by Janet Benton
“Soon she’ll be wanting to take charge of how often you breathe and how many steps you take,” she said. “Ain’t that so?”
“It certainly is so.” I nodded. “Has she taken charge of thee?”
“Yessum. Tried to cut my budget close for a while, after her mother left for Austria and made Clementina my mistress. But I said, ‘Your mother trusted me to spend what I needed, just as long as the food was to her liking. I suggest you stop all this fussing and leave the kitchen to me.’ ” Miss Baker poured batter into a buttered pan. “Don’t worry your head, Miss Lilli. You’ll get your share of sweets.”
Miss Baker is a woman of her word. Yesterday, after she provided for Margaret and me in the kitchen as richly as she supplied the Burnhams—with roast pork loin, potatoes, candied carrots, and greens—she tucked a piece of walnut pie wrapped in a napkin into my hand and another into Margaret’s.
“Mind you don’t leave crumbs for the mice,” she said as she pushed us toward the door to the back stairs. She refused to let us help her clean the kitchen. “Plenty of chances in days to come. Go get some rest.”
After almost two days’ worth of her rich meals and desserts, my milk seems more plentiful, and Henry shows no signs of suffering. Thank goodness for an opinionated cook.
* * *
I see by looking back that my letter to Peter went out twenty-nine days ago. Since then, each time the letter carrier’s bundle has fallen through the front-door slot and Clementina has collected it, my pulse has grown as insistent as a woodpecker’s beak at a tree—to no avail. But this afternoon, Clementina called for me.
My hands were deep in a basket of peas in need of shelling; I wiped them and rushed to the parlor. Clementina sat on a padded chair with letters in her lap, scrutinizing an envelope. Her face was pink and sweaty from the heat.
“This has gone to three addresses,” she observed. “First to a post-office box downtown. Then our Pine Street house. Then here.”
As far as I could recall, only Father and Patience had the post-office box for the Haven. But when Clementina gave the envelope over, I didn’t recognize the hand.
“If thee will excuse me,” I said, starting from the room.
“You’ll let me know if it affects your employment.”
I nodded, then raced to the kitchen to sit. Margaret and Miss Baker looked on curiously. On the back of the envelope was this: PHILADELPHIA LADIES’ SOLACE.
A reply to my request! I ripped open the seal. Inside, on fine parchment and in an elegant and curlicued hand, was a florid rejection.
“Our aid goes only to the deserving,” the writer explained, “who through no defect of character face hard limitations. The evils of indiscriminate almsgiving, and the dreaded prospect of giving encouragement to those who dwell in sin, are kept at bay by this principle.”
This is precisely what Anne warned us about. This is why the Haven is so crucial and so hard-pressed for funds. I must have looked crestfallen, for Margaret came beside me and quietly asked, “Have you gotten bad news?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’ll tell thee tonight.”
Miss Baker had the grace not to inquire.
Later, in the cool of evening, Margaret and I met for a lesson. Her private efforts had done much good: she could read a page of simple sentences. We worked on a new sentence, “My cat loves to eat fish,” which led her to bubble over with anecdotes of her family’s several pusses. When her fount ran dry, she told me more about her friend at church, Rosa, with whom she became acquainted last summer. Rosa was so pleased to see Margaret again at church service last week that she walked her to the driveway of this house after the social. Rosa works at a cigar factory—“but she doesn’t smoke or chew,” Margaret hastened to explain. She withdrew from her skirt pocket a note Rosa had given her, softened at its corners from frequent fingering. She asked me to read its contents, since she’d tried but wasn’t confident she had it all.
“Won’t you join in a celebration of spring at Valley Green this coming Sunday, 1 p.m. onward? Bring a blanket and a picnic. Reply to Rosa Jones, care of xx Herrick Street.”
It was not a personal invitation but one that all invited would receive. Yet Margaret took it much to heart. We composed her exuberant acceptance, and after a fitting pause, I told her of my rejected request for aid.
“That’s because you were honest,” she said, appalled at my naiveté. “You ought to claim you’re a widow.”
