by Janet Benton
Yet our circumscribed life had kept me faithful to the bounds it dictated. Had I ever needed, before her death, to put myself at odds with anything but my desire for frivolity in order to pursue right? Not once. The guidance at hand had never failed me. I was ruled entirely by convention.
And now that I faced an actual choice, I wasn’t planning to distinguish myself. I would cast away the baby who sustained her life at my breast. I would refuse to bear my personal cross. Like so many others in my circumstance, I would let myself be turned into a fraud.
Amid this scouring of my soul, I heard dimly the needling voice of Reverend Williams: “Repent of thy sin, and accept the saving grace of thy heavenly Father.”
But the moment I let go of Charlotte and pretend she never existed, my life of sin begins. Lies will color—no, suffuse—my most intimate relations. The pain at my center will stay closed in and festering, while lies spread like a layer of lard beneath my skin.
A message sounded in my brain: Remember the courage of thy ancestors.
Some early Friends suffered beatings and imprisonment and sacrificed their homes and livelihoods in order to uphold their right to draw close to God without a minister’s interceding. My own elders were raised amid slavery and condemned it when doing so was hazardous. They forswore the luxuries created by slave labor, such as cane sugar and cotton. They gave goods and funds to help the enslaved escape; some even helped transport those who were escaping. These Friends risked much to behave rightly and retain their freedom of conscience, yet I planned to take the coward’s way.
My throat grew clogged till I could barely breathe. I dropped my knees to the floor and lowered my head.
After some period, the vibrations in me quieted. The reverend’s voice had ceased, and those around me were rising to their feet. Gina nudged my arm from above, her face questioning. I found myself able to stand. I walked unsteadily to the kitchen and reclaimed my bastard from the cook, who’d taken her for a stroll and was extolling, remarkably, upon the quiet contentment of this baby. Then Gina followed me to the recovery room, wanting company. Seated in a wooden chair, her belly resting on her thighs, she told me she couldn’t wait to leave this institution behind and begin to regain her virtue. She settled into tatting lace for the sleeves of her baby’s christening gown—since a christening is one of Angela’s first plans.
It seems Gina and I are caught in opposing tides. She is eager to ride the incoming waters toward shore and to walk a jetty of lies into a more righteous life. But my body is trembling, despite my having slid beneath the covers and applied Charlotte to my breast, for a new awareness has pulled me so far out from solid ground into the wild ocean that I may never find my way back.
My baby sleeps in my arms, in blameless beauty.
Fourth Month 16
Sorrow ate into me last night like a rat chewing through a wall. For I was still planning to hand Charlotte over to the adoption agent, despite my chapel awakening, as I have nowhere near the courage of my ancestors.
I rose before seven and stepped with Charlotte to the kitchen to fill a breakfast plate, as Delphinia hadn’t come. Then I returned to eat in the recovery room, hunched in bed with Charlotte at my breast. Soon after, the door opened. Emmeline entered, removed her wrap, and took the chair beside me. Avoiding my eyes, she proffered a shabby envelope, which I tore open.
There was a strangeness to the letter’s language. It seemed to convey not a real family’s sentiments but someone’s idea of what I would wish to hear. We’re well supplied with money and a large house. We’ll give your baby a happy life. Insipid platitudes, rushed together, and put far too bluntly.
So I questioned Emmeline—aiming to find out if only the letter was a fake, or if even the existence of a decent family should be doubted. She offered more of the same: “They’ll treat her like their own, they will,” and “None but the best families come to this agency, ye needn’t trouble yerself.” Her long face flushed with extra warmth, which happens to those unaccustomed to lying. Then I asked if anyone from the agency would visit Charlotte to be sure the family was caring for her properly, and if I could receive a periodic report.
She took a breath and held it. Leaning over my bed, she released her breath, giving me a hefty dose of spring onion. “If ye care that much,” she said—and then she halted.
“Then what?” I shifted a restless Charlotte from lap to shoulder.
