“It’s Esther.”
“Poor dear,” Patricia said. “He must not know if he’s here or there.”
Father raised himself on his elbows. Patricia pinched my arm.
“Ah, Esther,” he said, wrapping his hand around my wrist. He held it to his chest and his eyes brimmed. “Du bist zu mir zurückgekommen, sie aber nicht. Jetzt geh’nie weg von hier.”
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“You returned to him.” This was Nan from the door. She looked in with her hand on her stomach, the way it always was now. “The other one didn’t. Myrle, he means.” She stopped, raised her eyes to mine. “But you, he’s saying, you’ll never go away from here again.”
“I’ll be,” Patricia said. “He’s sicker than I thought.”
Never. The sound of it rung in my ears, no matter what Patricia said. Now she meant me when he said it, not the other girl, and that was something. Something grand. I thought of Myrle’s fingers through the crack in the door, how with a touch they’d almost burned. We’d stayed like that until the whistles from the factories went, far off. I’ll be back, I’d told her, I promise. And she’d only said, When? Myrle had never asked to come home. Those fingers of hers weren’t anything like I knew anymore. That’s what Chicago does to a girl, wringing you out until you become someone else. Maybe Myrle really was drowned, if that’s what she wanted, to sink deep in the place where she had Charlotte and Keyes and I had only pinpricks. Maybe that’s what the Elliot boy had done to her from the start.
And who was I to say any different?
Part V: The Birth of Norma Byrne
MYRLE
I
She was coming and I couldn’t stop her. I wasn’t about to try. I lay in the darkness of our room and didn’t make a sound. The pinch was sharp at my back, my stomach a stone. The air felt restless and no end to it, save it was hushed like the inside of a box. Already I could imagine the curl of her hand in mine, her fingernails that would need trimming, and a thread of hair on her crown. A new little girl, just like that. As if I had done something to deserve her, and I wished I had.
“Charlotte,” I called. She woke on the pillow next to me with those springs of hair in her eyes. When the light shone through the windows, I felt another one, sharper this time, with a twist in my insides. Charlotte took my hand.
We waited until the sun rose higher on the windows, the pains faster and the sheets hot to the touch. In the chair next to me, Charlotte worried herself into silence. By the door, Mrs. Keyes had abandoned the knitting in her lap. “At least it’s a Sunday,” she sighed. “We won’t have those factories blaring at us.” The alley outside was quiet as a church, the house too, the other girls still asleep. If it hadn’t been for babies, I might have thought the three of us the last in the good wide world. If we spoke, something terrible would surely come of it. When the door finally opened, Mrs. Keyes dropped her head. “Thank heaven,” she said and crossed herself. “The woman’s here. We’ll survive the day.”
“Hold on, dearie,” the midwife said as she bustled in. She was a small woman with a graying bun and round cheeks, but her hands were frighteningly quick. She dropped her bag and tapped Mrs. Keyes on the shoulder. “Get two bowls of hot water and a knife. Plenty of towels. And be sure that water’s clean. The knife with it.” Hurrying out, Mrs. Keyes opened her mouth as if she might cry. The woman winked at Charlotte and touched her hands to my stomach. “Nice and low,” she crooned. “You shouldn’t be much time at all.” She washed at the sink and sat at the foot of the bed, pressing open my knees. “You’ll feel my hand.”
I winced.
The woman whistled. “She’s upside down, that’s the trouble. I’ll have to turn her.” She cocked her head. “You’re a young one, aren’t you? But that will be all right. Young ones have strength more than the old mothers. You might just have to bite your tongue a bit.”
I knotted the sheet between my fingers. Charlotte sat with me on the bed, the bed far too narrow now and stiff at my back. When Mrs. Keyes returned, the other girls were awake in the hall, crowding together with their whispers. “You leave her alone, you hear me,” Mrs. Keyes scolded them. “Myrle’s got enough problems without you bumbling about.” She fastened the lock and checked it twice.
