The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 11

“ T his looks like a nice place,” I said as Rory pulled up to the orphanage. The Studebaker had deep blue-velvet seats, folding brass cup holders and rolled smooth and weighty, even on the gravel part of North Lamar. I’d never ridden in a car as nice as this.

At breakfast this morning Frances had asked Rory, again, if he’d meet her for lunch, but he’d turned her down again, though this time with a firm Frances tacked onto the end of it. Also he was Too Busy and Under Enough Pressure and to Quit Asking, and he was so rude about it, Frances got tears in her eyes. I kept mine down on my eggs. If Meemaw’d been at the table, she’d have threatened to prod pole him. On high. And while I knew it was easy to judge somebody else’s marriage sitting two chairs down, I was starting to feel bad for my sister. Selfishly, I also needed them to get along so he’d say yes about the money. But Rory must’ve realized he was being cross and he gave in and offered to drive us instead of old Mr. Binny, and everything went back to somewhat all right again.

The orphanage was on an empty road that jutted off North Lamar just before the square, so less than two miles from the Tartts’ house. Though I hadn’t noticed it yesterday, you could see it from Lamar, a narrow blue two-story house, with well-tended-to azaleas along a little front porch. A sign over the front door said All God’s children are welcome. Frances unlocked the door with a key from her pocket, then locked it behind us when we were inside. In the entryway, a large sign read Welcome to the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls and then listed all God’s children that, in fact, were not welcome. Frances made no notice of the dispute between the signs and I wondered if she ever had.

“In here’s the lounge where you can take a break,” Frances said, guiding me into a room immediately on our right. It was sunny and cheery, with flowery curtains, a blue sweetheart-back sofa, and a braided blue rug in front of a fireplace. I imagined little girls sitting cross-legged listening to bedtime stories in here. On a round table was a coffee urn and a red metal tin.

“Oh goody,” Frances said and opened the tin and stuck a cookie in her mouth.

“Where all the girls?” I asked.

Chewing, Frances said, “Oh, they’re not allowed in here.”

Back in the entryway, we walked straight ahead down a hall. The empty walls were a sour hue of white, and it was warmer back here with the sweet, sticky scent of babies and small children. On the right, sun streamed in through several open doors, but on the left, the first door, which looked a little warped, was only cracked open. I’d always had an unfortunately shrill sense of smell, and through that door I caught the smell of something dank .

“There she is. Yoo-hoo, Garnett! ” Frances hurried herself down the hall, her neck walking ahead of her. At the end, a faded-blond woman turned and watched us coming, expressionless. She did not come to us.

“Garnett, good morning!” Frances said, using all of her face. “Garnett, this is my sister Birdie, who I told you about. Birdie, I’d like to introduce you to Chairlady Garnett Pittman.”

Chairlady Garnett nodded to me, and then she smiled. One definitely coming after the other. “Of course I remember. We are so very grateful you came to help out.”

“Garnett’s been chairlady going on over a year now”—and to Garnett—“with many more to come I hope! ” Frances sang it more than said it. She was mouth breathing heavily.

Chairlady Garnett was thin and tall as me and looked around forty. Her collarbone sat skeletal atop a plain dress the color of mayonnaise. She wore no lipstick or powder on her pale, yellowy face. Frances had on a heavy dose of dark blood this morning. The pin on Garnett’s left shoulder was bigger than Frances’s and gold instead of copper, with the word Chairlady inscribed on it.

She was looking at me very intently with her gray eyes. It was sort of paralyzing. “You’re from … Warren County down in the Delta, is that right?” I nodded; Frances looked ready to cry that Garnett’d remembered this. “I grew up not too far from there, in Carroll County. Those were the good old days, weren’t they? Before folks’ morals started going to pieces.”

“Birdie balances the books for one of the stores in Footely and she’s trained, too, took a course even.” One of the stores, ha. I was surprised, though, how proud Frances sounded.

“Well, don’t worry,” Garnett said and smiled. “It’s not very difficult, what we need you to do.”

“I’m—not.”

