Orphan Train

  Mrs. Murphy blushes and blinks; she shifts in her chair, picks up her teacup, and then puts it down without taking a sip. “Yes, that’s probably wise,” she says, and Miss Larsen looks over and gives me a smile.

  Hemingford, Minnesota, 1930

  Over the next few days, every time I see her Mrs. Murphy has another suggestion for how I should comport myself on meeting the Nielsens. “A firm handshake, but not a squeeze,” she says, passing me on the stairs. “You must be ladylike. They need to know that you can be trusted behind the counter,” she lectures at dinner.

  The other women chime in. “Don’t ask questions,” one advises.

  “But answer them without hesitation,” another adds.

  “Make sure your fingernails are clipped and groomed.”

  “Clean your teeth just before with baking soda.”

  “Your hair must be”—Miss Grund grimaces and reaches up to her own head, as if patting down soap bubbles—“tamed. You never know how they might feel about a redhead. Especially that tinny shade.”

  “Now, now,” Miss Larsen says. “We’re going to scare the poor girl so much she won’t know how to act.”

  On the morning of the meeting, a Saturday in mid-December, there is a light knock on my bedroom door. It’s Mrs. Murphy, holding a navy blue velvet dress on a hanger. “Let’s see if this fits,” she says, handing it to me. I’m not sure whether to invite her in or close the door while I change, but she solves this dilemma by bustling in and sitting on the bed.

  Mrs. Murphy is so matter-of-fact that I am not ashamed to take my clothes off and stand there in my knickers. She removes the dress from the hanger, unzips a seam at the side that I hadn’t realized was a zipper, and lifts it over my head, helping me with the long sleeves, pulling down the gathered skirt, zipping it up again. She steps back in the small space to inspect me, yanks at one side and then the other. Tugs at a sleeve. “Let’s see about that hair,” she says, instructing me to turn around so she can take a look. Fishing in her apron pocket, she pulls out bobby pins and a hair clip. For the next few minutes she pokes and prods, pulling the hair back from my face and smoothing it into submission. When she’s finished to her satisfaction, she turns me around to look at my reflection in the glass.

  Despite my trepidation about meeting the Nielsens, I can’t help smiling. For the first time since Mr. Grote butchered my hair months ago, I look almost pretty. I have never worn a velvet dress before. It is heavy and a little stiff, with a full skirt that falls in a lush drape to my midcalf. It gives off a faint scent of mothballs whenever I move. I think it’s beautiful, but Mrs. Murphy isn’t satisfied. Narrowing her eyes at me and clicking her tongue, she pinches the material. “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back,” she says, hurrying out and returning a few moments later with a wide black ribbon. “Turn around,” she instructs, and when I do, she loops the sash around my waist and ties it in the back with a wide bow. We both inspect her handiwork in the mirror.

  “There we are. You look like a princess, my dear,” Mrs. Murphy declares. “Are your black stockings clean?”

  I nod.

  “Put them on, then. And your black shoes will be fine.” She laughs, her hands on my waist. “A redheaded Irish princess you are, right here in Minnesota!”

  AT THREE O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE first heavy snowstorm of the season, I greet Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen in Mrs. Murphy’s parlor, with Mr. Sorenson and Miss Larsen standing by.

  Mr. Nielsen resembles a large gray mouse, complete with twitching whiskers, pink-tinged ears, and a tiny mouth. He is wearing a gray three-piece suit and a silk striped bow tie, and he walks with a black cane. Mrs. Nielsen is thin, almost frail. Her dark head of hair, streaked with silver, is pulled back in a bun. She has dark eyebrows and eyelashes and deep-set brown eyes, and her lips are stained a dark red. She wears no powder or rouge on her olive skin.

  Mrs. Murphy puts the Nielsens at ease, plying them with tea and biscuits and inquiring about their short trip across town in the snow and then remarking generally on the weather: how the temperature dipped in the past few days and snow clouds gathered slowly to the west, how the storm finally began today, as everyone knew it would. They speculate about how much snow we are bound to get tonight, how long it will stay on the ground, when we might expect more snow, and what kind of winter it will be. Surely it won’t rival the winter of 1922, when ice storms were followed by blizzards and nobody could get any relief? Or the black-dust blizzard of 1923—remember that?—when dirty snow blew down from North Dakota, seven-foot snowdrifts covered entire sections of the city, and people didn’t leave their houses for weeks? On the other hand, there’s little chance that it will be as mild as 1921, the warmest December on record.

