Lilli de Jong

by Janet Benton

  The streetcar let me out downtown. Soon the plate-glass windows of the store came into view. BANCROFT OVER-SEAM COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA was painted in gold-and-brown lettering on the glass. After donning my bonnet, I stepped up and rang the bell. The gleaming machines in the windows were lovely; the prettiest was painted black and decorated with gold filigree. A light-haired matron in a plum-colored dress opened the door, and I asked to see Miss Bancroft.

  “She’s not in. May I show you our machines? We have the most alternatives of any manufacturer in Philadelphia. We even have the new zigzag. Miss Bancroft invented it.” She pointed to a framed newspaper article on the wall. I nodded, though I couldn’t make out its words.

  “I’d like very much to see the machines,” I said. “But first I need to speak with Miss Bancroft.”

  “May I ask the nature of your business?”

  As she waited for my answer, I grew more nervous to speak. But the store’s odor of metal and linseed oil brought to mind our garden shed at home, which reassured me. “I’m told she cares about unfortunate women, and if only I had a sewing machine…”

  “Goodness.” The woman gestured into the shop. “Come in!”

  I followed her to a counter and stood before it. She put on a pair of eyeglasses and inclined her slim face toward me.

  “What’s your situation, dear?”

  At the doorway to a changed self, I held my breath, then stepped through. Her mind was a blank slate for my tale to be written upon.

  I released my breath. “My husband died—in a mining accident—in Easton. I was with child when he died. I have so little money left, and I’d like to sew.”

  Her face flushed with compassion. “How old is the baby?”

  “Just two months.” I saw Charlotte’s grinning face, her feisty fist clutching an apple blossom in Gina’s yard. I choked back a sob—a real one, but knowing it would help my case.

  “Oh, my,” she replied, shaking her head. “We do like to help widows when we can. If we get an old machine in partial trade for a new one, Miss Bancroft gives it to a widow on installment. No money down, and a payment due whenever you can make it.” The woman opened a drawer and pulled out a ledger. “Mind you, sewing doesn’t usually bring much of a living. But you could earn enough to keep yourself and one baby.” She located a certain page, examined it, and shook her head. “No machines at present. But I’ll add you to our list. Will that suit you?”

  Hope banged in my chest. “Yes, very well.”

  “Name? Address?”

  In my haste to answer, I gave the address of my former home. If the shop does send a letter, Father will have to forward it to the post-office address I left behind—the Haven’s box—and it will follow the same circuitous path as that letter from the Philadelphia Ladies’ Solace.

  So be it. I thanked the woman, my eyes warmed by tears brought on by shame as much as gratitude.

  I traveled back to the Burnhams’, knowing I would share my tale with Margaret and Miss Baker and feeling mixed relief and horror. People are so easy to fool. It’s not at all difficult to take convenient detours around the impediment of truth.

  Sixth Month 3, First Day

  I must have fallen asleep last night in the rocker, for I woke with Henry on my lap and dawn creeping up behind the trees. I put him in his crib, where he slept on, and tiptoed to my room to record my nightmare.

  I dreamed that Father—only forty-nine, in truth—had grown white-haired and weary. His tall frame was stooped as he walked with effort across the wide planks of our main room. Then he stopped short; his eyes became fixed, as if made of glass; his face went blank, and his big hands hung from slackened arms. Though his body remained upright, life had abandoned him.

  Grief smacked me like some giant hand.

  Then all at once, the animating principle rejoined his body. New vigor flowed through his veins. His shuffling walk resumed, and his face presented again the look of one alive, as if that peculiar death had never happened.

  This sudden alternation between life and death occurred three more times, plunging me into grief and rescuing me from it, until the final time, when he sat in a mahogany chair—one that he’d carved and turned and joined himself—and, like a wind-up toy that has wound down for good, he ceased to be. His body took on the immense heaviness of death. It slumped forward, chest to thighs, head and neck dangling past the knees.

  With a choking sob I crouched before him, my knees touching the toes of his worn leather boots. I threw my arms about his slumped head and calves, clinging, as if once more a child.

