Chapter Five
Open Arms, by then already a relic from another time, stood on a side street between a milliner’s and a leather goods shop, in a small, defunct dressmaker’s factory.
The orphanage had been born as the passion project of a Cincinnati steel heiress and was privately maintained throughout what would later be called the Gilded Age—a time before world-size wars, when railroads were spreading across the country like kudzu and the rich were being photographed and seen by the poor for the first time and wanted to be well thought of.
When the steel heiress died, she left paperwork in place for the orphanage to qualify for government funding.
She also left a small annuity that was managed by a board of trustees at one of the local banks.
For all of that—or because of it—the orphanage remained pretty much the same as it had always been: six dormitory rooms, each housing up to four girls (never boys) who slept in bunk beds and kept their donated clothes in apple crates that sometimes doubled as nightstands and chairs.
The day-to-day operations of Open Arms were in the hands of its live-in administrator.
The previous administrator had depended heavily on her secretary and chloral hydrate, and by the time that administrator retired the secretary had been running the place for several years.
The board wasn’t blind to this; they promoted her.
So when the handbell clanged in the middle of the night, it was thirty-five-year-old Lydia Verts who sprang out of bed.
The handbell was tied to a basket Lydia kept on the deep sill of one of the orphanage’s three front windows.
It was a just-in-case basket that had a history of false alarms. Clang, clang for an empty Cracker Jack box, a discarded wingtip shoe, a watermelon rind, a dead blue jay—left, she suspected, by boys on their way to and from the school a block away.
No matter; the bell had to be answered. Never before in the middle of the night, though.
She tied her robe as she walked, her long auburn hair—already streaked with gray—flowing behind her, her slippers whispering across the creaky floor.
She pushed in the button on the wall and waited for the overhead bulb to spark; she was still learning to trust electricity.
Then she pulled back the curtains, opened the metal shutters, and there, of all the things to be found in a basket meant for a baby, was a baby.
Wrapped in a cream-colored blanket. Wide awake, green eyes peeking out of the folds.
Lydia pulled the basket inside and closed the shutters against the cold night air.
Instinctually—and against the whole premise of the basket, she supposed—she set it down, ran to the front door, drew back the bolt, and went outside to look up and down the street, thinking, Are you sure?
Have you thought this through? But it was a short block lit by a single streetlamp and not far to either corner; no one was there. She went back inside.
When she lifted the baby out of the basket and unwrapped the blanket, she discovered a head of bright red hair that was almost orange in the electric light.
The baby was eight, maybe nine months old, Lydia guessed.
Pinned to her tiny shirt was a handwritten note.
Please take care of this baby as I cannot.
I named her Margaret, but call her what you like.
Lydia was overworked and Open Arms was understaffed. If the baby’s name was Margaret, so be it. But Margaret what? Anderson would do for now, Lydia decided. It would change.
She carried the baby to the apartment she lived in at the back of the facility and, with her free hand, pulled the bedspread off her bed and laid it across the floor.
She set the baby on the middle of the bedspread and wrapped it around her to keep her in place, then went back out into the hall, trying to think of everything she was going to need.
There was a donated crib in the storeroom; it was filled with clothes, also donated and in need of mending.
She emptied the crib, wiped it off, wheeled it down the hall to her apartment, and put the baby in it.
She walked back to the storeroom and dug through the chest of leftover baby supplies and found diapers, an aspirin box of safety pins, a bottle with a nipple cap. Even a tin baby rattle.
You never know where the day’s going to take you, she thought, shaking the rattle.
What else?
Milk.
In her apartment, she got the bottle from the icebox and poured some milk into a pan to warm it.
Margaret never cried, never made a sound.
She remained upright in the crib, just as Lydia had positioned her, and looked about the room with what seemed to be guarded curiosity.
She stared at the headless seamstress’s dummy that was a leftover from the building’s dressmaker days; Lydia kept an old light-blue cardigan draped over its shoulders, and a plastic necklace she’d won at a carnival.