  The Nielsens are politely curious about me, and I do my best to answer their questions without sounding either desperate or apathetic. The other three adults watch us with a quivering intensity. I sense them urging me to do well, to sit up straight and answer in complete sentences.

  Finally, as one conversational theme after another runs its course, Mr. Sorenson says, “All right then. I believe we all know why we are here—to determine whether the Nielsens might be willing to provide Dorothy with a home, and whether Dorothy is suitable to their needs. To that end, Dorothy—can you tell the Nielsens why you wish to become part of their household, and what you might bring to it yourself ?”

  If I am honest—which is not, of course, what Mr. Sorenson is asking of me—I will say that I simply need a warm, dry place to live. I want enough food to eat, clothes, and shoes that will protect me from the cold. I want calmness and order. More than anything, I want to feel safe in my bed.

  “I can sew, and I am quite neat. I’m good with numbers,” I say.

  Mr. Nielsen, turning to Mrs. Murphy, asks, “And can the young lady cook and clean? Is she hardworking?”

  “Is she a Protestant?” Mrs. Nielsen adds.

  “She is a hardworking girl, I can attest to that,” Mrs. Murphy says.

  “I can cook some things,” I tell them, “though at my previous residence I was expected to make stew out of squirrels and raccoons, and I’d rather not do that again.”

  “Mercy, no,” Mrs. Nielsen says. “And the other question—?”

  “The other question?” I’m barely keeping up.

  “Do you go to church, dear?” Mrs. Murphy prompts.

  “Oh, right. The family I lived with were not churchgoing people,” I answer honestly, though in truth I have not been to church since the chapel at the Children’s Aid Society, and before that only with Gram. I remember clasping her hand as we walked to St. Joseph’s, right in the center of Kinvara, a small church made of stone with jewel-toned stained-glass windows and dark oak pews. The smell of incense and lilies, the candles lit for loved ones passed away, the throaty intonations of the priest, and the majestic trumpeting of the organ. My da said he was allergic to religion, it never did anybody any good; and when Mam got grief from the neighbors on Elizabeth Street about not going to services, she’d say, “You try packing up a swarm of kids on a Sunday morning when one has a fever, one has the colic, and your husband’s passed out in the bed.” I remember watching other Catholics, girls in their Communion dresses and boys in their spitshined shoes, walking down the street below our apartment, their mothers pushing prams and fathers strolling along beside.

  “She’s an Irish girl, Viola, so I suspect she’s a Catholic,” Mr. Nielsen says to his wife.

  I nod.

  “You may be a Catholic, child,” Mr. Nielsen says—the first thing he has said to me directly—“but we are Protestant. And we will expect you to go to Lutheran services with us on Sundays.”

  It’s been years since I’ve attended services of any kind, so what does it matter? “Yes, of course.”

  “And you should know that we will send you to school in town here, a short walk from our home—so you won’t attend Miss Larsen’s classes any longer.”

  Miss Larsen says, “I
believe Dorothy was about to outgrow the school-house, anyway, she’s such a smart girl.”

  “And after school,” Mr. Nielsen says, “you will be expected to help in the store. We’ll pay you an hourly wage, of course. You know about the store, Dorothy, do you not?”

  “It’s sort of a general-interest, all-purpose place,” Mrs. Nielsen says.

  I nod and nod and nod. So far they’ve said nothing that raises an alarm. But I don’t feel the spark of connection with them, either. They don’t seem eager to learn about me, but then again, few people are. I get the sense that my abandonment, and the circumstances that brought me to them, matter little to them, compared to the need I might fill in their lives.

  The following morning, at 9:00 A.M., Mr. Nielsen pulls up in a blue-and-white Studebaker with silver trim and raps on the front door. Mrs. Murphy has been so generous that I now have two suitcases and a satchel filled with clothes and books and shoes. As I’m closing my bags Miss Larsen comes to my room and presses Anne of Green Gables into my hands. “It’s my own book, not the school’s, and I want you to have it,” she says, hugging me good-bye.

