Orphan Train(80)

With Vivian hovering at her shoulder, Molly goes to the site and signs in on her own account: click, click, credit card number, address, click . . . okay, free shipping?

“How long will it take to arrive?”

“Let’s see . . . five to ten business days. Or maybe a little longer.”

“Could I get it sooner?”

“Sure. It just costs a little more.”

“How much more?”

“Well, for twenty-three dollars it can be here in a day or two.”

“I suppose at my age there’s no point in waiting, is there?”

As soon as the laptop arrives, a sleek little rectangular spaceship with a glowing screen, Molly helps Vivian set it up. She bookmarks the New York Times and AARP (why not?) and sets up an e-mail account ([email protected]), though it’s hard to imagine Vivian using it. She shows Vivian how to access the tutorial, which she dutifully follows, exclaiming to herself as she goes: “Ah, that’s what that is. You just push that button—oh! I see. Touchpad . . . where’s the touchpad? Silly me, of course.”

Vivian is a fast study. And soon enough, with a few quick strokes, she discovers a whole community of train riders and their descendants. Nearly a hundred of the two hundred thousand children who rode the trains are still alive. There are books and newspaper articles, plays and events. There’s a National Orphan Train Complex based in Concordia, Kansas, with a website that includes riders’ testimonies and photographs and a link to FAQs. (“Frequently asked questions?” Vivian marvels. “By whom?”) There’s a group called the New York Train Riders; the few remaining survivors and their many descendants meet annually in a convent in Little Falls, Minnesota. The Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital have websites with links to resources and information about historical records and archives. And there is a whole subgenre of ancestor research—sons and daughters flying to New York clutching scrapbooks, tracking down letters of indenture, photographs, birth certificates.

With help from Molly, Vivian sets up an Amazon account and orders books. There are dozens of children’s stories about the trains, but what she’s interested in is the documents, the artifacts, the self-published train-rider stories, each one a testimony, a telling. Many of the stories, she finds, follow a similar trajectory: This bad thing happened, and this—and I found myself on a train—and this bad thing happened, and this—but I grew up to become a respectable, law-abiding citizen; I fell in love, I had children and grandchildren; in short, I’ve had a happy life, a life that could only have been possible because I was orphaned or abandoned and sent to Kansas or Minnesota or Oklahoma on a train. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason—to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?” Molly asks when Vivian reads some of these stories aloud.

“It certainly helps,” Vivian says. She is sitting in one wingback with a laptop, scrolling through stories from the Kansas archives, and Molly in the other, reading actual books from Vivian’s library. She’s already plowed through Oliver Twist and is deep into David Copperfield when Vivian squeaks.

Molly looks up, startled. She’s never heard Vivian make that sound. “What is it?”

“I think . . .” Vivian murmurs, her face glowing bluish in the skim-milk tint from the screen as she moves two fingers down across the trackpad, “I think I may have just found Carmine. The boy from the train.” She lifts the computer from her lap and hands it to Molly.

The page is titled Carmine Luten—Minnesota—1929.

“They didn’t change his name?”

“Apparently not,” Vivian says. “Look—here’s the woman who took him out of my arms that day.” She points at the screen with a curved finger, urging Molly to scroll down. “An idyllic childhood, the piece says. They called him Carm.”

Molly reads on: Carm, it appears, was lucky. He grew up in Park Rapids. Married his high school sweetheart, became a salesman like his father. She lingers over the photographs: one taken of him with his new parents, just as Vivian described them—his mother, slight and pretty, his father tall and thin, chubby Carmine with his dark curly hair and crossed eyes nestled between them. There’s a picture of him on his wedding day, eyes fixed, wearing glasses, beaming beside a round-cheeked, chestnut-haired girl as they cut a many-tiered white cake—and then one of him bald and smiling, an arm around his plumper but still recognizable wife, with a caption noting their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Carmine’s story has been written by his son, who clearly did lots of research, even making the pilgrimage to New York to scour the records of the Children’s Aid Society. The son discovered that Carmine’s birth mother, a new arrival from Italy, died in childbirth, and his destitute father gave him up. Carmine, it says in a postscript, died peacefully at the age of seventy-four in Park Rapids.

“I like knowing that Carmine had a good life,” Vivian says. “That makes me happy.”

Molly goes to Facebook and types in the name of Carmine’s son, Carmine Luten Jr. There’s only one. She clicks on the photo tab and hands the laptop back to Vivian. “I can set up an account for you, if you want. You could send his son a friend request or a Facebook message.”

Vivian peers at the pictures of Carmine’s son with his wife and grandchildren on a recent vacation—at Harry Potter’s castle, on a roller coaster, standing next to Mickey Mouse. “Good Lord. I’m not ready for that. But . . .” She looks at Molly. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”