* * *
It would take five years for Luella and me to make our way abroad. Luella returned to England where she eventually married an English countryman who let her wear short dresses and throw wild parties, as the world changed in a way that suited her. I returned to Paris, where Georges visited often and my mother relaxed into old age with the satisfaction that her daughter had finally come home.
Emory never left Bolton Road. During the years Luella and I lived with him, his habits didn’t change. There was a period of mourning for Effie, and then he began slipping off to gamble, women flocking to him in even greater numbers as his hair peppered with graceful aging. It hurt only a little to be near him. The death of my daughter and the guilt over losing the last year of her life caused most of my pain.
I never told anyone about the girl I took to the gypsies. Neither did Inez. She told the authorities that the man who dropped Effie at her door had refused to give his name, and that no other girl had been with him. “Poor Dr. Langer,” she’d said, with her smile beguiling a young and susceptible policeman, “to have let that girl slip away before...” She clicked her tongue. “I imagine the guilt makes him see her in everyone.” The maids confirmed her story, as did I, and the police dropped the matter. I cashed in the bank account Georges had opened for me, and gave the reward money to the girl myself. She told me her name was Mable.
It was only after Effie died, and I read the story she’d written, that I discovered it was Signe.
For years, I devoted myself to getting Signe’s story published. No one was interested. It told the story of a girl’s struggle in our great city of New York that no one wanted to hear. Signe’s truth was the last thing the world could handle. It was war-torn and damaged and wanted stories that glittered with luxury and pretense. Not until 1939, twenty-three years later, would others be ready for it.
When I opened the package from the publisher and saw Effie’s book, the cover a joyful blue with a single white bird soaring over the page, it gave me more than closure. It gave meaning to the year I lost my daughter. It made me feel that in saving one girl, I had, in fact, saved the other.
Mable
It was Tray who brought me the book, placing it gently on the kitchen counter where I stood splitting peas. He’d been all the way to Boston that day to see his sister. It was one of those perfect days with the air soft and cool, the sun dipping in and out of the high, white clouds, the trees so thick and green they breathed abundance.
Not much took me by surprise anymore, but when I saw the title of that book, I’ll admit it was like Effie reminding me how it felt to have your heart freeze in your chest. I must have blanched white because Tray eased the pea shells from my hand and walked me to the sofa. We had four boys, and I thought I’d faced every heart-stopping moment there was getting the older ones grown and out of the house without too many wounds and scars.
Tray placed the book in my hands. “The animals need feeding,” he said, and left me alone.
The book crackled with newness as I opened it, the pages crisp and white as the inside of an apple, with a sweet smell unlike our old, musty books. It’s startling having your own story told back at you. Not since that night in the cabin with Effie had I ever breathed the name Signe Hagen.
Not even to Tray, who returned an hour later, leaning his thin frame on the doorway and regarding me with the ease he always had about him.
“You read it?” I asked.
“It’s a long train ride home.” He smiled, his eyes dancing as if he was still a boy. “Strangest thing, Effie telling me your story after all these years.”
I slapped the book shut. “What makes you think this is my story? There’s no Mable in it.”
“Well now, let me see.” Tray sat beside me, stretching out his legs and latching his hands behind his head. “This girl, Effie, goes all the way to escaping the House of Mercy with a girl who saves her life before disappearing into a cabin in the woods.” He looked around at our farmhouse. “Not too far off.”
“This doesn’t mean we’re talking about it.”
“I suppose that would be asking too much of my wife of nineteen years.”
“Yes, it would.”
“All right then.”
“And the children are never to know.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tray dropped his arm around my shoulders.
Twilight warmed the room as I laid my head on his chest, listening to the faint beat of his heart and gazing out the window.
Our love had been a simple thing. I certainly wasn’t looking for it. Those first few years with the gypsies, I kept my head down and did what I was told. I was grateful to them, and determined not to mess it up. But whenever I did raise my head, there was Tray smiling at me. He’d help me with my work, tell my fortune, make me laugh. I never laughed so hard in my life. The love part just snuck up on us. Tray was eighteen and I was twenty-one when we married. For a while we continued our life on the road, but the world changed so quickly there was no place to put a wagon after a while without someone yelling at you to get off their property. We used the money Effie’s mom gave me to build this cabin and start raising animals. I’d handed all of it over to Marcella and Freddy, thinking it would barely pay my way with them, but they’d sewn it into the underside of their mattress and held on to it for us.
