And there, again, is what I always questioned. Why did she never go after what she wanted? Did she even want anything, other than my happiness, and then my father’s?
I shake my head. I’m getting too philosophical. I’m here in New York to escape the voices in my head, not indulge them.
I lift the lid of my mother’s charm box. I haven’t looked at it since my father died and Mom and I put his ring in here for safekeeping.
I don’t see the pink, satiny ribbon that I expect upon opening. Instead, a letter is folded just under the lid. I smooth out the sheet, the bottom third of the paper swinging as if it may rip off at the crease. Underneath is the pink bow I remember; this letter was added after the last time I opened the box.
I’m surprised to see the date on the top of the paper: July 5, 1946. The letter has been opened and closed so many times I would have guessed it was older.
Stranger is the salutation. Dear Nurse Anderson, it reads.
Anderson was my mother’s maiden name, but she wasn’t an Anderson in 1946. She hadn’t been an Anderson since . . . what, 1925? Before I was born, anyway. And she’d certainly never been a nurse.
My mother was a homemaker my whole life. The closest she got to a career was cooking for the PTA bake sale at Christmastime every year. Every letter she’d ever received had been addressed Mrs. or even wife of.
But there is no denying the carefully printed letters here. Nurse. Could Nurse Anderson be an aunt or a cousin of my mother’s I’ve never known? It seems impossible, but less so than the alternative: that my mother had been a nurse. That, I would have known.
Curiosity makes me forget the cold, and I read the rest of the letter.
July 5, 1946
Dear Nurse Anderson,
My name is Hattie Perkins, and twenty years ago today you assisted in the delivery of my baby girl. Surely you have had a great many patients at Bellevue. But the tiny flicker of hope that you will recall my name or my daughter’s, God bless her, compels me to write you this evening.
I don’t know if you remember her: Margaret Perkins. But I do. Oh, how I remember. At twenty-one years old, I thought I could forget. I thought I could run away from heartbreak, forget it like the sting of a boy’s rejection or last year’s fashion. But I could not forget, have never forgotten. I have spent decades remembering Margaret’s birth and the decisions we made then. I believe my childlessness in the decades since has been my punishment from God.
I wonder what could have been different. But I cannot change the decision I made then. The best I can do is try to celebrate my baby girl. Stop running from my sins and from her memory.
You were the last one of us to see my precious daughter. Any recollections you have of her—from her expressions to her cry—would be appreciated. I don’t even know my own daughter’s eye color, God forgive me.
I hope that the decades since we have seen each other have blessed you in ways they never have me.
With great sorrow and fragile hope,
Hattie Perkins
The emotion in the letter strikes at my heart. I don’t know these people, but I know grief. And to think this poor woman, Hattie, was plagued by it for decades. My grief has lasted months, and already I am worn down and wearied by it.
The address must be a mistake. A letter to the wrong Anderson. It’s a common enough last name.
But if it was meant for a stranger, why did my mother keep it?
My heart aches to think that just a few months ago, I could have simply picked up the phone and asked my mom. For nearly four months, I’ve been unable to make new memories with my mom—but now, I have a chance to bring her back to life however thinly. I can find out why my mother kept this letter, find out who Nurse Anderson and Hattie Perkins were to her.
For the first time in weeks I feel a sense of purpose. Perhaps my mother’s life can act as a signpost for my own.
I check the year on the letter again: 1946, when I was finishing my freshman year at Vassar and Mom was still alive. Strange to think my world was so different not even five years ago. I had Mom, had just met Jack, hadn’t yet been broken down by the realities of teaching.
I shake my head and reach for Mom’s charm box again. Enough self-pity. I need to remind myself of the mother I knew, hold the familiar objects that will make her mine again. With the letter gone, the box looks just like I remember it. On top is the frayed pink bow I wore as an infant; I pull it out to put on, first rubbing the bow between my fingers and wondering at its worn softness. The ribbon is three fingers wide, and I tie it around my wrist now like a chunky bracelet.
