The Chaperone

  Cora lowered her nose to the roses, breathing in. She wouldn’t begrudge anyone a reunion today.

  She would love her. She already knew it. She would love Mary O’Dell no matter what kind of person she turned out to be. Even if she was not her mother, even if she really turned out to be just a concerned friend, and the similar handwriting was a strange coincidence, Cora would still love her for being such a caring friend or such a good person in general that she would take a train all the way down from Massachusetts just to give a stranger some solace. She would love her for even having known her mother, who might be dead now, found too late. Whoever got off the train would tell her more than she’d ever known. She would be grateful for that.

  She searched the floor for a woman with dark hair, curly like her own. That was when she noticed an older woman wearing a gray matron’s hat walk up to the booth. Cora would always remember it, the shock of seeing her mouth, her exact mouth, on the face of another person. This woman was stouter, and older, but she had the same full lips, the same slight overbite, and her square jaw was still firm. She stood on the toes of sensible gray heels to survey the crowd. Cora moved toward her without feeling her feet.

  “Mary?” The name came out high-pitched, strange. “Mary O’Dell?”

  The woman looked at Cora, but didn’t speak. Her hair was reddish-blond, and though the bulk of it was pinned up under the matron’s hat, Cora could see its texture was nothing like her own, and nothing like the hair of the woman in her memory, the woman with the shawl. In fact, nothing about this woman before her was like anything she’d remembered or imagined. This woman was dressed beautifully, in a gray linen dress that was wrinkled at the hips, the front panel embroidered with flowers. A short strand of pearls, small and dainty, circled her well-creased neck.

  “Cora?” They were the same height. Her eyes were gray and larger than Cora’s.

  Cora nodded. People were all around them, standing, waiting, walking, looking up at the clock. But really, it was as if they were alone in that enormous space, taking each other in.

  “You’re my mother,” Cora said, with no accusation, but with no question in her voice. All she had to do was look at the other woman’s mouth and chin, even her nose. “You. You’re not a friend. You’re my mother.”

  She stepped back from Cora, looking nervous.

  Cora shook her head. No. She wasn’t angry. And then it was as if the child in her were bursting forth, too excited, too thrilled to be contained, and too impatient for misunderstanding. Cora opened her arms and moved forward, and then she was breathing in the woman’s unfamiliar smell and the roses still clutched in her own hand. The body against hers felt stiff and still. But she was not pushed away. She was embraced back, held tight, just as in her wildest hopes. But this was real. Without letting go, she looked up at the blue ceiling with its glinting zodiac, her vision blurred, her nose running.

  They stepped back from each other. Cora realized she’d lost her hat. She stooped to pick it up. They both laughed, and then stopped, staring at each other.

  “Well.” Mary O’Dell reached up to touch her glove to Cora’s cheek. “There’s no point in denying it, now is there? Not when you’re the spitting image.” She had an Irish brogue. It was pretty, Cora thought, gentle. The voice she should have known.

  “These are for you.” Cora held out the roses, and still her words were high-pitched and strained, though she’d managed to blink her eyes dry. She pressed her hat back over her hair, feeling foolish. “I don’t know where to begin,” she said.

  Mary O’Dell took the roses and nodded solemnly, as if agreeing that yes, this was the problem, not knowing where to begin.

  She could only stay for an hour, she said. She was sorry, but she would have to catch the one-fifteen to Boston in order to get home in time. She didn’t say in time for what, and Cora decided it best not to press for details. Not yet, at least. Cora also told herself not to be disappointed. This woman, her mother, had spent all morning on a train, and she would spend all afternoon getting home. One hour was fine for a beginning.

  The Dining Concourse was one floor down, as busy and crowded as the great room upstairs, but with none of its light and beauty. They stood in line to order iced teas, which they carried to the only free table they could find. It still had a dusting of crumbs from its previous tenant, so they sat across a corner from each other and held their tea glasses upright in their laps, the roses in an empty chair on the other side of the table. They sat the same way, backs straight, feet tucked under chairs, legs crossed at ankles.

  She nodded at Cora’s ring. “You’re married,” she said with approval.

  “Yes!” Cora felt shaky, too awake. She put her tea on the table. “Almost twenty years now. He’s wonderful. A lawyer. We have two grown boys.” She opened her purse and took out a photograph of Howard and Earle, taken in a studio the afternoon they graduated, both of them in cap and gown and looking so serious, even Howard. She slid the photograph across the table and watched her mother’s mouth, so much like her own, break into a smile. How many times had she fantasized about this very moment, the first time she could show evidence of her beautiful sons to her own mother, who Cora now could see had the same slanting right eyebrow as Howard. The boys. She would tell them the truth as soon as she got home, now that there was good reason. Her mind surged ahead—there might be a visit? At Christmas, perhaps, when Howard and Earle would be home from school? Or Thanksgiving, rather. They’d already lost so much time.

  At the next table, a man reading a newspaper reached into the pocket of his suit, brought out a silver flask, and flipped open the lid without once looking up from his paper.

