The Girls with No Names Read online

  “I watched, and wrote.” I wasn’t about to give her details so she could grind our precious moments out like the butt of her cigarette.

  Mama lifted a wire corset from its hook. “Help me with this.” A deep inhale passed over her teeth as she sucked in her breath, squeezing her hands on her hips so I could hook the tiny metal clasps at the back. She turned to me, looking resigned, as if the corset had squeezed the anger out of her. Her eyebrows lowered and her lips sank, her whole face surrendering. “When you were little, I worried Luella was too attached to you. She’d carry you everywhere, check on you when you cried and tell me when you were hungry. And then it was you who ended up too attached to her.” She sighed deeply. “I wish you hadn’t followed her to the gypsy camp, but I know you won’t do a thing like that again. Just don’t go and get sick on me now, okay? You stay strong while your sister’s gone. Promise me?”

  I nodded, grateful I’d managed to keep my blue fits from her all summer.

  * * *

  Over the next month my father made himself scarce, working late and going to the office early, or so he said. Not once did he ask about my writing, but I had nothing new to show him anyway.

  The energy my mother mustered in his absence was impressive. Her movements became rapid, brittle; her skirts snapped and her bracelets jingled. Summer was almost over, but she and I still went on picnics, attended the theater and took day trips to the beach. Not all of society was in Newport and the remaining ladies filled our drawing room with their rustle and chatter.

  Luella, Mama announced gaily, was at summer camp. What summer camp? The mothers were intrigued, pronouncing that their daughters—the girls wearing polite, bored smiles next to them—could use the discipline of summer camp. “Upstate,” Mama answered vaguely. “The name’s escaped me, but I’ll let you know after I’ve paid the bill.” She gave a trickle of laughter at her foolishness for forgetting details.

  The girls drew me aside to ask where Luella really was, their breath coated in the herring Mama served on tiny crackers that crumbled as you bit into them.

  “She’s truly at summer camp.” I gave the vague smile I’d practiced, wondering if Mama’s false laugh had tipped them off, or if they knew Luella would never stand for any loathsome summer camp.

  One quiet girl with a sneaky way about her asked, “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Mama wanted me home with her, for company,” and for now this felt true.

  When I managed a walk by myself, I went up Bolton Road to the curve where the driveway to the House of Mercy broke off and wove up the hill. I stood with my face pressed into the iron gate, watching for any sign of life, but no girls came down as far as the road and I never saw anyone come out of the whitewashed house at the gate’s entrance. From the road, I could only see a portion of the dark building, gabled windows and arched doorways, the spire of a chapel twisting above the trees. I made up a hundred stories about what was happening to Luella in that place.

  September arrived. School began, and still, no Luella. Bruised shadows deepened around Daddy’s eyes and he hardly spoke to me. At night I heard him pacing the halls. If I happened to meet him in the morning, he’d look as if he had forgotten my very existence. A polite, stilted “good morning” was all that passed between us.

  When fall arrived, Mama’s energy collapsed and she no longer bothered making up believable lies. She told me that Luella had been sent to a distant cousin in Chicago.

  “Not Paris?” I said, and Mama looked confused. “Remember,” I said, “you were going to send her to Paris?”

  “No, not Paris,” she said sadly.

  I wanted to scream that she was lying, but the tightness in my throat and the weight on my chest pinned me into silence.

  In school, I couldn’t pay attention. My mind was easily muddled. Teachers’ voices confused me. The blackboard blurred and text seemed to slide off the page. With each passing day, the rope of life knotted under my feet; there was no balance, no equilibrium.

  I never returned to the gypsy camp. I was afraid if I crossed that stream and climbed that hill, all I’d see would be a deserted meadow, empty holes where the fires had been, wheel tracks leading away, the ghost of my sister dancing in the moonlight. I fingered Tray’s ribbon tied around my wrist—pale yellow like a fading wisp of sunlight—and tried to remember Marcella’s tales of magic and evil.

