Astray: Stories

by Emma Donoghue

  The boy doesn’t know what the right answer is.

  “Last chance, Half-Bosch,” announces Houghton. “Tomorrow, the Major’s off to Princeton for three days, so we’re going to bring the tastiest fillies in Hopewell back to the garrison. If you don’t produce some manner of female and show us you know how to put her through her paces …”

  “The point is,” says the captain, leaning in, breath fragrant with gin, “are you a girl or a man?” His grip shifts from collarbone to throat. “No two ways about it, Half-Bosch. Man or girl.”

  “I had one already,” says the boy, pulling away in a fury of terror. “At the farm. I found her the first day. Much prettiest.”

  “Ooh, keeping the best for yourself, you rat!” Byrne cackles and smacks his shoulder. “Well, bring her back tomorrow and show us what you’re made of.”

  What he’s made of? It’s not a phrase the boy has heard before; it makes him think of the gingerbread boy, who ran and ran until the fox snapped him up. He wakes before dawn and lies like a corpse. He can’t feel his feet. He finds himself thinking of his mother’s softly creased hands, setting down a bowl of borscht before him. He shoves the memory away. His mother would not know him. He sees as clear as lightning that he will never go home.

  By noon he’s kneeling beside the girl in the pantry, holding on to her hands. He tries not to hear the shouting in the distance.

  “They hate me,” she says again.

  “How do they know it was—”

  “They don’t, they hated me before. But now they hate me because I wasn’t in the hayloft. My aunt’s demented.” Her pupils are huge and dark. “The little one’s not twelve. I never thought—”

  “I wasn’t there,” he whispers, eyes down. Yankee whores, rebel whores.

  “She’s been bleeding all night.”

  The distant voices are rising. Clarity seizes him. “You come with me now,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the fields.

  “Run away with you? Are you mad? I couldn’t dream of it,” she says, but her face is bright.

  She’s misunderstood him, but he sees his chance; he leans in and kisses her. It’s not what he was expecting; lighter, more feathery. “You’re my girl,” he says then in a deep voice.

  “I barely know you,” she says.

  She’s smiling so widely that he knows he’s won, and something sinks in his chest. “I won’t go without you,” he says.

  “But my aunt, my—Where are you going?”

  He hesitates. “Who knows?”

  “They’ll catch you. Won’t they?”

  He manages a shrug. He gets to his feet, not letting go of her hand.

  “Let me run upstairs and pack my trunk …”

  The boy shakes his head, alarmed at the thought of having to carry such a thing. “No time, little monkey. Just your coat.”

  Outside, panting from the hurry, she’s daunted by the icy fields. “Don’t you have anything for me to ride?”

  “I’ll lift you over the puddles,” he offers.

  The girl laughs. “I can jump them.”

  And for a moment, as they set off across the meadow hand in hand like children, he lets himself believe that they are running away. That he is man enough to be a deserter. That there’s anywhere he could take this girl without being tracked down and sent back to Hopewell in chains and hanged in front of his company. That he could bring her all the way home with him to taste his mother’s borscht.

  But all the while he knows how it’s going to be. He will lead her into the barracks that must be already filling up with other girls, girls with torn sleeves and bloody noses and scalps, reb girls and loyal, girls whose eyes will tell this girl all she needs to know. When the captain claps and orders Half-Bosch to fire away, this girl will start to scream, and the boy will reach down with frozen fingers and undo his buttons one by one.

  The Hunt

  Sharon Block’s Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (2006) documents the moment in 1776 when British and German troops in New Jersey and Staten Island started systematically attacking the female population. A cavalry commander named Lord Rawdon quipped, “The fair nymphs of this isle are in wonderful tribulation, a girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished.” Sixteen girls from Hopewell were held for days on end in a garrison; the rest is my invention.

  NEW YORK CITY

  1901

  DADDY’S GIRL

  I just now came up from seeing Daddy.

  I never walked in here without knocking before. His study is real cold; the back of his big chair is smooth like an icicle. I know every object in this room, but it is as if I have never stepped across the threshold before.

