Part I
Minneapolis, October 1894
1ABBY
The poor young woman, the one everyone would take to calling the “ghost girl,” or worse, in a matter of weeks, found her way to the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers by walking the railroad tracks. Later, this would be one of the things that made the other girls suspicious. Could someone in her condition—if she really was in said condition—traipse at least five miles in the sticky humidity of a growing thunderstorm, in a heavy satin gown, no less?
In Abby’s view, the new arrival’s trek didn’t imply dishonesty. It suggested desperation.
The thunderstorm, with all the crackling friction it gathered in the air and the impressive black anvil cloud over southern Minneapolis, ended up petering out into nearly nothing: just one bright streak of lightning at around three that Sunday afternoon, followed by a powder-keg boom.
Abby Mendenhall, treasurer and board member of the Sisterhood of Bethany, paid a railway switch operator to watch the comings and goings of the First Avenue red-light district and report back to her—which brothel was the current mayor’s favorite, which madams were trading girls down the river to St. Paul, who’d been raided by the police. Later, the switch operator told her he’d seen what he called a banshee picking her way over the railroad tracks about ten minutes before the crack of thunder. He had shouted at the girl to watch herself. He was Catholic, an immigrant from one of the Slavic countries. He’d crossed himself when she turned, and he saw her face.
“But I didn’t see no face,” he reported to Abby, his hands trembling. “She looked at me, and it seemed—there was no face there. Or, as soon as I saw it, I forgot it. All I remember is she wore purple.”
Abel Stevens, who owned a small dairy barn just around the corner from the Bethany Home, on East Lake, saw a waif coming toward him at the instant when veins of lightning split the sky. He’d known immediately something was wrong—she wore no hat or gloves, and her hair hung ragged and loose. Her skin glowed as pale as the lightning, as if something had scared the color from it. Abel had wanted to help her, but his wife stood beside him on the curb as they emptied buckets of slop. His eyes had met his wife’s. Both knew what that garish purple gown meant. His wife splashed her bucket violently, drenching the girl’s high-heeled boots as she passed them. Then—boom—the thunder. Stevens flinched. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.
As for Abby, she’d been in the Bethany Home’s parlor with Mrs. Van Cleve and the two male callers when the storm made its one announcement. She’d delayed her tea until three so that she could accommodate these two fancy gentlemen in their brightly patterned waistcoats, the gold chains of their pocket watches gleaming.
Wealth, she thought as she stirred her tea. Something she saw little of in her early years here, when the streets were no more than rutted logging routes and the mighty waterfall had been clogged with timber. There was still very little established wealth here, not like in the bigger, older cities; any Minneapolis means had traveled from New England. To see very young, Minnesota-born men wearing boastful watch chains both annoyed and enticed her. She’d been the treasurer of the Bethany Home since they were in short pants.
It irritated her more than it should to still have to grovel for donations, but this was probably the Lord’s way of keeping her humble.
“A hundred dollars apiece would be wonderful,” she told the two young ones, trying to sound grandmotherly. She was sixty-three: old enough to be their mother, at least.
“A generous sum,” Mrs. Van Cleve—Charlotte, Abby’s friend and another board member—said in her vociferous, off-key voice, her ear horn balanced in her lap. “I assume you’ll be making your contributions in…”
“Are banknotes acceptable?” the man on the left said, the one without any facial hair. His smooth cheeks and bright hazel eyes made him seem as if he might be scarcely out of sailor suits. He’d been nosing about since he arrived, peering upstairs from the foyer, stooping to inspect the brass plates on the parlor artwork. Men tended to snoop when they were allowed entry to the Bethany Home, especially the youthful, eager ones. “We have gold to back it up, if you don’t trust greenbacks. Mr. Hayward and I are in fine shape despite the Panic. We didn’t invest heavily in railroads.”
“Or in Argentina,” the other man added, with a laugh. This one seemed a bit older, in his early or middle thirties, with a substantial mustache. His eyes held Abby’s for a bit too long, then shifted away.
“Gold is preferable,” Abby replied. The men turned those bland smiles toward her, appraising her appearance: her silver hair, her plain black dress. Ah, she could see them thinking, a Quaker. How dull her paltry life must be.
