Awake Unto Me (7 page)

*

The pattern had altered. It was a matter first of a short, uninteresting Bible reading, then Svenhard would grasp one of her barely visible breasts and perform the ritual into the handkerchief she held. Beth would simply close her eyes and imagine she was reading a book or lying in the apple orchard talking with Theresa.

He said to her one day, “It is not necessary to tell anyone of this. It is between us. You understand?” She nodded dumbly, having grasped what he meant. It was clear—no one would believe a respected minister of the Lutheran church was abusing an eleven-year-old parishioner, and she knew her father needed the reverend’s good word for his business. She knew he would not impregnate her; he was not so addled as that. She was grateful that he only seemed to need to touch some part of her body as he performed his horrible actions upon himself. There came the day, though, when he grabbed her hand and led it to his body.

“I want to stop the Bible lessons,” Beth told her mother that night.

“Why?” Frieda asked, concentrating on cutting the potatoes.

“I don’t want to go see Reverend Svenhard anymore.”

“Don’t be silly, girl. Your father wants you to go. It’s good for you to receive such a fine education from such a man as Reverend Svenhard. It’s an honor.”

Beth knew her mother well enough to hear what Frieda hadn’t said. She wouldn’t try to persuade George. Only one adult offered possible solace. In the middle of the night, she packed a few clothes and some books and crept downstairs and out of the house.

She threw pebbles at Theresa’s window until Theresa appeared. She raised the sash and stuck her head out. “Shhhhhh! You’ll wake Maria. What’s the matter?” Maria was the youngest Rocco child, and she shared a room with Theresa.

“I can’t tell you. Just let me in, please.”

Theresa and Beth huddled in Theresa’s bed. Beth shook and cried but Theresa couldn’t persuade her to say what was wrong.

The next morning, Beth stood before Mama Rocco, who in the last year had been making a bigger effort to learn English because of their growing business and was often eager to converse with Beth.

“So, Lizbetta. What is the matter you should come to us in the middle of the night? Your Mama will be worried. I have the boys walk you home. Lizbetta?” Mama raised Beth’s downcast face and peered into her eyes. “Theresa, please go help Papa in the store.”

“But—”

“Theresa, leave us. Please go help Papa in the store.”

“But—”

“Theresa, not now. Go, please. I must speak to Lizbetta privately.”

Theresa reluctantly left them.

“Lizbetta, come over and sit down, child.” Mama Rocco gave her a glass of milk and waited.

“Will you tell me what is the matter?” She brushed a tear from Beth’s cheek.

“Reverend Svenhard,” she whispered.

“Who?” Mama asked, mystified. “What?”

Beth looked at Mama’s face, her kind black eyes, the dark mole next to her nose. She finally had to try to say something. “The reverend. Of our church. He—” She began to cry then and couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud.

Mama took Beth over to the davenport and sat her down. She sat down next to her and put an arm around her. “Is this reverend—” Mama clearly searched for the right words, her brow furrowed as she struggled. “Look at me, child.”

Beth reluctantly met her eyes.

“Is this man doing something to you he should not?”

Beth looked at her a long time, then nodded.

Mama let loose a stream of Italian curses, words Beth had learned from the men in the fields during the harvest. “Come, child.”

*

At the Hammonds’ flat, Mama asked to speak alone to Frieda. Beth waited in her room, going back and forth between relief that the truth was coming out and terrified at what Mama Rocco would say to her mother and what her mother would think.

They had dinner and Frieda sent Beth to her room right after. Beth was upset they wouldn’t play the piano, but some part of her knew that she could not be part of the conversation between her parents.

After a long while, Frieda came into Beth’s room and sat down on the bed. She was pale and sad.

“Your father says you are to go and apologize to Mrs. Rocco for telling such a terrible lie.”

“Mother, I didn’t lie. It’s true.”

“It can’t be true. You are mistaken. Furthermore, after you have apologized, you will make your farewells. You will not visit the Rocco family again.”

Nothing more was said. Beth returned to her lessons with Reverend Svenhard. George got another loan at a very good interest from Eric Svenhard and their store prospered. George complained about her silence and melancholy, but Frieda would simply excuse it as childish moodiness. “Growing pains,” she told George.

If she saw Theresa when she was out doing chores, she avoided her out of a deep sense of shame. She hated that Theresa thought she had abandoned her. When she went to the store, she felt Mama Rocco’s eyes on her but she never said a word. She was afraid it would get back to her parents.

Beth learned a valuable lesson about trust: there was no reason to have any, especially not in the people closest to her.

When Beth was fifteen she received word that she would not be going to Reverend Svenhard’s house anymore for Bible lessons because he was ill. It was some four years after she had started, and she had rarely missed a week. She’d become inured to it since she had no other choice. She received the news of his illness with no emotion. On Sundays, his assistant minister took over the Sunday services and George, out of respect, paid a call to Mrs. Svenhard to express his concern.

“Allow me to send Beth over to help,” he pleaded. “She was so close to him. It is a great disappointment that she must discontinue her study with him.” Beth had grown even quieter over the years, as if to speak at all would break something inside her.

Mrs. Svenhard agreed and so Beth came to their home, not for Bible study but to assist the private nurse they had engaged to take care of the ailing reverend. It was cancer of the stomach, they said. Beth absorbed the news dispassionately.

Beth entered the bedroom on the heels of Nurse Jennings, a silent, severe woman. She glided about the sick room, speaking only when absolutely necessary.

Svenhard’s eyes still followed Beth whenever she was in his sickroom and he watched her closely, but he was helpless and she was beyond his reach. She felt nothing at all—not anger, not pity. Nothing.

