The Lonely Hearts Hotel(18)

“Don’t leave me in this terrible building. Who will put out a little bit of milk if you don’t? I’ll starve! I’ll starve!

“Who will snap my fleas? I will itch to death. They will eat me alive. One morning I will wake up and I’ll be nothing but a bone.

“Who will say one nice word to me? Everyone will be accusing me of bringing them bad luck. It will just be so untrue. They will throw rocks at me. They’ll pour boiling water on me. They’ll swing me by my tail. My life isn’t worth living without you. You owe me something. You owe me something!”

Maybe that was what the ones you loved did to you: they made you feel lousy. Pierrot tossed his suitcase in the trunk and hurried into the back of the car. It wasn’t only Rose he was abandoning, was it? It was all the children. He used to entertain them and make them laugh. They depended on him for this. But he was going anyway!





10


    IN WHICH ROSE IS INSTRUCTED OF HER NEW FATE



Two weeks later, Rose was better and ready to go back to the dormitory. She took off her hospital gown and pulled her black tights up under her dress. She walked down the corridor, whose walls were painted blue. There were stone flowers carved above the arched windows. She walked through the wide-open doors of the common room. It was raining outside and all the children, chatting and playing with dolls, turned to look at Rose. They looked apprehensive: Rose wasn’t aware that Pierrot had left.

Sister Elo?se marched over quickly to tell her that Pierrot was gone and there would be no more touring for her. She wasn’t really much of an act on her own, was she? This struck Rose like a small bolt of lightning. She might as well have been Rip Van Winkle. She had been in the infirmary bed for a hundred years, only to find that everything about the world that was familiar and dear to her had irretrievably disappeared. But Rose stared at Elo?se, refusing to let her know that this upset her. She nodded and walked off, hoping her legs weren’t making her body shake.

Rose didn’t understand why Pierrot would have left without saying good-bye. It didn’t even seem possible. Especially since he was so effusive with his emotions. Over the next couple of weeks, she waited for some message from him. Why were there no letters, at least? There was a boy in the orphanage who had received letters from an older brother who had stayed in Europe after the war. They were the most wonderful missives. The boy read them out loud over and over again. The children crammed around him when he read them, as though he were a famous person and they wanted an autograph.

The children wanted to know what in the world had happened to Pierrot, and what adventures he was having. They fully expected reports to arrive that Rose would certainly share with them, the way she shared everything else. But letters never came. It made her feel insecure. It showed her that a person’s personality could change radically, that you could never really know someone. In fact, you could probably never know yourself. You could think of yourself as the most fun-loving, generous person but actually be cutthroat and indecent.

The Mother Superior came in one afternoon in the fall to tell Rose that she was being sent off to work as a governess. The Mother Superior was eager to get Rose away from Elo?se. But there were other reasons to send her off as well. Of late, the nuns were feeling pressure to send out all the older children to work. They had to make room for all the new children who were being dropped off.

The Great Depression had come to Montreal.

? ? ?

THE NEW ARRIVALS CAME in the backs of cars with priests. The doorbell seemed to ring every day that month. That morning, the Mother Superior had opened the door to see a priest holding the hands of two children, a girl in a white sweater and blue leather boots, and a boy with a crooked bow tie and no shoes at all.

Earlier that week a handsome boy had arrived with a large duffel bag containing his Sunday clothes and a teddy bear with a missing eye. He was followed shortly by a girl with blond ringlets whose parents had both died of consumption. She had a small oval tin with blue roses on it, filled with pastilles. That was her inheritance.

There was another boy who was pigeon-chested and went around shaking the other children’s hands saying, “How do you do?” He turned out to be very frank. He said his father had shot himself after losing money in the stock market. And his mother’s new husband thought he was too ugly to keep.

There was a solemn-looking boy whose lips were so full that it looked as if he were kissing the window of a train.

Once the doorbell rang and there was a girl in a small black coat and lace-up boots holding a baby in her arms. “Bonjour,” she said. “This is my brother. My mother said I should bring him. She didn’t give him a name. But if you please, I would like him to be named Emmanuel. I am not to leave the blanket.”

Women gave birth at hospitals. And the second the doctor cut the umbilical cord, they were pulling their moth-eaten stretched sweaters over their heads and running to the front door to get away from feeding an extra mouth.

One boy was brought to the orphanage by his mother. She was wearing a navy blue coat, torn at the shoulder, and men’s shoes tied with pink ribbons. She got down on her knees in front of the boy. “I will come back for you, my darling. I will think about you every single second of the day. As soon as I get work and a new apartment, I’ll come back for you.”

The nuns had little patience for these women. They would leave a bizarre list of instructions. About how their child liked to be sung to before going to bed and how they liked their milk to be warmed. And how there was a poem that they liked to have recited to them while each of their toes was wiggled.