The Girls with No Names

by Serena Burdick

  “I lied,” I said, quickly.

  “Is that all?”

  I tried to think up a better sin. “I kissed a boy.” I blushed and bowed my head.

  “How often?”

  “Many times.”

  A quiver traveled over her face. “What drove you to do this, child?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “My sinful nature.”

  Sister Gertrude rose from her chair and the heavy cross around her neck swung forward and threatened to knock into the lone lamp. She came around the desk. “Recognizing the sin, my dear, is one thing, driving it out another. Are you repentant?” I nodded. Sister Gertrude smiled and wrinkles creased the corners of her eyes. She took my hand, flinching at my clubbed fingernails. “What’s wrong with the girl’s hands?” She looked sharply at Herbert.

  “A birth defect,” I answered quickly and Herbert nodded in consent.

  Sister Gertrude lifted my hand to the light, inspecting my nails. “As long as it doesn’t require medical attention.”

  Herbert looked at me. “No, ma’am,” he said, cautiously.

  “That must be a relief for you.” She smiled again, dropped my hand and went to Herbert, leading him gently toward the door by his arm, his face red with discomfort. “We do our best to rescue our unfortunate sisters. Some find salvation. Some do not. That will be up to your daughter. All we can offer her is our protection and guidance.” The door opened and they stepped into the hall. “We find that a quick goodbye is easiest on them.” She cocked her head in my direction and Herbert gave a weak wave, looking genuinely concerned as he crushed his hat on his head and disappeared down the hall with Sister Gertrude. I felt the urge to rush after this strange man and cling to him, but Sister Mary was already in the doorway motioning me to follow.

  Chapter Ten

  Jeanne

  The night after my eldest daughter tossed her ballet slippers from the car, I couldn’t sleep. It was hot, and I lay next to Emory with the sheet tossed off and my hands clasped over my stomach, sweat beading under my nightgown. I kept picturing the brazen look on Luella’s face as she dropped her shoes into the street. Besides cutting me to the quick, my daughter’s blatant disrespect was infuriating. Was this the natural consequence of raising children in America? I would never have dared such a thing with my own mother.

  I rose and went to the window. Pulling the curtain aside, I looked into the yard at our lone oak tree, its huge branches cradling the pale moonlight. I hadn’t told Emory what happened in the car with Luella. I didn’t trust how he’d handle his daughter’s effrontery. Her quick temper—so much like his own—always set him off. They were more alike than either would willingly admit.

  There was no breeze to relieve the stifling heat and I slipped back into bed, tired, but restless. First thing tomorrow morning I’d write to my brother. He was sure to have advice on Luella. I wasn’t about to let my mother know her granddaughter had refused to go abroad.

  Something caught my attention and I rose up on one elbow, listening. The house was quiet and I dropped back down, clammy and uncomfortable. I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning until a gray dawn crept through the windows and the birds nesting in the oak set up a ruckus. Giving up on sleep, I climbed out of bed deciding the best thing to do was wake Luella before anyone else was up. We’d have an early cup of coffee and talk. If she went back to rehearsal and gave up this nonsense about quitting ballet, I’d agree to try and convince her father not to send her to Paris. Not that it would do much good. Emory was determined. Ever since Luella threated to elope he’d been uneasy about her. It was nonsense, of course, but the fact that she made the threat was worrisome.

  I pulled on my robe quietly so as not to wake my husband. There was so much tranquility in his sleeping face. It was like watching a child sleep and wishing you could hold onto the serenity of their slumber after they woke up to plague you.

  Creeping to Luella’s partially closed door, I pushed it open, not surprised to see her empty bed. I smiled to think the girls still slept together. I used to sit in their nursery and watch them all tangled up in the same bed, Luella sprawled with a limb off the edge or thrown over her sister; Effie curled in a ball.

