Mercy Train (2 page)

Sam felt abashed for her snide thoughts about her friend, who had always been loyal. What is wrong with me? she thought. How puerile. How unattractive, her mother would have told her.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Melanie said. “If all goes well today, you could start dropping off Ella a few days a week. Sarah told me she's looking for more work. She's game.”

Sam inwardly shrank. Before she could say she wasn't ready, Ella bumped her head on a drawer handle and, after a long pause, her face red, her mouth wide, unfurled a howl. Sam rushed to her and swept her up, cradling her head against her shoulder, Ella's cry still a painful tripwire to Sam's core. She felt her breasts harden with milk and begin to leak.

“Think about it and let me know, okay? It would be good for you. If it's the money, we'll figure something out.” Melanie waved her manicured hand in the air. “I would love, love, love to have you cranking out pots again.”

Rosalee, her dark hair cut in a flapper's bob, ran in and crashed into her mother's legs.

“Careful, please.”

“Mama,” Rosalee said. “Mama. Mama. Mama.”

Melanie sighed. “Yes, Rosa.”

“Juice, juice, juice, juice.”

Melanie poured a little apple juice into a sippy cup and doubled it with water.

“Sarah?” Melanie called to the nanny, and then said quietly to Sam, “She was on the clock at nine.”

“I'll be right there!”

Sarah jogged down the stairs and into the kitchen. She was what they called a “Sconnie,” a UW student from Wisconsin, apple-cheeked and sturdy-framed, as opposed to the “Coasties,” the more sophisticated, moneyed kids from New York and California who lived off-campus and ate sushi.

“Sorry about that. Hi,” Sarah said, waving to Sam. “Oh, and hi to you.” Ella smiled as Sarah touched the pad of her little nose.

“Hi, Sarah,” Sam said. “Here's her diaper bag. I'll put the bottles in the refrigerator. There's a jar of squash and a jar of sweet potatoes. And a thing of Cheerios. She's not a great napper, but she'll fall asleep in a sling if you don't mind wearing her around. Oh, and she can sit up okay, but you have to watch her because she's not that stable and can fall back and hit her head.”

“No problem,” Sarah said. She exuded a warm confidence that Sam had never been able to pull off. “We'll have a great time together.”

Melanie crossed her arms and smiled, amused by Sam's worry. Sarah expertly fashioned the sling around her body and waited for Sam to relinquish the baby.

“And my cell phone number—”

“On the refrigerator already,” Melanie said, grabbing her keys from a pewter hook. She had an office space near the wine store on Monroe Street where she went to write every day until four. She'd gone back to work when Rosalee was just four weeks old and said she'd never regretted it. She was not about to relegate the importance of her creative life, her career.

“It's better for everyone,” she had said, “not the least of whom is me.”

At the time Sam thought it impressive, a model for her to aspire to. After she had Ella, though, she couldn't help but think her friend selfish.

“Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama. Come with me. Come to my room,” Rosalee whined, tugging at her mother's hand.

“Come on, Rosalee,” Sarah said. “Why don't you show me your new Pocahontas dress?”

Rosalee thrust out her bottom lip and stamped her foot.

Sam held out Ella to Sarah and tried not to let the tears leak out.

“Believe me, Samantha, you're going to get used to this,” Melanie said.

From Sarah's arms, Ella smiled at Sam with six little teeth, the two front ones spaced far apart, her eyes gray-blue and impossibly large. Sarah tucked Ella's chubby legs into the sling and hammocked her, and then took Rosalee's hand and whisked out of the room with a “Bye” over her shoulder.

“I'll walk you out,” Melanie said, picking up her laptop bag.

Sam was embarrassed to be crying in front of Melanie, who was derisive of the earth-mother culture of Madison. “Spare me the hippie bullshit,” she'd say.

The sun streaked through the cloud breaks, warm on Sam's head.

“We'll talk,” Melanie said. “Get back in the studio, woman. Okay?”

They hugged, and Melanie clicked away in her heeled boots toward Monroe Street. Sam stood in her open car door and strained her ears through the birds and a leaf blower down the block, thinking she could hear Ella's cry. But she couldn't be sure. She sat behind the wheel.

