Sister Noon (4 page)

No one had asked Mrs. Pleasant into the parlor. Lizzie found her standing just inside the heavy oak door under the portrait of philanthropist Horace Hawes, with his brooding Lincolnesque looks. No one had offered to take her wrap, a bright purple shawl, which she nevertheless had removed and carried over one arm.

Lizzie Hayes had not kept Mrs. Pleasant waiting, but neither had she taken off her work apron. Mrs. Pleasant was better dressed. She wore a skirt of polished black alpaca, a shirtwaist with a white collar, gold gypsy hoops through her ears, and her usual outdated Quaker bonnet, purple with a wide brim. She noticed the apron at once; Lizzie saw her famous mismated eyes, one blue, one brown, flicker over it, but her facial expression did not change. Her skin was finely wrinkled, like crushed silk, and she smelled of lavender.

There were no courteous preliminaries. “I’ve brought you a girl,” Mrs. Pleasant said. She’d come to California forty years earlier with the miners, but never lost the southern syrup of her vowels. “Named Jenny Ijub. She’s just off a boat from Panama. Her mother took sick on the voyage and was buried at sea. When I ask how old she is, she holds up all five fingers. Quiet little thing. She doesn’t seem to know her father.”

One of her hands rested on the little girl’s hair. Mrs. Pleasant dipped her head as she talked, so her face was hidden by the bonnet brim. “I have my friends at the docks. I’m known to care for such cases.” As her face vanished, her voice grew softer, more confiding. She knew how to make white people comfortable.

She knew how to make them uncomfortable. Where had she really gotten the child? Lizzie felt the contrast between them. Mrs. Pleasant was tall, elegant, and spotless. Lizzie was short, dusty, fat as a toad. She was a person who rumpled, and not a person who rumpled attractively.

She cleared her throat. “We have a waiting list.” Lizzie would have said this to anyone. It was the simple truth. So many in need. “And I’d have to be certain of her age. She’s quite small. We don’t take children under four years.”

“I’ll have to find somewhere else, then.” Mrs. Pleasant smiled down at Lizzie. It was an understanding smile. Seventy-some years old and Mrs. Pleasant still had all her own splendid teeth. She stooped a little and aimed her smile farther down. “Don’t you worry, Jenny. We’ll find someone who wants you.”

Lizzie looked for the first time at the girl. She was dark-haired and sallow-skinned. She had sand on her
shoes and stockings, it was impossible to get to the Home without picking up sand, but was otherwise as clean as could be. Neatly and simply dressed. Hatless, though someone—Mrs. Pleasant?—had woven a bright bit of red ribbon into her hair. Her cheeks were flushed as if she were too warm, or embarrassed. She did not look up, but Lizzie imagined that if she could see the girl’s eyes they would be large and tragic. She held her back stiffly; you could deduce the eyes from that.

Lizzie hated saying no to anyone about anything. Saying no, however you disguised it, was a confession of your own limitations. Not only was it unhelpful, it was galling. She reached out and touched Jenny’s arm. “I have some discretion. Since she really has no one. We’ll find a bed somehow. Would you like to stay with us, Jenny?”

Jenny made no response. Her eyes were still lowered; she had one knuckle firmly hooked behind her front teeth, and her spare hand wrapped around the cloth of Mrs. Pleasant’s skirt. When Mrs. Pleasant was ready to leave, Jenny’s fingers would have to be pried apart.

“That’s lovely, then,” said Mrs. Pleasant. “Now I know she’ll have the best of care.”

“We might even find a family to take her. Be better if she had a bit of sparkle. Don’t put your fingers in your mouth, dear,” Lizzie said. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a silver bell. “This is how we call Matron,” she told Jenny. She rang the bell twice. “We have two Jennys already, but they are both much older than you. So we must call you Little Jenny. Shall we do that?”

The bell sounded very loud. Jenny’s fingers twisted inside Mrs. Pleasant’s skirt. Mrs. Pleasant knelt. She
pulled a violet-hemmed handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped Jenny’s mouth with it. She had the face of a grandmother. “Listen,” she said. “You must be brave now. Remember that I’m your friend. I’ll send you a present soon so you’ll see I don’t forget you, either.” Mrs. Pleasant said these things quietly, intimately. It was not for the matron to hear, but she arrived just in time to do so.

