The Girls with No Names Read online

  Luella had wrapped her arm around my waist. I felt her body quivering. “Look at her. She’s marvelous. It makes me want to move in ways I’ve never dared,” she whispered, her desire beating off her like heat.

  Since the age of five, my sister had trained as a ballerina under a Russian choreographer. The French are good dancers, our very French mother informed us, her voice lilting with her accent, but the Russians are great dancers. The Americans, she scoffed, do not know the meaning of ballet.

  This gypsy dancer was something altogether different. I’d never seen anything like it. She was mesmerizing, her movements seamless and indefatigable. My sister and I stood for so long that we didn’t notice the air cooling around us as the sun slipped behind the trees, leaving us in a darkness that twisted our sense of direction.

  Safe now in our warm bed, with our parents none the wiser, we both agreed it had been worth it.

  “What if we’d never made it home?” Luella wrapped her leg over mine.

  “What if the oysterman got us?”

  “And yanked me inside with his clammy ghost claw.”

  “And slit your throat.”

  “Effie!”

  “What?” I could be as brave as anyone in my own fantasies.

  “You don’t have to be so gruesome. He could just smother me with a pillow.”

  “Okay, he smothers you and takes you as his spirit-wife. Meanwhile, I wander the empty house, hearing you, but unable to reach you.”

  “Mama and Daddy put out a search party.”

  “And I drown myself in the Hudson out of misery and fly up to Heaven, never to see you again because you’re stuck on earth with the oysterman.”

  “You’d sink into hell for committing suicide.” Luella was the least pious person I knew, and yet she still corrected me.

  “Then the oysterman would be in hell too. Which means we’d be together, wandering in hell for all of eternity. A happy ending.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong.” Luella twisted a piece of my hair around her finger and gave a gentle tug. “I’d never let you kill yourself for me, not even as a ghost, so the story is bunk. You’ll have to start a new one.”

  Which, if I was going to be accurate—even in fantasies, I tried to be as accurate as possible—was true. Luella would never let anything happen to me.

  When something did happen, it was Daddy who was to blame.

  Chapter Two

  Effie

  I did not think my father capable of wrongdoing. When people spoke of him it was with admiration, if not slight reverence. Devilishly handsome, they said, quailing under his astounding blue eyes and full-lipped smile. It was a look you wanted to fall into and at the same time wriggle out from under. He was a man of few words. Not shy like I was, just stolid and taciturn, and when he spoke it was with the subtle hint that he knew much more about you than he was letting on.

  My mother was straightforward and plain as paper, a disparity that I understood made my parents an odd couple. Once, I overheard a woman—homely herself with bony arms and a sharp chin—say to another woman as she sipped wine in our parlor, “I don’t know what spell Jeanne wove over Emory when they were courting, but I wouldn’t have risked it. Men that comely always stray.”

  I was only seven years old at the time and all I could glean from this comment was that it had taken trickery on my mother’s part to marry my father, and that somehow, she’d pay for it.

  In public, Mama sang Daddy’s praises, swooping to his side with the grace of a long-necked heron. But when she told us how she met Daddy, it was with a tone of warning as Luella and I sat rapt on her bed, watching her apply cold cream to her face.

  “I was twenty-one,” she said, this first bit already a travesty. “Living with my mother in a grand, old Parisian home. I thought I’d be stuck there for the rest of my life. No matter that I was a regular dancer on the Opéra stage, I had never had a single proposal.” She wiped a glob of cream down the bridge of her nose. “These lengthy limbs of mine made me a lovely ballerina, but not a lovely catch. Never mind my height. Men don’t like to be looked in the eye. The worst thing, of course, were my hands.” Luella and I looked at them on cue. Mama’s nightly cream application was the only time we got to see them gloveless. We knew well the story of when she was sixteen and her skirt caught fire over the limelights during a rehearsal of La Bayadère. She would have died if she hadn’t beaten the flames out with her hands. Hands now covered in scars. “A hideous embarrassment,” she called them.

