After breakfast the girls spent an hour with Mrs. Poole, a thin, pinched-face woman of indeterminate age, who read exactly ten pages of What Katy Did. It was Dana’s third time to sit through the novel, and she liked it even less with each repetition. She much preferred the third in the series, when Katy experiences her adventures in Europe, but her favorite book by far was Little Women, with its cozy family of a mother and daughters and all their promising futures.
Once she’d read the final page for the day, Mrs. Poole wrote a question on the small blackboard at the front of the room. Why is Katy a brave girl? Dana, being one of the older girls, was charged with handing out the copybooks and pencils as the girls were instructed to turn to the next blank page to write an answer to the question. The littlest girls, or those who could not write, needed only wait for a few moments and Mrs. Poole would write a sentence on the board for them to copy ten times over. Something like, She is brave because she has learned to walk again.
“I don’t think she’s brave at all,” Carrie whispered, refusing even to open her copybook. “I think she’s a stupid girl who deserves to be crippled forever.”
Dana ignored her and began writing the same answer she’d written the last time Mrs. Poole asked this question.
“Besides, it doesn’t make you brave to learn to walk. Anybody can walk. It’s what—”
Whatever thought she’d prepared was lost in the sharp, stinging sound of Mrs. Poole’s hand squarely against Carrie’s cheek.
“We do not talk during lessons.” The woman held the novel clasped to her breast like some treasured companion and stormed back to the front of the narrow classroom.
Dana ventured a guarded look at Carrie and felt her own face burn at the sight of the palmprint forming on the dark, taut skin. The girl’s eyes welled with tears, no doubt a reaction to both the pain and humiliation of the reprimand, and they splashed—two, three, four—onto the red cardboard cover of the copybook.
Feeling the kindest thing would be to look away, Dana did just that and drew a deliberate, black slash through the sentences she’d written. She moved the dulling point of her pencil to the next blank line and wrote: We don’t think she is brave at all. We think she is stupid and deserves to be crippled forever. It doesn’t make you brave to walk. Anybody can walk. Sometimes it’s more brave to sit still.
She touched the blunted end of her pencil to her chin and looked out the window. Unlike those in the dormitory, the windows in the classroom were tall and wide, with only two thick bars running from top to bottom to indicate that the girls weren’t just students in some impoverished academy. Though the barren trees and the thin layer of muddy snow still bore the banner of winter, the sky was a clear, endless blue, what her mother used to call a “sneaky sky,” able to trick a mind into expecting warmth and blossoms and sweet new grass.
Later, in the hour before lunch and then again at three o’clock, the girls were permitted to go outside for half an hour under the watchful eye of whatever matron had drawn recess supervision duty. Here they had the chance to intermingle with the boys, sometimes sparking reunions of brothers and sisters who had been brought in for their cooperative crimes.
Those who knew how to play—the little ones who’d been to school or the older ones who still remembered—would engage in squealing fits of tag or freeze. They weren’t permitted ropes for jumping (Mrs. Karistin liked to tell them that all the ropes were used for hanging), and there was never a continuity of interest to organize any real sport.
Dana preferred to watch from her favorite seat on a black iron bench, her face turned to the sun. She’d been too stunned to play when she first arrived, and with Mrs. Karistin’s insistence on calling her Baby Killer, the children were too afraid to invite her to join their games. Now she felt simply too old and took on the role of secondary caregiver, helping up the little ones when they fell, dusting their dirt and, later, washing their wounds, even when they trembled at her touch.
This afternoon, Coal Grubber’s cheeks, finally dry of tears, glowed a healthy pink as she and others enjoyed a squealing game of blindman’s bluff in the chilly, early-spring air, waving her arms and chasing Apple Thief, who looked nothing like a girl driven to this place by hunger. Tomorrow, Dana knew, they might be gone, each having served her juvenile sentence for her minuscule crime. Nobody stayed long. Nobody but her.
“Did you really kill a baby?”