For some reason, sitting there with the past rising up from that book, and thinking about how kind Tray’s family always was to me, I started crying, which made me angry. I struggled to get up, but Tray tightened his grip and held me still. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “You were a child, Mable. No one holds you responsible anymore. Time for you to stop too.”
This only made me cry harder, my whole body shaking with sobs. I was grateful my two youngest were at Marcella and Freddy’s for the night. I never cried in front of my children.
Tray held me in silence until I was cried out, at which point I slapped my hands on my thighs and stood up, grateful for the practical task of popping peas from their shells. “Now look here, we hardly get a night alone and I’m starving. No more talk of that.” I shooed my hand at the book I’d tossed onto the couch.
I never told my husband about Edna, or escaping into the night, or about that policeman. There’s not a thing in this world Tray holds against anyone. He’d forgive a flea for biting him. Still, since I could never bring myself to tell him what I’d done, or what was done to me, I was glad he finally knew. Even though it wasn’t a surprise he’d forgive me for my wrongs, it was a relief.
“Signe is a beautiful name. It suits you,” he said.
“That’s exactly what Effie said, but I’m never changing it back.”
“I didn’t expect you to. I just wanted you to know that your real name is beautiful to me.”
Tears sprang up again and I swatted his hand away. “That’s enough of that,” I said, going into the kitchen and putting on a pan of water.
Later that night, I eased out of bed with Tray sound asleep. Tray had placed Effie’s book carefully on our bookshelf. I pulled it down and I snuck out of the house with it tucked under my arm, making my way to the boulder in the backyard that the children used to leap from, scraping every inch of their knees off. I clambered up and dangled my legs over the edge of smooth stone. The air was warm and comfortable. I looked up at the full moon, that cold, hard stone in the sky somehow casting the world in milky light. I had shot at coyotes with Papa under that moon, leapt from a roof under that moon, lost Edna under that moon and escaped with Effie. It was the same moon under which I’d dropped my baby in a river, the same moon that rose only hours after Mama’s death, that fat, solid, dependable orb. Maybe Papa was sitting under it right now. He’d be sixty-nine years old.
Slapping at the mosquitoes eating my legs, I opened the book and thumbed through it to the end. If Tray had come across Effie’s book so effortlessly, Papa might find it too. I always fel
t guilty taking away the name he’d given me. It wasn’t a story he’d be proud of, but at least my name was here, preserved forever along with Mama’s memory.
I looked at the cover, House of Mercy, by Effie Tildon. I was glad I’d given her my story. Her name got to be remembered too. Risking my neck to return her to her family was the only truly selfless thing I’d done in my life. Even letting Edna go had been self-serving. I’d loved her, and doing something for someone you love is always a little bit self-serving.
Lifting my face to the moon, I let the cool of it wash over me, sending a little prayer to Effie before making my way back to the house.
That night, the strangest creatures came to me in my dreams. They were winged and full of eyes, and when they spread their wings their feathers rippled under me like a vast, dark body of water. From the surface came Effie, looking just as I’d seen her that first time in the laundry at the House of Mercy. She smiled, and I touched her soft cheek as the creatures’ wings enveloped her and she slipped away, leaving behind a sky filled with the shimmering, white light of the moon.
* * *
Afterword
In 1891, the House of Mercy, a notorious asylum for “destitute and fallen women,” stood on the highest point of Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park, a massive, foreboding building stretching the length of the plateau. The women it imprisoned were not privy to the view from the barred windows of their dormitory, or from the steaming laundry room, and certainly not from the basement, where they were isolated for the smallest infraction. These women were lucky if they made it through a day without crushing a finger or scalding their hands from the vats of boiling water as they scrubbed, ironed and folded. Their endless, long days were spent with overworked, aching limbs and searing headaches from the gas fumes in the enclosed laundry room, praying they wouldn’t fall ill from tuberculosis and be sent to die, wretched and alone, in the House of Rest for Consumptives, another grand building just up the road.
I have stood on that picturesque hillside imagining the mansion that once loomed there, the women’s faces pressed up against the bars, anger and injustice simmering in their eyes. The determination.
