by Lynn Austin
“Well, I wasn’t sure when they first asked about her—I’ve had so many boarders over the years, you know. But now that I’ve met you, I’m positive. You look just like Christina.” She points to a plate of cookies on the table beside me. “Help yourself.”
“Thank you,” I reply, but considering my nervous stomach and the room’s odor, I don’t think I can eat. I clear my throat and say, “I would be grateful to hear anything you can remember about my mother, Mrs. Marusak. I was only three years old when she died.”
“They told me she drowned in a shipwreck?”
“Yes, that’s right. On her way home to Michigan.”
“Such a tragedy. And to think, I always urged her to go home.” She clicks her tongue as she settles into the sofa cushions. “Christina certainly knew how to work hard, even though she was just a tiny little thing—and very young. I figured she had lied to me about her age. She didn’t look twenty years old when she showed up at my door asking for a job.”
“Mama worked for you?”
“Yes, for about a year. I remember Christina because she was very different from the other young women who have worked for me over the years.”
“In what way?”
“She was kind to all the boarders and treated everyone, including me, with respect. I was reluctant to hire her at first. But my cook up and quit one morning, and so I hung a sign in the front window advertising for a new one. Not an hour later, Christina and her scoundrel of a boyfriend came knocking on my kitchen door… .”
Chapter 4
Mrs. Marusak
Cicero, Illinois
October 1871
The girl stood outside my kitchen door, her golden hair shining like sunlight. She was neatly dressed and well-groomed but so tiny I mistook her for a schoolgirl. “I’m here about the job as a cook,” she told me. “My name is Christina de Jonge.”
“Don’t waste my time. You’re a child and I have a house full of boarders to feed.” I went back inside, but she opened the screen door and followed me.
“I’m twenty years old. And I grew up with three older brothers and a hardworking father, so I know how to cook for hungry men. I have work experience, too. Back in Michigan, I worked as a maid in a very large house for a busy family.”
I was frazzled, trying to get dinner ready on time without any help, and I didn’t see that the pot of potatoes was about to boil over. Christina grabbed a kitchen towel and moved the pot to a cooler part of the cast iron stove. “Please, just give me a chance to show you what I can do,” she begged.
Meanwhile, the boyfriend hung around in the kitchen doorway, smoking a cigarette. “Close the screen door,” I hollered to him. “You’re letting all the flies in.”
Christina picked up a fork and stuck it in one of the potatoes to test it. “They’re done,” she said. “Would you like me to drain off the water?”
I needed help. It was a few days after the Great Chicago Fire, and my boardinghouse was stuffed to the rafters. I usually boarded only single men, but I had rented three of my largest rooms to families with children who had no place to go. Every bed in the attic dormitory was filled, and more young working men slept on the floor. They all needed to be fed. “Very well. I could use your help today, but I’m not making any promises. The sign stays in the window, and if someone more experienced comes along, I’ll have to let you go.”
“I understand.”
Christina put on an apron and set to work right away, plucking chickens out on the back stoop. I don’t know where the boyfriend went, but he disappeared while we made supper. Christina helped me serve it to a dining room full of hungry boarders, and she did a good job of it, too. The men all perked up when they saw a pretty young girl serving their dinner, and I began to wonder if I could charge more for rent with Christina brightening up the place.
“So, may I have the job?” she asked when she finished scrubbing the pots and pans after supper.
“For now. There’s a spare room behind the kitchen where my last cook slept. Your pay includes room and board.”
“What about Jack—my fiancé? Do you have a job or a spare bed for him?” He had reappeared around dinnertime, but I made him stay outside, and I didn’t offer him any food.
“The boardinghouse is full. I don’t even have a closet he can sleep in.” I had been boarding young men for nearly ten years and liked to think I was a good judge of character, but I didn’t like the looks of that young man from the very first time I saw him. He was a handsome devil, and he knew it. It was more than self-confidence, it was cockiness—as if the world owed him a lot more than it owed most people.
Christina fixed herself a plate after the dishes were washed, and she shared it with him outside on the back step. I could hear them talking through my open bedroom window, and I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to give her a hard time after she had worked at a demanding job all afternoon. “Why didn’t you fight harder to get me room and board in this place?” he growled.
“I tried, Jack, but Mrs. Marusak says that every bed is full. Some men are even sleeping on the floor.”
“You should have told her I was your husband, not your fiancé. Now where am I supposed to sleep?”
“Not with me,” she said firmly. “Not until we’re married.”
“Come on, Christina. You know I’m going to marry you as soon as we get settled. You have a job now, and—”
“And you still don’t.”
“Why did you run away from home with me if you don’t want to be with me? Don’t you love me?” he asked in a wheedling voice.
“I didn’t run away from home. I came with you because I love you, and I want to spend my life with you—and we both know that my parents never would have let us get married.”
“Right. Because I’m not religious like them. I thought Christians were supposed to be kind to strangers. What a bunch of hypocrites.”
