After that, Teresa walked to the river every day to visit Fanny. She went because she couldn’t imagine life without him. She sat by his still body, stroked his stiff hair, and talked. She didn’t mind the stench of his decomposing body. Besides, if she sat upwind, fresh river air blew the odor away.
Day after day, as she always had, Teresa told Fanny everything: how she sidestepped Grandma’s fast hand, what Sister Rosina told her, how Bappa beat her again, how her desire to dance had collapsed. Week after week, she talked to him. She talked to him until his bones crumbled, and she could no longer see what he had been.
•
In the spring of 1920, Teresa passed her final exams to complete her grade-school education, but no one came to see her graduate, not Bappa or Grandma, not Mr. Funk or Mr. Tillison. Angry, she moved in a vacuum, although she did experience a flush of happiness sitting on the platform with her classmates and Sister Rosina. She knew that Schoenchen residents considered finishing grammar school a major educational feat, one that few adults accomplished, so graduating proved her superior intelligence.
Eight students, four boys and four girls, graduated. Except for Teresa, all were Volga Germans: five Werths, one a Zimmerman, and one a Dreher but not Heinrich. He’d been held back again. The girls wore white dresses, but Teresa alone wore white stockings and shoes. The other girls wore more fashionable black stockings and shoes. As usual, I’m an outsider. Teresa’s face tightened. A scowl pinched her brows.
At home, Teresa discovered that the Biekers didn’t come to her graduation because Bappa’s black rabbit escaped. Bappa caught it, but the incident kindled his temper, so Grandma felt reluctant to leave him alone. He was drunk, of course.
In her room, Teresa peeled off the ugly white stockings.
Later that week, her graduation photograph arrived showing the eighth-grade class in all its finery. The girls sat in the front row, their black and her white stockings and shoes in full view. How she hated the photo! Just looking at it reminded her of her inferiority. One day she tore it to bits.
•
Summer turned into a miserable time. All desire to dance left Teresa; reading became a chore. Few people, as usual, remained in town. At night, Teresa winced as she listened to the Biekers discuss what to do with her. They planned to find her a job, perhaps at Saint Anthony’s Hospital in Hays, so she could bring them her salary. Teresa, however, wanted to continue her education, but she could not make them understand.
That fall Teresa did attend a brand-new high school in Schoenchen, but only for a short while. There she learned that United States women could now vote in the upcoming presidential election. That pleased her. She knew Volga Germans were dead set against women voting. She’d heard Bappa say, “Mark my word, they’ll vote in strict Sunday laws and outlaw beer gardens.”
However, high school soon palled. Teresa was so bright in grade school, but in high school, her mind blanked, probably from her concern about Bappa and her rising fear that the Biekers would give her away.
Finally, Grandma and Bappa agreed on a goal for Teresa: she would learn to cook and marry. As soon as possible. Grandma never taught Teresa to cook because she was so clumsy, but at fourteen, perhaps she could learn the fundamentals.
“They want to get rid of me, they do, or they wouldn’t want to marry me off,” Teresa whispered into her featherbed that night, talking to her imaginary mother.
Try not to be too discouraged, her mother counseled.
Then matters suddenly deteriorated.
Part II: “Among the Lowest of the Low”
5
A Ward of the Court
Teresa struggled to repress tears. Shame replaced the fear she felt when Sheriff Loreditch removed her from her home, when he put her on this train with these other dislocated Ellis County children—all five strangers. We didn’t work out. A chill etched her bones. We’re going back to New York, like Albert. She traced her fingertip along the back of her head where her hair had been shorn and her scalp stitched.
After the train pulled out, Teresa asked her freckled seatmate and the fair-haired boy in front of her where they were going, but neither knew. The farther the train traveled the more convinced Teresa became that she’d suffered Albert’s fate. She slipped from her seat and walked down the aisle toward stout Kate Bissing, their escort. Teresa knew Mrs. Bissing had to work for the county because, gossip said, her filthy rich husband, old Judge Justus Bissing, had found greener pastures.
“You there!” Mrs. Bissing said. “Sit down.”
But Teresa continued to grab seat backs and edge toward the plain-faced woman. “Please.” Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Where are we going?”
