6.
June with her nonsense child chatter talk talk talk, still won’t look at V. Do you know who I am? V asks kneeling on the rug beside her daughter,
Don’t you dare ask that, Rose fumes. Don’t do that to our girl.
7.
V calculates the distance between June and the door, how quickly she could grab her, how quickly they could run. V and June slipping down the streets of Minneapolis, slipping toward the Cascade Club or where?
8.
You see Em still? V asks. Em will hide them in her attic. Loyal Em will help.
Gone, too, Rose says, relieved. California last I heard.
9.
Three long years of dreams and this is home.
10.
Don’t go to Mother’s place. Ray hates you, V.
11.
What’s this? Hank growls, home from work too early, a cap of snow covering his head. June racing toward the door to knot her arms around his leg. What in God’s name is your sister doing here? Shouldn’t she be with that doctor in Duluth?
Hank looks around confused. Wet V. No suitcase at the door.
She’s run away, Rose sighs.
Then she should run, Hanks says. Cigarettes and grease V can smell across the room. Hank in filthy station grays. Industrious or not, V wants more for June than Hank will earn. Bully Hank. We can’t hide her here, he says, scooping June into his arms. How’s Daddy’s little girl, how is my Margaret?
Honey, Rose begs sweetly. I can’t send my sister out into this snow.
12.
Hank can. Hank can drive down to the drugstore, call up the police. Or he’ll knock now at the neighbor’s; the neighbors have a phone. Hank holding June too close in his thick arms.
Daddy mad, June says, and Hank nods yes.
I want you gone, he says to V. On your own or with the police. We don’t need you here.
Can’t you drive her, Hank? Rose pleads. Can’t you take her to the Cascade Club at least. Let Mr. C do what he can to help her; I know he truly cares.
First, she signs the papers. She signs, I’ll take her there.
Attachment Theory: Two
June, held safe in Rose’s arms, watches from the window as that strange girl leaves with Hank. Black dot in thick snow. Girl who didn’t belong in their apartment. Bad girl June wants to be gone.
Bye-bye, June waves out to the night, and Rose waves, too.
Yes, Rose says, bye-bye.
June, the lucky little foundling, the precious only child secure now in a future she can’t see through the snow. Private schools and parties, a new dress for every dance, cashmere and pearls, college at sixteen. A small house from Rose and Hank for her first marriage. A second marriage, a second little house. Rose and Hank nearby to raise her children. Lucky June, watching this moment from the window, always wants the moon and stars and so they’re hers.
I want a candy, she tells Rose, turning from the trouble, turning from that strange girl who left in Daddy’s car.
Oh you! Rose laughs, kissing June’s small nose.
And even though it’s time for supper, and June’s favorite hot dish is ready in the oven—cheese potatoes with little bits of ham—Rose carries June into the kitchen, lifts the glass lid to the sweet jar, and lets June make her choice.
[EVIDENCE OF V: AUGUST 1975, MINNEAPOLIS
I track June to her bedroom, cool cave of basement darkness where she escapes her teenaged kids. Rumpled bed, make-up stains on dingy pillows, a drugstore bottle of Ciara the single decoration on her dresser. Disheveled open drawers I’ve often searched for some dark secret. The reason that June disappears for boats, and friends, and parties. June and her doting second husband leaving us for days without a word.
Hey, I say, watching her reflection in the mirror. June a beauty still, her lipsticked mouth open in an O as she brushes on mascara. June will put on make-up and be gone. I’ve been thinking about something.
What else is new? June says with a laugh. You’re always thinking. It’s true, I am, but my quick brain is the one trait June admires.
I’ve been thinking, I say again to June’s reflection. My reflection. Green-eyed to June’s brown eyes. Faded jersey. Wild, frizzy hair. June’s nervous middle daughter prone to irrational suspicions. An irrational suspicion is why I’m in June’s room. A terrible hunch. An intuition. A gnawing fear I need June to dispel. I know it might sound nuts—
Cut to the chase, June says, leaning toward the mirror to get her lashes painted right.