“Don’t call them that. And they might have gotten used to you if you had tried a little harder.”
“There was no future for me in that dingy little town.”
“I know, and none for me, either, except to marry a suitable Dutch boy from church and have dozens of children. I want to see something of the world. I only wish we had known that Chicago had been destroyed, too. Everything is in such chaos. I was lucky to find this job.”
“Come here, beautiful… .”
It got quiet for several minutes and I assumed they were kissing. I was afraid I would have to fire her because I couldn’t have a servant in my household who engaged in immoral behavior. It was hard enough to keep tabs on a house full of young men, let alone my servants. But then I heard her say no in a very loud voice and then, “Good night, Jack. I have to get up before dawn to start the fires and make breakfast for the boarders.”
“Where am I supposed to sleep tonight?”
“Back where we’ve been staying, I guess.”
I was impressed with her character, and I decided then and there to take down the sign and hire her.
Christina was a hard worker, I’ll give her that. For someone as young as she was, she knew how to handle herself in the kitchen. As we worked together, I noticed that she pronounced certain words differently than most people in Chicago. “Where did you say you’re from?” I asked.
“I grew up in Michigan. My parents emigrated from the Netherlands.”
“From where? I’ve never heard of such a place. It sounds made-up, like a land from a storybook—the Netherlands.”
“You’re right,” she said, laughing. “It does.” She said no more about her family, and it was none of my business to pry.
The boyfriend showed up at the back door around suppertime the next day, looking as though he’d worked in a coal mine. “I got a job clearing away rubble from the fire,” he told Christina. “It’s the only work that’s available right now, but the foreman says if I work hard, he’ll eventually put me on a building crew.” She moved into his arms for a kiss, hugging him tightly, not carin
g that she would be smudged with soot.
While the boarders ate their dinner, I let Christina fill a basin with warm water and give Jack a sliver of leftover soap and a mirror so he could clean up outside in the summer kitchen. Chicago was in ruins, and I’d heard stories of how workers had to load all the charred bricks and burned timbers and twisted metal onto wagons and haul it to the edge of Lake Michigan to dump it in. Later, city officials would fill in the new shoreline with dirt and grass and trees, and make it into a nice park. But cleaning up after the fire was a terrible job! Every day Jack would come home all black and filthy, and Christina would haul hot water for him so he could wash up. He expected her to scrub all his dirty work clothes, too, yet she did it willingly because she loved him. I’ve never seen a girl so crazy in love with a man. Or so totally blind to the way he stood in front of that mirror, admiring himself as he preened like a dandy. Every night he pressured her to sleep with him, and every night she said no. She insisted on getting married.
On her first half-day off, Christina left with Jack in the morning and came back waving a piece of paper. “We got married today, Mrs. Marusak. Here’s the paper to prove it.”
“Congratulations. I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to quit.”
“Not at all. We’re trying to find a place of our own to rent, but I need to ask for a favor in the meantime. May Jack please stay here with me until we do?”
“That bed is hardly big enough for one person, let alone two.”
“We don’t mind,” Jack said. I didn’t like the way he grinned. “I tried to find a hotel room for our wedding night, but every place we could afford was already full.”
“Well … as long as it’s only temporary. And I need you to promise not to leave me and go work someplace else without giving fair notice like my last cook did.”
“I promise, Mrs. Marusak. I like working here.”
“Good. Then I suppose Jack can stay.” But I would have to keep my eyes open for another cook, knowing that Christina might soon get pregnant.
About a week later, she told me they’d found a one-room apartment to rent a dozen blocks from here. The owner had chopped up his regular apartments into even tinier spaces so he could rent to more people. But Christina was so crazy in love with Jack, I doubt if she even cared what the place looked like. She walked all the way here to cook for me every day, in all sorts of weather, arriving before dawn to fix breakfast for my boarders and staying until the last of the dishes were washed in the evening. She worked so hard I decided to let Jack eat here at the end of his workday so Christina wouldn’t have to go home and cook another meal for him on their tiny potbellied stove. That was all they had in the way of a kitchen, and there was no running water at all.
At first Christina would watch for Jack through the kitchen window every afternoon, and she would run outside to throw herself in his arms when he arrived, even when the weather was cold and snowy. I couldn’t get over the way she looked at him, like he was royalty or something. But he was just too handsome for his own good. And very hot-tempered, as it turned out. It seemed like he was always changing jobs and always running out of money. “Jack is working his way up in the world, Mrs. Marusak,” Christina told me when he quit working at the docks and started working for one of the railroads. “He’ll be president of the railroad company one day, you’ll see.” All I could do was nod my head and wish her well. He might have been making a good living, but I could tell by the way he staggered into my kitchen at suppertime that he was drinking a lot of it away. Some nights he didn’t show up for dinner at all. I had experience with men like him, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he broke Christina’s heart.
