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CLAUDIA AND BEULAH were under orders never to let Jessie Binford step inside their grandmother’s house, but what were two daughters to do when their mother called to them from the other side of the screen door?

She swayed back and forth a little as she crooned to them: Claudie! Binnie! Mama’s home!

Binnie was the name Beulah gave herself when she was too young to say her own name. No one ever called her that but her mother. The sound of it brought back the sensation of her mother putting her cool fingers over Beulah’s eyelids as she fell asleep. It brought back the taste of cornmeal boiled in sweetened milk, with a little pool of bacon grease in the middle, the only dinner her mother ever made for her. Those were the singular comforts Beulah knew from the years before she and Claudia turned up on their grandparents’ doorstep. How could she refuse them now?

But Jessie Binford had nothing like that on offer anymore. She stumbled through Meemaw’s front door with an avalanche of excuses: She’d lost a job, a good job, and it wasn’t her fault, or maybe she’d been put out of her furnished room and just needed a night or two while she looked for another, or she’d been abandoned by the man she’d taken up with most recently, although it was also possible that she abandoned him, and was prepared to swear that she’d never let a man like that bring her to ruin again.

And she was a ruin — a graceful, beautiful, sharp-as-knives ruin. She carried a brown glass bottle in her bosom and sipped out of it from a dropper. “My medicine,” she told the girls as soon as Meemaw was out of earshot.

“Did you get sick, Mama?” Beulah asked, turning her face up to her mother, as if to the sun.

“No, baby,” her mother said. “The medicine’s to keep Mama well.”

Jessie’s medicine made her buoyant but droopy-eyed, and talkative in the most meaningless way. What started as an elaborate account of her ambitions — a move out West, a marriage to a promising older gentleman, a position in a department store — dissolved into mumbles, until her chin came to rest on her chest and she fell asleep right there, in the chair where she was sitting, in the middle of the afternoon.

It was a sin to sleep in the afternoon. It was a sin to wear perfume. It was a sin to accept a gift from a man: an ivory comb, a stickpin with a glass ruby, a pretty silver snuff-box. Jessie Binford should’ve crumbled under the weight of her sins, but instead she was elevated by them, and left them on display for anyone to see.

She had been smart to come around during the day, when their grandfather was out on patrol. He’d never let her inside if he was there to put a stop to it. Meemaw should’ve known better than to grant Jessie admittance when his back was turned, but she was a sentimental old woman who would not pass up a chance to lay her eyes on any of her three remaining children, for as long as she lived. So their mother was let back in. Poppa shouted about it in the evening — they hollered at one another until the cups rattled in their saucers and the neighbors came and pounded on the door for them to keep quiet — but it made no difference. Their mother was allowed to stay.

But she didn’t stay long, as she tired of the yelling and chafed against the rules of the house just as Claudia did. In fact, what pained Beulah the most about seeing her mother again was the way that Jessie and Claudia quickly came to be more like disobedient sisters, trading stockings and trying on each other’s ribbons and combs. Claudia took on airs in a way that never would have been tolerated when her mother wasn’t around. She refused to help with the washing for fear that it would ruin her delicate hands, and she wouldn’t get down on her knees to scrub the old pot-black stove because her hair, piled in a delicate top-knot, would come tumbling down if she bent over that far.

Little trinkets turned up for Claudia during Jessie’s visit — a cameo portrait of an unknown lady in profile, tied to a blue ribbon, a powder puff and a pretty round box to put it in, a silk scarf. Claudia handled these gifts carelessly, as if they’d simply blown in on the wind and another batch might drift in behind it. She learned that attitude from her mother.

None of those trinkets were meant for Beulah. From the bedroom (Claudia and Beulah’s bedroom, taken over by Jessie, so that Beulah slept by herself in the parlor, across two chairs shoved together) would come a trill of laughter, and then a hushed whisper that sounded like the shuffling of feet on a bare floor, and then another flurry of high-pitched giggles.

After a week or so of this, Beulah woke up one morning and found her mother gone, vanished in the middle of the night, having slipped out with Claudia, except that Claudia had the sense to steal back to bed before dawn and Jessie did not.

AFTER THAT, ANY mention of Jessie Binford was forbidden at Meemaw’s house. Beulah, aiming to please her grandmother, did her best never to mention or even think of her mother. She did, however, expect to see her when Poppa died.

