Part 3
Pittsburgh made Nell feel as if the whole world had been built too tall.
The buildings leaned over the streets with their rows of windows and brick faces darkened by coal smoke. Streetcars clanged. Horses snorted. Men in caps moved in crowds thick enough to swallow a girl who stopped walking. The air tasted of iron, river damp, hot grease, and something burnt that never quite left the back of her throat.
Professor Thomas Whitcomb’s house stood in a quieter neighborhood up from the mills, where the sidewalks were swept and the front doors had brass knockers shaped like lions. To Nell, it seemed less like a house than a public building pretending to be private. There were carpets no one stepped on with muddy shoes, books no one moved without permission, and bells that rang from rooms where people wanted tea, towels, letters posted, gloves found, or a fire stirred.
Mrs. Whitcomb inspected Nell the first morning with a practical gaze that was not cruel, only accustomed to being obeyed.
“You can read?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Write?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Add columns?”
“If they don’t run too long.”
That almost made Mrs. Whitcomb smile. “We’ll make them longer, then.”
Nell was given a small attic room with a narrow bed, a washstand, and one window that looked over the back alley. She had never had a room of her own before. The privacy thrilled her for half a day, then frightened her after dark, when the walls did not breathe like the cabin walls and the floorboards made no familiar complaints.
She placed Miss Mercy beneath her pillow.
The doll looked strange in that room. Too poor for the clean white sheets. Too old for the iron bed. Too country for a house where even the sugar bowl had a silver spoon. Nell told herself she did not care, but the first time Alice Whitcomb came into the attic without knocking and saw the doll on the bed, heat climbed up Nell’s neck.
Alice was fourteen, pale and pretty, with hair cut in a fashionable bob that made Nell think of magazine pictures. She picked up Miss Mercy between two fingers.
“What is this?”
“My doll,” Nell said.
Alice laughed, not loudly, but with enough surprise to sting. “You still play with dolls?”
Nell took Miss Mercy from her. “I don’t play with her.”
“That makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
Nell could have slapped her. The thought came so quickly and clearly that she scared herself. Instead, she folded the doll into the handkerchief and put her in the bottom drawer of the washstand.
Alice watched with bright interest. “Does she have a face?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t need one.”
Alice stared at her, then shrugged. “That’s creepy.”
For days afterward, Nell kept Miss Mercy hidden. She hated herself for it, but not enough to bring the doll out. The city taught embarrassment faster than it taught street names. Nell learned which forks went with which plates, how to polish silver until her face warped in it, how to keep her accent softer around guests, and how to hold her shoulders so she did not look as if she expected to be scolded.
Professor Whitcomb was kinder than his household. He forgot meals, misplaced spectacles, and spoke to Nell as if she were capable of understanding him, which at first she found suspicious. One afternoon he found her reading a newspaper someone had left in the breakfast room.
“You follow the war?” he asked.
Nell nearly dropped the paper. “I was only looking, sir.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
She looked down at the headline about soldiers in France. “I follow what I can.”
He nodded toward the chair. “Then sit for five minutes and tell me what you think the article means.”
No one had ever asked Nell what she thought an article meant. No one outside her mother had ever asked her what she thought about much of anything. She stood there with her hands damp under her apron, then sat on the very edge of the chair and gave him a careful answer.
After that, Professor Whitcomb began leaving old magazines near the kitchen stair. Sometimes he marked columns in pencil. Mrs. Whitcomb noticed and said nothing, though once she handed Nell a household ledger and told her to copy the numbers in a cleaner hand.
By late spring, Nell could move through the house without feeling that every object wished to expose her. She sent money home. She wrote Martha every Sunday. She carried Miss Mercy in her apron pocket when no one was likely to see and tucked her into bed each night beneath the pillow.
In June, the Whitcombs prepared to leave for their summer place near Lake Erie. The house filled with trunks, tissue paper, garment bags, and the sour smell of impatience. Nell was to travel with them. Mrs. Whitcomb said she needed someone reliable, and Nell took the word reliable into her chest like a medal.
The day before they left, Nell packed her own small bag. She placed two dresses inside, her brush, her Bible, Martha’s letters tied with string, and Miss Mercy wrapped in the handkerchief.
Then Mrs. Whitcomb rang for her.
One errand became six. A seam had torn in Alice’s dress. The professor’s notes had to be found. A jar of cold cream had shattered in the bathroom. By the time Nell climbed back to the attic, the sky outside her window had gone purple with evening.
Her carpetbag sat on the bed.
Open.
For a moment she thought she had left it that way. Then she saw the handkerchief on the floor, unfolded and empty.
Nell dropped to her knees.
She searched under the bed, inside the pillowcase, behind the washstand, beneath the loose edge of the rug. She emptied the carpetbag twice. She shook out both dresses and the Bible and every letter from home.
Miss Mercy was gone…
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