The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming

by J. Anderson Coats

  To my mom and dad

  1

  MRS. D SAID TO LEAVE the packing to her, but when she wasn’t looking, I pulled out a half-size carpetbag I made from a flour sack and put in the things I don’t trust her with.

  My lucky hopscotch stone.

  Three hairpins I found in the big girls’ yard behind the schoolhouse from back when I went to school.

  The little book Miss Bradley made for me from folded sheets of cheap blank ragpaper that she stitched up the spine with packing cord.

  We’ve been staying at Lovejoy’s Hotel in New York City for two days before I get careless and go through my secret carpetbag when Mrs. D is only halfway out the door.

  In three steps she’s standing over me, holding out her hand. “I must have that paper, Jane.”

  “Why?” I ask, and it’s a perfectly reasonable question, but her brows twitch and her mouth goes tight and straight.

  Usually when Mrs. D makes that face, it’s followed by her telling me how easy it would be for her to entrust my growing-up years to a Mother who keeps one of the mill-run boardinghouses back in Lowell. Those mills are desperate for girls to stand behind the looms now that the war is over.

  Instead, she sighs like I’m simple. “In case I need to write to Mr. Mercer about the voyage. Now, do as you’re told.”

  Mrs. D hasn’t exactly told me to do anything, and it’s not like she can write real good anyway.

  “The pages are all filled up,” I reply, and I show her the ones at the front that are covered with copy exercises and sums.

  She narrows her eyes but lets me keep it.

  There are exactly seven blank pages at the end, but there’s no reason Mrs. D has to know that. It won’t be long before this little book will be useful once more.

  We’re a week at Lovejoy’s before another member of Mr. Mercer’s expedition arrives. She’s called Miss Gower, and she barely gets through her nice-to-meet-yous before she tells us she already wrote to Washington’s territorial governor to ask that she be officially recognized as the Old Maid of the Territory.

  There’s a pained silence. Being an old maid is akin to having a dire sickness or expecting a baby—something you don’t mention in polite company. Mrs. D looks faintly disgusted, like she’s about to change a very full diaper, but I blurt, “What did he say?”

  “Hsst!” Mrs. D gives me a Look. “Children should be seen and—”

  “He agreed, of course.” There’s more than a hint of pride in Miss Gower’s voice and half a chortle. “It’s best to call things as they are, and an old maid is definitely what I am and will remain, come what may. What should I call you?”

  “Who? Me?”

  Miss Gower nods. She’s not even looking at Mrs. D.

  “J-Jane.” I stand a little straighter, like I’m back at school giving a recitation. “Ma’am.”

  “My stepdaughter,” Mrs. D adds with a sigh, “who really ought to know better than to speak to her elders in such a way.”

  Whenever Mrs. D says things like this, I try not to giggle or roll my eyes. She’s only two and twenty, and she doesn’t look old enough to say things like Children should be seen and not heard.

  She means them, though.

  “This little charmer is my son, Jeremiah. We call him Jer.” Mrs. D turns Jer toward Miss Gower, since this is usually the part where grown-ups coo and make a sappy face to get him to smile.

  Miss Gower’s brows twitch. “I so dislike the prefix step. It implies partitions in a family that holy wedlock should render obsolete.”

  Papa said almost the same thing on their wedding day. We’re all Demings now. Steps are for walking down.

  “Hmm. Well.” Mrs. D smiles all tight-lipped and pointy. “Do pardon us. The baby needs his rest. Jane?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” As I close the door, Miss Gower is shaking her head like she just saw something impossible or ridiculous or both.

  I like to think Papa would do something akin to that if he were still alive. That he’d notice Mrs. D sighing over my sawdusty bread and dirty fingernails and ask her to help me mix better or scrub harder instead of complain. He’d have surely given back all the dolls and skipping ropes and other childish things she made me hand over the day she had Jer. I like to think he’d be taking my side.

  Mr. Mercer comes by the hotel again today to assure us we’ll be under way anytime now, bound for Washington Territory, where there are limitless opportunities for individuals of excellent character and the climate is positively Mediterranean. A number of us in his expedition are staying at Lovejoy’s, waiting for him to complete the arrangements.

