Chapter 11 Faith

11

FAITH

The telegram arrived while May was out. Faith was surprised to see it delivered here, to the home. She didn’t intend to read it, but Miss Rhoades had already taken it from its envelope, as was policy. And it was so short.

Best Not Write for Emmanuel’s Sake

Love Mother

Faith sat on her bed and stared at the message. She wasn’t surprised May’s mother didn’t seem concerned about May’s reported injury. (The choice of the word “love” felt particularly harsh.) No one from Faith’s childhood had been capable of safeguarding her honor or well-being, either. But she ached to think how the reply could send May deeper into the dangerous spiral Faith had observed in the weeks they’d lived together. Her roommate appeared to be unraveling at an unnerving pace.

Dust had collected on May’s side of the room. She had even forgotten to make her bed this morning. Faith hurried to tuck in the sheet corners and plump the pillow before May returned. Maybe she’d be so distracted she’d believe she’d done it herself.

Someone had once taught Faith to look for unseen forces behind any sort of dramatic change. People were not only like magnets, they were magnets, able to attract and repel one another, changing one another’s paths, nudging them toward safety, or toward the abyss. This particular teacher of Faith’s had proved himself to be, by Faith’s reckoning, an agent of evil, and she wasn’t sure how much of his instruction she still believed. But there did seem to be many potent influences acting upon May now: Mrs. Mendenhall; the beau, Hal; the grotesque man who’d attacked her. Too many voices for one person to bear.

Another point that couldn’t be ignored: May’s woes seemed to coincide with the arrival of Faith herself. What if May’s fall from grace was Faith’s fault?

She remembered the Pullman conductor who’d tossed her and Madam Irini from the train in Decatur, Indiana, as if they were bags of mail. The old palm reader had seemed unfazed, clearly used to this sort of treatment, but Faith had been shocked by his callousness.

“If I see you on this train again, bringing your bad luck, I’ll have you both skinned alive,” he sneered at them from the top of the ladder. The engine had hit another deer and was stalled. Passengers dangled from the half-open windows. A band of boys in their teens leaned out to ogle the two women, calling them hags.

“Come on,” Madam Irini said, dusting off her skirt. She made no mention of the tickets they’d paid for, which had been meant to take them all the way to Chicago. “Let’s walk.”

Madam Irini had already been on the train when Faith boarded in Buffalo, and had set up shop in one of the sleeper cars: her tarot cards and silk pillows, the gauzy red scarf she hung over the window, her crystal ball the size of a grapefruit. She’d noticed Faith in a coach car on her way to the toilet. Faith had been huddled against the window, knees pulled to her chest. Madam Irini leaned over the florid-faced man snoring beside her and asked Faith to come help an old woman count something.

Money, it turned out, and lots of it—that’s what she needed Faith to count. As the train rambled west, she showed Faith how to read palms, or, rather, how to read people: to determine what they wanted to hear and give it to them. She let Faith stay in her sleeper car and traced her head, heart, and life lines, teaching her how to manipulate readings of them, how to bend the story.

“Everyone’s in love with someone they have no business with,” Madam Irini told her as they swayed back and forth with the train, their noses nearly touching. Her lips curved in a thin smile. “That’s a good place to start.”

Madam Irini rode trains back and forth, north and south. She had no home in the soil, as she put it. Railway travelers were an easy mark for fortune-tellers: they were either bored and captive, restless, or running from something and anxious for reassurance. Madam Irini looked ancient, with creased, soft skin and watery brown eyes. She told Faith late one night, after Faith helped her count her coins and store them safely in the lining of her carpetbag, that she’d been born enslaved in Georgia.

“I say I’m a Gypsy,” she said. “Folks don’t look too closely at me anyway, only at their own palms.”

After the conductor threw them out, they’d walked to the station in Decatur, Madam Irini hobbling with her heavy carpetbag, insistent on carrying it herself. Even after a day and a night in each other’s company, Faith still had the sense the woman didn’t trust her, or anyone else, to hold all that money.

Yet, at the station, she’d surprised Faith by handing her a ten-dollar bill. “Where are you headed, dearie? Won’t you come east with me? I might as well go back to New York, then down to Florida to see my sister.”