  I loved those scars. They were badges of heroism, and proof of Mama’s strength and survival. When I was little and I’d lose my breath, the only thing that calmed me was running my fingers over the folded, twisted skin on her hands. Pitched forward with my head to the floor, I’d pull off her gloves and trace her wounds like a map, memorizing the curve of each scar, until my heart slowed and I could breathe again. Then Mama, without a thread of panic, would say, “There now, that’s done with,” and pull me to my feet.

  A blob of cream dropped to the rug. She laughed and said, “Why your father wanted to marry the likes of me, I can’t imagine!” wagging a long finger at Luella. “Now you, my dear, will have none of my difficulties.”

  My sister stiffened. This part we’d heard many times before. Mama made a point of lauding Luella in the same way she lauded Daddy, often publicly, always demeaning herself in the process, saying things like, “It was Paris that turned Emory’s head. It’s a good thing he proposed before we left!” or, “Thank goodness Luella didn’t get my looks. With her beauty, she’ll go places in her career I never could.”

  Luella was beautiful. She was the spitting image of a photograph in the drawing room of our great-grandmother on our mother’s side, Colette Savaray, a Parisian socialite who became a recurring character in the stories I made up. She’d died before Mama was born, and it was her husband, Mama’s grandfather Auguste Savaray, who had taken Mama to the ballet every season. “He adored me,” Mama reminded us. “It was for him I learned to dance.”

  “I’ll never dance for anyone but myself,” Luella retorted.

  “You wait and see,” Mama answered.

  Where I was concerned, there was no talk of husbands or careers. My heart ensured that I’d never be a dancer, my clubbed fingernails that I’d never find a husband. Luella would fulfill our mother’s dreams; my focus was only to stay alive.

  I was born seven weeks early, on January 1, 1900. My father said only great things could come of a Tildon child born on the first day of the new century.

  I surely disappointed.

  According to Mama, my cry sounded like a cat mewing, which alarmed the midwife. Turns out, my heart wasn’t right. “It’s a malformation due to the imperfect development of the organ,” the doctor informed my parents.

  The way I saw it, God hadn’t seen fit to finish me.

  “You’re lucky this one has no visible signs of cyanosis,” the doctor went on to tell them, as if the fact that I wasn’t born with gray coloring, like most babies with my condition, was something to be proud of. It was not much of a comfort, followed by what he said next: “Unfortunately, there’s no way to close the abnormal opening in her heart. She’s not likely to live through the year.”

  I imagined my mother accepting this information stoically, holding me in my pink newness like a breakable thing, her sinewy limbs draped on the bed, blue veins like fine thread running through her white thighs. According to her, it was Daddy who bellowed that no doctor was going to tell him his child wouldn’t live to see her first birthday.

  He was right, because despite my unfinished heart, I stayed alive, happily feeding on condensed milk from a glass bottle shaped like a banana. The doctor said I was too weak to nurse, but my mother believed I didn’t have the will, that I wasn’t trying hard enough. “I told the doctor that with a temperament like yours, you’d never survive,
” Mama told me, reproachfully, as if I was expected to prove myself even as an infant. Daddy, who loved modern inventions, said the feeding bottle was fascinating with its newly refined, rubber nipple. “I tried to convince your mother that it was an advantage, not a failure,” he reassured me.

  But I was sure she never saw it that way. She had already birthed Luella, and therefore knew what success looked like in a newborn. I imagine my sister came out kicking and screaming, attaching herself to our mother’s breast with rightful ownership, growing into a plump, feisty three-year-old who already knew exactly what she wanted by the time I came along.

  Mama told us that the first time Luella saw me she insisted, since I was the exact size of her glass-eyed baby doll, that I was her baby too. She’d swaddle me and place me in the stroller next to her doll, stroking my soft head, and the hard doll’s, with equal care. I used to picture this doll as my strange twin, wondering if it haunted my mother to see this lifeless version of me, a reflection of what she feared I’d become.

