by Amy Sorrells
“Everything that’s happened to us since Chudniv has been by the hand of Yahweh, by the grace of Yeshua.”
Jakob felt a growing desire to cover his ears when Peter went on about divine interventions. Galya’s strength, the generosity of strangers, and Peter’s wit had gotten them this far. The hard work and talent of Tato cutting the stones they sold—not miracles or grace—had fetched them steerage tickets aboard the Statendam. And it would be luck that got them to America in the huge hunk of floating steel. As grand as she was in size, her great steam tower and twin masts had grown ugly from frequent trips back and forth across the Atlantic bringing cargo after cargo of immigrants to America. Besides that, steerage practically guaranteed the boys would come down with some sort of illness; the air was thick with wet coughs, vomit from passengers suffering motion sickness, and other unsanitary filth. The two of them clambered up to the deck as often as possible for fresh air, but these opportunities were few and clogged with first- and second-class passengers.
On the whole, the journey across the Atlantic was a blur for Jakob, whose eyes only reached the level of the filthy skirts of women and the threadbare, reeking pants of men. So many people were stuffed in with them, they could hardly move. Being stuck in one place caused Jakob’s head to fill with images of making himself as small as possible in the kitchen cupboard back home in Chudniv, but the priority of survival eventually and thankfully forced that memory from his mind. Still, he jumped at every creak and jerk of the ship, and though Peter assured him they were safe, he kept himself close against his brother, never daring to leave him. Peter never dared to leave Jakob either, even when they had to relieve themselves.
After thirteen days on the ship, Jakob supposed he should have been happy and singing a Psalm with Peter when they steamed into New York Harbor, the enormous Lady Liberty greeting them with her torch held high and spikes upon her head. But he was not happy. His head itched, and he couldn’t help scratching until it bled, along with most of the other passengers similarly infected with lice. So many were terribly sick from the journey, coughing and aching from the cramped quarters, and pale from the horrid smells and lack of fresh food. Worse, Jakob had heard Peter talking to other passengers who were all certain the immigration authorities would find reasons to send them back to Europe. Diseased eyes, a crooked gait, whatever the reason, Jakob knew he couldn’t rest until they’d been cleared at the immigration station.
The boys were stripped of any dignity or hope left in them before they stepped off the Statendam, as their heads were shaved and they waited naked in examination lines. Doctors probed and prodded them for eye diseases and other maladies. When they were allowed to dress again, the doctors’ assistant used a piece of chalk to write “SC” and “P” on both of their backs, the first indicating their obvious scalp infections, and the latter indicating they needed to be quarantined for possible lung infections before being granted permission to enter the streets of the city and begin the arduous search for work and a place to stay. But their sentence to two weeks in a quarantine house turned out not to be a detriment. As Peter would later say, it was the moment they met their fortune. Less than seventy-two hours before they would’ve been released and shooed into the streets of New York City, they were adopted.
“Come with me,” the head caretaker in quarantine, Mrs. McGafney, said to them one day. She was a fat woman, and Jakob had been intrigued with her from the start, wondering how much a person had to eat to become that fleshy. After all, he hadn’t ever seen a fat woman, since half of Europe and all of the immigrants on the Statendam were starving. Mrs. McGafney was a redhead, and she had the patience of one, too, as she yanked Peter and Jakob from their cots by their shirt collars. Jakob had grown weak, feverish, and even more scrawny than he had been when they left Europe. He could not move as fast as Peter, nor could he help but yelp as Mrs. McGafney pulled him by the ear to get him going.
They were escorted to the foyer, where a man stood dressed in the finest suit of clothes either boy had ever seen. A woman stood next to him, holding on to his elbow. She was wrapped in beautiful gray fur, which accentuated the brilliant emeralds and diamonds hanging from her earlobes. Peter and Jakob didn’t know much English yet, but they understood completely what the exchange of money looked like, as the dapper man handed a large roll of bills to Mrs. McGafney. She escorted the couple to the reception desk, where he and the woman signed a few papers. At the same time, she eyeballed Peter and Jakob with a look that said, “You’d better behave.”