Back east—Buffalo…Faith shivered. She shook her head.

“All right,” said Madam Irini, “you go on ahead. I see nothing but good news for you in the West.”

The words had comforted Faith at the time, even though she already knew Madam Irini told people only what they wanted to hear. Now Faith wondered if the conductor had been the more accurate soothsayer. If bad luck followed and clung to her like gnats on fruit.

She placed the telegram face-down on May’s quilt. Her fingers had scarcely left it when the door opened.

“What’s that?” May was breathless, face flushed, back from church with the piquant aroma of griddled bread and coffee clinging to her clothes. She crossed the room in three steps and plucked up the telegram, then sat down with a whump on her bed.

“You told your mother your address?”

“No. I asked the telegraph office to forward it here. Oh,” May said, after she’d read it, and for a second Faith thought she might cry, but then she crumpled the telegram angrily and tossed it at the wall. She kicked off her shoes and peeled down her stockings, then sat on her bed and began fanning herself with a temperance pamphlet someone had left on their table.

Slowly, Faith lowered herself to her own bed, so that they were facing each other.

“Who is Emmanuel?” she asked.

She waited for May to accuse her of violating her privacy, but May didn’t. Her fanning slowed, and she took in a deep breath.

“He’s my little boy,” she said after a while. “But he thinks my sister-in-law is his mother.”

“Why?” Faith asked, even though she could guess the answer.

May sniffed, looking toward the window. The milky light amplified red blotches on her cheeks. “My brother is married. Emmanuel shares their last name and could fit neatly into their household. It was best for everyone. He was born, and I came here to live with Amelia.”

Faith knew she would have to be selective in asking questions, and so she filled the gaps in her own mind. In a crowded Italian neighborhood in Chicago, where there could be no secrets, May and this fellow, Enzo, had had a tryst—probably more than the single night of lovemaking May liked to reminisce about—resulting in the boy Emmanuel. Enzo wouldn’t marry May, so Emmanuel became her brother’s son. And May was cast into the wilderness.

People could be so strange, Faith mused, especially when they thought their neighbors might judge them. The more someone cared about being proper, the odder, and often crueler, their behavior.

Faith had saved May a piece of soda bread, but when she brought it to her, wrapped in a napkin, May waved it away. She continued staring out the window, her expression fluctuating between grief and bitter anger. Faith sat back down and took a bite of it herself, wishing she’d thought to smuggle a pat of butter from the dining room. Hunger gnawed at her these days, following her around like a begging dog. She longed for the courage to ask for more food, or to ask May if she, too, had been consumed with hunger and thirst while pregnant.

What else would she ask May if she knew she’d receive an answer? To start, how old was Emmanuel? Old enough to read a telegram, perhaps, or close to it, which didn’t fit with May’s version of events. May told the story of her doomed romance with Enzo as though Emmanuel was the baby she’d been carrying when she arrived at the Bethany Home. But Emmanuel had never left Chicago.

“Did you—” Faith blurted out, louder than usual. May startled backward on her bed, as though a hand had shoved her in the chest. Magnets.

Faith swallowed the last bite of bread and cleared her throat. She looked down at the napkin. For all Madam Irini’s teachings, she still couldn’t always get people to spill their secrets. Especially people she cared about.

A train of words burst out of her. “Did you have another baby? Why does Mrs. Mendenhall want you to leave?”

Two questions. Ask two questions, you’re unlikely to receive even one reply.

May sat up, and her bare feet smacked the floor. Her mannerisms seemed off, unlike her: more confident, in a sense, but more erratic. She put on her stockings and shoes, fastened the toggles on her woolen shawl, and tossed one side over her shoulder. “I’m off to buy something. I shall see you at dinner.”

The white sky outside threatened more snow. Faith hated to think of May out there in the cold, missing that afternoon’s fireside reading time, the pleasure of a warm blanket, and the cool trickle of Miss Rhoades’s voice reading Trilby . She reached for May, longing to atone for her invasive questioning and beg her to stay, but words failed her.

May flinched. “Don’t follow me” was all she said, her finger pointed at Faith’s nose. She flung herself out the door with such force it felt as though she’d been squeezed out of the room, as though Faith and her questions had swelled to fill all available space.