The Foundling: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ann Leary is the New York Times bestselling author of a memoir and four novels including The Good House. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages, and she has written for The New York Times, Ploughshares, NPR, Redbook, and Real Simple, among other publications. Her essay, “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” was adapted for Prime Video’s television series, Modern Love. Her novel The Good House was adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. She lives with her husband in New York. Visit her online at AnnLeary.com.

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Chapter One

One

I’VE been told that my mother had a wonderful sense of humor. Also that she was pretty. But most people recall her wit first, and her easy laughter, and because of this I’ve always had a better sense of how she felt than how she looked. She must have been happy most of the time if she found so many funny things to say and to laugh about. She died when I was an infant, so I have no memory of her. After I moved to my aunt Kate’s house, I’d hear her talking with friends about my mother and me, usually in hushed tones after I’d just left the room.

“She’s a somber little thing,” somebody would say. Or “She’s so shy; she certainly hasn’t Louisa’s high spirits.”

That was my mother—Louisa. Apparently, there was a sparkle in her eye. My uncle Teddy said this about her once, and when I asked him where the sparkle was—what part of the eye, he laughed and gave me a wink. When I asked him again, he told me to shut my trap.

I didn’t inherit my mother’s high spirits or her sparkly eye, but she did leave me a very nice lady’s suitcase. It had been a wedding gift from a wealthy distant cousin. I never saw it until the day Father came for me at St. Catherine’s Orphan Asylum. He gave Mother Beatrice no notice, just showed up one afternoon in the summer of 1922, when I was twelve. He arrived in a borrowed black Packard, and when he strode out to the courtyard, where my friends and I were playing, he called out, “Which one of you is Mary?”

At least five of us raised our hands—it was a Catholic orphanage, after all. But I felt, as he smiled vaguely at each of us in turn, like he’d reached inside me and crushed my heart with his hand. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year, but I recognized him instantly. I’d grown a bit; I think that’s why he didn’t know me at first.

“What about Edel… or Trudy?” he said. “We called our girl Trudy when she was a baby. Trudy Engle.”

I was too thrilled to remain hurt. As soon as I stepped forward, he said, “Well, there you are,” and pulled me close. I felt the strange smoothness of his freshly shaved jaw during that brief moment when he pressed his face against my forehead. He used to have rough whiskers when Uncle Teddy took me to visit him up at the lumber mill.

He told me to pack my clothes—he was moving me in with Aunt Kate. The laughter and taunts from some of the older girls when he reminded them of my original name were like blanks fired from a pistol. They were like the loud pop-pop-pop from a clown’s dummy pistol in the circus that came to Scranton every summer. The circus had a free night for “Foundlings and Other Unfortunates.” We all screamed and clung to one another when we were little and heard that clown’s gun the first time, but the next year and the years after, we didn’t even flinch. We fought over peanuts and candy in the stands while the clown did those same old tired gags. The elephant never left its tent on foundling night—sometimes the acrobats took the night off too. We were left with that dumb clown and a dog act, and who cared about them? We got free bags of goodies. Similarly, who cared about those girls calling me that stupid nickname? I had a father; they didn’t. He was taking me away. They were staying there at the home.

“Well c’mon, let’s get your things,” Father said. He was carrying the lovely white suitcase that had once belonged to my very own mother.

“She hasn’t many things,” Mother Beatrice scolded when we were in the long, low-ceilinged dormitory hall. “Certainly not enough to fill a large suitcase like that, Mr. Engle. I don’t know what a girl would do with such an expensive-looking piece of luggage. If you’d given us more notice, we’d have gladly packed her essentials in a parcel as we do for our half-orphans who are lucky enough to have family to go to.”

A few of my friends—Dorothy, Marge, Mary Hempel, Little Mary—they’d all followed us inside, and now they gaped at Father like he was a film star—it wasn’t every day a real father showed up at St. Cat’s. I realized that I was gazing up at him the way they were, more like an awestruck fan than a daughter. I moved closer to him, and I even thought for a moment that I should hold his hand—the way daughters did with their fathers in the movies. But he accidently jabbed me in the shoulder when he tossed the suitcase on the bed, then he pulled a handkerchief from his vest to wipe his forehead. It was so hot up there in the ward on summer days you could barely breathe sometimes.

Mother Beatrice was busy examining my mother’s suitcase, and that really bugged me. It was my mother’s, why did she have to touch every inch of it? Finally, she turned the two brass clasps in front, flipped up the top and whispered, “Oh my.”

The other girls and I crowded around to see the inside, which was lined entirely with pink satin. Mother Beatrice tentatively lifted a thin panel, revealing a lower compartment. This was also lined in pink. It was padded, like a pillow, and decorated with little hand-stitched ovals.

“Oh, this is very nice,” Mother Beatrice said, her bony fingers flitting, spiderlike, across the pink lining and in and out of the pockets. “A place for everything and everything in its place, very nice, though hardly useful for a little girl—now what’s this?”

She yanked at a thin strap that was dangling from one of the pockets. Out sprang a lady’s garter. It was attached to a sheer silk stocking that swept across Mother Bea’s throat, and had it been a snake the nun couldn’t have screamed louder nor tossed it farther from her. I thought I’d suffocate it was so hard not to laugh. Father was unable to restrain himself. He chuckled and winked at us girls as we giggled into our hands.

“Goodness me,” Mother Beatrice whispered, staring at the items on the floor. She was blushing to the very edges of her habit. Father leaned over to pick up the stocking and the garter. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He carefully folded the stocking and tucked it and the garter into a pocket in his jacket.

“This was my wife’s suitcase,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know there was anything left in it. She only used it once. On our honeymoon.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the nun, clearly flustered, her face still beet red. She crossed herself. Then she closed her eyes, resting one of her hands on the suitcase. The girls and I bowed our heads and lowered our eyelids slightly, but we watched her the way we watched all nuns who prayed—as keen and alert as hunting dogs. We were looking for our mothers’ angels (I never saw mine, but I always looked because there were older girls who said they saw their mothers floating above the nuns whenever they prayed). When Sister crossed herself again, I packed up my flannel drawers, woolen leggings, and other items with the help of Dorothy and the others.

My departure from Scranton and my aunt Kate’s house, five years later, was almost as abrupt and unexpected as my departure from St. Catherine’s had been. One hot spring morning, I was standing in a stinking, crowded trolley, silently cursing the broken-down truck that was blocking...