The girls of Exeter Orphanage freely shunned those with physical deformities and had a precocious talent for mistreating those whose skin was darker than their own. They made such discrimination a full-time job. Hence, the popular girls of Exeter Orphanage, as young as they were, acted more like adults and less like preadolescent girls. Perfect though they believed themselves to be, they never realized that they too had been shunned and abandoned.
Macy and her white cohort kept largely to themselves during the harsh winter of 1902. To the casual observer it seemed there were three divisions among the girls of Exeter Orphanage. Macy and Evelyn comprised the “Rainbow Duo,” as they were known by the “Exeter Elite,” which is what the institution’s headmistress called almost every other girl except for Ellen F., who by herself made up the third faction.
Headmistress Grimalda Robinson also referred to the sixteen popular girls as the “Adoptables,” though she would never use this word in front of prospective adopting couples. Still, whether or not Mrs. Robinson would have admitted this in front of anyone didn’t really matter, since unadoptability was certainly the case for the “Rainbow Duo.”
Amanda Bosworth, the oldest and cruelest orphan, was considered by all to be the unofficial leader of the “Exeter Elite.” She had won that dubious distinction because everyone knew that at age thirteen she would never leave the orphanage. “Here to live, here to die, here for my ghost to haunt these halls for all eternity,” Amanda would boast. She actually took enormous pride in being “unadoptable,” a word that Mrs. Robinson accidentally let slip once while in the girl’s presence.
“We mustn’t be too free with that word, now must we?” Grimalda had said to her husband one evening during dinner as the two discussed how each other’s day had gone. “Of course, I would never consider any of the Elites to be unadoptable, but you know how it is with this girl Amanda Bosworth. She’s a real bitch. The only one who rivals her for the title of “HEAD BITCH” would have to be the F. girl.”
Mrs. Robinson was correct by all accounts. No one could be as rude, capriciously moody, and mean-spirited as the aloof Ellen F.
Grimalda Robinson remembered the circumstances surrounding Ellen F.’s arrival very vividly. Ellen F. had been given up by an odd stranger who wished not to give his name. Such was his privilege, as Mrs. Robinson made very clear to him.
The stranger had entered the orphanage with the baby tucked under his left arm. He surveyed the building as he made his way to Mrs. Robinson’s office, led by the headmistress herself, a strong scent of chemicals filling the air and making it unpleasant to breathe. The baby girl, wrapped carefully in an intricately woven afghan, was given to Sally Ross, nurse and overseer of all the children’s health, at Exeter Orphanage while Mrs. Robinson got the paperwork in order.
“I didn’t think I’d have to sign anything,” said the stranger, whose fedora covered the top half of his face so that all Grimalda could see was his mouth and chin.
“You can sign with an X if you like, sir. It’s just an acknowledgement that we received the child from a third party. Basically it’s proof that Exeter Orphanage has not acquired the child through any illegal means such as buying her on some black market, which in fact does happen from time to time, or extorting her from her parents. It’s a nonsensical waste of time and paper, I know, but this is how American society works nowadays. Everything is based on suspicion.”
The man shook his hands free of his raincoat’s long sleeves, which were still dripping on the floor, even though he had been inside the orphanage for at least ten minutes. Mrs. Robinson noticed his signature once he had returned the document. He actually wrote an X, she thought. I didn’t think he’d take me seriously.
When she took the pen he had used, the stranger thought that Mrs. Robinson was going to cross out his “X” and insist he use his real name. “I need a surname for the child,” Grimalda said.
She could now see his whole face, darkened though it was by the brim of his hat. “I thought this was a completely anonymous process,” said the stranger. “You said so yourself. What was the point of my signing with an “X” when you were going to ask me for a surname? I never said that the child was mine. She’s a twin. There you are! I can tell you nothing more.”
Mrs. Robinson found it curious that the man had brought only one of the babies to the orphanage, and she began to wonder what the circumstances were. “Oh?” she replied, waiting for the stranger to volunteer more background information.
After a long pause he added nervously, “Well, I don’t know if that’s important for you to know.”
“I see,” she said. “And where is the other child?”
