* * *
—
My mother and father never took me to Coney Island as a child. I never questioned it. I couldn’t picture my calm, collected mother on a roller coaster or parading around in a bathing suit. We did other things together instead. The nights I got restless and wished for a sister or a brother, Mom always knew what to do, whether it was dressing up like Nancy Drew and Bess Marvin or letting me stay up late to catch fireflies.
“Bioluminescence,” Mom taught me, pointing with her thin fingers to the end of the bugs’ abdomens. We’d put our little friends in jars and set them on the windowsills for night-lights. By morning, they’d always escaped. I wonder now if my mother let them go.
Now, as I sit in the taxi on the way to Brooklyn, I remember it all: catching fireflies, baking cakes, playing dress-up. So many cherished memories. What will I find out today? Will whatever it is taint the recollections I have of my mother?
I’m relieved when my thoughts are disrupted by our arrival at the Couneys’ home. It’s the pale yellow of a melted candle: skinny at the top and with widening layers beneath.
I knock on the door before I can doubt myself. Before I can think too much about what I’ll discover.
The woman who opens the door cannot possibly be Dr. Couney’s daughter. With lines disappearing into the folds of her neck, she is decades older than my mother. Heavyset and with hair that used to be dark, the woman fills the door like a shadow. “Yes?”
“Good afternoon.” I reach out to shake her hand. “I’m Mrs. Stella Wright. Is Dr. Couney’s daughter in? I’m hoping to learn about a girl who was one of your incubator babies back in the twenties.”
“She is.” The woman nods. “But I’m Nurse Louise Recht. I worked with Martin for forty-four years. You can talk to the both of us.”
“Thank you.”
Nurse Recht leads us to a sitting room that, like the outside of the house, is a cross between decadence and decay. Dim lighting reveals a red velvet sofa slumped alone along one edge of the room. No carpet covers the floor, and the cold radiates from the hardwood through my shoes and into my toes as I cross the room. I look around as I sit. Where are the trinkets? The paintings and vases that go with such rich fabric and dark mahogany furniture?
“Hildegarde will get you tea.” Nurse Recht aims the comment at the woman who has just appeared from the stairway. Like the nurse, she is sturdy and dark-haired. Though younger than the other woman, she wears a set of glasses that sit uncomfortably atop her nose.
“Of course,” she murmurs, exiting the room. She returns with a teapot and three chipped china mugs.
“Thank you.” My voice is painfully loud as I take the cup.
We sit in a lopsided triangle. I am on the depressed sofa cushions, Nurse Recht sits in an armchair nearby, and Hildegarde is set farther back on a streaked wooden chair.
“How do you do?” I nod at Hildegarde. “I am Mrs. Stella Wright. I’m here to ask about Margaret Perkins, one of the Luna Park babies back in the late 1920s.” The woman’s face remains impassive, no quirked eyebrow or tightened lip suggesting even a flicker of recognition.
Nurse Recht intervenes. “Hildegarde here mostly ran the Atlantic City location, but I was at Coney.”
“Do you remember her? Margaret?”
“We had thousands of babies.” Nurse Recht purses her lips at me as if I suggested otherwise. “I don’t remember the names of each one.”
“What about my mother’s name, Althea Anderson? She was a nurse at Bellevue.”
I think. My mother didn’t graduate from Bellevue, according to the school’s reports. But she signed a birth certificate there.
“Bellevue didn’t usually send us their babies.” Hildegarde frowns.
“No . . .” Nurse Recht holds up a finger. “But there was the one time. I don’t remember the baby’s name, but the nurse who brought her was here every day for two months. Althea.” She looks up at me. “Your mother?”
“Yes.” Barely able to contain my excitement, I pull out the portrait of my mother I keep in my pocketbook. “She’s quite young in it, but I imagine she would have looked much the same when I was born.” I pass the image to Nurse Recht, who startles. The photograph was taken when my mom graduated from high school, and she looks worlds younger than I recall ever having seen her. In the photograph, her collarbones jut out below a string of pearls, and her slightly pointed chin is tucked toward her shoulder. Dark hair like Nurse Recht’s or Hildegarde’s is pulled back in plaits atop her head, and the tip of a bouquet is revealed at her chest. She isn’t beautiful, but she is mine. I reach back for the image. “You recognize her.”
