The Girls with No Names

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The Girls with No Names Page 26

by Serena Burdick


  After three numbers, we collapsed at the table, catching our breath. The man waved his hand at the waiter and ordered two more drinks.

  This one was sweet and tasted of mint and lemons. I drank it quickly. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Gin Fizz.” The man propped his elbows on the table. “And what, my dear girl, are you?”

  I watched a drop of water roll down the outside of my glass. It was clear what he meant, and there was no way he was getting any kind of answer out of me.

  “A shy one?” He smiled. “At least give me a name to go along with that lovely face?”

  The newspaper headline swam back at me. By tomorrow my name would be in every paper. The room swelled with music and the man said, “I’ll get your name out of you one way or another,” and lifted me to the dance floor. The piano was quick and lively and I moved next to him, loose and sloppy. Looking around at the dancers’ arms and legs jiggling to the tempo, I couldn’t help but think of the distorted limbs of the fallen girls on the pavement.

  “Your name?” The man put his hand on the small of my back, his lips to my ear.

  “Mable Winter,” I said, remembering the name of the Sunday school teacher at Marie’s church. I’d always thought it such a lovely name.

  “Mable Winter.” The man whistled, moving me slowly off the dance floor and pressing me against the wall in just the way Renzo had in the doorway of the tenement. My head swirled and my ears rang with the sound of piano keys, voices, clinking glasses and tapping shoes. The man’s lips were salty and he tasted like the drink in my glass. This man was no good, and yet I let him press himself on me. I liked the smothering heat and whirlwind sensation. He either didn’t notice the milk leaking down the front of my dress, or didn’t care. He kissed fast and hard and I was hoping he’d suck the life out of me when the pressure suddenly let up. I opened my eyes to see the man being dragged off me by the back of his shirt.

  “All right, that’s enough.” A wide, baby-faced policeman stood over us, his badge glinting in the lamplight.

  The music had stopped and there was a commotion of angry voices. The room rocked and I felt dizzy and hot. Sweat trickled down my side. The midwife’s already gone to the police, I thought, panic launching me forward. The policeman snatched my arm. “Oh no you don’t. We’ve been through this before.”

  We have? I wondered as he pushed me out the door. Outside, the air was cool and damp. I heard shouting and swearing and the lights of the buildings tipped and swirled against the night sky, disappearing with a bang as I was shoved into the back of a police wagon.

  Turns out that no-good man saved me. Isn’t that the oddity of life? I don’t doubt for a second I’d have jumped into the river, or wandered the streets until I was recognized and convicted as a baby killer, if I hadn’t bumped into him. Instead, I woke up in a jail cell as a prostitute.

  The booze made my memory of the night before fuzzy as that gin drink. Not until I opened my eyes to the light coming from a small, square window did I remember being arrested. I stood up, my body aching all over, and walked to that square of light. I leaned against the concrete wall and tapped the pain in my temples with my fingertips. There were six other girls in there with me, two slumped asleep against the wall, the others sitting on a bench with their elbows on their knees. They looked weary and angry, their eyes saying, don’t mess with me. I’m in no mood. The pain between my legs was excruciating and it felt like a swab of cloth was stuck to my tongue. Not until midmorning did a policeman come down the hall, banging his stick against the metal bars so we had to hold our ears. He laughed, unlocked the door and led us, single file, down the hall and out a side door where another officer herded us into a police wagon.

  We were taken to a glittering courtroom and sat shoulder to shoulder on sleek benches under bright lights. The judge called us up one by one, peering down from his perch. When my turn came, and he asked my name, I said Mable Winter without pause.

  That idiot judge convicted Mable Winter to three years in a reform home for prostitution, as secure a place as any to hide out.

  After that, Signe Hagen was as good as dead.

  Book Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Effie

  I was released from the sanitarium on the day of my fourteenth birthday. It was New Year’s and the girls had prepared a musical performance. In the room above the chapel, winter sunlight struggled through the dirty windows where Sister Agnes and Sister Mary ushered girls to chairs, fluttering their hands and clucking like anxious hens.