  The newspaper folded on the desk says January 18, 1901. I still can’t get used to it, this century I mean. It sounds most improbable.

  Doctor Gallagher said he would have to show me if I couldn’t take his word for it. But I’ve never seen Daddy without his necktie, even. I guess I always thought he was a modest kind of man. So when it came to it, today, I just couldn’t bear to lift the sheet that went up to his chin.

  Daddy’s face looked kind of peeved, like when Momma was alive and dinner went on too long and I could tell he wanted to stroll down to the saloon on Seventh and smoke a great black cigar.

  He looked the same last Saturday, the last time I saw him—only he seemed clammy, then, somehow. Was it the pain? It strikes me now, he must have known; he must have felt it coming. Nobody ever could pull the wool over Daddy’s eyes. He called me in—he was sitting right here in this chair—and he told me to go stay with my friends in Brooklyn for a week. No reason given, no questions to be asked. No, I wasn’t to call home on the telephone; he didn’t want to be disturbed. “Get on, girl.” I thought it must of had something to do with politics.

  I reckon we ought to bury him right away. Before the reporters burst in and get a look at him.

  Why couldn’t Doctor Gallagher have kept his big mouth shut and let a man rest in peace? I don’t see that the public’s got a right to know. There was a fellow from the New York Times on the stairs five minutes ago, hollering though the keyhole. “Miss Hall, Miss Hall. Could you tell? How long have you known? Are you in the dimes now, Miss Hall? Is it true you’ve netted a cool million?”

  All today I have kept a good hold on myself, because I am known to my friends as the sort of girl you can rely on, but now it is all starting to shake loose. My mind runs round in little circles. I feel banished from my old life.

  My name is Miss Imelda Hall, known as Minnie. I am twenty-two years of age. I help—used to help—my daddy, Mr. Murray Hall, run an employment agency at 145 Sixth Avenue. My daddy was an important man in New York, a pillar of the Democratic Party.

  All in all, I am glad I didn’t lift the sheet. There are some things you shouldn’t look at, because what are you supposed to do afterwards? Like that thing I saw once in a trash can behind the market, I believe it was a baby.

  Oh, my good Jesus.

  If Daddy was here now, he’d give Bridget a smack around the head for letting the fire go out.

  He left his hat on his desk. Inside it’s black with grease.

  Why, what a fool I was, we all were. Daddy’s friends used to complain that all the years they were going bald as taters, he never lost a hair off his head. And another thing, his face is always smooth, as if he’s come up directly from the barber’s, even when I know for a fact he’s only just got out of bed.

  I should have wondered about that, shouldn’t I? But a girl’s not inclined to set to wondering, when it’s her own daddy and he doesn’t care for being stared at. And he never seemed like anything but your regular poker-playing whiskey-drinking good fellow. Not exactly handsome, but a real charmer with the ladies.

  It turns my stomach.

  How could Momma? How could she? Unless she didn’t know. Could that be true? Could you be married to someone without the slightest idea who they were? And what
about all his other girls, don’t tell me none of them knew. I can’t decide who’s the real deviant.

  I am sitting here in Daddy’s study at Daddy’s desk in Daddy’s big leather chair, and any minute now he is going to walk in here and catch me.

  I know what he would rather I did. “Put a match to the whole damn lot,” he’d say; “no use rooting around in a dead man’s papers.”

  But the thing is, Daddy, I’m a little curious. And this is not your private study anymore. You’re not really going to come across the landing and find me poking about, are you? I can do what I please now. The thing is, quite above and beyond the thing itself, this changes everything. For instance, if Daddy’s not my daddy, who is? I just can’t see a fine upstanding woman like Momma carrying on with another … with a man. Did he tell her, “Go right ahead, Cecilia, don’t mind me”? I just cannot see Daddy putting up with that kind of malarkey.

  I’m counting on him to have left something, some kind of clue. Surely it would be here if it was anywhere, wedged in one of these bursting drawers or pigeonholes, slipped in between these old campaign handbills and Democratic Party meeting notices and postal cards to “good old Murray Hall.”

