The Story of Beautiful Girl

by Rachel Simon

  “This is strange,” Kate said. “What’s going on?”

  The men paused in their stroll, looked across the grounds toward the hospital cottage, turned, and looked up at the tower clock.

  Lynnie, remembering a practice from last month, did her best. “Ooo?”

  Kate turned to her. Lynnie pointed. “Ooo?”

  “Who?”

  Lynnie nodded.

  Kate looked at her with a smile of pride, then turned back. “You know that older one. He’s Dr. Hagenbuch, the dentist they brought in from Wilkes-Barre. I thought he’d resigned.”

  Lynnie nodded. She’d thought that, too.

  “It’s the others I’m wondering about. The big guy I’ve never seen before. But the young one, I know. He’s a reporter for a Philadelphia station. John-Michael Malone.”

  As the men stood looking at the clock, the heavy one reached into his coat and withdrew something Lynnie had never seen before. He held it up to his eyes and pointed it at the tower.

  “Whoa,” Kate said. “They have a camera.” She looked at Lynnie, her face moving into a stunned smile. “A camera! Do you know what that might mean?”

  The men headed down the hill toward the residential cottages.

  “Come on,” Kate said, hurrying toward the door.

  Kate and Lynnie moved across the grounds as swiftly as they could without attracting attention. Something about the men’s presence violated all the rules, yet Kate kept muttering, “It’s about time,” with a big grin on her face. The men turned toward Lynnie’s cottage, and when they mounted the steps for A-3, Kate said, “He has more guts than me.”

  She and Lynnie hurried up to A-3.

  As the door closed behind them, they saw the three men heading toward the dayroom, where Consuella and Hockey, the attendants on the day shift, were sitting in front of General Hospital as they played cards, with the A-3 residents staring at the television with bored eyes. Hockey glanced over as the men entered the dayroom, and when Dr. Hagenbuch went over to him, Lynnie heard him say, “… dentist… show these dental students around…” Hockey never liked missing his stories, as he called soap operas, so he waved them away.

  “I can’t believe it,” Kate said.

  They stood at the edge of the dayroom, watching. Without a second look from Consuella and Hockey, the men moved hastily into the bathroom, then the sleeping room.

  “I hope they get as far as Z-1,” Kate said. “I hope they get to the cemetery.”

  Before Lynnie knew it, the men were coming back through the dayroom. Now that they were walking toward Lynnie, she realized that John-Michael Malone’s young face was set in a grimace, the same as her own face had been when she’d first confronted the smell. Like Uncle Luke, John-Michael Malone had an air of seriousness about him and walked with deep steps. But he wasn’t looking around with smugness, nor was he gliding his eyes over the filth on the walls, the hole in the ceiling, the residents. He looked at every detail, quickly though with close attention, and in his face was distress.

  Then, suddenly, John-Michael Malone strode toward Lynnie. Lynnie glanced at Kate, who, observing his approach, wore a worried expression. Then Kate touched the cross on her necklace and made her face regular, and Lynnie cast her gaze back to John-Michael Malone.

  He had stopped right in front of her and was looking directly into her face. He said, “Do you live here in this building?”

  “Cottage,” Dr. Hagenbuch corrected him.

  “Cottage,” John-Michael said without removing his eyes from Lynnie.

  Lynnie could feel Kate’s hand come to rest reassuringly on hers.

  Lynnie, still facing John-Michael, nodded.

  He said, “Randy, can you get her?”

  The chunky man moved so he was turned to her, his camera in the folds of his jacket.

  Lynnie could hear the camera making a whirring sound. She saw something—a microphone—appear in John-Michael’s hands. She heard him say, “Do you like living here?”

  It was a ridiculous question; everyone hated it here. Besides, no one except Kate and Doreen thought Lynnie could speak. These men must be unaware of her muteness, and if they lacked that basic knowledge, maybe they truly didn’t know the answer.

  “Do you?” John-Michael Malone said again. “Do you like living here?”

  She didn’t need to squeeze her fists together for this word. “No.”

  John-Michael gave her a sorrowful look and said, “If you could walk out that gate right now and never come back, would you?”

