Lilli de Jong Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Janet Benton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover image: Mother and Child, c. 1906 by Julius Gari Melchers. De Agostini/M. Carrieri/Getty Images

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Benton, Janet, 1963– author.

  Title: Lilli de Jong : a novel / Janet Benton.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016012853 (print) | LCCN 2016024555 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385541459 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780385541466 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Quaker women—Fiction. | Unmarried mothers—Fiction. | Mother and child—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. | Pennsylvania—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E6973 L55 2017 (print) | LCC PS3602.E6973 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—DC23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016012853

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541466

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Notebook One

  Notebook Two

  Notebook Three

  Notebook Four

  Notebook Five

  Notebook Six

  Notebook Seven

  Notebook Eight

  Notebook Nine

  Notebook Ten

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  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.

  * * *

  One cold night in First Month of last year, barely three weeks after Mother had passed, I awoke in a state of vexation in my slant-walled room in Germantown. I lay on my mattress, waiting for my heartbeat to slow and the tendrils of some frightening dream to evaporate into the air. My mouth was parched from panting; I rose to fetch a cup of water, only to find the pitcher on my washstand empty. So I descended the narrow stairs into our main room and headed for the kitchen. Across the planks I walked, past Father’s bedroom.

  Its door was ajar, its bed, empty.

  Was Father staring at the embers of the kitchen fire again, too miserable to sleep without his dearest Helen? No; the kitchen was bare of life; its hearth was still and silent.

  By the back window, as I ladled water from a bucket to a cup, a quick movement outside caught my eye. Something was moving in front of the outhouse. In air shimmering beneath the moon, a white shape billowed. It became recognizable as Father’s first cousin, Patience. She was a spinster from Ohio who’d arrived two days prior, ostensibly to aid us in recovering from Mother’s death. That woman stood in her dressing gown on the frozen ground, her pale hair loose and stippled with moonlight, her muscular arms clutching my father’s torso. And he, clad in faded woolen underwear, gripped her in return. Their pelvises were pressed together, and their faces seemed joined at the lips, as if consuming one another.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth and ran upstairs to the shelter of my quilts. In silence I shivered, half waiting and half dreading for the darkness to yield some noise from that unseemly pair. When they did come inside, their footsteps halted on the first story, though Patience’s steps should have risen to the bedroom beside mine. The door to Father’s chamber clicked shut.

  I knew little of such congress then. But I imagined nauseously their protuberances and indentations, their odd bits of bodies covered in curls of hair, fitting together in ways obscure and obscene. I lit a candle and stared at the cracks in my plaster ceiling, trying in vain to find the shapes that as a child I’d perceived as rabbits and mice, looking for the fissures that once had seemed to spell my name. I even picked up my book of Bible verses—but nothing took away the ghastly picture of my father, like a drowning man, grasping at a piece of flotsam.

  It is many a spinster’s custom to travel relative to relative, staying as long as she’s needed. But in our little stone house, with its patriarch in grief, Patience had found a way to halt her wandering.

  I intended to wake before dawn to prepare our meal. I wanted to witness their emergence from what had been my parents’ room and thereby to impose on them the shame they ought to feel. But I was trapped by heavy sleep till sun came streaming in and overheated me. I dressed and rushed downstairs to find Father, Patience, and my brother, Peter, seated at our oak table. Father and Patience wore bland expressions. Their bodies appeared to have softened, like butter placed near the stove. His hand brushed hers in passing the canned peaches, and her thin lips opened to expose her small teeth, then eased into a dog-like smile.

  Peter saw nothing amiss, for he kept his eyes on his plate, as he had at every meal since Mother died. He chewed and swallowed bite after bite determinedly, as if taking care not to choke on his own restlessness. And when Father’s gangly, red-haired assistant came down from his attic room and joined our table, he greeted us as usual and fed heartily.

  “Lilli,” said Johan, his broad cheeks pink with anticipation, “can we haul those scraps to Rittenhouse town today?”

  The bits of linen left behind from Mother’s sewing and the rags too worn for use would fetch much-needed coins at the paper mill, and I’d be glad not to perform that sad errand alone. Such an outing, too, would allow Johan and me to share the fruits of our minds. On our return, freed of the sacks of cloth, we could ramble the snowy roads and stop for a sweet at the market, perhaps dangling our gloved hands near, even curling them together.

