2

ACCORDING TO RECORDS kept locked up in Saint Luke's Hospital in Seattle, Washington, a female child was born to a young woman twenty-two years old named Elizabeth Owen. The nurse, whose name was Mrs. Alma Porter, wore her Waltham watch on a chain around her neck and she had looked at it. The time was exactly 2 A.M. The baby had no blemishes of any kind and had cried lustily after birth and then went right to sleep.

The year was 1912.

Mrs. Porter liked being a nurse. She felt that nursing was rewarding and she liked Dr. Gray because she did. He said she was a credit to the profession and had many times given her a lift in his Pierce-Arrow machine. She was a little too heavy and her feet were small. She liked the third shift. She liked being there when the little children were born into this strange, strange world. She herself had three grandchildren. Although her elder daughter had never before known a Norwegian, she had married one. They are clean and you can count on them. Her younger daughter married a policeman.

She was sorry to say that many young nurses were not so serious as they had been when she herself was young; they thought only of running around and so forth, so they didn't like the third shift. They wanted to be on hand to walk out with young men and so forth. The way everybody was acting now.

The young nurses were romantic and jumped to many conclusions. They thought if a girl had a ring on her finger she was married, but it is easy as pie for a girl to borrow a ring from a friend or even from her mother, painful as that would be for the mother, or a gold-plated ring from the five-and-dime, and sterling silver rings look like platinum or white gold but a sharp eye can tell silver rings from platinum rings because cheap silver leaves a smudge on the finger and you can tell when you are washing a patient. These rings you can buy at places are also worn by girls who check into hotels with men or as a protection from mashers who happen to be sitting and watching at nearby tables. And they are worn by plain girls who want people to think they are married. There is a good deal of deceit in this old world, some of it innocent enough. A lot of water runs under the bridge, a lot of it dirty.

You can't always tell what a person is or has got herself into by the suitcase she carries into the hospital because all those things can be borrowed, including the traveling clock that makes a good impression, and brushes and combs with silver handles. You can often tell by a toothbrush — that is, you'd be surprised how many people in the city of Seattle don't bring toothbrushes.

The thing to watch for is the underwear.

The small suitcase Elizabeth Owen carried into the hospital might have been borrowed, since it was made of genuine leather, and the photograph in the genuine silver frame of the young man could have been her brother, handsome as Francis X. Bushman in the movies that time. The stitches of Elizabeth Owen's underwear were very, very small, like fairy stitching, and the garment was made of genuine silk, and it was not brand-new, as if she was maybe used to silk.

You do not so much expect people with silk underwear to get into trouble. Because they do not need to.

The baby was such a dear little creature. How could the young woman do it? How could she give the little child away? All her life the little girl would wonder who she was and if she had brothers and sisters, because somebody always tells.

The Reverend Doctor Matthews looked like a mad Lincoln; his eyes saw everything and he spoke with an angel's tongue. He was famous around Seattle for his sermons on hellfire and they were printed in the papers along with his photograph. His was the most important Presbyterian church in the city because most of those who worshipped there were blessed with money and large front yards. Down from his high pulpit he departed in his shiny black Jeffrey coupé a gift from his flock, for Saint Luke's Hospital where he loped along the corridors and appeared at bedsides to encourage the sick and to quiet the dying. He urged those who yet possessed the strength to come down from their beds and to get on their knees with him. It may be that God looks with greater favor on those who grovel.

As the Reverend was himself unmarried it may be assumed he looked on sexual union as sinful and on children as the result of sin. He did however take a keen interest in the little girl born to Elizabeth Owen, for well-fixed parishioners of his had just a year before lost a little boy of seven. Lost meant that the little boy had been thrown from a presumably gentle horse and had had his neck broken.

