Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  Mrs. Hong touched the braid. The hair was gorgeous. She could see from Rachel’s coloring it had never been her own, but how she had acquired it was none of Mrs. Hong’s business. What she did know was that it would be a pleasure to work with this hair. Still, it would need to be washed and combed, divided and sewn. It would keep her girls busy for weeks, not to mention making the custom form and the cap. She knew what price she’d give to Madame Hildebrand in similar circumstances. She doubted this Leadville girl had the means, but she named that price anyway, as any businesswoman would.

  What little color there was in Rachel’s cheeks drained away. The price Mrs. Hong gave was double what she could earn in an entire year. Madame had been right; Rachel could never afford to have something so beautiful. Struck dumb by disappointment, she began wrapping the braid with shaking hands.

  Mrs. Hong read the authenticity in Rachel’s reaction. Accustomed to dramatic bouts of bargaining for everything from bolts of silk to baskets of onions, Mrs. Hong had expected her first price to be countered, but now she saw she’d aimed too high and frightened the girl. “Wait,” she said, placing her hand on the braid. The hair came alive under her palm, curling around her fingers. She made another guess about Rachel. “Doesn’t your father want to pay for the wig, as a gift for his lovely young daughter?”

  Rachel shook her head. “I’m an orphan. I work as a nurse’s aide at the Hospital for Consumptive Hebrews. I’ve saved most of three month’s pay, but . . .” Rachel’s voice faded as she considered the pittance in her pocket.

  Mrs. Hong, however, asked, “How much do you have?”

  Rachel realized she wasn’t being refused—Mrs. Hong was negotiating. She berated herself for not bargaining the way Mrs. Abrams had over the horse carving. Rachel took the bills out of her pocket and placed them on Mrs. Hong’s worktable. It was all the money she had in the world.

  “And this is what you earned in three months?”

  “More than that. That’s my earnings.” Rachel divided the pile; the money she’d taken from Naomi was still creased where it had been folded to fit into her shoe. “And this is my savings.”

  Mrs. Hong calculated. Because the girl was providing the hair, the sum on the table would cover her initial expenses for materials, but it was labor and skill that made her wigs so precious. She longed now to transform the crackling braid on her table into a head of hair, imagining the business she could drum up by showing it off, but she needed to make some profit. “This isn’t half what it will cost me, out of my own pocket, to make the wig. I have a business here, mouths to feed, rent to pay. I’m not running a charity.”

  Rachel tried to regain her bargaining position. “I can pay you most of what I earn for the next”—she did some math—“the next seven months, but I need the wig by September. I’m going back east for nursing school, so it has to be finished by the end of summer.” Rachel was surprised by the words that came out of her mouth. She’d only meant to set a limit for the price of the wig, but as soon as she’d expressed the idea, she was taken by the possibility.

  Mrs. Hong tallied the total and considered the girl’s offer. She wouldn’t lose money, but she would barely profit. She needed something to sweeten the deal. Since the stock market crash, people everywhere were losing jobs. Mrs. Hong wondered if this girl could keep hers through the spring and into the summer. Maybe. Maybe not. It was a bet Mrs. Hong was willing to make.

  “I’ll tell you what, Leadville Orphan Girl. You give me all you have now, as a deposit, and I will begin making the wig. You keep up the payments every month. With your final payment on September first, the wig will be finished, and it will be yours.”

  Joy spread over Rachel’s face. Mrs. Hong wondered if the girl knew how beautiful she was. “Yes, of course, I will, Mrs. Hong, I’ll come next month and every month.”

  “There is one more thing. This is a very special price. If Madame Hildebrand or any of my other customers ever hear what I let you pay, they’d be furious. I am taking food out of my own mouth to make you this offer. And I will be doing all the work before you finish paying. What if you don’t pay me after all? I need some protection.” Mrs. Hong paused. “If you miss a payment, or don’t pay in full by September, I keep the hair and the wig and everything you’ve paid so far. Agreed?”

