Orphan Train (28 page)

I slide two dollar bills across the desk. “I appreciate it.”

With his fingertips the clerk pulls the money toward him.

I wave at Dutchy and he opens the door, salutes the clerk, and follows me into the elevator.

I
N THE STRANGE
,
SHADOWED LIGHTING OF MY SMALL ROOM
D
UTCHY
takes off his belt and dress shirt and hangs them over the only chair. He stretches out on the bed in his undershirt and trousers, his back against the wall, and I lean against him, feeling his body curve around mine. His warm breath is on my neck, his arm on my waist. I wonder for a moment if he’ll kiss me. I want him to.

“How can this be?” he murmurs. “It isn’t possible. And yet I’ve dreamed of it. Have you?”

I don’t know what to say. I never dared to imagine that I’d see him again. In my experience, when you lose somebody you care about, they stay gone.

“What’s the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?” I ask.

“Seeing you again.”

Smiling, I push back against his chest. “Besides that.”

“Meeting you the first time.”

We both laugh. “Besides that.”

“Hmm, besides that,” he muses, his lips on my shoulder. “Is there anything besides that?” He pulls me close, his hand cupping my hip bone. And though I’ve never done anything like this before—have barely ever been alone with a man, certainly not a man in his undershirt—I’m not nervous. When he kisses me, my whole body hums.

A few minutes later, he says, “I guess the best thing was finding out that I was good at something—at playing the piano. I was such a shell of a person. I had no confidence. Playing the piano gave me a place in the world. And . . . it was something I could do when I was angry or upset, or even happy. It was a way to express my feelings when I didn’t even know what they were.” He laughs a little. “Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“What about you? What’s your best thing?”

I don’t know why I asked him this question, since I don’t have an answer myself. I slide up so I am sitting at the head of the narrow bed with my feet tucked under me. As Dutchy rearranges himself with his back against the wall on the other end, words tumble from my mouth. I tell him about my loneliness and hunger at the Byrnes’, the abject misery of the Grotes’. I tell him about how grateful I am to the Nielsens, and also how tamped down I sometimes feel with them.

Dutchy tells me what happened to him after he left the Grange Hall. Life with the farmer and his wife was as bad as he’d feared. They made him sleep on hay bales in the barn and beat him if he complained. His ribs were fractured in a haying accident and they never called a doctor. He lived with them for three months, finally running away when the farmer woke him with a beating one morning because a raccoon got into the chicken coop. In pain, half starved, with a tapeworm and an eye infection, he collapsed on the road to town and was taken to the infirmary by a kindly widow.

But the farmer convinced the authorities that Dutchy was a juvenile delinquent who needed a firm hand, and Dutchy was returned to him. He ran away twice more—the second time in a blizzard, when it was a miracle he didn’t freeze to death. Running into a neighbor’s clothesline saved his life. The neighbor found him in his barn the following morning and made a deal with the farmer to trade Dutchy for a pig.

“A pig?” I say.

“I’m sure he thought it a worthy trade. That pig was massive.”

This farmer, a widower named Karl Maynard whose son and daughter were grown, gave him chores to do, but also sent him to school. And when Dutchy showed an interest in the dusty upright piano the widower’s wife used to play, he got it tuned and found a teacher to come to the farm to give him lessons.

When he was eighteen, Dutchy moved to Minneapolis, where he took any work he could find playing piano in bands and bars. “Maynard wanted me to take over the farm, but I knew I wasn’t cut out for it,” he says. “Honestly, I was grateful to have a skill I could use. And to live on my own. It’s a relief to be an adult.”

I hadn’t thought about it like this, but he’s right—it is a relief.

He reaches over and touches my necklace. “You still have it. That gives me faith.”

“Faith in what?”

“God, I suppose. No, I don’t know. Survival.”

As light begins to seep through the darkness outside the window, around 5:00
A.M
., he tells me that he’s playing the organ in the Episcopal Church on Banner Street at the eight o’clock service.

“Do you want to stay till then?” I ask.

“Do you want me to?”