  She shot her eyes toward Kate. Kate turned toward Lynnie, and her eyes said it was all right to respond.

  Lynnie nodded.

  And then John-Michael asked one more question. A simple question, one that Kate had tried to teach her to say months ago: “Why?”

  There was so much Lynnie could have said in response that even if her lips and tongue were fully accustomed to words, she would have had trouble saying them all. Yet she had only a moment, and as she struggled to narrow down her answer from a number larger than she knew to a mere five, or even four, she thought of the dogs. The dogs always with Smokes and Clarence, always the reminder of that night, of the breaking glass, the clattering bucket, the rag—that night, when it was done, and the door opened, Smokes said, If you tell, this’ll happen, and then he’d thrown something soft and furry at the dogs, and in seconds they’d torn it to pieces.

  That, she knew, was what would happen to her baby. That was why she’d never told the truth to Buddy, or Doreen, or Kate.

  That was why, no matter how many answers she had, she was not going to give any.

  She looked down at her feet.

  “She doesn’t say much,” Kate said to John-Michael.

  “Who is she?” John-Michael asked.

  “You can’t say her name on the air.”

  “We won’t. My producer will want to know.”

  “Lynnie,” Kate said. “Evelyn Goldberg.”

  Then Lynnie stopped hearing the camera. By the time she glanced up, the men were leaving the front door.

  Kate looked at Lynnie with her softest Kate smile. “You did good, sweet pea,” she said.

  It was difficult to return to the laundry and pretend it was an ordinary day. This was, after all, Lynnie Day. She had practiced saying “five,” blown out candles, received a new book. She had even seen a camera—not a Brownie like Nah-nah’s or a Polaroid like Daddy’s. But a camera that would, Kate had explained, take a film, like they used for movies and TV.

  As Lynnie removed the last load from the dryers and rolled it to the steel tables for folding, she thought about what Kate had said as she’d returned Lynnie to the laundry: I’ll stay late today. I want to be here in case it airs. Then she’d explained what it meant for something to air, and Lynnie understood: It was like when you went out to the cornfield after the corn was gone and anyone could see you there, even though you were staring off into your memory, waiting for two people who would never return to your life, crumpling to your knees, and putting your hands to the soil, wishing you could pull those people from the dirt.

  Lynnie didn’t know if she wanted to be aired.

  Kate had said something else, too, just before she left Lynnie at the laundry. She’d said, You know, people far away might see this, and then something big could happen.

  So as Lynnie folded the shirts and bottoms and socks, she tried to envision people far away, watching her. Would the old lady be one of them? Would the baby have her eyes on the television, too? Turn the pages, Lynnie reminded herself, and tried to see what the baby’s life was like now. She hadn’t done this for so long, but now she wondered. Was the baby with the old lady or someone else? Was the baby growing tall, like Lynnie? Did she resemble Lynnie from the photo when she was a child? Did she like smells and hugs the way Lynnie did? Did she speak like everyone—everyone except her and Buddy—so words came out of her lips?

  And Buddy. Buddy. Would he see it? He would. He had to. He’d been gone so long, it co
uldn’t be his choice. Maybe he’d been locked in jail. Maybe a storm had stranded him on a desert island. Though if he could see a television tonight, that would change. He would break out of jail, like the good guys do when a bad sheriff locks them up on TV. He would build a raft and paddle across the water. He would come back at last and hold her.

  She reached into the pile of warm laundry, pressed her face to the soft heat, and moved her arms deep inside. They had held each other with the baby between them. They had placed their lips together. They had sung a perfect note into each other’s bodies.

  Yet Lynnie still expected, when they returned from the dining hall just before six, that the night would go on as always. Suzette was tuning the TV to her favorite show, Gilligan’s Island. The residents of A-3 were settling into the same seats they’d claimed for years. Lynnie went to her usual bench, and Doreen lowered herself, as always, to Lynnie’s right.