  Then one day in early October when Miss Paisley left the art class, three girls moved their sheets of paper to sit near one another, bending their heads over their drawings and whispering loud enough for me to hear.

  “Did you hear Suzie Trainer’s never coming back to school?”

  “I heard she wouldn’t be let out for three years.”

  “Three years!”

  “There are girls who get put away for more, if they’re not reformed.”

  “Or repentant.”

  “It’s like prison. You get put away for however long fits the crime. There are girls who’ve been in there for ten years, twenty. Some never get out, but I heard three years was the minimum.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  The door swung open and Miss Paisley’s heels clipped back into the room. She glanced at the trio. “Girls, separate yourselves...now!” They scattered back to their seats.

  Miss Paisley stood close enough that I could see the flabby skin under her arms, and smell her breath reeking of onions. “You’ve drawn nothing?” She rapped the empty sheet on the table.

  I had dropped my pen, and my gloved hands were splayed on the paper like wounded wings. I stared at the satin tips of my fingers trying to find a point of focus.

  Three years. Three years if you showed remorse. Luella would never show remorse. My vision clouded. My ears filled with a muffled sound like distant waves crashing. I didn’t have three years. I wouldn’t live that long without her.

  I picked up my pencil and began drawing a thin, sharp outline of the vase in front of me. A spark of determination broke through the shadows in my head. For the first time since Luella left, I began to compose myself. Each line on my paper darkened with each purposeful stroke as the fog of my confusion lifted and I narrowed in on a single plan.

  Chapter Nine

  Effie

  The lantern was still where Luella had stowed it. A bit rusted, and with dirt splattered on the glass panels, but intact. Once I’d pulled it from its resting place beneath the ovate, glossy leaves of the abelia, it seemed thoughtless that we’d never returned it to the oysterman.

  That morning I avoided my parents, skipped breakfast and left for school early. In my first class I told the teacher I wasn’t feeling well and he sent me to the infirmary, where I had no intention of going. Instead, I made straight for the front door of the school. Dark clouds scurried across the sky as I hurried down 57th Street. I’d taken the train home, and now here I was, holding a rusted lantern, not knowing if Mama had gone out or was sitting in the drawing room looking out at me standing in the shrubbery.

  Tucking the lantern on one side of the front steps, I gently pushed the door open. Mama’s gloves were next to her silver-chain handbag on the hall table. I peeked into the drawing room. It was empty. I tiptoed up to my room, where I wrote a quick note and left it on my pillow. Back downstairs, I clicked open Mama’s bag, the mesh rippling like the metallic scales of a fish. The inside leather held a belly of money.

  I took all of it and slipped out, picking up the handle of the lantern. My breath quickened as I followed the road to a place where I could duck safely into the woods, leaves crunching underfoot like aged paper. At the stream, I peeled off my shoes and socks and waded in up to my ankles. It was ice-cold, but I didn’t move. The wind picked up, shaking red and yellow, perfectly veined leaves from the trees. I left the few that had fallen onto my hair as I stepped out of the water, stamping my numb feet
on the bank.

  The oysterman’s house teetered on the edge of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. Its frame tilted to the east, as if the wind had been blowing from the west for a hundred years. The white paint had long since worn away, and its drab clapboards seemed to cling on for dear life. I picked my way down the slope and up the dirt path, past an abandoned shovel and a bucket of dead fish. The creek stretched wide and shallow behind the house. It was said that if a man tried to wade across the devil would drag him by his trousers to the bottom.

  I knocked on the front door, hoping not to lose my nerve, telling myself the oysterman ghost was a figment of my imagination.

  It took a long time for the bolt to slide back, the door opening just enough to reveal a single, squinty eye. “Yeah?”

  I’d left the lantern on the woodpile where he’d find it on his own, rather than admit my sister and I were the ones who had broken our promise to promptly return it. “I’ve come to ask for your help,” I stammered.

  “You in trouble?” He eased the door open enough so I could see the whole of his face. It wasn’t an ogre’s face after all. In the light of day, it was just worn, tired, and in need of a shave.