I don’t know, I say, struggling for words. Is Grandma Rose really your mother?
Me, already ashamed, watching June inside the mirror, watching her wide O close to a frown, her shaky hand return the clumpy wand to the tube of Maybelline. In the long pause of her silence, I already know I’m right: Grandma Rose isn’t her real mother. And Grandpa Hank? I say. The best people in our family aren’t the family that I thought.
Who told you? June asks, turning to search my face for clues.
No one did. But there’s that birth certificate. The missing girl in Great Aunt Ida’s family album. The hurried way she closed the book on V. And June without a trace of Grandma Rose’s heart. Hank and Rose’s great devotion that exceeds what June deserves. What we deserve. And your real mother, is she V? Grandma Rose’s youngest sister?
Someone had to tell you, June says, angry. That gossip Ida in Cheyenne. I didn’t find out until I was thirty-three years old.
No one told, I swear. I’m shaking from making this bad hunch true just by saying it aloud. I don’t want a missing girl to be June’s mother, or June to be a person who began as someone else.
Don’t you tell the other kids, June says, one lotioned finger pressed against my lips. It would break my parents’ hearts. They never wanted us to know. And don’t you ever tell my parents—
I won’t, I say, eager to protect our beloved Hank and Rose, to be complicit in a secret that will keep us as their own.
V is not our family, never was, June insists, returning to the mirror to finish painting on mascara once her shaky hands have calmed. Anyway, what difference does it make? None, she says to her reflection. Absolutely none.]
Minor Honor
What Mr. C can offer isn’t much—his Ford, some cash, a new bar-boy from Romania Mr. C will pay to get V across the border to Wisconsin. Mr. C can make connections if V still has the goods to sing and dance.
I do, V says. But us? Didn’t he get her letter? She’s eighteen now. They can start over in New York. V can work on Broadway. She can waitress. She’ll start at the bottom; she’ll find work in a club. She only needs a husband and a job to win June back.
That’s quite a tale, kid, he says, interrupting V.
A tale? Don’t you love me still? Didn’t you promise—
Love? He laughs. I’m too old for love. I’ve got a business here to run. Plus— He gestures toward the band on his left hand. A year too late, he says, but life goes on. I’ve got my own boy now to raise. Pale gold in snowy moonlight. Why were they always standing in the snow? And a wife that won’t much like— He scans the snowy alley on the lookout for police. A nervous habit V remembers well.
And June? V asks. And June?
She’s all set with your sister. He pats V on the shoulder like a stranger. Start a clean slate in Wisconsin. You’re young enough—
I’m not, V says, too cold to even cry.
Heaven
1.
Black road in the country, V’s driver skids into a ditch to save a deer. Stuck. Oh shit, oh shit, the two words he’s repeated this entire snowy drive. That and Mr. C. Oh shit, Mr. C.
Shut up! V screams. Mr. C won’t help us here. She spreads the Minnesota map out on her legs, lights a match, finds again that red line border promising Wisconsin. Not much more than an inch. An inch is twenty miles. I’ll walk, V
says. She isn’t going to wait for the police. At a farm along this road V will beg for help. A new ride to Milwaukee. Give your coat to me. Your boots, V says, pointing at his feet.
No, no. The snow, he says, but V insists.
Across the border, V can make her own way to Chicago, or maybe someplace warmer without this goddamn snow. She can take the train to California to find Em. There isn’t any safety sitting here.
What will I tell Mr. C?
Say that you couldn’t stop me. Now give me all your money; I’ll need every dime.
2.
Wading through the snow, V can’t find that state-line border or a house. Can’t read the wind-blown map with just the moon. Her tiny size-five feet lost inside the driver’s huge galoshes. His heavy coat clearing a path of snow behind her like a trail. A path police could follow if they knew to find V here.