Carrie had come to sit beside her. She’d twisted her hair into a number of braids and now tied scraps of red cloth at the bottom of each one. Wordlessly, she handed a scrap to Dana and turned, allowing Dana to braid and tie the back.
“Did you really cut someone?”
“Sure did.” She sounded proud. “My uncle. He was trying to touch me in that way, and I wasn’t having none of it, and he chased me into the bathroom, and I got ahold of his razor. And I cut him.” She turned to look at Dana and made a slicing motion that started from the corner of one eye and extended clear to her ear. “There to there. So much blood, like you’ve never seen. He was screamin’ and chokin’ the life out of me when my mama found us.”
“Is he in prison too?” Dana took a new tuft of hair, so much softer than she’d imagined it to be, and began plaiting.
“Nope. Because they said he didn’t do anything. But I’m going to be here for a whole month.”
Dana’s hands went still. “How do you know that?”
“Because that’s what the judge say.” She handed a scrap of ribbon over her shoulder. “You never did answer me. Did you kill a baby or not?”
No one had ever asked her so bluntly, nobody with any authority, anyway. Only the terrified children, and Mrs. Karistin when she was feeling especially menacing. To the children, she said no, so their fears would be assuaged; to Mrs. Karistin, she said nothing, so she’d have no satisfaction. But Carrie, she knew, would not be satisfied with either.
“I wouldn’t be here unless they thought I did.”
“But did you?”
She tied a small, red knot. “No. I don’t think so.”
Carrie made a low humming noise that made Dana feel, for the first time ever, that she might have a sympathetic ear, which disappeared quickly with her next question.
“Are they gonna hang you?”
“Why would you ask such a thing as that?”
“Because that’s what happens to killers. They say, ‘You shall hang from the neck until you are dead.’”
Dana swallowed, with each word imagining the feel of a rope. “I—I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, how long are you going to have to stay here?”
“Nobody ever said. How do you know all this?”
Carrie turned around fully, clearly frustrated with the conversation. “Weren’t you paying attention? At the end, the judge pounds his hammer, and he says, ‘I hereby sentence you to a month’s hard labor.’ Or ‘For this crime, you shall spend no fewer than five years in the correctional facility.’ Or ‘I sentence you to prison for the rest of your natural life.’” She delivered each sentence in a deep, authoritative voice. “You went before a judge, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But he never said anything like that.”
“So you had a trial?”
Dana nodded. “In the DuFranes’ parlor.”
Carrie’s eyes went wide. “In a parlor? You can’t have a trial in a parlor. It needs to be a courtroom, with a jury and—”
“How do you know all this?”
Her face beamed with pride. “I have a cousin who lives in Cleveland. We lived there for a year or so. Anyway, he’s going to be a lawyer, and he works running messages to the courthouse. And sometimes, last winter, he let me sit in and watch with him because it’s warm in there. They have balconies up top for when it’s a Negro on trial, but when it’s a white man, ain’t nobody up there. So I watched them all.”
“Maybe they just don’t know what to do with me. Maybe they haven’t figured out yet if I’m guilty or not.”
“How
long have you been here?”
Dana thought. “Two Christmases.”
“Well, that’s plenty of time. You need to talk to the warden.”
“I tried, once.” Last spring, after waking from a nightmare in which her mother was being swept away in a raging river. Certainly, she thought, Mama had been trying to see her. “Mrs. Karistin told me that when Mr. Webb wanted to see me, he would see me. And that’s the way it works here. ‘Two thousand souls under this roof, he don’t have time for none of your beans.’”
Carrie laughed. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny, but you sound just like her.”
Dana smiled. “I’ve had time to practice.” She motioned for Carrie to turn around, then finished the last braid. “There. Much better.”
When Carrie turned around again, her face was serious beyond her years. “I bet my cousin can help.”
It was the first bit of hope since the last visit with Mama. “Do you really think so?”
