The Chaperone (16 page)

“You’ve heard from other girls who went out on the train?”

“A few.”

“Mary Jane? I don’t remember her last name. But she was here when I was, and she was on the train with me. Or Little Rose?”

“No. Just a few girls, I said. Are you still with the Church?”

Cora considered lying. But even now, the blue eyes scared her. Through the lace curtain, she saw the shadow of a seagull on the sill.

“No, Sister. They weren’t Catholics, the people who took me.”

Sister Delores frowned. Her left hand had a tremble. She stopped it by laying her right hand over it on the desk. “They were supposed to put you all in Catholic homes.” She brought her hands beneath her chin and gave Cora an accusing look. “They hardly ever did, though. Isn’t that nice? Our own children, who we fed and clothed, could now be donning white hoods against us.”

Cora shook her head. “I’ve had nothing to do with white hoods.”

“What church do you attend now?”

“Presbyterian. My adoptive parents were Methodists, but now I’m Presbyterian.”

It was as if she’d answered First Church of Satan. Sister Delores stared.

“Well.” The nun again rested her hands on her desk. “We got wise to what they were pulling. Now we send out our own trains. The Church does, I mean.”

“Still? Children still go out on trains?”

“Certainly. When we get financing. It’s been a very good program for most.” She turned her hands over, showing her palms. “You’re sitting there in very fine clothes. You just said you had a positive experience.”

“I did,” Cora said. “I’m grateful.”

It was true. She would be the first to say how lucky she was. If not for the train, she could have grown up here, her hands ruined from laundry, her mind dull from lack of school. She knew the train had given her an easier life, and more importantly, the Kaufmanns. But that had just been luck.

“I want to learn about my birth parents, Sister, who and where I came from.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“Why not?”

“The records are confidential.”

“You have records?”

“It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t share them with you.”

“Why not?”

“Those are the rules.”

“Why?”

“Because no good can come of that knowledge.” There was the hard look Cora remembered, the blue eyes unblinking and still. “Miss Kaufmann, it’s likely that your parents are dead, and that they were dead before you even came here. What good would knowing more do you?”

“I want to know,” Cora said. “Even if they’re dead.” She smiled. “Actually, I’d like to learn more about my Catholic roots.”

The nun’s eyes narrowed. “You can do that on your own.”

“I want to know who I am.” Cora looked at her lap. She didn’t want to beg, but she would. “Who I would have been, without charity.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re a child of God. You’re you. Do you need to find out the sad tale? Would it bring you real peace? No.” She made her hand flat, slicing it through the air. “It would do you no practical good. And if they’re not dead, then that’s a bigger problem. We don’t betray the birth mothers’ privacy. If they’re alive, they don’t want to be found.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“How?”

She leaned back in her chair, sighing. “You want me to be frank, Miss Kaufmann? I’ll be frank. If your mother was alive when she gave you up, you were likely conceived in some sort of sordidness. Drinking. Drugs. Adultery. Prostitution. Rape. Do you want me to go on?” She sat up straight, her eyes still on Cora’s. “That wouldn’t be your fault. No one is saying that it would be. That was the whole point of caring for you, and certainly the point of sending you out on the train. Consider the trouble that people went to, the expense, to get you girls into decent homes so you could have decent lives. What? Are you a homing pigeon for misery? You want to undo all the time and money that was spent on your behalf, coming back here to find the very squalor we lifted you out of?”

Cora swallowed. She shouldn’t be scared, not of the annoyance in the nun’s gaze, the sureness of her questions. She was an adult now. A married woman. She could talk back.

“But some of the girls just had sick parents,” she said, her voice steady. “One girl’s mother was in the hospital. I remember. That’s not squalor. That’s sickness. What if she got better?”

“She probably didn’t. And do you know why she was in the hospital? You don’t. Not really. What the girl was told and what was true may have been two different things. We would likely have spared a child knowing what would have been too much for her.”

