It’s good! You’ll have your own room. You’ll have a sister. They’ll take better care of you than we can here.”
“I already have sisters,” Honora said.
“Now you have one more. Go gather your things.”
“I don’t want to go.”
Fiona’s face hardened. “Ungrateful. Get your things.”
“I don’t want to go,” Honora said. “What about Delia?”
“Get your things now. And dry up that crying. Don’t make her return you.” Fiona sank to kneeling beside Honora and slowed her speech. “Do you know what happens when they return you?” She paused while Honora stared at her. “Do you know? Do you have any idea?”
Honora shook her head.
“If you come back here, they beat you. Not just once. Not with just the paddle. Not just on the backside. Have you seen me legs, Nora?” she slipped back into her brogue, like she assumed the Kelleys had. “And do ye know what happens when ye turn eighteen? Ye don’t get fifty dollars like you would with them. Ye get a curbstone pillow and a cobblestone bed and you hope that some man finds ye pretty enough to give a pittance for dinner in exchange for a night of torture, and ye wait for ladies like this to have pity on you. Which they never will.” Fiona’s face was bright red. “Don’t be like me. Do you understand, Honora?” Fiona stared into the scared and now cold black eyes of the little girl until she remembered herself. She pawed at her face and blinked and said, “Don’t make her bring you back. Do what she says. Do what she says, and then one day if you do it well enough, you won’t have to anymore. Gather your things.”
Honora went to her bunk to find her second dress and primer. She folded her apron around her things and tied it to make a neat package. While she did it, Fiona stared at her own callused hands and neither girl noticed Delia’s electric-blue eyes staring vacantly into the bunkroom, sponge dripping dirty water in the doorway.
Fiona led Honora to the parlor office by the hand. “Don’t be afraid, Nora,” she murmured, though the girl would not look at her again. “Mrs. Toppan is a very nice woman. She wanted you because she knows how good your work is. She knows how sweet you are, and how your stories make everyone happy, and she wants you to make her little girl happy like you make the girls here happy,” she chattered on until they reached the door of the parlor office. “They’re going to love you, Nora,” she said, and pushed open the door. Mrs. Toppan and Matron Greene stood.
Matron Greene said, “Mrs. Toppan, this is Honora Kelley.”
Honora smiled hugely. She walked toward Mrs. Toppan as Mrs. Toppan said, “You may call me Auntie.” Honora curtsied in front of her new employer.
“They call me Nora,” she said, still smiling. “It’s short for my name, Honora, madam.”
Auntie smirked and kept her gaze level with the little girl. “That won’t do. That won’t do at all. You need a proper American name. We’ll call you Jane. Do you like that name, Jane?”
Honora frowned at first. She didn’t know of anyone named Jane. The only time she ever heard the name was when she was cleaning the parlor and a policeman came in and asked Matron Greene to identify someone named Jane. A body. During the moment of silence, Mrs. Toppan’s face creased between her brows and her eyes narrowed. Honora remembered Fiona’s instructions, and then she smiled wide again and nodded. “It’s a beautiful name, Auntie. I love it.”
Jane was excellent in her chores, she was well-behaved and courteous, she enjoyed helping Auntie prepare for guests, and she loved the Bible stories that she got to hear from the back of the church. Her favorite story was of King Solomon mediating between the two mothers. They both claimed to be the mother of the same child, and they came to King Solomon to decide who could keep the baby. He suggested a compromise. “I’ll cut the baby in half,” the preacher said. One mother agreed. The other mother said, “No! Don’t! She can have him!” and to that mother, Solomon gave the child. Even if that wasn’t the real mother, Jane intuited, the child was better off with her.
Jane imagined that she was that baby.
She imagined whole lives for herself, and she always had. Her daydreams distracted her from her regular tasks, made them endurable. Auntie felt that the girl at the asylum had cheated her, that Jane had not told the children “stories,” as that girl had said, but bold-faced lies, slander, titillations that no children should hear, let alone conceptualize for themselves, and her gentle daughter Elizabeth was far too soft for such narratives. The first time Auntie overheard one of Jane’s tales was when she walked in while Jane was cleaning Elizabeth’s chamber pot. Elizabeth sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, jaw hanging, as Jane gesticulated about her elder sister marrying a black man in Paris and having a dozen beautiful gingerbread-skinned babies with curls so tight they sprung back into place when pulled, who danced on feet so small it looked like they balanced on the tips of their toes, and even the boys had the best sweet smiles, and they were always kind to everyone, and if you dropped your bread from your basket into a puddle, any of the children would share theirs with you, that’s how rich and generous her sister’s children were—
Elizabeth looked up at her mother’s shape, a petite silhouette framed in the doorway, and she smiled. “Did you know?” she grinned. “Did you know about Jane’s family?”
Jane stood and smiled at Auntie, with her hands behind her back. Her cheeks dimpled even as Auntie slapped her, hard, and she did not look up or cry afterward. “I’ll have no such lies told to my child,” Auntie said. “There are no dark-skinned people in France. You have no sister. And a Parisian would never court a Paddy, besides.” She stared down at Jane before she turned her eyes on Elizabeth. “Shame on you for listening to such nonsense. Come.” She walked toward the hall.
Jane’s eyes finally brimmed and flooded, but she kept her face down, even as Elizabeth asked, “Are you alright? Jennie? I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would make her mad—”
“Now,” her mother shrieked, and Elizabeth followed her into the parlor where she was made to sit until Jane finished the chores in her room. Then she was allowed to return, to change into her day dress, and then retreat back to the parlor to continue her needlepoint while her mother’s friends came to be entertained. Jane served them tea and biscuits.
“They won’t tell anyone,” Elizabeth told Jane on a church picnic, the next month, with a group of schoolchildren behind her. “I told them about your sister, about her children. They don’t believe me.”
Jane looked up from her darning and into the sun where they stood.
“Will you tell us the story?” a blonde girl asked. “About the gingerbread children?”
Jane looked at Elizabeth. “What did you tell them?”
“Just a little,” she said. “I just told her that your sister married a man in Paris, and they had children like sweet cake, that were sweet and interesting. But they didn’t believe me.”
“Please, Jennie,” said a little boy named James Murphy, with a face that reddened in the sun. “Tell us about the candy children.”
Jane