  The steamship was supposed to sail back in September. January’s half over, and we’ve heard anytime now since Christmas. No one wants to say what at least some of us are thinking: Perhaps Mr. Mercer is a confidence man who has pocketed our passage money and plans to run off with it.

  If that were true, though, he’d surely be long gone by now. No, he’s probably trying to find just the right ship. It will need to be grand if it’s to fit the seven hundred unmarried girls and war widows Mr. Mercer plans to bring out west to teach in the schools of Washington Territory or to turn their hands to other useful employment.

  Or, if you are Mrs. D, marry one of the many prosperous gentlemen bachelors pining for quality female society.

  She’s pinned all her hopes on it. Mrs. D hated working in the Lowell mills. She hated leaving her kitchen and hearth and standing for fourteen hours a day before a loom, sneezing from all the dust and lint and not being able to sleep at night because of the ringing in her ears. She wants to be a wife again, to have someone else go out to work while she keeps house. If she has to go all the way to Washington Territory to do it, by golly, that’s what she’ll do.

  After Mrs. D paid our passage, Mr. Mercer gave her a copy of a pamphlet he wrote about the advantages and charms of Washington Territory. She glanced at it once, rolled her eyes, then left it on her chair in the dining room. I snatched it up and hid it in my secret carpetbag, and when she’s not around, I read it.

  I’ve read every word hundreds of times. Even the big words I must puzzle over. Even the boring chapters on Lumber and Trade.

  My favorite part is the last chapter, Reflections Upon the Foregoing, where Mr. Mercer writes about the sort of person who would want to go to Washington Territory. An unspoiled and majestic place, he says, a place ideally suited to men of broad mind and sturdy constitution who seek to make a home through industry and wit.

  The same must be true for girls of broad mind and sturdy constitution. Otherwise Mr. Mercer would never think to bring us out there. My constitution is sturdy enough. After Jer was born, I got strong hauling buckets of water and scrubbing diaper after diaper on a secondhand washboard.

  The problem is my mind. It might not be suitably broad.

  When Jer was just weeks old, I had to stay home from school to look after him while Mrs. D went out to work. I never much cared for school till I had something to compare it to. Suddenly all the braid-pulling boys and backside-bruising seats and longhand division and terrifying recitations in front of a frowning Miss Bradley weren’t so bad after all. Not when you put it against the endless trudge of keeping house, where there’s always one more thing to clean. Not when strangers on the street call you poor dear and cluck and sigh over all the fatherless children.

  Beatrice was the first of my friends who stopped coming around. Jer cried the whole visit, and I couldn’t even offer tea because the fire kept going out. Not that there was anything to talk about. I didn’t know the new girl at school, and Beatrice didn’t care how hard it was to dry diapers when the weather was damp.

>   Elizabeth and Violet didn’t make it past the threshold.

  It could have been different. It should have been different. Papa and Mrs. D were married when the war was going to be over by Christmas. Of 1861.

  In Washington Territory they probably barely even knew there was a war. Just stepping off the boat in a place like that will give all of us what we want. Mrs. D will have her hearth. Jer will have his mama. Since she’s set on remarrying, better it be to a man who made his way west before any shots were fired on Fort Anywhere. A man with all his limbs, who doesn’t cringe when there’s a sudden loud noise. He’ll step right out of the chapter on Trade, maybe, or Civil Government, tall and handsome and happy to give Mrs. D whatever she wants, so she’ll smile at me and mean it, then tell me to run along and play and be home in time for supper.

  I will have ordinary chores and lots of friends. I will have a dress that fits. I’ll spend my days in a schoolhouse instead of being someone’s little mother, as the mill girls would say. I will have limitless opportunities because of my sturdy constitution and a mind I hope to broaden. No one will ever call me poor dear.

  No one will ever have cause to.

  It’s been sleeting all morning, so Jer and I can’t play outside. Jer just turned two and already he’s trying to talk. Ever since we got to New York, the only thing he wants to talk about is carriages.