  Dr. Romero monitored my heart monthly during the first year of my life. After that it became a yearly examination, the fat, smelly, cold-fingered doctor declaring each time I walked in, “Ah, look who we have here,” as if surprised to see me, when clearly I was expected.

  During these visits I had Mama’s sole attention, which made me not mind them so much. My heart didn’t hinder me. I was agile and energetic, though small for my age, and if I didn’t exert myself I could keep my blue fits to a minimum. Luella named them for the terrific shade of blue I’d turn.

  Selfishly, I didn’t think how these visits affected Mama until a chilly September afternoon when I was eight years old and she took me by train to the east side of Manhattan, to a quiet street lined with stately brownstones. When she opened a little black gate next to a sign that said, Louis Faugeres Bishop, M.D., a prickle of fear went through me. I had the sense my mother was pushing me toward something dangerous I couldn’t see. “Why aren’t we going to Dr. Romero’s?”

  She clicked the gate shut behind us. “Dr. Bishop is a heart specialist.”

  “What was Dr. Romero?”

  “Not a heart specialist.”

  The examining room was stale and bare, with a sharp vinegar smell like the pickles Velma canned in the kitchen. There were no pictures on the walls or even a vase of flowers to put us at ease, only a strange-looking contraption covered in rubber tubes with intricate dials and knobs. It made me think of Frankenstein’s laboratory, from a book I’d snuck since Mama declared it inappropriate.

  Steering clear of the machine, I hopped up onto a metallic bed covered in a starched white sheet that crinkled under my legs. Mama eyed the contraption, her gloved hands clasped tightly over the curved handle of her purse.

  “What’s that?” she asked the doctor when he stepped into the room.

  Dr. Bishop was short and wiry with a glossy bald head that bobbed up and down excitedly, his round spectacles slipping down the bridge of his nose. “That is an electrocardiogram. Invented by a Dutch doctor. It’s the only one in America.” He pushed his glasses up, his bulbous eyes glistening behind his thick lenses. “Unfortunately, I won’t be using it on the child. We’re still in the early stages and have barely perfected it for grown men.”

  Mama gave a tight nod of relief as the doctor unceremoniously pulled my dress from my shoulders and stamped a cold stethoscope against my bare chest, cocking his head as he listened to the murmur caged in my ribs. The tips of his fingers felt cold and waxy against my back. He had white eyebrows with long hairs that curled toward his wrinkly forehead. The face of an executioner, I’d write in my journal later, handing over a death sentence as solemnly as one slips a cloth over a prisoner’s head at the gallows.

  Dr. Bishop unplugged the stethoscope from my chest and let it fall around his neck. I stuffed my arms into my dress sleeves and yanked it up over my shoulders. Mama quickly buttoned the back as I held my hair out of the way, my nudity a point of embarrassment for both of us. The doctor tugged the glove from my right hand and inspected my deformed fingernails—a side effect of my heart condition. One I’ve never understood, hearts and fingernails having little to do with one another. Like Mama, my gloves came off only at bath and bedtime. The air felt wonderful between my fingers as the doctor lifted my hand into the sunlight from the window. “How long has she had the clubbing?”

  “It started when she was five.”

  “Has it gotten worse?”

  “It’s stayed pretty much the same. Will it get worse?” She glanced at her own hands concealed in expensive satin. Around my sister and me, my mother was a tower of strength; around doctors, or men in general including my father, she weakened, ready to be declared wrong at every turn. I thought now, as I’d thought many times, that if she took off her gloves she’d feel braver, like she didn’t need to hide. She’d be as strong as she was sitting beside me when I lost my breath.

  Ignoring her question, the doctor banded his fingers around my upper arm. “Has she always been this thin?”

  “She eats plenty. She’s just a thin child.”

  “She’s not just a thin child, Mrs. Tildon. She’s a child with a ventricular septal defect. Come with me.” He strode into an adjacent room with the cold authority I had learned to associate with doctors. My mother, in her smart white blouse and gored skirt with pearl buttons, followed with her submissive shuffle. Shut the door, he said. Mama turned and gave me a warning look, closing the door behind her. As if anyone could get into trouble in this barren room, I thought.