I told her I won’t make false claims.
“I know you wouldn’t freely choose to,” she replied. “But for Charlotte’s sake, you should.”
She said she’d start off lying for me, with my permission. She’d ask at church if anyone could help a widow set herself up. Someone might have an old machine to loan or give me.
I wanted to say yes, but I asked her to hold back. Though lying had been her idea, I wouldn’t encourage it. This was just the sort of influence I mustn’t have on Margaret.
I wondered, however: Might J. S. Mill support the use of falsehoods to help one cross a landscape littered with foul prejudice? At least until the world’s a fairer place?
If only someone older and more experienced than Margaret could advise me.
If only I could speak with Mother. She’s so close by—in the burying ground beside the meetinghouse.
Yes, I know the body after death retains no remnant of the soul; nevertheless I want to be near her, to have only dirt and coffin separating me from the body that carried and nourished me, my solid ground, my mast, my lodestar.
Sixth Month 1
I’ve been paid! What a relief it was when money reached my hand. Twenty-five dollars minus fifty cents for Dr. Snowe’s care and four dollars fifty cents to Margaret and Clementina for what I gave Gina. Remarkably, Clementina decided not to deduct for the days Charlotte was here this month. So I have twenty dollars and twelve pennies.
I whistled a tune as I moved Henry’s carriage along the back porch, soothing him to sleep. Miss Baker had suggested that I let him nap outdoors, saying fresh air is good for babies. When Albert returned from playing cricket, after putting his bat into the stable, he walked to the back porch to observe me.
“I’d never have expected to hear you whistling,” he said, withdrawing a handkerchief to wipe away a layer of perspiration from his face. “It doesn’t seem the sort of thing a Quaker does.”
I pointed to indicate his son, so that he would speak more quietly. “I was paid today,” I whispered.
“Is it that easy to brighten your mood?” he whispered back. His jovial face came near to mine, and I caught the scent of liquor. “Why, I’d pay you ten cents a day just to see you smile.”
I might have agreed, if he’d meant it as more than a jest. That ten cents a day would more than make up for the increased fee at Gina’s, and another cause to smile would do me good.
Henry calls. It’s time to become his nurse again. When I write, I forget that I don’t belong to myself.
* * *
The Burnhams have gone to stay downtown overnight, and Miss Baker departed with permission to attend her neighbor’s funeral, leaving me no duties beyond Henry. So despite my dread of being seen by familiar people, I hatched a daring plan: to visit Mother at her grave.
I believed I’d be unrecognizable if I wheeled Henry before me and disguised myself; Margaret agreed, helping to make it so by loaning me her violet cloak and straw hat, which I wore over the green satin dress from the Haven. I wheeled Henry’s carriage toward Main Street and the burying ground, certain that I looked like an elegant mother out for a stroll—perhaps a South Carolinian transplanted north for the more bearable summer season.
I avoided bumps and mudholes as best I could, grateful for Henry’s acceptance of the jostling. When the road grew smoother, he fell to sleep. I turned onto Main Street, then Coulter Street, and then the flat ground dotted with rough-hewn grave markers that protruded but slightly above the grass. To my far left, a wheelbarrow stood balanced on its haunch
es. I held still, observing: no signs of people. So I halted the carriage and walked to Mother’s low stone. Along its rectangular top was etched the barest outline of her life: HELEN BROMER DE JONG, 1834–1881.
My hand went to the warm locket at my neck. I kneeled, staring at the ground that held her. “Mother,” I called plaintively, without meaning to.
Then nothing more. My head began to throb. The muscles in my shoulders ached.
I’d come, oddly enough, to ask Mother’s permission to lie. I wanted to claim to be a widow, since others might be willing to help me then. I hoped that Mother’s nearness might let me see how to place a boundary around such dishonesty. Yet at that moment, I understood two things: She would have had nothing but disapproval to offer on the subject, and I would lie, regardless.