  “Daney! Tarij. Tarij Daney yes!” Jer bounces on the bed in our room and points out the window at the sliver of street crowded with people and horses and wagons.

  “You might think you want to sit out front and watch carriages,” I tell him, “but it’s too cold, so what you really want is to hear me reread Reflections Upon the Foregoing.”

  “Tarij,” he repeats stubbornly, so I shrug and leave him at the window and read aloud anyway.

  My brother doesn’t need to hear Mr. Mercer’s reflections the way I do. Saying the words out loud makes Washington Territory feel like a secret that’s been kept just for me, and it’s going to change everything.

  2

  CHILDREN AREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE in the parlor of Lovejoy’s, but if Jer and I play quietly in the corner, Mr. Hughes can pretend he doesn’t notice us. So we’re there, building with some blocks that once belonged to Mr. Hughes’s son, when the front door bangs open and a gust of freezing air blows a cabman into the foyer.

  “I’ve come to collect the Mercer party,” he says. “Continental’s ready for ’em.”

  Mr. Hughes sighs and nods, then sends the bellboy upstairs with the news. Although he tries to hide it, Mr. Hughes considers us all fools for believing in Mr. Mercer’s expedition. He thinks we’ll come to a bad end, and he’s too polite to say it, but he has Opinions on the sort of girl or woman who would volunteer to travel all the way around Cape Horn to a town on the edge of the world and take up residence there.

  I have Opinions on the sort of person who considers someone else’s decision foolish just because he wouldn’t make the same one.

  It’s water under the bridge now. I leap up and sing, “The ship is here!”

  “Ship! Ship!” Jer rushes for the door like the ship is waiting in the gutter. I chase him down, and we put away the blocks. Mostly, I put them away while Jer squeals ship and dances like a monkey.

  Things feel different already. My hands are starting to turn skin-colored again, and my nails are growing past my fingertips for the first time in ages. I haven’t washed a dish or a diaper in weeks. Sending out the laundry isn’t cheap, but there’s nowhere to wash anything in a hotel. Even though Mrs. D complains like it hurts her bodily, every week she’s been misering out coins from the bottom of her purse to the hollow redheaded girl who picks up our dirty laundry and brings it back clean and pressed.

  The girl is my age. Her feet are bare and raw, and her forearms are covered with flatiron burns both fresh and healed-over. She won’t look at me or Mrs. D or even Jer. When we first moved in, I thought maybe she’d like to play hopscotch sometime. I told her my name and made a joke to coax her to look up. She did—for half a moment, sidelong—but her eyes were empty, like a cart horse or a dairy goat.

  That was me once. That’s how everyone in Lowell saw me. That’s why I wasn’t even Jane Deming anymore, only poor dear.

  Never again. Not in Washington Territory.

  Outside the hotel, a wagon and a carriage are holding up traffic. Jer is puppy-wiggle happy just being close to the muddy wheels and snorting, stamping horses. The cabman’s boy packs the wagon with our trunks and carpetbags while the cabman holds open the carriage door and gestures for us to get in.

  Jer’s eyes go round under his little cap. “We go tarij? Daney, tarij?”

  I grin and squeeze his hand. “We are indeed going in the carriage.”

  Miss Gower steps toward the mounting block the cabman has put in front of the door.

  “Ma’am?” I tug her sleeve. “Would you mind if we sat by the window? My brother would dearly love to see the city go past.”

  “Your brother?” Miss Gower peers at me over her spectacles as if she’s waiting for me to add something.

  “Me too, if I’m honest.”

  Miss Gower steps away from the open door, and I resist the urge to hug her. She doesn’t exactly look like the sort of person you hug without forewarning. Instead, I thank her and hop onto the mounting block and into the carriage. The cabman swings a squealing, delighted Jer up and onto my lap.

  Before long, we arrive at the pier. The wharves are busy with crates and ropes and dockworkers, and beyond there’s a sweep of green-gray water cluttered with hundreds of boats and ships. Everything smells salty and damp.

  The cabman directs us toward a group gathered near a disorderly pile of trunks. There are several women on their own, but mostly it’s men and families with children and couples, too. Perhaps they’re waiting to send off their daughters or mothers or sisters to Washington Territory.