“Yes.” Nurse Recht smiles. “We became good friends. Like I said, she was here almost every day.”
“And it paid off. Look at you now!” Hildegarde raises her eyebrows. “The spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re like me.” Hildegarde points to her own body. “Proof of the incubators’ success. Dad told reporters how much I weighed till the day he died. But he would have loved to have a pretty girl like you in the papers instead.”
“Do you mean to say you were one of the incubator babies?”
“Six weeks early, 1907.”
My head swims. “But wait. I wasn’t—I mean, I’m not—”
“The baby Nurse Althea Anderson brought to Luna Park was not her baby,” Nurse Recht interrupts. “The mother was recovering from birth and couldn’t come herself.”
I breathe out with relief. “That’s right. I wasn’t the baby. Her name was Margaret, and the mother’s Hattie. Do you remember what happened to her?”
“I can’t tell you if she was a Margaret or not, but Althea’s girl made it just fine. Althea took her home that September, when we were closing down the park. She was probably—I don’t know, five pounds by then? Big enough to survive. Althea was taking her back to her parents, and I never did hear anything else about her. Never saw Althea again, even, which surprised me.”
I shake my head. “Are you sure it was September that she took the baby home?”
“Most definitely. I know Althea was with us that whole summer, till Labor Day.”
My next question is indelicate, but I have to ask. “Do you recall whether my mother was expecting her own child at the time?” It would explain why she didn’t graduate—she was pregnant with me, dropped out of school, and married my father.
Though the timeline seems off, since I was born September 5. Just days after Labor Day, when she was still working and ferrying babies back and forth across the boroughs.
Nurse Recht laughs, interrupting my thoughts. “Oh, no. They wouldn’t have kept her on at Bellevue if she were. And she was skinny as a rail, that Althea. Looked more like a preemie all grown up than Hildegarde does.”
The two nurses are still talking, but I miss what they say. Part of me is scrambling to piece everything together; part of me is resisting. I don’t snap back into the present until Hildegarde plunks a thick album in front of me. “Here are newspaper clippings and photographs from over the years,” she says. “You might find them interesting.”
I pull the album toward me and flip through the pages.
INCUBATOR MAN SAVES 2,750 LIVES!
STRANGEST PLACE ON EARTH FOR HUMAN TOTS TO BE NURSED, FED, AND CARED FOR: YET THE SYSTEM IS PERFECT.
INFANT WEIGHING POUND AND A HALF MAKES BID FOR LIFE.
SAVES 10,000 LIVES.
PLEASED WITH BABY PLANTS AT CONEY.
SMALLEST BABY IN THE WORLD.
HOME RUN AFTER BEING BORN A DUBIOUS 2 POUNDS.
The articles range from 1903 to the late 1930s, and a few clippings even hail from outside the state of New York. I stop flipping when I reach one with a picture. A younger Hildegarde stands in a nurse’s pinafore, her gaze steady toward the camera. She has an infant in each hand—no
t in each arm, but each hand. An empty milk bottle sits on a table beside her, and the babies are the very same height and even width as the narrow glass pitcher. Unintentionally, I gasp, and Hildegarde smiles slightly. “I wish I remembered their names. Cute little things.”
Nurse Recht shakes her head. “It’s so hard. We fought for those babies day and night, but they all grew up and left us eventually. Too many names to count.”
“Of course.” I think of her words. We fought for those babies. “I imagine it was hard work.”
Nurse Recht smiles wryly. “Hard work in and of itself—the machinery, the hours, the feedings, the diapers. But harder was the outside world and its clamor. No one else thought these babies could survive. No one else wanted them to.”
I think of James, whose parents doubted he could read. Of Mary Ellen, who Principal Gardner is convinced will never be more than an oversized baby doll.