  I expected to find them that way now, but when I walked into Effie’s room all I saw was Effie’s thin face on the pillow, with the half-moons of dark circles below her closed lids—permanent reminders of her failing heart. On the pillow next to her was a folded piece of paper. Tiptoeing around the bed, I slipped the paper from the pillow and crept into the hall. The note was written in pencil, the words coming through in the dim morning light like a whisper.

  My dearest sister,

  Our time at the gypsy camp has changed me. No matter what I keep telling myself, I can’t forgive Daddy, and I can’t go on lying to Mama. I won’t ask you to forgive me, because my actions are as wretched and unforgivable as our father’s, but I am leaving. Patience said if she’s forced to marry the miserable boy she’s been promised to she’ll stab herself through the heart, and I don’t blame her. She and Sydney asked me to go with them weeks ago, but I only made up my mind tonight. Sydney is mad about me. He’s told me more than once, and Patience said he wouldn’t help her if I didn’t come along. The truth is, I want to go. Not because of Sydney, I don’t feel an ounce of love for him. I want to go so I know what it’s like to come to the end of a road and not have it matter whether I turn left or right. Can you imagine wanting to live by the ocean, or the mountains, and simply doing it? To not be bound to any place or person?

  I love you, sweet sister, but I’m suffocating. I have to do this.

  When I miss you, I will remember holding your hand at the edge of the field when we first heard that glorious gypsy music. That was the moment everything changed for me. I promise to make this up to you one day, and I’ll write as soon as I can. You’re stronger than you think and I know your heart will last forever. You’re not to have a single blue fit while I’m away. Kiss Mama. Tell her I know she won’t understand, but I love her too.

  Your sister forever, Luella

  Stunned, I looked into the empty hall, the swinging pendulum from the clock dizzying, the resonant tick in my chest like a faint, second heartbeat. Luella’s door was cracked open. To think that she’d left in the middle of the night at lord knows what hour, that she was gone from the house at this very moment, sent my customary fear racing; and yet, this was not the tragedy I’d imagined. Never once rushing home from the train station, or eyeing the clock for the girls’ return from school, or watching out the window for them to emerge over the hill, was this the scenario I played in my head. In those plots, my girls were victims. Crumpling the letter into a ball, I strode back to my room and shut the door with a bang. Emory sat up.

  “What? What’s wrong?” He looked dazed, still half asleep, his hair sticking out at odd angles.

  I threw the ball of paper onto the bed, went to the window and heaved it open. A single, cool breeze, that’s all I wanted. My fingernails bit into the wooden sill, but the air remained petulant and heavy below a miserable overcast sky.

  Behind me, I heard the crinkling of paper and the sound of Emory’s eyeglass case clicking open. When I turned around, he was already yanking trousers over his thin hips, his eyes puffy from sleep, the color in his face rising as he pulled on his shirt, buttoned and jabbed it into his pants. Standing his collar straight up, he slung a silk tie around his neck, making a mess of looping it. “Blast it!”

  I crossed the room, steadying my fear with the task of righting Emory’s tie while he rubbed a finger up and down the bridge of his nose, careful not to look me in the eye.

  “How did this happen?” My voice cracked.

  “She’s insolent and ungrateful. She always has been. We trusted her and gave her too much freedom and now she’s gone too far.” The vein over Emory’s temple pulsed.

  “What are you going to do?”
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  “I am going to go get her.”

  “You think she’s with those gypsies over the hill?”

  “What other gypsies are there?”

  “She says she’s leaving with them. What if she’s already gone?”

  “She can’t have gone far. I’ll have her home by supper. Whatever you do, don’t show that letter to Effie.” I nodded. The one thing we always agreed on was keeping Effie calm, whatever it took.

  Emory’s tie slipped through my fingers and fell against his chest. I stared at it, unable to look into his face. His confidence was reassuring, his unwavering certainty that things would go his way. It was a quality that attracted me to him, that put to rest my perpetual ripple of panic. A line in the note I’d breezed over in my shock came back to me, I can’t forgive Daddy, and I can’t go on lying to Mama.