“But we will accept banknotes,” she added in a hurry, hoping they’d still offer gold. They had to know, didn’t they, that most banks had become unreliable? It wasn’t just railroads and Argentine investments. The price of wheat had collapsed in the past year, as well as silver. The number of men walking around covered in flour dust—mark of the well employed—had plummeted as the mills let laborers go. The change in fortunes had Abby worried. Where did men take out their frustrations in times of trouble?
“We’ll take any donation,” Charlotte chimed in. “We aren’t affiliated with a church, like the Home of the Good Shepherd in St. Paul, so we receive no tithings.”
“Which allows us to run this place a bit differently,” Abby added. She wanted to say more but knew she shouldn’t. She hoped her weighted expression hinted at what was rumored to happen inside the Home of the Good Shepherd and its laundry.
The man with the mustache sneezed, picked up one of their best linen napkins from
the sideboard and blew his nose on it, then dropped it on the embroidered settee. Abby’s and Charlotte’s eyes met. They might not have to answer to any priest or bishop, but they still had to suffer fools.
“What of the fines you collect from the city?” his friend asked. “Shouldn’t they—”
“We do, however, collect two-thirds of the fines the city imposes on prostitutes and madams,” Charlotte continued, as if she hadn’t heard his question. Abby took a sip of Ceylon and hid her smile in her teacup. Impossible to tell, sometimes, whether Charlotte hadn’t heard someone, or if she simply wanted to interrupt.
“Doesn’t that compromise your mission?” the man pressed Charlotte, a little smile lifting one side of his mouth. “You want an end to the social evil, yet you’re reliant on its continuation for your survival.”
“Our mission isn’t confined to ending the ‘social evil,’ ” Abby replied. The edges of her ears had grown hot. “It’s also to house, feed, and care for any unwed mother, then send her on her way with the means to support herself.”
The man grinned. “You’re saying there’s always going to be gals getting themselves in trouble, whether they’re sporting women or not.”
Abby looked to Charlotte, who set down her ear horn. “We’re saying that if we could persuade the city to impose the fines on men—and it’s four of every five men, mind you, who have visited a brothel at least once—instead of the girls, we would.”
The room went blue-white with lightning. God Himself, putting an exclamation point on Charlotte’s sentence. In the instant when their faces were blanched with fire from heaven, the two men exchanged a glance. Thinking, perhaps, what Abby was: that Charlotte could have exaggerated that statistic to make her point. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Anyhow,” the younger man said smoothly, “our interest is primarily in you.”
BOOM. The belated thunder rattled the house, vibrating the windows.
“In us?” Abby replied.
“All of you, the Sisterhood of Bethany. You built this place from the ground up, isn’t that a fact? And you command a surprising level of political influence.” He cleared his throat, perhaps waiting for them to thank him for the compliment. “We’re here because we’re in favor of Mr. Pratt’s campaign for mayor. Can we count on your husbands’ votes for Pratt in the election, a week from next Tuesday?”
Abby met Charlotte’s eyes again. She would have been astonished if she hadn’t heard this many times before: a request for the neck of the household
to make the head turn.
“I would ask my husband who he plans to vote for,” Charlotte said, gruffly, holding up her ear horn, “but, you see, I can’t very well hear his reply.”
Abby snickered into her handkerchief, then remembered they were supposed to be courting donations. “Sirs, of course our husbands shall vote for Mr. Pratt.”
“I serve with him on the school board,” added Charlotte. “Good man. Besides, you wouldn’t expect us to back a Democrat, would you?”
The men nodded, though they still seemed oddly unsatisfied. They rubbed their palms on their trousers.
At last, here was the matron, Miss Rhoades, with the refreshments. She set a tray of tartlets next to the Chinese teapot: butternut tassies, made with Gold Medal flour milled right in Minneapolis.
Miss Rhoades took a deft step backward toward Abby’s chair. Her fingers tapped Abby’s arm. Once, twice, with a firm pressure.
Abby reached for her hand. “Does something require my attention?”
Miss Rhoades shrugged, a casual gesture belied by the urgent grip of her fingers. “Cook has a question for you, ma’am, in the kitchen.”
“Please excuse me,” Abby said, rising with Miss Rhoades’s assistance.
The men leapt up. “Is anything the matter?” the younger one asked.
“No, no,” Abby said, indicating that he should sit down at once. “I’m wanted in the kitchen, that’s all. It shan’t take more than a minute.”