Beth assisted Nurse Jennings at her tasks. “You may call me Jane,” she told Beth. Jane was gentle but firm, and not quite as forbidding as she had seemed at first. She was kind in her way; it was only with the Svenhard family that she was frosty. She treated her patient as though he were an errant twelve-year-old.

“Reverend, you are not allowed to have whiskey. The doctor has spoken.” Beth found it gratifying over time that the man who once gave orders to everyone now had to take them whether he wished to or not. Beth asked Jane her reasons for doing everything and Jane always answered patiently. Beth found that comforting and was emboldened to ask more questions.

“Doctor Graham prescribes the medicinal dose. I am to give it twice a day as a tincture. See here. It is mixed with alcohol.” The medicine was laudanum, to reduce his pain, Jane said, and the dosing was strict; otherwise it could kill him. Jane showed Beth how to take his temperature and how to prevent bedsores. Together, they even bathed the reverend. Jane was, of course, detached. Beth was beyond even disgust at having to help Jane perform this task. She cared only about the knowledge she was gaining, not about the reverend or his pain.

Jane had a different way of speaking with the reverend than she spoke with his family. Jane was respectful, even subservient with Mrs. Svenhard, who treated her as something better than a maid but not quite as an equal. When the doctor came once a week to examine his patient and confer with the family, he also would speak at length with Jane. She would listen to him intently and report at length on her observations. Beth could see the doctor needed Jane to tell him about the reverend’s condition, and he was serious with her. Beth saw that though he gave her orders, they were orders he had formulated with information she gave him. She liked the amount of power Jane had, even though it was subtle.

Jane went out on a rare errand one day and ordered Beth to stay and watch the reverend. His wife had gone somewhere as well.

“I am trusting you with this. It is not usual for a nurse to leave for any reason. But we are almost out of laudanum, and he has to have it.”

Reverend Svenhard was quite ill then and could no longer leave his bed at all.

Beth stood at the side of the bed and looked down at the reverend. He said nothing, but his watery, glazed eyes still followed her every move. It seemed to her as though he might have been asking her to forgive him. She picked up the bottle of laudanum.
I could kill him. No one would know
. He stared at her, his eyes shiny with pain. He had lost most of his weight and was skeletal. She looked at him, twirling the bottle of tincture of laudanum in her hand. No, she concluded. It’s better he is alive and can be reminded by seeing me every day what he’s done
.

“Please,” he croaked. “I am in so much pain. Have pity. I…”

Beth looked at him closely.
You won’t say it. You don’t think you did anything wrong.

“Nurse has gone out. She must bring more laudanum. You cannot have any.”

He had often whimpered and whined after their activities. He seemed to believe her very presence had led him to his actions. “You do this to me. You have the most terrible effect on me,” he would whisper.

Perhaps she
was
the guilty one. She often remembered her mother’s face after she talked to Mrs. Rocco and how her mother had never spoken of it again after the conversation with her father. In her parents’ view, she was clearly guilty, Beth was sure. Otherwise they wouldn’t have done what they did, forcing her to keep seeing the reverend, never speaking to her about what she had said. When Beth read
The
Scarlet Letter
, she knew then she might not have to wear a letter, but she was every bit as branded as Hester Prynne and would pay as Hester did for the rest of her life.

Jane had said, “It is our duty to prolong life and to relieve suffering.” Beth thought,
We’re allowing him to live, but I’m glad he’s suffering and doubly so every time he looks at me.

When Jane wasn’t looking, Beth would purposefully undermix the reverend’s pain medication. She would smile when he pleaded with Jane to give him more painkiller, and she would refuse, saying she must follow the doctor’s orders. For Beth it was more satisfying than overdosing and killing him. Her anger rose to the surface, and she let it stay there.

*

“I want to go to nurse’s training. Jane will help me,” Beth announced to her parents. “I want to start as soon as I graduate from high school.” She stood silently and listened to her parents argue.

George said, “No. Never. I will need her at the store. That is her future.”

It was the only time Beth ever saw her mother stand up to her father. “He’s dead,” Frieda said to George. “We’re free. You will let her go.”

George fumed, but in the end, he agreed.

It was a great satisfaction to Beth that she was required to live in the student nurses’ dormitory at the hospital. She was never once homesick, as some of the other students were. She recognized the feeling as relief.
Svenhard is dead. I am no longer his prisoner nor must I bow to my parents’ wishes nor anyone else’s any more. I am free.

Lucky Jack was standing at the bar bemoaning the poor state of the crimping business to Leo. Kerry, having nothing better to do, was listening, although she would have rather spent every second with Sally, but Sally shooed her away, saying, “I got to make some money, girl, and I only know one way to do that.”

So Kerry was forced to find something else to do with her spare time besides hang around Meiggs’s Wharf. Teddy was at the Palace Hotel most of the time, still working as a bellhop. She hadn’t made any other friends, nor did she want to.

Jack said, “That ugly monster Big Moe is getting the lion’s share now. He’s bribed all the captains and everyone’s scared to death of him.”

“You ought to go back to gambling, Jack. It’s not quite as dirty a business.”

“Nah. It’s no good without Dr. Addison. I never could get the hang of his system.”

Leo shook his head again.

Kerry caught the name, Big Moe, and it started a train of thought. She’d heard Sally talk about who she wouldn’t take on as customers—he was one of them. Kerry would’ve rather not had her doing any whore business, but she knew there was no chance of that. Rose would kick her out of the house if she didn’t pull her weight, and Sally, if nothing else, was a realist. Kerry could entreat all she wanted but Sally wouldn’t budge.

“You’re a lovesick little fool, you are.” Sally had scoffed at her. “I thought you was tough. I was wrong.” She’d given Kerry’s hair a yank or her nipple a tweak.