  “What won’t Luella forgive you for?” It was a dangerous question. Making him admit it in that moment wouldn’t do either of us any good, but I wanted to hear it anyway.

  Without missing a beat, he said, “Cursed if I know,” and snatched his waistcoat from its hook.

  He stepped into the hall and I followed, reaching up to smooth his cowlick. “Your hair’s a mess.”

  “Stop fussing.” He pushed my hand away and dropped a kiss on my forehead before hurrying down the stairs, leaving me alone in the hall.

  The air prickled around me. My husband had not kissed my cheek or lips, but my forehead, like pandering to a child. The clock struck six and I reached up and wiped the kiss from my forehead. It would do no good to wallow, or panic over the horrors that might have befallen Luella in the hours she’d been gone. Despite Emory’s faults, he took good care of this family. He’d set things right.

  Sucking in my stomach, I walked briskly to my room. I’d get dressed, eat breakfast and take Effie out. By the time we came home, Luella would be here—brooding in her room, no doubt—and Emory and I would have to decide how to handle her.

  But at the end of the day, when Effie and I rode the elevated back to Bolton Road with our new gloves in hand, the sky an arresting gold, Luella was not there. I knew it the moment I stepped inside the foyer and saw the stricken look on Emory’s face. My husband was not the type of man who allowed himself to be defeated, and as he ushered me into the drawing room, I knew the situation was dire.

  My mother-in-law sat on the edge of her chair looking like an ancient, porcelain figurine, her knuckles clasped, her dark eyes accusing. Etta Tildon hadn’t left her house since her husband’s death a year ago. Dread rose up in me. Only the worst news could have brought her here.

  I stood rigid while Emory paced, the parlor aglow from the setting sun. “Luella wasn’t at the gypsy camp. I spoke to the parents of those children she wrote about in her note, and they’re no more informed about their whereabouts than we are. They said their children left with Luella in the middle of the night, took a horse and a wagon. Apparently, both belonged to this Sydney fellow. His father said this meant the boy wasn’t stealing, and even though he didn’t approve, if his children chose to leave it was their right. I told him they were an ignorant lot and as far as I was concerned he stole my daughter. It got ugly. The boy’s brother, this Job fellow, raised his fist at me and I threatened to get the police involved.”

  Relief washed over me, followed by a stab of anger. At least Luella wasn’t murdered and left in the stream as I’d let myself imagine. She’d run away, just like she’d said, without any regard for how worried we’d be. I pictured her face in the car as she dropped her shoes out the window, her confident defiance. She was just like Emory, doing exactly as she pleased, certain the world would take care of her.

  I sat coolly on the edge of the sofa. “Where did they go? Their parents must know where they went?”

  A grunt came from Etta, but she stayed quiet.

  Emory’s arms smacked his sides. “They don’t know,” he said.

  The breeze I’d been waiting all day for finally came through our open windows. I turned my face toward it, watching Emory pour himself a scotch from the beveled decanter on the table beside me. The crystal clanked against the tray and the sound chimed through the room.

  “Bottom line is,” he went on, “if the gypsy parents plan to track down their children, they have no intention of telling us about it. They’re a roaming people, and a tight-knit family, and don’t take kindly to strangers barging in. I imagine they’re just as keen to get rid of Luella as we are to have her back, but we’ll have to track her down on our own.”

  “What are we going to do? Can the police go after them? How are we going to find her?” I pulled at the collar of my dress.

  Emory drained his glass and poured himself another. “The police will do nothing. Luella left of her own accord. She’s sixteen. If she wants to leave, there’s no law that says she can’t. Worse, if they choose, all she and this boy need is a magistrate to marry them.”

  This had not occurred to me. A marriage like that would be irreparable. “We should tell the police she was kidnapped. They can find her and make her come home.”

  Emory glanced at his mother. “Mother and I think we should keep this mum. No authorities. No reporters. We’ve decided the best course of action is to hire a private investigator to track her down. In the meantime, if people ask, we’ll say that Luella is away at summer camp.”