  And then, for the fourth time since I first set foot in Minnesota over a year ago, everything I possess is loaded into a vehicle and I am on my way to somewhere new.

  Hemingford, Minnesota, 1930–1931

  The Nielsens’ home is a two-story colonial painted yellow with black shutters and a long slate walkway leading to the front door. It sits on a quiet street several blocks from the center of town. Inside, the floor plan is a circle: a sunny living room on the right leads into the kitchen in the back, which connects to a dining room and back to the foyer.

  Upstairs I have my own large room, painted pink, with a window overlooking the street, and even my own bathroom, with a large porcelain sink and pink tiles and a cheerful white curtain with pink piping.

  Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen take things for granted that I’ve never dared to dream of. All the rooms have steel air vents with black-painted scrollwork. Even when no one is home, the water heater is on, so that when they come home after work, they don’t have to wait for the water to heat up. A woman named Bess cleans the house and does the washing once a week. The refrigerator is stocked with milk and eggs and cheese and juice, and Mrs. Nielsen notices what I like to eat and buys more of it—oats for breakfast, for instance, and fruits, even exotic ones like oranges and bananas. I find aspirin and store-bought toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and clean towels in the hall closet. Every two years, Mr. Nielsen tells me, he trades in his car for a new model.

  On Sunday morning we go to church. Grace Lutheran is different from any place of worship I’ve ever seen: a simple white building with a steeple, Gothic arched windows, oak pews, and a spare altar. I find the rituals comforting—the tried-and-true hymns, sermons by the mild-mannered, slope-shouldered reverend that emphasize decency and good manners. Mr. Nielsen and other parishioners grumble about the organist, who either plays so fast that we jumble the words or so slow that the songs become dirges, and he can’t seem to take his foot off the pedal. But nobody actually protests—they just raise their eyebrows at each other midsong and shrug.

  I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other. I like the coffee hour with almond cake and snickerdoodles in the vestry. And I like being associated with the Nielsens, who seem to be generally regarded as fine, upstanding citizens. For the first time in my life, the glow of other people’s approval extends to, and envelops, me.

  LIFE WITH THE NIELSENS IS CALM AND ORDERLY. EACH MORNING AT five thirty, six days a week, Mrs. Nielsen makes breakfast for her husband, usually fried eggs and toast, and he leaves for the store to open for the farmers at six. I get ready for school and leave the house at seven forty-five for the ten-minute walk to the schoolhouse, a brick building that holds sixty children, separated into grades.

  On my first day in this new school, the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Buschkowsky, asks the twelve of us in her class to introduce ourselves and list one or two of our hobbies.

  I’ve never heard of a “hobby.” But the boy before me says playing stick-ball, and the girl before him says stamp collecting, so when the question comes to me, I say sewing.

  “Lovely, Dorothy!” Miss Buschkowsky says. “What do you like to sew?”

  “Clothes, mostly,” I tell the class.

  Miss Buschkowsky smiles encouragingly. “For your dolls?”

  “No, for ladies.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice!” she says in a too-bright voice, and in that way it becomes clear to me that most ten-year-olds probably don’t sew clothes for ladies.

  And so I begin to adjust. The kids know I’ve come from somewhere else, but as time passes, and with careful effort, I lose any trace of an accent. I note what the girls my age are wearing and the style of their hair and the subject of their conversations, and I work hard to banish my foreignness, to make friends, to fit in.

  After school, at three o’clock, I walk directly to the store. Nielsen’s is a large open space divided into aisles, with a pharmacy in the back, a candy section up front, clothes, books, and magazines, shampoo, milk, and produce. My job is to stack shelves and help with inventory. When it’s busy, I help out at the cash register.

  From my place at the counter I see longing in the faces of certain children—the ones who sidle into the store and linger in the candy aisle, eyeing the hard striped sticks with a fierce hunger I remember only too well. I ask Mr. Nielsen if I can use my own earnings to give a child a stick of penny candy now and then, and he laughs. “Use your discretion, Dorothy. I won’t take it out of your wages.”