  I waited, lifting my legs up and down, my black boots making round shadows on the floor that appeared and disappeared like twin moons. Dr. Romero had never made a big deal of my clubbed fingernails or pointed out how thin I was. I’d never heard the words, ventricular septal defect. I didn’t like the sound of defect. Bored, I peeked behind a curtain that hung to one side of the table and saw a tray of frightening tools. I quickly dropped the curtain and sat straight, eyeing the machine in the corner. If Dr. Bishop was a heart specialist, then he’d know especially how to heal me. Maybe he wasn’t an executioner, but a mad scientist able to seal shut a heart like Frankenstein’s ability to infuse life into an inanimate body.

  * * *

  A hand appears, thin and ashen. Wispy fingers float to the sheet that falls to the floor, revealing the body of a child. Her eyes are blank, colorless marbles, her skin transparent, her bones white lines of solid cartilage. In every aspect she is dead, and yet past the curve of her ribs, deep in her chest, there is a steady pulse of color, not vibrant red as one expects from a heart, but pale pink and blue. With each beat, the color brightens until the room is a wash of candied light. Slowly, she rises.

  * * *

  I tugged at the sheet bunched under my legs. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be healed. I liked surviving. Others were expected to live year to year without incident, but my years were accomplishments. Each birthday meant I’d done a good job staying alive. What would matter now, I wondered, if I didn’t need to work hard at living?

  Mama emerged from the doctor’s office frowning, the thin lines of her arched brows pulled together. Come, she beckoned, her fingers swooping through the air. I jumped off the table and my boots blasted to the floor. The doctor winced. “Sorry,” I said, and he gave a weak wave, looking as if he’d just realized I was a child.

  We took a cab home, driving slowly through the crowded Manhattan streets, the driver’s duster jacket and goggles coated in a layer of dust that kicked up from the road. Mama wrapped her scarf over her mouth. I didn’t mind the grit on my tongue. It felt satisfyingly real. I tried to focus on the sun on my face and the smells from the food venders, but Mama kept glancing at me with an anxious smile that made my stomach uneasy. Why didn’t I get to know what was said in that doctor’s office? After all it was my heart.

  As soon as we stepped into the hall, Mama shooed me up to my room, but I snuck ba
ck down and sidled up to the parlor door. Daddy had come home early from work, which was unusual.

  Through a crack in the partially opened door, I watched my mother pace over the Oriental rug, her skirt a vivid blue under the blaze of the chandelier, her face animated. Behind her, the fire crackled and spit inside the iron grate. My father sat on the sofa running his hand methodically over the seat like he was stroking an animal. His vest was undone and his tie askew. Normally Daddy was meticulously put together and I found something profoundly disturbing about his disarray.

  Mama must have felt it also because she leaned over and compulsively straightened his tie, saying something in a low voice I couldn’t hear. Daddy flicked her hand away, standing so abruptly he bumped the glass lamp on the end table. It tipped, threatening to fall before he reached out and steadied it. A sob escaped Mama. The sob was not for the lamp. I wanted him to reach out and steady her, but Daddy turned his back and gazed into the fire. “What did he say, exactly?”

  Mama was very still, now. “He said, there is no treatment to close the abnormal opening in her heart.”

  “What kind of pathetic specialist is he?”

  “He said there are new experiments happening all the time.”

  Daddy turned. “Then there’s hope?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why did he say three years?”

  “He said, perhaps three years.”

  “Perhaps.” Disgusted, Daddy turned back to the fire with his hands latched behind his back.

  I moved away from the door with a heavy sadness. I didn’t know how to comfort my parents. I was sorry to be the cause of all their worry, but what I couldn’t explain, not even to Luella, was that I didn’t mind having the hole in my heart. I viewed the world through that small, damaged portal. It was a weakness I sharpened my strength upon. From behind its protective edges, I could be brave. Just like Mama’s disfigured hands were proof of her strength, my open heart was proof of mine. If only people could see it, they’d know how strong I was.