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

by Marilyn June Coffey

  Worse than Mrs. Beaten was the snobbery, which wore Teresa down. It reminded her of grade-school days, when children treated her like scum. It reminded her of the Biekers, of Judge Gross, and of the women like Mrs. Addison who made sure she knew her place. It reminded her that no matter how high she rose, she could never shed her past. No one at Presbyterian knew she was an orphan; she had made certain of that. No one in Denver knew but Frenchy. Still, at Presbyterian, she felt like one.

  In 1968, Porter Memorial Hospital, a Denver hospital run by Seventh-Day Adventists, asked Teresa for an interview. She went, although she knew nothing about Seventh-Day Adventists.

  At the interview, she said, “Why are you interested in me? I’m a Catholic.”

  “But you are the nearest to a Seventh-Day Adventist that we could find,” the interviewer said. “You don’t drink and you don’t smoke.”

  When Porter Hospital offered Teresa a salary better than her current one, she accepted the offer. Porter proved to be a good place to work, much better than Presbyterian was. Porter had an excellent reputation, the administrators believed in keeping the library up-to-date, and no one seemed particularly snobbish, thank goodness.

  Teresa and Frenchy bought a house at 2570 South Marion, only three blocks from her new job. They used money from the sale of his sister’s house as a downpayment. Frenchy, who was much better at budgeting money than Teresa, handled all their money. Teresa turned over her paychecks to him, letting him pay bills and deposit the remainder in her savings account. Thanks to Frenchy’s good management, they were able to own their new home with a mortgage of only $100 a month.

  •

  One day, Teresa slipped home for lunch to find her husband there.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. She expected Frenchy to be at work for the Cole Company, a manufacturer of keys, in Woolworth’s key department. He had taken a correspondence course in making keys, liked the task, and found himself good at it. At last, Teresa had thought, a job he likes.

  Frenchy’s key shop. (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)

  “I quit.”

  “What happened?”

  “They got smart with me.” A man brought a key to Woolworth’s that he wanted remade. When Frenchy examined it, he saw that the Cole Company made the key but not in this Woolworth store.

  “You didn’t get the key from us,” Frenchy said, “so I’m not going to fix it.”

  The men quarreled.

  When the Woolworth floor manager told Frenchy to make a new key, Frenchy refused. “I’m not working for Woolworth’s. I’m working for the Cole Company.” He walked off the job.

  Holding a job seemed impossible for Frenchy, Teresa thought. In Denver, he took up and then gave up TV repair. After managing five different apartment houses, he quit that line of work. He lasted only a few months at the Villa Shopping Center. Now he had thrown in the towel on making keys. How could he continue this way?

  Fortunately, Teresa now earned enough money at Porter to provide for them both, thanks to their low mortgage and to Frenchy’s frugal financial management. “You are a good cook,” she said, “and you love to keep house. Why don’t I bring home the bacon and you fry?”

  Frenchy loved being a gentleman housekeeper, content to stay home and watch baseball, basketball, and football on TV. He kept the house spotless. He cooked good meals and even drank less.

  When Teresa returned from work, she waited on him, grateful not to keep house, which she despised. They watched whatever TV program Frenchy wanted to watch. Sometimes Teresa brought her husband little presents. With Frenchy keeping house and Teresa coddling him, their marriage improved markedly.

  Teresa still despaired of Frenchy’s drinking, but she never gave up. Since she knew he liked to be treated like a little boy, she said, “Instead of drinking this Tuesday, try not to.” Then she had him skip Saturdays. She praised him lavishly on weeks he stayed sober, and finally he stopped drinking altogether. Perhaps his failing health helped. When he drank now, he got much sicker than he had when he was younger.

  •

  After Teresa attended the Nebraska orphan reunion, she felt differently about being orphaned—less lonely, not so ashamed. For the first time, she talked to people in Denver about her past.

  “Are you Jewish?” Mrs. Rosenberg said. “You look Jewish, that’s certain.”

  Teresa knew Mrs. Rosenberg only slightly, but she answered honestly. “I don’t know if I am or not. The Catholic Church baptized me and then placed me out as an orphan.”