If Mother could have but laid a calming hand upon me, I might have broken down and told her everything. I might have found relief in unburdening myself, perhaps even changed my plans. But if her spirit could have perceived me there, I would have been cruel to awaken it, for my situation would only cause her pain.
She had reached her rest after enduring far more suffering than I. Shortly after I was born, Mother’s father and brother died of typhoid fever. When I was four and Peter, two, she birthed twins prematurely; they didn’t live. Then her mother died of consumption. And at forty-seven she faced her own death.
Yet until bedridden in her final days, she never flagged in providing practical and moral assistance. People of all sorts came to our house, seeking her guidance as often as they sought the articles of clothing and food we gathered for them. It seemed she grew stronger, not weaker, until the very end.
“Mother,” I blurted, “where did thee find the strength?”
A ringing voice shot across the graves. “Is that Lillian de Jong?”
I raised my head, appalled. Old Hannah Purdes, the woman who’d delivered Father’s Notice of Disownment, stepped from behind the wheelbarrow. I hadn’t seen her since that day, when she’d said I would no longer teach at the Meeting school.
“Thee looks as if thee sees a ghost, child. I’m visiting my loved ones, same as thee!” Hannah hobbled over, having apparently declined in recent months. She clutched my arm, staring me up and down and back again. “No longer dressing plain, I see! Whose baby is that? Where has thee been? Thy neighbor said thee was a governess.”
“I was—I am. We’ve moved to the family’s summer house, not far from here.”
Hannah pressed for details—the number of children, the name of the family, the reason I was responsible for the baby that day—and I stayed quiet, struggling over what to tell her.
“Dear Hannah,” I said at last, “I’m near to fainting from the heat, and the baby needs changing. Please let me be on my way.”
“Has thee visited home recently?” Her speckled eyes narrowed.
I answered no. Henry gave a moan and a snort, then sank back into measured breathing.
“Go soon. Thy father needs thee.”
I couldn’t ask if he was deathly ill, or if orders for his cabinets were slowing, or if something ailed his wife, without showing the full extent of my estrangement. But Hannah knew.
“Thee seems a human soul cast out by itself,” she said to me, clasping my arm more tightly. “I see it, child. May I visit thee?”
How moved I was! Yet I couldn’t allow this. Begging her pardon, and knowing my quick departure would do no good to her impression of me, I wheeled Henry’s carriage away, leaving with more questions than I’d brought.
As if in counterpoint to that thought, Hannah yelled an answer to what I’d voiced at Mother’s grave: “Helen de Jong found her strength in silent worship.”
Looking back I saw Hannah’s face poking from its gray bonnet, querulous and imposing.
As I walked toward the Burnhams’, Henry woke and called out in hunger. I took a detour through a break in a fence into an unused pasture, and behind a wide tree I soothed him and was soothed. In that deeper state brought on by nursing, a bit of knowing came to me.
Hannah was incorrect. Mother’s calm had come by waiting silently in Meeting, but not her strength. That came by extending wisdom and assistance to those whose welfare concerned her, whether family, neighbor, or stranger. Our needs made her brave and persistent. Our improvements sustained her. When exhausted, she rested and regained her force by reading the works of weighty Friends. Often she returned to the diary of Caroline Fox, an English Quaker, and spoke aloud the words Caroline had once heard articulated in her spirit: “Live up to the light thou hast; and more will be granted thee.”
Through most everything Mother did—though outwardly it might have seemed to benefit only others—she gathered light and knowledge and stored it up within herself. Amidst that brightness, she could always find a bridge across her troubles, until her very end.
As must I, following in her way. I will be grateful for my work with little Henry, and for my service to unhappy Clementina and puzzled Albert, and for dear Margaret, who needs companionship as much as she needs learning—and most of all for Charlotte. These people are my lamps, who bring more light to me, however much that light may sometimes prick my eyes, and who thereby will help me see a way through trials to come.
Sixth Month 2
I came in from the garden this morning with fresh greens to find Miss Baker angling to hear my circumstances—though it grew clear that she already knew from Margaret.