“Go back to your seat.”
“Just tell me the worst. Are we going to New York City? Please. I have to know.”
“The only thing you have to know, Missy, is what I’m going to do if you don’t sit down.”
Mrs. Bissing’s hand rose, so Teresa trudged back down the aisle, sat down, and covered her face, her shoulders shaking.
When the train stopped, Teresa looked out the window, expecting to see New York City’s busy streets. Instead, a sign read “Abilene.” They were still in Kansas, only about a hundred miles from Schoenchen, stopping to take on new passengers, Teresa supposed, but no. Mrs. Bissing marched up the aisle, sweeping the Hays children before her. When Teresa saw some Saint Joseph’s nuns greet Mrs. Bissing, she nearly fainted with relief.
The nuns took Teresa and the other children to Saint Joseph’s Orphanage. They toured the entire building, but the only thing Teresa noticed was a tall blond boy. Seeing him made her feel as weak as Heinrich Dreher had. When the nuns assigned her to the same dining room table as the boy, Gilbert, she saw he had a crooked smile and was about her age. Everyone else looked older or younger, mostly younger. Sitting across from Gilbert, watching him push his hair out of his eye ignited a strain of music in Teresa’s mind, music good for dancing. Dancing! How long since she wanted to dance? She moved her feet in a box shape under the table and glanced at Gilbert, pretending to dance with him.
That night, the nuns took Teresa and the other new children to their second-floor sleeping quarters, a big open dormitory with the boys on one end, the girls on the other. To her surprise, the nuns gave her a nightgown. She hadn’t slept in a nightgown since she was three. Grandma made fun of people so stuck up they slept in nightgowns. Since the dormitory had no private place to change, a nun showed Teresa how to put on her nightgown over her dress, and then take off her dress.
At 5 a.m., a nun clanged the wake-up bell. Teresa shivered as she dressed under the privacy of her nightgown. She looked for Gilbert, but the boys had gone. By six, everyone filed into the chapel for Mass, but the boys sat behind the girls, so Teresa couldn’t see Gilbert. Resigned, she settled into her hard pew. Soon the customary Latin words of Mass enfolded her. Hearing those words nine times a week in Schoenchen had rendered them indelible. Even her memory of saying Hail Marys alongside the Biekers comforted her.
After Mass, Teresa walked down long narrow wooden stairs to a humid basement where she helped other girls hang damp clothes. The sheets, heavy with moisture and hanging like huge rectangles, reminded her of the Foundling laundry room. No wonder she loved to smell freshly washed clothes. She surreptitiously picked up a boy’s shirt, pretended it was Gilbert’s and buried her face in it.
After a blissful breakfast at the table with Gilbert, Teresa returned to the basement and ironed. Back and forth, back and forth, she pushed the heavy flat iron across the pillowcase, creating more wrinkles than she flattened. Maybe the heat from the iron, which seemed hotter than a wood-burning stove, or perhaps the strain of the past few days made her feel dizzy. Then the pillowcase turned black as she crumpled to the floor.
When Teresa woke, she lay in a small square room with two high windows opposite her bed. Late afternoon sun drifted through the panes. Beside her sat Sister Agneta, her face wrinkled as a prune. “Feeling better?” She
stroked Teresa’s forehead with a damp cloth. Teresa nodded, but she seemed to be floating.
“I’ll come see you later.” Sister Agneta placed a thin pamphlet on Teresa’s chest. As Teresa dozed, the pamphlet slipped down by her ribs. When she woke, she grabbed the pamphlet just as it was about to slide off the bed.
The cover featured a nun who was dressed more somberly than the Saint Joseph nuns. She wore black except for a pointed white collar and some white stripes on her black bonnet. Her serene face gazed right at Teresa. Why she could be my mother! Teresa opened the pamphlet, entitled “Sister Irene,” and read.
Sister Irene, co-founder of the New York Foundling Hospital. (Courtesy of New York Foundling Hospital)
“Sister Irene, born into a prosperous New York family, was christened Catherine Fitzgibbon. By her late teens, Catherine had become quite a beauty.”