  They glanced my way, whispering and nudging each other as I took my seat. I sat in a chair at the back looking around for Mable. When I didn’t see her, I scanned the backs of the younger girls up front for Dorothea, but didn’t see her either. A girl I didn’t recognize took a seat at the piano, running her fingers along the top of the dusty fallboard with an exaggerated look of disgust that sent a round of laughter through the room. There was a sharp rebuke from Sister Gertrude, and the girl pinched her lips together in smug submission and lifted the fallboard.

  As her fingers moved across the keys, I was stricken with homesickness. She was playing Liszt’s Années de Pelerinage, a song I used to play for Luella while she practiced her arabesques. The grace of my sister’s arms and the soft thud of her feet came back to me as the music played, the memory so abrupt it brought tears to my eyes. I tightened my jaw, shaking off the tears as I forced myself to remember the hard floor and the pain in my chest. I was not going to cry. My memories were trinkets of pain compared to the abuse my body endured.

  The song came to an end with a burst of applause as the girl gave a dramatic curtsy. Other acts followed. Duets and solos were sung, more tunes banged out on the piano to cheers and boos, the girls getting restless. When it was over, there was yellow cake with white frosting—a gift from the Ladies Aid Society—which I ate reluctantly, my stomach shrunken and filling quickly. A few bites in I felt a hand squeeze my shoulder and looked up as Sister Gertrude’s ageless, white face broke into a smile.

  “I am glad to see you back with us,” she said, her eyes fragments of a deceptively calm sky. “Almighty God, the supreme Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to those who truly repent.” She released her grip. “The good Lord has given you a second chance. I trust you will use it wisely. Finish up.” She gave a motherly nod at my plate, waiting until I lifted my fork.

  Anger uncoiled in my gut, pure and huge and satisfying. I sliced my fork into my cake, glancing at Sister Gertrude’s hands for signs of my teeth marks. Sadly, they were as smooth and unmarked as her face, and I wondered whose hand I’d bitten. “Where’s Dorothea?” I asked, not daring to ask about Mable.

  “Her father came for her.” It pleased Sister Gertrude to say this, to emphasize the fact that no one had come for me. “You’re to go directly to the dormitory when you’ve finished,” she said, moving away, the hem of her black habit flicking like a cat’s tail across the floor.

  I bit back a smile, pieces of the sweet, spongy cake sticking to the roof of my mouth. Dorothea’s father had come for her. She had her happy ending.

  * * *

  A man waits on the porch twisting his hat in his hands and stamping his cold feet, looking at the snowdusted hillside. He is nervous, and wonders if he’s made a mistake. This place is far nicer than anything he can give his daughter. The door opens abruptly, startling him, his daughter running at him so fast her thin frame hits his legs with an impact greater than either of them expects. She buries her face in his stomach and latches her arms around his waist. He hadn’t anticipated crying. When he looks up, the sister standing in the doorway grimaces, as if reunions, or the weakness of a man in tears, disgusts her. He doesn’t care. Lifting his daughter into his arms, he knows, without a doubt, that he has not made a mistake.

  * * *

>   I held this image all the way through cake and up into my bed, letting the absence of Dorothea in the next room delight me, regardless of the fact that I missed her.

  * * *

  The sisters determined I was well enough for sorting, and the following day I returned to my old station in the laundry room. I expected the usual silence and stony glances, but as soon as Sister Agnes closed the door behind her, the girls flocked to the sorting table pressing me with questions. Which window did you leap from? How far did you get? Did you see Edna fall? Was it very gory? Did the dogs get you? We heard you got a foot bit off? Can we see?

  Unused to popularity of any kind, I recoiled and dropped my eyes to the table in silence. Come on, they said. You can’t fool us with your timid act. There was more urging and questioning until someone shouted, “Leave her alone!”