  Something you never got around to mentioning, something you always wanted to say. You and Momma did plan to tell me, didn’t you? I expect you just didn’t quite know how to broach it. Surely you didn’t reckon to let me go my whole life through, not knowing who in the heck I am?

  This must be it. I knew it would be here. So simple, a folded paper with “Minnie” on the outside: I can hardly bear to open it.

  “Gone to hustings, home late, don’t wait dinner.”

  Damn him. His notes were never more than ten words long.

  This desk is full of the junk of a whole lifetime. My stomach is growling now. I’m dizzy, adrift, lost in a sea of old papers. But what I’m looking for must be in here somewhere.

  He always said I had Momma’s eyes and his nose. The senator used to say, “Isn’t she the dead spit of her daddy?”

  I must have been adopted.

  Now I am making a right mess and papers are falling on the rug but I don’t care. It has got to be written down, surely. Where I was born, how they got me. There must be a letter or a certificate or a photograph, even. Something with my name on.

  Could be my name is not my name, of course. It could be staring me blue in the face and I’d never recognize it. Could be I had another name before they adopted me and turned me into Miss Imelda (Minnie) Hall. Maybe I am not an Imelda but a Priscilla or an Agnes. And of course I am not a Hall either. God knows what I am. A stray, a foreigner? Come to think of it, I’ve got no proof I’m twenty-two years old. Could be it’s all lies.

  I am not rightly anyone or anything now. Just like a bit of orange peel floating down the gutter.

  It makes me shake to think of it. Not about my name so much as about Daddy. When I think of him now, I could just rip him to pieces.

  I am quite an independent person. My friends and I go all over the city on the subway trains. I have been up the New York World Building, twenty-two stories high, and seen a moving picture at Koster and Bial’s. (It was a man sneezing, that’s all, but still.) Yet Daddy has always been able to cut me down to size and make me feel like a little idiot girl. When the cycle craze started and I longed for a machine of my own, he said I was too young, and even when I turned twenty-one and asked again, he said surely I wasn’t so immodest as to want to pedal around town in bloomers. Then the other day I came down all ready for a party and Daddy made a very cutting remark about the neck of my bodice. I told him it was all the rage, but he said I might as well serve up my bosoms on a plate for the fellows. He made me go right upstairs and change my whole ensemble and I was late for the party. And to think that all this time, all these years—well, there’s no other way to put it, but Daddy had bosoms himself.

  What kind of monster plays a trick that lasts a lifetime? What kind of woman decides to be a man?

  These cards are so old they’ve gone yellow. “Best of wishes from all the boys to good old Murray Hall.” “With the compliments of State Senator Barney Martin to his old friend Murray Hall.” “Merry Christmas, dear Murray, from all your pals on the Committee.”

  I never could stay awake when Daddy talked Tammany Hall. Who’d promised his vote in which ward, and which man could be trusted, and which other fellow would slit your throat as soon as look at you. How Daddy’d started out as a nobody fresh off the boat and now he was a professional bondsman, but best of all, he was rich in friends, and what else could a man rely on in this world?

  There was that one time Daddy got wild at Skelly’s on Tenth Avenue and whipped a policeman in the street, ended up in the station house. But his buddies squared it in the right quarters, and he was home for breakfast. Momma had been worried near out of her mind. But the Democrats can fix anything in New York. Sometimes it takes a bribe or a riot or maybe even a body in the river, I’ve heard, but the job gets done. You keep on the right side of the Tammany Hall men, Daddy used to say, you wear a permanent smile.

  I wonder what they would say if they could see him now. If they lifted the sheet, as I cannot bear to do. I don’t need to lift it; after all, I know what I’d see. Like looking in some funhouse mirror.

  When I went over to draw the curtains just now, I could hear those jackal reporters down below, shouting up at me. “Miss Hall, Miss Hall.” But I will not talk to them. They put words in a person’s mouth.

  Yes! Here it is in my hand: “The Last Will and Testament.”

  It doesn’t take long to read.

