I must have fallen asleep last night in the rocker, for I woke with Henry on my lap and dawn creeping up behind the trees. I put him in his crib, where he slept on, and tiptoed to my room to record my nightmare.
I dreamed that Father—only forty-nine, in truth—had grown white-haired and weary. His tall frame was stooped as he walked with effort across the wide planks of our main room. Then he stopped short; his eyes became fixed, as if made of glass; his face went blank, and his big hands hung from slackened arms. Though his body remained upright, life had abandoned him.
Grief smacked me like some giant hand.
Then all at once, the animating principle rejoined his body. New vigor flowed through his veins. His shuffling walk resumed, and his face presented again the look of one alive, as if that peculiar death had never happened.
This sudden alternation between life and death occurred three more times, plunging me into grief and rescuing me from it, until the final time, when he sat in a mahogany chair—one that he’d carved and turned and joined himself—and, like a wind-up toy that has wound down for good, he ceased to be. His body took on the immense heaviness of death. It slumped forward, chest to thighs, head and neck dangling past the knees.
With a choking sob I crouched before him, my knees touching the toes of his worn leather boots. I threw my arms about his slumped head and calves, clinging, as if once more a child.
“Papa!” I called. If he could have but patted my crown and said, “Yes, dear Lilli,” or “What new thing has my daughter seen today?”—but he was dead for good.
I woke with a crushing in my chest. What if something has happened to him? What was Hannah referring to? To be so close, yet unable to go…Should I go? I’d have to reveal my situation. Then he would exile me, as Patience did.
Perhaps this dream was a punishment for my dishonesty at Miss Bancroft’s shop.
I’ve opened my locket to touch Mother’s hair. It retains the faintest trace of her violet water.
This fragment of Mother’s actual body, chestnut brown and silken, is my most precious possession. I hold it and hear that fragment of philosophy she held dear: “Live up to the light thou hast; and more will be granted thee.”
What of the one who covers her light with the dirt of deception—can she ever reclaim it?
Tomorrow the Burnhams leave for New York City to meet Clementina’s parents, who have arrived by boat, and Miss Baker and Margaret will listen for Henry while I visit Charlotte at Gina’s, for I’m desperate to hold my baby. I missed our visit by going to the sewing-machine shop.
Darling Charlotte! Mother will soon be nigh!
NOTEBOOK SEVEN
Sixth Month 4, late
Our situation has taken an appalling turn for the worse.
I set off to see Charlotte today with a buoyant step. But as I neared Gina’s neighborhood, traces of a noxious smoke began to reach me. I sped along the road, sweating under my concealing shawls, sliding on muddy places but managing not to fall. I came to a halt to recover my breath only when I reached that enclave—but I still haven’t recovered my breath.
Mounds of rubble lay where several of the wood row-houses had stood. A sickening smell was rising from their half-charred, smoldering hulks.
I ran closer, hardly aware of my feet on the dirt road. The front door to Angela and Victor’s had been red; no row-house standing had such a door. I searched among the threads of smoke, the expanses of charred beams and planks, the dampened heaps of plaster and possessions. At last I saw a rocking chair’s curved base protruding. Near it were burnt spindles that could have been from a cradle; beside them lay a door-shaped rectangle, mostly charcoal, its unburnt edge still red.
In terror I called my baby’s name.
“Gone!” said a voice. Turning, I saw a crooked woman on a cane approaching, her face a map of wrinkles. I moved toward her, intending to speak, but nausea bent me double. As I gagged over the ground, she spoke kindly in the rolling syllables of her native tongue.
I raised myself and croaked. “My baby! Gina! Lucia! Where are they?”
Through halting words and gestures, she informed me that they and others affected by the fire had been transported by ambulance to Germantown Hospital.
“When?” I asked.
Two days ago, she communicated, some with burns and breathing trouble. She pantomimed a person riding a horse and asked, “You want?”
Certainly I did. I raced the way she pointed and soon reached a low-roofed livery stable. I hired a hackney carriage for my very first time, counting on the ten-dollar bill in the cloth purse that hung at my neck.
“To Germantown Hospital,” I told the driver as I stepped up to the bench. As we rolled along, I tried to understand the fare card that hung before me, but in my harried state, its many terms and stipulations were too confounding.
The driver stopped at the hospital’s brick compound and agreed to wait. I rushed in and asked a woman seated in the main hall to direct me to Charlotte and the others. Consulting a list, she claimed to find no patients by their names, and she refused to let me tour the floors to find them.
I ran to the nearest door, opened it, and stepped into a smaller room. By the time the woman had caught up with me, I’d explained the situation to another worker. He banished my pursuer with a sour look, then examined the columns of his discharge ledger and found evidence of Gina, Victor, Angela, and two babies. Gina and her baby had left yesterday, both in adequate health; the ledger didn’t say where they’d gone to. Victor and Angela must have taken longer to get from the house, for they’d been transferred to Pennsylvania Hospital, which could better treat their burns.
“What of my baby?” I asked. My future happiness hung on his reply.
“She was also transferred.” He ran his finger down the page and stopped. “No evident damage besides a cough caused by inhaling smoke.”
I dared to breathe. “Where was she sent, then?”
“To the Children’s Asylum at Old Blockley.”
At first I couldn’t comprehend. All my efforts since leaving home have been aimed at keeping us from the city almshouse—a massive stretch of human misery located beside a disease-breeding swamp. Even I, who barely saw a newspaper due to Mother’s horror of them, knew that its supervisor and treasurer were recently convicted of fraud and thievery, and that not even its cadavers are safe from plunder: some of the newly buried are dug up and ferried across the river at night to be sold for medical uses. There are always fresh corpses, for between its substandard food and insufficient hygiene, Blockley is a veritable slaughterhouse.
I moaned, but the man behind the desk had no sympathy to spare. “We send all children there who lack a caretaker,” he said, his cold eyes boring into me. Clearly he was certain that I was a defective mother. He had no way to know how it has anguished me to live apart from Charlotte.
And why hadn’t Gina told the hospital where to find me? I’d trusted her!
“Did thee discharge them?” I asked.
He nodded.