Jane was excellent in her chores, she was well-behaved and courteous, she enjoyed helping Auntie prepare for guests, and she loved the Bible stories that she got to hear from the back of the church. Her favorite story was of King Solomon mediating between the two mothers. They both claimed to be the mother of the same child, and they came to King Solomon to decide who could keep the baby. He suggested a compromise. “I’ll cut the baby in half,” the preacher said. One mother agreed. The other mother said, “No! Don’t! She can have him!” and to that mother, Solomon gave the child. Even if that wasn’t the real mother, Jane intuited, the child was better off with her.
Jane imagined that she was that baby.
She imagined whole lives for herself, and she always had. Her daydreams distracted her from her regular tasks, made them endurable. Auntie felt that the girl at the asylum had cheated her, that Jane had not told the children “stories,” as that girl had said, but bold-faced lies, slander, titillations that no children should hear, let alone conceptualize for themselves, and her gentle daughter Elizabeth was far too soft for such narratives. The first time Auntie overheard one of Jane’s tales was when she walked in while Jane was cleaning Elizabeth’s chamber pot. Elizabeth sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, jaw hanging, as Jane gesticulated about her elder sister marrying a black man in Paris and having a dozen beautiful gingerbread-skinned babies with curls so tight they sprung back into place when pulled, who danced on feet so small it looked like they balanced on the tips of their toes, and even the boys had the best sweet smiles, and they were always kind to everyone, and if you dropped your bread from your basket into a puddle, any of the children would share theirs with you, that’s how rich and generous her sister’s children were—
Elizabeth looked up at her mother’s shape, a petite silhouette framed in the doorway, and she smiled. “Did you know?” she grinned. “Did you know about Jane’s family?”
Jane stood and smiled at Auntie, with her hands behind her back. Her cheeks dimpled even as Auntie slapped her, hard, and she did not look up or cry afterward. “I’ll have no such lies told to my child,” Auntie said. “There are no dark-skinned people in France. You have no sister. And a Parisian would never court a Paddy, besides.” She stared down at Jane before she turned her eyes on Elizabeth. “Shame on you for listening to such nonsense. Come.” She walked toward the hall.
Jane’s eyes finally brimmed and flooded, but she kept her face down, even as Elizabeth asked, “Are you alright? Jennie? I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would make her mad—”
“Now,” her mother shrieked, and Elizabeth followed her into the parlor where she was made to sit until Jane finished the chores in her room. Then she was allowed to return, to change into her day dress, and then retreat back to the parlor to continue her needlepoint while her mother’s friends came to be entertained. Jane served them tea and biscuits.
“They won’t tell anyone,” Elizabeth told Jane on a church picnic, the next month, with a group of schoolchildren behind her. “I told them about your sister, about her children. They don’t believe me.”
Jane looked up from her darning and into the sun where they stood.
“Will you tell us the story?” a blonde girl asked. “About the gingerbread children?”
Jane looked at Elizabeth. “What did you tell them?”
“Just a little,” she said. “I just told her that your sister married a man in Paris, and they had children like sweet cake, that were sweet and interesting. But they didn’t believe me.”
“Please, Jennie,” said a little boy named James Murphy, with a face that reddened in the sun. “Tell us about the candy children.”
Jane smoothed her skirt around her and said, “Well they weren’t just gingerbread, you know. Some of them were made of licorice. Some of them had ladyfingers for fingers, and they had peppermint eyes and lips like slices of peach. And they loved to kiss.”
“No!” James said. “Kissing is bad.”
“No,” said Jane, very seriously. “Kissing is good. It’s like eating candy, like a treat. The sweet children love to kiss in Paris.” She carried on about fruits and kissing until she saw Auntie coming up the hill with her friends, and she stopped. She picked up her darning and tried to blend into the blanket beneath her, but the children moved in around her. They pleaded for her to tell them her story. Where was her family from? When would they come to retrieve her? Would her mother please bring them candies? Would she teach them how to kiss? James moved her face toward his, and he pushed his thin lips into hers, and then Auntie yanked him away. His own mother dragged him away by his ear. The picnic was over. The servants with whom Jane sat all gathered their families’ food and dishes, and one of the elders helped Jane pack up the Toppans’ lunches as well.
At home, Jane got the paddle. She didn’t cry, and Elizabeth did. She begged her mother to stop, said that Jane was only telling them stories because she asked for them, that it wasn’t her fault, that Jane was just following orders like her mother told her she had to, that Jane hadn’t kissed James, James had kissed her, he had wanted to kiss her, he loved Jane. Jane hadn’t even liked James. Jane wasn’t fast. It was all James. And boys could do what they liked. She only did what he said, the same way that she did what Auntie said. This explanation just made Auntie more mad. The scandal that her own daughter could have asked to hear such vulgarities brought on harsher punishments and shame on James and all the Murphys for socializing with the workers. Finally, Elizabeth fled from the room, and then Auntie stopped. Jane shook as she brought herself upright.
“I will not have your slander under my roof,” Auntie said. “Do you understand? Just because you are a Paddy by blood doesn’t mean you have to act like one.”
“Yes, Auntie,” she said. And then, without looking up, she asked, “Pardon me. I only don’t want to get in trouble. What is a Paddy?”
“A Paddy is what you were born as: lazy, dishonest filth that tells un-Christian lies to anyone who will listen. With a beating and a blessing, we might be able to get rid of those blasphemous qualities.” Jane swallowed and kept her eyes to the ground until Auntie reached down, and with her gnarled hand tilted up Jane’s face, and she said, “You want to go to heaven when you die, don’t you, Jane?”
Jane cleared her throat and said, “Yes, Auntie.”
“Then you can tell no more lies.”
“I weren’t telling lies, mam—”
Jane’s thin eyebrows lifted into her forehead as Auntie leaned down till their faces nearly touched. “You have no sister. You have no family. Your father was a drunken mess, and he abandoned you.”
“He didn’t,” Jane said, her small round jaw set. “He didn’t abandon us. He only couldn’t take care of us anymore and he didn’t want to hurt us. He told my sister and me that before he left us.”
“If I hear one word more about your dishonorable father or insane sister, I’ll take you back to the asylum. Do you want to go back to watery cabbage soup and dry bread?”
Incidents regarding Jane’s family only repeated themselves twice more. Jane learned to draw her mouth tight like a purse string, lest the other children pull out of it for themselves and at her expense. She knew the truth, and Elizabeth and the other children believed her, and that would have to be enough.
Elizabeth attended Jane after each of these beatings. She taught Jane how to pronounce her words so that none of Auntie’s friends would know that she was Irish, taught her about the families in the neighborhood, which