But the stranger didn’t answer, instead lowering his head even further down so that his chin was almost flush with his neck. His posture suggested a look of shame. “I can’t tell you that. Forgive me. It’s not for me to say, but I assure you that it’s only for reasons of protecting the mother and all others involved that I’m keeping silent. Nothing illegal has been done. I swear to you.”
So Mrs. Robinson was forced to come up with her own conclusion. Perhaps the mother didn’t know she was carrying twins while she was pregnant, she thought. Perhaps she could afford only one child. Seeing as how this child is a female, the other could have been a male. It was common at the time to give girls up for adoption. The Exeter Orphanage for Boys across the street had only eight boys, because most families were prone to keeping males. They were of more use to their fathers as field hands capable of doing arduous work. What’s more, they carried on the family name.
Grimalda Robinson checked the watch pendant hanging just above her right breast. It was past midnight, and she found herself there late because one of the “Exeter Elite” had set a fire earlier in the water closet. The girl had filled up a toilet bowl with cleaning fluid and set it on fire with matches she had stolen from the kitchen. The fumes were so great that they had to open every window in the orphanage. Grimalda and Nurse Ross put the fire out themselves, nearly choking to death from the smell. The headmistress had decided not to call in the fire marshal, since this would have been the second case of arson among the girls in the past month, and, although it was meant more as a joke and less as an attempt to burn the building to the ground, this time it would have resulted in criminal actions against the girls.
Mrs. Robinson had not one disciplinary bone in her body. Even before the “Exeter Elite” had come along, she had suffered through dozens of mischievous pranks. As devious as the “Exeter Elite” and their predecessors were, Mrs. Robinson had protected them, because she knew that if she didn’t, people would begin to think she had no control over them, and she would have been replaced by someone who was not afraid of the girls or of losing her job.
“Sir,” Grimalda answered. “I need a name for her records. I assume there is no birth certificate. I just need something for the state’s files.”
The man thought for a moment before saying, “Smith. Just put down Smith.”
Headmistress Robinson nodded and was about to write Smith when yet another ruckus erupted upstairs.
“I really must be going,” said the stranger. “Besides, it looks as though you have your hands full.”
Halfway to the door he stopped just short of the fireplace in Mrs. Robinson’s office. “I’m sorry it had to be this way,” continued the stranger. “She’s not mine. Truly she isn’t, but I’m still sorry for her.” He then walked out quickly.
Grimalda Robinson never saw the man again.
After his departure Mrs. Robinson removed the child’s soaked afghan and replaced it with an infant’s pajamas, which Nurse Ross had brought down to her. Grimalda gave the baby to her assistant, who brought the child upstairs to the nursery, which was nothing more than an empty room with three cribs, empty because the youngest orphan besides this newest arrival was five.
The headmistress then felt
the child’s wet covering and was tempted to throw it out before she saw an inscription in one of the corners: “BY THE HAND OF ___ F.” Although she couldn’t read the first initial, the “F” was as clear as newspaper print. Grimalda Robinson decided to wash and keep it. She read where the name “Smith” had been signed as the baby’s surname. On a whim Mrs. Robinson decided to change it to “F” as indicated on the blanket. After all, this initial possibly denoted the infant’s mother. Grimalda next tried to decipher the first initial, which could have been a “B,” “E,” or “H.” Frustrated by the water-closet fiasco, she arbitrarily chose the letter “E” and wrote on the form the first female name she could think of: “Ellen.”
Mrs. Robinson worked in the orphanage not because she loved children and pitied their plight but because she desperately wanted to work in a government job. She understood that there was a way of working up the ladder of success and one day becoming the head of some government office. After all, in the early 1890s it was difficult for women to find any work, and the government, although just as sexist as the private sector, did not openly say, “You can’t be boss of anything. You’re only a woman. Go back to childbearing and running a house.”
By 1902 Grimalda Robinson and Sally Ross had divided their nineteen girls into three groups. The “Rainbow Duo” tried to include Ellen F. in their games, but she always declined with such rude remarks as, “That’s a game for babies. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a baby like the two of you” or “You can only play that game with two people. What are we supposed to do? Take turns? Doesn’t it make more sense to find a game that three could play?”