  The stench of fish wafted up from the creek. A docked boat groaned as the water shifted beneath it. “I’m not in trouble, just in need of your assistance. I can pay you.”

  I stood on his dirt threshold and told him what I needed as simply and quickly as possible, the man looking suspicious to the end.

  “Odd thing you’re askin’.” He let go of the door and it swung back, allowing me to see a fireplace, and a wooden table with a nub of a candle in a silver holder. The man ran a hand through his hair, white and patchy with age. “How much you payin’?” I pulled the wad of money from my pocket. I hadn’t counted it, but the man’s eyebrows rose at the bulk. “Looks like a lot? Where’d you get that? You steal it?”

  I shook my head, another lie.

  He didn’t look convinced, but reached for the money anyway, his fist swallowing the last tangible tie I had to my mother. “You want to go right now?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hang on a minute.”

  The door shut in my face. I slipped off my tailored coat, hoping I’d look shabbier without it. The wind blew cold off the water and I shivered as I reached down and yanked at the pocket of my blue serge skirt. The seam ripped and the pocket wilted open. I wished I could remove the lace cuffs on my blouse, but that would require scissors. A ripped pocket would have to suffice. Reluctantly, I pulled off my gloves and shoved them into my coat pocket, curling my deformed fingernails into my palms.

  When the man returned, I handed him my coat and asked if he could get rid of it for me. He shook his head. “You don’t make no sense,” he said, taking it from me and hanging it on a hook inside the door. “Let’s get on then.”

  We backtracked, following Bolton Road to the south, stately elms lining our way. It began to drizzle and a wet mist settled over my cheeks. The man yanked his coat around his neck and bent his head in silence. Slivers of wind snuck under my dress and I held my arms across my chest and tried not to shiver. If we kept going to where the road wound around the southern part of the hill, we could cross to Emerson Street and loop back to my house. For a minute I entertained the idea, but then the man cut to the right and I followed him up a steep, grassy hill. It would only be for a few days. As soon as Mama took my note to Daddy, Luella and I would be home.

  The man and I came out onto another section of Bolton Road, and within a few paces we were standing at the iron gates of the House of Mercy, gazing up the winding drive where white stucco walls stretched to either side of us.

  “I never asked your name,” he said.

  My name. I hadn’t thought about that. “I suppose I have to take your name.”

  “Rothman, Herbert Rothman.”

  I looked at Herbert. The drizzle of rain had stopped and the wind had whipped his hair into a puff over his head like something gone to seed. His coat hung down to his knees and bagged over his thin shoulders. I stuck out my hand, “Effie Rothman. Nice to meet you, Herbert.”

  His hands were buried in his coat pockets and he made no attempt to remove them. With a puzzled expression, he said, “You don’t look like a gal who’s done anything wrong.” I dropped my hand. “It ain’t too late to turn back, you know.” He gazed up the road as if it held the worst possible ending. “Can’t you just repent at church or something? Don’t seem right, doing this.”

  I wanted to tell him that this was the bravest thing I’d ever done. But all I said was, “You won’t get into any trouble.”

  “It certainly ain’t me that’s gonna be in trouble.”

  Herbert yanked the brass ring hanging from a large bell on the gatepost and a loud clang rang out. A woman appeared from behind the whitewashed lodge brushing her hands together, fragments of dirt scattering. “Admittance?”

  Herbert nodded. The woman barely glanced at us as she rummaged in her apron pocket and produced a substantial key ring. Her face was aged and brown from the sun. She wiggled the key until the lock gave way and the gate swung open. “Go on up to the main door. Sister Gertrude will let you in.”

  We walked through and the metal gate clanged shut behind us. Herbert pulled his hat over his ears and trudged ahead. I followed, the click of the lock etching a pinch of fear at the base of my neck.

  The house was a massive brick structure on a high plateau overlooking the Hudson River, a battlement defending its stronghold. Rooftop and gabled dormers seemed to stretch for miles. Looking out over a vertiginous groomed lawn, fortified at its base by a lofty white wall, I could see the thickly wooded valley and the river, a winding slice of gunmetal reflecting the dismal sky.

