Orphan #8 (33 page)

Rachel happily followed the directions of the nurses throughout the day, doing the tasks she was assigned, taking breaks when she was told to, eating the sandwiches and drinking the coffee set out in the staff kitchen. Though children brought up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home complained about the regimentation of institutional life, for the rest of their lives most were never so happy as when they had a routine to follow. Rachel was helping wheel in patients’ beds when she was told Dr. Abrams wanted to see her in his office.

“Ah, Rachel, yes. The head nurse tells me you’ve been working hard today.”

“Yes, I like the work very much. Thank you again, Dr. Abrams.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Also, I telephoned the Orphaned Hebrews Home today and asked for the Infirmary.”

Rachel froze, anxiety bubbling up from her gut. The Home seemed such a world away, it had not occurred to her a simple phone call could link them. She braced herself for the look of betrayal on Dr. Abrams’s face. She was nothing but a runaway orphan who had insinuated herself into their home with her lies. Of course they would cast her out. She was already plotting how far from Denver the little money she had could take her.

“I spoke with a Miss Gladys Dreyer. We had a frank discussion about your situation out here.” Dr. Abrams paused; Rachel was light-headed from being unable to breathe. “She gave you a wonderful recommendation, said you were a good nursing student and that we were lucky to have you.” Rachel, stunned, stammered something. Dr. Abrams checked his pocket watch. “You go on home now. Please tell Mrs. Abrams I’ll be along by seven.”

As Rachel closed the door to his office, her relief was so acute she collapsed into a chair in the hallway, cradling her head until she regained her composure. She had never expected Nurse Dreyer to cover her lies. It could only mean Gladys didn’t know it was Rachel who had stolen Naomi’s money and cut Amelia’s hair, though she must have realized who had stolen her hat. Had Rachel been forgiven? Relieved as she was not to have been exposed, the kindness made her ashamed of herself. She swore she’d make Nurse Dreyer’s falsehoods as true as possible by learning everything she could about nursing.

When Mrs. Abrams opened the door and ushered Rachel into the warm house, she felt guilty all over again. She helped set the
table, and soon enough Dr. Abrams arrived, accompanied by two interns in need of a home-cooked meal. Mrs. Abrams chided him for giving her no warning, but the amount of food she’d prepared told Rachel she was used to unexpected guests. Rachel was quiet through dinner—the men talking medicine, Mrs. Abrams joining in when the conversation turned to politics. After helping clean up, Rachel asked Dr. Abrams’s permission to bring an anatomy book from his study upstairs with her. “Take the one by Henry Gray,” he said. “Leave me the new edition, but there’s an older one you can keep if you like.” In the Ivy Room, Rachel pored over the illustrations, so superior to the sketches in Emerson’s
Essentials
, and set herself a plan of study.

Before the month was over, Rachel had fitted herself into all the patterns of the hospital. The work was more satisfying than assisting in the Infirmary, more important than taking inventory. At home, Rachel had proved hopeless at even the simplest cooking tasks, so it became her job to set and clear the table, Mrs. Abrams sitting with her husband by the fire while Rachel washed the dishes.

On the last day of the month, Rachel was called into the hospital office. “Sign here,” the accountant said, pointing to a ledger, then handing over an envelope.

“Is everything all right?” Rachel asked, unsure what the transaction signified.

The accountant pushed up her glasses and checked the ledger. “I assure you, it’s all there. You started November fourth, correct? Check if you want to.” Realizing she was being paid, Rachel stammered no, she was sure it was fine. She could hardly wait to get back to the Ivy Room and open the envelope. It wasn’t much—she
was a girl, after all, working as a nurse’s aide for a charity—but it was the most money Rachel had ever come by honestly. It made her feel like she was a person making her own way.

Keeping only enough to pay her fare on the streetcar, Rachel stashed the money in her case, next to Amelia’s braid. She decided then and there no matter how long it took, she would save up enough to pay back Naomi. She imagined going down to the Western Union office with the cash, bills freshly ironed. How surprised Naomi would be to get the cable. How Rachel, forgiven, would be able to go home.

