So in lieu of continuing to squat and scrub away the remnants of animal droppings that come in on people’s shoes, I returned the bucket and brush, then followed Anne to the office. The room was mostly taken up by a wide mahogany desk, and Delphinia sat hunched over it, her pen gliding across a piece of parchment, a gas chandelier with three bright globes hanging over her. Two tall oak cabinets stood to her side. The bench opposite the desk, where I’d had my entrance interview, completed the room’s functional effects. I sat upon it.
Delphinia was greatly pleased that Anne had provided her with a helper. She indicated with her knobbed hands the piles on nearly every surface, including the floor. I told her I relished the chance to work with paper rather than with soap, and her smile grew. Then Anne pulled a thick folder from a cabinet and said she was off to visit a potential patron. Delphinia rose and added a stack of annual reports to Anne’s satchel.
“Only ninety-three dollars have been donated in the two and a half months of this year,” Delphinia told me. “The residents have paid a hundred more. But our expenses are over three hundred a month. The state supports most every other charity in the city, but they’ve refused—again—to give us even a dollar.”
“How is the place still open?” I asked, alarmed.
Delphinia sent Anne a questioning look. Anne nodded consent, so Delphinia explained. “The cook and I have gone without salary for two months.”
“I take no salary,” Anne added hastily. “And we haven’t paid the mortgage since December. Our banker agreed to wait till April. The people I’m off to visit—they must say yes.”
The matron and superintendent exchanged a look of anxiousness that was tempered by mutual respect. Then Anne donned her hat and coat, stood erect before the open door, and directed her body outward with the force of an arrow.
Delphinia cleared her head of their fiscal emergency with surprising quickness—a necessary skill in this place, to be sure. She came to stand beside me, giving off a pleasing scent of bergamot and dust. She instructed me to begin with the piles upon the floor, sorting loose papers and folders into categories. Next I should find their places, in alphabetical order, in the unlocked oak cabinet.
“The cabinet beside that one is locked,” she explained, “because it holds the folders of all the girls who’ve come through here.” She showed me where its key hangs on the wall, hidden by a scarf, and said to put personal items about the residents inside.
After a few moments of sorting bills from letters, my hands held Nancy’s folder. Someone must have gotten it out to make note of her delivery. I placed it to the side, meaning to wait till I had several pieces to file in the locked cabinet. Then the cook rushed in, her wide face sweating.
“I got nothin’ but turnips and onions to fix for dinner,” she told Delphinia. “These girls’ll get sick if they eat that once more.”
I nodded in hearty agreement. So Delphinia put on her cloak and left to go plead for a further extension of credit at the market. After examining me with her beady eyes, the cook returned to the kitchen.
I took up the folder, closed the office door, and sat on the bench. Nancy had whispered to Gina and me that her fall had come from trusting a fellow servant’s vows. She’d revealed her condition to him and begged him to marry her immediately, she said, but he left the household that very night. Her tears appeared sincere as she told us, yet a hesitation in her manner had made me doubt.
I opened the folder and stared at a discharge paper from the city hospital. Raising my body with effort, I stood nearer to the gaslight, for the script was cramped and crabbed. The paper revealed that Nancy—“a housemaid of sixteen years and one month, of sound constitution”—had been violated with regularity by the master of the house and had become pregnant by this means. He beat her on discovering the fact. She took up potions that left her ill but failed at their purpose of feticide. Subsequently she threw herself down the stairs to end the pregnancy—not once, but twice in succession—and was injured. Another housemaid brought her to the city hospital, and the note I read was based on the housemaid’s testimony.
One month later, Nancy was discharged to no one, still pregnant and owing a debt to the city for nourishment and care, having had no way to pay her costs and refusing to inform the city of her relatives’ whereabouts. The city would have placed her out to whoever would pay them for her work, to resolve her debt, but Nancy was spared by reason of “impending motherhood.”
Anne’s interview notes, put down in her spidery script, continued the story. Nancy had confined her bulging abdomen with a corset and served food at a restaurant to earn her keep, until the corset caused such agony that she could no longer wear it. No wonder she’d feared William might be malformed, with those laces constraining his growth—not to mention the potions she’d taken and her repeated falls. When she could no longer pay her rent, the landlady told Nancy of this refuge.
Last I read the notes of the Haven’s solicitor in Philadelphia, William Stone. He’d met with Nancy’s employer to request damages and support, and the beastly man claimed to have no knowledge of how Nancy had come to be with child; he called her account “the fantasies of a lonely housemaid,” threatened a libel suit, and shooed the solicitor away.
I closed the folder and felt behind the scarf, reaching for the key to the oak cabinet so I could hide the folder away. How many horrid narratives must be locked within those deep drawers! Though I would not do so, I wanted to read them all, the way a child is compelled to pick at a scab until it bleeds. Then the Haven’s front door whooshed open, and Delphinia’s heels clicked across the foyer toward the office. I thrust Nancy’s folder into a stack and kneeled to the floor with other papers in my hands. I forced my breathing to slow and my countenance to settle.
Delphinia entered, bursting with the satisfaction of having arranged an immediate delivery of ten pounds of mutton bones—some with meat!—and a peck of potatoes. She settled behind the desk again and resumed her correspondence.
It is some hours later, and I’ve come to understand Nancy’s reasons for lying to Gina and me. Why would she have wanted to recount and thus to relive her defilement and degradation? But it appalls me that she and William are the ones who’ll carry forward the shame of those events. Instead, disgrace and shame ought to torment—no, to destroy—the master of that house.
How is it that shame affixes itself to the violated, and not to the violator?
The meal bell rings. Even with such trouble in mind, I’m eager to taste that mutton.
Third Month 20
Life at this charity never spares its occupants.