The Girls with No Names

by Serena Burdick

  Later, I’d learn that Suzie Trainer was one of the “good girls.” The pious, earnest girls—even the ones who faked it—got certain privileges, an extra blanket, heftier portions at dinner, some were even allowed into Sister Gertrude’s private quarters. What went on in there, no one was certain, but we were sure it involved extravagances like cookies and tea.

  I wasn’t one of the good ones, my first night in here ruined any chances of that, but I wasn’t a dissident either. As usual, I was suspended in between, sticking to neither identity. For the most part, I wasn’t thought of at all. A weary look might be cast in my direction, but I was flimsy, meek and unthreatening, which made me easy to ignore. At least at the Chapin School I’d been Luella’s little sister. In here, I was invisible. I envied these girls their camaraderie, their womanly bodies and filled-out identities, their selfdom.

  The Irish girls stuck together, as did the Italians, Russians and Romanians. Everyone kept to their roots, as if the borders of countries still divided them. Only Mable and Edna were a world unto themselves. I didn’t know their ethnicities, but it didn’t matter. They were competent, resourceful. They didn’t need anyone. The smattering of girls who thought of themselves as American, like Suzie Trainer, also stuck together. But Suzie squashed any hope I had of belonging with them. “You don’t know me, got it?” she snarled. “Don’t sit near me at dinner or chapel. And if you so much as look my way...” and her eyes became tight slits, “I’ll make your life miserable.”

  Misery, I thought, was relative. The longing for my family had become a permanent bruise in my chest. My arms trembled with exhaustion. My lower back ached and my legs were so sore it hurt to walk. The hot water in the vat stung my cracked, bleeding knuckles, and no matter how fast I scrubbed, there was always another pile in front of me. My heart raced with the exertion. After the first few weeks my blue fits became a daily occurrence, and I would squat down next to the vat with my head between my knees until I could breathe again.

  It was quickly understood that I was too weak for scrubbing and Mable put me on sorting. “Not out of any kindness, mind you,” she assured me, escorting me to a table piled with laundry bags. “A girl who can’t keep up brings us all down, so don’t mess this up.”

  Mable speaking to me at all was a rare occasion. There had been no further talk of escape. At first, I had the wild fantasy of stealing pen and paper from Sister Gertrude’s chamber and sneaking a letter to one of the laundry boys, but the wagons didn’t drive up far enough to the house for me to attempt it.

  Slaves were how the girls referred to themselves, stating how much money the laundry brought in with presumption. Six thousand a year. “Peeves me washing rich folks’ laundry by the ton.” Edna flung herself down on her narrow bed, addressing Mable in the bed across from me as if I wasn’t there. “The sisters collect the money while we clean bloodstains out of them posh bloomers!”

  “Don’t let the sisters catch you saying so,” Mable said.

  We all knew how the sisters looked for opportunities to whip and gag us. There was talk of straitjackets, and being sent to the pit, a windowless room in the basement where you were forgotten for weeks. A wide-mouthed Russian told me that a girl had died down there. “When the sisters found her, she’d coughed up blood all over the floor and now they say she haunts the place.”

  Tonight, past the moon shadows, I looked for that girl’s ghost in the rafters. Maybe she’d keep me company. Thirty-eight notches for thirty-eight days, and no one had come for me.

  Needing to pee, I tossed my covers off and slid the chamber pot out from under my bed, crouching over it and peeing as slowly as I could so as not to make much noise. There was nothing quite as humiliating as squatting in a room full of girls looking for opportunities to ridicule you.

  When I was done, I crept into the hall and slid open the window, cold air chilling my arms as I tipped the pot out. The world seemed motionless. Maybe time had stopped, and my life would be right where I left it when I got out of here, I thought, sliding the window shut.

  A muffled sob startled me and I turned to see a sniveling girl, no older than six or seven, standing in the doorway of the children’s dormitory. She tried to say something, but choked on her words and I shook my head fiercely at her. If someone heard us, we’d both be in trouble. Stifling her sobs with a hand to her mouth, she hiccupped through her fingers, “I wet myself,” her desperate eyes planting a seed of empathy into my belly.

