What a contrast to my thudding heart was the total quiet and dimness of that sanctuary. High above, its windows of stained glass let through radiant beams of sun. I released my valise and fell to the cool floor, holding Lotte to me. I withdrew my necklace and examined it; the chain was broken, but from inside the locket the tintype of Mother looked out, her pressed lips and gleaming eyes showing her perpetual concern for the human condition. Not one strand of the hair I’d clipped upon her death remained, however. Never again would I hold a fragment of her.
Crouched in the clear air of that chapel, I smelled the stench of our bodies, thick and intimate. My clothes were dirtier than I’d realized; the golden yellow of my shawl was dulled by soot and dust. Charlotte was grimy on her exposed skin and hair. My boots were caked with manure, ashes, and urine-soaked dirt. Inside them, my damp stockings had rubbed soft places raw, and the keen pain of my feet overcame me.
Thus did my illusion of being less desperate than the other vagrants die, quick as a spark. Then, perhaps sensing we’d reached a safer place, Charlotte began to squall.
I took us to a pew in the darkest corner, where she shook her limbs and cried.
“Sweet girl,” I whispered, leaning over her, my body hot and shivery. “Mother is sorry. Mother is so very sorry.”
While at the Haven, I’d believed I could live as my conscience dictated, without inviting suffering and endangering my daughter’s life and mine. Why had I believed this?
If only I could turn our world to one that welcomed us.
I kissed her wet cheeks repeatedly, shushing her, hoping a church caretaker wouldn’t be drawn by our noise. Her fingernails dug into my flesh like talons. But suddenly she stopped and slept, as if a lever had been lifted that silenced her.
A calm fell over me. And in this calm, I looked about the splendid place that humans had built to honor God. Its pews were oak, and finely carved; its walls were painted with lilies of gold and green; its brass sconces were decorated with vines. Halfway to its arched ceiling, red and green and golden light streamed through stained-glass windows, which showed the disciples and Jesus seated at the Last Supper.
The poet Whittier called such finery a distraction from the holy presence. But I let that beauty cast its spell; it soothed my roughened spirit.
Weak, thirsty, dizzied by exhaustion and hunger, I lowered my eyes. A row of Bibles sat on the back of the next pew. I took one and turned its pages to the Book of Job, wanting to remember how it resolved.
When studying the Bible at school, I’d always considered Job’s dilemma an interesting one—and difficult, yes, but theoretically. This time, though, when I read Job’s cries—“He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths….He breaks me down on every side”—I felt my own pain recognized. And when God replied by roaring about his unmatched powers and magnificence, asking, “Hast thou an arm like God, and canst thou thunder with a voice like his?” I was appalled by his bullying. Yet Job wasn’t. Despite receiving not one word of apology from God, who’d allowed Satan to toy with him disastrously, Job surrendered his complaints. He claimed to detest himself and repented “in dust and ashes” for having protested his withering hardships. For God was all-powerful and magnificent, he echoed, and Job, nothing but limited and weak.
Was there something gorgeously profound in this? A beautiful bowing down before the force that gives life and extinguishes it? A relinquishing of our need for a sensible existence in the face of this force that can, on a whim, destroy us?
Or does Job’s response show that the human relationship with God is merely the equivalent of a fistfight or an arm wrestle—a contest that humans always lose?
Perhaps Job surrendered merely because to do otherwise would have afforded no benefit. Was Job like a child with a tyrant father who recognized the need for outward compliance?
Or—and suddenly this seemed the truest—he may have understood that the only way to recover was to accept what had afflicted him. Blame was not the part that mattered. Job surrendered not with weakness but with courage, and thereby gained the ability to go on.
A chill set the hairs on my arms to prickling. I stared up at the stained-glass windows, no longer craving my own shouting match with God.
If my spirit is pressed even harder, I wondered, will it yield something marvelous—the spirit’s equivalent to olive oil or the juice of grapes?
All at once I felt the shaking I’d felt once before, in the Haven’s makeshift chapel. The vivid stained-glass scene came to life; the colorful figures seated at the Last Supper began to move and speak together. And one of the disciples was the thirsty pauper who’d died in the train station. She turned her head outward, transforming from a flat figure to a round. She rose from her stool, every bit as feverish and desperate as she’d been that night. She reached her bony, crooked arms toward me, gaping with an undisguised, enormous need I couldn’t fill.
I knew not how long I sat, unmoving, captured by the buzzing strangeness of that altered state and seeing all my failures in her pleading. I hadn’t loved my mother well, for I had stood by while she was poisoned. I’d meant to love Charlotte; look what I’d done. Why had I failed, when all my aims were good? In time it seemed I held not Charlotte in my arms, but Mother as she died. I heard words coming through her trembling body: To love is to risk. To risk is to suffer.
Finally I became sensible of Charlotte waking, shifting. On a cloth I changed her and stared into her dark blue eyes. She stared back, withholding nothing.
A rattling of keys through the wall told of someone coming our way. Gathering Charlotte and my valise, I ran out and continued moving till I reached Broad Street Station, where I’ve given my remaining strength to this recounting.
My nerves are raw. My body trembles. I’m too tired to stand and beg—too tired to compete for food packets from the ground or even to chew—tired to the marrow of my bones.
*
Some days have passed—two? Four? How empty I feel. My locket with its broken chain lies nestled in the purse beneath the hollow of my throat. My baby, held upright against my left side, moves her eyes about, taking in the detritus of our homeless life. I’m still affected by the doses of laudanum I’ve been taking from the bottle in my valise. The drug brings ease. My hunger fades; my breathing slows; my suffering gives way to a welcome euphoria. But Charlotte has gotten some through my milk, and thus has been subdued and less inclined to motion.
To drug a baby is despicable—and I’ve drugged two.
Confessing makes me crave to harm myself in retaliation, which brings on more despair, which could lead me to take another dose, another.
Except that, just now, I’ve stood with Charlotte and poured the laudanum into the drain at the base of a fountain.
Who is thee, my ready friend, whom I entrust with all my secrets? Why do I sense an understanding heart, when thee is no more than paper?
There is perhaps some logic to it. I find hope and courage through this unburdening. In fixing events to a page, I can step beyond them, into the future—where I dread to go.