The Chaperone (7 page)

Cora, sitting in her little wooden chair, felt her blood go still. She looked at Mary Jane, who appeared too stunned to move, but with a strange smile on her face. Cora shook her head. She was afraid of Sister Delores, but she was more afraid of the train. She didn’t want to go to Ohio. And Betsy. Betsy wasn’t with them.

“I have a family,” Patricia said. She already had the panicked voice of someone about to cry. “My mother’s in the hospital. She won’t know where I am.”

Rose said that she couldn’t leave New York, either. Her father was coming to get her any day. Her and her older sister.

“This has all been decided,” Sister Delores said quietly. Her hard look, the one they knew better, had already returned. “If you were placed with us, it’s because you’ve got no one else. Some of your parents may have made you promises that they can’t keep. You can’t rely on them.”

“My father’s coming for me,” said Rose.

“Your father’s a drunk.” Sister Delores looked at her without blinking. “If he would stay sober through the week, he could keep a job, and he could come get you as he says he will. But he hasn’t done that, has he? Has he? No. And he won’t. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be unkind, but you are too gullible. It’s been a year now, Rose. We can’t throw away a chance like this so you can wait around on an empty promise.”

Rose started to cry, her whimpers louder and higher-pitched than Patricia’s. She took the tips of her brown braids and held them against her eyes. Cora felt heat behind her own eyes, her bottom lip starting to tremble. This train, this horrible train, was leaving in a few hours. They wouldn’t be able to go back to the home. She wouldn’t see Sister Josephine again. Or Imogene. Or Betsy. They would give her bed away to a skinny girl with a shaved head. Perhaps they already had.

“Stop that. Stop that crying. You don’t understand what good fortune this is.” Sister Delores looked at them and shook her head. “I wasn’t going to tell you this. But before you even get on the train, you’ll each get a new dress.”

Mary Jane turned to Cora, her eyes bright with excitement. She reached over and squeezed Cora’s hand. She thought Cora was like her. Neither of them had a mother in the hospital, or a father with good intentions, or an older sister to leave behind. Not as far as they knew. But Cora shook her head again. She didn’t care if Sister saw her. She didn’t know if her mother was in the hospital or if she had a father coming to get her. But she might. The train would take her away from all she knew, from who she was.

“I won’t go,” Patricia said. Now she was crying full on. “I won’t go. I don’t want a new family. I have a mother.”

Sister Delores stood quickly. There was no telling if she had the paddle. Patricia shrank from her reach.

Cora looked up at a high window, at the sliver of gray sky beyond. Even if she could reach the window, and somehow fly through it, where would she go? They’d had breakfast before they left, and already she was hungry again.

“How very selfish,” Sister Delores said, still looking at Patricia. She shook her head, her veil brushing her shoulders. “That you would deny another child a place to sleep and enough to eat because you refuse to take advantage of an opportunity.”

“Let someone else go in my place,” Patricia said. “They can go to the Middle West.”

“Stupid girl.” Sister Delores frowned. “These are good homes. They can’t place someone right off the street.”

From the other side of the door, an infant cried. They heard a young voice, different from theirs. A boy’s.

“Why just us?” Mary Jane asked. “Why not the other girls?”

Sister Delores nodded, as if to thank someone, finally, for asking a logical question. “They only had seven spots for us,” she said. “Out of a hundred and fifty. And they told us the younger ones do better. We’ve been sending our babies out for a while.”

“Betsy’s younger than I am,” Cora said. She was not defending her young friend. She was hoping Sister would realize her mistake, take her back to the home, and make Betsy get on the train.

Sister Delores shook her head. “Betsy’s slow in the head. You can see it, looking in her eyes. They said no one would want her.” She gazed up at the picture of Jesus. The girls understood that they should not speak. Even in profile, the veil obscuring half her face, Sister Delores’s weariness was clear.

“We love all of God’s children.” She continued to look at the picture. “But only some can get on the train.”

She took a deep breath and pulled her shoulders back. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. Her quiet voice, her hard blue stare, was enough.

“I’m going to tell you once more, and once more only. If you’re sitting here now, you are a very lucky girl. And for your own good, I guarantee you are each getting on that train.”

They didn’t know
they were part of an exodus, a mass migration that spanned over seventy years. They didn’t know that the Children’s Aid Society had already filled, and would continue to fill, train after train with the Great City’s destitute children, sending, before the end of the program, almost two hundred thousand of them off to what was usually an easier life among the farm families of the Middle West, with its abundant fields and fresher air, its clean Main Streets and church picnics, its earnest young couples who wanted a child.

Or a field hand. A young slave. An indentured servant who could be made to work long hours in the cold and the heat, who wouldn’t need much food. A prisoner whom no one would miss, who could be beaten, starved, tormented, undressed and violated, all within the privacy of one’s home.

The routine was almost always the same. Flyers would be mailed a few weeks before a train went out: Homes for Children Wanted. Various Ages. Both Sexes. Well-Disciplined. Caucasian went without saying. The address, time, and place of distribution would be announced at a later date.

The trains didn’t go to the same towns every year. The Society kept them in rotation, thinking the chances would be better if a community wasn’t already thick with orphans, if the orphans they had were anomalies, not a real threat to the demographic. And there were so many little towns to choose from, their little downtowns snug against the tracks. The agents, the women with the rosters who rode the trains as well, told the children not to worry if they weren’t selected at the first few stops. People always went for the babies first. Once they were all spoken for, the agents promised, the older ones would have a chance.

Still, they were coached. They were taught to smile when smiled at, and to sing “Jesus Loves Me” on command. The girls were told that if potential parents asked them to lift their skirts, they should, to show that their legs were straight. People had the right to know what they were taking on. Two red-haired boys had the seat in front of Cora. They held hands even when asleep. The older boy told the agent they were brothers, and that they couldn’t be separated. She told them she would do her best.