Emmeline shook her head and pressed her dry lips closed.
Where this urge came from I don’t know, for I’d never bribed a soul—but I rose from bed with Charlotte clutched to my chest, and with my free hand I took a dollar from my purse. I proffered it to Emmeline. Her eyes grew large, but she snatched the bill and pushed it into her dress. Like a mouthful of oil, that dollar greased her tongue.
“I shouldn’t tell ye,” she said, “and ye mustn’t tell Mrs. Pierce.”
I gave a solemn nod of agreement. “I’ll be grateful for any advice thee can share.”
She moved closer to me and whispered. “I visit once a year till each child reaches the age of independence. Most of our families do their children justice. But the things I’ve seen with them bastards, miss, would give you chills. Oh, those families claim they’ll treat ’em fair. But they haven’t the money to feed their own flesh and blood. No, there’s no charity in taking a bastard. They see the chance for free labor, which is the entire reason they’ll take it.”
“Free labor?” I said. “From a baby?” Charlotte gave an exhalation, and dampness seeped through her clothing to my forearms.
“Oh, they’ll grow up right quick.” She joined her hands, stretched out her knobby arms, and cracked her fingers. From the pocket of her skirt she removed a wad of tobacco. With this tucked in her cheek, she leaned her bony frame forward again. “I’m only saying this once and shouldn’t say it at all. They’ll feed the babe enough to keep it alive and give it clothes. But once it can push a broom or clean a stall or hold a needle, they’ll make it work. No wages or schooling, and they’ll beat it for any sign of gumption.” She paused to suck at her tobacco, then added in a deeper tone, “Mind ye, we do get better families wanting a baby. But what can ye expect for a bastard?”
She stood and spit into the sink. The powdery smell of Charlotte’s skin and the urine in her diaper mingled with the bittersweet reek of tobacco juice.
“Can’t thee find a better family for her?” I begged. And then, “I have more money.” I quelled the sob in my chest.
“There’s no use in asking to be treated different from the rest.” She indicated Charlotte with a jab of her chin. “Who’ll take such a one as that, if they want to raise a lady or a gent?”
Such a one as that! About my Charlotte!
It had been one thing to consider keeping my baby in a surge of honesty, despite the promise of her rose-colored future with another family. It was quite another to discover that her life would be disgraced and impoverished without me. The lump in my throat descended to my gut, as if I’d swallowed a rock. My next words came out small and pinched. “Is it best that I not give her away?”
“Not if ye care that much, miss.” Emmeline shook her head with vigor. “It’d make no sense to give the baby over, not a whit.”
She waited for a reply. Receiving none, she bowed to me and left. Soon after, I received a visit from Anne, which I experienced as a fleeting dream.
Few people will have the strength to associate with you, Anne said.
Should I care more for being liked than for being true?
How can you hold on to your misfortune? she asked.
I leaned to kiss my baby’s forehead and to inhale her elusive scent.
Thee is no misfortune, Charlotte. Thee is a blessing.
Fourth Month 17
Between changing, nursing, holding, and tidying up, it’s a wonder I can write. But I need to decide where to go, because I can’t go home.
Some naïve, good-hearted person might tell me to try. But my status would threate
n Father’s livelihood, not to mention that Patience despises me already; imagine how her cruelty would grow if I disgraced her house. And I couldn’t bear to see Father’s belief in my goodness vanish with his first sight of my baby. Besides, Patience would never let me stay.
No. With grief eating at my heart, I decided to ask Anne how I might obtain a sewing machine. I could easily make clothes, I figured—plain ones, at least—and support Charlotte and myself in this way.
Anne was out, but Delphinia obliged me with a consultation. I sat on the bench with Charlotte, who stared through the many-paned window at the falling rain.