He sat down, looking disappointed. Abby could hear Charlotte begin squawking as the parlor door shut behind her, “Now, about your donations…”
Once she was in the hallway, Abby could hear a muffled commotion coming from the kitchen. Pearl, one of the cook’s apprentices, stood waiting for them beside the cellar steps. She was about twenty years old, willowy, with hair the color of wildflower honey. Overly aware of the admiration she attracted, a trait Abby had tried, gently, to iron out.
“Cook’s at her wits’ end. Imagine, arriving unannounced—”
“Shh. Hold your peace, Pearl,” Abby whispered.
They followed the stairs down to the cellar, where the kitchen, baths, and inmates’ dining room were, and went quickly through the chilled, damp hallway. The polished-wood scent of the first floor gave way to basement
mustiness. Pearl led the way into the kitchen, eager, as was Pearl’s custom, to get to the epicenter of trouble.
Crouched near the back door of the kitchen was a wet lump of a person, tangled dark hair and ruined purple silk, two pale hands with fingers interlocked, cradling the back of its neck, head down. Mary O’Rourke, whom the girls called Cook, had her foot wedged between the figure and a crate of acorn squash, yelling and trying to protect the produce from those filthy skirts. Miss Rhoades went to crouch in front of the girl, one hand on her shoulder, the other lifting a handkerchief to her own face, presumably to cover a smell. As Abby grew closer, she saw scabbed gashes on the girl’s bare hands, then caught the scent in the air: urine.
“Oh,” Abby said, more an intake of breath than a word. “Oh my.”
“She’s soiled herself !” Cook moaned. “Right here on me clean floor.”
Pearl stifled a laugh. Miss Rhoades glared up at Cook, then turned back to the stranger. “My dear, please…” She tried prying the girl’s fingers apart. “We’d like to help you, if you’ll only let us clean you up.”
Abby knelt as well. An unannounced arrival wasn’t completely unheard of; Abby made sure to spread word about the home when she visited taverns, the jail, the court, the workhouse. Her network—the uncorrupt policemen; the madams she’d helped avoid prison, or bury their unfortunate dead; the boxcar operators who saw girls streaming in from the east and out toward the west—knew what to whisper if they sensed a girl was in trouble: The Bethany Home will take you in.
“You’re safe here,” she told the stranger in a firm, clear voice. “There’s a bed for you if you need it, friend.”
The girl’s shoulders stopped trembling at “friend.” Amazing how the word, so common and ordinary among those who practiced plain speech, could lift the spirits of people unfamiliar with the custom. Slowly, the girl unlaced her fingers and picked up her head.
Pearl gasped. Cook
had gone quiet. Abby refused to react. A face was a face, just like any other, no matter how beautiful or unusual it might be. God had made this face just as He’d made all the rest. She stared calmly into the girl’s eyes, the color of a churning sea, and asked her name. The girl didn’t answer.
“Choose a name to use while you’re here,” Abby told her. “Not your own. We can mark your birth name in our register later, if you’re willing to share. Come, now. Choose a name to hide behind, if you need.”
Evidently, the girl had heard; she pursed her lips, thinking. Her cheekbones shone, pink and wide, despite the pallor of her skin. Light freckles dotted her nose and eyelids.
“Deaf, ma’am?” Miss Rhoades asked.
“I don’t think so.” Abby put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “What brought you here?” She lowered her voice. “Is a child on the way?”
The girl’s injured hands went to her stomach. She gave a small nod.
“Miss Rhoades,” Abby said, turning back to the matron, “why don’t you suggest a name for her?”
Miss Rhoades had lowered the handkerchief from her nose. “How about Faith? We haven’t had a Faith here in a while, ma’am.”
Again, Pearl snickered. Faith, in a harlot’s dress. Abby threw her a sharp glare, and she stopped.
“Faith, then. Will that do?” Abby asked. “How about Faith Johnson?”
The strange girl nodded.
“Miss Rhoades can explain the rules of the house in detail,” Abby continued. “Expectant mothers are contracted to stay one year, regardless of when the baby arrives. During this time, you’ll learn a skill—in the kitchen, or with the seamstress or laundress. That’ll help you get on your feet when you leave. Some girls stay in the city, some go west to do farmwork and get away from old acquaintances. And some are married right here in the chapel.”
