“I’m sorry to hear that.” I look sadly about me, imagining the generations of women who found their calling within these walls. Could my mother have been one of them?
“No.” She smiles again. “The place is nearly a century old. I’m sure our girls will be thrilled to be moving somewhere a bit more functional.”
I nod without really hearing her, already wondering what I’ll find here as the woman escorts me to a library on an upper floor. “Good.” She indicates a box in the corner. “They are here. Now, if you don’t mind—I’ve got to go get on our cook about supper. I’ll come back and check on you in an hour.” Her stern expression returns.
“Of course.” I’m happy to be alone, to make my discoveries without scrutiny. To find Nurse Anderson. Find my mother? I’m still not convinced it’s possible. I’ll scan the pages for any Andersons, Althea or otherwise.
I reach into the box the woman has indicated and pull out the pamphlets on either end. The first is dated 1875; the final, 1949. I’m thankful they’re chronological.
I take out the entire decade of the twenties.
I run my eyes down each list of graduates. Nothing in 1920 or 1921. By the time I get to 1927 without finding a single Anderson, I’m starting to wonder if I’m wasting my time.
No Andersons are listed as graduates in 1928, nor 1929. I pull out 1930 just to be sure, though no Anderson I may find here could be my mother. I was four years old by 1930, and my mother certainly wouldn’t have been in school with an infant straddling her hip or a child tugging on her skirt. Anyway, I remember some of being four: days with Mom at the library, in the park, walking down the street. No hospital visits.
I place the reports back in order in the box and slump back. They reflect what I’ve known my whole life. My mother was not a nurse. And if she had a family member who was, I may just never know.
* * *
—
Early-winter darkness is falling by the time I leave the Nurses’ Residence, but I can still make out the address etched above the door. The very same address on Margaret Perkins’s thumbprint note.
Maybe it’s foolish, but I’m not ready to go home. I still feel that there’s more to discover—and now might be my only chance.
I cross back to the hospital and find the same receptionist on duty.
“Hello.” She smiles at me kindly. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
I don’t know how to answer her question, so I don’t. “I’m looking for something different now,” I admit instead.
“Oh?”
“Do you have the birth records of the babies born in this hospital?”
“Not here, I’m afraid. They’re at the Bureau of Vital Statistics.”
I check the clock behind the woman; it’s approaching five p.m. I clench my fists in frustration but thank the woman again for her help before turning to go. As I pivot to leave, I nearly slam into the man waiting behind me. He’s wearing a sweater, but it doesn’t disguise what’s clearly an amputated arm, his left sleeve hanging limply and unnaturally at his side. I know immediately he’s a veteran. Jack may carry emotional and mental scars from the war, but no one passing by him on the streets would ever know. He’s well-built with shaggy blond hair and the most endearing smile. Women turn their heads when he saunters by.
This man is different, and I don’t need to check the service medal pinned to his chest to know he served overseas.
“Thank you for your service,” I say. I step around the man and the older woman with him—his mother?—and head toward the door.
I feel his gaze still on me as I turn, and I wonder if he’s angry. Until he whistles, long and low, and I stop. I shudder the way Jack does when he hears a car backfire, and my fingers tug at the fabric of my skirt as if I could stretch it longer.
“I’m sorry,” the man’s mother whispers. “Ignore him, please.”
I take a few steps with my head held high. Until the man whistles again, and I turn. “What makes you think,” I begin, “you can—”
He jumps forward with a roar, swiping at me. I step back, eyes squeezed shut.
But nothing happens. No one barrels into me.
I open my eyes. The man’s mother, small though she is, has him wrapped tightly in her arms to immobilize him as I’ve had to do with some of my students to stop them from hurting themselves or another. I blink at her, not used to being rescued. “I . . . thank you.”
To my surprise, my would-be attacker responds. “I’m sorry.” He’s crying now. “I’m here for . . .” He coughs. “To address that.”