Next is my father’s golden wedding band. A wave of sadness washes over me as I turn it slowly between my thumb and forefinger, though my dad’s death did not shake the earth I stand on like my mother’s has. Years have softened the pain. Will they soften this pain, so much more intense?
Kissing the ring lightly, I slide it onto my thumb and reach for the flower and the photograph resting at the bottom of my mother’s box. I look at the familiar creased photograph first. In it are my maternal grandparents, neither of whom I ever met. Both dark-haired like my mother, their faces radiate joy. I never knew any of my grandparents, but maybe that’s part of why my mother and I were so close. It was just us and my dad for so many years, and then just us. I gaze again at the photograph. I don’t know how my grandmother can breathe in her ruffled outfit, much less smile.
I look at the yellow witch hazel pressed between two sheets of paper. How foolish it seems now that I never asked my mom why the plant was so precious to her. Where did it come from? Did she press it, or did someone else?
The flower is still bright after so many years, its story forgotten.
I press the sheet to my nose, but whatever scent the flower once carried is long gone.
I hate the time I wasted too focused on myself to ask my mom about her own story.
As I move to place the flower back into the box, I see an unfamiliar envelope at the bottom.
I pull it out and gasp. It’s addressed to Michael Perkins.
Perkins, again. Hattie’s husband, Hattie’s son? No, not Hattie’s son. Her letter said she was childless apart from Margaret.
Margaret. I look at the return address, the girl’s name unmistakable: Margaret Perkins, 1208 Surf Ave., Brooklyn.
But Margaret had died, hadn’t she?
I open the envelope and slide out the stiff, expensive paper.
One month and still kicking! I love you, Mom and Dad.
Love from your daughter,
Margaret Perkins
Below the girl’s name is an inked print, tiny and blurred. A thumbprint.
I shiver. So Margaret Perkins lived for at least a month, but she spent that time somewhere in Brooklyn without her parents. By 1946, Hattie was looking back on a life without her. She didn’t even know the girl’s eye color.
I put the thumbprint aside and pull out the letter addressed to Nurse Anderson again. The mystery of Hattie and Margaret is a perplexing one, but it’s not the one that matters. What I do need to know is why my mother has Hattie’s letter in the first place—and what relation Nurse Anderson has to my mother.
Surrounded by the clothes in her closet, I breathe in my mother’s scent. I know exactly which outfits were her favorite, which one she had the longest, which one she wore to my high school graduation. I know which dress she chose for my father’s funeral, and I also know she never put it on again. I thought I knew everything about my mother. She never talked about herself much; I cringe as I realize that I assumed she didn’t have much to say.
But maybe I was wrong. Is there a side to my mother I never knew?
And can I now, four months after losing her, find her again?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Althea Anderson, September 1926
Three days later, Margaret is pin
k and white again like a pig. Her cheeks get rounder each day, and the hair on her head is thick enough now to identify it as blond. Just like Hattie’s. Though I always picture Hattie as she was after Margaret’s death, her curls weighed down with sweat, I force myself to remember her beauty. The woman is young and pretty, and Margaret will be, too. Hattie will know how to drape Margaret’s clothes and style her hair.
I finger my own dark hair twisted under my cap. Well, a nurse has no time to worry about vanity. No matter that my face is pale and my nose sharp. A patient desperate for a shot of morphine or a woman on the brink of motherhood does not care what I look like. No, they care what I can do. And at Bellevue, the first Florence Nightingale–based nurses’ training school in the entire country, I can do a lot.
So long as I stay quiet and keep my head down, that is.
I’m good at that.
Louise appears beside me as I reflect. “She’s come a long way.”
I nod.
“Her parents will be thrilled.”
I nod again. I certainly hope so. But who knows what they will say? I’ve thought through a thousand speeches, but still I don’t know how I’m going to tell Margaret’s parents what I’ve done. Much less how they’ll respond.