  I felt as if the air had been sucked from the room. Etta’s eyes bore into me and I tugged off my gloves and ran my fingers over my scars. I didn’t care who saw them.

  “And Effie,” I finally asked, “what do we tell her?”

  The reminder of our youngest softened Emory. It was ironic that her birth had unhinged our marriage as she was now the only thing that kept us close. Emory set down his drink and came to rest his hand on my shoulder, glancing at my bare hands. I think, for a moment, he considered taking ahold of one.

  He sighed. “It wouldn’t be right to ask her to lie for us.”

  “I agree.”

  “It would break her if she knew the truth.”

  “To know her sister left her willingly would be devastating.”

  “Best to let her think it’s our fault.”

  “Yes, but what do we tell her?”

  “I suppose the same as everyone else, that we’ve sent Luella to a summer camp.”

  I wanted to lean into Emory’s hand, to feel his fingers against my neck. “She won’t believe us. She knows her sister better than we do.”

  This intimacy was more than Etta could stand for and her voice cracked into action. “She’ll believe what she’s told. If she questions you, silence her. It’s your tolerance that’s produced this hedonist nature in Luella in the first place. Don’t make the same mistake with Effie.”

  The insult caught me under the ribs like a bullet. This was my fault. I should have sent Luella away in the spring like Emory wanted. Taken her threat seriously. Watched her closer. I wriggled my fingers back into my gloves as Emory’s hand slipped from my shoulder.

  Revving up, Etta tapped the heel of her boot and barked, “Bring Effie down here before I atrophy sitting in this chair. It’s getting dark. It’s not safe to be out after dark anymore with foreigners crawling out of every crack in this city.”

  As I predicted, Effie didn’t believe a word of Emory’s story. Her small voice, asking where her sister was, sliced at my decorum until I couldn’t hold the tears back. I reached out to her, but she pushed me away and fled the room. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t follow her. Even as a baby she’d hold her arms out only for her sister, never me.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. At three o’clock I got up to check on Effie, her small features still so childlike as she slept. Her pallor was worrying, the dark circles under her eyes more prominent. Seeing her in bed without her sister sent a terrible fear through me. How slight and weak she was, how vulnerable without Luella. For over an hour I
sat and watched her sleep, listening for the slightest catch in her breath. She was the one I’d always worried about losing, not Luella. And this backward order of events confused me. I had a longing to lay next to her, but resisted. I always resisted comforting Effie. I didn’t want to coddle her. Treating her like a normal child was the only way to get her to survive. If she thought she was weak, she would be.

  Over the next few months, I avoided Emory, slept fitfully, found food distasteful and smoked too much. Despite this, I ran the household as if all was normal, keeping a firm grip on order and routine as I waited for news of Luella. She’d tire of that filthy life, I told myself, praying on my knees at the foot of my bed that she not come home married, or, worse, unmarried and in a compromised condition. I held out hope.

  Effie surprised me. She held herself together admirably without her sister, did as she was told, repeated our lies even though she knew they were falsehoods. She was stronger than I’d ever given her credit for, which was why I stopped worrying about her and focused on willing Luella home.

  It took until October for the detective to arrive with news. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight and by ten o’clock in the morning frost still covered the ground. I’d crunched through it earlier to dig up my lily bulbs, the grass blades looking deceptively soft and fuzzy in their coats of ice. My trowel didn’t make a dent in the frozen ground and I decided to wait until afternoon, as it was bound to warm up, which put me at my writing desk in the parlor when Neala announced the detective.

  He was a tall, weedy man with deep brown eyes. When I saw him in the doorway, I leapt up so fast my calendar slipped to the floor with a bang. I left it, approaching the man with such urgency he retreated a step. “What news?”

  He glanced behind me. “Is your husband at home?”

  “He’s at work. I’ll relay any message.”

  The man removed his hat with a nervous flourish before fishing a letter from his breast pocket. “Your daughter’s in a town outside of Portland, Maine. She doesn’t want to come home. And she was right furious that you sent me to find her.”