The Chaperone (10 page)

“We should start right away,” Mother Kaufmann said. She was already in the mudroom, putting on her heavy brown boots. “It’s a little wet out. We can go to the barn. Bring the lantern for when it gets dark.”

Cora was almost as stunned as she was thrilled—Mother Kaufmann had never played any kind of game with her. She was always busy, always getting something done. She got the fire going under the big tub to wash the clothes and sheets; she killed chickens with the clothesline before hanging them by their feet on the hook for plucking; she shoveled manure; she strained milk; she gathered eggs; she washed the strainers and the milk pails; she cooked the meals and canned pears and asparagus; she hauled in water to wash the dishes; she sewed tears in clothing. Cora helped with all this when she wasn’t at school, but she was given time to loaf, to pet the animals, and to lie on her back in the grass to look up at clouds. Still, she’d always done her loafing alone.

Once Mr. Kaufmann made the ring, however, Cora and Mother Kaufmann went out to the barn every evening, both of them staying up late to make the time. Mother Kaufmann was patient, especially at the beginning, when Cora was still learning how to uncross the wands at the right speed and angle to shoot the ring into the air. When she failed, after many tries, Mother Kaufmann told her she wasn’t moving the wands quickly enough. She showed her how to do it and told her to try again. And again. Again. Even in the cold, Cora would sweat in her dress, breathing hard. But she was so happy to be playing graces, to be playing anything with another person. They only had Cora’s two wands, so Mother Kaufmann didn’t use any—she caught the ring with just her hands before tossing it back to Cora. When Cora pointed out that this wasn’t exactly fair, Mother Kaufmann looked impatient and said fairness wasn’t the point.

She started tossing the ring from farther away. When it got late, she would blink at the lantern, and her tosses would get less controlled and even harder to catch.

But after a while, Cora was good enough to send the ring up high enough that she had time to run under it and catch it with one wand or two. She was allowed to stay up late and play on her own. She thought about the game even when she wasn’t playing it—the satisfying click the ring made when it landed just right on the wands. By Christmas, she could throw the ring up, spin around twice, and catch it with both wands. She could catch the ring behind her back. She could catch it with her arms crossed at the elbow. She tossed it up high enough to make one of the hired hands take off his hat and say, “Whoo-wee!” She could even catch the ring with her eyes closed, but after succeeding at this twice, she’d almost broken her nose, and she was too scared to try again.

The Kaufmanns agreed it was time for her to take the ring to school.

“You don’t need to ask them anything,” Mother Kaufmann said. “You just stand there and show them what you can do. Smile if you want. But they can come to you.”

On the cold,
sunny morning when Cora first walked into the school yard with her wands and her ring, they ignored her. The girls playing graces kept tossing and throwing, and the others waited for their turn. The boys were over by the tree. Cora heard pebbles shift under her shoes as she rocked back and forth, getting ready. She pushed her braids behind her shoulders. It was just like at home, she told herself, the same ring, the same wands. But her hands trembled as she crossed the sticks beneath her ring.

She caught several high tosses in a row. She caught the ring behind her back, and then she did it again. She knew they were watching when the clicking sounds of the other girls’ rings and wands stopped. She flew the ring up again, still higher than before, and this time when she caught it with the wands behind her back, someone, a boy—she would never know which one—yelled, “Darn, Cora. Bully for you!” And really, that was the moment, the exact moment, when everything started to change. Two of the older girls came up to her, just as Mother Kaufmann had said they would. They wanted to know how she could throw the ring up so high and always catch it. Could she show them? Where had she learned to play so well?

“New York,” Cora said, still throwing the ring high, high, high, in the air. She wasn’t ready to look at them just yet. “Everyone there is good at this.”

It was surprising, and a little perplexing, how easy things were from then on. The girls fought over who would play with her. Some started being friendly all the time, even when they weren’t playing. Cora was never invited to anyone’s house, but they were all a little nicer, and some risked the wrath of their parents by walking home with her from school. “You’re perfectly nice,” one girl told her. “My father said some people can overcome their backgrounds.”