  “Papa!” I called. If he could have but patted my crown and said, “Yes, dear Lilli,” or “What new thing has my daughter seen today?”—but he was dead for good.

  I woke with a crushing in my chest. What if something has happened to him? What was Hannah referring to? To be so close, yet unable to go…Should I go? I’d have to reveal my situation. Then he would exile me, as Patience did.

  Perhaps this dream was a punishment for my dishonesty at Miss Bancroft’s shop.

  I’ve opened my locket to touch Mother’s hair. It retains the faintest trace of her violet water.

  This fragment of Mother’s actual body, chestnut brown and silken, is my most precious possession. I hold it and hear that fragment of philosophy she held dear: “Live up to the light thou hast; and more will be granted thee.”

  What of the one who covers her light with the dirt of deception—can she ever reclaim it?

  Tomorrow the Burnhams leave for New York City to meet Clementina’s parents, who have arrived by boat, and Miss Baker and Margaret will listen for Henry while I visit Charlotte at Gina’s, for I’m desperate to hold my baby. I missed our visit by going to the sewing-machine shop.

  Darling Charlotte! Mother will soon be nigh!

  NOTEBOOK SEVEN

  Sixth Month 4, late

  Our situation has taken an appalling turn for the worse.

  I set off to see Charlotte today with a buoyant step. But as I neared Gina’s neighborhood, traces of a noxious smoke began to reach me. I sped along the road, sweating under my concealing shawls, sliding on muddy places but managing not to fall. I came to a halt to recover my breath only when I reached that enclave—but I still haven’t recovered my breath.

  Mounds of rubble lay where several of the wood row-houses had stood. A sickening smell was rising from their half-charred, smoldering hulks.

  I ran closer, hardly aware of my feet on the dirt road. The front door to Angela and Victor’s had been red; no row-house standing had such a door. I searched among the threads of smoke, the expanses of charred beams and planks, the dampened heaps of plaster and possessions. At last I saw a rocking chair’s curved base protruding. Near it were burnt spindles that could have been from a cradle; beside them lay a door-shaped rectangle, mostly charcoal, its unburnt edge still red.

  In terror I called my baby’s name.

  “Gone!” said a voice. Turning, I saw a crooked woman on a cane approaching, her face a map of wrinkles. I moved toward her, intending to speak, but nausea bent me double. As I gagged over the ground, she spoke kindly in the rolling syllables of her native tongue.

  I raised myself and croaked. “My baby! Gina! Lucia! Where are they?”

  Through halting words and gestures, she informed me that they and others affected by the fire had been transported by ambulance to Germantown Hospital.

  “When?” I asked.

  Two days ago, she communicated, some with burns and breathing trouble. She pantomimed a person riding a horse and asked, “You want?”

  Certainly I did. I raced the way she pointed and soon reached a low-roofed livery stable. I hired a hackney carriage for my very first time, counting on the ten-dollar bill in the cloth purse that hung at my neck.

  “To Germantown Hospital,” I told the driver as I stepped up to the bench. As we rolled along, I tried to understand the fare card that hung before me, but in my harried state, its many terms and stipulations were too co
nfounding.

  The driver stopped at the hospital’s brick compound and agreed to wait. I rushed in and asked a woman seated in the main hall to direct me to Charlotte and the others. Consulting a list, she claimed to find no patients by their names, and she refused to let me tour the floors to find them.

  I ran to the nearest door, opened it, and stepped into a smaller room. By the time the woman had caught up with me, I’d explained the situation to another worker. He banished my pursuer with a sour look, then examined the columns of his discharge ledger and found evidence of Gina, Victor, Angela, and two babies. Gina and her baby had left yesterday, both in adequate health; the ledger didn’t say where they’d gone to. Victor and Angela must have taken longer to get from the house, for they’d been transferred to Pennsylvania Hospital, which could better treat their burns.

  “What of my baby?” I asked. My future happiness hung on his reply.

  “She was also transferred.” He ran his finger down the page and stopped. “No evident damage besides a cough caused by inhaling smoke.”

  I dared to breathe. “Where was she sent, then?”

  “To the Children’s Asylum at Old Blockley.”

