“I could get fired.”
“I said the worst thing. Getting fired wouldn’t be bad at all.” My mother had been against the Dear Kitty job. She wanted me to pursue my writing. “That silly old Kitty” is what she always called her. Having accidentally opened the door to a discussion of my career, or lack of one, I moved to close it. I told her I would decide what to do and let her know.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Every word with her was filled with hidden meaning. Feeling okay. She meant the pink pills. Was I depressed? She always worried. It’s why she wanted to talk on the phone so frequently.
“You’re leaving the apartment regularly, right?”
“Ma, I go to the café every day.”
“Besides that. You go out, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
We both knew I was lying.
When I hung up the phone, it took a few minutes to fully inhabit my New York life again. I went to my desk and turned on the computer. The responsible choice would be to forget Julia’s request, but I had a vague sense that she might lead me someplace interesting, away from this apartment and this life.
I downloaded the addresses into a spreadsheet, all 52,407 of them. I was stunned at the number, thinking of the thousands of pages I’d written over the years and how that writing could have been put to better use. As the spreadsheet filled, I waited, drumming my fingers on the trackpad, a nervous tap tap. I clicked send and off it went to Julia’s personal account. Once it was gone there was no taking it back.
A few minutes later I received Julia’s reply:
From: JuliaCole
To: PlumK
Subject: Re: spreadsheet
Thank you for the spreadsheet. I’ll be in touch again soon.
In the meantime, Verena Baptist wants to meet you.
J.
? ? ?
VERENA BAPTIST WELCOMED ME into her cluttered, blood-colored home. “Welcome to Calliope House,” she said, but who Calliope was or what the name meant wasn’t explained. You’re Eulayla Baptist’s daughter, I wanted to say.
Calliope House was actually two townhouses joined together, sitting on a leafy stretch of Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the West Village. I stepped into the entryway and was enclosed in a womb of red wallpaper. To my left and right there were ruby-hued rooms, one a living room, the other filled with desks, where women sat, working and talking to one another. Chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and on most flat surfaces were stacks of books and papers.
Verena didn’t fit into her surroundings, being an entirely vanilla creature with blond skin and hair, a beam of light in the dark. She was tall and slender. When she reached for my hand, I could feel the bones in her fingers, as fragile as matchsticks. I had expected some resemblance to Eulayla Baptist, who’d had that plasticine, middle-American look of the beauty queen, but no one would have guessed they were mother and daughter. When Verena spoke there was a light undercoat of southernness, just enough to set her apart from the average New Yorker.
“The house is a little overwhelming,” she said, almost apologetically. “It was this color when I moved in and I didn’t want to change it.” I scanned the room with the desks, but the women took no notice of me.
“Is this a house or an office?” I asked, still looking around, noticing something different every time I turned my head. On top of a cabinet, a large orchid was trapped under a bell jar.
“It’s both.” Verena explained that she lived in the house, but it also served as her office. Most of the women came and went each day, but a few of them lived there with her.
She explained that from the 1920s through the 1970s, the townhouse had been owned by a Catholic charity that used it as a home for unwed pregnant teenagers. The girls had either run away or been cast out by their families. With nowhere else to go, they moved into the house for the duration of their pregnancies. When their babies were born, the infants were adopted by religious families and the girls never saw them again. The young baby-less mothers left the house on Thirteenth Street and reentered the world as if nothing had happened to them—nothing they could talk about, anyway.