She wished she could call her mother. She called Jack.

“So?”

“I'm out here and she's in there.”

“You did it,” he said.

“I don't feel liberated.”

“You don't have to.”

“I guess I'm headed home.”

“Your studio awaits.”

“I'm scared.”

“I know. Just get a feel for things. Get your hands dirty. Clear out the cobwebs.”

“Literally. Have you seen it in there? It's like
Tales from the Crypt
.”

“I thought I'd bring home Matsuya for dinner.”

“What if I suck?”

“Sam.”

“Okay. I miss her already.”

“You're a good mom.”

“My usual. Spicy tuna roll, shrimp tempura roll.”

“I'm going up for tenure.”

“Already? What happened?”

“The department is shifting. Daniels was forced out. He'll retire at the end of the year. I think the timing is right.”

“Wow. That's huge. Not that I didn't know you were the ‘it' kid.”

“It doesn't mean I'll get it.”

“You'll get it. You get everything.”

She'd meant this as a compliment, because he was one of those people who got the grants, the jobs, the fellowships he applied for, one of those people who was well liked because of an easygoing exterior that belied the smart and driven man underneath. But her words hung in the air a moment too long and she couldn't tell if she'd sounded a little bitter. She couldn't tell if she'd been mean.

“That's not true,” he said. If he was stung, he didn't let on. “I'll tell you more about it later.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too. Hey, Sam?”

“Yeah.”

“I hate to be a nudge. But.”

“The teapot.”

“I need Franklin's support. He's already on the fence. I don't want to give him a reason, you know? He asked me about it last week.”

She hid her face in her free hand. She had to throw the body, the spout, and the lid, trim a base, pull a handle, assemble the parts, making sure that the piece actually worked, that it poured easily, while still looking graceful and light, with smoothed joints and upward lines and energy. Then the bisque firing, which might bring out cracks and warping, which would mean starting over. All this before figuring out the colors that would best suit the shape, the precise measuring of chemicals and minerals, and applying the glaze. And then another firing. It was an exhausting, teetering climb to imagine, and she couldn't get quite enough air.

“When?” was all she could get out.

“Two weeks.”

Sam dropped her head against the steering wheel. “Oh, Jack.”

“You can do it. I know you can. For me.”

She chucked the phone into the passenger seat and tried to regain her breath. She glanced back at Melanie's house and started the car, willing herself to drive away from Ella. But she couldn't bring herself to go home and face her studio. She felt a curious new sensation of being cut loose. The day stretched out in front of her.

She could do whatever she wanted.

 

VIOLET

Violet skipped, laughing a little as she slipped on the rain-slick cobblestones. The air was heavy with fish and soot, but it was familiar and it was welcome. The sun had just cracked the sky, the morning still cool in the shadow of the Great Bridge. The sky was a spring-water blue. She stopped atop the small hill on Roosevelt Street to watch the masts of the few ships in the East River, black spindles and dirty sails, moving slowly under the bridge's span. She had never been across to Brooklyn, had never been on the bridge itself for that matter, but she didn't think she was missing much. Boston, maybe, or California, or some other place she had heard about—that would be different.

Violet had escaped from the Home before the sun came up, through a window near the laundry, leaving behind two weeks of hourly bells, bread and molasses for breakfast, bread and milk for lunch, soup for supper, and Bible verse recitation with the Presbyterian ladies who came in every evening to help purify the children's still salvageable souls. She would not miss the coughing, hiccupy cries of the babies, their faces pink and their noses gooey, or their heavy-footed wetnurses—Italian women with thick eyebrows and ample bosoms—who scowled at the children as they trudged to the nurseries. But she was sorry to have missed today's bath. She was filthy, her fingernails edged in dirt, her head itchy. Upon admittance to the Home, they'd hacked off her long black hair, leaving it short in back with a jagged line of bangs high on her forehead. The attendant, Miss Nickle, had said it made her eyes look bluer and prettier. Violet didn't see this as any kind of benefit, but she did like that she felt lighter without all that hair. She felt harder to catch.

