WHEN MRS. DIGGES APPEARS the next day in Frieda's bedroom, the air in the room changes, bunching tight. "This," says the matron, holding a yellow note, "was delivered just now to my attention."
It's the middle of a breezy afternoon. Frieda—on her knees as she scrubs the bedroom floor—has been floating, her mind awash with dreams, finally having dodged (or momentarily suppressed) the unease that jabbed at her this morning: a malaise of unfinished business. (She didn't speak to the senator, got no promises from Morse, didn't do a thing to help Jo.) She's been floating, yes, relishing the afternoon's reprieve, but she founders now on the matron's sharp voice.
"Addressed to me," says Mrs. Digges, who shakes the yellow page. "But you'll see that it's really aimed at you."
At me, thinks Frieda. Of course. This morning was just the feint. Here comes the combination punch.
***
Though she'd tippled no more yesterday than a glass of tepid milk to wash down some burnt ends of pork, Frieda awoke with what Lou used to call a "hangover." She plodded down to breakfast as if through catacombs, as if forced beneath unlucky ladders. Three strikes, she kept thinking: Weeks, Morse, Jo. Plus Felix, injured—how? how badly? (If Frieda had talked to Weeks—if she hadn't talked to Morse—would Felix somehow have been spared? Impossible, but still she blamed herself.)
The other girls, too, seemed to be ducking something. Fate? Yesterday, for an hour after the motorcade's departure, they had whirled about in dithering excitement. They'd met a man who knew the president! Did you see how tall? one girl exclaimed, and another cried, His hands! A third chimed in, The one I liked was Storrow. Something about that itty-bitty mustache. Then Mrs. Digges had ordered them to take down the banner (which Melba ripped by mistake, so it said WELCOME, SENATOR WEE), and to untie the wind-tattered bunting. In minutes, the decorations had all been dismantled, and thrill waned to sluggishness, then standstill.
Which remained the girls' controlling state at breakfast. The oatmeal that they spooned was like torpor turned to food. Chewing seemed the most that they could manage. A draft carried the residue of yesterday's pit fire, the dark smell of recently snuffed flames.
Yetta, who had watched everything from her window yesterday and mocked Frieda last night before bed ("That big shot took a shine to you, huh? You'll be rescued soon, right? Your new best friend?"), sat beside her now in boastful silence. Frieda hadn't bothered to explain the situation; Yetta, she decided, was too bent on vindication to offer her reliable advice.
Across from them sat Jo, scarcely eating—just enough to keep from being punished. Now that Frieda was privy to the secret of Jo's condition, she could see nothing but the pregnancy. Jo's breasts, her cheeks, even her eyes, looked swollen with a terrifying, bloated sort of beauty.
Leaning across the table, Frieda whispered, "Are you okay?," but at once she heard the question's senselessness. What would she do if Jo responded "no"? What could she ever truly do for Jo?
All Jo did in answer was to shrug.
This was Frieda's own response, not half an hour later, when Dr. Slocum posed the same question. A date with him was plenty, by itself, to make her ill: the treatment room, its calcimined gloom; the ceiling's tangled vines; his sweaty pate. First he checked the progress of her poison ivy rash. Scabs that had broken when she stretched to hurl the baseball were driving her to madness now with itch. The doctor said good, that meant that they were healing. Another while of soap-and-soda balm, and she'd be fine. Then he nodded grimly, told her, "Lift."
She hiked her denim frock, set one foot on a chair, a cow habituated to the stanchion. Despite the heat, her body tensed with chill.
Today, the doctor told her, they were going to draw some blood for a new Wassermann and make some slides, too. "See how soon we can get rid of you" was how he put it.
"But I thought—" she said. "Didn't you say August?"
"Actually, I believe I said perhaps." But the Fourth, he said, had triggered a spate of "moral zone" infractions; a large influx of patients would be coming. To avoid overcrowding, some old cases would be quickened. He must now determine who was ready.
