Violet made her way down the steps. Since there was no light under Mother Mary Joseph’s door, she continued down the hallway to the kitchen. When she found no one there, she decided to step outside for a breath of air. The day had been long and heavy, like every day since the first of January. New Year’s, a time for luck and second chances—the day Violet had finally understood Lily’s predicament. No monthly rags. Sick stomach every morning. Her two good dresses, her only dresses, pulling at the bosom. Lily had been sulking for the better part of December, but until that morning, Violet had never once thought Lily could be expecting.
A sharp wind cut across Violet’s face and whipped up a sudden squall of snow, slicing the stars out of the evening sky. Violet whirled around to go inside, tried the handle, and found the door locked. Gooseflesh rippled under the thin sleeves of her blouse, prompted more by fear than cold. She cradled her arms, tucked her head, and balled her body up against the fieldstone wall. Violet had been lost in the snow when she was nine years old, the night she’d helped birth Lily, and ever since, she was terrified to be alone in it. She stayed tucked for a long time before she remembered to breathe. The air raced out of her lungs so fast it seemed to push back the wind. The snow stopped falling as quickly as it had begun, and the stars repopulated the inky sky.
Violet drew in a breath and listened for the wind to circle back, but heard only the thump of her own heart. She straightened slowly and twisted the knob a second time. The door stayed put inside its frame. Try the main entrance, she thought, whether the nuns like it or not. Just as she rounded the corner, a woman, her face hidden behind a tightly drawn shawl, bolted out of the asylum’s double oak doors and down the slate front steps, vanishing into the frozen night. Violet might have thought the woman an apparition if her sobs hadn’t pierced the icy silence.
Violet scurried through the yard and up the steep steps to a large porch. She looked back to make certain the woman had disappeared before turning the knob and dashing across the threshold. Violet’s flesh prickled in the heated air; her limbs ached from the warmth of the foyer. She stood for a moment, dripping melted snow, silently thanking God for the unlocked door, when what sounded like a baby’s whimper interrupted her prayer. Violet looked around and spotted a large white cradle to her right, near the arched entrance to the chapel. A wooden sign above the cradle instructed, Go and Sin No More. The cries started again, full on, so Violet walked over and scooped a swaddled bundle into her arms. A note pinned to a moth-eaten blanket simply read, Be good to my boy. Violet offered the infant her finger to suck, and noticed his disfigurement. She’d only seen two other harelips in her life. They reminded her of a pig’s notched ear. The crying stopped momentarily, and the baby looked up with his broken expression. Violet kissed her finger and lightly traced the triangular opening from the infant’s nostril to his lip.
“I’m right here, Sister!” a male voice yelled from the hospital side of the entrance. “I’ll see to the matter.”
Violet looked to her left as a corpulent man in a bloodstained apron parted a set of pocket doors on the opposite wall.
“What is it, Dr. Peters?” Mother Mary Joseph called out.
The man stood for a moment, eyeing Violet as he would a bit of gristle on the side of his plate. “Just another whore,” he answered, in a voice too low to carry into the next room. He pushed a plug of tobacco into his bearded cheek, walked over to Violet, and whispered, “Just another stinking whore.”
Chapter three
AS SOON AS VIOLET LEFT THE ROOM with Mother Mary Joseph’s handkerchief, Lily walked to the door on Muriel’s orders and looked down the hallway in both directions. “Coast is clear!”
“Not for long,” Muriel called from the other end of the room, “what with all your yelling. Now, hurry up. Chapel will be over soon. And who knows when that sister of yours will get back.” She reached into her top drawer, pushed aside a crumple of nightclothes, and pulled out a pile of magazines. “If the Reverend Mother catches us, we’ll have to scrub floors for a month of Sundays,” she said, fanning the magazines out on her bed like a winning hand of pinochle.
“Can she really make us do that?” Lily’s eyes dipped toward the contraband.
Muriel grabbed her nightgown and draped it over her curly red locks, making a pious face. “With our own toothbrushes.” She tied the gown’s arms around her forehead, fashioning a nun’s wimple for her makeshift veil. “Here at the Good Shepherd,” she said in Mother Mary Joseph’s unsteady falsetto, “unwholesome pursuits will not be tolerated.” Muriel lifted a pudgy thumb and started ticking off the rules. “No tobacco. No cards. No alcohol. No profane language.” She unfolded her pinky with a flourish. “And no suggestive literature.” She cleared her throat and stretched her voice another octave. “It’ll rot your very soul.”
“I’ll not scrub one floor,” Lily said, as she considered the consequences for the infraction she was about to commit. “And I’m not afraid to tell her that,” she added, though her voice lacked conviction. She sat on the corner of Muriel’s bed and fingered the magazines. True Story, True Romances, Modern Screen, Movie Monthly—all scandalous, though none very recent. Why, Gertrude Olmstead was on a November 1928 cover of True Story, and she hadn’t been heard from since talkies became the rage.
“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you tell her that one.”
“Who?” Lily picked up the December 1929 True Story with a picture of Clara Bow on front.
“Mother Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Both girls erupted into laughter. “Oh!” Muriel pressed her hands against her belly. “He’s a real scrapper,” she said, rubbing a tip of elbow or knee poking up.
Lily grimaced. “What was that?”
“He’s kicking.”
Lily looked at Muriel’s belly, stunned.
“You didn’t know?” Muriel swung around sidesaddle, reached for Lily’s hand, and placed it against her stomach. “Here,” she said. “Feel that?”
When the baby kicked again, Lily pulled her hand away and wiped it on the blanket. “How awful!”
“Awful? Happens to everybody.”
“Not me!”
“You too, silly.”
Lily’s mouth dropped open.
“First you feel flapping inside,” Muriel squinted, “but soft, like a hummingbird’s wings. After that, the kicking starts.”
Lily’s eyebrows sprang up.
“I’m just starting my seventh month,” Muriel said, “so you should be showing any day. Probably just need to put a little meat on those bones.” She picked up a 1925 Movie Monthly with a picture of Priscilla Dean on the cover. The headline read, “Ladies in Peril.” She scooped up the remaining magazines and buried them in the open drawer. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
Lily shook her head and moved to her own bed. Clara Bow peeked out from under her arm. “She said I’d already had quite an education, and that nature would take care of the rest.”
“How ’bout that sister of yours? She’s no spring chicken. Imagine she’s been around the block a time or two.”
“Violet? Hardly. She’s too busy mooning over Stanley. Stanley, Stanley,” she singsonged. “That’s all I ever hear.”
“What sort of fella is he?”
“Sweet enough, I suppose. Not much taller than Violet. Educated. Finishing up law school right here in Philadelphia.”
“How romantic. Will she see him?”
“No!”