  At first I couldn’t comprehend. All my efforts since leaving home have been aimed at keeping us from the city almshouse—a massive stretch of human misery located beside a disease-breeding swamp. Even I, who barely saw a newspaper due to Mother’s horror of them, knew that its supervisor and treasurer were recently convicted of fraud and thievery, and that not even its cadavers are safe from plunder: some of the newly buried are dug up and ferried across the river at night to be sold for medical uses. There are always fresh corpses, for between its substandard food and insufficient hygiene, Blockley is a veritable slaughterhouse.

  I moaned, but the man behind the desk had no sympathy to spare. “We send all children there who lack a caretaker,” he said, his cold eyes boring into me. Clearly he was certain that I was a defective mother. He had no way to know how it has anguished me to live apart from Charlotte.

  And why hadn’t Gina told the hospital where to find me? I’d trusted her!

  “Did thee discharge them?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why didn’t Gina take my baby along, or find me?”

  Again his eyes judged me. “She had no home herself. She was distressed to have no way to reach you.”

  No way to reach me? How could this be true? I realized and cursed myself. Since she couldn’t read, I’d never thought to write out the Burnhams’ name and address. I hadn’t even told that information to her.

  Of course she’d had to leave Charlotte; merely carrying two babies out the door would have been difficult. And the man didn’t know where she’d gone. Not back to the same neighborhood, certainly, or the kind old woman there would have told me.

  No, I couldn’t blame Gina. I simply had to go immediately to Blockley and remedy the effects of my grievous error.

  Thank goodness the Burnhams were en route to New York City to meet Clementina’s parents. Miss Baker and Margaret might worry at my continued absence, and Henry would awaken hungry, but so it had to be.

  I left the hospital and raced toward the waiting carriage. To the driver I called, “Blockley Almshouse, quickly, please.” He gave his signal and the horse dashed off, with us bouncing behind.

  Soon I’ll hold and kiss my darling, I assured myself. Soon she’ll smile and gurgle. She’ll tense her little limbs and wave them with the thrill of being in my arms.

  Yet my breathing came in fits and pauses. I thought of the diseases that must run quickly through the almshouse. A fine layer of sweat covered me. Inside my abdomen, the muscles clenched and twisted.

  At last we crossed the Schuylkill River, which was high and frothy from a night of rain, and drew near to Blockley.

  To call the almshouse imposing would be an understatement. Its many-acre compound is surrounded by high stone walls, which the carriage skirted at length to locate the gate at Thirty-sixth Street and Darby Road. On entering, we had to trace an arc around a group of well-dressed people tromping through, as apparently the place draws gawkers. Ahead stood a gathering of three-story stucco buildings, each perhaps five hundred feet long. These were surrounded by stretches of dirt, the monotony of which was relieved only by an occasional shrub or a tree.

  The driver halted his horse before a building fronted by enormous columns that bore the word ADMINISTRATION. But I bid him to continue, until I saw a plaque on another edifice that listed the Children’s Asylum among its holdings. The driver promised to wait, explaining the cost at 75 cents per half hour.

  I hurried to a massive door and banged its knocker. The door was opened by an oily-bearded man in an ill-fitting suit. Fetid air eased out around him. I summarized my baby’s situation and told him I needed to remove her immediately.

  “Applicants are allowed only at certain hours,” he said. “The Visitor of Children takes applications from one to four on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from them that wants to board a child out.”

  “Surely a mother seeking her own child can enter at other times,” I asserted.

  “Not as far as I’ve seen.” He shrugged. “And that baby’s been a cost to the city. You’ll need to pay the charges before you take ’er.”

  “Charges? Even if I never put her here and don’t want her to stay?”

  He nodded, raising a hand to stroke his beard.

  “May I speak with someone else?” I had to get inside and find her.

  Without protest he nodded and closed the door. Apparently he was accustomed to such a request. I waited on the wide steps and stared at the brass knocker of a lion’s head, its mouth gaping and toothy. Soon a pink-faced nurse stood in the doorway, pulling at the hem of her apron and adjusting her muslin cap. Upon gaining a sense of my dilemma, she concurred with the man about the hopelessness of my endeavor.

