The Chaperone

by Laura Moriarty

  “Can I help you?”

  She turned. A young nun with a faint dark mustache was hurrying up the steps, followed by a man in overalls carrying a wooden crate.

  “Oh. Yes,” Cora said, climbing the steps as well. “I… I’d like to speak with someone.”

  “Regarding?” The nun looked at her pleasantly, taking one side of the crate while the man, still bearing most of its weight, took a ring of keys from the pocket of his overalls.

  Cora hesitated. But the nun was clearly in a hurry.

  “I used to live here,” she blurted out. “As a child.”

  The man, who wore wire-rim spectacles, glanced at Cora as he turned a key in the lock. He nodded at the nun, took the crate, and carried it inside.

  “I see,” the nun said, wiping one hand against the other. Rushed as she was, her expression seemed pointedly neutral; it was impossible to tell if Cora had shocked her, or if grown orphans came by every day. “I’m afraid we have Mass now. We’ll all be upstairs until one. You could come back tomorrow, either before twelve-thirty or after one.”

  Cora worked to hide her disappointment. After all these years, she was still that conditioned to show only calm acceptance to a nun, to not talk back, to not be disagreeable or show ingratitude, even with the look on her face. But that was ridiculous. She wasn’t a child now. She was an adult, a married woman. She had nothing to fear.

  “Could I just wait inside?” Cora smiled pleasantly, masking her own surprise. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to come back,” she added. “And I’ve come a very long way.”

  The nun nodded, and Cora followed her up the stairs and through the door. The entry was small and painted white, with a stairway to the right and, straight ahead, a long hallway leading to a window-bright kitchen. Cora could see part of a stove from where she stood. The cookie smell from outside was gone; now she only smelled bleach.

  “Thank you, Joseph,” the nun called out, though the man had disappeared. She shut the front door, turning the lock. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be late.” She was already moving up the stairs, using both hands to lift the hem of her habit. “Just go down the hallway and through the kitchen to the dining hall. You’re welcome to sit and wait there.”

  Cora stood in the entry, listening to a muffled piano coming from somewhere above. The wooden crate had been set by the door. It was full of girls’ shoes, she saw now, scuffed and used, each pair held together by a rubber band. She looked at the front door, the brass knob in the middle of an oval-shaped plate with beaded edges. Nothing about it was familiar. But then, it wouldn’t be. It wasn’t as if she’d spent much time by the front door, coming and going as she pleased.

  She moved down the hallway to the kitchen, the smell of bleach growing stronger. She passed two doors, both closed, and spaced evenly apart. She still heard the piano overhead, and now, the voices of girls singing. Sing, my tongue, the Virgin’s trophies / Who for us her Maker bore. Cora went still, looking up at the low ceiling. She knew this song, remembered it. Without thinking, she moved her lips to the words. For the curse of old inflicted / Peace and blessing to restore.

  The kitchen was unfamiliar. Both the sink and the green enamel stove looked modern, newer. Three cylindrical containers of bulk oats sat on a shelf next to the icebox. She almost laughed. After all these years, they were still serving oatmeal. Maybe the nuns put sugar or syrup in it now. Or maybe they didn’t still serve it twice a day, every day. In any case, when she was here, she hadn’t minded the oatmeal. She’d been happy for anything that eased her hunger, even if for only a few hours. And she hadn’t known anything better—that had helped. But after just a few days at the Kaufmanns’, eating scrambled eggs and potatoes and roasted chicken and peaches, she’d decided she would never eat oatmeal again. It didn’t matter if Mother Kaufmann put brown sugar in it, or butter, or syrup. It was the texture Cora remembered. She hadn’t had a bowl since.

  Through the open doorway to her right, she saw the ends of two straight-edged tables. And benches, and light coming in through square, cross-barred windows. She walked into the dining room, sweat cooling on her forehead. The room was smaller than she remembered, and the four tables, arranged two by two, weren’t as long as the ones where she had eaten all those silent meals with the other girls and the nuns. But they were the same tables, of course. Everything seemed large when she was small. They’d had to eat in shifts, she remembered, the younger girls before the older.

  She sank onto a bench, her gloved hands resting cautiously on the table.

  “Hello.”

  She turned. The man in overalls had entered from a door on the other side of the room. He carried a folded ladder to the center, just beneath a small circle of exposed wires. Before he opened the ladder, he stopped, the spectacles glinting in the sunlight.

  “You are fine?”

  He had some kind of accent. She wasn’t sure what. He had an angular face, his hair thinning and blond.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” She coughed, her throat dry. “I’m just waiting.”

  “I can get you something to drink?”

  “Oh. Yes. Some water would be wonderful. Thank you.”

  She heard him opening the ladder, and then his footsteps to the kitchen, the keys jangling in his pocket. She removed her gloves. When she heard him running the water, she placed her hands on the table, her fingertips tracing the groove of the wood. After every meal, they’d wiped the tables down with boiled rags. She looked out the back window. The grass in the yard was summer dead, and there was just a stump where the big tree had been.

  The handyman returned, and a glass of water was set in front of her.

  “Thank you,” she said, glancing up.