I answered sparely, trying to confine my attention to an examination of each lettuce leaf I rinsed and dried. No doubt sensing my discomfort, Miss Baker gave me to know that I’d find no ill opinion in her quarter.
“I’ve come down some myself, being a cook in service,” she said, sorting good strawberries from bad. “My daddy ran a factory behind our house. My mama—she and two brothers and their mama came here from Tennessee. She played piano and sang at the Mother Bethel AME. When Daddy died, we lost the factory and all the money that came with it. But even when I was living high, I didn’t think I was better than nobody. The good Lord made us all.”
“I certainly agree,” I replied.
Moving to the hearth, she tilted a hanging pot of water to fill a teapot. She was making burdock tea for Margaret, who’d taken to bed with a fierce headache. When I asked what I should do next, she gestured to a barrel in the corner. “Peel and chop them old apples. They’re too sorry for eating plain.”
She set the teapot on a warm spot on the stove and plunked a ball of dough onto a floured board. I peeled apples and sliced off rotted spots into a bucket, letting the occasional worm fall. Miss Baker saw my mincing expression.
“If you want to eat apples, you’re bound to meet some worms.” She smiled. “You liking your work here?”
I nodded. “Fairly well. I’m grateful for the position. And thee?”
“It suits me.” She got out pans and buttered them. “Here and at home, I try to make folks happy with my cooking.”
“Thy cooking makes me happy,” I offered.
Miss Baker smiled, revealing buck teeth. “I’m glad.” She lifted rolled dough into the pans. “You can better the world from anywhere you find yourself.” She pressed a fork along the outsides of the crusts. “How is Mrs. Burnham? It’s hard for her in this big old house, with her parents overseas and not half as many servants as they had. Course they used to entertain.”
“Thee has been here a long time.” A worm dropped into the bucket.
“Seventeen years. Since the mistress was nine. She was agreeable then, cute as a button, with none of the sourness you see now. That’s on account of her blunted ambition, I reckon.”
“The violin?”
“The violin. Played it like the devil. Girl of her upbringing is supposed to keep quiet and pretty, not be full of passion. Her parents doused her hopes of attending music school like ten fire brigades at a fire.”
I pondered this as I inhaled the clarifying scent of apples.
“You need a sewing machine?” she asked.
“How does thee know?”
“Margaret told me. That girl thinks right well of you. Today’s your afternoon off? You going to see your baby?”
I nodded.
“Well, instead of that, there’s a rich lady downtown you oughta visit.” She explained that the woman is a sewing-machine inventor with a factory and a shop and is known for her kindness to mothers in need. “After my daddy died, Mama bought one of that lady’s machines on a time plan, with no payments due till we started scraping by.” She slid her pie crusts into the hot oven. “Then it turned out I was half good at cooking, so I got sent out. Bless your heart, Miss Lilli, Miss Bancroft is doing well with that shop, and I wager she might even give you some old machine.”
“She wouldn’t give one to an unwed mother, would she?”
Miss Baker didn’t answer. With a fork she mixed warmed vinegar and sugar in a bowl.
“Where is the shop?”
She told me the street and cross street downtown. Just then Margaret entered, having woken much improved, and poured herself some burdock tea. She heard my plan as I tossed the apples and strawberries in the sugar and vinegar and Miss Baker sprinkled cinnamon on top. Margaret assured me between sips of tea that she felt well enough to care for Henry. So I removed my apron and washed up, then gave Henry a nursing so he’d stay contented. As I sat with him, I came up with an idea.
With Henry in his crib, I raced upstairs and dug into a drawer to reach my plain poke bonnet. I hadn’t worn it since leaving home, and as I put it on, I felt how pleasantly it shields the head and hides one’s thoughts. I walked one story down to use the hallway glass, expecting to look like an imposter, someone only pretending to be respectable. Yet there was no visible difference between the young woman in the mirror and an upright Friend.
I decided not to wear the bonnet on the streetcar. That seemed too bold. I tucked it in my brown bodice, covered my head with my gray shawl, and left the house.