Chapter 1
New York, 1890
Lillian jiggled her foot so impatiently that it worked its way out from under her skirts. She stilled her foot to observe it. Even without drawing it closer, she could see the sorry condition of her boot. The crease near the big toe had cracked, and the blacking she had applied last night did little to reverse a year of daily wear. On rainy days, she lined the interior with squares of newspaper to absorb the water that seeped in, but this morning the September sun beat down with a vengeance as if it were summer, which she took as a good omen. She would just have to hope that no one noticed her feet today.
That is, if she could ever leave the apartment. Where was Mrs. Oberman? Lillian checked the mantel clock again, which showed that it was one minute after she had last checked it. It’s not as if the woman had far to travel – her rooms were on the first floor of this very building. Lillian had seen her occasionally on the stoop in the weeks since they moved here, and when this job opportunity fell in Lillian’s lap, she cornered Mrs. Oberman and asked her to watch Marie this morning. But Lillian realized now she hadn’t really described the nature of the job in any detail. She had planned to outline everything when Mrs. Oberman arrived and couldn’t easily back out, but now it was getting late. Had she forgotten?
Lillian’s stomach knotted as she imagined how crowded the El would be at this time of day, and how long her trip would be to the 103rd Street Station. She had only ever been as far as 59th Street, just the southernmost part of Central Park, for Marie’s birthday every year. Their mother, Helen, would pack a picnic lunch, and Marie would want to touch all the trees, roll around on the grass, joyful as a pup. Helen often remarked that it was a shame Marie was born a city girl.
But Lillian forced herself to stop thinking of Helen. As far as Lillian was concerned, she and Marie had no mother.
She rose from her seat and went to check on Marie in the bedroom. No, not the petticoat! She rushed over to where Marie sat cross-legged on the floor, happily cutting her petticoat into ragged squares with Lillian’s sewing scissors. Lillian grabbed the scissors from Marie, accidentally scraping the pointed blades across Marie’s palm.
“So you got bored of the buttons, I see.” When Lillian had left Marie minutes ago, she had been lining up buttons by size, a daily activity that usually occupied her for the better part of an hour. “You know I can’t afford another petticoat for you. So you’ll be wearing that one with these square holes. Just so you know.” After they had moved to this tenement and it was just the two of them, Lillian started talking more to Marie, even though she knew Marie wouldn’t answer. It was too quiet otherwise. And she could say anything to Marie. After all, Marie could hear perfectly well; she just didn’t speak. Any secret was safe; it was like shouting your troubles down a well.
Lillian looked around for a place to hide the sewing scissors. With her back turned, she didn’t hear Marie creep up behind her, and startled when Marie hugged her around the waist in her clumsy and exuberant way. Prying the arms from around her waist, she turned around and looked at Marie. When they were younger, Lillian had been wildly jealous of her sister’s looks, even cutting Marie’s hair while she slept one night. Lillian had taken the locks, shiny mahogany, and held them to her temple, covering her own mousy strands, pretending she sported this beautiful mane. When Helen found out the next morning, Lillian had extra chores for a week and Marie snubbed her for two, but Lillian hid the hair, tied with a ribbon, and sometimes took it out to stroke it like a cat.
At 14, Marie was now far more beautiful than she had been then, but Lillian felt no envy ever since the scarlatina took Marie’s sight and part of her mind.
A knock at the door pulled Lillian out of her reverie, and she rushed to answer it. Mrs. Oberman shuffled in with a curt nod of her head and lowered herself down in a chair, easing her humped back into a comfortable position. Lillian thought she might have detected a whiff of alcohol but decided it was instead the lingering smell of some fermented food.
“Mrs. Oberman, we had agreed to half past eight this morning.”
“Ach, at my age, not all the parts of the body want to cooperate so early in the morning. You’re too young to understand.”
Lillian had no time to explain that Mrs. Oberman’s body parts should not be Lillian’s problem. “Marie needs to be watched closely. You must be in the same room with her at all times.” She put on her coat and checked that her keys were in the deep pockets of her skirts while she talked. “I should be back by midday. Marie likes bread and cheese for lunch, she’s already had breakfast.”
There were ten other things she should tell Mrs. Oberman but she ran out the door without saying goodbye to either of them. She hoped to get down the stairs before Marie realized she was gone and started crying. She didn’t need that echoing in her ears during her interview.
***
The bench outside the Head Nurse’s office was uncomfortable, and Lillian shifted when she felt pins and needles in one leg. She had been five minutes late, a miracle that it hadn’t been more; the El had arrived just as she approached the station, an omen even better than the sunny weather. But now she had been waiting on this bench for fifteen minutes. Was she being punished for being late? Or was the Head Nurse running late herself, and Lillian needn’t have rushed at all? Would her interviewer be irritated with her, or apologetic?
Before she could decide which was more likely, the door opened and the Head Nurse waved her in without comment.
“I am Nurse Holt,” she said as they sat down. “I am in charge of all nurses and nursing activity at the hospital.” She paused and eyed Lillian carefully, looking her up and down. Lillian was thankful that the desk between them hid her shoes.
Nurse Holt finished her examination of Lillian with a barely audible “Hmm,” and then looked down at a sheet of paper in front of her. “It says here you are eighteen and have an aspiration to matriculate over at the Bellevue Training School.”