“There, you’re all set now,” Mrs. McGafney said as the man shook hands with the official at the desk, and the couple turned toward Peter and Jakob. She pushed the boys toward the couple, her voice pointed and cold with thinly veiled relief.
The woman with the diamonds and emeralds in her ears came toward Jakob and placed a white-velvet-gloved hand gently on his shoulder. She knelt in front of him, not bothering to fix her skirts so they wouldn’t be soiled by the damp, muddy floor of the Ellis Island dormitory. She pointed to herself and said, “Mama.” Then she pointed to Jakob.
“Vin ne hovoryt',”* said Peter, pressing the finger of his right hand—the only finger left on that hand besides his thumb—to his lips in Jakob’s defense. He couldn’t blame Jakob for not wanting to speak to anyone since they left the Netherlands.
The gentleman raised an eyebrow, looking to Mrs. McGafney to see if she understood.
“The young boy, we think he is mute. Hasn’t spoken since he got here. His brother always speaks for him. None of the orphans arrive whole, after all.”
“Do we know why the older one—”
“Name’s Peter.” Mrs. McGafney interrupted the man.
“Peter. Yes, of course. Do we know why Peter is missing his fingers?”
The caretaker shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.
“No telling what they’ve been through,” said the woman, clicking her tongue against her teeth with pity. “I might not speak either if I were him. But he will most surely in time.”
Their names were John and Harriet Stewart, a wealthy couple from Chicago involved in the shipbuilding business, who’d been unable to have children of their own. As such, they’d felt compelled to do what they could to help ease the growing problem of orphans clogging East Coast orphanages, and they hadn’t minded at all the possibility of adopting older children. Harriet Stewart held cool cloths to Jakob’s head as he fevered the whole way to Chicago on the train. The autumn trees and rolling hills of the East turned to patchwork fields of crops in the Midwest, reminiscent of the land surrounding Chudniv. John and Peter tried as best they could to communicate through their language barrier, using hand gestures and drawing on scraps of newspapers until they were clutching their stomachs with laughter—something Jakob hadn’t heard from his brother since long before their journey began.
Once they arrived in Chicago, Jakob’s fever broke, as did everything he knew about life before then. The Stewarts’ home in Wicker Park was the most magnificent structure the boys had ever seen, scalloped shingles on the gabled roof with finials on every peak. Windows made of stained glass and framed with wrought-iron guards and transoms. A front porch that wrapped around the entire first level, trimmed in fretwork and spindles. The inside was no less grand, with rugs, plush sofas, velvet drapes, intricate paintings taller than Jakob, shiny woodwork, and fireplaces everywhere—even in their own bedrooms.
On sunny days, streets were filled with children, boys dressed like sailors or Little Lord Fauntleroy in knee pants and knickers and hats with streamers, and girls in white dresses with eyelet and organdy, pin tucks and lace, pinnies, hair bows bigger than their heads, and shoes always shining, always neat and new.
The Stewarts provided Jakob and Peter with nannies to clean and dress them, and tutors who quickly taught them English. Jakob discovered books—free books!—from the library, along with boxes full of books bought new just for them.
> One night after the boys had been there for several weeks, they sat down to dinner with the Stewarts. Candlelight flickered from chandelier candles and illuminated the room, which was dressed in the finest wallpaper available. The beef roast, carrots, and potatoes were cooked to perfection, and plenty of other sides and bread filled the center of the table. For the first time since their arrival in America, Jakob spoke.
“Please pass the potatoes.”
Mama Stewart gasped into a napkin she held to her lips.
After an uncomfortable silence, Papa Stewart grinned. “Well, Peter, pass your brother the potatoes.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter said, grinning too.
Unbeknownst to them, Jakob had been practicing, whispering English words under the bedcovers after the lights were turned down in the evenings.