  I glanced down the hall at Sister Gertrude’s closed door and with a finger to my lips, motioned the girl to follow. We tiptoed into my dormitory where I helped her out of her wet nightgown, guiding her twiggy limbs through the big, flapping sleeves of a dry one I’d found from the wardrobe. Her pale form was gossamer in the moonlight, bones protruding through paper-thin skin. When she dropped her arms, she looked like a bug-eyed moth about to take flight in her oversized nightdress.

  I shooed her back to her room, but she stared at me with huge, dark eyes. Ignoring her, I went back to my bed, but her soft flapping feet followed. I widened my eyes and jerked my head toward the door. Instead of heeding me, she climbed into my bed and pulled the covers to her chin, her eyes plastered to my face.

  There was nothing to do but shove the girl’s wet nightgown under my mattress and climb in next to her. I’ll admit it was comforting having her small, warm body beside me. She rolled over and tucked her knees against my thigh, blinking slowly until her lids dropped shut.

  I waited until I was sure she was asleep before lifting her out of my bed, my skinny arms quivering under her weight. In the children’s dormitory, I found her empty bed and laid her down, then tiptoed back to mine, remembering to collect my abandoned chamber pot on the way.

  The next morning, I lingered behind until I was the last left in the dormitory, at which point I quickly pulled the girl’s nightdress from under my mattress, stuffed it under my chemise and tied it around my waist, pulling and smoothing it out as best as I could before hurrying to chapel. It was nerve-racking, but also slightly thrilling having this nightdress secretly tied around my middle. I could only hope no one noticed the extra bulk or the sour smell of urine.

  At breakfast, I spotted the girl three tables over, her head bent over her oatmeal. I tried to catch her eye, but she never looked up.

  It was only after I made it to the laundry that I realized I couldn’t possibly get the thing washed and dried without someone noticing. I became even more anxious when I saw Mable approaching with a cryptic look and told me I was to find her in the chapel room tomorrow night. If she knew I was hiding something, she didn’t say.

  I wore that smelly, damp nightdress all day and by bedtime all heroics were gone and I felt ridiculous slipping it off and shoving it back under my mattress. The little girl would just have to wear the too-big nightgown and hope no one noticed it was missing from the wardrobe. If discovered, it was not something that would go unpunished.

  It was chilly and I pulled the covers over my head and breathed into my hands to warm them. Sneaking the nightdress reminded me of the time Luella and I snuck into Mama’s room and tried on all her dresses, silk and lace hems dragging over the rug as we pranced around. We squeezed the little ball on her glass perfume bottle, dousing ourselves, the air, and dipped our fingers into pots of rouge and creams and powders. Naturally, we were caught. The perfume alone would have given us away. Remembering Mama’s face when she discovered us made me smile. She’d tried to look fiercely angry, but had burst out laughing, delighted that we were playing at being her.

  A poke to my shoulder startled me out of my reverie and I pulled the covers back. The little girl from last night stood over me, her eyes like misplaced buttons in her shrunken face, her arms wrapped around her skinny, shivering chest.

  “Did you wet your bed again?”

  She shook her head and climbed in next to me as if this were routine. I glanced at Mable, who slept with a pi
llow over her head, and then at Edna whose back was turned to us. The girl pressed her cold hands against mine.

  “What’s your name?” she whispered, her breath moist in my ear.

  “Effie. What’s yours?”

  “Dorothea.” She squirmed next to me. “It’s cold. I don’t like the cold. Will you tell me a bedtime story? My mommy knew lots of stories but she can’t tell them anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she got flattened into the earth.” She had a lisp and pronounced it earf. “Sometimes she comes into my dreams. Not pretty like she used to be, but twisted and lumpy with her face smashed and her hair burnt up. I won’t see her if you tell me a story.”