I can’t speak past the lump in my throat, so I just nod. I’m not angry. The man is like my Jack.
The woman releases her son and approaches me to make sure I’m all right. “Your husband fight, too?” She nods to my ring, and only then do I realize I’m twisting it.
“Yes. France.”
“Be gentle,” the woman sighs. “He’s seen things he can never escape.”
I’m preoccupied the whole taxi ride home, thoughts of my husband and my mother warring for space in my mind. Jack, because of the distorted face of the man in the hospital; Mom, because I can’t imagine her in a place that served patients like him. My sensible, even-keeled mother would have been lost in a hotbed of violence and gore like the hospital. And she hated germs; even when I was sick, she’d treat me at home rather than take me to the doctor’s. Nursing would have been my mother’s worst nightmare.
And yet. That letter was addressed to Nurse Anderson, and it landed in my mother’s hands. It meant enough to her that she kept it beside her other treasures for years. I can’t leave the city without trying to find out more. I have to go to the Bureau of Vital Statistics tomorrow.
I pay the cabdriver and run through the cold into the lobby of the apartment building. It’s hard to believe this is the same lobby where I played tag with my friends in the building, or where Mom and I waved Dad off on his business trips. The colors are brighter now to fit the postwar mood, and floral curtains hang before windows that were bare during the Depression.
The rotary telephone in the corner looks similar to the one we had in the lobby as a child, but I can tell from the oval-shaped base that it’s newer. The feedback, I hope, will be less distracting on this model.
I dial our home telephone number and see the maimed veteran’s face in my mind as I wait for my husband to pick up.
“Jack.”
“Stella!” He sounds relieved to hear my voice, and my shoulders loosen slightly. “I was hoping you’d call—I . . . I’m looking forward to having you home tomorrow.”
I appreciate his olive branch and don’t want to disappoint him the way he did me, but the questions about my mother are too compelling to ignore. “I’m afraid I need to stay another day.”
“What?” His voice suddenly sounds farther away, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or the connection. Or Jack himself.
“I’m sorry. I just found . . .” I hesitate. Jack won’t understand my need to delve into the past, and knowing I’m running around the city rather than staying safely ensconced in the apartment will worry him.
I also don’t want the one person I have left in the world to think that I’m just being rash yet again. I know how Jack feels about my decisions to give Gardner the ultimatum, quit over the straitjackets, and come to the city. I don’t need to hear that I’m wrong in staying, or in trying to solve a mystery my mother died without choosing to reveal.
“I just found”—I flounder—“more than I expected. It’s going to take longer to go through it than I thought.”
“Fine,” Jack says. But it’s the kind of fine that contains unsaid multitudes.
“Jack . . .” I want him to know I’m not staying away to spite him. That I’m hurting, too. That I wish he had offered to come. That I want him to trust me enough to not mind my being in the c
ity, trust me enough to tell me about his past.
“I just hope you get what you’re looking for out of this, Stella. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.”
And then the line goes dead.
I set the phone down, feeling bereft. I’m not just hurting. I’m afraid. Afraid of losing the man I most love in the world, because however much we love each other, we can’t seem to agree on what secrets a marriage can survive.
I remember the words of the Bellevue veteran’s mother: Be gentle. And I try. I try to understand how such a sweet, goofy man would want to ignore and deny an ugly past rather than relive it; it makes sense that he would fear tarnishing my view of him. But can’t he also understand that I don’t know who we are as a couple if I don’t know who he is as a man?
I trudge upstairs and into the frigid apartment. I gather the many quilts from Mom’s old bedroom to put on my own twin, burrowing into them in search of her scent. She used them more and more as she got sicker and weaker; they smell not of the mother I knew and loved but of sickness.
