Rose was born to an eighteen-year-old girl who didn’t know she was pregnant until she was six months along. Rose’s mother hadn’t particularly liked Rose’s father. The boy waited for her on the corner of her street every day. He would always beg her to come into the alley with him and let him have a peek at her breasts. She decided to give in one afternoon. Somehow she thought that if she made love to him, he would go away and leave her alone. Which, actually, proved to be the case.
When she realized she was pregnant, the girl hid it under baggy clothes the whole time. She gave birth to a tiny baby girl at home in the bathtub. It had purple lids over its eyes. It looked like it might be thinking about a poem. The girl’s sisters all stared at the little baby in shock, not knowing what to do. They forgot to put their hands over the baby’s mouth and it let out a cry that summoned everyone in the house.
With tears streaming out of two black eyes that she’d gotten from her father, the girl wrapped the baby up in a little blanket. She put on her black coat and boots. She was supposed to go straight to the church. Babies were abandoned on the church steps all the time. The baby’s fists opened and closed like a pensive sea anemone. But before the girl left, she got on her hands and knees and secretly begged her mother for fifty dollars. Her mother, with a mixture of disgust and compassion, handed her daughter the bills. The girl whispered “Thank you” and hurried out the door.
She passed the church and walked another mile and knocked on a door at the end of a lane. There was a woman who lived there who would take your baby off you for fifty dollars. For the fee, the woman promised, the baby would not be put in an orphanage.
A woman with gray hair the color of gunpowder and wearing a coat opened the door for Rose’s mother. In the kitchen, she said she would make sure that the girl was given to a rich family in Westmount. She would be dressed in beautiful white outfits with elaborate little collars, which would make her look like a flower. She would have a governess and an Irish wolfhound. She would be read to all the time from great fat books. For a small fee. For a small fee. For a small fee she could secure a home and good fortune for her daughter.
What a foolish imagination Rose’s mother had to have had to buy what this woman was selling. It was no good to have an imagination if you were a girl and living in Montreal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Intelligence was what she needed. But she never listened to anyone.
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A MAN, taking a shortcut home from the factory, found Rose wrapped in her blanket in the snow beneath a tree in Mount Royal Park. She was frozen and had two little round spots like blue roses on her cheeks. The man put his ear up to the girl’s face and felt that her cheeks were as cold as stones, but he heard a tiny, tiny exhale. He tucked her deep into the folds of his coat and ran with her to the hospital. At the hospital, they put her in a bucket of warm water. When her eyes flittered open, it was a miracle of sorts.
The police went to the park and found other babies in the snow, each having turned into a stone angel. The terrible merchant’s identity was uncovered and she was arrested. As she was being dragged into court, all the people threw snowballs with rocks embedded in them at her. The woman was sentenced to be hanged. Although everyone was indignant and outraged about the fate of Rose, nobody came forward to adopt her. All anyone could afford was indignation.
When the policemen brought the baby to the orphanage, they said, “Watch out for this one. Nothing good was ever meant to happen to her.” All the girls at the orphanage were named Marie, and so was this baby girl. But her nickname, which she would always be known by, was Rose, because the two bright spots on her cheeks had turned from blue to red, then took two more weeks to disappear.
3
A HISTORY OF INNOCENCE
The orphanage was on the northern boundary of the city. If you went to where the city ended and then walked two thousand paces, you would come upon the orphanage, although it isn’t there now. It was an enormous place. It was not the type of building that you would want to bother making a pen-and-ink sketch of because you would surely get incredibly bored drawing all those identical square windows. It would require no artistry on your part and, therefore, you might find your time more creatively spent illustrating a running horse.