Me, she thought. I'm ready. How I'm ready. Maybe she wouldn't need Mr. Morse or even Alice. Maybe she would get out on her own.
He asked if she'd been taking all her pills.
Yes, she said. The blue ones. Every meal. They tasted like tea from a rusted kettle.
The pills, the insertion of the medicated tampons ... she tried to consider it all as just another chore, like hauling trash or scouring the toilet. But when those chores were done she could retreat to her room, relax. Her body—her sullied flesh—could not be quit.
Dr. Slocum scanned her chart, then sat down on a stool, which he lowered by means of a small crank. "Last time," he said, as he donned a pair of gloves, "I noted some clitoral enlargement. If it's no better now"—his hands moved to her thighs—"I'll have to ask if you've been inappro—" And there he stopped; his lips pulled pale and tight. "Oh, come on. Really. Of all things." He stared at her, his eyes small and dark with detestation, then held up his blood-shiny fingers. "You couldn't have had the courtesy to tell me?"
"I didn't know. It must have just started." Now this morning's unease made more sense.
The doctor stood up, stripping off his gloves. "Well, with all this blood, it's no good, we can't make slides. I'll have to try again after your monthlies." He shoved at her one of his gauze tampons (unsoaked), and left her to clean her own mess.
She emerged minutes later, feeling junky, dispossessed (the doctor was an Indian giver of hope!), and was drawn by the noise of some furor. In the parlor, by the sounds of it. Shrieks of disbelief. Yetta's shrill voice: "How typical!"
When she stepped into the room, all the girls turned to face her. They jeered at her and pointed. (Was she dripping? Had Slocum told them?) It was all she could do not to flee.
She stood there, wobbled by a teetery, tightrope feeling—just how she feels now, as Mrs. Digges approaches, holding out the yellow sheet of paper—but when she saw the patients' grins, at once she understood: the girls weren't jeering her but cheering.
"There she is!" said Flossie.
"Make room," Melba barked.
Yetta, rolling her eyes, said, "Forgot the red carpet." But her coolness seemed to come at some effort. Even she looked flush with inspiration.
From Frieda? From something she had done?
She caught sight of Mrs. Digges, over by the lowboy, her mouth taut with a runner-up's forced smile.
"Look," said Flossie, pointing. "Look what Burnham brought."
Frieda followed her pointing and walked up to the lowboy, on which was laid a copy of today's Globe.
"You're famous. The whole world'll see," said Melba.
The world? Don't be silly, Frieda thought. Most readers would focus on the double-banner headline:
AMERICANS AND ALLIES WIN BATTLES
ON ALL FRONTS TO CELEBRATE FOURTH
Others, more attentive to battles on the ball field, would delight in a bulletin from Philly: "Babe Ruth Rejoins Sox in Quakertown. Signalizes Return by Making Hit and Fanning Twice."
But for readers who could make it past the war news and the sports, past word of striking weavers up in Lawrence, there it was, below "Mutt and Jeff," on page eight: a photograph of Meyer Morse and Frieda. At first glance it looked as though the two were shaking hands. Close study showed a baseball being passed.
"Doesn't it look just like you?" Melba gushed.
"It is her," Yetta said.
"Oh, but you know!"
"There's an article, too," said Flossie. "What's it say?"
Frieda saw the byline, Theodore Cushing, but couldn't bring herself to read further. She felt fractured: part herself, part the girl in Cushing's photo. Standing here, but trapped in yesterday.
"If you'd like to read it aloud, go ahead," said Mrs. Digges. "Read it out once, and we'll be done." She made a gesture like shooing a wet dog.
The patients' expectation pressed in from all sides. Frieda drew a breath and she began.
MENSWEAR MOGUL RUNNING FOR TREASURER
WOULD BE FIRST HEBREW ELECTED STATEWIDE
Meyer Morse, proprietor of the noted company that bears his name, manufacturers and dealers in men's clothing, has declared his candidacy for Treasurer of the Commonwealth.