It was a rare still moment in the neighborhood, the small space between the exhale of night and the inhale of morning. No clopping hooves of carriage horses, no puttering automobiles, and even the elevated trains were not yet roaring and screeching. The Fourth Ward was an overstuffed slice of the Lower East Side: tenements, docks, boardinghouses, saloons, dance halls, factories, shops, warehouses, a slaughterhouse, a bone boiling plant, a tannery, a coal yard, a mission, a manure dumping ground, and a police station. No grass, no trees, no open space save the cold river. It was a hive of small dark streets that angled and turned in odd directions, and to outsiders it was an iniquitous place to be avoided. But Violet was glad to be back.

In just her muslin dress and plaid apron from the Home, she was chilled by the breeze along the wharf. The rigging of the harbored ships clanged against the masts as she walked along South Street, passing grubby kids asleep, tucked in among barrels and shipping containers and crates waiting to be loaded. Garbage and ash wagons were lined up to dump their foul freight onto a barge in the river. Violet held her nose in the crook of her arm. At least it wasn't yet summer, when dysentery hit the tenements worst, when the noisome smells of filth and decay would become unbearable.

Violet walked up to Water Street and stepped over the gutter stream churning brown. The neighborhood was coming alive: shopkeepers opening up; sailors, fleeced and pilloried, blundering back to their quarters; the box factory night-shift workers stopping for cheap rum; the ragpickers scavenging the heaps of refuse left from the night's debauchery. Violet looked up to the second floor above the vegetable store, but it was too early for the women in the windows; their services weren't generally offered before noon.

Across the street, the two Dugan boys searched the pockets of a drunk slumped outside of a bucket shop called the Tiger Eye. The older one had copper hair and freckles; his little brother had dark hair and olive skin. The others teased them about their mother, calling her a bed warmer or a sailor screwer. But they were just jealous. In the Fourth Ward, having a mother around was a silent, collective longing.

“What'd you get?” Violet called, as she crossed over to the boys.

She had learned fast in the city, and she had done her fair share of pocket picking. She liked the surprise of it, the endless possible discoveries. A licorice whip, a deck of cards, a gold nugget—anything could be awaiting quick fingers.

He held out his palm, dirty in its creases, displaying a nickel and two pennies. Violet tried to grab them, but he snatched his hand away.

“I'd knock you if you weren't a girl,” he said.

Violet teased him with a quick-footed shuffle-ball change, a step she had learned from her mother.

“You were put in the Home, huh?” he asked.

“Ran off this morning.”

“Good thing,” he said. “They might have put you on one of them trains.”

She'd heard rumors about the trains at the Home, but she didn't understand why they wanted kids or where they went. She'd seen the Aid Society women in their black coats and fretted brows scurry about, holding the hands of some of the youngest charges, bitty ones she never saw again.

The younger boy rubbed his runny nose and kicked the drunk's foot.

“Let's go,” his brother said to him, jingling his new coins in his fist.

“Hey, Red,” Violet said. “Seen Nino?”

“Nah. I heard some of the newsboys got busted.”

The barkeep pushed through the swinging doors and dumped a bucket of dishwater into the gutter. When he saw the boys he feinted a lunge.

“Go on,” he barked, as they scampered away. “You too,” he growled at Violet.

She stuck out her tongue at him and jumped into the fetid stream, splashing his feet. The water seeped through the soles of her boots, but it was worth it, she decided, for the zing of retaliation.

As she neared the Mission, she saw Aid Society women milling about in heavy black wool dresses, their stiff bonnets encasing hair that was pulled tightly into puritanical buns. They had baskets of sweets, which they held out for children who made a tentative approach, their desire for candy outweighing their fear of authority.

“How about you, little sir,” said the oldest of the women, her nose like a small gourd, bending down to a boy with a dirt-streaked face and bare feet. “You want to live with a nice Christian family?”

He grabbed a handful from the basket and took off down the street.

Three little girls, no older than five, sat on the curb. One of the women directed a couple of scruffy boys to sit next to them.