  “No! Then of course you can’t be Jewish! Jews don’t put their children in orphanages. We take care of our own.”

  Teresa didn’t reply. She just shrugged and thought, “One more argument against my being Jewish.”

  Eventually she confided in Dr. Ken Moon, a friendly colleague and neighbor. He seemed fascinated with her history, especially her desire to know more about her mother.

  “Why don’t you go to New York and find out?” he suggested.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’d find out much there. When I wrote to the Foundling for my birth information, the nun who replied said, ‘The case is closed.’”

  “It might be different, face-to-face.”

  “Maybe. You know, I’d love to go to New York, but how expensive that would be! The airfare, the hotel room. I don’t see how I could swing it.”

  “Well, let’s think about it, shall we?” Dr. Moon patted her hand.

  That night Teresa said to Frenchy, “It’s been two years since we wiped out the savings account buying that new Buick of yours. Do you think I have enough to go to New York?”

  “Maybe,” Frenchy said. “We can probably swing it, but it might be tight. I’ll take a look.” He pulled out the savings account book and discussed prices with a travel agent before he told Teresa she had enough money to go. Barely enough, but enough.

  The next time Teresa saw Dr. Moon, she said, “I’m going to New York! I’ve decided to go even if it breaks my bank!” She thrust both fists in the air like a champion boxer and laughed.

  “Great! A good decision! You won’t regret it.”

  A week later, Dr. Moon came into the library with an envelope. “Here. For you. We doctors took up a collection to support your trip.”

  “For me?” Puzzled, Teresa opened the envelope to see a row of what looked like fifty-dollar bills.

  “For your trip. All of us doctors chipped in.”

  Teresa burst into tears.

  “Now, now! This is supposed to make you happy, not sad.” Dr. Moon whipped out his handkerchief and handed it to her.

  “Oh, it does! It does!” Teresa’s tears subsided as she lay down the envelope to wipe her cheeks and blow her nose. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, how can I ever thank all of you?”

  “Please, Teresa, it’s only a small token of our gratitude for all the work you’ve done for us,” Dr. Moon laughed. “And the shamrocks you knit for us for Saint Paddy’s day.”

  He left before she could reiterate her gratitude. When she picked up the envelope, she noticed she still held Dr. Moon’s handkerchief. She used it to wipe her damp cheeks.

  •

  About a month later, Teresa flew to New York. Her trust in revealing her past to Dr. Moon was justified. The doctors’ money paid her airfare and then some.

  When she arrived at the New York airport, she couldn’t wait to see the Foundling, so she took a cab directly to the orphanage. She stepped out and looked up at enormous modern buildings, nothing like the ones she knew as a child. Could this be the place? Then she remembered Mary Buscher talking at the Nebraska reunion about the Foundling moving, in 1958, into new quarters.

  “I saw it happen right there on the evening news,” Mrs. Buscher had said. “The Foundling moved out of its old buildings on Sixty-Eighth Street and into its new ones nearby. My heart just sank. If ever I wanted to go see my first home, the home I moved into when I was eight days old, why it would be gone. Used by someone else perhaps. And the new
buildings, of course, they didn’t look like anything I remembered.”

  These modern buildings, then, must be the new quarters. Teresa shook herself and entered, found the main desk, and identified herself. She showed the nun in charge letters that the Porter doctors wrote for her, letters attesting to her popularity as a medical researcher.

  “Thank God,” the nun said, “someone came back who was cheerful and didn’t complain.”

  Teresa started. I could complain, too! My Schoenchen home wasn’t the greatest. But she said nothing.

  Wanting to stay near the Foundling, Teresa rented a room in an inexpensive old hotel on East Sixty-Eighth Street. The place looked a bit seedy but that didn’t concern her until the hotel man said, “You won’t go out at night, will you?” Then she wondered if she had stumbled into a sleazy neighborhood, but she didn’t care. Her room and the lobby were comfortable.