3.
V wakes in a cellar bed of straw and branch, a dirty tarp across her body for a blanket.
I found you on the road, an old man says. White-haired, bearded madman, or maybe God. Just a little hill of nothing, buried in fresh snow. Brought you to my place to get you warm out of that blizzard. It ain’t a palace, but at least you’re still alive.
Alive. V slips her aching hand inside her pocket, feels the roll of cash from Mr. C, the fold of extra bills the driver finally gave her. June’s picture she carried from Duluth. Her head pounds from the pain; her legs and feet are numb. But here she is alive.
Did I make it to Wisconsin? Voice nearly gone, her throat tight like a fist. Bones so sore they must be broken.
You did, he nods. You made it near-dead to Wisconsin. But how much could Wisconsin matter to you, girl?
Minnesota History Center Notes: January 10, 2001
Outside, the January day grays toward evening. The library is closing; June’s files aren’t June’s files anymore. Her story in state custody again, one story among the thousands sealed for a century.
I could have gone my whole life without knowing, June says, slipping her arms into her jacket, waiting like a child while I free her zipper from a snag, raise it to her chin, lift the fake fur hood over her curls.
Meaning what? I ask, although I can see June is exhausted. Ready to be done.
Just that, June says. Exactly what I said.
She passes me her worn folder full of papers: correspondence with the court and the adoption agency, V’s death certificate, her birth certificate, stories she’s clipped out of the paper, today’s copied file pages we requested from the clerk. State reports, miscellaneous statistics, excerpts from that ledger I won’t look at for another fifteen years. You keep all this, June tells me, as if this is my inheritance—not cherished heirloom crystal, but this secret we’ve been sharing since I was twelve years old. This single thing we did together. You’re going to need them for your book.
What book? I ask, trying to pass them back to June, but she’s busy now with leather gloves and can’t be bothered.
The one you’re going to write, you mark my words.
But we don’t even know the story, I say. Every fact we’ve found today just leads to questions.
We know enough, June says. Who else is going to tell it?
June already heading toward the exit, June leaving me to trail her the way I always will.
“I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty, and don’t mean to bear it a minute longer than I can help.”
–– Amy March, from Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1869
Exile
V disappears among the exiles in Chicago. A fugitive. A nobody. A nothing. When people ask V who she is, she has a thousand stories she can tell. Reinvention. The fiction of V’s life. She’s the daughter of a doctor from Detroit. She’s a farm girl from Wisconsin. Iowa. Crowned the Dairy Princess in Sioux City three years in a row. She’s Val, or Vy, or Vonnie, just like June is Margaret now. Just like Rose was never married in Milwaukee. When V gets a rare audition, she gives her stage name, Venus. Auditions only, because no one in Chicago will hire ordinary V to sing and dance. In a city full of dolls, V’s a minor Midwest talent. And what about those stretch marks on her skin? Those spent breasts a baby emptied? What guy would pay to see that in a show?
Nights, V works as a dice girl off of Halsted, a flirty 26 Girl, paid to keep the score, to hustle drinks and lure men to the game. You look like you could use a good strong whiskey. Want in on some action? Wouldn’t you like a lucky rabbit’s foot tonight? V, downing gift-drink after gift-drink, Coca- Cola laced with vodka—weak, but still she feels the fog. After close, V becomes the work crew’s private showgirl, Baby Vixen. V performing a capella the way she used to do with Em.
Walking home alone through darkness, her skin a layer of summer heat and stains strange men have left, V doesn’t need a map to know the borders of her life. Her furnished cheap hotel room. The corner store where she buys her Spam and bread. An apple every other day so she stays strong. Far beyond her small asylum: Minneapolis, a place she’ll never see again. Dark-eyed June, the daughter V can’t hold. The daughter who didn’t recognize her mother. V’s sisters, the March girls reinvented minus V. V’s mother, still living with that man. Mr. C with V’s girl heart in the pocket of his vest.