  Mrs. Nielsen leaves the store at five to start dinner; sometimes I go home with her, and sometimes I stay and help Mr. Nielsen close up. He always leaves at six. At dinner we talk about the weather and my homework and the store. Mr. Nielsen is a member of the chamber of commerce, and conversations often include discussion of initiatives and plans for stimulating business in this “unruly” economy, as he calls it. Late at night, Mr. Nielsen sits in the parlor at his rolltop desk, going over the store ledgers, while Mrs. Nielsen prepares our lunches for the next day, tidies the kitchen, takes care of household tasks. I help wash the dishes, sweep the floor. When chores are done, we play checkers or hearts and listen to the radio. Mrs. Nielsen teaches me to needlepoint; while she’s making intricately detailed pillows for the sofa, I work on the floral cover for a stool.

  One of my first tasks at the store is to help decorate for Christmas. Mrs. Nielsen and I bring boxes filled with glass balls and china ornaments and ribbon and strings of sparkling beads up from the storage room in the cellar. Mr. Nielsen has his two delivery boys, Adam and Thomas, drive to the outskirts of town to cut a tree for the window, and we spend an afternoon putting swags of greenery with red velveteen bows over the store entrance and decorating the tree, wrapping empty boxes in foil paper and tying them with flocked ribbon and silk cording.

  As we work together, Mrs. Nielsen tells me bits and pieces about her life. She is Swedish, though you wouldn’t know it—her people were dark-eyed gypsies who came to Gothamberg from central Europe. Her parents are dead, her siblings scattered. She and Mr. Nielsen have been married for eighteen years, since she was twenty-five and he was in his early thirties. They thought they couldn’t have children, but about eleven years ago she got pregnant. On July 7, 1920, their daughter, Vivian, was born.

  “What is your birth date again, Dorothy?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.

  “April twenty-first.”

  Carefully she threads silver ribbon through the tree branches in the back, ducking her head so I can’t see her face. Then she says, “You girls are almost the same age.”

  “What happened to her?” I venture. Mrs. Nielsen has never mentioned her daughter before and I sense that if I don’t ask now, I may not get the chance.

  Mrs. Nielsen ties the ribbon to a branch and bends down to find another. She attaches the end of the new ribbon to the
same branch to make it look continuous, and begins the process of weaving it through.

  “When she was six, she developed a fever. We thought it was a cold. Put her to bed, called the doctor. He said we should let her rest, give her plenty of fluids, the usual advice. But she didn’t get better. And next thing we knew it was the middle of the night and she was delirious, out of her mind, really, and we called the doctor again and he looked down her throat and saw the telltale spots. We didn’t know what it was, but he did.

  “We took her to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, and they quarantined her. When they told us there was nothing they could do, we didn’t believe them. But it was just a matter of time.” She shakes her head, as if to clear the thought.

  I think about how hard it must have been for her, losing a daughter. And I think of my brothers and Maisie. We have a lot of sadness inside us, Mrs. Nielsen and I. I feel sorry for the both of us.

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, IN A SOFT SNOWFALL, THE THREE OF US WALK to church. We light candles on the twenty-foot tree to the right of the altar, all the fair-haired Lutheran children and parents and grandparents singing with songbooks open, the reverend preaching a sermon as elemental as a story in a child’s picture book, a lesson about charity and empathy. “People are in dire need,” he tells the congregation. “If you have something to give, give. Rise to your best selves.”

  He talks about some families in crisis: hog farmer John Slattery lost his right arm in a threshing accident; they need canned goods and any manpower you can spare while they try to salvage the farm . . . Mrs. Abel, eighty-seven years old, blind now in both eyes and all alone; if you can see it in your heart to spare a few hours a week it would be greatly appreciated . . . a family of seven, the Grotes, in dire straits; the father out of work, four young children and another born prematurely a month ago, now sickly, the mother unable to get out of bed . . .

  “How sad,” Mrs. Nielsen murmurs. “Let’s put together a package for that poor family.”

  She doesn’t know my history with them. They’re just another distant calamity.

  After the service we walk back through quiet streets. The snow has stopped and it’s a clear, cold night; the gas lamps cast circles of light. As the three of us approach the house I see it as if for the first time—the porch light shining, an evergreen wreath on the door, the black iron railing and neatly shoveled walkway. Inside, behind a curtain, a lamp in the living room glows. It’s a pleasant place to return to. A home.