Faith stared at the floor and rubbed her arms. Nothing Abby had just said seemed to entice or encourage her; she appeared miserable.
“You may keep the child,” Miss Rhoades said gently, “or we can help with an adoption placement when the time comes.”
Faith’s eyes widened, but, again, she didn’t respond.
Abby turned to the rest of the women. “Now that’s done, it’s time to get our new arrival clean and clothed. Pearl, there’s an empty bed in your room, is that correct?”
Pearl wrinkled her pretty nose. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Help Miss Rhoades take Faith upstairs. She can be your roommate.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they both said, Miss Rhoades with greater enthusiasm, and each of them reached for one of Faith’s upper arms to lift her from the floor. As she stood, wobbling, something fell from her skirts, a little sachet. It hit the floor with a metal thump, and Faith’s eyes met Abby’s, full of meaning.
An ocean, hidden there in those curious eyes. Abby felt cold suddenly, overwhelmed with the urge to open the door and send this girl back up the cellar steps. Something about her did not seem right. Away, away with her.
But no. The girl had been delivered to her doorstep, and now she was Abby’s to keep.
“Mrs. Mendenhall?” Miss Rhoades touched Abby’s arm.
“Leave us, please,” Abby said. “Leave Faith with me for a moment.”
Once they were gone, Abby reached down to the floor, her fingers outstretched toward the little velvet pouch, but Faith got in front of her and crawled on her knees to pick it up. Being alone with Abby had transformed her. She almost looked eager. She took Abby’s hand and placed the pouch inside, then curled Abby’s fingers around it.
Abby felt ill. She didn’t need to open it to know what was inside. Gold bullion coins. The crinkling of paper between her fingers, too: several greenbacks. She didn’t want to know where or how Faith had acquired this bounty. Her urge to send Faith away intensified.
“You don’t need to pay to stay here, friend,” she said softly.
Faith nodded, but she pushed the bag of money back toward Abby’s chest, and when Abby tried refusing, she shook it. The gold clinked. Keep this for me, she seemed to ask. Somehow, Abby heard a voice in her head, even though the girl’s blanched lips did not move. Her face truly was astoundingly lovely, if unsettled and deathly pale.
“Very well, very well.” Abby slid the pouch inside her pocket. No one could know about this, not Charlotte, not Euphemia Overlock or anyone else on the board. Abby would figure out what to do with it later.
The girl was shivering now, and yawning; Abby shouted for the matron. Miss Rhoades came back in, followed, unfortunately, by Pearl, who buzzed through the kitchen’s swinging door like a mosquito in summer, hungry for blood.
“That’ll be all, Pearl,” Abby said sharply. When Pearl had gone, sulking, Abby lowered her voice. “Beth, I’ve changed my mind. Is May Lombard still bunking alone?”
Miss Rhoades chewed her thin lower lip. “Well, yes, but—”
“Take Faith to May’s room.” Better May than Pearl. May might recoil at Faith’s appearance, but she would ask no questions. May talked too much on her own to interrogate a roommate. That, and her year was up; she was due to leave. “Please, help Faith change into a clean chemise and dress. See that there are fresh linens on the bed.”
“Yes, Mrs. Mendenhall.” Miss Rhoades hesitated, scratching the hair behind her ear
It had grayed since Abby had hired her, fading from rich chestnut to the color of sun-bleached cedar.
“Funny,” said Miss Rhoades, “don’t you think Faith looks a little like Delia did?”
“No, I do not,” Abby replied. “Off to the linens you go, Miss Rhoades.”
She felt drained of energy when she reached the foyer to find the clean-shaven man with his hand on the doorknob of the matron’s quarters. “Can I help you?” she asked, her tone sharp.
“I thought I might see the library,” he replied. “Or the living room—is that in here?”
She took him by the arm and led him back to the reception room. “I’m afraid the library is for the inmates, dear sir. We must respect their privacy.”
They found his friend sitting glaze-eyed as Charlotte held forth on temperance. He rose from his seat when Abby came in. The men waited for her to take her chair, but she didn’t.
“Thank you both, very kindly, for paying us a visit,” Abby told them. “We happen to have donation envelopes right here in the basket on the hearth.”
Their smiles faded. “Can’t we have a tour?” asked the man with the mustache.
“We’re being exceedingly generous,” his friend added. “You should at least vouchsafe to us a peek at the innards of this place. Make sure our money’s well spent.”
