The Chaperone (24 page)

“Responsible?” She brought her bottle to her lips.

“Ya.”

“For me?”

“Ya.”

She almost laughed. “Well, that’s very sweet.” She started to lean back in her chair, mirroring his posture, but her corset wouldn’t let her. “I can assure you I’ll be fine. I’m a grown woman.”

“I can see.”

She glanced up. His face was neutral. She couldn’t tell if he was being suggestive. He’d just told her about his wife and child. But she’d heard about European men.

He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I just do not want… The nuns have reasons for keeping the records private. I have been working there for a few years now, and I have seen the people who bring their children, and the people who come to visit.”

“Please.” She raised her palm. “The sister already gave me this lecture. I know my mother could have been a drunk or… a woman of… ill repute. I know all this, thank you.” Her purse, with its wonderful new contents, was nestled against her side. “But I don’t care. I have an address. I came looking for answers, and now I might find them. That’s all that matters to me.”

“That is good.” His brows lowered behind the silver frames. He seemed not to require more from her, but now she wanted to talk, to say these words to another person, this stranger, her sudden confidant.

“So I don’t care if she’s a drunk or… or… anything. But you know, she could very well be a decent person. I remember the parents who came to visit. Some of them were just poor. Some were just sick. It’s not as if they’re all bad people.”

“I hope not.” He nodded, looking at the table. “My own daughter stays there now.”

Cora tilted her head. “Your daughter? She’s…” She couldn’t think of how to ask. If she was his daughter, she wasn’t an orphan.

“My wife died. The influenza.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cora said. She’d heard the flu had been especially bad in New York. In Kansas, in just 1918, more than ten thousand had been killed, including Alan’s sister and her husband in Lawrence. Everyone at the funeral, except for the minister, had worn a paper mask, and Alan, even in his grief, had yelled at Howard for yanking his off after the service. When they returned home, they’d been too scared to even get on a streetcar, and Cora, terrified, had kept the boys home from school for months.

“I’m glad you survived,” she said. “For the sake of your daughter.” She didn’t know what to say. “Did you… did you fall ill at all?”

“I wasn’t with her.” He rubbed the blond stubble of his chin. “I was gone for most of the war and a little after. Down in Georgia. Fort Oglethorpe. I was interned.”

“Interned?” She frowned. “You mean imprisoned?”

“Ya, it was the same. Only with prison, you get a trial.”

She leaned a little away from him. “What did you do?”

“It was what I did not do.” He held her gaze. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the request of a mob. I wouldn’t kiss the flag, not for them. So I was a spy. They had about four thousand of us spies down there. Only we did not know we were spies until they tell us.”

She was silent. He could be lying. Perhaps he’d really been a spy. Or maybe he’d been secretly sending money to Germany, the way she’d heard some immigrants were doing. Perhaps he’d deserved to be sent to Georgia. But then, maybe not. In Wichita, at the start of the war, a foreigner who sold popcorn from a cart on Douglas Avenue was nearly killed by a mob. Alan had been there, just walking down the street, and he said it was the most frightening moment of his life, seeing so many people screaming at this man who was on his knees pleading, trying to explain that he’d misplaced his war bond, and that he hadn’t hung the flag from his cart because it was torn and he hadn’t been able to mend it. The police finally arrived and got the man to safety. Later, she and Alan heard the man wasn’t even German, but a Polish Jew.

“Your wife died while you were there?”

“Ya. And I did not know. They only sometimes gave us our mail. I never got the letter.” He shrugged. “There was nothing I could have done. It was all barb-wired.” He pointed up at the low ceiling of the drugstore, his finger moving in a slow half circle. “There were men in towers with machine guns. When they let me out, I make my way back, and that is when I found out about Andrea. The neighbors said a charity took the baby. I spend three months to track her down, and find out she was placed down here.” He lifted the bottle, then set it down. “But then I could not take her out. My business was gone. I had no money. I could not work and care for her. I told the sisters I know how to fix things, and they take mercy on me and hire me. So now, at least, I get to see her every day. And I know she is safe.” He rubbed his chin. “She is almost six.”