He went in his sleep one night, which Meemaw said was the best way to go, and she would know about that, having lost so many. She laid him out for viewing in their parlor for three days leading up to the funeral, so that the neighbors and the town constables might pay their respects. Beulah was glad when that came to an end and he was put into a box and taken away. She’d never lived in a house with a dead man before and hoped she would never have to do it again.

Beulah guiltily looked forward to the funeral because she longed to see her mother in a good stiff black dress, her hair done up nicely under a veiled hat, bringing soothing words for Meemaw and a fresh handkerchief to cry into.

But her mother was quite jarringly absent from the church, and so was Claudia. Beulah was, therefore, the only relation to sit alongside her grandmother during Poppa’s funeral. All she remembered of it was the dark church, the black wax on the pews that she could dig into with her fingernails, and a tiny window with a pane of red glass that didn’t let in the light.

Where was Claudia? She had vanished on the night he died, just slipped out as the doctor slipped in with his black bag. She didn’t return to see her grandfather laid out. Her absence at the funeral was enormous and inexplicable. Beulah tried to make excuses for it.

“Claudia just run off ’cause she’s scared,” she whispered to Meemaw right before the service began, by way of explanation, but Meemaw wouldn’t even look at her, and seemed not to have an opinion one way or another about Claudia.

A few of the neighbor ladies came back to the house after the funeral and carried out their obligations as they related to pans of chicken and dumplings, and a Polish dish of sausage and noodles that was unfamiliar to Beulah but worth investigating. None of the food was to be eaten that day, though. Meemaw insisted that it all be put away in the cold room. She wanted to be left in peace, and to put her head on the pillow for a few hours in the gray late afternoon.

The neighbor ladies did as Meemaw asked. Beulah saw them out and thanked them for their kindness. She was twelve by then, and knew how to behave like the lady of the house when circumstances required it. After they were gone, she sat on the front porch with the darkness crowding in around her and a little pecan pie in her hand. She was not terribly surprised to see Claudia coming up from the end of the street after a while, slowly, carefully, putting one foot directly in front of the other as if she were walking on a railroad track.

At sixteen, Claudia looked like a woman. She wore her dresses a little shorter so that her ankles showed, and she didn’t mind it when a glimpse of petticoat could be seen from underneath her hem. Her hair was long and full and rich enough to be pleasing in its abundant arrangement of curls and knots, while Beulah’s was still as thin as string and good for nothing but braiding. Claudia didn’t look anything like their mother — she was prettier, with a pink little mouth pursed into a bow, and eyes too big for her heart-shaped face — but she carried herself like Jessie Binford did, with a certain sway to her walk like she was blowing around in the wind. She had the tiniest waist Beulah had ever seen, a feat that could only be accomplished by a girl of that particular age, when the bone stays were more tolerable and the ribs were soft enough to give way to ever-tighter corset ties.

She was, in every way, a pleasing picture of young womanhood. Beulah hardly knew what to make of her anymore.

Beulah watched as this body containing the spirit of her sister picked its way over the cobblestones and up onto the wooden sidewalk in front of Meemaw’s house. She put the last corner of the pecan pie in her mouth and brushed away the crumbs.

“He gone now?” was the first thing Claudia said to her.

“You’d know that if you’da been here,” Beulah said sullenly.

“I knew it,” Claudia said. “It wouldn’t a done me any good to be here, and it wouldn’t a made a difference to him, ’cause he’s dead.”

“Meemaw went to lie down,” Beulah said. “You ought not to bother her right now.”

Claudia stood looking down at Beulah and then up at the front door where she’d peered through the screen, all those years earlier, asking for admittance that first time. Beulah was still a little peach of a girl, with cheeks that had only just lost their baby fat and eyes that naturally curved upward in a way that made her look just a little more flirtatious than a girl of twelve should be. She was too young for mourning and instead wore a somber dress of dark blue with a little red carnation tucked into the pocket.

That flower made all the difference. It was like a flame burning in a window, late at night.

“Why don’t you come with me,” Claudia said.