  Rachel did, eagerly. What was money to her if she could anticipate having Amelia’s hair for her own? The little girl was called out from behind the beaded curtain and sent running into the alley. She returned in minutes with a wrinkled man who carried a roll of paper and a box containing ink and pen. In Cantonese, he wrote out two copies of the terms of Mrs. Hong’s agreement with Leadville Orphan Girl. Mrs. Hong took up the calligraphy pen to create the character of her name, and Rachel signed as well.

  “Now then, let’s get to work.”

  Hours later, Rachel left Hop Alley in the last light of the winter day. All of her money and Amelia’s hair were with Mrs. Hong. In her pocket, a folded piece of inscrutable paper was all the promise she had that she would get everything she bargained for.

  The next day, Mary asked Rachel why she hadn’t visited her. Too full of excitement to keep it to herself, Rachel told Mary all about the Opera House and Madame Hildebrand and Mrs. Hong’s House of Hair. Without mentioning the theft of Amelia’s braid, she told Mary that yesterday she’d gone to the shop and bargained hard with the wig maker, settling on a price she could afford for a lovely wig made from dark red hair.

  “Why red?” Mary asked. “You’d look more natural as a brunette.”

  “She had these braids of hair for me to choose from, and that one just seemed so alive.”

  Lingering with Mary’s lunch tray, Rachel recounted the rest of the afternoon she’d spent at Mrs. Hong’s. “She had me sit in a chair, and one of the little girls—”

  “Eat this, will you? I haven’t touched it. What are the girls’ names?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Hong always talks to them in Chinese. I’ll ask her next month. Anyway, she sat me in a chair. You know that ointment, Vaseline? Well, Mrs. Hong rubbed that all over my scalp. Then one of the girls handed her strips of gauze dipped in plaster, and she wrapped them around my head like a mummy. I had to sit there for a long time while the plaster dried, then she cut it off my head with a scissors.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “I was, but the little girl held my hand, and Mrs. Hong said, ‘Don’t worry, Orphan Girl, nothing’s going to hurt you.’ Then after she took off the plaster cast, the other little girl washed my head. They’re both so adorable. I started to sing the alphabet song just to entertain her, and she sang along! I didn’t know she could speak English. But then Mrs. Hong sent her into the back room. She’s very strict with the girls.”

  “Are they her daughters?” Mary blotted her mouth with the napkin. It came away spotted with blood. She hid it under her pillow.

  Rachel had wondered this herself. Mrs. Hong ordered the girls around like servants, but it was no worse than the monitors at the Home. What did Rachel know, anyway, of how mothers treated daughters? “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can find that out, too.”

  For the rest of the month, Rachel’s workdays flew by. Her afternoons off were spent visiting Mary, and each Friday evening, she helped with the Shabbat dinner, the table filled out by interns from the hospital invited into the warm circle of the house on Colfax. The day after collecting her next wage envelope, Rachel made her way back to Hop Alley to make her payment to Mrs. Hong. She lingered at the workshop, her curiosity emboldening her to ask about the girls.

  “This one, I call her Sparrow, because she chatters all the time, and that one I call Jade, to make her strong. Now go, do your work!” The girls darted into the back room. Mrs. Hong lowered her voice. “They call me ‘auntie,’ but they’re nothing to me. Their mother pays me to keep them, teach them a trade. Their fathers were customers, Chinese men, but she doesn’t know which ones.”

  Rachel parted the beaded curtain to watch the
girls at work. Sparrow was combing out long strands of hair, and Jade, the older of the two, was operating a sewing machine, stitching layers of hair to strips of linen. The way they worked made Rachel think of girls in a garment factory, though where that impression came from she wasn’t sure.

  In April, Mrs. Hong asked Rachel to stay in the workshop. “I need you for a fitting.” She lifted a tightly knit cap off a plaster form and settled it on Rachel’s scalp. With a long needle and silk thread, Mrs. Hong plucked at the cap, snugging it to cup the back of Rachel’s head and hug her temples. As Mrs. Hong worked, Rachel asked her how she came to have the wig shop. Instead of answering directly, Mrs. Hong launched into an oblique story.