  EVERY OTHER THURSDAY AFTER SUPPER, MRS. NIELSEN AND I JOIN Mrs. Murphy and six other ladies at a quilting group. We meet in the spacious parlor room of the wealthiest lady in the group, who lives in a grand Victorian on the outskirts of town. I am the only child in a room full of women and am immediately at ease. We work together on one quilt, a pattern and fabric that a member of the group has brought in; as soon as that one is finished, we’ll move to the next. Each quilt takes about four months to finish. This group, I learn, made the quilt on my bed in the pink bedroom. It’s called Irish Wreath, four purple irises with green stems meeting in the middle on a black background. “We’ll make a quilt for you someday, too, Dorothy,” Mrs. Nielsen tells me. She begins to save cuttings from the fabric station in the store; every scrap goes into a steamer trunk with my name on it. We talk about it at dinner: “A lady bought ten and a half yards of a beautiful blue calico, and I saved the extra half yard for you,” she’ll say. I’ve already decided on the pattern: a Double Wedding Ring, a series of interlocking circles made up of small rectangles of fabric.

  Once a month, on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Nielsen and I polish the silver. From a deep drawer in the cabinet in the dining room she takes out a heavy mahogany box that contains the cutlery she was given by her mother as a wedding present—her only inheritance, she tells me. Removing the pieces one by one, she lines them up on tea towels on the table, while I gather two small silver bowls from the living room mantel, four candlesticks and a serving platter from the sideboard, and a hinged box with her name, Viola, in spidery script across the top from her bedroom. We use a heavy, mud-colored paste in a jar, a few small, stiff brushes, water, and lots of rags.

  One day, as I am polishing an ornately decorated serving spoon, Mrs. Nielsen points at her clavicle and says, without looking at me, “We could clean that up for you, if you like.”

  I touch the chain around my neck, following it with my finger down to the claddagh. Reaching back with both hands, I unfasten the clasp.

  “Use the brush. Be gentle,” she says.

  “My gram gave this to me,” I tell her.

  She looks at me and smiles. “Warm water, too.”

  As I work the brush along the chain, it is transformed from a dull gray to the color of tinsel. The claddagh charm, its details obscured by tarnish, becomes three-dimensional again.

  “There,” Mrs. Nielsen says when I’ve rinsed and dried the necklace and put it on again, “much better,” and though she doesn’t ask anything about it, I know this is her way of acknowledging that she knows it holds meaning for me.

  ONE NIGHT AT DINNER, AFTER I HAVE BEEN LIVING IN THEIR HOUSE for several months, Mr. Nielsen says, “Dorothy, Mrs. Nielsen and I have something to discuss with you.”

  I think Mr. Nielsen is going to talk about the trip they’ve been planning to Mount Rushmore, but he looks at his wife, and she smiles at me, and I realize it’s something else, something bigger.

  “When you first came to Minnesota, you were given the name Dorothy,” she says. “Are you particularly fond of that name?”

  “Not particularly,” I say, unsure where this is going.

  “You know how much our Vivian meant to us, don’t you?” Mr. Nielsen says.

  I nod.

  “Well.” Mr. Nielsen’s hands are flat on the table. “It would mean a lot to us if you would take Vivian’s name. We consider you our daughter—not legally yet, but we are beginning to think of you that way. And we hope that you are beginning to think of us as your parents.”

  They look at me expectantly. I don’t know what to think. What I feel for the Nielsens—gratitude, respect, appreciation—isn’t the same as a child’s love for her parents, not quite; though what that love is, I’m not sure I can say. I am glad to be living with this kind couple, whose quiet, self-effacing manner I am coming to understand. I am grateful that they took me in. But I am also aware every day of how different I am from them. They are not my people, and never will be.

  I don’t know how I feel, either, about taking their daughter’s name. I don’t know if I can bear the weight of that burden.

  “Let’s not pressure her, Hank.” Turning to me, Mrs. Nielsen says, “Take the time you need, and let us know. You have a place in our home, whatever you decide.”

  Several days later, in the store stocking shelves in the canned food aisle, I hear a man’s voice I recognize but can’t place. I stack the remaining cans of