  Across the street from the hotel stood the Lenox Hill post office, which looked more familiar than the orphanage had. Curious, Teresa entered the building the next day and saw that the spacious interior seemed familiar, too. She located an older postal worker.

  “I was a Foundling orphan,” she told him as he made change for her purchase of stamps. “It’s strange, but this post office seems familiar.”

  “Maybe you remember the nuns bringing you here. In the old days, they often wheeled orphans over here.”

  The postal worker also told Teresa that the Foundling hired people to “love” the orphans, to hold them and caress them so they wouldn’t die of lack of mother love. So perhaps orphanage life wasn’t as bleak as Teresa supposed. For the first time, she imagined someone cuddling her when she was a toddler, an infant. She wondered who had loved her, who had wrapped her in strong, warm arms. Maybe the same person who taught her to hold up her arms when she wanted to be picked up. A sudden burst of warmth hit Teresa, as though a cloud dissolved to reveal the sun.

  Later that day, Teresa returned to the Foundling for a closer look. She saw the original basket that, in 1869, sat outside the front door to collect babies. She saw Sister Irene’s desk. She met Sister Mary de Sales who knew the history of Kansas riders.

  “You weren’t the only one,” Sister de Sales said. “We placed about 5,000 children in Kansas.”

  “Five thousand!” Teresa felt astounded. She knew the Foundling had placed some hundred children in Ellis County, but she had no idea so many children had been placed all over the state.

  Later, she sat in a pew in the huge modern chapel and watched. Most nuns who worshiped there dressed in street clothes, none particularly fashionable, but a few wore the same kind of habits and bonnets that nuns wore in Teresa’s day. Seeing them excited Teresa. She remembered women who’d cared for her, their warmth, their odors, pungent and spicy. She remembered most vividly their strong insistent hands washing her hair. I must have been a handful. That pleased her.

  Still later, Teresa asked to see her records, but the nun in charge refused. This disappointed Teresa even though it did not surprise her, not when she remembered their frustrating correspondence about her birth certificate. Still, the nuns’ refusal stirred up unanswered questions. Did my parents try to find me? Sometimes she wondered if they had come to Kansas seeking her, and the Biekers refused to tell them anything. Or maybe the woman who asked her if she were Austrian was Rosie. Preoccupied, she barely heard Sister de Sales describe Teresa’s mother as a “small proud little woman.”

  “What did you say?” Teresa said.

  The nun repeated her words.

  Just like me, but I’m not so proud. I wonder why she was. Her fantasy that Rosie came from a rich family never vanished, so Teresa thought Sister de Sales’s words might prove that Rosie was well-born.

  Maybe I can find out if I’m Jewish. Turning to the Sister, she said, “You know, a woman in Denver thought I was Jewish. When she asked me about it, I told her the Foundling baptized me in the Catholic Church and then placed me out as an orphan. Then she said, ‘Oh, no! You can’t be Jewish! Jews don’t put their children in orphanages. We Jews take care of our own.’”

  Sister de Sales’s face was impassive, her voice quiet but decisive. “They don’t always know what their girls do.”

  Maybe they don’t. Maybe I am Jewish. The nun didn’t say I wasn’t.

  Teresa remembered reading that some Catholic orphanages refused to return Jewish children to their parents. The Catholics supposedly did this because they wanted Jewish children, in particular, to be converted and raised Catholic. Teresa wondered if the Foundling had done that, if she were Jewish and her proud mother came to get her and the nuns refused to give her back.

  Perhaps that’s why the payments stopped.

  She almost asked, but she dared not.

  Next Teresa went to the Lying-in Hospital where she had been born, even though the old hospital had been replaced by the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. She visited the hospital’s fine medical library and the library at Columbia; she owed at least that to the generous doctors. Then she simply became a tourist, inspecting the Statue of Liberty, the United Nations building, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Teresa loved New York. She loved to watch the people, especially the stylishly dressed women. She knew she must look dowdy alongside them. If she had stayed with Rosie and grown up here, would she too have looked so smart and self-assured?

