d revealed at admittance—that my father had been disowned and I no longer attended our Meeting, which left me with no spiritual home save that inside myself. So my child wouldn’t find me, if it did roam thusly.
Since I couldn’t be dissuaded, Anne bid me to do as I wished.
In the hours between supper and bedtime, in lieu of embroidering, I wrote several versions. I crossed out more than I retained, then burned those tortured pages in the kitchen stove.
With my face and page bathed in milky moonlight, I’ll try once more.
1883. 3rd mo. 18
My dear baby,
I’m writing most of all to say I’m sorry. Thee will be born soon, and in three more weeks we’ll have to part.
Of course thee can never forgive me. No apology or reason can suffice. Yet I want to leave something I’ve touched, a page for thee to hold and read in my absence.
Will thee wish to know thy origins? One day—at how old?—thee might trace thy way back to this charity and learn that being sent to strangers was not thy fault—and see that, wi
thout me, thee has gained a better life.
I loved thy father. He seemed sincere and true. We agreed to marry, and I allowed him an intimacy I shouldn’t have. It came clear I’d been deceived, but the force of life in thee carried on, as it cared not how it was planted. So I alone will welcome thee.
Tonight, dearest, we live as one. I believe the moment we meet face to face will be my happiest, and my saddest.
Here is my love. Here are my wishes for good. Please know I’ll send these toward thee, day and night, for as long as I shall live.
What hardships might attack thee—without me to repel them? How this grieves me to consider.
I wish my words could hold thee.
My baby, I honor thy soul.
Mother
Third Month 19
Anne came into the foyer this morning and stood over me while I held a dripping boar’s-hair brush aloft, announcing that I should stop scrubbing the oak planks at once.
“You’ll assist us in the office each morning but Sabbath,” she said. “At least a year has passed since any serious filing has occurred. I was a fool not to enlist you sooner. An educated girl is a rarity here, and I’m certain you can be trusted.”
So in lieu of continuing to squat and scrub away the remnants of animal droppings that come in on people’s shoes, I returned the bucket and brush, then followed Anne to the office. The room was mostly taken up by a wide mahogany desk, and Delphinia sat hunched over it, her pen gliding across a piece of parchment, a gas chandelier with three bright globes hanging over her. Two tall oak cabinets stood to her side. The bench opposite the desk, where I’d had my entrance interview, completed the room’s functional effects. I sat upon it.
Delphinia was greatly pleased that Anne had provided her with a helper. She indicated with her knobbed hands the piles on nearly every surface, including the floor. I told her I relished the chance to work with paper rather than with soap, and her smile grew. Then Anne pulled a thick folder from a cabinet and said she was off to visit a potential patron. Delphinia rose and added a stack of annual reports to Anne’s satchel.
“Only ninety-three dollars have been donated in the two and a half months of this year,” Delphinia told me. “The residents have paid a hundred more. But our expenses are over three hundred a month. The state supports most every other charity in the city, but they’ve refused—again—to give us even a dollar.”
“How is the place still open?” I asked, alarmed.
Delphinia sent Anne a questioning look. Anne nodded consent, so Delphinia explained. “The cook and I have gone without salary for two months.”
“I take no salary,” Anne added hastily. “And we haven’t paid the mortgage since December. Our banker agreed to wait till April. The people I’m off to visit—they must say yes.”
The matron and superintendent exchanged a look of anxiousness that was tempered by mutual respect. Then Anne donned her hat and coat, stood erect before the open door, and directed her body outward with the force of an arrow.
Delphinia cleared her head of their fiscal emergency with surprising quickness—a necessary skill in this place, to be sure. She came to stand beside me, giving off a pleasing scent of bergamot and dust. She instructed me to begin with the piles upon the floor, sorting loose papers and folders into categories. Next I should find their places, in alphabetical order, in the unlocked oak cabinet.
“The cabinet beside that one is locked,” she explained, “because it holds the folders of all the girls who’ve come through here.” She showed me where its key hangs on the wall, hidden by a scarf, and said to put personal items about the residents inside.
After a few moments of sorting bills from letters, my hands held Nancy’s folder. Someone must have gotten it out to make note of her delivery. I placed it to the side, meaning to wait till I had several pieces to file in the locked cabinet. Then the cook rushed in, her wide face sweating.
“I got nothin’ but turnips and onions to fix for dinner,” she told Delphinia. “These girls’ll get sick if they eat that once more.”
I nodded in hearty agreement. So Delphinia put on her cloak and left to go plead for a further extension of credit at the market. After examining me with her beady eyes, the cook returned to the kitchen.
I took up the folder, closed the office door, and sat on the bench. Nancy had whispered to Gina and me that her fall had come from trusting a fellow servant’s vows. She’d revealed her condition to him and begged him to marry her immediately, she said, but he left the household that very night. Her tears appeared sincere as she told us, yet a hesitation in her manner had made me doubt.