  Sickened by this image, I didn’t know how to respond. How could I erase a burnt face? Children weren’t supposed to know this kind of violence, at least not in my old world. In this new one, girls died in basements and mothers were flattened into the earth. I felt suddenly uncertain any of us would survive. Then, in the dark, over the creaking bedsprings and the wind sighing around the gabled dormers, Marcella’s words came back to me; you must keep your imagination alive. That way you will have somewhere else to look if things turn unbearable. This was unbearable.

  In a hushed voice, I whispered the story of a gypsy boy named Tray and his selfish sister Patience and their kind mother, Marcella, how they played their music and bewitched two sisters listening at the edge of the woods. “The sisters disappeared and they were never found again.”

  The girl scooted closer and pressed her face in front of mine. “Where did they go? Did the gypsies carry them off?”

  “One girl was carried off and the other tried to find her, but that girl had a bad heart and the searching wore it out.”

  “Did she die?”

  “No, but all the blood emptied from the hole in her heart and she became as hollow as a ghost, wandering forever in search of her sister.”

  “I don’t like it,” Dorothea said, with childlike frankness. “I want a happy ending.”

  “I’m not good at happy endings.”

  “Try.”

  I smiled. “Okay. The sisters find each other and Marcella creates a magic spell that heals the young sister’s heart so she lives forever.”

  This made Dorothea smile. “Marcella’s a good witch. My mommy told me of good witches. Did she have a wand?”

  “Of course.”

  “And was she beautiful?”

  “Very.”

  “If she could heal a heart, then she could heal my mommy’s face, couldn’t she? My mommy’s waiting to heal so that God can take her to Heaven. I’ve seen the pictures of angels in Heaven and none of them have smashed faces.” Dorothea squeezed her eyes shut, screwing up her delicate features in concentration, her whole body tensing. It seemed a long time before she opened them. “I saw her,” she whispered, her wide eyes reverent as if she’d really seen her mother. “Marcella made Mommy pretty again. God will be happy now and help her to Heaven. And if I’m good and don’t wet my bed, I will make God happy too and He will send Daddy to come for me.”

  The open trust in her face made me wish I was little again, and that I could still believe in magic. I wondered if I should warn her that no one was coming for us, that stories couldn’t be trusted and happy endings were unlikely.

  I wanted to tell her about my heart, how when you’re dying from the beginning you view the world differently. I’d never been able to explain this to anyone. Since coming to the House of Mercy, I felt abandoned by my own deformity, betrayed by a thing I believed made me strong when it had been a weakness all along. What I really wanted was my sister. I needed to tell her that I was getting worse. My legs were swollen and I woke most nights pinned to my back as if the beams had come down on me. I needed to tell her that I was running out of time.

  I should have at least told Dorothea, warned her that there was no magic Marcella to heal the hole in my heart, only a gypsy woman who hadn’t told me the truth about anything. Don’t believe my stories, I should have said. I believed them, and that belief turned me into the fictional Effie Rothman. When I die, it will be Effie Rothman’s death the sisters mark in their book for all of eternity. Effie Tildon will cease to exist.

  I didn’t tell her this. I just stared at the cracks in the ceiling, crisscrossing like a complex railway system leading to dead ends. Dorothea’s head grew heavy with sleep on my shoulder, and the ghost appeared in the rafters. Only it wasn’t the strange dead girl I’d imagined, it was my sister, dangling her pointe shoes from their laces and calling for me to follow her. Come with me.

  I can’t. I’m stuck, Luella. There’s a boulder on my chest.

  I’ll lift it.

  You won’t be able to.

  I can do anything.

  It’s too late.

  It isn’t. I never believed you were dying.

  Is that why you didn’t take me with you?

  Her shoes rotated in a slow circle above my head. No. It was just a test, Effie. To prove you were strong enough to follow me.

  But I failed, just like Mama.

  You didn’t. You simply followed me to the wrong place.

  Then where are you?

  I’ve gone again.

  Gone where? There was no answer. Gone where, Luella? Gone where?