  “When the Chinese men came to America to build the railroad, they weren’t allowed to bring their wives and children. After the railroad was finished, some of them went home, some stayed here. The railroad crossed Indian country, and some of the Chinese men set up trading posts on the frontier. Sometimes an Indian woman would stay with the Chinese man, to work in the trading post. If the Chinese man decided to come into Denver to open a laundry, the woman might leave her people and follow him, wash the clothes, have his children. The white people write the laws so the Chinese man can’t bring his own wife here, but they don’t mind if he lives with an Indian woman he will never marry.” A hardness came into Mrs. Hong’s voice and she seemed to speak more to herself than to Rachel. “The white people, they think Indians and Chinese are both dirty, no matter how clean we make their shirts.”

  After a minute of silence, Rachel asked, “What happened to Mr. Hong?”

  Mrs. Hong straightened her back. “What makes you think I ever got married? Married women work themselves to death, all their money goes to husbands who gamble it away. Why would I ever do that to myself? I call myself ‘Mrs.’ because my clients like to think I’m a respectable widow. Ladies are always suspicious of a woman who isn’t some man’s wife.”

  Before Rachel left, she stopped in the back room to wave good-bye to the girls. She thought it sad that they didn’t go to school, and cruel when Jade whispered how their auntie kept them locked in the shop when she went out on a delivery or to take an order. There was no one to rescue the girls if Mrs. Hong exploited them, no recourse if they were treated harshly. Maybe she should mention it to Mrs. Abrams? Then Rachel reconsidered Sparrow and Jade, their features too Oriental to pass for white, their skin too light to conceal their mixed parentage. Rachel thought of their mother’s profession and knew there was a worse kind of life Mrs. Hong was saving them from.

  As she rode the streetcar back to the comfortable house on Colfax, Rachel imagined where, if not for the agency, she and Sam might have ended up: in back alleys or boxcars, on soup lines near Hoovervilles. Rachel had often wondered how it would have been if the agency lady had found her and Sam a foster home. They might have gotten lucky—a cozy apartment with a nice family, a foster mother kind as Mrs. Berger, a foster father generous as Dr. Abrams. Or maybe not. Who would she have turned to if, in that cozy apartment, lived a boy like Marc Grossman? For the first time, Rachel began to appreciate what she herself had been saved from by the Home.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MILDRED SOLOMON’S CHEST WAS PRESSED AGAINST my back; the back of my head rested on her clavicle. She wrapped her arms around me. Our gentle breathing rose and fell in unison. I felt a tug. Was she plucking at my fingers, wanting more morphine? Looking down, I saw a needle threaded with yarn as rough as horsehair poking through the tendons of my hands.

  I woke with a gasp, the dream worse than ever. I could actually feel the burn of seawater in the back of my throat. Wiping drool from my mouth, I sat up on the bed and adjusted my wig. Focusing on my watch, I saw it was past midnight. Mildred Solomon moaned and shifted in a fitful sleep. What dreams, I wondered, haunted her? I doubted I was in them.

  The room was suffocating, the window closed since the storm. I got up and opened it, wishing I had one of Flo’s cigarettes to pass the time until Dr. Solomon woke again. It wouldn’t be long now.

  That talk about concentration camps put me in mind of Sam and the story he told me after returning from the war. I remembered him calling from the pay phone on Amsterdam Avenue, his voice on the line instantly familiar, collapsing the years since he’d gone to war. I told him I would have met him at the dock if I’d known when his ship was coming in. “It was a madhouse at the harbor,” he said. “I didn’t want you messed up in all that.” Was he worried I’d be grabbed and kissed by a returning soldier, or that my wig would be knocked off in the jostling crowd?

  “Did you know they’d turned the Home into a barracks?” he was saying. “I couldn’t believe it when the truck stopped here to let us off. We’re in F3, can you imagine? I never even saw the inside of a girls’ dorm the whole time I lived here. Why don’t you come up and see me?”

  I did, running from that old apartment in the Village to the closest subway stop, the Broadway line seeming to crawl uptown as I counted the seconds until I saw my brother again.