  “Yer in a right fix, ma’am,” she told me.

  “But this is my own baby,” I explained. “Surely these rules don’t apply.” Her stubbornness was putting me in a panic; I felt short of air.

  “We must follow procedure. A child can be taken only after yer situation has been thoroughly examined. So say the rules of the Department of Charities and Correction.”

  I felt the force of her indignation bearing down on me as she stood in the doorway above. No doubt the watery mucus in her eyes gave a clue to one of the diseases inside.

  “Can I speak with someone else, to get an exception made?” I asked. “Or can I at least come in and view my baby?”

  “Oh, no,” she said gravely, plumping out her lips. “The managers would have our heads. But I’ll tell ye what. Have ye got any friends that can write?”

  “Yes.” That lovely assertion buoyed my hopes.

  “Ye’ll need a letter attesting to yer character. Have ye a home of yer own?”

  “Well, no. Yes. Sort of.” I would ask Clementina if I could bring Charlotte there—except she was away. The nurse looked me top to bottom, perhaps noticing my haphazard attire.

  “Ye must have a home,” she said. “We don’t let the children go just anywhere.”

  I filled my lungs and shouted, “My baby is just two months old and needs her mother’s milk. No matter where we live, I’ll keep her alive better than thee can!”

  The nurse blushed to her ears. “Be that as it may, I can’t go giving out babies willy-nilly to folks at the door. Go get proofs of employment, good character, and a place to live. Bring the baby’s certificate of birth to prove yer the mother. Then apply to the Visitor of Children tomorrow between one and four.”

  How could the fundamentals of our city be so absurd? I stormed back to the carriage, determined to get what papers I could from Anne and return forthwith to find someone with common sense.

  The driver said I’d owe a dollar twenty-five more, for we were switching back to a miles-based rate rather than a time-based one, which befuddled me. But I had him take us over the rutted streets toward
the charity that had been my refuge. He wove us cannily among the wagons, buggies, carts, mules, goats, dogs, and people until finally we arrived.

  I brushed the dust off myself as best I could, then rang the bell. Anne answered and invited me in. She led me to her office and sat behind her desk; I took the bench.

  “Are you still employed with the Burnhams?” she asked. She must have doubted it from my condition. I told her yes but explained my baby’s whereabouts and the obstacles to my claiming her. I asked if she could give me the birth certificate and a letter describing my character, lodgings, and employment.

  Her face twisted, whether with concern or annoyance I was unsure. “You’ll need to return tomorrow. Delphinia rushed off to a funeral and took the cabinet key. The birth certificate is in your folder.”

  I implored her to look for a spare key, which surely she must have about, and to write the letter for me.

  She exhaled through her nose. “We don’t usually help a girl after she leaves. Our resources are severely strained already.” She turned her head to the window, then faced me again. “You should let the baby go, Lilli.”

  “Let her go?” I blurted. “Thee would have her killed and buried in that horrid place?”

  Anne cleared her throat and rose from her chair, elegant and unyielding. “I understand the hazard. The situation is truly sad. But some infants at Blockley do survive. And you must face the world you live in. You could start anew, were it not for this impediment.” She began walking around the desk, indicating my dismissal.

  “Impediment?” I stood. “I’m begging thee. Have the documents ready by tomorrow morning.”

  Anne nodded, her cheekbones made more prominent by her tight expression. “As you wish.”

  She escorted me out.

  Even with no papers from Anne, I wanted to try to enter Blockley once more. So I had the hack driver return—along the same chaotic roads, through the same gate, past the same imposing buildings. This time the windows to the Insane Department were opened, releasing to the outdoors the expulsive yells and groans of the lunatics confined within. I recalled a photograph, circulated at Meeting during Blockley’s recent scandals, showing inmates with grotesque expressions, their bodies held by stakes and chains. Some had blocks of ice strapped to their heads, ostensibly to cool their thoughts. I shivered as the driver swerved to avoid a line of curiosity seekers that stretched across the dirt toward that department’s door. The well-dressed visitors craning their heads were awaiting their turns to gain a glimpse of the mad.