“I know who would like to have that child,” he told Doctor Gray, and then he and Dr. Gray and the well-fixed parishioners set things in motion. The result was that the baby born to Elizabeth Owen was left on the doorstep of a Mr. and Mrs. McKinney in Seattle on Saint Patrick's Day, and for that reason Mr. and Mrs. McKinney saw to it that she celebrated Saint Patrick's Day as her birthday with green balloons, shamrocks and coiled serpents of green barley sugar, although the McKinneys had not an ounce of Irish blood between them. She was left on the doorstep as not so likely to cause neighborly comment as if she were publicly arranged for and taken either from the hospital or from an adoption agency. The McKinneys must have had a peculiar idea of what was most likely to cause comment, for in retrieving the infant from the doorstep they could have been hardly more conspicuous had they marched down the aisle of the church wearing lampshades and snowshoes. On the day the McKinneys took Amy — Amy after Mrs. McKinney — in, it happened that a young cousin of theirs who worked as a student nurse at Saint Luke's Hospital came to call.

“I know that baby,” the young cousin said. She spoke of Elizabeth Owen as “a lovely young woman” who walked the corridors for exercise and she spoke of the photograph of the handsome young man. If the picture of the handsome young man existed, one wonders what the young man thought — doubtless that he was lucky that Elizabeth Owen was at least willing to abandon the baby, and that she did not hate him as evidenced by the photograph she kept and displayed. And what did Elizabeth Owen think as she walked the corridors? Certainly she considered the little child about to be abandoned in that hospital and tossed out like a weed. The young man might have been pleased at the young woman's sacrifice. Everybody is flattered by sacrifice.

Amy worked out well for the McKinneys. Her birthdays made it a pleasure to buy presents and to give again; Christmas once more had a point; there were cookies in the cookie jar. At five, when at last she was old enough to remember herself, she knew herself to be a quiet, orderly child who picked up and put away her things in their special places; she seldom forgot to wash her hands or to say her prayers in a clear voice. Already she was learning to save money awarded for the performance of little tasks suitable to her small hands; she dropped coppers into the china piggy bank provided, and although a small friend had demonstrated how these could be removed by sliding them out on a table knife, she let them remain in the pig until the pig was full, at which time another pig was provided and then another and another. She did not long for the day when each would be smashed with a hammer, for she knew and accepted the fact that then the money would disappear into a real bank. At five she had grown into the tricycle left behind by the little boy thrown from his horse, a machine that had been painful for the McKinneys to contemplate when they opened the closet door. They had been torn between the memories of it and their sense of thrift.

For a lawyer whose business was almost exclusively urban, Mr. McKinney was extraordinarily appreciative of nature and had years before acquired a nice piece of property on Puget Sound and there built a beach house of logs and a boathouse where he kept his dinghy. On long walks in fairly formal clothes, the McKinneys explained nature as they saw it to Amy, and she learned to be attentive to rocks, to seashells and hidden rookeries. She noted the indecisive flutter of butterflies' wings. A snapshot of the time shows her sitting on a high rock looking over the water; she wears a new pair of high boots of which she was most fond. It was perhaps the loneliness that surrounds this snapshot like a frame that moved the McKinneys to consider trying out a second child who would become a companion to Amy. They tried out first one and then another, both boys, but neither seemed to fit into the picture; possibly the McKinneys had a tendency to compare each child with the one they had lost and found each new one wanting. Neither child was with them for more than a week, so his leaving could not have made much more impression on them than his arriving. But the McKinneys believed in sticking to a thing — that is how one gets ahead — and they brought yet a third little boy into the big house in Seattle. He did not appear to be so abashed before the high ceilings and broad polished stairway as his predecessors — the McKinneys could not but wonder if his true parents had had some limited acquaintance with lofty ceilings, oak paneling and maroon draperies at the tall windows. But persistence like that of the McKinneys is sometimes a mistake.