“Here we go.” The midwife reached under the sheet. “You try telling her to come out. Think on that.” Charlotte’s face shone. “Go on, Myrle,” she said. “You yell all you want.” But I couldn’t catch my breath. The bed felt higher, the light from the windows streaming, and a pain tore through my insides to the back of my throat. “She’s a mischief,” the midwife swore, shaking her head. I wondered if telling her to come would do any good. What had Mother said? It’s a fine thing to be born, but it’s none too comfortable. Fine things go like that. But what did Mother know of comfort or finer things, when dirt clung to our house and even our gaslights left their smoky stains. I could see them flickering, high on the wall, and a flood of heat rushed between my legs. The midwife stood back. “My goodness,” Mrs. Keyes said. There she was, my little girl. She was blood-thin and purple, a helpless bundle on a sheet. The midwife slapped her stomach and she cried out. “That’s right.” The midwife smiled. “Mrs. Keyes, you take her. We have some doing here.” The woman drew out a needle and thread and a blackened bottle of whisky from her bag.
“Myrle, she’s here,” Charlotte said. “Look who she is.”
“The lungs of an ox, I should say.” Mrs. Keyes held the baby close so I could see her all at once. Her eyes were full, her hair pale as thistles.
“What should we call her?” Charlotte asked. “Helen?”
“Or Ruth,” Mrs. Keyes said.
“What about Rose?” Charlotte asked.
“That’s not a name,” Mrs. Keyes said. “That’s a flower. This one’s a bona fide girl.”
They waited for me, but I couldn’t think. All the names I had imagined before, now they seemed less.
“You’ll feel this one,” the midwife said. A sharp prick and the light from the windows was high and white and flooded the place. I heard a wail, as clear as a bird and rising—the girl was a beauty with her noise. “Greta, that’s a name for her,” I said, letting my eyes close. “After Mother. Even Esther would like that.” “Watch her now. She’s going,” the midwife called. “Myrle?” Charlotte asked. But it was the noise I wanted. It faded off now into the far corner of the room and the room with it—a noise I knew as well as my mother’s voice, and I had always known it. There’s more to you than they think, Mother had said. Just looking at you, I can see it. Ten, twenty years to come. Just you wait.
Twenty years, Mother said. But it took longer than she could have guessed. I remember sleeping on Agnes’ porch with my sisters in the summertime, hours after the house had gone to bed. Through the screens, the cicadas hummed—zikaden, Mother called them. They sang the most when we were milking, at the end of the day and in the early mornings before we started our chores. Once we finished them, Mother would walk us to the river. “Look,” she’d say, plucking a cicada off a leaf. She cupped it in her hand. They were ugly things—bright with circles of green, yellow, and black. Agnes stepped away and Esther made a face, but Mother curled her fingers around the insect as if something precious. “These nest only a few winters,” she said. “But others burrow underground for more than seventeen years. When they come out, they are everywhere underfoot. And the way they sing, you can’t hear your own voice. But after a few months, they are gone again. They leave only their shells.” Mother waved her hand one way and another to show us. “Shells on every tree trunk and fence post.” She blew on the cicada’s back and it drew out its wings. Like glass, those wings—veined and thin, and the cicada didn’t look so ugly then. I asked Mother if I could hold it, and she let it walk into my hand. When I tried the sound zikaden on my tongue, the creature thrummed against my skin. I blew
on it the way Mother had done, its wings spreading. “Can you imagine?” Mother said. “After seventeen years, the world would be a very different place.”
Those days, Mother brought us to the river whenever she wanted to tell us the names of things. “Spruce,” she said. Fichte. “Nettles.” Nessel. And Elster. “For the noisy magpie. That’s what we named you for, Esther,” Mother said. “And what a good name it was.” Esther’s cheeks grew dark. The next morning, Mother asked us to remember what she’d taught. Agnes always could, but Esther couldn’t, and I for one didn’t understand how something might have two names at once. Mother wouldn’t give up on us, and soon the whole world and every leaf and twig had at least two names to call it by. Only in the year before the war did Mother stop her lessons. “Quiet,” she’d say. “You keep those words in your mouth.” Later when she took to her bed, we found her looking out her window as if she could see the shadows of every named thing now and forever in the paint peeling from the barn.