  “Oh my.” Mary O’Dell looked up from the photograph. “Oh goodness. What fine young men. You don’t know what a comfort this is, to see that you’ve done so well.” Her voice seemed anxious, fragile. She used the back of her bare hand to whisk crumbs off part of the table before setting the photo down. “I can’t tell you how I’ve worried and wondered about you. I didn’t know if you’d even… survived, if your name was the same. I didn’t know if you were suffering somewhere. I knew nothing.”

  “I was fine,” Cora said, smiling. “I was well cared for. Good people adopted me.” Not really the truth. Not legally. But it was the truth that the Kaufmanns had been good to her, and that was what she wished to convey.

  “Thank you. Thank you for telling me that.” She nodded as if still trying to reassure herself, the matron’s hat bobbing up and down. “I think that really, I always knew you were all right. I would get scared, but I was sure I would have known if you were suffering.” She laughed a little, touching her pinkie to the corner of her eye. “I never dreamed you were off in Kansas, though, out on a farm with horses and cows. I always thought you were here, in New York.”

  “I always thought you were here. I never guessed Massachusetts.”

  She couldn’t quit staring at the familiar mouth, the lips. She had the strange sensation that she wasn’t simply looking at her mother, but also, aside from the different-colored hair, a prophetic vision of how she herself would look in less than twenty years.

  Cora nodded at her hand. “You’re married, too.”

  She nodded, held up her ring. The diamond was as big as Cora’s.

  “Not to my father?” Cora asked. She was being indelicate. But they didn’t have much time.

  Mary O’Dell glanced at the man with the flask, and then to the table on their other side, where two girls with leather-encased tennis racquets frowned at an unfolded map.

  “No.” She spoke so quietly that Cora had to strain to hear her over the surrounding chatter. “I met my husband when I was twenty-one. I had you when I was seventeen.”

  Cora nodded, her face pointedly neutral. She’d known that answer was likely. “And my father?”

  “A boy at a dance.” She adjusted the gray hat. “That sounds bad, worse than it was. I mean that’s where we met. He and I were together for a while. I was working in
Boston, living in. They used to have these big dances on Thursdays. It was the day off for domestics, you know, our one night to ourselves. We knew each other for a month, maybe.” She lowered her gaze, then looked at Cora shyly. “You probably think I’m low class, hearing that.”

  Cora shook her head. It wasn’t so bad, the story. Not compared to what Sister Delores had prepared her for. Prostitution. Rape. But in her fantasies, her parents had loved each other, and for much longer than a month.

  “Well, it was just ignorance.” Mary O’Dell’s voice had grown so quiet that Cora had to lean in a little to hear. “I’d been to school back in Ireland, and I wasn’t dumb in books. But I didn’t know anything about boys and babies. My mother told me nothing except go to church and keep my skirt down.” Her mouth curled into a half smile, just the way Howard’s often did. “I mean nothing. I got my first curse on the boat coming over. I was by myself, and I didn’t tell anyone because I thought I was dying. You see? That’s how little I knew. I didn’t know it was normal. I was sure I was being punished for impure thoughts. I had no idea about anything.”

  “I understand,” Cora said.

  “As for your father, I don’t know that he knew much more.” She winced. “He was only fifteen.”

  “He was Irish? He was Irish, too?”

  She looked offended. “Of course.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Don’t know. I heard he went west. He left after I told him I was pregnant. I only know what his friends told me, and they didn’t tell me much.”

  Fifteen, Cora thought. Just Louise’s age. Three years younger than her own boys. He would be a different person now. She looked down at her hands, pale and folded in her lap. She’d always disliked how large her knuckles were. Mary O’Dell’s knuckles were ladylike and small.

  “What was his name?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know my father’s name. It might have been mine.”

  She scoffed, looking away. “That was never going to be your name. I can tell you that from the way he took the news.”

  “I still want to know.”

  “Fine. Jack Murphy.” She gave Cora a dull look. “God as my witness, I’m not lying. But if you want to search the great West for a Jack Murphy from Ireland by way of Boston, you should rest up. You’ll have a lot of interviewing to do.”

  Cora blinked. So that was that. She would never know her father. Even if she could find him, this man with a common story and a commoner name, he likely didn’t want to be found. He’d run away as soon as he’d known there would be a baby, wanting nothing to do with her. Sister Delores had been half right.

  “You got his hair,” her mother said, as if making a concession. “I don’t mean you should hate him. I did then, but I don’t now. He was just young and scared. I remember he came from a big family, poor. He didn’t want more of the same, I imagine.” She shrugged, her face matter-of-fact. But when she lifted her tea to her lips, Cora saw her hand was trembling.

  “I’m sorry,” Cora said. “That must have been terrible for you.”

  “Well, I was sorry for you. That’s who I was sorry for.” She looked at Cora, then away. “But I couldn’t have cared for you on my own, unmarried. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “I know,” Cora said. She did. Her understanding was ready and waiting, easy to summon. She reached across the table to touch the back of Mary O’Dell’s small hand, which was rougher than she would have guessed, even on the back. “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.” Mary O’Dell’s hand did not move, did not respond to the gesture. Uncertain, Cora put her own hand back in her lap.

