Quivering with outrage, I took every bit of the remaining money, added it to my cloth purse, and secreted the purse beneath the lining of my valise. I decided this was more a restitution than a theft.
Then I hid some of my remaining items—including my diaries, some leather-bound books, a few trinkets, the silver spoons from a box in the kitchen, and my wedding lace—between the blankets in the trunk at the foot of my bed. I hoped against evidence that respect would keep Patience from searching that trunk and pawning what she could. Many more items that rightfully belonged to me were arrayed throughout the house, but they’d have to wait till I had a home worthy of the name, if they remained by then.
I waited by the warm kitchen stove for Patience to return.
“I know what thee did,” I said as she unloaded vegetables and meat from our wicker basket. With the confidence of the wronged, I pushed my face into her ruddy one. “Father doesn’t look kindly upon thieving, and neither does the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Her face blanched. In such an unfamiliar role I shook and sweated, but I managed to effect a trade: her secrecy for mine.
That evening I told Father I was taking a governess position downtown to save money for further education. I could get a position at a different school, I said, if I had more training. To my mixed relief and disappointment, Father neither spoke a word against the plan nor found reason to doubt it. The next morning, when I traveled downtown on the same railway car that Peter and Johan had taken, I was embarking on a very different journey.
At a newsstand, I obtained the morning’s papers. I sat on a bench and scoured the advertisements for any place that might shelter me. There were many notices from midwives who offered housing and medical services, but I hadn’t near enough money to pay the prices listed. I found one notice of a women’s refuge run by the city, but its name included the word Magdalen, which gave away its nature as a place that served women of the night—and the description expressly excluded those who were with child. At last I found a discreet listing in the Public Ledger for the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants, which offered shelter to “friendless women” and listed visiting hours that very afternoon. I prayed that I was correctly perceiving the nature of the place.
On that bench I sat for several hours, my hands in the pockets of my cloak, my mind a whir of regrets and supplications to my Inner Guide. For months I had failed to consult it, much less to follow its edicts. Perhaps this is why it stayed silent as I sat and suffered.
At last, avoiding puddles of slush and animal waste as best I could, I walked to a stuccoed edifice on Tenth and Fitzwater Streets, arriving shortly after the opening time. Climbing its few marble steps, I entered an arched doorway into a foyer and joined a line of twenty or so creatures at least as miserable as me.
We didn’t speak to one another. Each head and face was hidden by a hat or bonnet and a shawl. One after another of the applicants filed into the office and dragged herself out again, having been deemed insufficiently worthy by whatever person was judging them inside. On departing, some cried out threats of killing themselves or their babies, saying they’d prefer that to the almshouse or the street. My body was atremble by the time my turn came to sit upon the bench opposite the desk of the inquisitor.
Stern and long-faced, she introduced herself as Mrs. Anne Pierce, the superintendent of this establishment. She began her inquisition gently. “What brings you to this shelter?” “How far along do you judge yourself to be?” Then her questions grew more pointed, so that I thought her last name, Pierce, was apt. “Have you been with child before? Was this man your first lover? How many times did you lie with him? Did others think you good? Have you ever been taken before a magistrate? Have you broken any law? How often do you drink alcohol? Do you take patent medicines regularly?”
I blessed my upbringing, for I could truthfully reply yes and never and no in their proper places. She stood and paced the small area behind her desk, three steps one way, three steps the other. Her tall form was clad in a gown that was demure in color and design but made of costly wool, of the sort that only expert weavers can produce, in the old way, by hand. On such small observations I focused my thoughts, fearing the chasm that yawned behind them, into which I’d plunge if she would not take me in.
At last Anne Pierce sat and proclaimed her decision. Upon considering the virtue of my previous life, and impressed by my former employment as a schoolteacher, she considered me deserving of a bed at her charity.
“Our furnishings are spare,” she informed me, “and our rations, meager. But we will protect you from the damages of publicity and offer you a chance for repentance and reformation.”
I expressed my gratitude, saying that I asked no more.
She demanded to know my lover’s name then, saying it was necessary for admission, so that her solicitor could try to procure damages and support. The money, she explained, would reduce my burden and help pay the Haven for my care. Spelling it out for her as she wrote—JOHANNES ERNST—and hearing him described as “the male offender” made the situation bitterly clear.
“The promise of marriage,” said Anne, “is one of the oldest lies in the lustful man’s book—often laced with exclamations over the woman’s beauty.”
How right she was.
As I sat in her office, then followed directions to the Haven’s one empty bed, I considered my foolishness. I hadn’t known Johan well enough to give him my trust. He’d left his parents and siblings in New Jersey to come to Philadelphia; as explanation he’d offered only that his youngest brother would inherit the farm, so he needed to find his own situation. Had there been other reasons underlying his departure? Had he left in disgrace? Or had he been taken by the same wanderlust that carried him next to Pittsburgh? For that matter, was his family an upright and responsible one, as I’d assumed, or were they a pack of wastrels?
How can one truly know a man, if one considers him as a singular being? The individuals in a family fit together like pieces in a puzzle, forming a larger picture, making clear the nature of the whole and its parts. But Johan came to me unmoored, careening, a piece set free.
Now I’m the same, a puzzle piece without its puzzle, careening among other unmatched remnants. My body shivering on a stone bench in the courtyard of an institution for the shamed and exiled. At last, confessing my story to a page.
If I strain my ears, I can hear poor Nancy’s cries.
How ill prepared I am for my turn on the birthing table. I’ve only seen our horse give birth, and some sheep and cows in the neighbor’s barn. They betrayed discomfort merely by the twitching of their legs and the pleading of their widened eyes.