  I looked up at Mable standing behind a steaming vat of water. She was thin, her features stark and chiseled, her face damp and sweaty, the muscles in her neck tensing. Her hair had grown into a yellow fuzz that crowned her brow and stuck out around her ears. Even from across the room, the spectral blue of her eyes was discomfiting. She kept them on me as she dropped her hand into the vat and resumed scrubbing, my popularity vanishing as the girls glowered and grumbled back to their laundry stations.

  If she was looking for forgiveness, I wasn’t going to give it. In the pit, I discovered anger was better than despair.

  Over the next few months, I kept my resentment burning, growing a little hotter each day. I kept the image of Mable and Edna running away from me fresh in my mind, along with the memory of my father tripping up the stairs with Inez, and my fight with Luella the morning she went to the gypsies without me. I reached for memories that hurt, like Mama insisting I wear gloves to cover my clubbed fingernails and Luella saying she envied my blue fits, giving credit to something that kept me weak and her strong.

  I learned of Edna’s death in rumored fragments. One girl told me she heard Edna leapt blindly from the wall and landed on the craggy rocks bordering the Hudson.

  “Broke nineteen bones!” she cried. “The police didn’t find her until early morning and rushed her to Washington Heights Hospital, but she was dead before nightfall.”

  A girl named Tilly, who now slept in the bed next to me, said she heard Edna was alive for three days on the rocks before anyone found her.

  Some of the girls claimed she’d escaped into the night and Sister Gertrude had made up the story to scare us. Because how else did Mable survive? they wondered. Easily, I thought, remembering how nimbly she’d leapt from the rope compared to Edna’s ungraceful plummet to the ground.

  No one dared ask Mable anything, but they didn’t mind approaching me. I told them the truth. I never made it to the wall. I fainted on the lawn. I saw nothing.

  “Then why were you in the infirmary for so long?” Suzie Trainer demanded one evening, as she and six other girls surrounded me in the hall as we made our way to chapel.

  “Have you ever been in the pit?” I said with a satisfying edge I’d been honing. “It would make you sick too.”

  None of them looked like they believed me, but I wasn’t going to show them my hand. I liked that the girls didn’t know about my heart condition; not even Suzie Trainer, who had paid no attention to me in our Chapin School days. For the first time in my life, I was seen as courageous and daring. What did the truth matter anyway?

  My truth had been that Luella was in here, and she wasn’t. My truth had been escaping into the night, and I hadn’t. The truth of my whole life had been that my heart was failing, and now it had stabilized, which meant this asylum doctor had done what my parents’ doctors couldn’t. Maybe I’d saved myself by locking myself away. Maybe that was the truth. And if Edna had died falling from the wall, then the truth was she and Mable hadn’t left me as bait. They’d saved my life.

  By March, the weekly mercury treatments succeeded in keeping the swelling down and my blue fits under control, but a film lay over my mind that blurred my thoughts. I stopped imagining stories. The scene of Dorothea and her father was the last story I told myself, and it became a gold nugget I’d take out and polish to keep shiny, as if remembering it over and over would somehow bring clarity back to my senses. I had little appetite and often vomited in the bathroom. My collarbone protruded and my ribs became bumpy as a washboard. I tried to hide my tremors, but I could hardly hold a fork without it clattering against the plate.

  “You’ve got to eat more,” Tilly said one day as we walked into the dining room. “Keep up your energy. If you’re well, you’ll get to go to Valhalla in May.”

  Valhalla was a farm where a select number of girls were taken in the summer. A program designed to show the trustees what good work the sisters were doing providing work for the girls and extra funding for the grounds. “Truthfully,” Tilly smirked, “Sister Gertrude pockets the money for her sherry and steak. Soil’s so bad at the farm we can’t grow a thing, but that’s no matter. I’d grow weeds for a breath of fresh air.”

  “Who gets to go?”

  “Only the most reformed.”

  Despite my exhaustion and loss of coordination, I was determined to set myself on a path of righteousness, arriving bright-eyed for the 7:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist, raising my voice in prayer, working at the laundry with my eyes down, my hate pulsing under my ribs.

