Songs of Willow Frost (5 page)

“You’re so lucky, William.”

For a moment he actually felt that way, then, and now, to no longer be so alone.

“After my mother died,” Charlotte whispered, “it was just my
father—he always came into my room on stormy nights—‘just to make sure I was okay.’ He hardly said a word. I couldn’t see him, of course, but I knew who it was.”

William paused, not fully comprehending what she was saying. He had always wondered what happened to her father. Before he could ask, she changed the subject.

“I have to leave this place—soon.”

“Why? You’ve been here longer than I have …”
And who would take you?

“They’re going to send me away,” she said. “They say I don’t belong here anymore. They’re going to send me to a special school for people like me. Sister B says it’s time I was with my own kind.”

William swallowed and chewed his lip. He remembered the past few summers, when farmers from the Yakima Valley would come to Sacred Heart and adopt the strongest boys or, occasionally, the prettiest girls. William knew then that no one would ever adopt a blind girl, no matter how comely she might be.

“But, where would you go?” he asked. “Maybe the special school isn’t so bad. They could teach you how to read with your fingers …”

He felt her shaking her head.

“I know all about that place. My father used to threaten to send me there if I didn’t do as I was told or if I said anything bad about him. They have you sit in a room and make brooms all day. That’s all they ever do, until you’re too old to do anything else. And if you refuse or complain they send you to a lockup.”

That was the one good thing about Sacred Heart. Despite children’s worst indiscretions, Sister Briganti would rarely cast them out. William had heard rumors that the state paid the school a fixed amount per child, so to the sisters a crowded orphanage wasn’t a complete tragedy.

William didn’t know what words he could offer that might comfort Charlotte. If the sisters thought that a special school would be
better for her, their decision would be irrefutable. And where else could she go? She didn’t have any other options.

Charlotte drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I want to go with
you
,” she said.

“And where am I going?” he asked, though he had a vague idea—a wistful dream, a hope, an unmade plan.

“I want to go with you to find her.”

“Willow?” William asked as he caught the scent of Charlotte’s floral shampoo, a welcome respite from the dank-smelling closet. After living in the boys’ sweaty dormitory for so long, he was suddenly aware of how much he missed the comforting smell of perfume, the fragrances of home.

“Your mother.”

“I don’t even know who that woman really is. Sister Briganti might be right, I could just be letting my imagination get the better of me.”
This mirage probably happens to everyone at some point
, William thought.
The joyful dreams of sad, lonely children are difficult to wake up from
.

Charlotte pulled down another coat and draped it over them. She leaned into him as he listened to the rain and her breathing until he thought she’d drifted to sleep.

Then she stirred, just for a moment. “Think about it, Willie. We both have nothing, and nobody wants us,” she murmured. “So that just means we have nothing to lose.”

William stared into the darkness, wondering if this was how Charlotte perceived the world. Then he realized she probably didn’t see
anything
. So instead, she saw the world through her imagination—which had to be better than real life.

He listened to her breathing until she fell into a restless sleep, twitching and occasionally crying out, softly.

Pigs Get Fed

(1934)

When William woke, Charlotte was gone, like his mother, leaving him to wonder if she’d ever been there at all. A janitor let him out, and William stretched his tired legs, then limped back to his dormitory, his back aching as he went about his day.

That night he was grateful to sleep once again in his own bed, where all week long he dreamt of the Movietone Follies and each sunrise he woke up, torpidly searching for the sad melodies of songs with long-forgotten lyrics. As he counted the rain-soaked days and his mornings with dry sheets, inching closer on the calendar to when Willow Frost (he couldn’t quite call her his mother) would be performing, he thought about Charlotte’s desire to run away.
There is nothing here. And no one is coming for us, no one at all
. He knew she was right, but still, he hesitated.

When he rolled over in bed he stared at Willow’s picture; then he sat upright, scratching his head as the others brushed their teeth and got dressed. Some of the boys had regal, sepia-toned portraits of themselves with their parents displayed prominently on their night-stands. But all William had was the dog-eared photo from the handbill that he’d placed near his bed in a frame crafted from Popsicle sticks and rubber cement. Looking at the photo, he was convinced they had the same eyes, the same chin. In his memory, his ah-ma’s nose had rounded slightly to the left. He couldn’t tell from the head
shot because Willow was showing her good side, backlit Hollywoodstyle, but he remembered that unmistakable bend. And in turn, he wondered what she would remember about him. He was little and remembered less. She was a mother.
How could a mother forget?
he wondered.
How could a mother leave her child behind?

A
FTER BREAKFAST HE
grabbed his books and hurried upstairs to his classroom, where thirty-five children crowded into neat rows, boys on the left, girls on the right, two to each desk—all but Marco, who seemed to relish having his own space, even if it was a wheelchair in a corner at the front of the room.

William wedged himself into a wooden seat in the back, next to Dante, who was twice his size but clumsy and loping like a big dog that didn’t know how enormous he really was. “Sorry about the other night,” William whispered. “You can punch me in the arm if you wanna get even.”

“No need.” Dante shook his head. “A night in the cloakroom is punishment enough. Too much if you ask me.”

Dante had grown tired of the sisters calling him Danny. “Too Irish,” he’d said, and now he wanted to be called Sawyer, in homage to his late lumberjack father. For a big son of a lumberjack, Sawyer cried an awful lot.

