The House of Closed Doors (8 page)

I tried to imagine declaring that Jack was the father. I saw in my mind’s eye the shock on Mama’s face, pictured the endless questions. I saw the tearful faces of my cousins gathered around Jack as he faced the ruin of his magnificent marriage prospects to wed the daughter of the late Red Jack Lillington, feed merchant. His child would be born outrageously early after a secret and hasty wedding, and it would be years before Hartford stopped talking about it.

It was too late for the truth. Surely this one lie‌—‌not even a lie, it was merely a reluctance to speak‌—‌was the most expedient, perhaps even the most noble, course of action? I would be free, Jack would be free, and life would go on.

I looked up at my stepfather and forced a smile, prepared to close one door to the future forever. “I said I would submit to your decision, Stepfather, and I shall. After all,” I looked at Mama and made my smile brighter, “it will only be for a short while.”

EIGHT

N
ovember blew in on bitterly chill wings as I prepared to leave. That I would not be spending Christmas with my mother distressed us both, but I tried to make light of it for her sake. She was now mourning her friend Ruth, who had mercifully been taken before her pain became too much for those who loved her to bear, but she stood up well under the burden of grief. She believed firmly in the life to come and that Ruth was walking in Paradise; and as a young woman she had endured the worst pain of loss that any wife and mother could possibly imagine, and it had strengthened her. Her fragile body was sustained by a character as strong as steel.

I had been sorry to miss the funeral. Ruth had been a part of our lives for as long as I could remember. She had sustained my mother and me in the days of our terrible grief and had in turn drawn comfort from us as her husband’s heart-wrenching illness made her own home a place of shame. Our house had been a refuge for Martin when the burden of seeing his father abuse and hit his mother became too much; he would cross our threshold with tightened lips and lines of pain across his young forehead but always left us with renewed strength in his demeanor.

I would have liked, so very much, to give my condolences to Martin, and it saddened me that by my own foolishness I had made it impossible to visit him at such a time. I stood by the window to catch a glimpse of the funeral procession and could just make out the white-blond of Martin’s hair under his somber hat.

As far as the town of Victory was concerned, I was recovering from a prolonged, disfiguring, and painful case of the mumps and was prostrate with weakness from having eaten practically nothing for a month. Soon, according to my mother’s story, I would depart to convalesce at a sanatorium in the burgeoning resort of Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, a place of fashion and wealth. I imagined that many of my acquaintances in Victory were making witty remarks about how I would cut a swathe through the men there.

Two trunks had been packed for me. In addition to the large one holding my belongings, a small one overflowed with tiny articles of clothing for my child. Until recently I had not really thought of the reality of giving birth, but the inevitability of that event‌—‌and the memories it evoked‌—‌were greatly troubling my mind. I frequently awoke from nightmares in which I heard my mother screaming.

The fourth of November came, the day set for my departure. I rose well before dawn so that I could be on my way before the good citizens of Victory left their beds. I urged my mother to stay indoors, as the biting cold would do her no good: I hugged them all, even planting a faint, cold kiss on my stepfather’s cheek for my mother to see. Bet gave me the hardest hug of all and wiped a tear from her eye.

“I must ask your forgiveness, Miss Nell.”

“What else could you have done, Bet?” I smiled, grasping her hand. “I could not have hidden the state of affairs much longer. I only wish I had told you when I first suspected.” My smile faded as I looked at the worried faces of the two women dearest to me in all the world. “Don’t worry,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height. “I will be quite all right.”

B
y the time the ancient, creaking brougham pulled up to the gates of the Prairie Haven Poor Farm, my bones were chilled. The enclosed carriage offered as much protection from the elements as possible, and curtains had even been hung on the inside. A bearskin rug, quite a new one with hardly any bare patches, covered my knees, and I wore every article of winter clothing I could cram onto my body. Yet four hours of rolling jerkily along an iron-hard road, planked or corduroyed in parts but in others a frozen mess of ruts, congealed my blood into ice crystals.

And I had to ask the driver to stop twice; I had begun to discover one of the more uncomfortable aspects of having a baby taking up space in my lower parts. One feature of the Middle West farmland in winter is that there are very few evergreen bushes or convenient hedgerows, so the merest glimpse of a green patch by the road had me enthusiastically thumping on the front of the carriage with the stick provided for that purpose. The ensuing process naturally chilled me even further.

At nine o’clock in the morning of the fourth of November, the brougham finally drew up in front of a high iron gate flanked by two gray columns, each topped by a round stone ball. Yew hedges, rimed with frost that sparkled in the pale morning sunlight, surrounded the gate. I had learned that the Poor Farm lay a good three miles away from the small town of Prairie Haven; from what I could see through the carriage’s curtains, it was located on the bend of a road that ran through farmland, iron-hard and silent in the cold. No other habitation could be seen as far as the horizon except for the house we’d passed about a quarter of a mile back, from whose chimney a thin stream of smoke drifted on the frosted air.