I followed Frances over to the last door on the right side, the sunny side of the hall. She opened it and whispered, “This is the baby nursery.” She sounded awestruck. It was a pristine white room and held several empty cribs. In rocking chairs, two ladies each held an infant, while two more watched on.

“And in here is the toddler room, where I volunteer,” Frances said, moving up a doorway, to the right of the nursery. A cluster of little girls played with blocks on a blue rug while another one fretted into the neck of a very tired-looking old woman in a chair. On the floor were some beat-up children’s books and some alphabet blocks and toys. Connected to the room was another one full of small beds. All the toddler girls wore short, white gauzy gowns with needlework stitched on their collars that I recognized as Frances’s, blue violets, light green leaves, red birds. “Right now we’ve got six toddlers, ages two to five,” Frances said.

“We keep the toddlers separate from the big girls,” Garnett said behind us. “For sanitary reasons.”

Frances nodded toward the exhausted woman sitting in the corner. “Miss Mildred sleeps here at night with the toddlers,” she said. The girl that Miss Mildred was rocking was dark headed and looked about three. Hearing Frances’s voice, the sleepy girl took one look at her and broke into tears. Scrambling down from the old woman’s lap, she ran over and wrapped herself around Frances’s shin, and I realized it was love.

“Alright, Ella Jane, I’m here,” Frances said, picking her up. The girl sobbed, grinding her face down into Frances’s shoulder. Frances’s eyes glowed and she mouthed to me, Her mama died . House fire. I couldn’t say my sister looked very sorry about that.

While they searched for a baby doll that’d gone missing, with Ella Jane purple and shrieking, I eased back into the hall. I liked children, but I preferred older ones with a little more vocabulary than just screaming.

Across the hall from the baby nursery, I peeked into a kitchen. Not terrible, though nothing fancy, but it was real hot in there. A colored woman in an apron tended to things boiling in several tall pots. Up from that was the door to a small, plain dining room, and next to the doorway was a narrow staircase. Since Frances was still baby doll hunting with the screaming girl and Garnett was explaining something to the older woman, I walked up the stairs. Midway, I started to see spots of mold on the ceiling. I followed them like a shepherd following the constellations. In less than ten minutes, I’d gone from This looks nice to Good Lord.

There was a large attic room up here that held about two dozen metal cots, each with a thin mattress and a sheet; some had a lumpy pillow, some didn’t. The floor was bare and scuffed up, with a dozen rusty tin cans placed around the room. I could smell that mildew and when I looked up, sure enough the white plaster ceiling was covered in cloudy brown water stains. It looked dryish for now, but what a view for an orphan, lying in bed, staring up at those awful bulbous stains. Then I saw it and almost jumped—on one of the cots was the baby doll that’d gone missing. Head, body, no legs, one arm.

Somebody snickered and I looked back behind me. In the corner, two girls were huddled together with something. Somewhere nearby, a handbell clanged hard, once, annoyed, and the girls dropped the something and ran out the door. These girls were bigger than the toddlers, maybe eight or nine years old, and both wore long-sleeved, long-skirted dresses that were thin but seemed hot for July. I walked over to the corner and there lay the pale legs and one curved arm of the baby doll. Clearly there’d been a massacre by the under-ten set. There were also some soggy alphabet blocks. The Q and T looked partially eaten.

“Who funds this place?” I asked Frances downstairs. She was holding a still combustible-looking, whimpering Ella Jane.

“The church mostly. We also have a big fundraiser every year—I’m trying to get on the committee—and we get some private donations. And there’s a donation box on the square. And we get some funds from the county for the schoolroom upstairs.”

That wasn’t nothing. “There was a girl upstairs eating a block .” I didn’t mention the amputee baby doll since I wasn’t sure Ella Jane could handle it. She looked like she could blow again any minute.

Frances shook her head. “I wouldn’t waste your time, Birdie, I tell you, those big girls are past helping.” She gave me an upped-eyebrow look like I ought to know why too. I told her I did not.

