This good grace served the Hamiltons well; society matrons never mentioned the fallen family who’d negotiated capital in exchange for the future Mrs. Hamilton.
(Mr. Hamilton had for once caught the wind, and when he bothered to go out, he kept his wife at home.)
The Hamiltons were so discreet that people were only sure of one child, Josephine, whose birth was announced in the Times. More slipped into the world unannounced—once in a while, someone’s nanny saw two girls coming from the Hamilton house—but it was impossible to tell how many there were, and after long enough, people stopped wondering.
There were so many—he was trying so hard for a son—and eventually it seemed gauche, tenement crowding in a respectable house. It would be an embarrassment to keep dragging them out into society like a magician with scarves.
(Mr. Hamilton could not have made use of his daughters as much as he could have of sons, but that was a subtler game that required savvy positioning on the field of play: more experience than he had, more tricks than his unlucky wife would have known.
He was a man of the old age, where daughers were meant to be retiring; he simply retired them.)
It was a shame, thought some of the sons who spent more than they should and could use some Hamilton money; it was wise, thought some of the fathers whose daughters had taken to smoking. Mothers were happiest. The girls would be married or not, mothers thought, and there was no need to ask questions and stir up extra young ladies; plenty of daughters needed marrying off without some Hamiltons dragging their dowries into it.
• • • • • •
No one ever told Jo about her family. All they told her was she must behave without question, because it was expected of her.
She heard some things. She knew they had money; she knew her mother was sad, and had been better off than this, once; she knew no one wanted to hear a word out of girls who were nothing but trouble.
She only saw her mother if her mother was well enough to come up to the fourth floor and smile and touch the tops of their heads as they stood, marveling.
She rarely was. (She was always sick, or made sick, or too sad to be well.) And on those visits she was pale, with dark circles around her eyes and lines drawn tight around her mouth, as if she’d been forbidden even to smile.
Jo believed it of her. Jo felt sorry for her. But Jo never ran for her like Lou and Ella did.
Jo guessed even then that Mother’s purpose was to have a son, and she was kept from all other causes.
Them included.
The impression spread. At last, even Ella gave up running when she came, as if their mother was a bad penny. (Jo regretted it—their mother’s face in that long moment before Ella broke down and went to embrace her.)
If only she’d have a boy already, Jo thought when she was feeling cruel. One son would be the end of all this trouble.
One son, and perhaps their father would be pleased enough to let her smile, or speak, or speak for them.
Every time her mother was confined, Jo thought, This will free her; this time, for sure, it will be a boy.
But beds kept filling their bedrooms, so it never was.
• • • • • •
Soon there were four. Then six. The rooms on the upper floors filled and filled.
Jo was almost ten and felt years older, surrounded by her mother’s children.
Lou, nearly eight, was a little flame, from her copper hair to her bloodcurdling shrieks. Six-year-old Ella was as placid as their mother, the same golden hair and water-pale eyes. Doris, hardly old enough to have a mind (five years old—a baby), followed Lou with a frown, playing at the edges of Lou’s puzzles, screaming when Lou screamed.
“You must take care of your sisters,” the nannies said, and Jo always said, “All right,” without knowing what they meant.
They needed no care. They were always at home. The governess came for lessons, and their clothes came by catalog, and they had the attic if they wanted to leave their rooms. There was nothing for Jo to do but watch them coming and going, and worry.
They went out in pairs with a nanny for walks and air, past a museum they never went into, but there was no call for them to play outside, or meet other girls, or go in a crowd, or see the city.
“If you misbehave outside, would you like to tell your father why you’ve been so bad?” the nannies said, or, “There are wolves in this city who eat wicked girls.”
As they grew older, it was the nannies’ insistence, and not their stories, that frightened the girls, and fear won out.
Some terrors were fiction; some were not.
There were no monsters in the streets, but if they misbehaved, their father would be angry.
They didn’t know quite what it meant, but whenever they asked their nannies what the punishment would be the nannies went silent, and the girls all knew that they must never, never cross their father.
• • • • • •
For Jo’s tenth birthday, her mother was in bed (a son, both nannies were praying), and her nanny was instructed to bring Jo to the theater to celebrate—after the lights went down, so they wouldn’t be noticed.
(Their mother, invisible as she was, sometimes effected little intercessions in strange places, where their father could be most easily convinced it didn’t matter.)
At the opera house, Jo sat forward, her head on her folded hands along the balcony. The nanny frowned.
“If you’re tired,” she said, “we’ll go home.”
But Jo was the farthest from sleep she’d ever been, sitting in the uncomfortable plush seat, feeling the violins under her hands, the rumble of voices floating up from the figures onstage, who did this and that wild thing, and pretended to love one another.
And in between grand gestures, there were parties, and dancers took the stage.
It was a reel in the second act, and a waltz in the third, a half-open embrace, the women grasping their skirts in one hand and spinning in their partners’ arms.
In those minutes Jo woke deeply, eyes wider with every clasped hand and turning head and reaching arm.