A
NEW PATIENT
arrived who soon became Rachel’s favorite. Mary wasn’t like the poor immigrants out from New York to recover on the charity of the hospital. She was from Philadelphia, young and wealthy. “I was, at any rate,” she whispered, her voice husky from coughing. Rachel had wheeled her bed out onto the porch for the day. Shivering, Mary pulled her mink stole around her neck. “Even before the crash, my father was living on credit, running up bills, lying to his clients. We didn’t know. I was in a private sanatorium in the Catskills, very posh. Last week, my mother showed up. Needed me home for the weekend, she told them, grandmother’s funeral, we’d be back Monday, no need to settle the bill, which was suspiciously overdue. I was crying over my grandmother all the way down the drive until my mother told me to shut up.” Mary paused to catch her breath while the cold air brought blood into her pale cheeks.

Rachel set out Mary’s lunch of creamy milk, hardboiled eggs, and buttered bread, but she had no appetite. “I know how they are in places like this—help me eat it or they’ll badger me no end.
Just take what I haven’t touched.” Rachel ate one of the eggs and a piece of bread while Mary talked. “Mother put me on a train for Denver with my steamer trunk like I was off to Europe. Handed me a bottle of codeine syrup, told me to cover my mouth and not to cough or I’d be kicked off. Spent her last dollars on the ticket.” Mary pushed away her half-empty glass of milk. “Seems Father had locked himself in his study, hadn’t come out for days. He finally confessed to my mother he was ruined. So, she shipped me off here, another charity case for the Hospital for Consumptive Hebrews.” Rachel cleared the meal and left Mary to doze, fur pulled around her face, eyelashes catching the occasional snowflake.

On days Mary was too weak to talk, she implored Rachel to tell her own story. There wasn’t enough time while working for extended conversation, so Rachel took to visiting Mary on her days off. It was a relief for her to have someone with whom she could speak the truth about herself. Mary encouraged her, pledging complete and utter secrecy. “I swear, I’ll take it to my grave, Rachel.”

“That’s not funny, Mary. You’ll see, you’ll be well by spring.” Sitting on Mary’s bed, Rachel whispered to keep the words between the two of them. She told Mary about her parents and the Home, about Sam running away and how she met the Cohens in Chicago, about Leadville and Max, about Dr. and Mrs. Abrams taking her in. Mary sympathized with Rachel over Sam, was appalled to hear about her uncle’s proposal, and agreed that she shouldn’t go looking for her father. One day Rachel even went so far as to talk about the Purim Dance.

“Men are animals,” Mary said, the flush in her cheeks for once not from the cold. “Always stayed as far away from them as I
could. Wasn’t easy, with my mother throwing parties and parading me around like a debutante, dragging the revolting sons of the nouveau riche over to fill in my dance card. I was almost grateful when the doctors diagnosed me. At least it kept the boys away. Now, tell me more about Naomi.”

Rachel did: how Naomi defended her plate at dinner, stood up for her in the dorm, visited her in the Infirmary, smacked anyone who tried calling her a name worse than Egg.

“Why’d they call you that?”

Rachel was surprised at the question. With her head hidden by the nurse’s cap or the cloche hat, Rachel had forgotten how few people realized she was bald. Dr. and Mrs. Abrams must have noticed, but they were nonchalant about it, knowing there were any number of medical reasons why someone could develop alopecia. Reluctantly she let Mary see what she looked like with her cap off. “It happened at the Infant Home, from X-rays is what they told me. I don’t really remember.”

“Explains your eyebrows. I guess I had wondered about that.” Mary tilted her head, appraisingly. “It’s strange, but kind of pretty in a way.”

“That’s what Naomi always said.” An unexpected blush overtook Rachel. Mary noticed.

“I had a friend, too, at finishing school. My particular friend. She wasn’t allowed to see me anymore after I contracted tuberculosis. She used to write, but her mother read one of my letters and put a stop to it. Said our friendship was unnatural.”

Rachel was astonished. It seemed impossible for the same accusation that had been leveled at Naomi to fit Mary as well. She must have meant something else, Rachel decided. With shaking hands,
she put her nurse’s cap back on and changed the subject. Searching for something Mary would like to talk about, she asked about the clothes in her steamer trunk.

“The only thing I liked about those dances were the dresses, Rachel. I had one from a shop on Park Avenue, satin so soft it was like melted butter. The trunk is in my room. Wheel me inside and show me my things. It’ll make me feel better.”

Rachel got permission from the head nurse, and the girls spent the rest of the afternoon rummaging through the trunk. As Rachel held up dresses that were of a finer quality and more modern than anything she could imagine affording or choosing, Mary recounted where they were purchased and when she had worn them.

“Choose something for yourself, Rachel,” Mary whispered. All the talking was irritating her lungs. She waved away Rachel’s objections with a limp hand. “Do it for me, to make me happy.”