  I followed Herbert up the wide stone steps and through the arched portico where leafless vines, thick with age, snaked up the mortar to the top of the parapet and disappeared through the holes in the balustrade. The gong at the front door reverberated loudly as Herbert rang it. Quick footsteps sounded and the door opened.

  “Sister Gertrude?” Herbert asked.

  “No.” The sister regarded us from under her veil and cap with small, dim eyes. “Sister Mary. What can I help you with?” Her words were wisps in the air, barely audible.

  “Just lookin’ to, um,” Herbert glanced at me. I kept my eyes on the sister’s clasped hands, pale and curved like seashells against her pleated habit. “Just lookin’ to admit my daughter here.”

  “You’ve not come with a magistrate?”

  “No, ma’am. Do we need one?”

  “No, certainly not. It’s just the usual way, but girls are admitted without a court order. Come, I’ll show you to Sister Gertrude.”

  Sister Mary stepped aside with a slight nod. She was so thin and pale she looked like a sickly child kept from the outdoors, the weight of her cap burdensome, a punishment that kept her head perpetually tilted to the side. The hallway was clean and white, the floor polished. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so. We stepped inside a small room with a sterile smell that reminded me of a doctor’s office. Sister Mary told us to wait, returning within minutes to lead us into an even smaller room where another sister sat dwarfed behind an enormous desk, bare save for a single lamp shining over the dark pool of wood. To my left, a heavy oak table ran the length of the wall with a row of books, a clock and a marble sculpture of Jesus bowing his head. On the windowsill, a spindly plant sat in dim light.

  The woman behind the desk excused Sister Mary, who gave an obedient nod and backed out of the room, her movements as cautious as her voice, afraid of taking up too much space or too much air. I wondered how any of the girls obeyed her. One glare from Luella would knock her over. Luella. Where was she? In the dining hall? The chapel? Some barren room? I looked at the woman behind the desk and did my best to hide my eagerness.

  The sister regarded me with a neutral gaze; the only
sound in the dim room was a soft tick of the clock. She looked at Herbert. “I’m Sister Gertrude,” she said kindly, glancing away momentarily to pull pen and paper from her desk drawer. “The child’s name?”

  Herbert twisted the brim of his hat round and round in his hands. “Effie Rothman.” The uncertainty in his voice was aggravating. I willed him to be believable. Sister Gertrude uncapped her pen and recorded the information. “Age?”

  At a desperate glance from Herbert, I answered for him. “Thirteen.”

  The pen hovered over the paper. Sister Gertrude looked up. She seemed old, and yet had a round, unlined face and smooth, veinless hands. Her life under her habit—out of the sun, with small meals and hours of kneeling worship—had preserved her nicely.

  “Thirteen?” she said skeptically.

  “I’m small for my age.”

  She gave a disbelieving grunt. “Birth date?”

  “January 1, 1900.”

  Her eyes went to Herbert. They were a snapping blue. “You’re her father?”

  Herbert cleared his voice with a guttural sound, managing a “yes,” through the phlegm.

  A speck of disgust flickered across Sister Gertrude’s face as she continued to take down his age, address and employment. She asked my mother’s name and Herbert gave one easily. Who she was, I had no idea: a dead wife, a daughter. Sister Gertrude pushed the paper to the edge of the glossy desk, proffering her pen and directing him to sign on the bottom line. Herbert did.

  “Now then.” She wove her long fingers together and clasped them in front of her, leaning forward with a soft, empathetic look. “We all fall short of God’s glorious standard, and yet I wholly understand that you would not be here if your daughter was not in peril of ruin. How, sir, has this girl fallen from the path of purity?”

  The twirling hat was now being compressed between Herbert’s hands. “She ought to tell you herself.”

  Shifting her attention to me, Sister Gertrude said, “Go ahead, dear. Nothing will shock me. I’ve heard every impropriety.”