  I had the freedom to accept his invitation. With Patience there, my home duties had lessened, and the students I taught at the Meeting school were on their winter vacation. So I answered Johan in the affirmative. Yet as I spoke, I felt a cramp of fear in my belly in place of my usual tingling anticipation of our heady talk. For in that kiss I’d witnessed, in the hunger that had made the bodies of my father and his cousin press hard into one another, a contagious force had come too near.

  I watched as Father ate his sausage and dipped a hunk of bread in the fat, his lips and the surrounding skin growing greasy and slick. He never had been suited to Mother’s refinement. Clearly, Patience was another sort of woman.

  Soon that woman bundled her sturdy frame against the cold and left to buy meat at the butcher’s. The three men entered their cabinet-making workshop at the side of our house. I went in as usual to straighten Father’s bed, which had been clumsily assembled. And strewn upon Mother’s pillow, where her chestnut hairs had always lain, was a tangled patch of Patience’s yellow hairs.

  I raised the familiar pillow to my face and inhaled, hoping that a trace of Mother’s violet water still lingered. An odor of sweat as harsh as cat’s urine penetrated my nose.

  I threw the pillow to the bed, the very bed on which Mother had died three weeks before, and left the room behind.

  Dear diary, that moment cut me loose of family and left me rudderless.

  * * *

  Mother was injured while driving our wagon filled with donated goods to a family whose house had burned. A wild dog frightened our horse and the horse bolted, dragging the wagon across a heap of rocks. Mother was tossed to the rocks, and furnishings toppled onto her.

  She was mottled with bruises, swollen in her head and a dozen other places, afflicted by pains that prevented sleep and comfort. To relieve the swelling, our doctor decided she must be bled. Mother, usually outspoken, always fell to muteness in the company of medical men, and bleeding had been a more acceptable method in her youth. For our part, Father and Peter and I had no grounds for doubting. We let the doctor do his ghastly work.

  She was sitting up in bed when he began it, cutting a vein in her arm and placing his collecting bowl beneath. He considered the blood loss sufficient when she fell forward, unconscious. She opened her eyes not long after but remained slumped and fragile. I fed her raspberry-leaf tea and beef juice, and by the next morning she could rise. But by then she had head and neck aches so severe that she could hardly walk.

  Saying her nerves were damaged, the doctor sent her back to bed and prescribed strong-smelling decoctions to ease the pain. When these didn’t help enough, Father informed him by letter, and the doctor called for increased frequency.

  I’m convinced it was those medicines that poisoned and extinguished her.

  The morning of her final day was warm. The golden sun was melting the latest storm’s ice and snow, making the roads safer for travel. So Father sent Peter and Johan to a lumber mill with a list of supplies to buy. Watching them depart, I’d wished that I, too, could escape th
e misery of our house. I wanted to travel in our wagon with those relatively untroubled young men and drink in their vitality. How callous this was! When Mother had been expecting to die, had even asked for paper and pen and prepared her will. Yet none of us believed her. We thought the medicines and pain were turning her mind morbid.

  As her daughter, and the nearest thing to her own flesh, I ought to have taken heed. I ought to have banished the doctor and his decoctions and sought out safer ways to ease her suffering. If only, at the very least, I had soothed her grief over dying at only forty-seven, with Peter not yet twenty and me twenty-two, and neither of us settled, and her husband sobbing in his workshop while her strength faded. If only I had found a place of calm within myself and tried, by my touch and voice, to transport her there.

  By late that afternoon, Mother was vomiting often, and her mental state had worsened. She shifted from near catatonia to confusion to agitation. Father left, to buy more medicines, he said. Her last hours came soon after, and they seared me like a cattle brand.

  I was walking away to fetch a cooling cloth for her forehead when a scream issued from the dearest person to me on earth. I turned to see her once-graceful body convulsing, gripped by unseeable sensations. Running to her side, I grabbed her hand. Her fingers were hot, like rods of fire, as if her remaining life was burning painfully away. Her face was scarlet. Even her eyes were changed, showing little but black. Then she began to make odd sounds I couldn’t recognize as words.

  I lay alongside her and curled over her slender limbs, willing her excess heat to transfer to me.

  “Shush,” I told her. “Rest easy. All will be well, Mother.” I repeated such assurances and held her for some unmeasured span and hoped Father would come home and prayed to God for mercy as she jerked and moaned and struggled to breathe, her heart pattering quickly against mine, until she ceased to move.