“What can I do for you, dear?” The matron peered across the desk at me, giving off a hint of irritation. Her deeply lined face was surrounded in a halo of white hair. It occurred to me that she must be very tired from caring for the inmates here, and that my change of plans had strained her further. Quietly I told her I’d decided to become a sewing woman and asked whether she knew how I might obtain a machine.
“You can apply to a ladies’ aid society for a grant,” she said. “I’ll give you an address. However, sewing work pays poorly. Many a widow has failed to feed her children through it.”
“I could work in a garment factory,” I offered. “Then I’d earn better.”
Delphinia sighed. She rested her elbows on the paper-piled desk, then propped her chin on her upraised fingers. “Would you, then? Do you have any idea what that entails?”
“I don’t,” I admitted.
“You’d work twelve-hour days, six or seven days a week. You’d be made to buy your own needles and thread from your employer. Docked pay or even beaten for speaking a word to another worker or for arriving a minute late. And paid barely enough to buy the meanest food and rent a corner of some dirty, shared room.”
I stared in reply. Her face was warm with passion.
“Where would you keep your baby?” she asked, baiting me.
I was quiet.
“One young woman left this place determined to support herself and her baby through factory work. The wages were too low for her to place her baby with a wet nurse, so she tried day boarding. Do you know what that is?”
“No.” My hold on Charlotte tightened.
“Her baby spent its days with an impoverished grandmother who sat on a stoop and watched hordes of children go at their mischief. The babies sucked on rags soaked in sugar water and laudanum, which makes babies sleepy and takes away their appetite.” Her face grew stiff. “Without the milk it needed in the day, that baby died within weeks of leaving here.”
“The poor thing!” My heart contracted.
“Not actually.” Her voice lowered. “The babies who live will learn to crawl. This means, if there’s no money to pay for day boarding, their mothers have to tie their legs to a table or some other heavy thing before leaving them in their sordid lodging. Do you know the reason?”
I shook my head.
“So they won’t get burned on the stove or climb out a window while their mothers are at their factory shifts.” Delphinia stood and came around the desk to plant her sturdy frame before me, perhaps to increase the effect of her words. “So if you worked at a factory,” she continued, “your baby would spend most days without your milk, either at day boarding or bound to a plank and placed upon the highest shelf.”
“Why?” I asked.
She took a breath and roared her answer. “To try and keep away the rats that do eat children.”
This pronouncement finished her. She collapsed onto the bench beside me and seemed to pull her mind away, as if to replenish herself.
I ought to have known that such horrors could bedevil even well-intentioned people. I should have known it from the evidence that life presented to my eyes and from the sad stories that Mother had brought home. But instead, I’d held on to a common prejudice. Regardless of my sympathy for the families she’d assisted and for the others I’d seen suffering, in some dim recess of my brain, I must have believed they’d wasted money, or failed to work hard, or otherwise exercised poor judgment and—I dread to say—brought on their plights.
I looked down to find Charlotte’s head leaned back, her nostrils and lips moving with her breath like petals in a soft rain. She’d fallen asleep without me having to nurse her first!
I thought of rats eating her.
Delphinia stood suddenly and took a swallow from the cup of tea upon the desk. “Factory work is out of the question,” she said. “And a sewing woman doesn’t earn enough to live in anything but squalor.”
“But haven’t any others here been able to keep their babies and live decently?” I didn’t want my hope extinguished.
“Certainly they have.”
“How did they manage?”
“They had families or acquaintances who were not above taking them in.” She found my eyes with hers. “In this way, Lilli, it can be a blessing to belong to the lower classes.”
“In what way, exactly?”
“People who have suffered and known hard limits may have a more realistic understanding of mistakes and bad fortune.”
My body felt heavy enough to fall through the floor. Every aspect of my former life, even its relative lack of suffering and limitation, now seemed a curse.
Then Delphinia’s face lost expression, as if she didn’t wish to influence me unduly. She told me of the one profession for which I was an ideal candidate at present: that of the wet nurse. “Families of means often hire wet nurses for their newborns,” she explained. “They do so when a mother has perished in childbirth, or fallen ill, or finds herself unsuited to nursing.”