Rachel picked the plainest dress, a drop waist in green wool. Mary insisted she try it on, declaring the result a success. “You practically look like a flapper,” she said before giving in to a fit of coughing. Over the next few weeks, Rachel accepted three dresses and a pair of hand-stitched shoes.

The evening after Christmas, Dr. and Mrs. Abrams invited Rachel to light menorah candles with them and were amazed to find she couldn’t recite the simple prayer. Dr. Abrams lamented the assimilationists back east who were so eager to be American they forgot how to be Jewish. Mrs. Abrams told her husband not to get started. “We’ll just teach her,” she said, and soon enough Rachel was speaking the Hebrew words and lighting the shammes.

“The doctor and I have a gift for you,” Mrs. Abrams said, handing
Rachel a package. Rachel didn’t seem to know what to do with it. “Is something the matter, dear?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever unwrapped a gift before.” She pulled away the paper to reveal a brand-new printing of
Essentials of Medicine
.

“When I spoke with Miss Dreyer, she said you were using this in school. I thought you’d like to have your own copy,” Dr. Abrams said.

Rachel thanked them both, promising herself to memorize every word. Sitting with the kindly couple by the fire, the menorah candles burning down, wearing Mary’s dress and shoes, her gift by her side, a cup of coffee in her hand and a plate of cake on her lap, Rachel could almost believe there really was a monarch of the universe capable of performing miracles.

O
NE MORNING OVER
breakfast, Mrs. Abrams said, “Simon’s birthday is in February and I want to find something special to send him. It’s your day off, why not come with me? We’ll make it an adventure.” Rachel had promised Mary she’d visit that afternoon, but her morning was free, so she accepted Mrs. Abrams’s invitation.

Rachel took a dollar from her savings, wanting to get Simon a present herself. Bundled up against the cold, they took the streetcar up Sixteenth and went in and out of the shops along Market. Mrs. Abrams purchased an illustrated edition of Webster’s dictionary for her grandson, but Rachel wanted her gift to be more whimsical. Remembering how fascinated Simon had been by the story the porter told them on the train, she asked Mrs. Abrams where she could buy a model or a carving of a horse.

“If you don’t tell Dr. Abrams, I’ll take you down Hop Alley. There’s a shop that sells carvings, everything you can imagine. I bought a chess set there, years ago.” She led Rachel farther up Market then turned down the alley that ran behind Twentieth Street. It was narrow, just enough space for the backs of the brick buildings to face off against each other. The doors and windows along the alley were filled with signs printed in Chinese characters and posters decorated with dragons and flowers. Two white men wearing last night’s top hats stumbled out of a door and scurried down the alley, hiding their faces. Mrs. Abrams pulled Rachel closer. “Here it is.”

They entered a cramped little shop, the teetering shelves stacked floor to ceiling with carvings in jade and quartz and onyx. Rachel scanned the shelves until her eyes settled on a rearing horse, his mane cut so thin the light shone through the stone. She brought it to the shopkeeper. He named a price and Rachel dipped her hand into her pocket for her dollar, but Mrs. Abrams stopped her. Despite the apparent language barrier, the shopkeeper and the doctor’s wife bartered with gusto, and in the end Rachel paid less than half the original sum.

The women retraced their steps, but just before they turned the corner Rachel spotted, in a window, a series of drawings of women with flowing hair: blond, auburn, brown, jet. One looked so much like the wig she’d tried on at the Tabor Opera House, Rachel paused. She saw an arrow pointing up the fire escape stairs and, painted on a door, English lettering above Chinese characters:
MRS. HONG’S HOUSE OF HAIR.
In a second-story window, Rachel thought she saw a bald head. As she looked, a small woman came into view and placed a wig on the form.

“Come along, Rachel, we don’t want to linger here,” Mrs. Abrams said, eyeing another jittery young man scuttling up the alley. Rachel followed reluctantly, her heart drumming against her ribs.

At the house on Colfax, Rachel ran up to the Ivy Room. She pulled her cardboard case out from under the bed and opened it. Taking up the thick braid of Amelia’s hair, she stroked it like a pet. She draped the braid over her scalp and imagined it already a wig to rival Madame Hildebrand’s. After carefully wrapping Amelia’s hair in newspaper, she took the carved horse out of her pocket and replaced it with what was left of Naomi’s money, as well as all she’d been saving to repay her, nearly every cent of three month’s pay.