“Speaking of.” Louise turns away from her own reflection in Margaret’s glass incubator and faces me. “Will they be making the trip to pick her up, or will you deliver her to them?”
“They’ve asked me to take her,” I lie. “So they can have everything prepared at the house ahead of time.”
“She’ll be in good hands,” Louise says. “The best.”
I flinch, not because I think she’s wrong but because I’m afraid she’s right. My hands are the ones that saved her. Are Hattie and Michael prepared to care for Margaret the way I know to?
I whisper my good-byes to the girl as I leave Coney Island for Manhattan. I hate leaving her each night, but I don’t mind the work in the emergency department. It isn’t as magical as delivering babies, but it’s better than surgery. I crave the sense of being needed, of being valuable. The urgency occupies my mind.
Unfortunately, Bellevue’s lead emergency doctor, despite twenty years of success with the nurse training program, makes clear his distaste for female medical workers. I spend half of my twelve-hour shift washing sheets and making beds. One patient whose water I have been sent to fetch is alone when I return. “Nurse,” the man croaks, his voice frayed with nerves. “Please.”
I turn from the door, sheets draped over my arm. “Sir?”
He points to his left eye, enshrouded in mist. A cataract. “What are they going to do to me, ma’am?”
First, retrobulbar anesthesia. Then, a six-millimeter incision. Saline and syringes for extraction of the cataract, and then iodine-treated catgut to suture the wound. You’ll need a pair of aphakic lenses to take home, but your vision will return in the next month and a half.
I swallow my knowledge like soup that scalds the throat going down. What else can I do, with the surgeon’s heavy footfalls approaching? “I’m but a nurse,” I tell the man gently. “You’d best ask the doctor.”
The man is disappointed. “You don’t know.”
I clench my toes as if to pin down and trample the words that yearn to fly free. “No,” I reply softly, “I do not.”
Forget the anatomy, alimentation, toxicology, dietetics, massage, biology, and hygiene. Forget the years of coursework and hours of practice. To qualify as a nurse, I must master it all. But to serve as one, I must pretend I know none of it. Too threatening is a woman who knows her medicine; one day, the doctors fear, we will rise up and take their coveted spots at the top of the medical world.
For now, I am quiet. But I hope the men’s fear is founded.
I hope one day, we are the doctors.
I return to reality when the next patient enters the ER, a little boy with a sprained wrist and an overprotective grandmother. It’s not exactly an emergency, which I explain as gently as possible before directing the indignant woman and her grandson to the children’s pavilion. Next is an elderly man with chest pain, whom I send immediately to Resuscitation.
I nearly have to be resuscitated myself when I recognize the next patient. “M-Mrs. Perkins,” I stammer, her startling green eyes and blond ringlets unmistakable despite the horrifying condition of the rest of her face. Her once-perfect little nose is bulging and twisted out of place, bruising spreading along both sides and pooling beneath her eyes. A faint smudge of blood remains on the woman’s skin, the rest of it wiped hurriedly onto the loose sleeve of her pale yellow dress.
Hardly able to breathe, I turn away from the sight of Margaret’s real mother and dig into the icebox. I pull out more ice cubes than I can hold, and the excess pieces spill from my hands and skitter across the floor. I watch helplessly as they slide every which way, leaving pale glimmering trails of water pointing back at me like accusatory arrows. I grit my teeth and wrap the remaining ice in cloth, angry at myself for being so careless. It’s not like me to get rattled. I can smile calmly and offer words of comfort to children with shards of bone jutting from their skin, victims of fires with flesh hanging in charred folds from their faces, elderly patients on the cusp of death. But here I am, flustered and incompetent in the face of a broken nose?
Of course, it isn’t the broken nose that’s thrown me. It’s the sight of Hattie Perkins. It’s the reminder that while I keep Margaret squirreled away in safety, life has marched cruelly on for her mother. I can’t attribute Hattie’s weight loss or short, jagged nails to the nose injury; those are signs of grief alone.