I refreshed myself with a full breath. “I’d be glad to help such a family, so long as I could bring Charlotte.”
Delphinia colored with pleasure, assuring me that a family would be glad enough to have me that they’d certainly allow Charlotte to come along. “Some girls are too rough for this work, but you’d be well suited for it,” she opined. “You’d be given the finest food and treated gently, all to support the quality of your milk. And the wages are excellent, perhaps twice as much as what other female servants make.” Her demeanor puffed with optimism. “In less than a year, you’d have the means to lease a sewing machine and set yourself up as a seamstress—with some money saved to make up for shortfalls.” She lifted a stack of papers and bounced it on the desk to neaten it. “All with no sacrifice to yourself or your baby.” She dropped the stack to the desk, which caused a loud report and startled Charlotte from her sleep.
“How can I find a family that needs a nurse?” I asked as my baby began to fuss.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Pierce you’d like to apply. Doctors often write to see if we have any candidates for the families in their care. I’m sure she’ll recommend you.”
I sent a prayer of thanks into the ether.
This love for Charlotte is like a hardy plant that rises in me. If I had to chop it down, its roots would fester—and corrupt the soil of my being.
* * *
Not three hours after my talk with Delphinia, I was called to the office in a rush. I appeared before Anne with spit-up on my shoulders and Charlotte at my breast. “If I take her off,” I explained, “we’ll have no chance of hearing each other.”
Anne nodded and closed the door, bidding me to sit. Lifting a fine parchment envelope, she said, “A doctor has written in urgent need of a wet nurse. The baby is his patient’s first, only a week younger than yours. The mother is unable to nurse him.”
Charlotte must have felt my heart quickening. She stirred and gave a cry.
“Will they find me suitable?” I asked.
“I believe so.” She gave a parsimonious smile.
“And Charlotte will come along.” I intended merely to confirm the point, but Anne raised her eyebrows.
“Dear girl,” she said. “An honorable couple couldn’t accept a bastard into their home.”
“Delphinia Partridge assured me…”
My words trailed off as Anne wagged her head
. “Miss Partridge means well, but her understanding of the circumstances—”
“I won’t go.” Tears slid down my cheeks. Their source must move closer to the eyes in mothers.
Anne bent across her desk to bring her stern face closer to me, so that I saw the crumbs at the edges of her lips. “Don’t be foolish. A baby doesn’t know the difference. She’ll go to a wet nurse in a more modest situation.”
“What does thee mean?” A crawling sensation spread over my arms.
“Someone who’s nursing a few babies at once, who’ll charge a fee you can afford and do just as you would for her. With the money you save at this work, you can start anew, perhaps in another city. You’ll reclaim your daughter before she’s old enough even to know you from another.”
Why would Charlotte cling to me so, if she didn’t know me from another? I swallowed and pressed her close.
“This family will pay twenty-five dollars a month,” said Anne, “and no expenses, aside from perhaps six dollars a month to place her out.”
The salary astounded me. As a new teacher, I’d earned thirteen.
“Consider your savings after a year.” Anne joined her slender, neatly tended hands before her on the desk. “You may never get such a chance at advancement again.”
That statement gave me pause. Could my life’s choices be so reduced that this would be my best chance at advancement?
The clear answer was yes. “Can I meet the family,” I asked, “and then make my decision?”
Anne’s mouth pursed, but with effort she spoke pleasantly. “Of course. And if they don’t suit you, then you may find some other option in your few remaining days of lodging here, isn’t that so?” She paused and stared. “You can’t stay more than a day or two past three weeks. You know how many are desperate to fill our beds.”
Panic snaked through my belly. She rose to signal my dismissal, patting down her skirt. I rose with Charlotte and started out the door.
“Neaten yourself and the baby,” she called. “I’ll send for the doctor and someone from the family.”