Mama Stewart came around the table, the royal-blue taffeta of her dress rustling like a flock of doves. She knelt next to Jakob, who despite his newfound voice maintained the constancy of his stoic and somber expression. Harriet held his face in her hands as she had on the steps in New York City. Tears fell from her eyes. “Praise God! He has heard my prayers. He will redeem the years the locusts have eaten, dear Jakob. He is redeeming them even now.”
“Yes, Mama Stewart.” Jakob allowed her to hold him, unwilling to squelch her joy. It was not her affection he shrank from, after all. It was that she gave credit to God, whom he knew had nothing to do with his newfound voice. Jakob had merely listened to his tutors and practiced.
* He does not speak.
1994
South Haven, Michigan
CHAPTER 5
The back of Catherine and Jakob Stewart’s home faced Lake Michigan, and Nel stood on the back deck soaking in the mid-afternoon sun. After the stale air of the plane ride and the emotion of the last couple of days, she looked forward to the sunset that evening, which was sure to calm her nerves. She’d learned to love Santa Fe sunsets, too, the jutting, rolling angles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains browning, then blushing pink before the sun fell behind them, followed by a blazing display of fire-orange against the advancing cobalt sky. And yet as beautiful as those sunsets were, Nel never felt they compared to the gentle eventides on Lake Michigan, breezes rustling through branches of white oaks and black oaks, hickories and sugar maples, and the occasional beech. All the trees around the house that had seemed so small in her youth stretched tall and arched over her as if welcoming her home. Her favorite was the oak growing right outside her old bedroom, where she’d sat for hours on the window seat, curled in her pajamas as she watched the birds flit back and forth, bringing sticks and stiff pieces of dead beach grasses, kite strings, and hair ribbons and weaving nests in the crooks of the branches. Eggs had appeared almost magically, and then even more magically, baby birds from within them. She remembered the patchy spots of fuzz on their translucent skin, their shaking, open mouths stretched wide, their papery-thin gullets straining toward the sky, and their mother’s return with food.
Well after Nel moved to Santa Fe, Catherine had gone back to school and achieved a Master Gardener certificate. The combination of all the species of trees on the Stewarts’ property demonstrated her gift for landscape and gardening as they created a spectacular display of variegated colors every fall. No wonder so many artists paint autumn at the lakeside, Nel thought as she pulled her sweater tighter. Northeastern gusts whipped around her. She shivered and wondered for a fleeting moment what Sam was doing in Santa Fe. Probably enjoying a round of golf or tennis at the club, although they’d had a few cold spells there as well.
Catherine was going to play tennis with a group of ladies from the church on the spring day in 1975 when Nel announced her plans to leave South Haven. Nel remembered the day as if it were a deckle-edged photo, yellowed and cracked in the center. She remembered her mother’s dress—white and sleeveless, cut short above the knees, ruffled hems adorned with navy-blue rickrack—and her navy sweater, arms tied in a graceful knot around her neck. She remembered her own extrawide bell-bottom jeans and a loose shirt embroidered by a local Potawatomi woman. Her VW Bug was parked in front of the house with her belongings stuffed into the trunk and filling up the back. The front seat was reserved for her last suitcase and collection of music tapes.
“You’re up early, Nel-Belle,” Catherine had said, raising an eyebrow at her then twenty-three-year-old daughter eating Cheerios at the kitchen table.
“Hoped to catch you before you left.”
“Oh?”
Nel had understood her mother’s surprise at a request for conversation, something that had been strained and lacking among the three of them—Nel, Catherine, and Jakob—ever since she’d returned from her hospitalization a few weeks earlier. It was bad enough that she lived at home. Her other friends had found apartments when they’d come back from college, or homes if they, as most of them (and their parents) planned, had found spouses in college. She had neither a spouse nor an apartment, the first of which had eluded her as she spent weekend after weekend of her college years with different guys, rarely hooking up with any of them—even the ones she liked—for more than a couple of consecutive weekends.