Beulah started to tell her that it wouldn’t be right. She intended to say that if she went with Claudia, even to the end of the block, she wouldn’t be allowed to come back home. She thought that she ought to remind Claudia about all the terrible things Claudia had shouted to her grandmother over the last few years, when Meemaw wanted nothing but a peaceful home and two good girls sleeping under her roof. She wanted to remind Claudia that there was only so much heartbreak an old woman could take, and to tell her that she ought to think more kindly toward the people who had tried to do right by her.

But when it came time to say any of that, the words just slipped away. All Beulah could see was her sister standing over her, with a hand outstretched. What could she do — what could she ever do, her whole life long — but to take that hand and to go wherever Claudia would lead her?

MONROE SQUARE WAS, in those days, a genteel pleasure ground for city-dwellers, equipped with flower beds in the English style, privet hedges pruned to a knife edge, and wide swaths of gravel where young ladies strolled with their parasols, their chaperones trailing behind.

It was the very civility of Monroe Square that allowed for such uncivilized goings-on. A girl could walk unaccompanied, and anyone might assume that she was under the watchful eye of some older woman sitting nearby on a park bench. There were always enough of them about.

A man could walk unaccompanied, too, and no one would think anything of that. He might be on his way to his place of business, or waiting to meet a friend. It was the most ordinary thing in the world for a man to make arrangements to meet a colleague at Monroe Square, so the men didn’t attract any attention, either.

In this way, a young girl could make a friend. She might never be permitted inside a saloon or a hall for dancing, but in a park she could catch a man’s eye, deliver a clever retort, and take a surreptitious sip of whatever was offered to her from a vest pocket. Claudia showed Beulah how to take a drink, and how to stop herself from shuddering when the fiery spirit took hold of her.

When they did meet a man, it wasn’t much of a walk, after that, over to Mayo Street, where the police would leave them alone. That one narrow street was Richmond’s own little pocket of lawlessness, a sanctioned red-light district, a place where a man didn’t have to give his name and a girl wasn’t asked her age. There were rooms for rent, and bowls of punch and jugs of ale right out on the sidewalk, and little player pianos that would grind out tunes for a penny.

Mayo Street was near the train station, close enough to draw men arriving from all over the country. It was an attractive place for girls, too, especially girls who were expecting a baby and wished to hide themselves away until it was born. There were houses where a girl in a certain kind of predicament could rent a room, and birth her baby in peace, and even keep it with her, if she wanted to, as long as she was willing to stay on and earn her keep afterward by entertaining the men invited in by her landlady. In this way, formerly respectable girls learned how to earn their living through the attentions of men, and Mayo Street flourished.

But for Claudia, it started over in Monroe Square, in the bright sunshine, right under the watchful eyes of the town constables who once patrolled with her grandfather. And it was there that Claudia took Beulah on the night of the funeral, and for many nights after.

Beulah didn’t much care for the other girls in Claudia’s circle. There was Henrietta Pittman, a fat-cheeked, curly-haired, gossipy girl who laughed too loud and told jokes Beulah never understood. There was another one named Geraldine, too tall and too skinny, all elbows and knees and a tendency to stutter. When Claudia introduced her to a third girl called Josephine, Beulah couldn’t help but wonder why all the girls hanging around Monroe Square bore a feminine version of a man’s name. Had they all been disappointments to their fathers?

The girls — and the men, for that matter — made for unpleasant company, as far as Beulah was concerned, but she had to admit that Claudia had spirited her away at just the right moment. There was nothing for her at home. Her grandmother stayed in bed most days, and told Beulah not to bother her. “I’ve buried two husbands and six children, and I don’t know how many other relations,” Meemaw said. “Just let me be for a while. You go on and take care of yourself now.”

In fact, Beulah could’ve taken care of herself and Meemaw, too. She could’ve put a meal on the table three times a day, and done the washing and mending, and swept out the house, and aired the bedding on Saturdays. But Claudia wanted Beulah to come with her, and Beulah was irresistibly drawn to anyone who wanted her.

She and Claudia still came and went from Meemaw’s house as they pleased, taking their baths there and eating their supper when nobody else would buy it for them, but that wasn’t often. Someone always had a dollar in his pocket. Mayo Street was their home now.

Beulah was thirteen before she looked up one morning and recognized the flat her mother had rented, all those years ago.

It was only then that she understood that she and Claudia had been born on Mayo Street.