“What do you think?”

He stretches out beside the wall and pulls me toward him, curving his body around mine again, his arm tucked under my waist. As I lie there, matching my breathing to his, I can tell the moment when he lapses into sleep. I inhale the musk of his aftershave, a whiff of hair oil. I reach for his hand and grasp his long fingers and lace them through mine, thinking about the fateful steps that led me to him. If I hadn’t come on this trip. If I’d had something to eat. If Richard had taken us to a different bar. . . . There are so many ways to play this game. Still, I can’t help but think that everything I’ve been through has led to this. If I hadn’t been chosen by the Byrnes, I wouldn’t have ended up with the Grotes and met Miss Larsen. If Miss Larsen hadn’t brought me to Mrs. Murphy, I never would’ve met the Nielsens. And if I weren’t living with the Nielsens and attending college with Lil and Em, I would never have come to Minneapolis for the night—and probably never would have seen Dutchy again.

My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate.

“S
O
?” L
IL DEMANDS
. “W
HAT HAPPENED
?”

We’re on our way back to Hemingford, with Em stretched out and groaning on the backseat, wearing dark glasses. Her face has a greenish tint.

I am determined not to give anything away. “Nothing happened. What happened with you?”

“Don’t change the subject, missy,” Lil says. “How’d you know that guy, anyway?”

I’ve already thought about an answer. “He’s come into the store a few times.”

Lil is skeptical. “What would he be doing in Hemingford?”

“He sells pianos.”

“Humph,” she says, clearly unconvinced. “Well, you two seemed to hit it off.”

I shrug. “He’s nice enough.”

“How much money do piano players make, anyway?” Em says from the back.

I want to tell her to shut up. Instead I take a deep breath and say, breezily, “Who knows? It’s not like I’m going to marry him or anything.”

Ten months later, after recounting this exchange to two dozen wedding guests in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church, Lil raises her glass in a toast. “To Vivian and Luke Maynard,” she says. “May they always make beautiful music together.”

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1940–1943

In front of other people I call him Luke, but he’ll always be Dutchy to me.
He calls me Viv—it sounds a bit like Niamh, he says.

We decide that we’ll live in Hemingford so I can run the store. We’ll rent a small bungalow on a side street several blocks from the Nielsens, four rooms downstairs and one up. As it happens—with, perhaps, a little help from Mr. Nielsen, who may have mentioned something to the superintendent at a Rotary meeting—the Hemingford School is looking for a music teacher. Dutchy also keeps his weekend gig at the Grand in Minneapolis, and I go in with him on Friday and Saturday nights to have dinner and hear him play. On Sundays, now, he plays the organ at Grace Lutheran, replacing the lead-footed organist who was persuaded it was time to retire.

When I told Mrs. Nielsen that Dutchy had asked me to marry him, she frowned. “I thought you said you wanted nothing to do with marriage,” she said. “You’re only twenty. What about your degree?”

“What about it?” I said. “It’s a ring on my finger, not a pair of handcuffs.”

“Most men want their wives to stay home.”

When I related this conversation to Dutchy, he laughed. “Of course you’ll get your degree. Those tax laws are complicated!”

Dutchy and I are about as opposite as two people can be. I am practical and circumspect; he is impulsive and direct. I’m accustomed to getting up before the sun rises; he pulls me back to bed. He has no head at all for math, so in addition to keeping the books at the store, I balance our accounts at home and pay our taxes. Before I met him, I could count on one hand the times I’d had a drink; he likes a cocktail every night, says it relaxes him and will relax me, too. He is handy with a hammer and nail from his experience on the farms, but he often leaves projects half finished—storm windows stacked in a corner while snow rages outside, a leaky faucet disemboweled, its parts all over the floor.

“I can’t believe I found you,” he tells me over and over, and I can’t believe it either. It’s as if a piece of my past has come to life, and with it all the feelings I fought to keep down—my grief at losing so much, at having no one to tell, at keeping so much hidden. Dutchy was there. He knows who I was. I don’t have to pretend.

