Lilli de Jong
Janet Benton
For family, wherever one may find it, with gratitude and love to mine
Every other door…is closed to her who, unmarried, is about to become a mother. Deliberate, calculating villainy, fraud, outrage, burglary, or even murder with malice aforethought, seems to excite more sympathy, more helpful pity, more efforts for the reclamation of the transgressors than are shown towards those who, if not the victims of others, are at the worst but illustrations of human infirmity.
—annual report of the State Hospital for Women and Infants, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1880
NOTEBOOK ONE
1883. Third Month 16
Some moments set my heart on fire, and that’s when language seems the smallest. Yet precisely these bursts of feeling make me long to write. I sit now in a high-walled courtyard, amid the green smells and slanted light of early spring, with that familiar burning in my heart. I’ll need to destroy these pages before returning home, but no matter; for the first time since Mother’s death, words come to me.
I’ve lost more than I’ve gained since Mother died last year, when I was but twenty-two. Yet I wish to tell of some good things. This small courtyard with its carved stone bench, for instance, which fast becomes my refuge. For with spring upon us, there is such a wellness in the out of doors. Crocuses peer from the melting snow. Budding trees sweeten the air with their exhalations. If I were at home, I’d have turned the soil in our kitchen garden today, and planted radish and lettuce seeds besides. For supper, I’d have made a soup from the hardy kale and onions that survived the winter.
But I’m not at home. I’m at the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants. I’ve fled the building to this sheltered patch of ground to escape the struggles of my roommate Nancy—who till this morning slept in a bed beside mine and now moans and yells from the birthing table. Her sounds are as guttural and plaintive as those of a dog with its leg clamped in a trap. Even the stoutest girls among us have gone pale from hearing, for each will have her turn soon, and then will return from disgrace only by giving up her offspring and denying its existence ever after—as I will do.
For Gina and me, who share a room with Nancy, the anxiousness began last night with Nancy’s moaning and tossing in her sleep. At dawn she awoke, her thighs and sheets wet with a watery fluid.
“No one came for me!” she wailed as Gina and I wiped her clean. She wasn’t crying from bodily pain—not yet; she cried from understanding, at the age of sixteen, that her daily hope of rescue had reached its end. Her parents had sent her to domestic service in the city, and for three years they’d relied on the money she sent home to their farm. She lost her work due to her pregnancy, which arose from misplaced trust in a fellow servant, as she explained to us one whisper-filled night. Yet though she’d written many pleas, her parents had supplied no aid, made no visit, sent no letter of condolence.
Gina bent her head of dark curls to kiss Nancy’s cheek. I squeezed her hand and eased her into a clean nightgown. And despite the fact that Gina and I are in our ninth months, too, we helped her down a flight of stairs and to the chamber of the Haven’s matron, Delphinia Partridge. At the door, we knocked and waited while Nancy hung about our shoulders.
Soon the bleary matron emerged, clad in a worn blue dressing gown, her silver hair tucked beneath a sleeping cap. We walked to the delivery room, where she encouraged a shivering Nancy to lie upon the birthing table.
To Gina and me the matron said, “Wake up the cook. Tell her to fetch the doctor.” She motioned with her head toward the door. But Nancy grabbed Gina’s plump arm and held it. Her lips were pale from how hard she pressed them together.
“I can stay?” Gina asked Delphinia. She came from Italy two years ago and speaks well for that.
Delphinia shook her head, unyielding. So we traveled the hall and woke the cook, who pulled a Mother Hubbard over her large form and ran out to fetch Dr. Stevens, a professor at the Woman’s Medical College who attends to us. Then Gina and I joined the other nine pregnant occupants at breakfast, poking at our bowls of oatmeal, after which we went about our chores, with Nancy’s cries punctuating our efforts.
Gina and I had kitchen duty. The cook had only turnips and onions for us to chop for the barley soup that would become our midday meal—not even canned tomatoes, since the winter’s stores were gone, and neither meat nor bones. But scarce rations were not our first concern. As we wielded knives against the stubborn curves of turnips and bit stale bread to keep the onions from stinging our eyes, Gina complained at how Nancy’s suffering pervaded the house. Girls in labor, she said, ought to be sent elsewhere, as it does us no good to be frightened.
The cook appeared too absorbed in preparations to bother listening. But she must have told the superintendent of this comment. For at the midday meal, Anne Pierce sat at the head of the table in a muted gown, her gray-streaked hair pinned close to her head, and reminded us why Nancy labors here. By the disgrace attending our conditions, we are barred from home, where otherwise we’d have given birth. And there exists no local institution but the Haven, Anne said, that will admit a parturient woman who isn’t married—besides the city hospital at Blockley, which houses the most contagious diseases and people far rougher than us, and often discharges them in coffins.
“No one with her own bed and two pennies to rub together would consider that hospital fit for a birth,” Anne said, puckering her lips as if tasting a lemon. “Besides, I see a purpose to your bearing witness.” She proceeded to give a talk from her end of the table that amounted to this: “Let Nancy’s suffering be an antidote to your passion.”
As if passion alone explained our predicaments. Our being female and unlucky—and, in my case, a near idiot in the ways of amorous men—must be added to that. We heard Nancy call for mercy each time Anne paused and leaned her proud head to sip her tea. Though we hover constantly at the edge of being underfed, few girls had an appetite.
Since then Nancy has made slow progress and been urged along by the doctor to no avail. Her youthful hips are narrow and the baby is large. If chloral hydrate or ergot won’t hasten her progress, the long forceps that Mother said can crush a baby’s skull or cut its mother may have to be employed, or surgery may be called for. A meek woman named Alice, said to be carrying twins, has whispered her worrisome conviction that we’ll all suffer such difficult labors because our babies are bastards.
It might fairly be asked how Lilli de Jong has come to belong in such company.
A memory answers. Bitterness is poison, yes, but I hold a flask of it to my lips and drink.