  He smiled, not moving away. She looked down at her hands. She’d taken Floyd Smithers’s advice and left her wedding ring back at the apartment.

  “I’m fine now, really,” she said. She waited until he had walked back to the ladder to lift the glass to her lips with both hands. As soon as the cold water touched her lips, her body seemed to take over, and she drank it all, gulp after gulp, her eyes closed, her head tilted back.

  The handyman, up on the ladder now, started to whistle.

  She turned away, setting the empty glass on the table. She didn’t wish to be rude, but she didn’t want to talk. She opened her purse and took out The Age of Innocence, more as a buffer to any conversation than an actual desire to read. She couldn’t read right now. She could only stare at the pages, trying to calm herself.

  The handyman stopped whistling. Without thinking, she looked up. He nodded at her book and started to say something, but before he could, she turned her whole body away from him, staring down at the pages, the swimming, unread words. She glanced at her watch. It was already a quarter till one. Her fingers tingled, and she felt a rushing in her arms, as if her very blood knew where she was.

  Sister Delores. Cora recognized her at once—the high cheekbones, the blue eyes—and had to work not to gasp. Of course. The nuns who had been old when she was a child would all be dead by now. But Sister Delores was only middle-aged, with deep lines between her faint brows, and especially around her mouth. If anything, even in the austere black habit, she looked less frightening than in memory. She seemed smaller, like the tables, and the dining room itself. Cora wondered if she still carried the paddle.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, leaning a little across the desk. Her voice was the same, low and commanding. “I used to think I would remember the face of each girl who lived within these walls.” She shook her head, peering at Cora.

  They were in an office, behind one of the two doors that opened to the hallway. Just above the nun’s head was a framed painting of Jesus in Gethsemane, and, beside that, a framed photograph of the new Pope. The wooden desk was free of clutter, with just a typewriter, a pen, and a stack of paper weighted down with a silver cross. The only window was somewhat obscured by a long lace curtain, which fluttered a little with the warm breeze, its patter
ned shadow flickering on the hardwood floor.

  “I don’t expect you to remember me,” Cora said. In truth, she was glad Sister Delores had no memory of her as a child. She had introduced herself as Cora Kaufmann from McPherson, Kansas, not Mrs. Alan Carlisle from Wichita, who had already pestered them with three letters, who had already been told no.

  “You’re in Kansas now, you say.” The blue eyes focused on Cora’s. “You went out on the train, then?”

  Cora nodded. Overhead, she heard water moving through pipes, and the shuffling of many feet. The girls were getting started on the laundry, taking the soiled clothes and sheets from the bags. All these years, while she had lived with the Kaufmanns and gone to school, and then married Alan, and brought up the boys in Wichita, back here, the laundry bags had still been arriving every day, at the same time, with different small hands doing the scrubbing and the hanging.

  “Was your placement good?” The nun winced, as if preparing for a blow.

  “It was, Sister. Wonderful people chose me. I couldn’t have been more fortunate.”

  Sister Delores closed her eyes and smiled. “Praise God. That’s nice to hear.” She opened her eyes. “That’s been true, more often than not, of the girls we’ve sent out, the ones we’ve heard from. Not always. But more often than not.”

  “You’ve heard from other girls who went out on the train?”

  “A few.”

  “Mary Jane? I don’t remember her last name. But she was here when I was, and she was on the train with me. Or Little Rose?”

  “No. Just a few girls, I said. Are you still with the Church?”

  Cora considered lying. But even now, the blue eyes scared her. Through the lace curtain, she saw the shadow of a seagull on the sill.

  “No, Sister. They weren’t Catholics, the people who took me.”

  Sister Delores frowned. Her left hand had a tremble. She stopped it by laying her right hand over it on the desk. “They were supposed to put you all in Catholic homes.” She brought her hands beneath her chin and gave Cora an accusing look. “They hardly ever did, though. Isn’t that nice? Our own children, who we fed and clothed, could now be donning white hoods against us.”

  Cora shook her head. “I’ve had nothing to do with white hoods.”

  “What church do you attend now?”

  “Presbyterian. My adoptive parents were Methodists, but now I’m Presbyterian.”

  It was as if she’d answered First Church of Satan. Sister Delores stared.

  “Well.” The nun again rested her hands on her desk. “We got wise to what they were pulling. Now we send out our own trains. The Church does, I mean.”

  “Still? Children still go out on trains?”

  “Certainly. When we get financing. It’s been a very good program for most.” She turned her hands over, showing her palms. “You’re sitting there in very fine clothes. You just said you had a positive experience.”

  “I did,” Cora said. “I’m grateful.”

  It was true. She would be the first to say how lucky she was. If not for the train, she could have grown up here, her hands ruined from laundry, her mind dull from lack of school. She knew the train had given her an easier life, and more importantly, the Kaufmanns. But that had just been luck.

  “I want to learn about my birth parents, Sister, who and where I came from.”

  “I can’t help you with that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The records are confidential.”

  “You have records?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t share them with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Those are the rules.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no good can come of that knowledge.” There was the hard look Cora remembered, the blue eyes unblinking and still. “Miss Kaufmann, it’s likely that your parents are dead, and that they were dead before you even came here. What good would knowing more do you?”