Cora lowered her gaze. “You must be angry,” she said quietly. “About being sent away.”

He sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “No. Like you tell me, I am lucky to be living. I can go crazy, thinking about what would be if I had not been sent to Georgia.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was good luck. The flu was in Oglethorpe, too. There were bodies going out every night. But I think it was worse in Queens, on our street, in our building. If I was not interned, I would have been with her, but maybe I get sick and die, too. And then what for our daughter? She would be a full orphan, not a half one.” He met Cora’s gaze. “She might have already gone out on a train.”

Cora was silent. It was so hard to believe that the trains were still going out, that other children were still, maybe at this very moment, headed west into anything, into so much good luck or bad. “It’s true,” she finally said. “It’s hard to know what could have been.”

“You should think about that.” He leaned forward on his elbows, and the table creaked. “So what will you do now? You will write to this person?”

“Yes,” Cora said. “It’s someone who knows, or knew, my… mother. She wrote from Haverhill, Massachusetts. She might still be at that address.” She felt insensitive now, talking about her own good fortune. But he was looking at her intently. Quite intently.

“Have you ever heard of the Florence Night Mission?”

He shook his head.

“On Bleecker Street?”

“That is in the Village. Not far.”

“The records said that was where I came from. I might go down there, just to see.” Might nothing, Cora thought. She would go to Bleecker Street tomorrow, as soon as she got Louise to class.

“You might as well. You have come all the way from Kansas.”

She smiled. He had a good memory. Her gaze rested on his hands. They needed cream, she thought. The pads of his thumbs were callused.

“I think the sisters were wrong not to let you see the records,” he said. “That is why I show you. But you should know they aren’t just mean and crazy, the nuns. They have reasons.” He held up his hands. “Have open eyes. That is what I mean.”

She nodded, looking at him shyly. It was nice to be shown such caring. She’d been feeling a little beaten down, perhaps, spending so much time with just Louise. And she’d thought everyone in New York would be so cold and hard. But here she’d already made a friend. A German handyman ex-prisoner, whom she’d never see again, but a friend nonetheless.

“Thank you,” she said, meaning it. “Thank you for taking the time.”

He nodded, his gaze moving over her face in a way she would long remember.

“It was a pleasure.”

She stood quickly, saying she had to hurry and catch the subway; her young charge would be getting out of class soon. She really had to run. On her way out of the store, she walked fast and kept her head low, concerned that she was blushing. But the woman behind the counter only called for her to please come again, with a little wave of her grape-stained hand.

THIRTEEN

“I hate movies.”
Louise sat under the painting of the Siamese cat, fanning herself with a section of the newspaper. “Really. I don’t care what’s playing. I absolutely won’t go.”

Cora looked up from the listings, irritated. Heat and humidity this early in the morning did nothing for her patience. “How can you hate the movies, Louise? You love theater. You have to read with the movies, but that’s the only difference.”

“Blasphemer.” She closed her eyes, still fanning. “Please don’t say that in my presence again.”

Cora frowned. After only a week of diction lessons from Floyd Smithers, free with the purchase of a daily milk shake, Louise’s way of speaking had already changed. The difference was subtle—she didn’t, in fact, sound as if she were faking a British accent. But she no longer sounded like herself, either, or like anyone from back home. Her vowels were more rounded, her consonants more distinct. She’d accomplished her goal in a matter of days: she had no accent at all.

“They’re hardly the same,” she continued, her eyes open now, fixing Cora with a pitying stare. “Movies are manufactured and packaged for the masses, served cold. Wichita sees what Los Angeles sees, and Manhattan sees what Toledo sees. It’s all the same because it’s all dead.” She put down the newspaper and fluttered a hand over the table between them. “Live theater is like dance. It’s alive and ephemeral. You have just one night between the dancer and the audience, everyone breathing the same air.” She sighed, as if realizing the futility of trying to explain any of this to Cora. “Besides,” she said, “you can see all the movies you like back in Wichita, but you won’t be able to go to Broadway once you get back.”