  Then Doreen leaned over and whispered that she’d been in the administrative office when the weirdest thing had occurred. Lynnie looked at her, but just as Doreen drew in breath to say more, Lynnie glimpsed, out of the corner of her eye, Kate letting herself inside A-3. Doreen took note of Kate, too, and together they watched as Kate marched right into the dayroom, went over to Suzette, and, after a brief exchange that left Suzette looking stunned, switched the channel. Then Kate backed away, standing behind Suzette and glancing over at Lynnie.

  At first everyone in the room groaned. Gilligan’s Island was one of the few shows that staff and residents agreed on. To make matters worse, Kate had turned to the news, which was viewed as duller than a wall. But sitting at a desk on the news was John-Michael Malone—and Lynnie stopped noticing everyone around her. “Your tendency might be to change the channel,” he was saying directly to the audience. “I ask you to stay with us all the way through this special report. It’s important that you see America’s disgrace.”

  Then, as the film began to run, the residents’ grumbling was quickly replaced by gasps.

  There were the gates of the School. There was Albert, motioning to a parking space. There were the empty fields, the power plant, the administrative building. The clock.

  “It’s us!” Barbara called out.

  “It’s Sing Sing in living color!” Lourdes chimed in.

  Lynnie felt her blood pounding as she watched her own world. The hospital cottage, with Marcus in his muffs. The gym, with the buckled floor and cobwebbed hoops. Z-1, with Christopher rocking back and forth, Timmy spinning. An entrance to the tunnel. A lake of ugliness on a lavatory floor.

  And suddenly: Lynnie!

  The room went wild. “Lynnie!” they called out. Loretta thumped her on the back.

  What if Clarence and Smokes saw her? She felt fear grab hold of her face.

  “Do you live here in this building?” John-Michael’s voice said off-camera.

  The Lynnie on the television, blond curls falling around her face, nodded.

  Doreen jabbed her in the side. “You’re a star.”

  Lourdes said, “Lynnie is ready for her close-up.”

  John-Michael, still off-camera, asked his second question. “If you could walk out that gate right now and never come back, would you?”

  The television Lynnie paused. She looked outside the frame of the picture—to Kate, Lynnie remembered. Then the television Lynnie looked back and nodded.

  The dayroom let up hollers of approval.

  In the attendants’ office, the phone started ringing. “Oh, shut up,” Suzette called out.

  The camera cut away from Lynnie. Now the television was showing them other parts of the School, but Lynnie couldn’t concentrate because other phones were ringing. Phones in other cottages. Phones all around the School. And everyone in her dayroom was in a state, calling out, “It’s us!” and, “We’re famous!”

  So no one could hear what John-Michael was saying. But they could see: John-Michael was entering Maude’s office, where she gave him a curious look, and then he was walking past her into Uncle Luke’s office. Uncle Luke, sitting at his desk, looked up, startled and confused. John-Michael said something, and Uncle Luke’s eyes flashed with suspicion, then anger. He stood up. Maude came into the room, looking flustered. Then Mr. Edgar, Uncle Luke’s beefy driver, appeared, gesturing for John-Michael to leave and covering the camera with his hand.

  The room went into a frenzy. No one knew what it all meant, though everyone knew it was something that had never happened before. They were on TV! Uncle Luke looked like a buffoon! Phones were ringing everywhere!

  “Ooo,” Doreen said to Lynnie, “someone’s got it coming.”

  Lynnie sat back, feeling her face turn like a page, from fear to thrill.

  She looked across the room. Kate, rising from her seat, was coming over, her arm held high. Lynnie stood up and raised her arm, too, and, with their faces in a mirror smile, they slapped their palms together.

  Then she looked past Kate’s face, out the window into the night sky. The clock was still glowing in its tower, trying to boss everyone around as it cast its light on them all. For the first time in Lynnie’s life, she glared back.