She nodded solemnly. “He’s the smartest person I know. I’m going to tell him all about you. But you have to tell me, true.” She leaned forward and held Dana’s gaze as if building a new wall around the two of them. “Did you kill that baby?”
“No.” Nothing else to add.
“But that baby died?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever tell that baby’s mama that you were sorry it died?”
“She. She died. A little girl. And no. They wouldn’t let me talk to her.”
“You have to do that. Write her a letter. Rip some pages from the copybook, or ask the teacher who read the story today. Ask her for paper and an envelope, and write to that lady. Do you know her name?”
“Mrs. DuFrane.”
She could hear her mother’s voice. “Mrs. DuFrane needs me to work late tonight. Lock the door.”
“And you said there was a judge? Do you know his name?”
Dana started to shake her head, then recalled the smallest snippet of a memory long buried, and she reached for Carrie’s hand, as if that grip would help her hold it. “The day they took me out of the cell at the police station, and the officer on duty didn’t want to let me go. He said . . .” She closed her eyes, trying to remember the exact words. He was an older man, and sweet. Like she’d always imagined a grandfather to be, and they’d sometimes played cards in the late afternoons. “He said, ‘This is highly unusual.’ And then the man who came to get me said, ‘It’s orders direct from Judge Stephens.’ And he had some piece of paper.”
“Then you need to write to that judge.”
Dana exclaimed, “I will!” and threw her arms around the girl who would be her friend for a whole month. Giddy with possibility, she bent her head to Carrie’s, and the two conspired as to what, exactly, she should say. Soon there was a third.
“Look at you two.” Mrs. Karistin’s face was close enough that Dana could smell the grayness of her breath. “Thick as thieves, as they say. Not that it applies to the two of you. Gotta change that, don’t we? If thieves is thick, what do we have when we got a cutter and a killer?”
Carrie kept her eyes focused on Dana and said, “Friends.”
THE WRITTEN CONFESSION OF MARGUERITE DUFRANE, PAGES 25–38
OH, MY DARLING GIRL, do you have any memories at all of our house back home? By “home,” of course, I mean Highland Park, where the nicer houses—like ours—had such lovely architectural idiosyncrasies. It has taken me your lifetime to warm myself to the sprawling vanity of Los Angeles. Here, it seems, walls are but a nuisance to the sunshine, and all the rooms are vast and light, with no place at all to keep a secret.
I remember, once, when Calvin was a very young boy—no more than three—and he’d taken to hiding and waiting for your father and me to seek him. He was quite unsophisticated at first, huddling behind potted plants or lying wait in coat closets. Once he folded himself into the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and poor Mrs. Gibbons nearly died of fright when she opened the door to retrieve the box of soap flakes. Soon, though, he ventured further into the house. Deep into the coal bin, high into the attic, until one day he disappeared altogether.
I wish I could report that I’d been terrified, my heart stopped with fear, the house filled with my hysterical cries, or something more fitting of a mother. But I was exhausted that day. In fact, it might have been during the early stages of my pregnancy with Mary, and insufferably hot. It was close to four o’clock, that difficult time between Calvin’s nap and your father’s coming home from work, and I was resting with a cool cloth covering my eyes when I felt his hot little breath against my cheek.
“I’m going hiding. Count to ten and come find me.”
I told him I’d be along, though I planned to dispatch your father to the task as soon as he arrived home, but I fell asleep and he, not wishing to disturb me, went directly to his library, looking over his papers or some such thing. I came downstairs having heard the bell for supper, and we were both halfway through the soup before remarking that Calvin was awfully late coming to the table. We sent Mrs. Gibbons to fetch him down, but she returned claiming not to have found him in his bedroom, or the playroom, or even outside.
I’ll never forget your father’s instant response. He tugged the napkin from his collar and stormed away from the table, bellowing our son’s name until I feared he’d shake the chandeliers. Then, and only then, did I remember that I was supposed to have found him.
