home, madam.”
“Oh! I love that,” she said, ignoring the last half of what Jane said. “What else?”
“He’s Irish.”
Elizabeth was shocked. She tried to dodge the obvious contention, but she swallowed, and she said instead, “Oh. How do you know that?”
“He talks like my pa did.”
Regaining her footing, she said, “Do you like that about him?”
“I don’t know him. I don’t have anything to like or dislike about him.”
The sounds of water sloshing over dishes were the only noises in the room for a moment.
“Well. If you like him—and I think you might, even if you don’t yet—if you like him, don’t wear that same dress when you go back.”
“It’s my work dress, madam.”
“I know,” she said. “If you change clothes, he’ll notice. You’ll be wearing nice clothes. You won’t be there for work. Or, not only for work necessarily. If you decide that you like him. But, you know, what’s the harm? You have little enough free time. You may as well enjoy it. Mother has company this afternoon, so if you come back late—not that you would, but if you wanted to stay longer to…find out if you might like him—well, she probably wouldn’t notice she’ll be so tired.”
Jane cut her eyes at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s shoulders went up to her ruffled neck. She smiled conspiringly. “What’s his name?”
“Peter,” Jane lied.
Elizabeth nodded, her bun secured as tightly as it had been when Jane wound it on her head that morning. “Mother said she and her guests will take tea in the parlor as soon as they arrive,” she said when she heard footsteps, and on cue, Jane snatched up the teapot from its hook and was filling it with water when Auntie entered.
Jane busied herself during the day, but her mind wandered. Normally the rote chores kept her thoughts from wandering, but this was different from the gossip that normally spiraled through her mind: whether she got the rumor from someone else or invented it on her own, the regular thoughts were of people other than herself, the drama of other lives. Today, she turned her attention inward. Of whether she should go to the store at all, and if she did, what she would say to Tom when she saw him again, the second time in a single day, of what she would say to Auntie if she was caught leaving the house after dusk, even if on her errands, of what she would wear when she inevitably did arrive. She followed Elizabeth’s advice: she changed into the only nice dress she had besides those for Sunday. She’d pieced it together from orange curtain panels she found in the maids’ quarters, and even though the bodice was of a more faded color than the skirt—the only reason those curtains had been discarded in the first place—she liked the fit of it. The velvet hugged unlike the regular cotton. The sleeves draped such that her arms looked thin and unmuscled, like the arms of a lady, and the skirts looked more voluminous because of the fabric’s pile. And because it was mottled, Auntie never let her wear it outside the house. The dark covered flaws in coloration though, she thought at twilight when, after she cleared the dinner dishes, she fastened herself into the dress and walked downtown.
Her pace changed every block. At one she nearly ran, and the other she walked so slowly she may as well have detoured. Her mind stopped when she barely tapped the bell outside the textile shop. Tom opened the door almost immediately. He stood aside for her to enter.
“Is this your new Sunday dress?” he asked before he even said hello. “It’s gorgeous.”
The way he pronounced gorgeous, she thought, gar-jiss, gar-jiss, was like her family had said it. It came back to her, and the room looked changed in the fading light when she walked in. Tom walked around her behind the counter, and he made no effort to conceal his observation of her as she followed him. “They’re finishing the order now,” he said, and as he did so, with no further preamble he added, “I was thinking on your name. Toppan isn’t really your surname, is it? The family who indentured you had you take it, ah?”
Jane’s lips parted in shock.
“Oh! I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just thinking on it while you were gone. I was thinking on you and almost nothing else all day. I should be ashamed the way I let you distract me when you aren’t even here, but I’m not. They made you take it, though, when they brought you home, right? Is your first name Jane actually, or did they change that, too?”
Jane waited while the silence extended between them. She thought that he would backpedal over the tension that he created, but he did not, he just stared into her with his stark green eyes, waiting for her to answer. “Honora Kelley,” she said back, and it was as if something in his soul unfolded, like his eyes had a new depth of recognition, although he did not know her. His placid expression no longer meant nothing. He said with his eyes, you are also Irish. They took it away from you. You want it back, but you don’t know how to get it—you didn’t even know that you wanted it till now, and now you’ve told me, too.
With her mouth ajar, Jane’s belly grew warm and nauseated. Tom said finally, “Beautiful.”
She said nothing.
“Have your parents died?” he asked.
“My mother, when I was young, of consumption,” she said evenly, and then with a more buoyant tone, “My father surrendered us to the Boston Female Asylum when I was five, and then he tried to sew his eyelids shut.”
Tom didn’t laugh, and Jane could not remember anyone ever asking about her. She looked down, realizing that she had been missing this.
“He was sick,” Tom said softly.
Jane looked at him, hostile.
“I’m not being funny. You’d have to be sick to surrender a beautiful and smart little girl—and, who with you?”
“My sister Delia. I never saw her after I left.”
“I’d want to kill them all if I was you,” he said for the second time that day.
“No,” Jane said, resuming the jolly disposition that made her a favorite among all of the bourgeoisie. “I’m very grateful for their generosity. I don’t know what I did to make God favor me and be chosen by the Toppans.” She smiled. “And thank you for assuming I was a beautiful child.”
“You have skin like magnolia petals,” he said.
Her hair was unraveling from the walk and she suddenly felt embarrassed, the collar of her best dress suddenly constrictive. She realized she was sweating a little, her eyes watering from the cruel lie she had told about and to herself. Tom stood. He withdrew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket. “It’s one of the good things about learning to be a gentleman,” he said. “I remember to carry a handkerchief but I don’t remember to use it. Tell me, where do you live?”
Jane moved the handkerchief over her face, recalling the gossip of signals that Elizabeth and her friends sent to men with them, of how lost those trivialities would be on Tom. She dabbed her forehead, her upper lip. “I have my own space. The whole top floor of the Toppan house.”
“You