Abby did her best to maintain a polite visage. “We are not a museum, sirs.”
With a harrumph, the older one went to the mantel and took two envelopes, then handed one to his friend. Both took out their billfolds and stuffed all the banknotes they had in them into the envelopes, then handed them to Abby. She and Charlotte thanked the men as they went, muttering and fussing, to the door. They turned and bade the women a polite, if hasty, adieu.
Abby and Charlotte watched them stride toward their carriage, talking animatedly. At one point they stopped—the older one gesticulating toward the house, the younger listening with arms crossed. Then they left.
Charlotte shook her head. “I thought you might ask for their addresses, so we could include them in the monthly solicitations.”
“They wouldn’t have contributed a penny more,” Abby replied, watching their driver prod the horse, who’d stalled on the roadway. “All they wanted was a glimpse at the girls.” She exhaled, thinking how close they’d been to witnessing a real spectacle.
The maid had already come with Charlotte’s wrap. Her coachman would be bringing
round the barouche. Mrs. Van Cleve was somewhat famous, despite her age and sex, and was frequently pulled in many different directions: public lectures, philanthropic events, school board meetings. Unlike Abby, who, as treasurer, paid several visits a week to the home and had to keep track of everything from the store of coal in the coffer to the need for new bedsteads.
Charlotte grasped Abby’s sleeve. Her milky eyes hovered somewhere around Abby’s forehead. “I trust you know what’s best, Mrs. Mendenhall.”
Abby patted her shoulder. “Thank you, my friend.” Faith’s pouch felt heavy in Abby’s pocket. She waited until Charlotte had gone to finish her reply: “I hope you’re right.”
2MAY
Someone to care for. Someone who needed her. It was all May Lombard had ever wanted, though in her dreams her dependents took the form of a doting husband and an array of children, not a bedraggled, silent wretch who’d crawled here from God knows where.
The afternoon Faith arrived to take over half her room, May had found a spare moment to work on her embroidery, a cheroot cigar case, which she sat busily embellishing with a pair of mallard ducks. She had given careful thought to the design: subtly romantic—a drake and a hen with wings crossed—yet masculine enough so that Hal would be well pleased.
May still found it bewildering that she’d ended up here, at the Bethany Home, among girls with all manner of tragic backgrounds and circumstances. Her own trouble had started in the most honest way possible. Her late father, who made what he proclaimed were the finest leather shoes in the Midwest, had chosen the youngest son of their closest neighbors, the Riccis (of Ricci & Sons’ restaurants, known for their risotto and kidneys), for her to marry. May and the boy, Lorenzo, had fallen head over heels for each other. Enzo, she called him. They were good Catholics, chaste, but they’d given in to passion one humid night after a parish festival. Everyone had drunk too much wine, and her chaperone—Aunt Cassandra, with the black nose-hairs—had fallen asleep in the back of a carriage. Lo and behold, it had taken just that one time with Enzo for May to fall pregnant. Just the one time.
The other girls at the Bethany Home had heard the story more than once. If they were growing tired of it, May didn’t care. Where she came from, the Near North Side of Chicago, people liked to talk. Too much, in fact; it was why her mother would never let her come home unless she’d found a husband. Enzo, unfortunately, was long since off the market. Hitching one’s wagon to an eligible bachelor was not an easy task when one lived in a home with thirty-some other women, but May was resourceful. Though no male visitors were ever allowed upstairs, or in the nursery, she kept her room tidy and cheerful, a bowl of wildflowers on the sill when she could get them, floor swept, and baseboards dusted. She even washed the white curtains that billowed around her window, so they wouldn’t turn drab and yellow, or gray and cobwebby.
Sometimes, when she had a spare moment, she’d take the others’ curtains down and wash and iron those, too. Incredibly, the other inmates never bothered to thank her for this effort. They seemed annoyed, in fact. Many of the girls here had worked in some of the houses of ill fame that lined the Mississippi. The very thought of it made May shudder, but she tried to remember that not everyone was raised in a home like hers, where her mother taught her to respect her elders and the space in which she lived, to be a good steward to God’s Earth. Her father educated her to be kind, gregarious, helpful to her neighbors. May had never once poked fun at a resident of the Bethany Home, no matter how disheveled or feebleminded she seemed, ...
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