Cora had for some time noticed that Louise always said “once
you
get back to Wichita,” not “once
we
get back to Wichita,” and Cora suspected that Louise was not simply hoping to be offered one of the permanent spots at Denishawn, but planning on it. Cora worried how Louise would react if it didn’t happen, how she (and therefore they) would survive the long trip home. It wasn’t that Louise never suffered insecurity. She was always criticizing herself on the way home from class, saying that her jumps had been too sloppy or that her legs were still too fat for a dancer’s. At the same time, she seemed so bent on success that Cora doubted she had any kind of contingency plan, or even any capacity to accept a different kind of life if things just didn’t work out. Part of her thought she should caution Louise, to warn her that life didn’t always go according to one’s wishes, if only to prepare her for the possibility of disappointment. But most of her understood that this conversation would not go well, and she managed to hold her tongue.

Nevertheless, Cora cautioned herself against hope, even as she waited for a letter from Haverhill, watching for the postman from her window like a hawk watching from a tree. A letter was her only hope. She’d already gone down to Greenwich Village and wandered its curving streets until she found 29 Bleecker Street, which was just a three-story building that appeared broken up into several apartments. Cora asked the greengrocer on the corner if he knew where she might find the Florence Night Mission, and although the grocer had never heard of it, he translated her question to Italian for an elderly man sitting by a barrel of apples, who apparently told the grocer to tell Cora that the Florence Night Mission had been across the street some thirty years ago, but wasn’t anymore.

And the old man, wrinkled and toothless as he was, looked her up and down.

So the Florence Night Mission was gone, a dead end. She tried not to be too anxious about the letter. Even if Mary O’Dell were still alive and living at the same address in Haverhill, even if she still wanted contact, it might be several days before Cora received her response. But probably not much longer than that. Cora had been clear in her letter that she would only be in New York for a few more weeks. She would either hear from Haverhill soon, or not at all. She knew that of the two possibilities, the latter was more likely. If that was the case, she would bear it. She was not like Louise, unfamiliar with disappointments, needing everything to go her way. If she got no reply, if Mary O’Dell was dead or otherwise unreachable, Cora would find a way to be grateful that she’d at least discovered that her mother, whoever she was, had wanted to know her. That might have to be enough.

She tried to distract herself,
playing the tourist the rest of the week. While Louise was at class, she visited Grant’s Tomb. She spent a whole day at the Museum of Natural History and several art museums. She went for a ride in an open-air bus, and she took a guided walking tour of Central Park, where she saw a veritable flock of grazing sheep, oblivious to the cityscape behind them.

And through it all, she was so lonely. The intensity caught her off guard. She’d spent plenty of time alone back home—days when Alan was at work and the boys were at school. She’d always liked having time to herself, to read, to think, to pretty up the house. But she’d had her friends and her volunteer work, or a pleasant exchange with Della or a neighbor to break up the time. This was a different kind of solitude, unrelenting and thorough. She moved through the crowded sidewalks as a stranger to everyone, without even a chance of bumping into anyone who might recognize her and call out. This was how it felt to be a foreigner, she thought, with no one knowing who you were or where you came from. It was as if she had become a person not just unknown but unknowable, and it bothered her to think that her grasp on herself was so weak that she needed steady reminding from people at home who knew her to feel like herself at all.

The German was foreign, of course, and he had seemed at ease.

On Friday, she paid a dime to take an express elevator, so fast it felt like a thrill ride, to the top of the Woolworth Building, so she could look out at the city from its highest point some sixty floors up. It was something, really, to be up that high, higher than she’d ever imagined she would be, surrounded by windows and looking down at the tiered and tapered tops of regal buildings that were all at least twice as tall as the tallest building in Wichita. She could see the great bridges, and the Statue of Liberty, so far away they looked small, and the embracing arms of the blue, surrounding water, and in the distance, it seemed, the very curve of the earth. But even then, even in her wonder, she couldn’t help but think that from up in the high and quiet, behind the glass of the observation booth, the city finally looked and sounded as apart from her as it felt. And after spending so much time alone with herself, she wondered if she were in Wichita, somehow looking down from such a great height over the quieter streets and surrounding prairie she knew so well, full of people she would recognize and love, she might still find the distance fitting.