  Mable, I noticed, was doing the same. She made no waves; no longer slapped or tormented the new girls. She kept her mouth shut and her head high, meeting the gaze of any girl who dared look at her as if she’d eat them alive. We all steered clear of her, which was easy now that she was no longer head laundress. An Irish girl named Darvela had taken over. Bigger than Mable, she’d plant herself at the ironing table flicking her green eyes around the room, ready to smack the back of a lazy girl’s head, or dash water in the face of anyone she disliked.

  I kept an eye on Mable, wondering if she’d try and speak with me. I couldn’t get the image of that policeman shouting at her in the infirmary out of my head, and how she’d held her ground. I wondered about her false name, and the oddity that we were both here under assumed identities. I wanted to know what she’d done as much as that policeman, and through the haze of my mind, a plan began to form. I didn’t have the details worked out, but it involved getting Mable to trust me, which wasn’t going to be easy. Her eyes still held the glassed-over remove I’d seen when the policeman stood by her bed, but at times, she did look at me from across the laundry room, as if contemplating our positions in a game neither one of us understood the rules to.

  I began sitting with her at dinner and chapel. I didn’t say anything, as I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I needed her to believe I’d forgiven her.

  It was the end of May, during lunch, when Sister Gertrude announced the girls who would be going to the farm. A wagon, she said, beaming, would be coming the following week to take twenty-five girls to Valhalla. I held my breath, my hard-boiled egg and spinach cooling on my plate. Since the weather had warmed, we were allowed a daily outing in the walled courtyard behind the chapel, a square of dirt peppered with rocks and weeds, the sky barely visible above the high barred windows and sloping rooftops. Just to stretch my eyes to a horizon, and wiggle my toes in the grass, would be a benediction. Escape, a miracle. But Mable had to go too, otherwise my plan would never work.

  The names were announced with intentional slowness, Sister Gertrude’s superior smile fueling the heat of anger in my belly. She enjoyed this torture. Mable’s name was called and I sighed with relief, until she said, “That’s all. Clear your dishes and head to chapel,” and left the room. She had not called my name. Heat flared to my ears and set the tips on fire. Mable was not reformed any more than I was. Sister Gertrude had done it on purpose, to set us against each other. I cleared my dish, biting the inside of my cheek, determined to use her own tactic against her.

  I lingered as the girls filed past
, waiting to approach Sister Agnes who stayed behind to make sure we all kept moving. She hadn’t forgotten the stolen key, and when I approached her she flapped her arms and lifted her plump chest like a penned-in bird ready to peck at me.

  “Go on,” she shooed, “get going with the rest of them.”

  I planted myself in front of her, noticing that I’d grown taller since I’d first arrived. “I want to speak with Sister Gertrude.”

  Sister Agnes ruffled the front of her habit. “You don’t get to make that request, missy.”

  “I have important information about Mable’s real identity.”

  It was delightful to see the stupefaction on Sister Agnes’s face. She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, and then whirled me around by my shoulders. “You get back to work now and don’t go making trouble.”

  I did as I was told, but within the hour, Sister Mary came for me in the laundry. Sister Gertrude wanted to see me straightaway, she said. I glanced at Mable, her eyes tracking me to the door as I followed Sister Mary out.

  We went through the small waiting area into the room at the center of the house where, so many months ago, Herbert Rothman had posed as my father. The lamp on the desk still leaked a pool of light over the shiny wood. Sister Gertrude shoved her arms into the glow and leaned forward, her face taut and bloodless, her white skin and black habit blending into the colorless room as if she sat in her own photograph, her magnificent blue eyes the only feature distinguishing her amongst the living.

  Behind me I heard Sister Mary’s shuffling retreat, then the click of the door. I fixed my eyes on the sculpture of Jesus on the side table, his outstretched palms and peaceful eyes as deceiving as Sister Gertrude’s. He hadn’t cast any demons from the fallen girls in this place. The devil had bred them, as far as I could tell.

 

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