We lie in bed longer than I am used to on Saturday mornings—the store doesn’t open until ten, and there’s nowhere Dutchy has to be. I make coffee in the kitchen and bring two steaming mugs back to bed, and we spend hours together in the soft early light. I am delirious with longing and the fulfillment of that longing, the desire to touch his warm skin, trace the sinew and muscle just under the surface, pulsing with life. I nestle in his arms, in the nooks of his knees, his body bowed around mine, his breath on my neck, fingers tracing my outline. I have never felt like this—slow-witted and languorous, dreamy, absentminded, forgetful, focused only on each moment as it comes.

When Dutchy lived on the streets, he never felt as alone, he tells me, as he did growing up in Minnesota. In New York the boys were always playing practical jokes on each other and pooling their food and clothes. He misses the press of people, the noise and chaos, black Model Ts rattling along the cobblestones, the treacly smell of street vendors’ peanuts roasting in sugar.

“What about you—do you ever wish you could go back?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Our life was so hard. I don’t have many happy memories of that place.”

He pulls me close, runs his fingers along the soft white underbelly of my forearm. “Were your parents ever happy, do you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger, he says, “With you I’d be happy anywhere.”

Though it’s just the kind of thing he says, I believe that it’s true. And I know, with the newfound clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstance.

O
N A MILD AFTERNOON IN EARLY
D
ECEMBER
I
AM AT THE STORE
going over inventory orders with Margaret, the sharp-eyed accounts manager. Packing receipts and forms are all over the floor; I’m trying to decide whether to order more ladies’ trousers than last year, and looking at the popular styles in the catalog as well as
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar.
The radio is on low; swing music is playing, and then Margaret holds her hand up and says, “Wait. Did you hear that?” She hurries over to the radio and adjusts the dial.

“Repeat: this is a special report. President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. The attack of the Japanese has also been made on all naval and military ‘activities’ on the island of Oahu. Casualty numbers are unknown.”

And like that, everything changes.

A few weeks later, Lil comes into the store to see me, her eyes red-rimmed, tears staining her cheeks. “Richard shipped out yesterday, and I don’t even know where he’s going. They just gave him a numbered mailing address that doesn’t tell me anything.” Sobbing into a crumpled white handkerchief, she says, “I thought this stupid war was supposed to be over by now. Why does
my
fiancé have to go?” When I hug her, she clings to my shoulder.

Wherever you look are posters encouraging sacrifice and support for the war effort. Many items are rationed—meat, cheese, butter, lard, coffee, sugar, silk, nylon, shoes; our entire way of business changes as we work with those flimsy blue booklets. We learn to make change for ration stamps, giving red point tokens as change for red stamps (for meat and butter) and blue point tokens for blue stamps (processed foods). The tokens are made of compressed wood fiber, the size of dimes.

In the store we collect ladies’ lightly used stockings for use in parachutes and ropes, and tin and steel for scrap and metal drives. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” is constantly on the radio. I shift our purchasing to reflect the mood, ordering gift cards and blue onionskin airmail letter forms by the gross, dozens of American flags in all sizes, beef jerky, warm socks, decks of playing cards to go in care packages to ship overseas. Our stock boys shovel driveways and deliver groceries and packages.

Boys from my graduating class are signing up and shipping out, and every week there’s a farewell potluck dinner in a church basement or the lobby of the Roxy or in someone’s home. Judy Smith’s boyfriend, Douglas, is one of the first. The day he turns eighteen he goes down to the recuiter’s office and presents himself for service. Hotheaded Tom Price is next. When I run into him on the street before he leaves, he tells me that there’s no downside—the war’s an open door to travel and adventure, with a good bunch of guys to mess around with and a salary. We don’t talk about the danger—but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a superhero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.

Fully a quarter of the boys from my class volunteer. And when the draft begins, more and more pack up to leave. I feel sorry for the boys with flat feet or severe asthma or partial deafness who I see in the store after their buddies are gone, aimlessly wandering the aisles. They seem lost in their ordinary civilian clothes.