“Most these girls come from positively nothing. Dirt-poor homes with ten kids to feed, sometimes from ten different daddies. In a couple years most those big girls’ll be having one illegitimate baby after the next, just like their mamas.” Her face bobbed like a puppet. “It’s better to focus on the little ones that are still adaptable.”

My sister was simply repeating something she’d heard, I could tell. But Jesus. At least it meant she hadn’t come up with that herself.

She put Ella Jane down in the toddler room, and I followed her to where Garnett was standing in the hall. She was watching something or somebody through the first door on the left, the warped door, open now, on the dank-smelling side.

Frances was still talking. “Garnett’s the one who came up with the work program, it’s a wonderful opportunity for girls who haven’t gotten adopted by age twelve. She gets to go work down on the Gulf Coast where she’ll learn a valuable skill and go to school and attend church on Sundays.”

“What kind of work do they do?”

“Can. Canning things. Vegetables, I think. There’s two girls down there already. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”

“You said that already.”

The room Garnett was staring into was barely big enough to hold a double-sided desk with a chair on each side, a girl, and a wooden filing cabinet. Like the upstairs and the attic room, this one also had moldy brown spots on the ceiling, and an even thicker scent of eau de wet dog . At the desk, the girl was doodling something, with her cheek smushed against her other hand.

“How come she’s not up in school with the others?” I asked. A dusty bare bulb hung over the desk, and to add to the charm, the one window was boarded up, the boards nailed right into the window frame. The big girls’ room was bad, but this was, by far, the saddest room I’d seen.

“Unfortunately she was expelled. She’s what we call a bad apple,” Garnett said, still watching her. “I don’t have anywhere else to put her until she goes to the work program.”

“What happened to her parents?” I asked.

At this, the girl turned and looked at us. She’d been listening. She had long, thin blond hair and very blue eyes. Behind Garnett, Frances was shaking her head at me, mouthing, Don’t ask that.

Garnett walked in the little room. “I told you no doodling on the cards,” she said. The girl set the pencil down, then adjusted it so it was perfectly perpendicular to the card, which I saw was perfectly aligned with a thick black Bible. “Meg, this is Miss Birdie, Miss Frances’s sister. She’ll be working on the books. Birdie, this is Meg.”

I moved into the doorway. The bulb gave off an orange, dirty light. The mold speckling the ceiling was starting to come down the walls. From what I could tell, this room was directly underneath the big girls’ room upstairs. “I think that leak upstairs might’ve made its way down,” I said.

“I know it,” Garnett said, shaking her head. “Believe you me, I know it. We had the roof patched up best we could, but that’s about all we can afford right now.” She put her hand on my arm and looked at me. I could see how much it concerned her. “I certainly don’t expect you to work in here. I was assuming you’d rather take the work home. There’s just not enough room to work in the lounge.”

“Um.” The thought of sitting around Frances’s house all day with her mother-in-law, who was very nice, but … besides money, wasn’t the point of coming all this way to see my sister? “I’ll—manage in here,” I said. “It’ll be easier in case I have questions.”

The little girl sighed when I said this. She was smaller and frailer than the pair of child surgeons I’d seen upstairs.

“Only if you’re sure? There’s a lot to do, the last bookkeeper quit in March and the inspector will be here in ten days. I know he’ll want to see the books.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

Garnett went and unlocked the file cabinet with a large key chain. She set stacks of envelopes and several ledgers and all sorts of little papers on the desk. “Meg, you’ll be quiet so as not to disturb Miss Birdie?” Garnett asked her.

The little girl, Meg, smiled up at her so sweetly it could not be genuine and said, “ Yes, ma’am. ” The way Garnett raised an eyebrow, I was pretty sure there was no love lost there either.

I went over and put my hand out to the girl. “Nice to meet you, Meg. I’m Birdie.”

“Don’t do that,” Garnett said low. “We don’t touch the big girls.”

The good news was the door to the office was too warped to shut completely, over here on the fertile side of the house, fungally speaking. The bad news was the office still smelled like we were sitting inside a smelly sock.

“I guess we’ll be working in here together,” I said to Meg, after Garnett and Frances had gone. Her hair grew straight and stringy down her back. She gazed at me, bored, and her eyes weren’t just blue, they were clear glass with a black prick in the center. I smiled at her. “How old are you?”

