Orphan Train(71)

We make a plan to meet in the lobby of the women’s hotel tomorrow at noon, and the four of them stand to leave. And then there’s a change of plans: Richard knows a bar that’s open until two and they go off in search of it, the two girls tottering on their heels and swaying against the men, who seem all too happy to support them.


JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, THE STREET OUTSIDE THE HOTEL IS LIT UP but empty, like a stage set before the actors appear. It doesn’t matter that I barely know the man Dutchy has become, know nothing about his family, his adolescence. I don’t care about how it might look to take him back to my room. I just want to spend more time with him.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“More than sure.”

He slips some bills in my hand. “Here, for the clerk. From the tip jar.”

It’s cool enough that Dutchy puts his jacket around my shoulders. His hand in mine as we walk feels like the most natural thing in the world. Through the low buildings, chips of stars glitter in a velvet sky.

At the front desk, the clerk—an older man, now, with a tweed cap tipped over his face—says, “What can I do for you?”

Oddly, I am not at all nervous. “My cousin lives in town. All right to take him up for a visit?”

The clerk looks through the glass door at Dutchy, standing on the sidewalk. “Cousin, huh?”

I slide two dollar bills across the desk. “I appreciate it.”

With his fingertips the clerk pulls the money toward him.

I wave at Dutchy and he opens the door, salutes the clerk, and follows me into the elevator.


IN THE STRANGE, SHADOWED LIGHTING OF MY SMALL ROOM DUTCHY takes off his belt and dress shirt and hangs them over the only chair. He stretches out on the bed in his undershirt and trousers, his back against the wall, and I lean against him, feeling his body curve around mine. His warm breath is on my neck, his arm on my waist. I wonder for a moment if he’ll kiss me. I want him to.

“How can this be?” he murmurs. “It isn’t possible. And yet I’ve dreamed of it. Have you?”

I don’t know what to say. I never dared to imagine that I’d see him again. In my experience, when you lose somebody you care about, they stay gone.

“What’s the best thing that happened to you in the past ten years?” I ask.

“Seeing you again.”

Smiling, I push back against his chest. “Besides that.”

“Meeting you the first time.”

We both laugh. “Besides that.”

“Hmm, besides that,” he muses, his lips on my shoulder. “Is there anything besides that?” He pulls me close, his hand cupping my hip bone. And though I’ve never done anything like this before—have barely ever been alone with a man, certainly not a man in his undershirt—I’m not nervous. When he kisses me, my whole body hums.

A few minutes later, he says, “I guess the best thing was finding out that I was good at something—at playing the piano. I was such a shell of a person. I had no confidence. Playing the piano gave me a place in the world. And . . . it was something I could do when I was angry or upset, or even happy. It was a way to express my feelings when I didn’t even know what they were.” He laughs a little. “Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“What about you? What’s your best thing?”

I don’t know why I asked him this question, since I don’t have an answer myself. I slide up so I am sitting at the head of the narrow bed with my feet tucked under me. As Dutchy rearranges himself with his back against the wall on the other end, words tumble from my mouth. I tell him about my loneliness and hunger at the Byrnes’, the abject misery of the Grotes’. I tell him about how grateful I am to the Nielsens, and also how tamped down I sometimes feel with them.

Dutchy tells me what happened to him after he left the Grange Hall. Life with the farmer and his wife was as bad as he’d feared. They made him sleep on hay bales in the barn and beat him if he complained. His ribs were fractured in a haying accident and they never called a doctor. He lived with them for three months, finally running away when the farmer woke him with a beating one morning because a raccoon got into the chicken coop. In pain, half starved, with a tapeworm and an eye infection, he collapsed on the road to town and was taken to the infirmary by a kindly widow.

But the farmer convinced the authorities that Dutchy was a juvenile delinquent who needed a firm hand, and Dutchy was returned to him. He ran away twice more—the second time in a blizzard, when it was a miracle he didn’t freeze to death. Running into a neighbor’s clothesline saved his life. The neighbor found him in his barn the following morning and made a deal with the farmer to trade Dutchy for a pig.

“A pig?” I say.

“I’m sure he thought it a worthy trade. That pig was massive.”

This farmer, a widower named Karl Maynard whose son and daughter were grown, gave him chores to do, but also sent him to school. And when Dutchy showed an interest in the dusty upright piano the widower’s wife used to play, he got it tuned and found a teacher to come to the farm to give him lessons.

When he was eighteen, Dutchy moved to Minneapolis, where he took any work he could find playing piano in bands and bars. “Maynard wanted me to take over the farm, but I knew I wasn’t cut out for it,” he says. “Honestly, I was grateful to have a skill I could use. And to live on my own. It’s a relief to be an adult.”