When Lee went to fight, Mother stayed in her room. She kept an oil lamp by her bedside so she could knit when she was awake. Father hung blue crinoline for her curtains, and through the end of October, the room filled with a watery kind of light. When Mother seemed bedridden for good, we sat with her with our schoolbooks. Agnes read aloud and Esther acted the stories out, but for me, I stayed close enough I could curl a length of her hair around my finger and feel the rise and fall of her chest. “Where I come from,” Mother said, “words have juice to them. Die Heimat. Die Sicherheit. Die Liebe.” She repeated the sounds like a chant. When she caught us listening, she wiped a hand across her mouth. “Beautiful, yes?” she said. “Now be sure to forget them.”
Agnes copied the words on a page of her book. I couldn’t make sense of them. Die, die, I read over her shoulder. “That’s not what it means,” Agnes said.
“Don’t you worry,” Mother told us, clutching our hands. “You’ll have Nan, as good as any mother. Girls should have their mother when they are young.”
Before Agnes could stop her, Esther tore out the page and threw it into the fire. Agnes stopped copying Mother’s words then.
It was late in November when Esther and I found Mother in her bed. She lay as she always did, her head turned to the window. Though her mouth was open, she wouldn’t speak to us. We stood in the doorway pinching our fingers. “Mother,” I whispered, as if I could wake her. Agnes broke through and dropped an ear to Mother’s lips. “Hurry now,” she said. “Get Father.” The smell of Mother’s room was close and sweet. She looked small as a pile of sticks under her blankets. “Go,” Agnes shouted. Esther gripped my wrist and together we ran. We called for Father in the fields and the stables. We called for him in the barn. When at last he heard, he rushed straight to their bed and held Mother’s hand. Nan hurried in, her face drawn. “Go on, you three,” she said, her voice strange. “Get yourselves dressed.” She gave us a kiss on the forehead and squeezed our shoulders, waving us off as if squeezing was enough. Father sat in their room and Ray came in from the fields, holding his hat. The three of us girls waited in the hall. We had dressed in our best, and Esther didn’t tug at her collar or shuffle her feet. Nan shook her head. “I think we’re to wear black,” she said. Then she whispered to herself. “She never taught us this.” Nan hurried into the room with a bowl of water and washcloths, but Father had already pulled the sheet and blown out the lamp. When he stepped into the hall, he drew the door closed behind him.
Later that night, we sat in the kitchen with the plate of cookies Mrs. Clark had brought. The plate had pretty white birds painted on the rim, but no one could eat from it. Mrs. Clark wept a bucket, or so Ray later said. But for himself, Ray hid his face for most of that day and the next. Mrs. Clark asked to sit with Mother in the parlor, but we brought her to Mother’s bed and carried in a chair. “Where are the others?” she asked. “Who?” we said. Nan brought in another chair and sat with her herself. I watched them as quiet as I could from the door. While Mrs. Clark’s shoulders shook, the sunlight fell through the window and crossed the room. I wondered if my shoulders should do the same, while my head felt swollen and my ribs were aching. Soon there wasn’t much sun in the room at all. After the woman left, Nan took the plate full to the pantry and covered it with a cloth. Father stayed at the table, lifting his face from his hands. “Mein Gott,” he said. “I was in the barn.” “What about Lee?” Esther asked, but Nan shushed her. “We’ll be sending a message to the hospital,” Nan said. “Then he’ll come home.”
In the early dark of the next morning, I went to Mother’s door. Father snored in the kitchen. The others slept in their rooms. Mother lay in her bed, her eyes closed and her hands crossed over her stomach. Nan had washed and dressed her and tied her hair from her neck with a ribbon. Under her chin, another ribbon kept her mouth shut. I touched her cheek. It was stiff. Twins, they had called us, though I’d never let myself hope it. Still seeing her in that bed, I wondered if one day I might look the same. The thought should have worried me, with her skin so still and gray, but it didn’t. Often I had pictured her face in a mirror when she was young—like mine but different. She had never told us why she left home back then. Was it a boy? A sister? Had she felt locked in a place, never alone enough for breathing? She had always seemed the staying kind. Same as me. But there was something now in the way she slept—as if she could go anywhere she wanted and by her own choosing. No one need ask her the reason why.