Still, I pull the blankets around me, drowning in them. Sleeping in this place without my mother is wrong, and sleeping in a bed without Jack feels the same way.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Althea Anderson, September 1926
The terror of smuggling a baby into the Nurses’ Residence is not enough to keep me awake after two months of sleeping so few hours per day. I drift off feeding Margaret, and a knock on the door wakes me with the baby sleeping in my arms on the bed. A thin stream of light glows beneath the door to the hallway. At least that means I can’t have slept long.
I extricate myself from Margaret’s tiny fingers, which are wrapped around my thumb, and press against the door. “Yes?”
“Miss Anderson.”
“Miss Caswell?”
“Please open the door.”
“I . . .” I hesitate. “I’ve gotten quite sick, ma’am. The smell . . . I don’t think you should come inside.”
“Miss Anderson. Open the door.”
My body stiffens. I take two strides across the room and pull the blanket up to Margaret’s neck. I don’t want to risk covering her face and suffocating her, but I position the pillow so it rests against the back of her head. She’ll be hidden from the door . . . as long as Miss Caswell doesn’t come in. And as long as the baby stays silent.
“Yes, ma’am,” I finally say.
I pull the door open a crack. Miss Caswell raises her thin eyebrows, and I pull it open wider. Without waiting for an invitation, Miss Caswell marches inside, straight to the bed, and grabs Margaret from beneath the sheets.
“I . . .” A strangled, uncertain sound escapes from between my lips.
“Who is this?” Miss Caswell demands. “And don’t tell me she is your father’s cousin’s uncle’s niece, either.”
“I . . .” I imagine I will be kicked out no matter what I say, but the truth seems most dangerous.
“She’s mine, ma’am.”
“Yours?”
“Her name is . . .” I flounder. I can’t say Margaret. Miss Caswell may make the connection to the note with the thumbprint. I comb through my brain for girls’ names and, despite living in dormitories full of girls my entire life, come up blank. I cast around for something, anything.
Luna, like Luna Park? The baby opens her eyes, looks into Miss Caswell’s hard mask of a face, and begins to wail. I step forward and take her, gazing into her eyes. Despite her size and her ill health, she has a brightness that is hers alone. Her eyes glow like orbs, but it isn’t the pale, steady glow of the moon. Her eyes are sparks, blazing like stars.
“Stella.” I say it with confidence. “My daughter’s name is Stella.”
* * *
—
I clutch the newly named Stella like a lifeline as house director Miss Hosken, to whom Miss Caswell has apologetically delivered me, details all the ways I have been careless, inconsiderate, feckless, disappointing, and unappreciative. I don’t argue with her; I knew as soon as Miss Caswell asked me to open my door I would be dismissed. Bringing the baby home at all was a risk that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. My life as I knew it is over, and the career I have been building toward my whole life is gone. On top of that, my small inheritance is wasted, and I’ve nowhere to go.
I don’t know what comes next, and it is only the weight of Stella in my arms that keeps me from falling apart.
Miss Caswell, at least, is concerned about me; she brings me a glass of water and frets about my health. “Is the baby all right?” she asks outside Miss Hosken’s office before watching me disappear inside. “Do you need anything else?”
Her kindness is no comfort when in the span of an hour I’ve gone from nurse to unwed mother. I focus on Stella’s sweet face to tune out Miss Hosken’s lecture. While I nod and murmur my apologies at all the right moments, I’m not listening. I’m planning. I need to pack, find a way to get Stella—Margaret—safely back to her parents, and find a job for myself. The mental to-do list is all that keeps me from collapsing into a heap on the floor, for I’m afraid that if I collapse, I’ll never rise again. It feels as if my entire life has been stolen from me.
At the end of the lecture, I’m exiled to my dormitory. They won’t make me move out until daylight tomorrow, but I’m not to leave my room or interact with the other nurses. I suppose I’m a corrupting influence now.
I pore through the want ads as I pack, but there are few live-in positions available, and even fewer in parts of the city I’d consider safe. Many of the advertisements don’t look for workers at all but wives. I’m nauseous at the very thought of meeting a man through an advertisement in the paper. It seems impossible, but I wonder if such a thing could explain some of the strange and often dangerous pairings I’ve encountered at the hospital. Does a woman ever respond to one of these and end up, like Hattie, in a marriage that is abusive?
