Orphan Train(75)

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1943


It is ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and I’ve been in the store for an hour, first going over accounts in the back room and now walking down each aisle, as I do every day, to make sure that the shelves are tidy and the sale displays are set up correctly. I’m in the back aisle, rebuilding a small pyramid of Jergens face cream that has toppled into a stack of Ivory soap, when I hear Mr. Nielsen say, “Can I help you?” in a strange stiff voice.

Then he says, sharply, “Viola.”

I don’t stop what I’m doing, though my heart races in my chest. Mr. Nielsen rarely calls his wife by her name. I continue building the pyramid of Jergens jars, five on the bottom, then four, three, two, one on top. I stack the leftover jars on the shelf behind the display. I replace the Ivory soap that was knocked off the pile. When I’m done, I stand in the aisle, waiting. I hear whispering. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen calls, “Vivian? Are you here?”

A Western Union man is standing at the cash register in his blue uniform and black-brimmed cap. The telegram is short. “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you that Luke Maynard was killed in action on February 16, 1943. Further details will be forwarded to you as they become available.”

I don’t hear what the Western Union man says. Mrs. Nielsen has started to cry. I touch my stomach—the baby. Our baby.

In the coming months, I will get more information. Dutchy and three others were killed when a plane crashed onto the fleet carrier. There was nothing anyone could do; the plane came apart on top of him. “I hope you will find comfort in the fact that Luke died instantly. He never felt a thing,” his shipmate Jim Daly writes. Later I receive a box of his personal effects—his wristwatch, letters I wrote to him, some clothes. The claddagh cross. I open the box and touch each item, then close it and put it away. It will be years before I wear the necklace again.

Dutchy hadn’t wanted to tell anyone on base that his wife was pregnant. He was superstitious, he said; he didn’t want to jinx it. I’m glad of that, glad that Jim Daly’s letter of condolence is one to a wife, not a mother.

The next few weeks I get up early in the morning, before it’s light, and go to work. I reorganize entire sections of merchandise. I have a big new sign made for the entrance and hire a design student to work on our windows. Despite my size, I drive to Minneapolis and walk around the large department stores, taking notes about how they create their window displays, trends in colors and styles that haven’t filtered up to us yet. I order inner tubes, sunglasses, and beach towels for summer.

Lil and Em take me to the cinema, to a play, out to dinner. Mrs. Murphy invites me regularly for tea. And one night I am woken by a searing pain and know it’s time to go to the hospital. I call Mrs. Nielsen, as we’ve planned, and pack my small bag, and she picks me up and drives me there. I am in labor for seven hours, the agony so great in the last stretch that I wonder if it’s possible to split in half. I start to cry from the pain, and all the tears I haven’t shed for Dutchy come flooding out. I am overcome with grief, with loss, with the stark misery of being alone.

I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.

Lying in that hospital bed I feel all of it: the terrible weight of sorrow, the crumbling of my dreams. I sob uncontrollably for all that I’ve lost—the love of my life, my family, a future I’d dared to envision. And in that moment I make a decision. I can’t go through this again. I can’t give myself to someone so completely only to lose them. I don’t want, ever again, to experience the loss of someone I love beyond reason.

“There, there,” Mrs. Nielsen says, her voice rising in alarm. “If you keep on like this you’ll”—she says “go dry,” but what I hear is “die.”

“I want to die,” I tell her. “I have nothing left.”

“You have this baby,” she says. “You’ll go on for this baby.”

I turn away. I push, and after a time the baby comes.

The little girl is as light as a hen in my arms. Her hair is wispy and blond. Her eyes are as bright as underwater stones. Dizzy with fatigue, I hold her close and shut my eyes.

I have told no one, not even Mrs. Nielsen, what I am about to do. I whisper a name in my baby’s ear: May. Maisie. Like me, she is the reincarnation of a dead girl.

And then I do it. I give her away.





Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011


“Oh, Vivian. You gave her away,” Molly says, leaning forward in her chair.

The two of them have been sitting for hours in the wingbacks in the living room. The antique lamp between them casts a planetary glow. On the floor, a stack of blue onionskin airmail letters bound with string, a man’s gold watch, a steel helmet, and a pair of military-issue socks spill out of a black steamer trunk stamped with the words U.S. NAVY.

Vivian smooths the blanket on her lap and shakes her head as if deep in thought.

“I’m so sorry.” Molly fingers the never-used baby blanket, its basket-weave design still vivid, the stitches intricately pristine. So Vivian had a baby and gave her away . . . and then married Jim Daly, Dutchy’s best friend. Was she in love with him, or was he merely consolation? Did she tell him about the baby?