“Eleven,” she said. She did not smile back. On her side of the desk she readjusted her three yellow pencils, sharpened to weaponry.

“You’re right small for eleven. How’d you end up a—” It was a blunt question, but this was a blunt room. “Here.”

“Automobile.”

“Where’s your mama?” I asked, even though Frances had told me not to.

“She went to pick up curling fluid.”

I nodded. “And then what?”

She gave me a long blue stare that said, Just how stupid are you, lady? “She did not bother to come home after.”

“I’m sorry. What about your daddy, where’s he?”

She sighed again like Why are you even asking me this crap? “He died. In a war.” And then, “I did not tell you that to feel sorry for me.”

“Noted. You don’t talk much, do you?”

She tucked her hair behind her ears—the left stuck out more than the right—and picked up a pencil and started drawing again on one of the index cards. She snuck a look up at me, I guess to see if I’d scold her. When I didn’t, she said, “We’re not supposed to talk to you ladies.” And then murmured, “You Oxford women are all alike anyway.”

“Good thing I’m from Footely. May I?”

I took one of the pencils she’d lined up. She straightened the last one. Taking my reading glasses out of my pocketbook, I opened a ledger labeled 1933 . It was simple balance bookkeeping. Each pale blue line had a date, a name, an amount, and a category, which looked typical: Food , Electric , Clothing , and so on. Every month or so paltry deposits were made at the Bank of Lafayette County, where Rory worked. Where it got tricky was tackling all the unorganized receipts on papers of all sizes and unopened envelopes. I got them all sorted by date, which went back to March 12, when evidently the former bookkeeper, Marcy Mayweather, had up and left this verdant room. I did not for a moment wonder why. It was starting to get real balmy in here.

“Who’s that you’re drawing?” I asked. Over my glasses it looked like a lady dancing, her dress flared out around her. I got nothing from her. She simply turned the card over and started drawing something else.

After over an hour of this, the room had gotten downright hot, and when I looked up at the clock on the grimy wall— Oh my God. I’d started at eight thirty and it was only nine o’clock? I leaned back in my squeaky chair, blotting my forehead with a handkerchief, and really took a good look around. I’d gotten somewhat used to the smell, but wasn’t anybody concerned that this little girl had been sitting in here surrounded by mold and mildew for, I didn’t know how many days? Not to mention, I looked behind me at the boarded-up window. “Did something chew its way out of here?” There was a hole in the baseboard underneath it. And there was another one behind Meg’s chair. The dang rats couldn’t even stand to be in this hot little room.

“Was this room this bad when the other bookkeeper worked here?”

“No, ma’am,” Meg said. “It has got a lot worse.”

Fifteen hours later at a quarter till noon, the little girl got up and left without a word, I reckon to go eat her lunch in the dining room. Frances came and collected me to eat with her in the lounge and asked me how it was coming along.

“Slow. Hot. I can’t promise if I’ll get it all done in time for the inspector.”

“But you’ll try, won’t you? If you could, Garnett’d be so happy with me,” Frances said.

“Well that’s what’s important here.” We served ourselves ham sandwiches and potato salad from a platter and sat on the sofa. There were six or seven other ladies in here and it was crowded. Garnett was right; there was no good place to work in here. “I asked the little girl, Meg, where her parents had gone to—”

“Birdie, you’re not supposed to ask that.”

“Well I did. She said her mama went to the store to buy something and never came home. Isn’t that sad?”

“It’s awful,” Frances said. “Though nobody was all that surprised. I heard her mother was …” She raised her eyebrows.

“She was what?”

“Well, among other things, feebleminded. She wasn’t right in the head. Most these unwed mothers are, they have no morals, they’ll lay with whites, coloreds, Indians, you name it. The best thing is to get them looked after by the state and nip it in the bud.”

She had that puppet-on-a-string look again, which I hated.

“How do you know, have you met her mother?” I asked.

“No, but it must be true since I heard it from Garnett.”