He made the declaration public yesterday while accompanying one of his chief backers, Senator John Wingate Weeks, on Independence Day visits to Camp Devens and to a War Department girls' detention home. The man who would be Treasurer chose the latter setting to underscore a view he called "moral accounting," asserting that the quarantine of delinquent girls—whose diseases, if spread to soldiers, incur costs both in medicine and lost service—is "not only our moral duty, it's darned smart business."
A Republican, who moved recently from Boston to the Cottage Farm section of Brookline, Mr. Morse has been active in civic life, serving on the Board of Commissioners of Sinking Funds for the City of Boston, and, most recently, as assistant executive manager for the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety.
Mr. Morse is the nephew of Leopold Morse, who served as United States Representative for Massachusetts from 1877 to 1883. If elected, he will be the first Jew to hold statewide office in the Commonwealth....
She recited the remainder in a mumbly, slapdash voice—Morse's growing wealth, his love of golf—and omitted altogether the last line, which noted his charming wife and his two sons, "the older of whom, Felix, a soldier in the 301st, he visited with yesterday at Camp Devens." Was it trepidation that kept Frieda from uttering Felix's name—as Mama would not speak the name of God—or selfishness: she didn't want to share him?
"That's it?" Melba griped. "Don't it say nothing 'bout you?"
"No," said Frieda, and scanned through the article once more. "Not unless you count the photo caption. 'Candidate Morse bestows gift on unidentified inmate during visit to girls' detention home in Fitchburg.'"
"That's it?" Melba said again. "You're kidding me, that's it? They don't even call you out by name?"
"Ha!" cried Yetta. "Like I said: typical. He just used us. We were barely props."
Flossie asked what kind of gift Mr. Morse had given her.
Frieda dropped the Globe. She said, "Nothing."
After lunch, Mrs. Digges announced new room assignments to make space for the forthcoming patients. Flossie and Frieda would move down the hall, joining Yetta, Jo, and three others. Frieda was instructed to clean her old room: "And I mean clean. Like no one's ever lived there."
As she stripped bare her mattress, then swept beneath the bunk, removing all traces of herself, Frieda thought again about the caption—the fraud of it, the way it made the photo tell a lie. Morse hadn't given her a thing! With evidence that a "fact" could be so far from factual—evidence typeset in black and white—it struck her that she was freer than ever to trust her own truths: the truth that Felix waited—would keep waiting—for her (would he see her in the Globe and come find her?); the truth of her body and its longings. If the world should believe that Mr. Morse "bestowed a gift," why shouldn't she—why couldn't she—believe?
She heard the rough-and-tumble of a motor truck's engine but didn't stop to think much about it. Probably it was the grocer or the coal man. With a fanciful, unbound feeling (her monthlies hardly hurt), she knelt to wash the grubby spruce floor. She pictured herself swabbing the deck of a clipper ship as it sluiced through the horse latitudes. (Where these were, exactly, she couldn't quite recall, but she'd always liked the music of the name.) Swashing her rag in circles she hummed an old tune, which Jack, playing pirates, used to sing: "something something sun, a drink of rum..."
That's when Mrs. Digges appeared, and the bedroom's air seized. That's when she produced the yellow note.
She hands it now to Frieda. "Telegram," she says. "You'll see why I'm waiving the no-mail rule."
Frieda holds the page but doesn't look.
"Go ahead. Don't worry, no one died."
FOR THEM HOLDING FRIEDA MINTZ. SAW PHOTO. AM
MOTHER. "UNIDENTIFIED" NO MORE. STILL A CHILD.
STILL WITH ME SHOULD LIVE.
It ends with the promise—the threat—of further contact. There's a telephone number she recognizes as Slotnik's.
She doesn't know she's shaking until the matron holds her shoulder and tells her to settle down, she'll be fine. But the pound of Mama's voice, even on the page—the beat of her twisted Yiddish syntax—rattles Frieda, knocks within her skull.