The little boy of six was given the name Bobby; the name to which he had responded in the orphanage was not one the McKinneys could get used to, and he seemed more theirs with a name they had chosen. They saw him to be a manly little fellow, not understanding then that the quality of manliness is not — at least in a child — entirely a blessing. He had been with the McKinneys almost a year when he and Amy and the McKinneys took the ferry, The Virginia Five, to the beach house one fine summer's day. Mr. McKinney was pleased to see how readily the little boy took to the oars of the dinghy. Later on they all gathered butter clams and Mrs. McKinney made a steaming pot of delicious chowder over which Mr. McKinney asked God's blessing. They were in bed in good time and fell asleep to the distant knell of a nun buoy.

Thick fog persisted the entire day following, but the fire in the big wood stove crackled away and while Mrs. McKinney baked her spice cake with Amy's help — “You children can lick the pan,” Mrs. McKinney said — Mr. McKinney and Bobby got out the old Parcheesi board. Bobby caught on to the game very quickly and Mr. McKinney could not but be amazed at how gracefully and successfully he threw the dice. He allowed the little boy to beat him the first game; in the middle of the second game he realized he was going to have to look to it or be beaten and thus give the little boy a taste for gaming.

Amy had for so long been accustomed to the water and alerted to the dangers of going near it without a grown-up that the McKinneys saw no danger in her going down to play in the boathouse with Bobby, who caught on to things so quickly. They believed that the earlier human beings learn to be on their own, the better; that children, like anybody else, thrive on responsibility. So Bobby and Amy went hand in hand in the fog to the boathouse and the McKinneys touched each other as people will, who are of one mind. They murmured comfortably.

However, as Mr. McKinney liked to say, Mrs. McKinney was a great one to worry. She worried about matches and poisons, both of which were kept out of reach; she worried about heights and depths and the possibility of being caught in the elevator and therefore she used the stairs in Frederick & Nelson's and refused to get her feet into a streetcar until it had completely halted and the conductor had reached down his hand. It now seemed to her that an hour was a little too long for two children to enjoy a boathouse in which there was no other distraction than a dinghy, that and four cushions stuffed with a material that might keep the human body afloat until help came and a red flag they raised aloft on a pole beside the boathouse when they wished The Virginia Five to come take them away.

Mr. McKinney said they were perfectly all right down in the boathouse, not to worry, but Mrs. McKinney said, “Very well,” and went on down through the fog anyway, and it was a good thing she did.

It was suspiciously quiet in the boathouse. She had expected to hear childish voices in the intervals between the spaced bawling of the foghorn, but no. She quickened her step, the first small seizures of fear, like fingers, stirring in her breast.

She hurried first to the edge of the water, but saw nothing there. She turned to the boathouse; the door was closed. It opened in. And her hands flew to her breast. When she could speak, she did, crying, “Stop it! Stop it!”

It!

The little boy, who had dropped his pants, was kneeling beside Amy who lay on the floor; he was examining her private parts and she, alas, his. It was a sight Mrs. McKinney attempted to cast from her forever. When the little boy had sheepishly stepped back into his pants she drove both children before her to the beach house. They went silently.

“I'm not even going to speak about it,” she told Mr. McKinney, “because it is unspeakable,” but of course he knew what she had found because of the set of her mouth. Many people who have lived a long time together do not need to speak, and especially not of such things.

It was now late in the morning, and The Virginia Five for that day had passed the boathouse some hours before. It was therefore the following day when The Virginia Five came to take them back to Seattle where the little boy Bobby was given back to the place he had come from. Nothing was said to the people there of the incident in the boathouse, only that something intolerable had happened, so maybe later on he had another chance. He had certainly learned at an early age what havoc sex can wreak.

The Virginia Five keeps popping up.

The McKinneys took their Presbyterianism seriously and insofar as they could took Christ's precepts as their own. They believed Christ would look with favor on Mr. McKinney's teaching Sunday School, a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds called the Youth League, and chiefly female. One cannot help but wonder why so many young men fall away so early from religion and so many young women remain steadfast in Christ's service. It may be, as is sometimes said, that there is something more loyal in the female nature, that young men are so quick to feel their oats, are forever straying. Mr. McKinney did not feel put upon when once each summer he saw his Sunday School class safely on board The Virginia Five for a trip to the beach house and a nice day beside the water and in the woods. Young people from the city, even the city of Seattle, are not enough acquainted with nature. For the small voyage Mrs. McKinney prepared a lunch of fried chicken and potato salad kept cold in thermos jugs lest it become poisonous and kill everybody. There is nothing like the sea air to stir the appetite.

