Orphan Train(33)

Maybe because the alternative is so bleak, I’ve grown to like the sewing room. I look forward to seeing the women every day—kind Fanny, simple-minded Bernice, and quiet Sally and Joan. (All except Mary, who can’t seem to forgive me for being alive.) And I like the work. My fingers are getting strong and quick; a piece that used to take an hour or more I can do in minutes. I used to be afraid of new stitches and techniques, but now welcome each new challenge—pencil-sharp pleats, sequins, delicate lace.

The others can see that I’m improving, and they’ve started giving me more to do. Without ever saying it directly, Fanny has taken over Mary’s job of supervising my work. “Be careful, dear,” she says, running a light finger over my stitches. “Take the time to make them small and even. Remember, somebody will wear this, probably over and over until it’s worn through. A lady wants to feel pretty, no matter how much money she has.”

Ever since I arrived in Minnesota people have been warning me about the extreme cold that’s on the way. I am beginning to feel it. Kinvara is rain soaked much of the year, and Irish winters are cold and wet. New York is gray and slushy and miserable for months. But neither place compares to this. Already we’ve had two big snowstorms. As the weather gets colder, my fingers are so stiff when I’m sewing that I have to stop and rub them so I can keep going. I notice that the other women are wearing fingerless gloves, and when I ask where they came from, they tell me they made them themselves.

I don’t know how to knit. My mam never taught me. But I know I need to get a pair of gloves for my stiff, cold hands.

Several days before Christmas, Mrs. Byrne announces that Christmas Day, Wednesday, will be an unpaid holiday. She and Mr. Byrne will be gone for the day, visiting relatives out of town. She doesn’t ask me to come along. At the end of our workday on Christmas Eve, Fanny slips me a small brown-wrapped parcel. “Open this later,” she whispers. “Tell them you brought it from home.” I put the packet in my pocket and wade through knee-deep snow to the privy, where I open it in the semidarkness, wind slicing through the cracks in the walls and the slit in the door. It’s a pair of fingerless gloves knit from a dense navy blue yarn, and a thick pair of brown wool mittens. When I put on the mittens I find that Fanny lined them with heavy wool and reinforced the top of the thumb and other fingers with extra padding.

As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I’m not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.


BY JANUARY, I AM LOSING SO MUCH WEIGHT THAT MY NEW DRESSES, the ones I made myself, swim on my hips. Mr. Byrne comes and goes at odd hours, and I barely see him. We have less and less work. Fanny is teaching me how to knit, and sometimes the other girls bring in work of their own so they won’t go crazy with idleness. The heat is turned off as soon as the workers leave at five. The lights go off at seven. I spend nights on my pallet wide-awake and shivering in the dark, listening to the howling of the seemingly endless storms that rage outside. I wonder about Dutchy—if he’s sleeping in a barn with animals, eating only pig slops. I hope he’s warm.

One day in early February, Mrs. Byrne enters the sewing room silently and unexpectedly. She seems to have stopped grooming. She’s worn the same dress all week, and her bodice is soiled. Her hair is lank and greasy, and she has a sore on her lip.

She asks the Singer girl Sally to step out into the hall, and several minutes later Sally returns to the room with red-rimmed eyes. She picks up her belongings in silence.

A few weeks later Mrs. Byrne comes for Bernice. They go out into the hall, and then Bernice returns and gathers her things.

After that it’s just Fanny and Mary and me.

It’s a windy afternoon in late March when Mrs. Byrne slips into the room and asks for Mary. I feel sorry for Mary then—despite her meanness, despite everything. Slowly she picks up her belongings, puts on her hat and coat. She looks at Fanny and me and nods, and we nod back. “God bless you, child,” Fanny says.

When Mary and Mrs. Byrne leave the room, Fanny and I watch the door, straining to hear the indistinct murmuring in the hall. Fanny says, “Lordy, I’m too old for this.”

A week later, the doorbell rings. Fanny and I look at each other. This is strange. The doorbell never rings.

We hear Mrs. Byrne rustle down the stairs, undo the heavy locks, open the squeaky door. We hear her talking to a man in the hall.

The door to the sewing room opens, and I jump a little. In comes a heavyset man in a black felt hat and a gray suit. He has a black mustache and jowls like a basset hound.

“This the girl?” he asks, pointing a sausagey finger at me.

Mrs. Byrne nods.

The man takes off his hat and sets it on a small table by the door. Then he pulls a pair of eyeglasses out of the breast pocket of his overcoat and puts them on, perched partway down his bulbous nose. He takes a piece of folded paper out of another pocket and opens it with one hand. “Let’s see. Niamh Power.” He pronounces it “Nem.” Peering over his glasses at Mrs. Byrne, he says, “You changed her name to Dorothy?”

“We thought the girl should have an American name.” Mrs. Byrne makes a strangled sound that I interpret as a laugh. “Not legally, of course,” she adds.