“Yes ma’am, but I’ve been told I’m not old enough.”
“Certainly not, and there may be other obstacles.” Nurse Holt rested her forearms on her desk. “They prefer to take girls with college experience. Many are from families of means.”
Lillian wasn’t sure if this were an insult or a test – had Nurse Holt spied her shoes as she had walked in? “But if I worked here as a nursing assistant, that would help to balance the scales when I go to apply.” Lillian started to tremble. She didn’t want to seem desperate, but in truth, this job was the only way she could see to make progress toward her goal of becoming a nurse. Her previous plan – applying to the live-in Bellevue program next year with a glowing letter of recommendation from Dr. Pratt that would mitigate her young age – had not worked out.
“Well, that is a fine articulation of why our nursing assistant job would benefit you. But tell me, how would you benefit the New York Cancer Hospital?”
Lillian felt perspiration surface under her collar, but she didn’t travel so far uptown to give up without a fight. “I’m a hard worker. I have a strong stomach. I’m not given to gossip with other women. I’m neat in my person and punctual.” She inwardly winced at that last word, remembering her lateness this morning. But that was Mrs. Oberman’s fault. Lillian had been ready to go with time to spare. Quickly, to draw attention from her comment about punctuality, she added, “And I don’t mind menial work.”
“You think the work we do here is menial?” Nurse Holt asked with an unreadable expression.
“No! I didn’t mean to imply…” Lillian thought frantically. What was the right answer here? She could feel the sweat dampening her collar now.
Nurse Holt sat back in her chair which creaked in the silence. “As it turns out, you are correct. The tasks assigned to the nursing assistant are quite menial. Rolling bandages, changing sheets, cleaning bedpans. So I need to be clear here. You will likely not have much contact with patients. Girls that come here because they are driven to help people can be frustrated that they are not soothing fevered brows. You need to be satisfied that you are a small cog in an important wheel, and not aspire to be more than your station dictates.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You should also know that the hospital has had some minor financial hardships of late. This is merely a temporary situation, but we communicate this to the staff because we expect everyone to police for waste and inefficiency. And as you may know, the position of nursing assistant is a relatively new one, one that not every hospital has.”
Lillian was all too aware of this. Hospital nursing was generally an 80-hour-a-week job that required living at the hospital. This was highly appealing to many girls, who wanted a safe and respectable way to live on their own. But even if she were old enough, Lillian could not do that and also take care of Marie.
“Our beautiful new building has lodging for our nurses, of course, but when our nursing need started to exceed our lodging capacity, it made more financial sense to hire nonresident assistants than it did to expand our facility.”
“Most sensible, ma’am.”
“Yes,” said Nurse Holt as she straightened the piece of paper on her desk. There were several heartbeats of silence during which the only sound Lillian heard was the rustle of a nurse’s skirts rushing past the office door. Was the interview over? As she opened her mouth to express her thanks, Nurse Holt looked up and said, “51st Street. That’s quite a distance to travel.”
“Yes, but quite direct on the El.”
“You must keep in mind that our nurses lodge in this building, and thus are never late. They don’t say, ‘The El was slow today’, and so neither must you. There is no excuse for tardiness.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have no children, correct?”
“That is correct.”
“Good. This job is incompatible with the unpredictable needs of caring for dependents.”
Lillian said nothing, curling her toes inside her boots with the effort of maintaining a neutral expression on her face.
“Well, I must say that your taciturn demeanor is refreshing. Many girls have sat in your seat, blathering on about their desire to help mankind and gushing about how they get on with everyone. That sort doesn’t last here.” Nurse Holt placed the piece of paper on the left side of the desk. “Congratulations, Miss Dolan, you’ve got the job. Report tomorrow at 8am to the nurse’s station on the second floor.” She held out her hand.
Lillian stood and shook her hand as she began to wonder how she would find a regular someone to look after Marie on such short notice.
***
As she put her key in the door, Lillian’s stomach gurgled with hunger and her thoughts were split between Marie and the hard-boiled eggs she had left in a bowl on the kitchen sideboard. When she entered the kitchen, it seemed her dual thoughts had merged in reality, because on the kitchen floor was Marie with the hard-boiled eggs, the empty bowl beside her. She was rolling the eggs on the floor with the flat of her palm, over and over again, the shells fragmented into a mosaic of pieces, now gray with grime. Marie’s face was a picture of contentment as she enjoyed the sensation of the fractured shell bits upon her hands.
Lillian whisked past her to find Mrs. Oberman fast asleep with mouth open in the very chair where Lillian had left her three hours ago. The smell of whiskey was undeniable now.
“Mrs. Oberman!” When she received no response, she kicked Mrs. Oberman’s boot, which elicited a snort and a minor effort to wake. As Lillian waited for Mrs. Oberman to become fully conscious, she walked from room to room to assess the damage. Marie’s fabric and notions covered the bedroom floor, chamber pot used but not overflowing, silverware scattered across the bed, tarts Lillian had been saving for dessert tonight gone, one crock broken. Lillian breathed a sigh of relief that nothing bad had happened. She strode over to Mrs. Oberman and gave her foot another rough nudge to bring her around. Mrs. Oberman blinked a few times and looked up.
Lillian held out a coin and said, “Can you come tomorrow for the whole day?”
Coming May 2022 from Heliotrope Books. Pre-order links coming soon.
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