“I hope your present is something that can be shared,” the matron told Jenny as she took her away. “If you have things the others don’t, you can’t expect them not to mind.”

The matron was a fifty-year-old woman named Nell Harris. She had come to the Home as a charity case; she had stayed on as an employee. She had soft-cooked features and a shifting seascape for a body. Her bosom lay on the swell of her stomach, rising and falling dramatically with her breath. Her most defining characteristic was that no one had ever made a good first impression on her.

She took Jenny down to the kitchen and offered her a large slice of wholesome bread. “Mrs. Pleasant gave me cake,” Jenny told her. The kitchen counters were piled with dishes, half clean, half not. Two girls in aprons were washing; another was drying. That one smiled at Jenny and flicked her dishrag. The air was wet and warm and smelled of pork grease.

“And that’s all it takes to make you think she’s nice as pie. She gave you away pretty fast, didn’t she?” Nell said.

L
izzie Hayes went back upstairs to the cupola. Out the window was an unbroken view of sand dunes, loosely strewn with scrub, chaparral, and bunches of beach grass. A storm was coming. Far to the west, the clouds were black and piled solidly against one another like rocks in a cairn.

Straight beneath Lizzie the prow of Mrs. Pleasant’s bonnet cut through the wind toward her carriage. Her purple wrap was around her shoulders and the ends of her bonnet ribbons whipped about her head. Mrs. Pleasant walked away quickly, like someone who had someplace to go.

The foghorn blew in the distance. Gulls streamed inland, shrieking, and the wind spun the ghosts of sand castles into the air. Lizzie returned to her box of donated books. Suddenly, unjustly, she found herself resenting
them. What did such donations do but make more work for the staff? Nothing arrived in good shape; everything needed to be sorted and cleaned and mended.

She blew the dust off
The Good Child’s Picture Book.
The author had the improbable name of Mrs. Lovechild. Lizzie opened to a woodcut of two girls picnicking together in an English garden. One of them had dark hair, the other light. They wore sun hats, which circled their heads like the auras of medieval saints, but tied in bows on the side. The flowers were as large as the girls’ faces.

Lizzie brought the picture closer. The book had an odd smell, like fermented fruit. The title page had been torn out, but a handwritten message on the flyleaf remained. “To my darlingest Mitzy,” it read. “On the occasion of her fourth birthday. Hope you feel better soon! Your Uncle Beau.” The book was probably filled with infectious germs.

Lizzie Hayes was an easy person to underestimate. Slow to act, she often appeared indecisive, but once she’d fixed on a course, it was fixed. She was hard to dissuade and hard to intimidate.

As a child she’d been passive and biddable. “So dependable. Quite beyond her years,” her mother had said on those frequent occasions when Lizzie did as she’d been told. But just beneath this tractable surface lay romance and rebellion. She loved to read, engaging books with such intensity that her parents had allowed only the dullest of them, and then curtailed the time she spent with those. Her mother was quick to spot the symptoms of overstimulation, and Lizzie had spent many hours lying in bed, sentenced to absolute inactivity until she could be calm again.

It was an ill-conceived punishment. With everything but her imagination forbidden to her, Lizzie’s reveries grew ever more fevered. She could lie without moving for hours in the semblance of obedience, and all the while an unacceptable cascade of pirates, prophets, and Indians pounded through her mind.

She was not trusted with fairy tales until she was sixteen years old; they were so full of murder and mayhem. She was not trusted with poetry at all, not since, at the age of six, she had wept bitterly while listening to Sir Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie.” She had made it only as far as the second stanza.

Sermons could have the same effect. When the Reverend Paul Clarkson came to luncheon, her mother was forced, over a nice lobster bisque, to suggest a little less exaltation on Sundays. “For a woman, religion should be a steadying thing,” she’d suggested, and the reverend, who had just burned his mouth on his soup and was taking great gulps of cold water medicinally, had not disagreed.

In adolescence, Lizzie had been prone to the type of satisfying melancholia that expresses itself in diets and music. “I’m not raising any saints,” her mother had said one morning when Lizzie was irritating her by fasting. She stood at the doorway to Lizzie’s bedroom, carrying a breakfast of steak and peas, and then stayed to watch each
bite. In our modern age, she informed Lizzie, extravagant holiness is ill mannered as well as ill advised. “The world is as the world is,” she was fond of saying. “And just as God made it. You’re ungrateful to Him when you wish it otherwise.”

