The Endless Forest
Page 170

“I am breaking every rule Mrs. Focht laid down,” she said. “Excuse me if I hesitate.”
Then she turned to Levi, and concentrated on his face alone.
Lorena keeps house for her husband of one year, takes in sewing and mending so they can put a little aside, and waits for the birth of her first child. It is a simple life. They are both satisfied with their lot and each other.
On the day she loses everything, Lorena feels the first birth pangs early in the morning. She keeps this to herself. First babies are slow in coming, and there will be time enough for Jonah to worry when he comes home from work. She is thinking about what he will say to find the midwife with her when she hears the sound of something very large crashing to the ground.
She finds Jonah sprawled in front of the door, a hand clutched to his chest as if to grab hold of his heart and make it behave. That night she gives birth to a daughter who breathes fitfully for a quarter hour, and then stops.
The little bit of money they have put aside goes to the coffin maker and the grave digger. Then she walks home to find a note from Mr. George pinned to her door. Now that Jonah is gone, he needs the little house for another worker, a man with a wife and children. He can give her two more days. He is not a cruel man, Lorena knows this. She also knows that he will do nothing to help her.
She has no place to go. A hard birth has left her too weak to take on work in a scullery or washhouse; her clothes are so worn that she can’t present herself as a house servant. Her people are in Philadelphia. She has exactly enough coin in her pocket to buy a simple meal.
Lorena dreams of the baby. Her breasts ache, and there is a hole inside her that seems to grow by the hour.
A woman who turns her away when she asks for work takes the time to give her advice. The almshouse is the place for your kind, she says. Except of course they don’t take colored.
On her first day without a roof. Lorena finds a copy of the Boston Advertiser on a bench in the park. At the very bottom of the last column on the last page she reads an advertisement:
Wanted. Wet nurse. Clean, healthy, no thieves or degenerates.
Apply to 73 Barleycorn Street. It takes her more than an hour to walk there. A house in a neighborhood of fine houses, the kind of place where successful businessmen raise their families with the help of nurses and cooks and maids-of-all-work. There will be meat on the table every night, fresh wheaten rolls for breakfast, ponies and pianoforte lessons for the girls, and when they are old enough, the sons will become members of the clubs their father favors.
The servant who answers the kitchen door is a true African, her English so turned around that Lorena has to ask more than once if she has found the right house.
The servant leaves her there with nothing more to do than study her surroundings. The kitchen is tidy and well scrubbed. On a long table are the makings of a cake: sacks of flour and sugar, a clutch of brown speckled eggs, a lump of butter. On a piece of paper are small hills of ground spices: nutmeg and cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Lorena commands her belly to be quiet before someone comes into the kitchen.
Another servant who might have been a sister to the first takes Lorena through to the parlor where she will be interviewed by the lady of the house.
The parlor drapes are pulled so that the sun won’t fade the expensive fabrics. With one part of her mind Lorena takes note of the figurines on the mantelpiece, the thick carpet underfoot, the fragile teapot on a tray inlaid with ivory. With the foremost part of her mind, the part that understands what is at stake, she calculates what this woman—Mrs. Wilde, she names herself—needs to hear that will convince her to hire Lorena.
Mrs. Wilde wears a gown the color of muddy water, with jewels at her throat and in her ears and on her fingers. A plain woman, who puts Lorena in mind of the old-time Puritans, those who made it their business never to smile. There is no sign of a cradle, or of a husband. She wonders whose child needs suckling, if it could be Mrs. Wilde’s. There is nothing about her bearing that marks her for a mother.
She says, “Where were you born, Lorena?”
By rights she should be addressed as Mrs. Webb, but this white woman, like most of her kind, won’t be bothered with last names for blacks.
The questions come rapid-fire. Lorena names her place of birth, her parents, their occupations; yes, her father taught her to read, she owns a Bible, and she writes a clear hand. Mrs. Wilde reels off a list of numbers and Lorena adds them together in her head. Divides them by three, multiplies by eleven. She tells the story of how she met Jonah and how he died. Yes, she has her marriage lines.
“Tell me about your child.”
“A girl,” Lorena said, her voice catching. “Died almost right away. Just three days ago.”
“Ill-formed?”
Lorena shakes her head because she doesn’t trust her voice.
The questions turn to her health. Has she had smallpox, measles, whooping cough, lung fever? Is she clean in mind and spirit and deed?
She says it like that, though Lorena would not have taken offense at a more direct question. She has never prostituted herself. The only man she has known was her husband.
“I suppose you sound white because your father was a minister,” says Mrs. Wilde.
Lorena drops her gaze because there is nothing to say to this that won’t shore up the world of wrong ideas Mrs. Wilde has built for herself.
“Well, I was hoping for a white woman but every one of them who answered that advertisement had gin on the breath. You don’t take strong drink?”
“I never have.”