Ellen F. was never honest with Macy and Evelyn about why she didn’t want to play with them. Perhaps the cause of her antisocial nature was her resentment at having been abandoned as a twin. During the middle of the day, Ellen F. would often retreat to her bed, which was in a room of nineteen other beds laid out in two rows of ten on either side of the room. She’d go there when all was quiet and withdraw under her blanket, in which she had been told by Nurse Ross she had been delivered to the orphanage. She then would look at the corner that read, “BY THE HAND OF ___ F,” and assume that it signified her mother.
Once, while Ellen F. was boasting that she knew her mother’s real name, Amanda Bosworth, a fellow “unadoptable,” had said, “Oh, please, F.!” This was what the “Exeter Elite” called her, sometimes meaning “Fucking dead whore’s orphan.” “You were named after that blanket. How do you know the person who made it was your mother? I betcha that it was Robinson who named you and that she got the idea from your old blanket!”
Since no one in the orphanage paid Ellen any mind, or even liked her for that matter, she would simply pass the hours lying in her bed curled up in her afghan, which now covered only half her body. By way of remedy she would adopt a fetal position. When all the girls were in bed for the night, her berth being last in the row, she would turn toward the adjacent wall. Her entire childhood was devoted to keeping to herself, since no one, as she believed, cared for her.
Ellen F. always had divergent opinions about her parents. Her mother weighed more heavily on the child’s mind than her father. Ellen knew that a man wearing a hat and raincoat had dropped her off at the orphanage as an infant. She had always assumed this person to be her father, no matter what Grimalda Robinson said to the contrary. She thus began to resent all men. As an adult she would scorn all males as “no good sons-of-bitches whose only purpose on this earth was to abuse women and then abandon their female children.” In her youth Ellen’s bitterness was milder, though even then her antipathy toward men was fairly ripe, especially when prospective parents came to the orphanage in hopes of adopting a little girl.
Since the age of six Ellen F. had snarled at anyone who wanted to adopt her. Couples were always drawn to her when they first set eyes on the blue-eyed, blond-haired, pale-skinned little girl, but they’d leave Exeter Orphanage with looks of shock and incredulity. After Ellen would go into her “canine routine,” as Grimalda Robinson described it, couples hurried out of the orphanage without another word to the other girls. This, Ellen believed, was her subtle revenge on the “Exeter Elite” for the way they treated her.
“It’s almost as though she doesn’t want to be adopted,” Mrs. Robinson told Nurse Ross one morning after a visit by Mr. and Mrs. Parker, who had changed their minds about adopting Ellen once she’d bitten Mr. Parker’s hand when he attempted to squeeze the little girl’s cheek.
“I know,” replied Nurse Ross. “She puts on her ‘I have rabies’ act every time a lovely couple comes into the orphanage and looks her over.”
It was after the “Parker incident” that Mrs. Robinson finally put Ellen F. into the “unadoptable” category.
Lying in bed alone, as she had done every day for the past several years, and clinging tightly to her afghan, Ellen sank half her face into it, leaving only the corner of her left eye exposed to the dormitory’s cool air. As she gazed at the uneven strokes of light blue paint on the wall, some of it cracking, she made out what appeared to be a person’s face, almost as when a child she would imagine what a cloud looked like—sometimes a train, sometimes a teddy bear, sometimes nothing but cotton.
Ellen became enamored with the erratic pattern of paint. It didn’t look like anyone in particular, but it could have been a woman with a cap. She began thinking of Nurse Ross, who a few weeks before had sat her on her lap for a talk. This conversation took place right after the incident when Ellen had found dozens of cockroaches in her bed. The child had no sooner stuck her feet under the covers and set her head on the pillow than she felt the insects crawling all over her. As she jumped out of bed, screaming at the top of her lungs, all the girls erupted in a roar of laughter. “Haha!” Amanda Bosworth mocked. “What’s the matter, F.? Don’t like your new friends?” The rest of the “Exeter Elite” then chanted to the melody of “Frère Jacques”:
DIRTY ELLEN! DIRTY ELLEN!