Lizzie’s mother knew that she hated peas. Lizzie ate them all silently, offered them to God, one by one, as a form of fleshly mortification.

As she’d aged Lizzie’s inner and outer aspects grew increasingly ill matched. Her breathless, romantic imagination, charming in a young woman, and delightful in a beautiful young woman, was entirely ridiculous in someone short, fat, and well past her middle age. Lizzie was sharp enough to know this, and since there was no way to keep the outer woman private, she generally kept the inner woman so.

The outer woman: Often when she’d misbehaved, her mother would march her to the dressing room mirror to look at herself. “That’s what a bad girl looks like!” her mother would say, her own sagging eyes floating behind the bad girl’s head, as if the mere sight of Lizzie’s face was a punishment. (As a consequence, Lizzie didn’t like mirrors much. When she was finally allowed to read the story of Snow White, she’d instantly understood that the mirror was the real villain of the piece. “Why, I couldn’t possibly choose between two such beautiful women,” is what the mirror would have said if it hadn’t been bent on blood.)

“You have only the beauty of youth,” her father had told her when her refusal to marry his good friend, Dr. Beecher, had made him angry enough to be honest. “I’m not a fussy man,” Paul Burbank had said on the occasion of
her second proposal. “
You
won’t be expecting romance,” Christopher Ludlow had said on the occasion of her third.

Lizzie remembered these things partly because they’d hurt, but mainly because for most of her life her appearance had been so rarely commented on.

The inner woman: And yet, as far back as Lizzie could remember, she had suffered from a kind of self-importance that expressed itself as the conviction that every move she made was watched. This made a certain sense among ladies out in society, where the mere whisper of eccentricity could cost a reputation, and among the religious, since God was interested, exacting, and everywhere. Lizzie was both out and devout.

Even so, her conviction was pronounced. Add to society and God that special circumstance familiar to every passionate reader: An unseen narrator hovered somewhere behind Lizzie, marking her every move.

And
then
add the fact that for most of her life Lizzie had been haunted by a photograph of an angel in a christening gown. Her mother had made the picture frame herself, an intricate, heartbroken oval of ribbon roses and wax lilies encircling the likeness of Lizzie’s brother, Edward. Lizzie was five years old when Edward was born. He’d lived less than three weeks and died, sinless, of inanition. Lizzie hardly remembered him alive.

Dead, he’d been inescapable. His picture hung first in the nursery and later in her bedroom. “To watch over you,” Lizzie’s mother had said. It was the sort of misunderstanding Lizzie and her mother were likely to have. Eventually Lizzie knew the difference between watching someone and watching over someone. Eventually she
understood that her mother had intended this as a comfort. But by the time she’d made the distinction, Edward was a pale, palpable, disapproving presence who could be neither banished nor appeased.

Nell Harris appeared, startling Lizzie with her large pudding face rising over the top edge of the book. “She’s in the kitchen, having a bite now,” Nell said. “I’m afraid she looks to be a fussy eater. So I’m to squeeze a bed in for her somewhere?” Everything about her tone and posture expressed reproach. We have a waiting list, she might as well have said. We have no beds. We have no money. We have standards. Deciding who we take in is not your job.

“She’s a friendless child,” said Lizzie. “With a father somewhere. And unless I miss my guess, a wealthy father. Out of wedlock, of course. But quite, quite wealthy. Mrs. Pleasant wouldn’t bother, otherwise.”

“So you don’t think that the child might be colored?” Nell asked.

The idea had been so far from Lizzie’s thoughts as to shock her now. She responded slowly. “There’s nothing of the colored in her face.”

“You can’t go by that. Mammy Pleasant herself fooled a lot of people for a long time, if the stories are true. Though I never credited them myself. You saw, she’s black as a Mussulman. But if this child comes out of the Home, if she’s adopted somewhere, no one is going to question her. They’ll just take her as white. It will be as if we’ve said so.”

Lizzie set the book down and wiped her hands on her apron while she thought this through. Lizzie Hayes believed it was better to be white than colored, believed it so absolutely that this was not the part she thought about. But
within these confines, she was a well-intentioned woman. She genuinely didn’t care what or who Jenny was. Lizzie wanted to be an influence for good in the world. If she could take in a motherless colored girl and turn her out white and adopted, she would count it a good day’s work.