She’d been a combined art history and business major at DePauw University, a small liberal-arts school in Indiana. The degree, she knew, was pretty impractical for a woman in the 1970s. She was supposed to have been a teacher or a nurse, something that would’ve allowed her to follow the traditional path of marriage, then children, then growing old with a successful husband. Thanks to a professor who’d shared her affection for stones and jewelry, she’d found a spot of unused space in the art building where she could spend as many hours as she wished learning to solder and bend, shape and cut, and pound age into shiny new metals to create rings and pendants, settings and wraps. Friends and neighbors back in South Haven raised their eyebrows when she explained she wanted to be a jewelry artist, but her parents had thankfully encouraged her to follow her passion. To the chagrin of the skeptics, after graduation she had found a job teaching art appreciation and art history at a nearby private high school. But to her disappointment, the pay wasn’t enough for her to live on her own. Even so, living at home wasn’t so bad. The lake inspired her art. And if she were honest, she’d enjoyed the time with her parents.
Tom Parrish, a theater teacher at the high school where she worked, broke her long streak of uncommitted relationships. As she prepared for the start of the first semester, he’d helped her carry boxes of old art-history books, framed poster prints of Cézanne, Matisse, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and other teaching accoutrements up three flights to her non-air-conditioned classroom. A native of Long Island complete with the big-city accent and in his midthirties, Tom seemed like everything the guys—boys, really—she’d known in college were not: sophisticated, established, and focused on the deeper meaning of life. David Mamet, Dostoyevsky, Antonin Artaud, and Shakespeare lined his classroom bookshelves, and he’d brought along a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance on their first date, a picnic lunch on the beach of Van Buren State Park, sand dunes on one side of them and the setting sun on the other as he read to her and they contemplated why, indeed, it’s so bad to be misunderstood, and how, in Emerson’s words, “nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
The teenage girls in the halls had gawked and giggled at Tom, blushing if he smiled back at them, and the ones in his classes wrangled over front-row seats. Nel’s physical attraction to him had been immediate, as had his to her. He’d taken her to his apartment—a studio above a local diner called the Onion, the smell of which lived up to its name. Inside the apartment, walls covered in tie-dyed tapestries, Tom lit some incense and a joint, and they took turns smoking and making out while Jim Croce and Bob Dylan crooned on his stereo in the background. They slept together every chance they had after that, and for the most part that autumn, Nel was careful to make sure either she or he, or both, took precautions. But not
hing was fail-safe, and by November her period was late enough she’d begun to worry. The positive pregnancy test had resulted in Tom hightailing it out of Nel’s life—he moved back to the East Coast; Nel didn’t know where. And everything that happened after that, including the ultimate loss of the baby and hospitalization, resulted in Nel deciding to leave South Haven.
Jakob had left much earlier that spring morning for the Brake-All factory. Nel had waited for him to leave to announce her plans to Catherine. If there was anything she couldn’t handle, it was disappointing her father more than she already had with the news of the pregnancy and late miscarriage.
“I’m leaving. After I finish packing the car.” She’d dabbed at milk left on the corner of her mouth by the last spoonful of cereal.
Had her mother dropped her racquet? She couldn’t remember. She did know Catherine’s response was sudden and devastating, and she recalled her mother running toward her, eyes full of tears, embracing her, rocking her as she had when she was a little girl.
“Oh, my baby,” she’d gasped into Nel’s long hair, straight and near waist length at the time, and as dark as a raven’s wing. Then she’d pulled back, wiped her eyes, and grasped Nel by the shoulders. “But I suppose I knew weeks ago that you would.”
Tears had filled Nel’s own eyes. She thought she’d feel relief when she told her mother, but instead she had felt more afraid and uncertain than ever.
“Where are you going to go? Chicago?” Her mother sat beside her at the table, and Nel noticed her hands shaking slightly as she toyed with the edge of an orange linen napkin, hand embroidered with an owl on one corner.
Nel hesitated. Chicago might’ve been the logical choice, with the Art Institute and plenty of friends from both college and high school there. “No … Santa Fe. There’s an artist colony there—several, in fact.”