The change in Christina happened so gradually that I don’t suppose I took much notice of it until it was too late. It was like watching a flower slowly fade and wilt and droop, until the petals started falling one by one. By the time a year had nearly passed, Christina had changed into a different person. I remembered how sweet and cheerful she was at first, how feisty and full of life. But it was as if Jack had pulled a stopper from a sink full of water and drained all the life from her. She no longer smiled or hummed while she worked. And Jack no longer came to the boardinghouse for his dinner after work. Instead, Christina would pull off her apron and hurry home to cook for him the moment she finished her work.
Chicago had just commemorated the first anniversary of the Great Fire when Christina arrived at work one morning with a huge purple bruise beneath her eye. She tried to keep her face turned away so I wouldn’t see it, but I couldn’t help noticing. “I tripped and fell,” she told me, “and struck the edge of the table.” I knew better. I tried to guide her closer to the window so I could get a better look at the bruise, and she gasped as if I had punched her when I touched her rib cage.
“Christina, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.” She slid away from me and started cracking eggs into a bowl for the boarders’ breakfast.
“Listen, I’m fond of you, Christina. You’re a sweet girl and a good worker. I know it’s none of my business, but if your husband did that to you, you need to leave him and go back home to your family.”
“I would never leave Jack. He’s my husband.”
“Any man who lays a hand on a woman doesn’t deserve her loyalty. Tell me, did your father ever treat your mother that way?”
“I told you, I fell down.” She hurried out the back door to bring in another load of wood for the fire.
I let it go the first time. But I noticed that she had a lot more “accidents” in the weeks after that. I even saw a set of deep bruises on her upper arm that looked exactly like a man’s handprint. Then one day she limped into work as if she ached all over. She had another black eye and her left wrist was so swollen and bruised she couldn’t hold on to anything. I sent for the local doctor, and he came and put a splint on it. He thought her wrist might be broken.
“Enough is enough, Christina,” I said after the doctor left. “Just because you stood in front of a justice of the peace with Jack Newell doesn’t give him the right to do this to you.”
Christina fell into my arms, weeping.
“I don’t know what to do to make him love me again.”
“He’s not worthy of your love. Jack Newell is a brute, and he isn’t going to change. You’re only what—twenty years old? My advice is for you to leave him and go back home.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Why not? No decent parents would want their daughter to be treated this way.”
“You don’t understand. I’m from a very tight-knit community, a very religious one. Everyone knows each other’s business. I defied the church’s teaching and went against everything my parents taught me when I ran off with Jack. I’m too ashamed to go home. Besides, I don’t even know if my parents would take me back.”
“Well, then. Even if you don’t want to go home, it doesn’t mean you have to stay with Jack.”
“But what else can I do?”
“Go pack your clothes right now while he’s at work, and move in here. There’s still a bed for you in the back.”
“He’ll come looking for me. And he’ll be furious.” I saw fear in her eyes where there was once adoration, and I could have murdered that man myself.
“I’ll hide you here. I have a couple of boarders who will be happy to help you get rid of him. They all love you, Christina. You brought sunshine into this place, but Jack Newell has stolen all the life from you.”
In the end, Christina agreed. She left everything behind in the apartment except her clothes and moved into my back room again. That night Jack came looking for her, and he was roaring drunk. I locked all the doors and didn’t answer him or let him inside. At first he stood outside Christina’s window and pleaded with her to come back. “It will never happen again, Christina, I swear. I’ll never take another drink, either. Please! I love you! I can’t live without you.”
I was afraid she would give in,
so I asked two of my burliest boarders to go outside and kick him off my property. What followed was a terrible scene with Jack cursing and raging and threatening to club the men with a chunk of firewood. “She’s my wife! She belongs with me!” he yelled.
By now several of my boarders had joined the first two in the shouting match. One of them had a brother who was a Chicago policeman, and he threatened to send for him if Jack didn’t leave. He finally left, but he returned on several more nights after that, drunk and bellowing. He had the whole neighborhood in an uproar, not to mention my boarders.
“I’m scared all the time,” Christina told me. “One of these nights he’s going to break through my window and kill me.” I feared she was right.
As luck would have it, my niece Vera had just been hired as a maid in a big mansion somewhere in Chicago. “I think they’re still looking for maidservants,” I told Christina. “I would hate to lose you, but I’ll ask Vera to help you get a job there, if you’d like. I’ll give you a good recommendation, too. Jack will never find you.”
And that’s what we did. I was happy that it all worked out for Christina when she was hired on as a housemaid. But I had grown very fond of her and hated to see her go. I paid her a little extra and hugged her good-bye. “Come back, now and then, and let me know you’re all right. Promise?”
“Yes, I promise.” She hugged me in return, but she didn’t keep her promise. That was the last I ever saw of Christina Newell.
Anna
Chicago, Illinois
1897
I feel exhausted by the time Mrs. Marusak finishes her story. I ache for my poor mama. And I hate my father for the way he treated her. I can only sit in stunned silence for a moment after she finishes. Her story leaves me with so many questions, and when I can finally speak, they start pouring out. “Do you know if my mother was expecting a baby when she left Jack?”