  I told the guard at the entrance who I was there to meet. Soon enough, Sam emerged from the Castle. It was strange to see him come through those oak doors a grown man instead of a little boy. He walked with purpose, almost a swagger. I’d been so afraid during the war that he’d be wounded or killed, as Simon Cohen had been. But there Sam was, whole and handsome. The rainbow patch of his division was bright on his shoulder, but the washed-out green of the uniform made his eyes glint like steel. Sam lifted me up in a hug that lasted so long, a few other soldiers started to whistle. Embarrassed, we crossed the street and sat on a bench beneath a gingko tree, facing our former Home.

  “Can you beat that, Rachel? I run away from this place out to Leadville, hobo up and down the West Coast, end up on an apple farm in Washington State, come back to New York to enlist, get shipped off to Europe, and after all that where do I end up? Right back where I started.” He shaded his eyes to look up at the clock tower. “Makes sense, in a way. Military barrack’s hardly different from being in the Home. Except back then, I was just a kid. At least in the military, I’m a man. I can stand up for myself.” His jaw tightened, and I saw, beneath his swagger, the wounded orphan who snuck out of the Castle all those years ago.

  We didn’t know how to start talking about what we’d seen and done since last we were together. It’s no wonder we struggled to reconnect. It wasn’t just the war—my brother and I had been living separate lives since that agency lady pulled us apart. Other grown siblings had a home to go back to, parents to visit on holidays, grandparents to host the seder. Between us, Sam and I didn’t know how to make a family. Our conversation turned to the pictures from Japan that had come out in Life magazine: clothes melted onto naked bodies, skin dissolving into bubbling sores, babies being born deformed. When I read that people who’d escaped the atomic blast were getting sick from the radiation, their hair falling out, I couldn’t help but feel a strange kinship. At the time, all I knew was that the X-rays I’d gotten as a child had made me bald. That night in Mildred Solomon’s room, I wondered if the cancer had been growing in me even then.

  To Sam, I said, “Sometimes I ask myself if there’s any limit to the harm people can do to each other.”

  “No,” he said. “There’s no limit.” He stared across the street, his eyes distant, as if he were watching a movie projected on the side of the building. “When our division liberated Dachau, it was like we had walked into hell. You’ve seen the newsreels?” I nodded, picturing the skeletal survivors herded into relocation camps, held there until the world could figure out what to do with Europe’s remaining Jews. “Believe me, they don’t show all of it, not by a long shot. We had to call in a construction battalion to move the bodies, they were piled so high. Imagine that, then add in the smell of rot and shit and smoke.” Sam’s grip on his knees was turning his knuckles white. “No, don’t. Don’t imagine it. I’ll have it in my head long enough for both of us.”

  I thought I’d seen the w
orst of it in the hospital. Soldiers with missing limbs or blown-out eyes. Scars that meandered the length of a man’s body like a map of the Mississippi. But the things Sam was saying made me feel sick in a part of my stomach so deep I hadn’t known it was there. I covered his hand with mine. He turned his palm up to accept the gesture. We sat for a long time like that, not caring anymore if we looked like sweethearts.

  “What are you going to do after you’re decommissioned?” I meant for a job; I assumed he’d be staying in New York. I was already planning to invite him over for Friday-night dinners, memories of Shabbat with the Abramses shaping my imagination. Not that I’d attempt to cook—if we wanted anything edible, I’d have to take out a roasted chicken from the deli on the corner—but no matter. We’d manage, this time, to be a real family.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “You know, the more I think about it, the more it seems my whole life has been preparing me for just one thing. I mean, after roaming around all those years, when the war broke out I was glad to have a reason to sign up. Good thing I came back here to enlist, though. I heard from my one buddy out west he spent the whole war guarding a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming. What a waste of time that would’ve been. Fighting gave me a purpose, and I was good at it. Kept most of my guys alive, killed a lot of theirs. It’s pretty simple.” Sam paused, let go of my hand to knock a cigarette out of the pack he pulled from his pocket. He held one out for me, but I shook my head. Still, when he lit it, I inhaled deeply, wanting to remember everything about this moment.

  “I’m going to Palestine, Rachel. I’m going to get past those damn British detention camps to join the Haganah. I’m going to fight until we have a country of our own.”