  Well, I guess I needn’t worry about anyone marrying me for my money. Oh, Daddy. Was any of it true?

  It’s not that I’m not grateful for the two hundred dollars, but where’s all the rest gone? What kind of deals did those friends of yours do? And I see that out of that sum I’m supposed to “cause to be erected a suitable headstone over the grave of Cecilia, the deceased wife of the testator.” That is a sweet thought, Daddy, but what would a “suitable headstone” for Momma say? I Married a Woman, Lord Forgive Me?

  Momma will just have to move on over and make room; I surely can’t afford two headstones if I’m to feed myself this winter. I bet she knew. She was a sweet-looking woman, was Momma, even if she was twice Daddy’s size. Now there is a queer thought: I don’t expect a layperson can spot the difference between a man and a woman after a few years in the grave, when you get down to the plain bones.

  Daddy was never seen around the Lower West Side without some class of female on his arm. Younger than me, sometimes; even the maids who came to our office looking for a job. He just couldn’t keep his hands off the opposite … I mean, girls. It saddened Momma so, she stopped speaking to Daddy years before she died.

  But I’ve got to try to be merciful, I suppose. There’s nobody else left to forgive him. I guess he had simply got to be a man’s man, and a ladies’ man, and every kind of man, so no one would suspect he was no such thing. Doing his best to fit in, play the game, when in Rome, that sort of thing. I bet he was sick when he tasted his first cigar, but he kept right on. And he got so he could drink his weight in beer and stand up under it too. As if he’d found a book on being a man and was set on following it page by page.

  It strikes me now that I do not even know where Daddy came from. He sometimes used to talk about making the crossing, but he never said from where, exactly. Daddy didn’t care to be interrupted with questions when he was telling a story. His tales made the crossing sound such a hoot: all the farmers down in steerage green as grass, and the fiddler carrying on regardless. He had an accent, but not like anyone else’s I’ve known. Could it have been Ireland he started out from? Or Scotland?

  I wonder now if it was an adventure, at first, or an escape? Was he hiding from somebody, the first time he put on a cap and a pair of trousers, or did he just like the feel of them? Could he have guessed it would be for always?

  Daddy never said much about his life
from before he crossed the ocean. Whatever I asked him, he claimed he couldn’t remember. He liked to say that if you looked back you’d turn to salt. What a curious phrase, “turn to salt.” Did he mean tears? He once said there was nothing set his teeth on edge more than an emigrant sniveling for home.

  He doesn’t have a name now either, no more than me. I wonder what he was born. Mary Hall? Jane Hall? Or no kind of Hall at all?

  I almost set to laughing when I think of calling Daddy by a girl’s name, and him in no position to stop me. Oh Lord, I could cry to think of him as a Nancy or Eliza.

  I don’t even know how old he was when he arrived. I see him at the rail of the ship, heading past the Statue of Liberty, but his face is blank. What is he wearing? I wish I could be there, a foot away, looking at the skyline. Just for a moment. Just to ask why it’s so bad to be a woman.

  I guess I could have been a better daughter. I used to get uppity with him when he would forget his key and haul on the bell when he crashed in at two in the morning, especially after Momma died. Daddy used to say I’d inherited his temper and Momma’s sulks together, but now it turns out my faults are all my own.

  No wonder he drank. Doctor Gallagher says it was a cancer in the left breast. He says Daddy must have been sick for years and years and never said a word; the cancer had worked right through to the heart. It sounds like woodworm, I can’t help thinking, or like when the mice get into the cheese. What a ninny I was; I thought all those books on medicine Daddy collected were some sort of hobby. I saw him take a spoonful from a bottle once but he said it was cod-liver oil. Five years of being eaten away, for fear of being found out.

  The papers are all in one big heap now, and I’m so cold I had best go down to the kitchen. There’s nothing left to read. Only one last drawer that comes unstuck with a shudder, and there’s nothing in it but a bit of card at the back.

  An old brown photograph: a girl with too many ringlets. One of his hussies from the early days? That goes on the top of the pile, facedown; I’ll toss the lot in the range after supper.