Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story

by Marilyn June Coffey

  She learned to curb her tongue around the Binders. They didn’t like the way she “showed off her book learning,” as they put it. With her ninth-grade schooling, she was by far the most educated in the family. Jess with his fourth-grade education was typical. Not one Binder had the slightest interest in knowledge or reading, while Teresa read voraciously, mostly confession magazines and newspapers, especially the weekly Ellis County News. Her studiousness, like her Catholicism, was one more characteristic that set her apart from her in-laws. But what really galled Teresa was their belief that Jess, in marrying her, had married beneath him.

  •

  Teresa had been married about five months when she went next door, as usual, to light her landlady’s fire. Mrs. Marshall and Teresa were friendly, so she didn’t mind lighting the fire for the older woman, but this morning, nothing went right. Three matches in a row were duds, the paper lit only to blow out, and Teresa bit her lip to keep from snarling. Then, before she could get the fire going, Mrs. Marshall asked her to address some envelopes. Teresa often addressed her landlady’s envelopes in French, not knowing what she was writing, but this morning, irritated, Teresa snapped, “After all, I light the fire for you.”

  “You’re in a fix,” Mrs. Marshall cried. “You’re in a fix.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  She was, but she didn’t know that yet. As soon as she knew, Mrs. Marshall counseled her “don’t reach up” and “be sure to get everything you crave or it will mark the baby.” Teresa didn’t believe these old wives’ tales, but Jess did. Not wanting his baby marked, he did everything in his power to get whatever Teresa wanted, so she accommodated her husband by wanting things, mostly candies, especially chocolates.

  Mrs. Marshall’s cute little next-door apartment was too small for three, so Jess and Teresa moved a few blocks away into a two-room house on Allen and Ninth. Teresa didn’t like the house, but Jess’s stepmother owned it, so they rented it at $8 a month: a whole house for the price they paid Mrs. Marshall for her tiny apartment.

  As her due date approached, Teresa felt apprehensive about giving birth. She had no one to consult but Jess who knew even less than she did. Oh, they enjoyed talking about the child they would have; Jess definitely wanted a son. But Teresa dared not discuss with him her fear the baby might be colored. She had no idea who her real parents were and her black hair curled so extremely. Was a parent or grandparent a Negro? Who was she? A person of no importance, she knew that. But did she carry colored blood that might leap out at any moment? She shuddered. How despicable being an orphan!

  Jess never knew Teresa’s concern about the color of their baby. When her labor began, he took her to Saint Anthony’s Hospital, and then went home to wait as husbands did in those days. Teresa screamed all night long, even after a nun reported that an irritable patient said, “Tell that mother to get her baby into this world. I want to get my sleep.” Finally, the next day, November 28, 1925, she gave birth to her first child, a girl.

  “What color is she?”

  She felt relieved to hear the nurse call the baby “all right.”

  When Teresa first looked at her daughter, she saw a sorry-looking little newborn with dark hair pasted to her head and her face all scrunched and red. An enormous burst of love coursed through Teresa’s body. As she touched her baby’s soft cheek, she saw not only her first born but also her only known blood relative. A part of her self that withered after her mother relinquished her began to bud. Rapturous, she turned a corner of the squirming blanket aside to show her mother who seemed to stand at the edge of the bed, peering at her grandchild.

  •

  The ugly duckling infant transformed into a pretty, dark-haired girl with blue eyes. Jess and Teresa named her Mildred, a popular choice. They decided not to baptize the baby, which left Teresa heavy hearted. She wished a priest could baptize Mildred Roman Catholic, but she knew Jess would never agree. He would be happy to have Mildred baptized a Baptist, which Teresa couldn’t condone, even though both parents now attended the Baptist church. Teresa went to church to please Jess, but sitting in a Baptist pew felt uncomfortable; she’d been taught that only Catholics know the truth about God. Although she no longer attended Saint Joseph’s, she still longed to have a priest bless her marriage. Religiously speaking, she lingered in what Catholics call Limbo.