  “Well, I blamed myself. God knows.” She again glanced at the surrounding tables. “I hated leaving you there.”

  “Leaving me where?”

  “At the mission. The Florence Night Mission. The people who ran it were good, and I knew they’d find a place for you. But it was a terrible time for me, staying there. The other women were low class, actual street-walkers.” She reached up, moving her hand over her pearls. “And some still practicing, mind you. They’d come in just to get out of the cold. I was the only one having a baby, and maybe the only one from a decent background who’d just made one mistake. But I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t have stayed in Boston. My cousins were there, my aunts, my uncle. I would have been a humiliation to all of them. They would have sent me back to Ireland, and I’d have been a Magdalene for sure. So I said I got a good domestic job in New York, and I came down and hid in the mission until I had you. And then I went back to Boston without you, and I said I’d been robbed of my earnings at the point of a knife.” Again, she half smiled. “Everyone felt sorry for me.”

  Cora waited. “And then what?”

  “Then nothing. I went on with my life. I never told anyone about it. It was as if it didn’t happen.” She lifted her chin. “It didn’t follow me, didn’t hurt me in any way. I married a good man, and we’ve done well. Two of our sons are in politics.” She straightened her shoulders. “Our daughter just married into a very good family.”

  “So I have…” Cora could hardly get the words out. “I have brothers? And a sister? In Haverhill?”

  She hesitated. “Half. They’re half.”

  “But still, I—”

  “They don’t know about you. I told you. No one does.”

  Cora lowered her gaze, understanding. Of course she understood. She could imagine the ridicule if one of the grand old dames of Wichita, one of the women from the club, suddenly owned up to a baby born out of wedlock. It wouldn’t matter if that baby was now thirty-six years old, if the woman herself was now a grandmother. A transgression was a transgression. Cora would be the agent of the entire family’s humiliation, and likely resented as such.

  “You’re not going to tell them about me.”

  “No.” There was no shade in this response, no room for argument, the pronunciation brief and firm. “And since I don’t know you, or what your plans are, I’ll make myself very clear.” The brogue had grown more distinct, and it no longer sounded soft. “I guarantee my children won’t be any more interested in you bringing shame upon me than I am. We do stick together. If you make any trouble, you’ll find that out yourself.”

  Cora looked away. The warning was both shrewd and unyielding, which made sense. Mary O’Dell, her mother, was a shrewd and unyielding woman; she certainly was when she was seventeen and pregnant, when Cora had first been a danger to her survival. Cora shouldn’t expect any sentiment to undo her now. Cora did not know her, and likely would not be allowed to know her, but she had at least learned this about her mother: this was a woman who, when still a girl, had pulled herself from a fire, who knew what it took to survive. How many, at seventeen, would have been able to keep a secret like that? But she’d done it. She’d had her baby and she’d gone back to Massachusetts and acted as if all she’d lost was her pay, acted as if a life had not moved through her, looking everyone in the eye. And now she thought Cora wanted to come to Massachusetts and be the ruin of her legitimate family, her marriage, her dignity, everything she’d suffered for and lied for and left her baby for, all those years ago. She didn’t know that such a threatening display was unnecessary, that Cora already understood, all too well, everything she feared.

  “I won’t trouble you.” Cora’s voice was surprisingly calm. She picked up the photo of the boys and slipped it back in her purse.

  Mary O’Dell looked at the spot where the picture had been. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I wish things could be different.”

  “I understand. I won’t go to Haverhill unless I’m invited.” She tried to laugh, miserable. “And it seems I’m not invited.”

  “It’s Hay-ver-ill. Just so you know. You don’t say the second h.”

  Cora could have slapped her. Thrown the tea in her face. That’s how fast the anger came on, the indignation. She’d been trying, hard, to show grace and kindness, even in her disappointment. She understood th
e predicament, why she had to be kept away. She understood. But no, she hadn’t known that it was Hay-verill, and not Haver-hill. How could she have known, this special pronunciation of the town where her extended family lived, this town where her siblings had grown up together, this town that Cora had never heard of until two weeks ago? No. She hadn’t known about the silent h.

  But she said nothing. It would do no good to show her rage, to try to hurt this woman who really had no other choice. It would do no good. The man with the flask stared down at his table, bleary-eyed.

  “Why did you write the orphanage?” Cora asked. “Why did you even come here today?”

  She turned so Cora couldn’t see her face, just the beaded helmet of the gray hat. “I told you. I needed to see who you were, who you turned out to be. It’s tormented me for so long.” Her voice was still quiet, wavering. “I was going to tell you I was just a friend of your mother’s, someone who’d known her. Stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She looked back and smiled at Cora with her familiar mouth. “But I’m glad I came. I’m so relieved, so happy, to see you, and to know that you’re just fine, that you didn’t grow up on the streets, that you turned out so well and proper.”

  Cora nodded. Well and proper. As if that were the same as fine.

  “You’ve given me such a gift today.” She reached across the table, cupping Cora’s cheek. “It’s true that if you ever came to Haverhill, you would be a thorn in my side. But know this. If we part now, and never meet again, you’ll always be a rose in my heart.”