“But I’m not a child now,” Cora said. “I don’t want to be lied to.” She held the nun’s gaze, not looking away. She wanted her to understand. Nothing would be too much for her. Even if her parents were sordid, or mad, or drunks, or dead, she wanted to know who they were. And they couldn’t be all bad. She saw them—she was sure she saw them—in her own boys. Earle was quiet and thoughtful like his father, but where had Howard gotten his pluck, his daring? No one in Alan’s family had a grin like that. And where had Earle gotten his talent for drawing? She didn’t care about sordidness or squalor. She knew the story would likely be ugly. But she wanted to know it. She did.

“When I was first brought here,” she said calmly, “I wasn’t an infant. I was already walking, and I knew my name. The older girls told me. I was chubby, they said. I’d been cared for. I have a memory of a woman holding me, speaking to me kindly. And in some other language, not English.”

“Then hold on to that.” The nun shrugged. “Know that you were loved. Don’t soil it with details that will only ruin what you remember. And consider your adoptive parents, who you just told me were the best you could have hoped for. Why betray the people who cared for you as if you were their own?”

Cora looked at the lace curtain through blurred eyes. It was a smart tactic, shaming her with the Kaufmanns. But it wasn’t fair. Hadn’t Mr. Kaufmann himself taken her to the cemetery in McPherson to show her the graves of the Kaufmann parents and grandparents who had settled the land and taught him to farm? And hadn’t Mother Kaufmann told her about her grandfather the abolitionist, so committed to his cause that he’d moved his Massachusetts family out to Kansas? Sister Delores was telling her bloodlines meant nothing, when most people’s entire lives were shaped by who their parents and grandparents were. Look at Louise. Myra wasn’t a dream mother by any stretch, but Louise had grown up so confident, so sure of what she was meant for.

Sister Delores stood slowly, steadying herself by leaning on the desk. Cora understood. The interview was over. The answer was, and would be, no. Cora nodded, standing as well. There wasn’t anything else to do. It wouldn’t matter if she cried or laughed or screamed or got on her knees and begged.

Cora managed a polite thank you. At least she had gotten this far. She was looking into the face of someone who had known her as a child, in the first home she remembered. Still, that was not what she had come for, and even as she followed the nun back into the hallway and to the front door, as obedient as the child she had been, she felt the same anger as when she’d received Sister Eugenia’s letter, back in Wichita. Who were these old women, with their cloistered lives, to tell her what she could and couldn’t know? What she needed and what she didn’t?

“I see that you’re disappointed,” Sister Delores said. Her voice was softer now, but the pale eyes didn’t blink. “I understand that. But please know, my goal is to protect you. From yourself. You think you want to know more than you really do.”

The front door opened, and the handyman walked in. He looked at Cora, right at her face, as if her distress was any of his concern. She lowered her gaze and moved by. And then, these were the facts: the sweet-smelling air as she stepped outside, and the sound of the door closing, and locking, behind her.

NINE

At intermission,
Louise said that the problem with the Ziegfeld Follies was that she’d come with high expectations.

“The comedy is good,” she told Cora, fingering the strand of beads around her neck. “But the chorus girls? Pretty faces and elaborate costumes. Boring. Maybe one or two girls are
authentically
beautiful. That’s it. I’ve never seen so many fake smiles.”

“Lower your voice,” Cora whispered. The theater’s big foyer was crowded with men and women talking in little groups. A sign gave directions to the Men’s Smoking Lounge, but many of the women were smoking as well, and, from what Cora could see, neither gender seemed interested in separation.

“Mark my words,” Louise said, with only a slight decrease in volume. “When I’m on stage, I won’t smile just because someone tells me to. I’ll only smile when it’s real.”

Cora sighed, looking up at the foyer’s glass-dome ceiling. Every inch of the New Amsterdam’s interior was ornate, with swirling vines and flowers and birds carved into the walls, and matching patterns on the green and mauve carpets. In her opinion, just being in such a beautiful space, not to mention feeling the ice-cooled air blown in by electric fans, was worth the price of admission. All of it had cheered her spirits, taking her mind, at least temporarily, off of her quick defeat by Sister Delores. She’d had to pull herself together before collecting Louise, who apparently wasn’t as good at detecting a forced gaiety as she thought. Either that, or Cora was a better actress than the chorus girls.