  “I want to know,” Cora said. “Even if they’re dead.” She smiled. “Actually, I’d like to learn more about my Catholic roots.”

  The nun’s eyes narrowed. “You can do that on your own.”

  “I want to know who I am.” Cora looked at her lap. She didn’t want to beg, but she would. “Who I would have been, without charity.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re a child of God. You’re you. Do you need to find out the sad tale? Would it bring you real peace? No.” She made her hand flat, slicing it through the air. “It would do you no practical good. And if they’re not dead, then that’s a bigger problem. We don’t betray the birth mothers’ privacy. If they’re alive, they don’t want to be found.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  She leaned back in her chair, sighing. “You want me to be frank, Miss Kaufmann? I’ll be frank. If your mother was alive when she gave you up, you were likely conceived in some sort of sordidness. Drinking. Drugs. Adultery. Prostitution. Rape. Do you want me to go on?” She sat up straight, her eyes still on Cora’s. “That wouldn’t be your fault. No one is saying that it would be. That was the whole point of caring for you, and certainly the point of sending you out on the train. Consider the trouble that people went to, the expense, to get you girls into decent homes so you could have decent lives. What? Are you a homing pigeon for misery? You want to undo all the time and money that was spent on your behalf, coming back here to find the very squalor we lifted you out of?”

  Cora swallowed. She shouldn’t be scared, not of the annoyance in the nun’s gaze, the sureness of her questions. She was an adult now. A married woman. She could talk back.

  “But some of the girls just had sick parents,” she said, her voice steady. “One girl’s mother was in the hospital. I remember. That’s not squalor. That’s sickness. What if she got better?”

  “She probably didn’t. And do you know why she was in the hospital? You don’t. Not really. What the girl was told and what was true may have been two different things. We would likely have spared a child knowing what would have been too much for her.”

  “But I’m not a child now,” Cora said. “I don’t want to be lied to.” She held the nun’s gaze, not looking away. She wanted her to understand. Nothing would be too much for her. Even if her parents were sordid, or mad, or drunks, or dead, she wanted to know who they were. And they couldn’t be all bad. She saw them—she was sure she saw them—in her own boys. Earle was quiet and thoughtful like his father, but where had Howard gotten his pluck, his daring? No one in Alan’s family had a grin like that. And where had Earle gotten his talent for drawing? She didn’t care about sordidness or squalor. She knew the story would likely be ugly. But she wanted to know it. She did.

  “When I was first brought here,” she said calmly, “I wasn’t an infant. I was already walking, and I knew my name. The older girls told me. I was chubby, they said. I’d been cared for. I have a memory of a woman holding me, speaking to me kindly. And in some other language, not English.”

  “Then hold on to that.” The nun shrugged. “Know that you were loved. Don’t soil it with details that will only ruin what you remember. And consider your adoptive parents, who you just told me were the best you could have hoped for. Why betray the people who cared for you as if you were their own?”

  Cora looked at the lace curtain through blurred eyes. It was a smart tactic, shaming her with the Kaufmanns. But it wasn’t fair. Hadn’t Mr. Kaufmann himself taken her to the cemetery in McPherson to show her the graves of the Kaufmann parents and grandparents who had settled the land and taught him to farm? And hadn’t Mother Kaufmann told her about her grandfather the abolitionist, so committed to his cause that he’d moved his Massachusetts family out to Kansas? Sister Delores was telling her bloodlines meant nothing, when most people’s entire lives were shaped by who their parents and grandparents were. Look at Louise. Myra wasn’t a dream mother by any stretch, but Louise had grown up so confident, so sure of what she was m
eant for.

  Sister Delores stood slowly, steadying herself by leaning on the desk. Cora understood. The interview was over. The answer was, and would be, no. Cora nodded, standing as well. There wasn’t anything else to do. It wouldn’t matter if she cried or laughed or screamed or got on her knees and begged.

  Cora managed a polite thank you. At least she had gotten this far. She was looking into the face of someone who had known her as a child, in the first home she remembered. Still, that was not what she had come for, and even as she followed the nun back into the hallway and to the front door, as obedient as the child she had been, she felt the same anger as when she’d received Sister Eugenia’s letter, back in Wichita. Who were these old women, with their cloistered lives, to tell her what she could and couldn’t know? What she needed and what she didn’t?

  “I see that you’re disappointed,” Sister Delores said. Her voice was softer now, but the pale eyes didn’t blink. “I understand that. But please know, my goal is to protect you. From yourself. You think you want to know more than you really do.”

  The front door opened, and the handyman walked in. He looked at Cora, right at her face, as if her distress was any of his concern. She lowered her gaze and moved by. And then, these were the facts: the sweet-smelling air as she stepped outside, and the sound of the door closing, and locking, behind her.

  NINE

  At intermission, Louise said that the problem with the Ziegfeld Follies was that she’d come with high expectations.

  “The comedy is good,” she told Cora, fingering the strand of beads around her neck. “But the chorus girls? Pretty faces and elaborate costumes. Boring. Maybe one or two girls are authentically beautiful. That’s it. I’ve never seen so many fake smiles.”