  The cabman’s boy points out the Continental, waiting at anchor in the river. She’s made of dark wood and has two masts, front and back. In the middle is the smokestack, where steam from the engine must come out. She has the perfect name. A promise, almost: Look how much space there is between Lowell and Washington Territory.

  Soon, sailors lower a handful of rowboats from the side of the Continental and glide toward the pier. I expected Mr. Mercer to oversee our boarding, but instead an officer named Mr. Vane climbs out of the first boat and gives us instructions.

  While we wait our turn for a rowboat, I ask Mr. Vane, “Is the ship setting sail today? Or setting . . . steam?”

  “We are, my dear. With the afternoon tide.”

  “How can we? Won’t it take a long time to get seven hundred girls and women on the ship?”

  Mr. Vane laughs. “There’ll be a hundred people boarding at the very most. Not all of them girls, either. Mr. Mercer’s ambitions have long since outstripped his abilities—and his funds.”

  There should be a chapter in Mr. Mercer’s pamphlet about the sort of easterner who feels the need to run down paradise just because he or she won’t get to experience it. Without this expedition I’d be stuck in Lowell and up to my elbows in diaper-stink washwater.

  Not soon enough, a rowboat bumps back to the pier, and it’s our turn to board. Mrs. D gives Mr. Vane a flirty smile and holds his hand a moment longer than she needs to as he helps her into the boat. I make a gag-face to Jer behind her turned back, even though he’s too little to appreciate how funny it is.

  More than one person—usually a preacher—has told me I should feel sorry for Mrs. D. They say she didn’t ask to be a widow at twenty. She didn’t ask to be left with a farm she couldn’t run and a baby that looks just like his papa. She didn’t ask to be forced to sell everything and grovel for a finger-crimping, soul-breaking job in a grimy mill town that has fifty women for every man, and those men ruined and scarred both outside and in.

  I always yes sir or yes ma’am this not-helpful person, but I didn’t ask to lose my mother when I wa
s so little I barely remember her. I didn’t ask for my father to die unremarkably in the mud during the Siege of Vicksburg or for a stepmother who sat steely-eyed when we got the news and said there’d be no crying under her roof. I didn’t ask for well-meaning people to be sorry I’m fatherless, as if that’s the only trouble I have, or for all this to be so common that those same people could only shake their heads sadly and murmur that phrase I’ve come to hate.

  Poor dear.

  The rowboat stops alongside the Continental, and we climb a rope ladder to get on board. Mr. Vane goes up one-handed, holding Jer firmly against his shoulder. Even though the ship isn’t steaming yet, it sways and rolls. Mr. Vane slides Jer into my arms. I put him down so he can get used to the motion, and hold his hand tight.

  The deck is crowded with passengers and sailors and officers and deckhands and baggage and hundreds of hatboxes. Mr. Vane is right. It’s not just girls boarding. Widows, children, couples, bachelors, families—all the people waiting with us on the pier are making their way aboard.

  Not quite the magnificent exodus of female society Mr. Mercer always spoke of. Still, it takes a certain kind of person to move all the way out west, so perhaps it’s a good thing there won’t be seven hundred. Mr. Mercer is wise to be choosy in who he allows to join this expedition.

  “Mr. Mercer said we would all be in staterooms.” Mrs. D shines her pretty-headtilt smile at Mr. Vane. “Can you tell us which one is ours?”

  “Staterooms are all on the main deck.” He swings a leg over the side and starts climbing down the rope ladder toward the rowboat. “Cross the promenade deck—that way—and go down the portside ladder.”

  “Wait!” Mrs. D flails her hands. “What—where—where is Mr. Mercer?”

  “No notion, ma’am.” Mr. Vane’s head disappears.

  Mrs. D mutters a bad word.

  “Just lodge yourself in the stateroom of your choosing.” Miss Gower appears at my elbow, a porter nearby with her trunk on his beefy shoulder. “If that layabout Asa Mercer can’t be bothered to show his face and direct the passengers, we will do for ourselves, and he can whistle for his supper if he has no liking for it.”