SLEEPS WITH BUGS! SLEEPS WITH BUGS!
WE HEAR SHE LIKES IT! DOESN’T SAY SHE HATES IT!
SLEEP BUGS SLEEP! SLEEP BUGS SLEEP!
The only girls who didn’t laugh or join in the singing were Macy Nugent and Evelyn Wild.
Nurse Ross rocked Ellen slowly back and forth in her arms. Ellen had finally calmed down after running around the orphanage crying and screaming and trying to pull her hair out because she believed bugs were crawling around her scalp. Nurse Ross wasn’t like Mrs. Robinson, who besides genuinely caring for the girls at Exeter Orphanage was the physical antithesis of its headmistress. Nurse Ross was short and pudgy, whereas Mrs. Robinson was tall and slender. Nurse Ross had long black hair that she wore in a huge bun. Grimalda Robinson was blond, and her hair was always braided in a circle around her crown. Nurse Ross wore tiny glasses, which made her look older than she was, whereas Mrs. Robinson never had a need for corrective lenses.
It was Nurse Ross to whom Ellen turned whenever she needed somebody, which wasn’t very often. Such times usually occurred when the “Exeter Elite” victimized her. While Mrs. Robinson was squashing the roaches and cleaning up the mess, watched by the uncontrollably giggling “Exeter Elite,” Nurse Ross gently stroked Ellen’s blond hair.
“You know, Ellen,” she said. “This is a funny place. It’s here where you feel lost, but it’s here where an orphan must be, lost or not, in order to be found. It’s a place where you feel unwanted, but it’s here where someone will come who’ll want you.”
Ellen lifted her head up and observed the subtle lines in Nurse Ross’s face. She raised an index finger up and traced one of the lines in the nurse’s forehead. A tear then escaped Ellen’s eye and ran down her cheek, which was already stained with dried ones. The kind nurse, feeling closer to Ellen than ever before, continued.
“I know you feel alone, Ellen, but I want you to know something. As long as you’re here, I’ll be here. I won’t leav
e you. I’ve been here a long time, and I wager I’ll be here even longer than that. I’d stay forever if my body would hold out that long. And you’ve only got another eight years here before the state considers you an adult. You’ll always find me in my room just opposite yours when you get awakened by a bad dream during the middle of the night. When the girls tease you or pull your hair, I’ll be here to make it better. At least, that is until you’re eighteen.”
Ellen kissed Nurse Ross’s cheek. She then snuggled deeply into the caretaker’s bosom, stroking the woman’s breast. Nurse Ross allowed this as she hummed a well-known lullaby to the child.
“Did you know my parents?” asked Ellen innocently. “Did you ever see them, I mean?”
Still smoothing the little girl’s hair, Nurse Ross answered, “I only remember a man dressed in a hat and raincoat. It was late at night when he arrived, and it had been raining. It was hard to see his face, but… .”
“BUT WHAT?” Ellen shouted, flailing her arms wildly.
Taken by complete surprise, Nurse Ross placed the child’s right hand back on her breast, leaned her head down, kissed Ellen’s forehead, and replied, “He didn’t look like you at all. I mean, it could have been your father, but what I remember of his face didn’t resemble yours at all. You’re too pretty to have been his child.”
“And my mother?” asked Ellen. “What can you tell me about her?”
Nurse Ross knew that she had already crossed the line on two counts, one being her divulging classified information and the other her allowing the child to fondle her breast. About the latter Nurse Ross wasn’t the slightest bit concerned. What preoccupied her was that she might have told Ellen too much about the stranger who had left her at the orphanage. She was afraid that Ellen would spill the truth to Grimalda Robinson about knowing more of her history than she was allowed to know.
Nurse Ross let go of Ellen’s hair and sat her upright. “There’s only one thing I can tell you about your mother, but you have to swear that you will tell no one you know this. Not any of the girls, and especially not Mrs. Robinson. If you do, it could lead to my dismissal from the orphanage, and then you’d never have me around to protect you or ease your pain. In fact, you’d never see me again!”
Embracing Darkness Page 13