“But you did it anyway,” I breathe.
“Of course we did, all the way through forty-three, when the incubators finally made it into hospitals. Until then, we had to. These babies could survive. Look at Hildegarde! The people who called us devil worshippers, freaks, circus acts . . . the ones who accused us of being liars and frauds and con artists . . . they couldn’t save you. But we could. So”—she shrugs, no-nonsense—“we did.”
“And my mother was part of that. Saving those babies.”
Both women nod. And to think my mother never let on, that I never knew she was a nurse at all. Why did she never tell me?
I look back down at the scrapbook. I gaze upon those tiny babies, froglike in proportion and antlike in scope. Even with Hildegarde sitting before me, I can hardly believe they survived.
“No one else at the time treated them?” I clarify.
“No.” Nurse Recht’s voice is hard. “You have to remember, many babies were born at home at that time, and the eugenics movement was not yet associated with Hitler.”
I cringe at the man’s name.
“The field of eugenics still had many scientific proponents here in America, Mrs. Wright, and they did not think anyone born with any disability should live. Thank God for the men who helped Dr. Couney change things”—she nods reverently—“men now at Bellevue and in Chicago.”
“Your Dr. Couney obviously had a different mind-set. Maybe it was his European education. Where did he train?”
It’s an innocent question, but Nurse Recht and Hildegarde exchange a tense look and our triangle dissolves. “He studied under Pierre Budin.” Why is Hildegarde’s voice so stilted?
Nurse Recht lifts her chin. “And his nurses were highly trained. I graduated from la Maternité de Paris. Europe remains the leader in natal care, but I am glad America is changing. Glad we are finished with the eugenics movement and its dangers.”
“It has not changed enough.” I lift my own chin. “I teach—taught—the disabled. Most of the school administration thinks they should just be institutionalized. Institutionalized! But they’re just kids.”
Our triangle connects again as Nurse Recht leans forward. “And ours were just babies. Strange, isn’t it, what men will do to hide their weakness?”
I’ve been flipping through the clippings as the nurses and I talk, and I stop now. “This bow.” I point to a wide velvety bow wrapped around an infant’s concave stomach. “Was that something you did?”
“Blue or pink,” Hildegarde smiles. “Every one.”
My shoulders rise so that my elbows lock, hands still framing the photograph. “My mother kept mine,” I whisper.
“Yours?”
If my mother was telling the truth all those years, if the bow really was mine, yes. I was there at the island. I myself existed in that strange scientific world of metal and tubes.
“It could have been Margaret’s,” I try, more for myself than for the nurses. A blurry truth is starting to surface, but I can’t let my mind go there, not until there’s proof.
“She was devoted to that girl.” Nurse Recht shook her head. “The same way a mother would be.”
I close my eyes as I pull the thumbprint card from my envelope clutch. “Did you all send these out, too?”
“Yes.” Hildegarde smiles softly. “My father was quite the showman. Knew exactly how to tug at parents’ heartstrings. We did holidays from Father’s Day to Chanukah, anniversaries, birthdays.”
“This card was in my mother’s things, but it’s addressed to Michael Perkins. Margaret’s father.”
“I suppose he gave it to your mother as a token of thanks.”
I shake my head. “The address is Bellevue’s Nurses’ Residence.”
The women exchange a look. “Interesting. She must not have known the Perkinses’ address.”
“And there’s one other thing I don’t understand. This same Margaret . . . she is listed as having died at birth.”
“That’s not too hard to explain,” Nurse Recht admits. “Hospital record keeping was really quite haphazard until the forties. They may have signed the death certificate before they brought her here, not expecting her to survive.”
Easy enough to believe. But if it was merely an administrative mistake, and Margaret survived to return to her mother, why did Hattie never know the color of her eyes? Everything—all of this, my missing birth certificate at the bureau, my mother’s slender figure in the summer of 1926—is impossible to ignore, but the very thought of what it might mean terrifies me. “The thing is, I was born September 5, 1926. Two months to the day after Margaret, and that same week my mother took Margaret home.”