The slippers of the women flicked through their skirts as they danced, as they sank and rose with the music, and Jo, watching them, was so tightly alive she thought her heart would pound through her chest.
• • • • • •
Lou was awake when they came home. (Lou was always awake.)
While Jo got shepherded inside their room and shoved into a nightgown and scrubbed, Lou’s jealous, gleaming eyes followed her.
Jo wasted no time. As soon as the nanny had closed the door on them, Jo was out of bed, pulling back the curtains to let in the light and clearing away dolls and books in careless handfuls.
“Those are mine,” hissed Lou. “Leave them. I’ll hit you.”
“Come down,” Jo said, like the bed was a citadel.
“No.”
“Come down,” said Jo, “and I’ll teach you to dance.”
After a long moment, Lou slunk out of bed and stood in the center of the room, frowning, her arms crossed.
“Liar,” she said, but when Jo held out her hands, Lou unfolded her arms and took hold.
• • • • • •
They were so busy practicing steps, and making up the ones Jo didn’t remember, that they didn’t sleep. It was the first time Jo had thought of Lou as a partner and not an interloper.
At dawn they called Ella and Doris to make a proper square for the reel, and the day (minus two resentful half hours walking in the fresh air) was given over.
They asked the nannies, quietly, if they knew any dances. The older one told them never to mind dancing, since that was for loose girls. The younger nanny waited until the older one was gone, and then she sat on Ella’s bed and said, “I can show you the polka.”
So that night was the polka. The next night was back to the waltz, and after that the reel. After a week they had grown tired of them.
“We should have real lessons,” said Doris, a
fter the third time Lou snapped at her about being in the wrong place.
“Yes,” breathed Ella. “Lessons! Oh, how divine.”
Ella had picked up some style from the older nanny, who went to the pictures too much.
“I don’t know,” said Jo.
Dancing was outside, and outside they must never go, for fear of being overwhelmed, or being overwhelming.
Lou raised her eyebrows. “Why not? You afraid of him?”
“Yes,” said Jo. “Aren’t you?”
None of them answered.
• • • • • •
But despite everything, once the Hamilton girls set their minds to something they were hard to shake.
It was a mistake from the start. At ten years old, Jo was already drawn and solemn, with eyes like flint chips. She was tall and had come up looking tough; none of it was calculated to please.
Their father had a weakness for beauty and docility, which Jo might have known if they’d seen their mother when their father first married her, before she began to disappoint him.
Better to send Ella, who had their mother’s eyes, who would have smiled through her lashes; their father might have given in to anything she wanted.
But they didn’t know, and they sent Jo, who knocked on their father’s study door like a solicitor and asked for dance lessons.
“I think not, Josephine,” he said. “Dance lessons are expensive, and you have no use for them.”
That seemed to be stacking one insult on another.
“Still, we would love lessons,” she said. “Father.”
He seemed to think for a moment. “Perhaps for your birthday.”
“Perhaps?”
“For your birthday,” he promised.
• • • • • •
After her eleventh birthday, Jo learned never to take a man at his word.
• • • • • •
At first it was just Jo and Lou and Ella and Doris in the tight knot of the reel, but the sisters kept growing older, and another one always came.
With so many trapped in the upper floors, it hardly surprised Jo how often they fought, or how fiercely. When you didn’t have one room to yourself in the whole world, you laid claim to every inch of whatever you could.
(For them, the wide, winding town house was all narrow halls and narrow beds, in rooms that got narrower by the day, and the board in the center of the floor demarcated for each girl the line that, in honor, her sister could never cross.)
Left to themselves they were a pack of wolves, but when Jo summoned them they filed like soldiers into Jo and Lou’s room, on the top floor, where they were least likely to be heard. They slid off their shoes and lined them up along the wall, and waited for Jo to call steps.
Once, early on, during a fight about the waltz, Lou called Jo “General.” It stuck.
Later, Lou would tease her about getting big ideas.
It was more as though the name slid into the empty spaces between Jo’s fears and habits (she was young, but she was already a jailer). “General” was the mortar that let her stand in both places at once and not fall.
By then Jo was fourteen and looked older than some of their first nannies, with the same air of being overstrict and underpaid.
When she walked down the back stairs with Lou one afternoon, that year’s cook never even looked up. All the nannies came that way when they brought those upstairs girls for exercise—no need for them to make a spectacle of themselves, going through the front way.
(A young maid, new to the house like the maids always were, might have looked up as they passed, and seen two girls close to her age, and thought, Poor things.)
• • • • • •
They saw a picture.
Jo hardly remembered it; the walk to the theater on Broadway was too long by half, and the park was a wilderness, and the streets were all a rush of carriages and cars and people skittering past them, and Jo raced through the middle of it all thinking only, We have to make it safely there.
And once they were inside the sheltering dark, she thought more about getting home than the movie, and she was watching Lou more than the screen. Lou was smiling, for the first time Jo could remember.
She only knew to pay attention when Lou said, “Aha.”