When the train arrived
at a new town, the children were cleaned up, their faces and hands washed, their hair combed, their clothes changed. Before they even left New York, they had each been given a bath, and not just one nice set of clothes, but two: one set for travel, and a nicer set for the selections. They had warm coats and new shoes that actually fit, caps for the boys, hair ribbons for the girls. The agents were experts at braiding hair and tying shoelaces and erasing evidence of tears or interrupted naps. When the children were clean and presentable, they were led onto some kind of stage, usually at a church or a theater or an opera house. There was always a crowd. People would come out just to watch.

Even at the time, Cora understood the danger she was in, standing on stage after stage, staying quiet as adults milled about, looking her and the other children over, telling some to open their mouths and show their teeth. She was glad not to be a boy. Men and women squeezed boys’ skinny arms to feel for muscle, and pressed hands against their knees and slim hips. Some were clear about their needs.
Have you ever milked a cow? Have you ever shucked corn? Are you sickly? Were your parents sickly? Do you know what it means to work?
But it wasn’t so good to be a girl, either. At one stop, Cora listened as a man with a long beard told an older girl with thick black braids how pretty she was, and how he had lost his wife a few years back, and how it was just him in the house, alone, but that it was a big house, and did she like babies? Instead of answering, the girl had started to cough, hard and purposeful, not even putting her hand to her mouth, her face red as if she were choking, until the man stepped away. When he walked past Cora, his face grim, she started coughing, too.

Rose was the first of her group to go. Cora didn’t see who chose her. She’d been so nervous, standing on the stage, that she didn’t even notice Rose was gone until they were back on the train, and she had the seat to herself. Mary Jane was picked at the next stop, practically jumping into the arms of a young man with a black coat and a cane who asked her if she would like her own pony. His wife was pretty, with a long green skirt and a matching, smart-looking jacket, her blond hair in coils under her hat. Walking out between them, Mary Jane had turned back and waved at Cora, a flash of loss in her eyes before she looked up at the man, smiled again, and disappeared through the door.

Cora didn’t see Patricia go, either.

By the first stop in Kansas, over half of the children were gone, but Cora still hadn’t been picked. She knew this was partly her fault. Some of the children sang the Jesus song on every stage, and it was true that they got more attention. But Cora was too shy. And in her young way, too suspicious. She remembered stories Sister Josephine had told,
Hansel and Gretel
and
Little Snow White
. Surely the people who showed up at the stages were as capable of disguise, of appearing good and kind as the agents looked on, only to transform into witches and child-eating goblins once they were out of sight. She wondered what would happen if she were never picked, if, stop after stop, and stage after stage, she had to keep getting back on the train, until finally—what? The train couldn’t go on forever. The agents would have to go back to New York. If she were still with them, she could go back as well.

This was what was in her head when she first saw the Kaufmanns. They were both tall people, pale-faced and lanky. Cora stared up at them more with curiosity than personal interest. The man was older than the woman, his forehead deeply lined, his lips thin and bloodless. The woman was younger, his daughter, perhaps, but she was not pretty like the woman in the green dress who had taken Mary Jane. This woman had small, pale eyes, and a pointy nose. A gingham bonnet covered her hair.

“Hello,” she said to Cora.

Both the man and the woman crouched low, their faces level with hers. Cora could not cough or pretend to be slow: one of the agents was right there, watching. The man asked her name, and she told him. He asked her age, and she said she didn’t know, but that she’d just lost her first tooth. Both the man and the woman laughed as if Cora had said something terribly funny, as if she were one of the children singing the Jesus song, trying hard to be cute. She gave them a hard look, but they continued to smile. The man looked at the woman. The woman nodded.

“We’d like you to come live with us,” the man said. “We’d like you to be our little girl.”

“We have a room all set up. Your room.” The woman smiled, showing overgrown front teeth. “With a window, and a bed. And a little dresser.”

Cora looked at them, revealing nothing. They couldn’t be her parents. They didn’t look anything like her. And they’d said nothing about a pony. Also, this was a strange place, the main street of the town dry and dusty. And windy. On the walk from the station, the wind had nearly knocked her down.

Then the agent’s hands were on her shoulders. “She’s shy. And tired, no doubt. They’ve been on the train for days.”

“Hungry, I imagine,” the woman said. She seemed distressed about this.

The agent, still behind Cora, gave her a push forward. “Go on now,” she said, with no question in her voice. “And be grateful, why don’t you. It seems to me you’re a lucky little girl.”

FIVE

At a blow of the whistle, she blinked awake,
her hat crooked on her head. Louise was not in her seat. She turned, looking around the car. The fat baby across the aisle, silent but awake in its mother’s lap, looked back at her with a stern expression. Many seats were empty. She fixed her hat and rubbed her neck. No need for alarm. Louise might just be using the bathroom. She’d been considerate, slipping into the aisle without waking Cora. She would likely be back any minute.

The train rolled past a field of corn, the stalks summer high, the golden tips peeking out of the green, straining toward the sun. Cora searched her seat for her book and frowned when she saw it on the floor. She wouldn’t be able to reach for it, not in her corset. She tried to lift the book between her shoes, but her soles were too stiff, and she only managed to scoot it under Louise’s seat. She looked over at Louise’s empty seat. The Schopenhauer book lay open-faced on top of the magazines. Cora turned, glancing up and down the aisle. Seeing nosign of Louise, she leaned forward as far as she could and grabbed the Schopenhauer. She checked the aisle again, then skimmed the pages until she found something underlined in the girl’s blue-inked pen.

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

There were blue-ink doodles along the margins. Three-dimensional arrows. Staring eyes. Spiraling vines with leaves. Another passage had stars around it.

We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.