All because of a game, a ring and wands, a set of rules. Really, it was as if she had tricked them. After all, she was the same person she had always been. She was still from New York City, with unknown heritage and dark hair. The game hadn’t really made her more graceful, or more anything, except more able to toss and catch a ring with wands. It wasn’t even that interesting of a game—there were only so many variations of the same toss and catch, and after a while, there was little room for further challenge or improvement. But she kept playing, long after she grew bored, for the same reason she started in the first place.

“I think you
likely came from good people,” Mother Kaufmann told Cora once. It was her fourteenth birthday, or what they called her birthday, the anniversary of the day she’d come on the train. She and Mother Kaufmann were in the kitchen, washing and slicing potatoes, Mother Kaufmann watching Cora to make sure she sliced away from her hand. The cake was in the copper-trimmed oven, and though it was a cold day, the air in the kitchen was warm enough that a glaze of mist had settled on the four-paned window.

“I never told you this.” She paused in her slicing to look down at Cora. “But you’re older now and I think you can hear it.” She started slicing again, still watching Cora’s hands. “When I told Mrs. Lindquist next door that we were thinking of getting a child from the train, she told me not to, not unless I only wanted a worker. She didn’t mean breeding and all that. She glanced down at Cora shyly. “She said you wouldn’t love me. She said children can’t respond to affection if they’re without from the start.”

Cora considered this, still slicing and listening to the rain fall from the eave over the window. Mrs. Lindquist was wrong. It was ridiculous. How could she not love Mother Kaufmann, who sang “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” as she and Cora pulled weeds in the garden, who could get very mad sometimes, but who had never laid a hand on her with anything but softness? How could she not love being in the kitchen with her, the scent of the cake in the oven, the sound of their slicing knives?

“She said it was scientifically proven.” Mother Kaufmann plunged two more potatoes in the bucket of water, rubbing off the mud with the pads of her thumbs. “But then we got you, and you wanted to be cuddled from the start. Not at the very first, but fairly quickly.” She looked down at Cora and smiled. When Cora was younger, she’d thought of Mother Kaufmann’s front teeth as little people, leaning into and against one another. “We’d hug you, and you’d hug back. We’d kiss your cheeks, and you’d kiss right back. You’d come up and sit in my lap. In Mr. Kaufmann’s, too. Mrs. Lindquist said someone must have held you when you were a baby. But you said the nuns didn’t hug and kiss.”

Cora had to laugh at the thought of it. Mother Kaufmann reached over to steady the knife. Even with all her work in the sun, her skin was much paler than Cora’s.

“Maybe the other girls then?”

Maybe. Cora remembered holding hands with Mary Jane. And there was the earliest memory, the one of the dark-haired woman with the knit shawl. Was she a real memory, then? And not just a lonely dream? Was that who had held her, and taught her to be held? She’d known her own name when she first came to the orphanage. That’s what the older girls said.

She glanced up at Mother Kaufmann. She’d never told her about the woman with the shawl. She’d worried the telling would hurt her, this woman who fed her vegetables but also cake and made her clothes and tied ribbons in her braids and stayed by her bed when she had a fever. She was betraying her now, perhaps, even thinking about the woman with the shawl. Cora leaned her forehead against Mother Kaufmann’s shoulder as a silent apology, and breathed in the lavender smell of her dress. When she looked up again, Mother Kaufmann’s blue eyes were bright and blinking fast.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, smoothing Cora’s hair. “We’re here for you now.”

But one day,
all at once and forever, they weren’t.

It happened in early November, when the days were still warm, but the cool evenings were lovely, the mosquitoes gone. Two cuttings of hay were stacked neatly in the barn, and Cora was back at school. On that day, she’d made a map of the solar system, writing each planet’s name neatly beside it. She was sixteen, the oldest student by far, and she spent a good part of her time at school helping the teacher with lessons for the younger children. She was good at drawing and explaining things. Mother Kaufmann had said maybe she could be a teacher herself—not in this town, but maybe one close by.

One of the hired workers found her as she was walking home. He was a young man, a Norwegian with good English who could lift a squealing hog, full grown, as if it were nothing, but when he stopped in front of Cora he was sweating, panting. He’d run toward the school to find her, and now that he had, he didn’t talk.