I opened the folder and stared at a discharge paper from the city hospital. Raising my body with effort, I stood nearer to the gaslight, for the script was cramped and crabbed. The paper revealed that Nancy—“a housemaid of sixteen years and one month, of sound constitution”—had been violated with regularity by the master of the house and had become pregnant by this means. He beat her on discovering the fact. She took up potions that left her ill but failed at their purpose of feticide. Subsequently she threw herself down the stairs to end the pregnancy—not once, but twice in succession—and was injured. Another housemaid brought her to the city hospital, and the note I read was based on the housemaid’s testimony.
One month later, Nancy was discharged to no one, still pregnant and owing a debt to the city for nourishment and care, having had no way to pay her costs and refusing to inform the city of her relatives’ whereabouts. The city would have placed her out to whoever would pay them for her work, to resolve her debt, but Nancy was spared by reason of “impending motherhood.”
Anne’s interview notes, put down in her spidery script, continued the story. Nancy had confined her bulging abdomen with a corset and served food at a restaurant to earn her keep, until the corset caused such agony that she could no longer wear it. No wonder she’d feared William might be malformed, with those laces constraining his growth—not to mention the potions she’d taken and her repeated falls. When she could no longer pay her rent, the landlady told Nancy of this refuge.
Last I read the notes of the Haven’s solicitor in Philadelphia, William Stone. He’d met with Nancy’s employer to request damages and support, and the beastly man claimed to have no knowledge of how Nancy had come to be with child; he called her account “the fantasies of a lonely housemaid,” threatened a libel suit, and shooed the solicitor away.
I closed the folder and felt behind the scarf, reaching for the key to the oak cabinet so I could hide the folder away. How many horrid narratives must be locked within those deep drawers! Though I would not do so, I wanted to read them all, the way a child is compelled to pick at a scab until it bleeds. Then the Haven’s front door whooshed open, and Delphinia’s heels clicked across the foyer toward the office. I thrust Nancy’s folder into a stack and kneeled to the floor with other papers in my hands. I forced my breathing to slow and my countenance to settle.
Delphinia entered, bursting with the satisfaction of having arranged an immediate delivery of ten pounds of mutton bones—some with meat!—and a peck of potatoes. She settled behind the desk again and resumed her correspondence.
It is some hours later, and I’ve come to understand Nancy’s reasons for lying to Gina and me. Why would she have wanted to recount and thus to relive her defilement and degradation? But it appalls me that she and William are the ones who’ll carry forward the shame of those events. Instead, disgrace and shame ought to torment—no, to destroy—the master of that house.
How is it that shame affixes itself to the violated, and not to the violator?
The meal bell rings. Even with such trouble in mind, I’m eager to taste that mutton.
Third Month 20
Life at this charity never spares its occupants.
This afternoon I strolled the Haven’s courtyard, where the crocuses and daffodils have opened their blooms completely. How grateful I was for that square of green tucked between two wings of the buil
ding that confines us. I took small breaths of humid air, because I have no room for filling breaths. Then all at once an inmate named Mary—a small person in a constant state of agitation, with muscles as taut as an out-flung whip—opened the French doors to the courtyard and ran past me.
She held a wooden chair before her and yelled to someone behind, “I’ll show you!” This threat was garnished by indecent expletives. Placing the chair before the high fence that separates the courtyard from an alley, she stepped up and—as best she could—cleaved her body to the planks. Despite the impediment of her round belly, she clambered to the top and heaved herself to the other side, to freedom. I heard a thud and the pattering of boots on bricks. My spirit trilled to picture Mary running free, though reason tells me she was better off confined.
Anne and Delphinia came rushing out, followed by a crowd of girls with their heads craning forward. I doubt anyone was truly sorry to find Mary gone. She’d proved crude and unrepentant after admittance; she’d never ceased her railing against the doors being locked to prevent us from going anywhere except this courtyard and the clotheslines; she’d even brought in alcohol and partaken of it by evening, and her roommate Sally told us that intoxication had made Mary’s language fouler. But Anne and Delphinia took a walk through nearby streets to try to find her while we inmates settled down to spoonbread and beans.
With our supervisors absent, Sally informed us of a note Mary had received from the father of her baby, entreating her to come back. Knowing of his wayward nature from Mary’s testimony, Anne had refused to approve Mary’s discharge.
A ways into our meal, Anne entered the dining room and took her place at the head of the table. Though her carriage was prim, the purple half-moons beneath her eyes revealed fatigue. She breathed in audibly and released a sigh. “I aim to take in only girls of good moral character,” she said, “but my judgment can be flawed. I owe you an apology.”