  A-Tisket, a-Tasket

  KATE

  1974

  It’s a miracle, Kate thought as she strode up the path toward the parking lot, sunlight glinting off the February snow. Thank you, Jesus, thank you, she prayed. Thank you for making Dr. Hagenbuch so appalled by the School that he quit. Thank you for sending John-Michael Malone to meet Dr. Hagenbuch, then giving them the courage to sneak into the School. Thank you for broadcasting John-Michael Malone’s exposé across many more states than Pennsylvania. Thank you for one television being on in one apartment where one woman happened to be eating her Swanson dinner, and happened to glance up from her jewelry making, and happened to recognize the gate. Thank you for giving that woman the fortitude that built slowly yet steadily over the next few weeks and led her to pick up a phone. Thank you for Maude taking that call and telling the caller she would have someone check the files to find out if an Evelyn Goldberg lived here. Maybe Maude would never have called back, though with the press now bearing down—and the governor at last coming to see the School—maybe she would have. But thank you, Jesus, for Doreen to be picking up the mail at just that moment, and for Maude to hand the request to Doreen, and for Doreen to run not to the file room, but to me, and to tell me breathlessly what she had in her hands. Most of all, thank you for the miracle of that woman making the long trip here today, even with the snow and her “stupid, meaningless job,” as she put it on the phone. It’s a miracle of love. And as Kate had been thinking for the last few days, since Scott had proposed on his knees, love’s the greatest miracle there is.

  At the parking lot, Kate looked at her watch. Twelve fifteen. Right on time, Albert was ushering a rusty Ford Falcon to a visitor spot. Although it seemed unlikely that a drive from Ithaca, New York, could be timed so precisely, Kate knew, from just a glance through the windshield at a tall woman with curly hair, that Hannah was a woman of her word.

  Kate waved as Hannah, dressed in a pea coat and flowing skirt, stood up from the car. It took her a moment to notice Kate; she seemed distracted by the clock in the tower. At last she glanced across the lot. Kate, in her quilted coat and boots, waved her mittens in the cold.

  They approached each other as opposites: Kate, smiling and jaunty; Hannah, grim and awkward. She’s the sister, Kate thought. She has no reason to feel troubled. But Kate suddenly understood: Kate had been Lynnie’s family, and the Lynnie Hannah knew was long gone.

  The two who had never met took each other into a hug.

  “It’s so strange being here again,” Hannah said, her voice weak as a shiver as they headed down the hill toward Kate’s office. “I’ve thought of it so much. It comes up a lot in my dreams.”

  “When was the last time you were here?”

  “The day we brought Lynnie. I never saw it again until that story aired on TV.”

  She made a choking sound. He
r dark hair was as curly as Lynnie’s. Kate knew from Eva that the child—no, she needed to think of her by name—that Julia shared this hair. Would Hannah ever recognize her niece if she happened to stroll into the bank where Hannah was a teller? Or wherever Hannah worked next—because, at twenty-seven, she’d been “job hopping,” as she’d put it, for years? Well, it wasn’t a scenario that would ever happen. Hannah didn’t know she had a niece.

  “I never tell anyone I have a sister,” Hannah said as they began walking. “But I remember so much.” She smiled. “We had fun. We had a bubble-gum game, where she’d pop my bubble. We had our own version of hide-and-go-seek. She liked sucking on wet washcloths and playing dress-up. And we loved to sing. Show tunes, Tin Pan Alley stuff. The one that got her most excited was ‘A-Tisket, a-Tasket.’ I’d stand on the desk and sing my heart out while she bounced on the bed.” She began the song, then trailed off. The wind droned across the empty cornfields. The governor had shut down the farm; those fields would never see corn again.

  Hannah sighed. “My parents never talked about her. We even moved so when my brothers got older, no one around them could spill the beans. Can you believe that? And can you believe I didn’t question that for years? The things you just accept.” She walked in silence a minute, then added, “Twice I asked my mother why we did it. The first time, after the twins were born, she said we’d confuse Lynnie if we visited. The second time, when I was in college, she said my father had wanted to spare us the shame. And all along I had to promise not to tell my brothers.”

  “Do any of them know you’re here?”

  “I called my mother and told her about the broadcast. She said”—Hannah brushed at her eyes—“ ‘Go. Tell me what you see. Then I’ll think about telling your brothers and your father.’ ”

  “Is that why you came? As an emissary for the family?”

  Hannah blew on her fingers, which Kate realized weren’t gloved. And her coat was unbuttoned, as if Hannah were unconcerned with her own discomfort. “No. It’s for me. I can’t tell you what it’s like having a sister no one talks about.”