  Teresa held high expectations for her daughter, a good baby who slept a lot and cried rarely. She wanted Mildred to rise above her humble origins, so she read baby books by the dozen and struggled to live up to their advice. Teresa rapidly became the sort of mother Marianna Wheeler describes in her popular book of that day, Before the Baby Comes: “A large number of babies, especially the firstborn, suffer from lack of proper knowledge on the part of the mother, who, in her anxiety to do right, frequently overdoes it.”

  Teresa, on right, with her friend Monie. (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)

  Teresa particularly wanted Mildred potty trained by the time she was a year and a half, but although she continually lifted Mildred up over the hole in their privy, the child didn’t seem to catch on, certainly not as quickly as Teresa wished.

  Nearly every afternoon, Teresa’s best friend, Monie, dropped by the apartment, and they would go walking. Monie, short for Monica, was a bit of a tomboy. She wore her hair in a masculine cut that failed to conceal her good looks. Like most flappers who disdained conventional dress, Monie wore straight frocks with no waistlines and the popular “cloche” hats.

  One afternoon, delighted to see pert Monie as usual, Teresa dressed her daughter and combed her shiny dark hair. Mildred enjoyed having her hair combed, but her curls were loose, not tight like her mother’s hair.

  “Any day now,” Monie observed as she watched Teresa lift Mildred into her buggy, “she’s going to be too big for that conveyance.”

  Teresa agreed as the three headed downtown for their daily walk.

  Teresa with her firstborn, Mildred, in 1926. (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)

  Whenever someone on the street stopped to look at Mildred, Teresa couldn’t wait to hear a compliment. “Don’t I have a pretty baby?” she’d ask. Naturally, the person would agree, and Teresa’s pride would swell.

  By the time Mildred was two, she indeed had outgrown her buggy, so Mildred rode in a stroller when Teresa and Monie went downtown to dance to the nickelodeon. Teresa loved to dance the popular shimmy, even though the Catholic Archbishop condemned it.

  “Listen to the way this guy describes the shimmy,” Teresa folded back the newspaper.

  “I’m listening.” Monie kept playing horsey with Mildred.

  “Quote, ‘to jig and hop around like a chicken on a red-hot stove, at the same time shaking the body until it quivers like a disturbed glass of Jell-O, is not only tremendously suggestive, but it is an offense against common decency that would not be permitted in a semi-respectable road-house.’”

  “Well, that’s news to me,” Monie said. “I didn’t know a road-house could be semi-respectable.”

  •

  One day in late September, 1929, Teresa and Monie stood on Chestnut Street, loafing around with Mildred. Mildred, almost four, was quite the little lady, but Teresa, five months pregnant, had gained an inordinate amount of weight. To her dismay, she fit her fattest sister-in-law’s clothes.

  Then Teresa noticed a shiny, late-model Studebaker a few blocks north. “Hey, get a load of that!”

  “Oil money,” Monie said.

  “Probably.”

  They stood still, Teresa jiggling Mildred’s stroller and watched the long lean car pull to the curb and stop.

  “What are they doing?” Teresa said.

  “Asking directions?”

  Moments later, as the car drew alongside them, Teresa saw two stylishly dressed women inside. A sweet-faced woman at the window beckoned. Teresa heard the driver say, “The pregnant one.”

  The sweet-faced woman leaned out of the window. “Is one of
you named Jessie?”

  “No,” Monie said.

  Teresa scrutinized the woman’s face, her broad nose, and her ready smile. She looked to be in her forties.

  “Are you Austrian?” she asked Teresa.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure? You look Austrian.”

  “Maybe I am. I don’t know much about my parents.”

  “I see.” The woman turned back in the car. Then she handed Teresa a used envelope with the address circled. “That’s where I’m staying. In Mission Mound. Do you know it?”

  Teresa nodded. Everyone knew Mission Mound, a fine residential area.

  “Come see me,” the woman said, “and bring your friend if you like. You’d both be welcome.”