“What?” she asked. A perfect breeze, cool and light, moved across her face, kicking up dust farther down the road. She could see the windmill, the top of the barn. It had never occurred to her this new world could be lost, just as quickly and permanently as the old one.

He was so sorry to tell her. There’d been an accident.

She backed away, and he followed, making sure she understood. Just an hour before, he had climbed up the silo, looked in, and seen their bodies already blue, but peaceful-looking, lying on top of the grain, her right next to him. As if they had fallen asleep in the cold. He didn’t think they had fallen. Or maybe one fell, and the other went in after. It was more likely that they’d both jumped in, as they often had, to tramp the clotted grain down. It was the gas, he said. From the grain. They must have thought enough time had passed. A quick death. And not painful. Another worker had already left to get the minister.

Cora ran around the Norwegian and toward them, cutting through the field to the silo, her hands in tight fists with her nails digging into her palms, her boots hard and fast on the dirt and yellowed stalks, grasshoppers springing all around. The dogs ran alongside her, barking, thinking she meant to play. She smelled manure and turned earth, everything familiar holding fear. She kicked a dog out of her way. Her hair fell out of its bun, and by the time she lunged for the ladder, she was crazed, her blood hot in her throat. The workers held her back, and told her she couldn’t go in, and that she shouldn’t climb up. They would need time to safely get the bodies out. You couldn’t see or smell the gas, and if she went in, she would for certain die with them. She tried for the ladder again. It took two of them to get her back in the house.

•   •   •

The Lindquists
came for her that night, their white-haired heads hovering over her bed, saying her name until she heard them. She shouldn’t be alone, they said. Their own children were grown; they had spare rooms. The Kaufmanns had been good neighbors, and it was the least they could do. They insisted. Just for a while, Mr. Lindquist said, until decisions were made about the farm. Even if Cora could function and keep the house running, it wouldn’t be right, a girl by herself. The Norwegian and another man were staying on to care for the livestock and fields.

Later, Mrs. Lindquist would apologize for taking Cora from her home. “We didn’t know we were making it easier for them to turn you out with nothing,” she said, using a fork to slide the remainder of Cora’s lunch into the slop jar. She glared out her own window to the Kaufmann farm. “The sheriff would have had to put you out, but at least it would have been harder.”

Mrs. Lindquist would also tell Cora, over and over, that the Kaufmanns had had no way of knowing they would be taken up so suddenly, or so relatively young. If they had, Mrs. Lindquist was certain, they would have made a will, or made Cora one of their legal heirs. Of course they would have. They had loved her as a daughter. Mrs. Lindquist had heard just that many times, straight from her neighbor’s mouth, and she would testify to it in any court. It was a shame, she said, the way the Kaufmann girl and her brothers were denying Cora any inheritance. The laws needed to be changed.

The Kaufmann girl. Cora, too, looked through the window, over the autumn-cropped fields to her old home. When Mrs. Lindquist said the Kaufmann girl, she did not mean Cora but Mr. Kaufmann’s daughter in Kansas City, who had a lawyer, and who was adamant that Cora should not be considered an heir, as she was not related by blood or marriage. As the lawyer pointed out, her selection had been arbitrary. The Kaufmanns could have picked any child from the train. It was unfortunate if Cora had truly misinterpreted their kindness as the familial love she was so sadly lacking. But if they’d wanted her in the will, they would have put her in.

Cora had no energy to be outraged. Her grief was a weight on her chest that she felt as soon as she woke. The Lindquists had gone back to get all her things, including her nightclothes, but at night, Cora couldn’t summon the energy to undress. She slept in her dress, and also lay awake in it, thinking about the Kaufmanns, how the Norwegian said they’d looked peaceful, but also that they had turned blue. At some point, she stopped combing her hair. Mrs. Lindquist, who’d had four daughters and lost only one to diphtheria, used bacon grease to get out the tangles. She’d warned Cora that next time, scissors would be required, and wouldn’t that be a shame, because the curly hair was so pretty in her opinion. Cora made herself use a comb. She felt bad for looking so terrible when she was taking up space in their home. The Lindquists had only thought she would be with them for a few days, maybe a week. But now she had nowhere to go.