All that V has loved and lost, in a city she can’t visit. V in Minneapolis, nevermore.
[How to end a story
that will not end in this life,
or the next, or the next,
because it cannot end?
Generation after generation,
we are walking through V’s snow.]
“No girl leaves our home school without a higher ideal, an ideal that in the inevitable, natural force of things must somewhere, somehow, some time find expression. A denial of this would be a denial of the eternal.”
—Fannie French Morse, First Superintendent, Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre. Excerpted from Proceedings of the First State Conference of Child Welfare Boards with The Board of Control, State Capitol, May 9 and 10, 1919, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1919
First the Facts, Then the Consequences of the Facts
From the Franklin Bridge into the roiling Mississippi
From the Foshay Tower
From the window of the Met
From the tenth floor of the Nicollet Hotel
From the Wrigley Building
From the Empire State Building
From the Brooklyn Bridge
From the Golden Gate
From the Woolworth Building
From the Chrysler Building
From a balcony off Broadway like so many falling stars
From a hotel window in Hollywood, Chicago, or Detroit
From an ordinary overpass in Champaign, Illinois
V leaps into the air with just her purse—
a spectacle, a comet,
a front-page story in the paper.
V leaps, so she will not die unknown.
“dazzling Venus of the cabarets
and in an instant it is done
flashing through the still night
like a comet
the marquee far below
what was once a form
to inspire poets
blood
and shattered bones.”
—“Beautiful Delores Multiple Heartbreak Ended in a Broadway Tragedy,” Minneapolis Tribune, February 16, 1936
[CODA: 2018
V dead. June lost to dementia. June’s children dead now or estranged. Medicated. Adjudicated. Committed on occasion in the legacy of V. My family that once was, reduced to ruin. But, V is not our family, never was. I drive back to the last place V and June were family. Minnesota Home School at Sauk Centre, Fairview Colony for the pregnant and the dim, that cluster of five cottages where V and June first lived. The trapped girls land-banked on three sides: jack pi
ne walls around the border, fields rising into hills, a too steep cliff that cuts into the lake. The old cottage sweltering in summer, freezing in the winter. Rooms so cold the inmates shivered in their beds. Bedroom light switch in the hallway so the matron could control V’s day and night. A house of locks and keys. The small tub where V once soaked her swollen body, felt the animal of June nudge against her ribs. I’ve come to see this cottage with the dream that I’ll find some evidence of V. A crazy secret faith: I’ll glimpse the ghost of the two of them together, V alive, June a tiny infant in her arms. I want to tell them how it turns out for our family, the force of things that Fannie French Morse predicted. That I have done my best to find them, sealed and erased. Dead or dying. Memory or not. I have tried to tell their story, the story of us all.]
[And whose was I? June asks me now, through the white space of dementia.
V’s, I say. You were V’s girl first.]
For every V and June. Unknown.
Mother and Child at Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre
Author’s Note
In the winter of 2001, I accompanied my mother to the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was in my early forties, my mother in her mid-sixties. We’d come in search of information regarding her birth and her adoption, information held within the restricted records of the Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre. In 1935, my mother had been born at that institution, the unplanned daughter of a talented fifteen-year-old inmate serving a six-year sentence at the school. Under Minnesota law, my mother’s adoption records were to be sealed for one hundred years, but that January day we arrived with a letter from the court granting my mother’s request for access to her own history. Over the next seven hours, side by side at a large table, we worked our way through intake forms, case notes, and adoption records, as well as institutional reports and ledgers available to the public. Encountering my maternal grandmother’s file for the first time, I immediately recognized an institutional bias behind the recorded “facts” of the narratives. From the state’s questions regarding sexual practices, partners, diseases, and social deviations, to their subjective description of the modest furnishings in her family’s apartment, to their inexplicable list of her Jewish acquaintances, I realized the truth we’d hoped to find wasn’t in that file.
Evidence of V Page 12