  The city seemed surprisingly like home even though the crowds sometimes frightened her. Once as she waited at a bus stop during rush hour, someone in the crowd started shoving. Suddenly a person pointed at Teresa and shouted, “Look at that pushy Jew!”

  Then a rider on the bus called, “Don’t you say that. Can’t you see she’s scared to death?”

  A pushy Jew! Maybe I really am Jewish.

  Too soon, she was back in Denver.

  •

  On Teresa’s sixty-fourth birthday, Mildred gave birth to her eleventh child. Eleven children! Teresa could weep! Such excess! At least Doris and Don had the good sense to stop ten years ago, after three sons, but not Mildred. She was worse than her mother-in-law who gave birth to eight. They both scorned Teresa’s two.

  “What’s the problem?” the mother-in-law said. “You get only one at a time.”

  Still, Mildred couldn’t drop children forever. Already forty-four, if she didn’t stop soon, Mother Nature would halt her.

  •

  When Teresa turned sixty-five on May 25, 1971, she continued to work at Porter even though she could retire. But why take out Social Security now when her good salary would only increase it? Besides, she didn’t want to stay at home; she liked being busy, so she continued to work.

  Even by her own tough standards, she was a successful medical librarian. She knew because nursing students at the hospital named her employee-of-the-month over and over. The local Newsmakers reporter wrote that choosing Teresa for this honor was “almost an annual custom.” One student, Lane Casey, gave her a rose representing the students’ appreciation. These honors warmed Teresa, but she knew they weren’t entirely her own doing. Porter Hospital should take some credit. It provided the warm safe soil in which she could flourish. At the hospital, she could be who she was, without apology. No one ever put her down, not even after learning she was an orphan.

  By this time, Frenchy and she rarely went out. To keep him from drinking, they avoided the dance halls—a sacrifice Teresa happily made to keep Frenchy sober. Sometimes she missed waltzing to the dance band’s rhythms, sliding with Frenchy across a shining dance floor, their bodies swaying as one. They even stayed home on New Year’s Eve, a significant change since they always celebrated Frenchy’s most beloved holiday. Now they turned on TV, listened to Guy Lombardo, and danced, just the two of them. Even in the confines of the living room, Frenchy still was a marvelous dancer. Teresa felt herself melt in his arms.

  •

  One blistering July day in 1978, Teresa came home for lunch to find that Frenchy had mowed their lawn when the hired man didn
’t show up.

  “How could you, honey?” she said. “In this terrible heat. You know you need to take good care of yourself.” Frenchy, on his dentist’s advice, had stopped taking his blood thinner, Coumadin, to prepare for some extractions.

  “Frenchy, I’m going to be late for supper,” she said after lunch. “I’m planning to work late.”

  “Come home at five instead. You can eat and go back to the hospital. I want to see the game.”

  Teresa agreed, knowing how Frenchy loved his evening sports! He never missed those games.

  A little after five, Teresa went home. The house seemed unusually quiet. No TV blared. No supper simmered on the stove. Teresa looked for a note but found none. That’s strange. Frenchy never goes anywhere without leaving a note. She looked all over the house but couldn’t find him. When she went down the basement, there he lay on the floor, his leg at an odd angle. She put a pillow under his head and said, “Did you break your leg? Oh, Frenchy.”

  Then she noticed his eyes. She knew something terrible had happened, so she called Dr. Moon, the doctor who had raised money for her New York trip. He lived across the street; he and his wife, a nurse, came right over. They took Frenchy to Porter Hospital to resuscitate him, but the doctor couldn’t. At the age of seventy-three, he was dead from arteriosclerosis.

  Finding Frenchy dead was excruciatingly painful. The pain seemed to gather in Teresa’s chest, around her heart. Concerned hospital doctors gave her an EKG test. That night severe pain pinned Teresa to her bed, but she refused to call for help. She knew the pain came from losing Frenchy. Just imagine. Yesterday he was mowing the lawn, but today he’s lying stiff in the morgue. If only she had found him earlier!

  The next day, the hospital doctors told Teresa that she had had a heart attack, but she refused to believe them.