I know what to do for the nose: clamp the ice to it, monitor for bleeding. But what do I do for the woman? Confronted with her pain and finally confident that Margaret will survive, should I tell Hattie what I’ve done? Hattie could even come with me to get the girl from Coney Island tomorrow . . . but what if she says no?
I force myself to ask the routine questions even as my brain churns in desperation. “How did it happen?”
She swallows, the tendons in her neck tensing. “I walked into the door.” Her voice quivers, a slight upward inflection at the end of her words.
I nearly drop the ice again. She walked into a door as much as I talked to my mother over breakfast this morning. No. Michael must have done this to her.
Part of me isn’t surprised.
“Is he here?” I ask in a whisper.
Hattie only hesitates for a moment before she nods, wincing. “Yes. But they made him wait outside.”
Standard procedure unless the patient is a young child. I’ve never been as grateful for the rule as I am now.
“But he’s mad about being stuck out there,” Hattie continues. “I think he’s afraid I’m going to say something.” She grabs my arm the same way she did when I took her daughter from her arms two months ago. “Don’t say anything. Don’t tell him I told you.” Her voice rises in volume.
I inhale slowly and close my eyes. “Hattie, this is serious. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”
She shakes her head. “No. It won’t happen again. This was the first time. I can stop it.”
“Hattie . . .”
“I can stop it,” she insists again, “because it’s my fault.”
I wait. She has to be right—for Margaret’s sake. Margaret needs a safe home to return to.
“I mentioned the baby, and he told me to shut up. But I didn’t listen. She’d be almost two months old now if she’d lived. That’s what I said.” She begins to cry. “But I shouldn’t have. Michael is right. No good can come from talking about her. Not when she’s dead.”
She’s not dead! I want to scream. The very thought of Margaret’s body turning cold and lifeless sets my heart racing. But I can’t say anything now. Blood is flowing again from Hattie’s nostrils, and her tears dilute the stream so it’s thin and fast-flowing
. In just seconds, her lips are covered in tiny, crisscrossing lines of blood like stitches.
“I need to forget her,” Hattie sobs, a red bubble blossoming in her nose. “Then everything will be okay.”
I take a deep breath. I can’t tell her now. She needs to be sent to Trauma.
Taking my own deep breaths, I hold her shuddering body as we wait for the Trauma nurses to arrive.
“The only good thing,” Hattie sniffles, “is that she’ll never have to see this.”
And then the nurses are taking her from me, leading her away so all I can see is the back of her body. From behind, she could be Mary Pickford, Hollywood’s sweetheart. But from the front? I shudder. She’s right. From the front, she is something no child should ever have to see.
* * *
—
September 3, 1926. Just one day after Hattie Perkins’s hospitalization and two days shy of Margaret’s two-month birthday, it is time for the girl to leave Dr. Couney. As the days shorten, Luna Park is shutting down. Steeplechase closed yesterday; Luna Park will close tomorrow. The babies have to go.
As Louise told me after Margaret’s bout of pneumonia last week, Margaret is one of the lucky ones. At five pounds, she is just about ready to leave the incubators by merit of her own health. I am relieved. The nurses tell me that babies have fared worse at the hospitals than the park in years past, and I can’t imagine the horror of watching a baby blossom here and then shrivel again at the hospital. Of course, there’s another reason I’m relieved. Selfishly, I am afraid of what would happen if Margaret were transferred to the hospital and registered. Would they find her death certificate, signed by an oblivious Ida? I shudder. Here at Luna Park, my word is enough for the nurses to go by.
Margaret is packaged like a gift; Dr. Couney remains a showman through and through. I imagine that my arm could slide under the band of the pink bow tied around the girl’s waist, that the stiffly printed graduation certificate Dr. Couney has crafted could cover Margaret like a blanket.
The Light of Luna Park Page 10