Now, when she's released, there will be no release. She'll go from one prison to the next. Mama—and Hirsch—will be waiting to chain her up. How much more severe will they be now? Will Frieda have to try to run away again? Could she? Running requires strength of leg but also of ideals. The latter may have atrophied too much.
"...with Miss Longley, of course," Mrs. Digges is suggesting, "when she comes with the new girls, tomorrow. We'll let her weigh in on what to do."
Frieda should be bolstered by the thought of Alice coming, but all that she can think of now is Mama. She pictures Mama finding the photo. Or did someone bring it to her—Mrs. Pinsker? a friend of hers from shul? How sick, how mortified she must have been! Mama, then, clomping to the Western Union office, having to ask a total stranger's help.
Frieda, on her knees from scrubbing, slumps down even farther, into a puddle of gray soapy water.
"Really, now," says Mrs. Digges. "Pull yourself together. For both our sakes, Frieda, please get up."
The wetness—wicking up her frock, along her legs—is for Frieda the very feel of shame.
"You thought you could run from her forever?" asks the matron. She pinches at the meat of Frieda's neck.
Frieda scarcely notes the matron's fingers. She's a girl again, sprawled across Mama's kitchen table: limbs drenched and slithery with wintergreen and linseed, and Mama's hand hard upon her wrist. "Farshtunken girl! Look at you. Revolting." The wrench of Mama scrubbing her, chafing at her skin. The sting of soap running in her eyes.
Which sting now, too, as she sits slumped on the floor, with tears she can't hide from the matron.
"But I didn't cry," she explains to Jo, that evening after dinner, "from thinking about how rough Mama'd been. Or not even, really, from worrying what'll happen—if she'll make me get married to that man. She will, I know she will. What can I do?"
Around them, in the parlor, girls are playing Twenty Questions. (Yetta asks Hattie, "Is this man dead or living?" "Alive, sorry to say. Live and kicking.") Frieda and Jo stand together in the corner, defectors from the other girls' amusement. Jo is the only one she's told of Mama's message—Jo, who entrusted Frieda first with her confession, who knows what a parent's scorn is like.
"What did it," Frieda says. "What really did it?" Her voice tightens, reedy with dejection. "It's not as if I haven't thought about that stuff before—the way Mama treated me back then. And I've always been so sure that she was cruel. But this time—this time I almost wondered who was right. What if she was, Jo? What then?"
Jo looks depleted, her eyes pale and drained. Lowly, she says, "Why do they even have us?"
"What?" says Frieda.
"Our mothers and fathers. Why? If all we ever do is cause them trouble. And why ... why didn't we listen?"
Frieda sees how thoughtless she has been—wondering, asking if she should have heeded Mama, when for Jo the answer couldn't be more clear.
Across the room, someone accuses Hattie of deceit. (The girls have spent all of their twenty allotted questions, and still they haven't guessed the secret name.) "Don't blame me," Hattie says, "if y'all's too dumb."
Jo plucks at a tuft of her scraggly, half-grown hair, as if weeding a thought her head has sprouted. "I always wanted to raise a kid—dreamt of it all the time. I'd show my parents: See? This is how. But now." Her mouth hangs empty. "Now."
Mrs. Digges arrives to say five minutes to lights out. Everyone out of the parlor. On the double.
The game ends abruptly in a cantankerous standoff when Hattie tells the name she had in mind. "No fair," Yetta grouses. "You said he was alive. Uncle Sam isn't ... he isn't even real!" They snipe at each other all the way upstairs.
Frieda, in the new bedroom, settles close to Jo (she chose the bunk beside hers, almost touching) and asks her what she plans to do. Surely she can't hide the truth much longer?
Jo says she's frightened—not of having the baby, but of after. "What if," she whispers. "What if ... I hate it?"
"You won't," Frieda insists. "You'll love it, 'cause it's yours."
Jo shakes her head. "It's his."