“Quite a beauty?’’ Teresa looked at the photograph. She noticed the high round cheeks, the slender lips, the half smile, and the dark eyes. A deep blue, Teresa imagined. She dreamed that she was Catherine, born into unimaginable wealth. How gorgeous she would look in a teal blue satin dress that brought out her blue eyes as she rode around New York City attending high teas. Still smiling, she dozed again.
Sister Agneta woke Teresa with supper. She tried to eat but finally pushed the soup, which she could barely swallow, aside and turned to the pamphlet. To her dismay, she read that an epidemic of cholera, a disease that had killed millions worldwide, swept through the city. The epidemic reminded her of the Spanish flu, of Pete and his horses. She shuddered, then continued:
“All Catherine’s beauty and the riches of her family could not shield her from this awful disease. The cholera pulled Catherine into a coma, a coma so deep she could not move a muscle, not even to blink. When her breathing apparently stopped, her parents believed Catherine was dead, but she was not. She could still hear, and she listened to her parents and the undertaker plan her burial.”
Teresa froze, pretending to be unable to move a muscle as she heard the Sisters plan to bury her. She lay so deep into her imagined trance that she jumped when Sister Agneta came in to remove her tray.
“Did I startle you? Sorry.” The nun laid her tiny dry hand on Teresa’s forehead. “Still quite cool,” she said, “and damp.” When she left with the tray, Teresa picked up the pamphlet again.
“Catherine lay helpless as hands removed her clothes, washed her skin, and dressed her body for burial. Desperate, she prayed for a divine act of mercy. The answer to her prayer came in the form of a vision of dozens of infants, pleading for her help. In response, Catherine dedicated her life to God and vowed to help the babies. As she did, her coma broke. The undertaker, about to close the coffin lid, saw her eyelid flutter and spared Catherine a terrible death.”
Teresa froze again. Then she fluttered her eyelids and squinted until the window panes stared at her like square black eyes. Next to her, a lamp shed a pool of light on her bed. Then she shifted to her side and read.
“After she recovered, Catherine joined the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul and became Sister Mary Irene, to her family’s dismay.”
How upset her parents must have been when such a lovely daughter became a nun instead of the beautiful wife of some fine man and the mother of their grandchildren.
“After she became a nun, Sister Irene begged her superior, Mother Jerome, to let her care for abandoned infants, but Mother Jerome objected: ‘What can we give them, poor as we are?’ Finally, in November 1869, she relented and gave Sister Irene and three other nuns five dollars to open a home.”
Five dollars to open a home! So little money. What could Sister Irene do?
“Someone donated a brownstone at 17 East Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village.”
Ah, she had helpers.
“Sister Irene and the other nuns scrubbed the building, furnished it with barrels for tables and boxes for chairs, and spread straw on the floor for mattresses.”
The same as in Schoenchen.
“On January 1, 1870, the nuns opened The Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity of the City of New York, later called the New York Foundling Hospital, and finally, simply New York Foundling.”
Startled, Teresa sat right up. The New York Foundling. Her orphanage. She was reading a history of how the Foundling began. She lay down and eagerly read:
“The rusty doorbell of the old brownstone rang as soon as the Foundling opened. An abandoned baby, the Foundling’s first, lay on the stone stoop. ‘Infants were left faster than cribs, clothing and nurses could be obtained for them,’ the Foundling physician reported. That first year, the nuns rescued more than a thousand babies.
“Within months of opening, the Sisters moved to a larger building at 3 Washington Square. By 1873, backed by state money, the Sisters moved into new quarters at Sixty-eighth and Lexington, into five connected buildings.”
Teresa turned the pamphlet sideways and examined a black-and-white sketch of the five buildings. Tiny people walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the buildings and little horses pulled carriages. High above the top turret of the tallest building waved an American flag. Teresa had few conscious memories of the Foundling, but she knew these buildings as well as she knew the Biekers’ house. She saw the color of the brick, the green of the fenced hedge around the block. She could even smell the acrid odor that overwhelmed her whenever she entered the building. “Home. My first home.” Unexpectedly she remembered Sister Teresa waving goodbye.