Instead of listening to Sister Seeley go on about arithmetic, William stared out the window, watching autumn settle upon Sacred Heart like a blanket of wet magnolia leaves. He calculated how he and Charlotte could get away to the 5th Avenue Theatre, the Pantages, or the Palace Hippodrome—wherever Willow would soon be appearing. He’d never been inside any of those venues but had always marveled at the posters on the street; even the old ones that were faded and peeling still thrilled him with images of ice-skating couples, animal acts, magicians with spangled waistcoats, and child performers like Dainty June Hovick—the Darling of Vaudeville.
Admission is usually twenty-five cents
, William thought. But Willow’s
show might cost a bit more. He had a whole dollar in coins, hidden beneath a rock in the grotto, but with four-penny flophouses now advertised as two bits a night, plus trolley fare and transfer on top of that, they wouldn’t last a week in the city.
And winter is just around the corner
.

“You’re still thinking about that show, aren’t you?” Sunny whispered from his desk across the aisle. William shook his head. “You get caught, they’ll kick you out for sure. They’ll sell you to a poor farm that’ll make this place look like Heaven on Earth.”

Heaven
, William realized,
some kids actually love this place
. Which only made him wonder how bad their lives must have been on the outside. But as a Chinese boy who always struggled to fit in, he knew he didn’t belong here. From the way the other kids looked at him and called him
chink
to their mortified reactions when he told them his favorite snack was barbecued chicken feet. Tommy Yuen had known it too. This was not their kind of paradise.
Though Sunny is right
. Just last month they’d learned that the board of trustees had voted to expel all the colored kids—sending them to the King County Poor Farm, down by the rills of the Duwamish River. There they’d be indentured workers until they turned twenty-one, without the possibility of placement or adoption.

William feared the poor farm even though he’d only seen it through the nickelodeon of his imagination, cranked to high speed by the stories Sister Briganti shared. “The poor farm isn’t a place of charity, it’s a den of iniquity. When you’re sent there they publish your name in the newspaper for all the world to see,” she’d said. “When you recite your bedtime prayers, give thanks that you’re not bunking next to grown men—drunkards, layabouts, and stew bums—the lot of them cursing, fighting, and causing trouble. Or some rapacious old beaucatcher, probably touched in the head. They’ll steal your shoes while you sleep, just to make a pot of soup with the leather.”

William blinked as Sister Seeley caught him daydreaming.

“Willie,” she said. “Why don’t you come to the board and solve this equation for us?” She held out a piece of chalk and cocked her other hand on her hip.

William walked to the front of the classroom and stared numbly at the blackboard, still thinking of how he could possibly manage outside, with or without Charlotte.
Was it worth the risk?
As he felt the piece of chalk in his hand, he missed the way his mother had helped him with his schoolwork when he was in the second grade. She’d been so cheerful, so content, and so incredibly proud. He vaguely remembered echoing those feelings. He wondered if he would even recognize that kind of love and adoration anymore. Everything was muddled now. He regarded the chalkboard. Somehow life had become a story problem, and William was terrible at math.

“W
E SHOULD DO
it—we should run away,” Charlotte whispered to William at lunchtime, half-daring, half-pleading. “We could team up.” She spoke with such enthusiasm, such ridiculous, impractical confidence—the way a little kid would see Mount Rainier peeking through the clouds eighty miles away and blurt, “We should climb it.”

William wasn’t so convinced. At Sacred Heart he could never get
enough
time with friends, but out in the real world, he’d be her eyes, her caregiver—her protector. She was his best friend, but he wasn’t sure if he could handle that much responsibility.
I don’t know how I’d provide for myself
, he worried. He wished he had someone to call on, but most of his ah-ma’s relatives had died from the Spanish flu, and the only cousins whose names he could remember had left years ago.

William asked, “Do you have anyone that could help us?” He watched as she felt the edge of her plate and turned it clockwise, eating and wiping her chin with a napkin.

“I have some relatives,” she said. “But I’m the
white sheep
of my family.”

He didn’t quite understand as he regarded Charlotte’s fair skin and ginger hair.

“I’m the only normal one. My father and all his brothers are behind bars on McNeil Island.” She smiled as she spoke, tucking her spoon into a heap of crab-apple pudding. William wasn’t sure if she was happy that her father was imprisoned or happy with her dessert. “And my grandma has her hands full taking care of my grandpa, who lost his wits in the Spanish war. I don’t know if she’d help us. I know she’d feed us, but she’d probably turn around and bring us right back here.”

Sister Briganti constantly reminded them that there were starving children out there, despite the fact that those kids still had able-bodied parents—times were that bad for everyone. William looked down at his sandwich and frowned.
Tomato
. He’d eaten tomato sandwiches every day since August. Soon, they’d switch to zucchini for the winter months, which only made him long for tomatoes again. Lunch seemed like a wide, colorful variety compared to breakfast, which was always oatmeal. He hated the warm mush because he was next to last in line and had to pick out the weevils that settled at the bottom. Sunny, who was dead last, refused his porridge one morning. He told the sisters he wasn’t hungry and stared back defiantly. That got him a whipping for being obdurate and a double helping the next day. He ate it without bothering to pick out the bugs, then threw up all over one of the sisters. William didn’t bother to ask if Sunny did it on purpose.

William shook his head. “I don’t know—I don’t like it here any more than the rest, but it sounds awfully tough out there.”
And who knows what might happen if we got caught? Sister Briganti would probably make us say the Hail Mary a thousand times and then still send us to the poorhouse
.

“Well, I’m leaving, William—with or without you. And I’m not coming back,” she said and then paused as though waiting for his reaction. “Ever.”

William took a bite and chewed the stale bread. “But … how will you live? What’re you going to do, steal lead from chimneys? Sell fruit on the street?” A girl in her condition, leaving, running away—it seemed like such foolishness. But even as he said those words of doubt, he felt an overwhelming admiration—for her courage, her
blind
ambition. She wasn’t about to settle for making brooms or sewing buttons on coats for the rest of her life.
Surely if a sightless girl wasn’t afraid …