And now, truthfully, she was enjoying the show, and grateful for all its distractions. She couldn’t wait to tell the boys and Alan that she’d gone to the Ziegfeld Follies and seen Will Rogers in person, not to mention funny Fanny Brice doing an impersonation of a ballerina. Cora thought the chorus girls were beautiful, though she didn’t see why, even in the number where each girl was supposed to be a different flower in a wedding wreath, they had to wear such immodest costumes, with nothing at all covering their legs and the midriffs showing on some. She would have preferred it if the chorus girls had taken off their elaborate, feathered headwear and used it to cover their thighs.

She turned to Louise. “How could you possibly tell if their smiles were fake? We’re in the back row of the mezzanine.”

“I could tell. They were that fake.”

Staring out into the crowd, Louise pulled her necklace up to her mouth, moving a bead in between her lips. Cora touched the girl’s hand and shook her head. It was hard to know when she was just trying to provoke or get attention, and when she just wasn’t thinking. Tonight, she was wearing a sleeveless dress as black as her hair, and when she wasn’t gumming her jewelry, she looked more sophisticated than any older woman in the room.

“I thought you loved theater,” Cora said. “Don’t stage people have to fake emotions all the time? Isn’t that their job?”

Louise winced before looking up at Cora as if she were the most tiresome idiot on the planet. Even with the blunt bangs, she could resemble Myra so much.

“Acting is not fakery, Cora. At least not good acting.” She shook her head, clearly disgusted. “A real actress, a real artist, feels whatever emotion she’s showing. You just saw Fanny Brice’s performance. You’re telling me that you can’t tell the difference between her expressions and those idiotic chorus girls’?”

“Fanny Brice is just being funny.”

“She’s a genius.”

Ah, Cora thought, smiling a little. Someone actually had the girl’s approval. Louise also admired her mother, of course, as well as the older girl named Martha at Denishawn who Louise said was the best dancer she’d ever seen. So it was a club of only three. Everyone else, as far as Cora could tell, only earned the girl’s scorn.

A silver-haired man in a dark suit walked by them, openly staring at Louise. Louise stared back, dark eyes gleaming, before turning to Cora.

“It’s an elegant crowd, isn’t it?”

Cora nodded. She had just been thinking how strange it was that this theater full of women in beaded dresses and silk gowns, so many with long strands of pearls or steel-cut beads, a few holding cigarettes in holders out for men in suits to light, was just some thirty blocks from the neighborhood by the orphanage. It was hard to fathom that they belonged to the same city, the same side of Manhattan, even. There might as well have been an ocean in between.

“You do think the crowd is elegant?” Louise looked at her, waiting.

“Certainly.” Cora glanced back at her, suspicious. It wasn’t like Louise to solicit her opinion on anything.

“Hmm.” Louise smiled, fingering the beads again. “You’ll notice many of the women are wearing paint.”

Cora rolled her lips in. So there was the trap. Before they left the apartment that evening, they’d had an argument over whether or not Louise could wear rouge and lipstick out to the theater. Cora had held firm, and made Louise wash her face clean. She had not believed the girl’s protests that Myra regularly allowed her to paint her face like a harlot. As far as Cora knew, obviously painted cheeks and lips marked women of a certain profession.

Looking around her now, however, she saw that many, if not most, of the women in attendance had unabashedly shadowed their eyelids and lined their eyes, and reddened and glossed their lips. More than a few wore skirts that just grazed their knees. Of course, compared to the very painted and nearly naked Ziegfeld girls that they had all just applauded and paid to see, the women in the foyer looked like nuns. None of it would have been conceivable when Cora was Louise’s age. Maybe Louise was right. Maybe the old rules were changing. Cora caught sight of herself in a gold-framed mirror: her long, high-collared dress, her pinned hair, her unpainted face. When she’d left the apartment, she’d thought she looked nice, wearing her good rose gown with the sash that made her waist look small, or smaller. But none of the younger women in the foyer wore a skirt as long as hers, and none had a collar as high.

Maybe she was falling behind the times, as provincial and outmoded in her thinking as in her dress. Maybe she was like the old women who had told her generation that they were behaving unnaturally, bothering legislators and asking strangers in the street to sign petitions, trying to get the vote.