Weakened by her exertion, Teresa lay down and pretended to slip into a coma. Soon she slept and didn’t hear the footsteps of nuns who dropped by her room during the night. When she woke, she reached for the pamphlet and devoured it as she waited for breakfast. Slowly she realized that, in an odd way, Sister Irene really was her mother, that she had been one of Sister Irene’s babies, that her fate had been determined in Sister Irene’s coma. Tears, seeping from the corners of Teresa’s eyes, refused to stop. When she finally dried her eyes and opened them, the beauty of the quiet room rushed upon her and, for a moment, she felt loved.
•
As Teresa healed, she worked in the kitchen, whistling as she peeled potatoes or set the tables. A small, industrious nun, Sister Sebastian, who worked in the kitchen, cheered Teresa. From Germany, the nun called forks “fogs.” As Teresa set the tables, Sister Sebastian would yell, “How about the fogs?”
One day the head nun asked to see Teresa. The girl sat in Sister Regis’s office wondering what she had done. Late autumn sun poured like butter through the windows and onto Sister Regis’s desk, brightening the papers she shuffled. At last, she pulled one to the top.
“Here we are,” she said. “The Foundling has decided that you will no longer be known as Teresa Bieker.”
What does she mean? Am I to become a nun?
“From now on, you will use your real father’s name. You will be Teresa Feit.”
The news rang in Teresa’s heart like Saint Anthony’s Easter bells. How she hated being a Bieker! She could scarcely grasp that this prize, which she believed never to win, was hers.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.” She wanted to rush around the desk and hug Sister Regis, but the nun’s flowing habit looked a bit too starched. “How can I ever repay you?”
“You don’t owe us anything, Teresa.” The nun rose. “Now go along. Aren’t you supposed to be working in the kitchen?”
All the way to the kitchen, Teresa danced a little jig. Maybe she would bump into Gilbert so she could tell him her real name, but she didn’t.
•
When Teresa healed enough to leave Saint Joseph’s Orphanage, Sister Regis offered her two alternatives: to become a nun or a housekeeper. If Teresa chose “nun,” she would go to the Motherhouse for the Saint Joseph’s nuns in Concordia, Kansas, where Sister Gertrude and Sister Rosina went every summer. If Teresa chose “housekeeper,” she would go to nearby Salina, take care of the Geist children in their handsome home, and at
tend Sacred Heart High School.
Neither choice appealed to Teresa; she’d prayed every night to go back to Schoenchen, not to the Bieker home but on a big farm with lots of children. Strangely, she longed for her childhood home. Even that awful last day at the Biekers seemed vague. However, she wasn’t being offered Schoenchen; she had to choose “nun” or “housekeeper.”
Ever since Sister Gertrude held Teresa on her lap and placed a picture of the Virgin Mary in her hand, the girl had dreamed of becoming a nun. She developed an immense love for nuns, feeling secure in their presence. As a child, she’d spent hours wearing a towel over her head, pretending to be a Sister, but faced with the opportunity, Teresa hesitated. These Abilene nuns don’t really know me. They don’t know what Bappa made me do. I’m not good enough to be a nun. Besides, if I become a nun, then Gilbert will never know that I love him.
As matters now stood, Gilbert had no way of knowing. Although they ate at the same table, they never spoke, but twice he had smiled at her. Mostly Teresa just looked at him. If she became a nun, he would fade away until he was only a photograph she held in her heart.
If she went to Salina? Then she and Gilbert would somehow, magically, manage to get together, she felt certain. Besides, living in a handsome house appealed to her, as did the idea of returning to school. So Teresa chose Salina.
After she had chosen, she wondered if she’d made the right decision. She waited after a meal to confide in Sister Nolaska, a tall, good-looking nun, head cook in the orphanage kitchen.
“I probably shouldn’t feel this way,” Teresa said as the cook prepared some beans to soak. “I know it isn’t proper, and certainly not for a nun.” She quietly revealed a tiny fragment of her passion for Gilbert.
“Let me show you something.” Sister Nolaska strode out of the building with Teresa behind her. Fresh air slapped Teresa’s face; she could feel winter looming. The nun led Teresa to a barn behind the main building and slid open the door. In a corner sat a dozen dust-covered trunks, some quite old.
Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story Page 9