II
A knock on the door. These days, I open it no matter how late. A girl stands shivering on the steps in a jacket made for spring. She looks at me like the old woman I’ve become. The sign on the door says: women’s house of boarding. Almost seventy years I’ve been in this place.
“I’m here for a room,” she says.
I show her into the parlor where the couch has been re-covered more times than I can count, always white. The girl sits on the edge of the cushions with her fingers between her thighs. She’s thin as a lily, her shoulders wings. With her dark coloring and eyes, my own hand looks bloodless in my lap. The girls these days wear their hair straight and long to their waists. They dress like men with their flat fronts, their legs as bare as faces, but they are good girls all the same.
“The board is two hundred a month,” I start. “You get breakfast with that and your evening’s supper. You’ll have your own room and a bath down the hall . . . .” Something flits in the corner of my eye and I turn to see it. Nothing is there.
“You okay?” the girl asks.
“Oh yes, dear. I just lost track.” I wash a hand over my eyes. “Do you have your papers?”
“Papers?” She looks around. Code of the Boardinghouse Keeper. The letters on the wall have faded in the frame, but still the girl covers her mouth. Her laugh is the first sign of pleasure in her I’ve seen.
“Maybe tomorrow?” I ask.
“Sure thing,” she says.
I show her upstairs to her room. She takes a breath at the door before stepping in.
“You’ll have time to rest before supper. When the others come off their shifts. That’s about seven o’clock.”
“Thank you, Mrs. . . ?”
“Byrne.”
“Mrs. Byrne,” she says. She stands as if chilled to the bone on the old rug. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself. She’s sixteen, seventeen, not a day more.
“Why don’t you unpack your things. Take a little lie-down.”
She nods but doesn’t make a move. I close the door between us as softly as I can.
At suppertime, the girls crowd around the table and talk. They don’t usually wear uniforms anymore, and they don’t care about keeping their voices down. Charlotte and I think that’s good enough. Factory work can still be had by the river, round the clock. But ours work as clerks in the shops, or maids and nannies. Some don’t seem to work much. “Runaways,” Charlotte whispers. We let them stay without their papers more
often than not. Morning and night, we give them their meals, though the other houses have long ago stopped. The others aren’t even houses anymore but tenements with hot plates, and no common rooms to speak of. “Full of criminals and addicts,” Charlotte says. “Wards of the state.” Charlotte is soft on our girls all the same. She leaves a chocolate on their pillows, keeps supper for anyone who’s late. The house is ours to do with as we please. We needn’t the money from renting. Still we answer the bell. A girl should have a good meal and a clean bed no matter what she’s come from.
“The new one is nervous,” I tell Charlotte in the kitchen.
“She’ll be fine,” Charlotte says. We are both older than God by now, or so Mrs. Keyes would tell us. We cling to the stair rails. Our stomachs are not so kind. Charlotte uses a cane, though she’s the stronger between us, as she always was. The rest is a question of being content with the hour at hand. Charlotte and I sit together in the kitchen late at night. We sleep in the same bed to keep warm. But we sleep there even in the summer when it’s hot enough for fans. On Sundays, we go to the market to fill our carts for the walk home. The rest of the day we stay at the stove, holding out our tongues for a taste from a spoon. This is how we fill ourselves.
Charlotte stirs a large pot of soup. A Kuchen bakes in the oven, after Mother’s recipe, or what I could remember of it. Die Heimat, Die Liebe, I sing to myself. I never learned what the words meant. “Like a lullaby,” Charlotte says. “Before I met you I thought all German sayings had something to do with pigs.” At the table, the girls wait for their meal with tired eyes, but they never hurry us.
“Mrs. Byrne!” Charlotte and I turn our heads. It’s our oldest girl, Gisel. Twenty-five with a scar on her cheek. I’ve never asked how she got it. A boyfriend, Charlotte thinks. The girl pushes the door open with her fingertips.
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