Margaret waited for the rest of the answer a long time. Seventy years later she would die waiting.
On the train north with Minna she had watched New England fly by and thought: we could get off anywhere. Hadn’t she raised that girl from a baby? Shouldn’t she be allowed to have the child instead of those Canadian strangers? She and Minna could make a life together. People might not believe the colored child was hers; then again, the baby’s own mother was lily white, just like Margaret (though Margaret suspected there was something dusky and foreign in Bertha’s past: Jewess, or Persian). Minna might pass, for Jewish, or Persian. She was born pale—Margaret knew because she’d been there—though she’d darkened up, with olive skin and green eyes. But where would they go? There was no house in the world that would take Margaret in, apart from the octagonal one from which she’d been cast out. From which she and Minna had been cast out. How could Dr. Sprague have done it?
On that northbound train she dared herself to think about getting married, having children. She was twenty-seven already, spinsterish at her toes and fingertips, singularity creeping up her limbs. She might marry somebody small, modest. Somebody like limping Joe Wear, who was likewise employed by Truitt: she might be allowed as little as him. A pinboy’s worth of happiness. They would have little candlepin babies. They would take in Minna: a girl needed a mother and father, even queer ones such as themselves would make. Minna would have brothers and sisters at last.
Dr. Sprague had paid for a compartment with a fold-down bed that folded up into seats. Your mother is dead, Margaret thought at Minna, though nobody knew that for sure. The girl had her diary in her lap. She didn’t understand it was a history book. Her mother had put her golden brown hair into two plaits the day before, the last record of her motherlove, now unraveling at the top.
“Do you think they’ll recognize me? My aunt and uncles.”
“I imagine so,” said Margaret. “Family knows family.” My darling. My dearest. You don’t need to go with those strangers, Minna, Margaret wanted to say.
They had been in Canada a long time already and had more Canada to go: Margaret, from Massachusetts, found this upsetting. The bigger the place, the more claustrophobic. They might never get out of Canada. She felt it close over her head like a coal mine.
At the train station in Fredericton, Benjamin Sprague stood next to his creamy green REO, one foot propped on the running board, looking like his brother except taller and thinner and unmustachioed and in a pair of new two-tone shoes of the sort Dr. Sprague never would have worn, shoes to go to the city in, and also he was lighter skinned, and with a nose that had once been broken—really, they looked only as alike as cousins, but he had the Sprague gravity. Margaret wished he would make decisions for her. “What news?” she asked him. The damp guarded look conveyed to Margaret that Bertha was dead, but they would wait to tell Minna. She started to sob. She reached to gather Minna in her arms, to whisper the scalding secret in her ear, but Minna had already climbed into the back of the Sprague motorcar, a fine sedan, and regarded her old nurse with dry eyes and a little horror.
“Minna!” said Margaret. “Will you write to me?”
The girl nodded.
“You’re homesick,” Benjamin said to Margaret in his deep voice, both sympathetic and imperative. He offered her a red paisley handkerchief, which she accepted and stuck in her pocket, though she knew that’s not what he’d meant. “You should go on home.”
She looked in her purse as though for her life. “I don’t have a ticket,” she said in a waterlogged voice. She wanted to be taken in with Minna, raised up by the Sprague siblings. Stranger things had already happened. But she understood that she and Minna had not been cast out together. Margaret had been cast out. The girl had been saved.
Benjamin Sprague pulled a roll of bills from his pockets. “For your service,” he said, handing her the bills, fake, clearly fake, no, Canadian. “Your folks’ll miss you. Thank you, I should say. Thank you for bringing our Minna to us.”
“Give me your address,” she said, “so I may write to my charge.”
“Charge no longer,” he told her, but he wrote it down on the back of a train schedule, in curvilinear script. Ah, there was the family resemblance: the strong Sprague S, the weak Sprague e. She folded the timetable and stuck it into her coat pocket.
She had no folks. She had no people. She waited for Benjamin Sprague’s REO to pull away and she walked into town, found a room in a hotel for women, found a job in a restaurant, stayed there for an entire year in case Minna needed her. She sent a note to Benjamin Sprague:
Dear Mr Sprague or are you also Dr, I shouldn’t be surprised with an educated family like you, if Minna wishes to find me I am working at Bach’s Cafeteria, I am there most days but will come anywhere.
Later she would remember this year as the loneliest and most peaceful of her life. She waited: for Minna, on customers. The Spragues would surely come to her. She wrote to Minna every week, till an envelope came back that said RETURN TO SENDER. No more explanation than that.
Benjamin Sprague was exactly right: Margaret Vanetten was homesick. She was homesick the same way she was anything else, from birth and forever. Born missing the womb, left off at the convent—she’d never had a bed to herself before going to work for Sprague and Truitt, and at first she couldn’t sleep for all the rooms and doors in that house.
She had loved Dr. Sprague like a father; she would never forgive him for sending her away. For all she knew, Minna had gone home once the worst of her father’s grief had passed. Two weeks, or two months—of course she would go back, taller but still a child, to comfort her father and sleep in her own bed. Now this envelope. She was the sender. Her love had been returned to her. Only Margaret had been forgotten. Only Margaret displaced forever. But Salford was her home, too. Those people could not keep her from it.
Not till she got back did she discover that Dr. Sprague was dead and the house boarded up. She couldn’t bear to stop by the bowling alley itself, to be among people who had known for so long what she, an idiot, had not: her life as she’d known it was over and she hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t felt the difference.
She was a hired girl again, working for a family who lived on Pinkham Square, who told her what a fine house theirs was, belonging to a fine family. In the foyer they kept a family tree, embroidered on linen, framed, enormous, stretching back to 1620. Her own family tree would have read, in its entirety,
Margaret (b. 1892?–d.)
She didn’t even know where her last name had come from. “It suits you,” Sister Catherine had said, as though it were a left-behind hat. Nobody behind her or ahead, just how Bertha had landed in Salford. Once Bertha had said to Margaret, “I didn’t mean to get caught up again in this whole business of families,” though Bertha had been cuddling two-year-old Minna at the time, and two-year-old Minna was particularly irresistible, a child who spoke in full sentences but still could see every supernatural corner of babyhood. “I never meant to be a line in the family Bible.”