The driver lent all his weight to pulling a large bell that hung on one of the gateposts. About five minutes later a lean, dried-up looking man with a deeply seamed face opened the gate; his long, bony hands with sharply knobbed knuckles showed white against the dark iron. He said something I could not hear to the driver and smiled in a wheedling way, revealing that he lacked all but about three teeth. The driver’s answer was clearly not the one he had wanted to hear; the corners of his mouth drew down in apparent disgust.

The carriage drove through the gate and headed in a straight line toward a collection of long, low buildings fronted by two imposing, entirely identical three-story edifices with gray slate roofs and green-painted windows. Split-rail fences seemed to section off one area of the grounds from another, and I thought I saw red-painted barns and silos farther off. Presumably, the livestock that lived on the farm‌—‌I knew them to be a fact from the manure pile, pungent even in the cold weather‌—‌were inside the barns.

It looked like a farm and yet not a farm. No farm would contain such institutional-looking buildings as the cream-painted blocks that loomed larger as we drew nearer, hiding the lower buildings behind them. Small groups of men and women appeared to be making their way to their day’s work in a variety of shuffling, dragging, or ungainly gaits. A loud cackling on my left indicated a hen run, and as I pressed my face to the frost-spangled carriage window, I could make out a heavily pregnant woman surrounded by a seething mass of rusty and black feathers.

The carriage stopped between the two large buildings in front of what, in the summer, would probably be a pleasant flower garden, surrounded by a low split-rail fence. As the driver helped me‌—‌I was stiff in every limb‌—‌to climb down from the brougham, a door in the southernmost building opened and an elegant woman with dark chestnut hair and olive skin walked swiftly toward me. A small, plump woman, more plainly dressed and wearing spectacles on a broad, short nose, followed her.

The taller woman held out her arms to me, guiding me toward the door from which she had come. Her companion ran alongside us, unabashedly making every effort to see my face.

“Tess, my dear,” the taller woman said, “do not crowd so close to Miss Lillington; my goodness,” she said, addressing me, “I am at a loss as to what to call you, in point of fact. Our inmates are usually known by their Christian names; to use a surname indicates a member of the staff, which you are not.”

By this time we were inside a hallway, very plain with walls painted a deep cream, but very clean. My interlocutor held out her hand.

“I am Catherine Lombardi, the matron of the Women’s House. The building in which you are standing is called the Women’s House, but the term also refers to the dormitories behind this building.”

I took her hand, causing her to gasp and exclaim over how cold I was. She ushered me into an oversized kitchen smelling strongly of fried pork and carbolic soap; a stove was giving off a wonderful warmth, and in addition a cast-iron chimney corner contained a glowing fire. I felt my feet and hands begin to tingle. Mrs. Lombardi installed me by the fire and quitted the room.

A few minutes later I had warmed up enough to strip off some of the outer layers of my clothing. The woman called Tess remained near me, stared at every item I shed, but said nothing. As I laid one of my shawls carefully on the table, she finally spoke.

“What’s your name?”

Her mode of speaking struck me as awkward. I had the impression that her tongue was too large for her mouth and had already noticed that while she was not speaking she kept her mouth open and her tongue thrust forward. In addition, she stuttered over the words in a way it would be tiresome to reproduce and blinked hard several times as she spoke.

“Nell Lillington,” I replied. “Eleanor, if you want my proper name, but I like to be called Nell.”

“I’m Tess,” she said. “My surname is O’Dugan, but no one ever calls me Miss O’Dugan. They call me Tess. My real name is Teresa.”

She began each sentence with a slight pause, as if she needed to gather her words, but I quickly became attuned to her way of speaking. This, I surmised, was an “imbecile,” the term used by my stepfather when he talked about inhabitants of the Poor Farm. “Feeble-minded idiot” was another of his phrases; but this young woman did not seem to be particularly deficient in sense to me. Her speech was simple but coherent; she was clean and neatly dressed, albeit in a style five years out of date. A slender silver ring decorated the smallest finger of her right hand. Her hair, fine as a child’s and quite straight, was pulled into a small bun at the back of her head, and her almond-shaped eyes shone with interest behind their spectacles.

Yet I had not missed the fact that Mrs. Lombardi had called her by her Christian name. Tess O’Dugan was undoubtedly an “inmate.” Just like me.

F
or the first month I spent at the Farm I existed in a confused daze, trying to understand the layout of the buildings, the routines, and, above all, the people. I had never realized that such variety of shapes and sizes could exist among human beings, that the human face could twist itself into so many forms and grimaces, or that human nature could be so unpredictable.

The House, as I learned to call the building I had first entered on arriving, was enormous. Its first floor housed the kitchen I had seen that first morning, the refectories, classrooms, workrooms, and the matron’s office and sitting room. A cavernous basement held a huge laundry, more workrooms, and utility rooms, food storage rooms, and two more kitchens for the butchering of meat and the washing of dishes. On the second floor of the House were the bedrooms where the staff slept, two spare bedrooms for visitors, and other rooms used to store linens and supplies. The third floor had a section that was assigned to those inmates who worked indoors. This is where I slept, in a large plain room with three other women, including Tess.