The nurses exchange a quick, nervous glance. “A coincidence.”
“Unless—” I am desperate to share the theory that has sprung up with a terrible, sudden clarity: that I am Margaret, that my mother raised me unbeknownst to Hattie and her husband. I am desperate to share because I am desperate to hear a plausible alternative. “Unless . . .”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Althea Anderson, October 1926
Stella becomes the calendar of my days. Her feedings and naps mark the minutes and hours, and her slowly growing weight charts the passage of days and eventually weeks until September has passed. Mrs. Wallace and Dr. Morrison, whose frequent visits to check on his patient I find myself looking forward to more and more, seem to take almost as much pleasure in Stella’s progress as I. Each milestone—Stella’s sticking out her tongue in mimicry, turning her head to reach her bottle—is both a joyful celebration and a sobering reminder. While my guilt at Hattie’s not being here to see her baby’s development is omnipresent, it isn’t strong enough to keep me from dreading the day I hear from her.
Each day that passes without her letter feels like a pardon, but still I await my sentence. Ironic, since losing the baby will free me. Without her, I will be able to get a better job, stop wearing all black, sell my pawnshop wedding bands.
But I don’t care about being free if it means losing Stella. I didn’t birth her, but I watched her come into the world. I watched her fight for life and win—first when she was born, then when she came down with pneumonia, and then again when she was taken from the incubators before Labor Day.
And she watched me. Stella was with me as I ventured into Luna Park’s crowds for the first time, as I discovered the oasis of calm within Dr. Couney’s incubator wards. Stella was with me as we crossed back into Manhattan and as I stood shamed before Miss Caswell and Miss Hosken; she was with me as I held my head high before the pawn seller’s smug smile. She was with me when I knocked on Mrs. Wallace’s door and with me when Dr. Morrison entered into our lives.
When Hattie takes back her baby, I’ll lose Mrs. Wallace and Dr. Morrison, too. They’ve both become so dear so quickly. I bask in the warmth of Mrs. Wallace’s delight when she holds Stella, her smile taking years off her face. I relish Dr. Morrison’s visits and companionship and the way he talks to Stella like she’s a ti
ny adult. As for his conversation with me, I feel a thrill when those gray eyes look into mine like I matter.
A tear slips from my eye, but I brush it away before it can fall to Stella’s cheek. She’s nestled in the crook of my elbow when we hear a metal clink outside, the low whistle of the postman.
Every day I collect the mail with fear and anticipation in my heart. Now, breath short, I force myself to move.
A letter for Mrs. Wallace from a friend in Colorado. A letter from her late husband’s sister.
And then my heart stops. An envelope from the Perkinses’ residence in Washington Heights.
I swallow. I don’t want to open it. A panicked thought swiftly crosses my mind, that I might dispose of the letter and none would be the wiser. But of course that’s not true.
The time has come for my sentencing. I have to know what Hattie says.
I pull the sheet from inside the envelope. The note is surprisingly brief, but I suppose all I requested was a date and time. I sit down to read.
Miss Anderson,
I close my eyes. How quickly I’ve been demoted from “nurse.”
Do not write to my wife again. The grief is making her hysterical as it is. She does not need new details to dwell on and drag her back into the past. Neither she nor I wishes to hear from you. My wife is in no condition to be a mother, and we are better off without the baby or her memory.
Thank you in advance for acting in accordance with our wishes.
Sincerely,
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Perkins
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Perkins! I don’t believe that for a second. Whether Ida delivered the note to Hattie and Michael found it, or whether he took it before his wife could ever read it, I don’t know. But I don’t believe Hattie had a hand in this response.
My anger at Michael boils, and I breathe deeply to keep it from bubbling over. Michael Perkins is controlling and demanding, but perhaps he is trying to protect his wife from further heartbreak. Grief does strange things, and both he and Hattie are suffering. When I bring them their baby, everything will change.
The Light of Luna Park Page 16