“That’s just a dummy,” she said to the baby.
“I call her Truly. She’s truly headless, ha ha.
” She picked Margaret up and carried her around while the gas hissed and the ice dripped into the pan beneath the icebox.
She whisper-sang “Love Sends a Little Gift of Roses” into the baby’s ear. She said, “My little firefly.”
Margaret had fallen asleep in her arms. Lydia kissed her on the forehead, laid her in the crib, and tucked a clean blanket around her. Then she turned off the stove and crawled back into bed.
—
Lydia had help at Open Arms, just never enough.
A state-appointed staff of two showed up each day for a few hours to prepare lunch and dinner (the former they served in the little dining room, the latter they put away for later—breakfast was in Lydia’s hands), and a state-appointed staff of two came once a week and washed the massive amounts of dirty laundry the orphanage generated, then strung it out and left it to dry on clotheslines that zigzagged the factory yard.
A volunteer nurse from the hospital came by every few days to take temperatures and listen to lungs.
A rotating handful of volunteers took “babysitting” shifts and corralled the girls to and from school.
Lydia tended to the administrative side of things and the general upkeep, and organized the army of little folding hands needed to keep up with the laundry, and performed the occasional disciplining and mothering the job required.
She also worked with the state to help find the girls homes.
Or, she didn’t help find the homes, since she had no means or time to do that, but she made sure the girls were properly recorded in the state system (through a series of phone calls and letters) and were ready to go, once homes were found, and she made sure they went.
Sometimes the girls were adopted. More often, they were placed with foster families who were in need of the money the state ponied up, and then lived in limbo, Lydia imagined.
For her, it was bittersweet sending the girls away—every time.
It was bittersweet welcoming them back, too, if they returned.
She’d had to estimate a birthday for Margaret’s records. It was probably March, but that was always a dreary, dead-cold month, so she made it April. April 9, because she had to pick a date on the calendar, and her own birthday was as good as any.
Margaret was assigned to her first foster home not long after her second birthday. The family lived one county over, and she was brought back a year later when the mother contracted polio.
She went into her second foster home, two counties over, when she was three, and she was brought back six months later when that foster mother was put in jail for pickpocketing.
The third foster home was even farther away, and Margaret’s stay there lasted for almost three years—until the summer of 1925, when a state inspector deemed it necessary to have her removed.
“Unsanitary conditions,” the report read, and Lydia felt terrible and guilty about that, though she couldn’t have known.
Margaret was seven now and eyed the orphanage with as wary a look as a seven-year-old could manage.
She smiled when she saw Lydia, though, and hugged her.
She also seemed to remember the layout of the building, reclaimed her old, lower bunk.
In no time, she was darting around the halls, playing with the other girls, her red hair zipping past the gray walls like a flame.
—
None of the girls, of course, were to be thought of as Lydia’s family.
Lydia had a family—or had what was left of the one she’d grown up with.
Her mother, still in Galena. Her younger sister, married now and living in Mt.
Gilead. Lydia had been married once, too, back in her early twenties, to a young man named Bo—a hod carrier who brought them to Doyle for a construction job, favored a plum-colored baker’s boy cap, and hit her as a matter of course, because he’d grown up watching his father hit his mother.
Bo didn’t see the need for Lydia to take a correspondence course in secretarial training.
He didn’t see the need for her to go out after dark without him.
One day at work, less than a year into their marriage, a horse kicked him in the head.
A foreman came and got Lydia and hurried her to the building site.
Bo’s skull was partly flattened and she had no idea how he was still alive.
He looked at her with his working eye and breathed heavily for several minutes.
Then he died. Someone brought out a tarp and, glancing respectfully at Lydia, laid it across him.
Someone went for the undertaker. Lydia walked back to the boarding house, and within a week she was enrolled in a correspondence course.