  But my sister was no longer there. In her place stood the apocalyptic lion from Tray’s card who stretched out on the beam and laid his head in his paws, the numerous eyes filling his body winking out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mable

  When my mother and I arrived in New York City at Pennsylvania Station, it was like being hit by a tornado—men chugging past like they were their own small locomotives, shiny and fast in black suits and derby hats, train wheels screeching while voices rose and fell in one big shouting match. I stood stunned as air from the train blew up my skirt and I breathed the strong scent of grease and tar and sweat.

  Mama hooked her arm in mine, told me to close my mouth and hurry up. She’d grown up in this and had no problem yanking me out into the bright street and up onto a trolley where I held on for dear life, the ground whipping past. Heat blew into my face and I closed my eyes and tried not to throw up, or fall off.

  By the time we got off on Mulberry Street, the city grit was crusted on my skin. I read every sign we passed, twisting my head so as not to miss anything: Frank Lava Gunsmith, Ravioli & Noodle Factory, Bicycles, Café Bella Napoli. I’d never seen so much stuff in one place: cartloads of vegetables and fruit, baskets of bread and dangling sausages, people and carriages moving every which way and never colliding, as if everyone understood the same unspoken rule about space that I couldn’t comprehend. My elbows bumped into every person I passed as Mama apologized for me.

  Coming to a halt, she shielded her eyes with one hand and squinted up at a drab, dark brick building. “This is it.” She pulled me down a narrow passage squeezed between the buildings, like a chute for pigs, that dropped us out into a large courtyard. The tenements in New York City were unlike anything I’d known. Clapboard siding rose up on all sides filled with windows and balconies, lines of strung laundry dangling between them. A group of grimy, barefoot boys screamed and kicked a ball that went smashing into the wall and bounced back at them. A busty woman with a scarf on her head leaned over a balcony shouting to a woman who stuck her torso out a window and shouted right back. A weary-eyed man sat on a barrel smoking a cigarette, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Another leaned against a brick wall fanning himself with his hat.

  The woman on the balcony paused her shouting as Mama called up to her, “Pardon me, I’m looking for Marie Casciloi?”

  The woman pointed to an open door near a stairway that rose up on the outside of the building. Why anyone would build a stairway on the outside, I couldn’t figure.

  “Third floor,” the woman said, and
went back to screaming at the other woman who ducked her head in the window and slammed it shut.

  In time, I came to love that courtyard. As well as my aunt Marie, a short, robust woman with a soft face who wept into my hair and kissed my cheeks whenever the mood took her. I’d never known anyone to weep from happiness. She had five children, three sons and two daughters, who she raised on her own after her husband, Pietro, died in a boating accident. At all times of the day, she’d whisper Pietro, with so much longing that it set off a fresh set of tears. Unlike Mama’s tears, Aunt Marie’s didn’t weaken her. Instead, they propelled her into action and she’d bang around the kitchen, or strip the beds with gusto, crying and moaning and laughing all at the same time.

  The two-roomed tenement turned out to be smaller than our cabin. I didn’t know so many people could squeeze in so tight together. The walls in the front room were papered in fading tulips and leaves that peeled at the corners and exposed gray strips of plaster. There was a big stove, a sink with cold running water and open shelving covered in cut-out paper and filled with floral china. A narrow table with a red gingham cloth took up the center of the room. An abundance of food, if not space, was at the heart of the Casciloi family. We shared one bathroom, down the hall, with three other families. And it always stank.

  At night, the boys moved the table against the wall and shook their bedrolls out over a threadbare rug. Mama and I slept in the back room with Marie and her twin daughters, Alberta and Grazia. The twins were sixteen years old and full of sass, with olive skin and jet-black hair. Mama and I had been given one of the two iron poster beds, which meant the girls now had to sleep with their mother.

  “As if it weren’t crowded enough already.” Alberta glared at me that first day I arrived, turning to the cracked mirror on the bureau and twisting her hair up.

  Mama had left me to put away our few belongings while she drank coffee with Marie in the front room. So far, all I’d done was watch my shapely, older cousins tuck in their thin blouses, yank their skirts into place and pinch their cheeks red—the womanliness of it was enthralling.