When I first began research for The Girls with No Names, I knew nothing about the House of Mercy. I was caught up in the horrors of the highly publicized Irish Magdalene laundries, asylums the church sold for millions of dollars with unmarked cemeteries containing graves that couldn’t be accounted for—good stuff for fiction.
But once I dug in, I discovered a number of Magdalene laundries existed right here in the United States. The first one opened in Kentucky in 1843. By the end of the century, twenty-four more followed. These were religious institutions claiming to help destitute women, to reform them, put in place to convict women of crimes of a sexual nature. In actuality, they imprisoned women and children of all ages for any behavior deemed “immoral.” They were, in fact, prisons. It made no difference what they were called: penitentiaries, houses or laundries. These socially acceptable establishments imprisoned, abused and enslaved women and children while the church made millions from their laundry service and lace making.
I spent hours unearthing articles on the House of Mercy in an attempt to give life to these women. As my research continued, I realized that at least Ireland had exposed the corruption of the church in the name of salvation, while the laundries masquerading as religious institutions in the United States were never held accountable. The women’s stories about what happened to them inside homes like New York’s House of Mercy are rarely spoken about, much less remembered.
From the lives of these real and daring women, Effie, Mable and Luella were born. Through them, I wanted to create a tapestry of New York City at the turn of the century made up of immigrants and tenements, of the Romani who camped in Inwood, along with the wealthy Victorians clinging to their traditional values, even as the youth of the gilded age shed these same values.
* * *
I would like to briefly address the use of the word gypsy throughout the novel. The word can be read as offensive as it fails to distinguish the Romani people—an ethnic community driven from their homeland—from travelers enacting a lifestyle choice. And yet, I chose to use the word gypsy to maintain historical accuracy, because of the historical setting and the characters who would not be aware of different language to use. I am aware that the word gypsy is seen by many as offensive, and again, the usage here is meant to be indicative of a time and place and is not in any way reflective of my own views of the Romani community.
I thoroughly researched the lives of the Romani people in 1910 America with the desire to create characters that would reflect reality and not perpetuate stereotypes or disparaging beliefs. It is my hope that I have portrayed these characters—Patience, Tray, Marcella, Sydney—with accuracy and respect, and that through the flawed humanness of all of my characters, the lines of poverty and privilege and culture differences are challenged in ways that show us, in the end, how similar we all are.
* * *
In The Girls with No Names, all of these worlds collide and intertwine in unexpected ways while exposing the dark reality of what it was like to be a woman in each of these social circles in 1913. Effie’s, Mable’s and Luella’s voices echo the voices of women whose stories were never told, women who suffered and endured and survived.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the following:
Stephanie Delman, for your devotion to my writing career, and years of encouragement, tenacity and insight that has carved our path together and made all of this possible.
Laura Brown—editor extraordinaire—for diving in with enthusiasm, clarity and heart and polishing this book until it shone.
To everyone at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, especially Stefanie Diaz, for championing my books abroad. To the team at Park Row Books who I am blessed to work with: Erika Imranyi, Margaret Marbury, Loriana Sacilotto, Justine Shaw, Heather Foy, Linette Kim, Randy Chan, Amy Jones, Rachel Haller, Kathleen Oudit, Punam Patel, Canaan Chu, Tamara Shifman, Scar de Courcier.
My early readers, Ariane Goodwin, Michelle King, Christina Kopp-Hills and Heather Liske for your acuity and wisdom. Sarah Heinemann, for slogging through research material at the New York City Public Library (I owe you one), and Melissa Dickey and Julianna Comacho for exposing me to writers who challenged and expanded my way of thinking.
I am indebted to Rebecca Lea McCarthy’s Origins of the Magdalene Laundries, Lu Ann De Cunzo’s Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writings, 1819–1919, Carol Silverman’s Romani Routes, and Michael Stewart’s The Time of the Gypsies.
There aren’t words enough to express my gratitude to my parents and extended family for your unwavering faith and confidence in me, and to Silas and Rowan for patiently making room in your lives for this book.
Lastly, and most importantly, to Stephen, for giving us a life that allows me the freedom to write and the room to dream.
ISBN-13: 9781488050992
The Girls with No Names
Copyright © 2020 by Serena Burdick
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, ev
ents or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
The Girls with No Names Page 33