No, not abusive. Hattie said Michael hit her only once, and I must believe that for their daughter’s sake.
Unnerved, I put the papers aside and focus on my packing. I fold my clothes and press them into my valise under a handful of medical texts too valuable to leave and Evelyn Scott’s Precipitations. I resist the urge to open the book and read the verses I know will calm my mind. This is not a time for reciting poetry or for fanciful imaginings. This is a time to find a place to live, a job.
“I’m so sorry.” Ida sticks her head in. Her face is tear-stained. “Someone asked why you weren’t at supper, and I told them you were with your cousin’s baby. I wouldn’t have said anything if I’d known Caswell thought you were sick.”
I force a smile. “It’s my fault, not yours.”
Ida continues with her awkward apologies and then, as she seems about to go, hesitates. “Do you know what you’re going to do?”
I keep my faux smile affixed to my face. “We’ll figure something out.”
“I only ask because I may have a place for you,” Ida explains in a rush. “My grandmother’s dear friend is looking for a caretaker. Her son and daughter-in-law are moving outside the city, so they won’t be able to check in on her as often. She asked me if I’d be interested, but . . .” Ida trails off. “I’m here.”
I should be here, too.
Ida fumbles in her pocket. “Here, let me give you her name.” She gives me a handwritten note with the name Mrs. Wallace and an address in Times Square alongside a job advertisement. “She hasn’t sent it in to the papers yet, so you have a good chance. Though, of course . . . well, it’s probably best you don’t tell her your situation. You could be a widow, perhaps?”
“Thanks, Ida.” I scrutinize her face, taking in her watery eyes. “Actually . . . I have one more favor to ask of you.”
Ida shifts her weight slightly, and I shake my head. “It’s nothing to do with the baby.”
I return to the letter on my
desk, pull it out, and add a postscript asking that Hattie’s reply be sent care of Mrs. Wallace, Times Square. I don’t know if I’ll be there when she responds, but I do know I won’t be here. It’s my only hope at this point.
I seal the envelope and hand it to Ida. “This goes to Hattie Perkins in Trauma. It’s important.”
Were I in Ida’s place, I’d question the letter and its contents. But mercifully Ida doesn’t. “I’ll make sure she gets it,” Ida promises. “I owe you.”
And then she is gone. I turn to the baby, who is oblivious to the chaos she’s just caused.
“Stella.” I whisper her new name. It fits her far better than Margaret ever did. Margaret is a name from my own generation, from Hattie’s. The name of a woman whose husband hits her and whose friends look the other way.
Stella is the name of a new generation of women. Women like suffragist Stella Benson or Victor Hugo’s muse. Women who will grow up to shine like stars.
I sit with Stella on the edge of the bed. She has a new name. I need a new story. I’ll apply to Mrs. Wallace’s as a widow, and leave her when I’ve returned Stella and my story no longer holds.
I take a shuddering breath. My whole life has been built on the foundation of solid, long-term plans; I’ve always known what I’d be doing the next day, the next month, the next year.
Now, I hardly know my next step. And once I return Stella—Margaret—I’ll have to figure it out alone. I am walking in faith, and as I look down at Stella beside me, I know that even if I can’t see the future, this, now, is the right path.
* * *
—
I’ve been told to leave by six in the morning, but I don’t want to face the other nurses. Stella and I leave at five a.m., when the only soul awake is the groundskeeper snuffing out the gas lamps outside the hospital. He is a small, shriveled man the same height as the lanterns he tends, and I made an effort to speak to him each morning. Today, I just give him a wave from afar, praying that Stella is masked in the darkness. I don’t want even him to know I’m leaving in disgrace. Ashamed, I turn my face and run. Away from the river and the hospital.
The Light of Luna Park Page 12