I was quickly at Arthur’s heels, echoing his calls, and in between reassuring him that the boy was simply hiding, as he always did. I did not mention my own lapse, as your father already thought I greatly exaggerated the symptoms of my pregnancy. Understandable, perhaps, because he did not know the depths of my fragility.
High and low we searched, your father still clutching his dinner napkin, both of us shouting so loud we might not have heard Calvin if he did call out. Inside every closet, behind every door. Cabinets and wardrobes. Under beds, beneath the covers, until finally we came upon the linen closet at the very end of the hall. This was not an ordinary linen closet, as it had been constructed shortly after the death of my parents, when your father and I became primary residents of the house. Behind it was a door, and behind that door a series of rooms that had been servants’ quarters back when families of privilege employed such persons to stoke fires and polish silver and curry horses. Every new invention, it seemed, made one more person unnecessary, and your father, quite frankly, was never comfortable with such displays of wealth, and so we learned to make do with a single live-in domestic. If I’d held my ground and convinced him to allow a permanent nanny, I might have been spared the devastation of Mary’s death. . . .
But I digress within my digression. We went to that closet, opened the door, and heard the faintest sound from the other side. It was clear the linens had been disturbed on the shelves, and Arthur began throwing them to the floor, calling Calvin’s name. Finally I spied a tiny finger poking out through a loose board at the back.
Calvin!
I fell to my knees and your father dropped beside me. We pushed on the board as the boy himself must have done earlier in the afternoon. Cheap particle stuff that it was—barely a step above cardboard—it gave way, and Arthur was able to push and bend it enough to allow our son to crawl out from underneath and join us, red-faced and sobbing, on the other side. I remember feeling a strange mix of anger and relief at having found him, and while he was still crying, I took him in my arms and praised him for being such a good hider.
“You didn’t come find me.” His words were wet with tears.
I buried his hot little face close to my heart and breathed hushes into his sweaty head, hoping his father hadn’t heard. I assured him that we’d found him now, hadn’t we? That was a very mousy place for him to go, and we were far too big to follow.
“I called and I called, but you didn’t hear me.”
“Enough of this,” Arthur said, throwing sheets and towels onto the shelves with no regard to folding or order. “Get downstair
s for dinner, and we’ll have no more of hiding for quite some time.”
The next day, carpenters came in to make reparations, and I didn’t give the incident another thought for years, until the afternoon that woman stood in my parlor, pregnant, insisting I find some way to secure freedom for her daughter.
I sent her away that day with a promise to think and to pray about the best course of action to take. No sooner had the door shut against the evening streetlights than I was at my correspondence desk, searching my address book for the name of the carpenter who had repaired that linen closet. For the first time, I was truly grateful that Arthur chose to leave the lion’s share of the day-to-day operations of the house to me. The man himself hadn’t written a check or opened a bill for most of our marriage.
Two days later, knowing Arthur would be at a university faculty meeting well past the dinner hour, four strong Italians went to work on my project at the end of the upstairs hall. Leaving them to their labor, I stepped out—dressed in my blackest dress and finest hat—to take care of another matter entirely.
Judge Stephens and my father had been friends since the two met in law school before he even met my mother. Not that Father ever worked as a lawyer; it was just something young men did while they waited to be old enough to be trusted with their family businesses—my cousin Eugene has carried on that tradition brilliantly. Still, he and George Stephens had remained a fixture in my childhood—holiday outings and family dinners. He delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral, and before my mother died, he oversaw the writing of her will, to ensure that every bit of my father’s money went to me and not the passel of worthless cousins who’d been waiting with bated breath for her passing.
For all I knew of Judge Stephens—and I carried a wealth of information that had seemed such a burden until this very afternoon—I did not know the extent of his power, or if his appointment would bring him anywhere near the case pending against the girl who had killed my daughter. I’d been too distraught to receive his visit in the days after Mary’s death, but I clutched a note written in his familiar hand on thick, official stationery assuring me he would do for me whatever I needed during this horrific time.
All for a Sister Page 9