It was a foxtrot. The leading man was supposed to be drunk, but it was the right idea—enough for Jo.
The leading man closed his eyes, and the heroine curled her fingers tight around his fingers.
“It’s lovely,” Jo said.
“Doris will hate it.”
“She can hate it after she’s learned it right.”
When the wedding proposal came at last and the leads kissed delightedly, Jo watched with a pang in her chest. It was over, and she’d have to take Lou back to the house, because what else in the world could she do?
“Is that what women wear to get married these days?” Lou asked, making a face.
Jo looked at the door and sighed.
• • • • • •
They snuck back into the house just before dusk, where five girls were lined up on Jo’s bed, fighting and fidgeting and waiting to dance.
“Foxtrot,” Jo said, and they grinned.
• • • • • •
Jo and Lou kept it up.
They slipped into theaters inside larger groups—harder to check tickets. Sometimes, when it was slim pickings, Lou flirted their way in. For someone who’d never really met men, she was an excellent flirt.
They sat in the sweet, sticky heat of the cinema, toes tingling as the piano rattled the floor. They brought home ragtime, the grizzly bear, the waltz.
(“A new waltz?” Ella sighed. “I liked the old one.”
Doris groaned.
“That one’s out of date,” said Lou. “This one’s just like the old one, only with less dress.”
“And more hands,” said Jo, and Ella went pink.)
• • • • • •
The nannies and the governess began to be dismissed. They had chosen the girls’ clothes and books, and with them gone, Jo decided Father would have to be convinced, somehow, to give them a living allowance.
When Doris said, “So who do we send?” Lou said, “Not Jo. She’s been in those trenches already, for all the good it did us.”
(Lou tried to sound clever; sometimes it came out bitter.)
But Jo had learned a thing or two since the first time. It was Ella who went.
Jo coached her to stand with her toes pointing inward and knock on the doorjamb with one timid fist.
It worked; Ella was a natural actress.
A year later, it was five-year-old twins Hattie and Mattie who climbed his chair and teased until he almost laughed and agreed to give them pocket money for magazines, when they went for walks.
Jo saved. “You never know what you’ll need,” she said, as if they’d break out and hop a train at any moment.
But the younger girls bought candy, and most of the older girls bought rouge and lipstick. Doris bought a booklet on the canals of New York, to general bafflement.
Lou hoarded her money for weeks and then bought a cigarette holder.
“You never know what you’ll need,” she said to Jo, and smiled, her mouth a little thin.
(It stung, and it must have showed; when Jo turned back to her book, Lou sat beside her, and rested her head on Jo’s shoulder, and turned the pages.
How Lou knew Jo had finished reading, Jo never figured. Lou had a knack when it came to Jo.)
• • • • • •
At last there were twelve, from Jo all the way down to Violet, who was born after Jo had already turned thirteen and who still slept in the nursery.
As soon as Violet was out of diapers, their father dismissed the remaining nanny.
“The older girls,” he said, “can watch the others.”
The decree made its way through the house before it came at last, by accident, to the girls it was about.
Jo heard it from
Nanny Harris herself, who was giving the littlest girls, Rose and Lily and Violet, a last scold as she packed.
“And because you’ve been so bad,” Nanny Harris was saying, “I have to go away, and where will I be when you want someone to tuck you in at night?”
“You’ll be lying to other children, I expect,” said Jo from the landing. “Girls, come down.”
Harris packed the rest of her things alone, with Doris standing guard in the doorway.
Back in her room, Jo put on a dress and combed her hair until she looked respectable.
She had decided to speak to their mother.
It was terrifying—it had been ten years at least since she’d seen her mother’s room, and almost a year since she’d seen her mother, coming into the nursery to try to smile at the toddling Violet—but these were desperate times.
This couldn’t be. The older sisters couldn’t replace the nannies as overseers for the younger ones. It wasn’t fair to force them into this captivity forever; surely even their mother, who saw so little, could see that.
But when Jo had summoned the courage to go down the front stairs to the second floor and knock on their mother’s door, the frothy white bed was made up, and the inlaid oak wardrobes were empty.
That was how Jo found out their mother had, at last, given up on producing a son for the Hamilton patriarch.
• • • • • •
Jo let herself cry for two minutes, to mourn a mother she’d hardly known, who could do no good for her daughters ever again.
Then she set it aside.
(She set everything aside. There was some hollow place inside her that grew and grew.)
Jo called Lou and Ella and told them, so they would have the crying over with.
Ella was tenderhearted enough to weep for their mother and not for herself. Lou dashed tears from her eyes as if ridding herself of a bad habit.
“We could tell them she ran away,” suggested Ella, after the first flood.
Jo said, “I don’t want to give them impossible ideas.”
Lou said, “Then divide them. Let’s get it over with.”
Jo spoke to Hattie and Mattie, and stoic Rebecca. Araminta and Doris fell to Lou; Araminta took it badly, mostly because it came from Lou, and Jo wished later that she’d known enough to give her to Ella instead.
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club: A Novel Page 2