  The car pulled away. Teresa stood on the curb, waving. She turned to Monie. “That could be my mother.”

  “Oh, don’t be foolish.”

  “I’m sure she is. She looks just like me. Here, watch Mildred.” Teresa grasped her big belly and started to run after the car, but Monie grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t be a goose! That couldn’t possibly be your mother. She was too young.”

  “But her hair was so curly,” Teresa insisted.

  “Why would your mother be in Hays, worm-brain?”

  “Looking for me.”

  Monie rolled her eyes skyward.

  “Well, she invited us to her house,” Teresa said. “Will you go with me? Tomorrow? It’s too late to go this afternoon. I’ve got to get Jess’s dinner ready.”

  “I’m waiting tables tomorrow, but Thursday I could.”

  “Okay, Thursday.”

  But Mildred came down with a cold Thursday morning, and Teresa couldn’t risk taking her outdoors.

  A week passed before they arrived at Mission Mound, an intimidating section of town, its brick houses large and far apart. When they found the address, they stood and considered the huge door, the shuttered windows, and the wide front porch.

  “Dingbust!” Monie said. “Looks like the governor lives here.”

  “You go first.” Teresa gave Monie a little push. “I’ll wait with Mildred.”

  “It’s your mother not mine, ninny.” Monie unwrapped Teresa’s hand from the stroller handle. “Go on.”

  Teresa edged up the steps, stooped to render her big belly less conspicuous, and pushed the doorbell. She jumped when a five-toned bell rang inside the house. Soon the door opened and there stood pretty Mrs. Cochran, wife of one of the town’s bankers. “Yes?” she said.

  “That woman with the curly hair, in a Studebaker, she told me to come see her here.”

  “Rosie, you mean.” Mrs. Cochran brushed her hair away from her cheek. She’d plucked her eyebrows, Teresa noticed. Penciled ones arched high over each eye. “I’m afraid she’s gone back to New York. So sorry.”

  As the door shut, Teresa turned and lumbered down the stairs. “You see? New York. She could have been my mother.”

  “Right. Or my great-great-step-aunt-twice-removed.”

  Teresa punched Monie.

  The door closed behind them with a heavy thud.

  •

  One day when Teresa sat with Mildred in a coffee shop, reading the Ellis County News, a headline made her gasp: Judge Gross was dead.

  Not long after she married, she heard that the judge resigned because of ill health, but she didn’t realize he was that sick. The paper said he had been “confined to bed for the past two years.”

  What a sorry thing, death, even for such an awful man. So why did she want to dance?

  Judge Gross is dead!

  She’d never again avert her eyes when she saw him on the street, she’d never again force a stiff smile and pretend that nothing happened.

  Judge Gross is dead!

  Suddenly she stood, and even though she was as big as an elephant, she plucked Mildred out of her stroller and twirled her around and around, her startled daughter grabbing handfuls of Teresa’s curly hair as they danced.

  •

  “You know, Tootsy,” Jess said one night, “I for damn sure want to buy this frigging little house.”

  Teresa recoiled. She and Jess still lived at Ninth and Allen in the two-room house they rented from his stepmother. Teresa hated the house. It sat near the railroad tracks in a lower-class neighborhood. Their neighbors, Mexican track workers, lived in trailer houses. However, Teresa, knowing how sensitive Jess was about being lower class, said only, “Oh, no, Jess. It’s way too small.”

  “Hell, we can manage.”

  Teresa protested, but Jess refused to listen to reason. Furious, she watched him put aside every penny he could spare, hoping to make a deposit.

  Then one morning her friend Irene dropped by. “Better you hear this from me than from someone else,” she said. “My husband’s bought this house.”

  “Petie? His own brother? Jess will be furious.”

  So he was.

  Not long after, Petie, angry that Jess opposed his purchase of the house, stopped by to shake the official sale paper under Jess’s nose.

  “I want you and Teresa out,” Petie said, “and I want you out immediately.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Petie. At least let us stay until Teresa has the baby.”

