Orphan Train(59)

On Sunday morning we go to church. Grace Lutheran is different from any place of worship I’ve ever seen: a simple white building with a steeple, Gothic arched windows, oak pews, and a spare altar. I find the rituals comforting—the tried-and-true hymns, sermons by the mild-mannered, slope-shouldered reverend that emphasize decency and good manners. Mr. Nielsen and other parishioners grumble about the organist, who either plays so fast that we jumble the words or so slow that the songs become dirges, and he can’t seem to take his foot off the pedal. But nobody actually protests—they just raise their eyebrows at each other midsong and shrug.

I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other. I like the coffee hour with almond cake and snickerdoodles in the vestry. And I like being associated with the Nielsens, who seem to be generally regarded as fine, upstanding citizens. For the first time in my life, the glow of other people’s approval extends to, and envelops, me.


LIFE WITH THE NIELSENS IS CALM AND ORDERLY. EACH MORNING AT five thirty, six days a week, Mrs. Nielsen makes breakfast for her husband, usually fried eggs and toast, and he leaves for the store to open for the farmers at six. I get ready for school and leave the house at seven forty-five for the ten-minute walk to the schoolhouse, a brick building that holds sixty children, separated into grades.

On my first day in this new school, the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Buschkowsky, asks the twelve of us in her class to introduce ourselves and list one or two of our hobbies.

I’ve never heard of a “hobby.” But the boy before me says playing stick-ball, and the girl before him says stamp collecting, so when the question comes to me, I say sewing.

“Lovely, Dorothy!” Miss Buschkowsky says. “What do you like to sew?”

“Clothes, mostly,” I tell the class.

Miss Buschkowsky smiles encouragingly. “For your dolls?”

“No, for ladies.”

“Well, isn’t that nice!” she says in a too-bright voice, and in that way it becomes clear to me that most ten-year-olds probably don’t sew clothes for ladies.

And so I begin to adjust. The kids know I’ve come from somewhere else, but as time passes, and with careful effort, I lose any trace of an accent. I note what the girls my age are wearing and the style of their hair and the subject of their conversations, and I work hard to banish my foreignness, to make friends, to fit in.

After school, at three o’clock, I walk directly to the store. Nielsen’s is a large open space divided into aisles, with a pharmacy in the back, a candy section up front, clothes, books, and magazines, shampoo, milk, and produce. My job is to stack shelves and help with inventory. When it’s busy, I help out at the cash register.

From my place at the counter I see longing in the faces of certain children—the ones who sidle into the store and linger in the candy aisle, eyeing the hard striped sticks with a fierce hunger I remember only too well. I ask Mr. Nielsen if I can use my own earnings to give a child a stick of penny candy now and then, and he laughs. “Use your discretion, Dorothy. I won’t take it out of your wages.”

Mrs. Nielsen leaves the store at five to start dinner; sometimes I go home with her, and sometimes I stay and help Mr. Nielsen close up. He always leaves at six. At dinner we talk about the weather and my homework and the store. Mr. Nielsen is a member of the chamber of commerce, and conversations often include discussion of initiatives and plans for stimulating business in this “unruly” economy, as he calls it. Late at night, Mr. Nielsen sits in the parlor at his rolltop desk, going over the store ledgers, while Mrs. Nielsen prepares our lunches for the next day, tidies the kitchen, takes care of household tasks. I help wash the dishes, sweep the floor. When chores are done, we play checkers or hearts and listen to the radio. Mrs. Nielsen teaches me to needlepoint; while she’s making intricately detailed pillows for the sofa, I work on the floral cover for a stool.

One of my first tasks at the store is to help decorate for Christmas. Mrs. Nielsen and I bring boxes filled with glass balls and china ornaments and ribbon and strings of sparkling beads up from the storage room in the cellar. Mr. Nielsen has his two delivery boys, Adam and Thomas, drive to the outskirts of town to cut a tree for the window, and we spend an afternoon putting swags of greenery with red velveteen bows over the store entrance and decorating the tree, wrapping empty boxes in foil paper and tying them with flocked ribbon and silk cording.

As we work together, Mrs. Nielsen tells me bits and pieces about her life. She is Swedish, though you wouldn’t know it—her people were dark-eyed gypsies who came to Gothamberg from central Europe. Her parents are dead, her siblings scattered. She and Mr. Nielsen have been married for eighteen years, since she was twenty-five and he was in his early thirties. They thought they couldn’t have children, but about eleven years ago she got pregnant. On July 7, 1920, their daughter, Vivian, was born.

“What is your birth date again, Dorothy?” Mrs. Nielsen asks.

“April twenty-first.”

Carefully she threads silver ribbon through the tree branches in the back, ducking her head so I can’t see her face. Then she says, “You girls are almost the same age.”

“What happened to her?” I venture. Mrs. Nielsen has never mentioned her daughter before and I sense that if I don’t ask now, I may not get the chance.

Mrs. Nielsen ties the ribbon to a branch and bends down to find another. She attaches the end of the new ribbon to the same branch to make it look continuous, and begins the process of weaving it through.