Among those enjoying the outing was a Miss Lovelace.

Amy, almost eight now, could scarcely keep her eyes off Miss Lovelace who appeared to be older than the other girls, some of whom still wore hair ribbons, but Amy sensed that she was not, that she perhaps ran roughshod over her parents, her father especially. Indeed, Miss Lovelace's footwear had special appeal. Already she wore the French heel, modified, it is true, but a heel and most certainly French. She did a thrilling thing with her hair, swept it up as if she were eighteen years old. It was an odd way to wear one's hair for an outing and strange to wear such an unsuitable heel. Amy longed to have Miss Lovelace speak to her and show her the picture she kept in her heart-shaped gold locket which she fingered and fingered after showing it to the other girls who made soft screams when they saw it. Sometimes Miss Lovelace paused in a grown-up way in the middle of a pretty gesture as if she expected the “click!” of a camera. She walked in a special light; the shadows of the pines touched her just so. Her future was assured; she would have many years to regard her profile in a complex of mirrors and whatever she wore would be transformed into a queen's raiment. Amy meant to own a heart-shaped locket should she live to be sixteen, and she would show little girls the picture in it. She would own similar shoes, for little girls are anxious to get into such shoes, at first their mothers', to be shod like an adult without a grown-up's responsibility. It was not because Mrs. McKinney was forty when Amy was adopted that she possessed no shoes to excite a little girl, but that she had always looked on shoes only as a cruel necessity in a society that frowned on the naked foot, and not as a means to increase her height or to tickle her fancy. Amy had once got inside satisfying grown-up shoes in a house down the block where there lived a little girl whose mother was very young. Mrs. McKinney knew her from church. There were all these shoes. The man was a salesman from over around Spokane on the wrong side of the mountains. Selling is a precarious occupation at best and success depends more on your selling yourself than on what you have to offer.

“I'm afraid they don't have very much,” Mrs. McKinney told Amy. Amy was beginning to sense that people who don't have very much are likely to want some of what you have. The McKinneys were doubtful of people and had reason to be. Some allowed dogs to eat from their plates; others did not wash their hands before they left the bathroom; others treated the Sabbath as if it were but another day.

Now while the younger girls helped Mrs. McKinney tidy up the beach house and wash the cups in which there had been hot cocoa, and the two gangling boys played catch down near the boathouse, Miss Lovelace sat talking seriously to Mr. McKinney about her future. Amy stood within earshot against the wall, a dish towel in her hands. She was uncomfortable in formal gatherings, never knew whether to stand or sit or if to sit what chair to choose and then what to do with her feet.

Miss Lovelace clasped her pretty white hands together and spoke. “Oh, I just know my future will be bright because I love Jesus so!”

Mr. McKinney nodded gravely as if he shared the confidence of Miss Lovelace, but Miss Lovelace must have realized at once how so cloying a statement must sound to an eavesdropper, and her eyes met Amy's and Amy felt drawn into an uncomfortable relationship whose exact nature was soon going to be resolved. Yes, before the hour was up and The Virginia Five took note of the raised red flag, Miss Lovelace would speak to her.

Pretty soon everybody began to move down to the boathouse. Everybody agreed that everything had been nice, that everybody had enjoyed the salt air and the smell of the pines, that it was a day of which memories are made. Amy moved to leave the beach house but in a curious way she was cut off by Miss Lovelace who passed before her and for the space of six seconds they were quite alone in the world, the voices of the others belonging to quite another age, quite another planet.

Miss Lovelace, smelling faintly of Florida Water, smiled. “Goodbye, little Amy,” she murmured. “Oh, you are so lucky to live here in the summertime! Aren't you lucky not to be living in an orphans' home!”