  But Petie refused.

  Soon Teresa and Jess were apartment hunting, to Teresa’s delight, although she carefully hid her satisfaction from Jess. Then unexpectedly another of Jess’s brothers, George, who worked at the George Philip and Son Hardware, arranged for Teresa and Jess to move into a cheerful three-room apartment above the store.

  “You’ll like it,” he told Teresa. He was right. She adored it. Sunlight poured through its big kitchen windows that looked out on the town’s busiest intersection.

  Teresa and Jess hadn’t lived in the apartment long before their second child arrived January 27, 1930, a hairless baby girl who weighed nine-and-a-half pounds.

  “Well, we didn’t get a boy,” Jess said when he visited, “but, damn, we got a big healthy girl. You and the baby are okay, and that’s all that frigging matters.”

  They took the baby home to their sunny apartment and called her Doris, a hugely popular name, even more popular than Mildred. Both names pleased Teresa. Having known derision, she wanted her children to fit in.

  •

  The longer Teresa lived in the apartment, the more she loved it except for its one flaw: a long straight narrow staircase, Teresa’s daily obstacle course. Each afternoon, as the weather warmed, she put Mildred in the buggy with Doris and crept down the stairs, balancing her heavy load step by step. But Teresa never complained about the treacherous descent. Even with the stairs, this apartment was the best place she and Jess had lived.

  Doris looked cuddly and cute, but she had Jess’s high forehead so she wasn’t really pretty. Although she slept little, she had a wonderful personality. The whole family loved her, particularly Mildred, who called Doris “sista,” not “sister.”

  Mildred, now four, struggled to learn to talk. When she spoke, she was unintelligible. Finally, Teresa realized that her daughter had a speech impediment. Shocked, she spoke slowly and exactly whenever she talked to Mildred.

  Teresa still attended Jess’s Baptist church, but she refused to have Doris baptized there. One day, scowling, she returned from a Baptist service and told Jess, “I’ve bent over backwards to please you, but I’m not going to that church of yours. Either I go to my own church or I’ll go to none. And that’s positive.”

  Faced with her ultimatum, Jess let Teresa return to the Catholic church, but he wouldn’t let his daughters be baptized there. Elated to return to Saint Joseph’s, Teresa attended regularly even though her civil marriage meant she couldn’t take communion or confess.

  That summer, Doris, only five months old, became deathly ill with pneumonia. Jess and Teresa rushed her to Saint Anthony’s Hospital where they watched Sister Myra save their daughter’s life by putting a finger down her throat so she could vomit up the poisonous phlegm. After
that, nurses administered drops of whiskey to Doris every few hours. Teresa stayed by her daughter’s side as often as she could. When she had to go home, she walked as fast and hard as possible, trying to pound into the pavement her fear that Doris might not be alive by the next visit.

  Teresa’s old friend, Euphersine, who visited Judge Gross with her, often dropped by the hospital. Teresa was proud of Euphersine. After high school, she’d gone to nursing school and had become Ellis County’s first nurse, but that did not make her too uppity to walk Teresa home.

  “Don’t worry,” Euphersine said. “Your baby will pull through.”

  Teresa hoped her friend was right. She ought to know. She’s a nurse. However, Teresa prayed for her tiny daughter just the same. After six long weeks, Doris healed enough to leave the hospital.

  Jess and Teresa, so grateful that their perky Doris wasn’t dead, did everything in their power to keep her happy. Soon she was spoiled tremendously. She didn’t want Jess to leave the apartment, and he left often, still driving a Dreyline truck despite his worsening rheumatism. On nights without Jess, Doris cried to get attention. Then Teresa and Mildred walked the floor with Doris or rocked her.

  One night when Doris woke them up, crying, Mildred kissed her and said, “Oh, you foiled darling.” Teresa stopped, then recognized that Mildred meant “spoiled darling.” She laughed and tousled the little girl’s head. She had two darlings, maybe both of them a little “foiled.”

  •