When I open Kat’s door, she is sitting on her bed, already dressed in a too-tight, too-short dress of pale pink and holding the broken doll against her chest. Her cinnamon-brown hair is a tangled mess from sleep, but her eyes—so very like Martin’s—are bright pools of topaz with not a hint of slumber clinging to them. Has she been awake for a while? Was she able to hear the conversation taking place directly below her on the first floor? It is impossible to tell from the blank expression on the child’s face.
I reach for the hairbrush that I placed atop the bureau last night, and then I sit down beside Kat on her bed. “Did you sleep all right in your new room, love?”
She looks at me, her eyes communicating an answer that I can’t decipher.
“I think today we should buy some new bedcovers for you in a color that you like. Do you have a favorite color?”
The girl looks down at her lap. I wonder if her gaze is drawn to the hazy pink hue of her dress.
“Pink, maybe?” I say.
She nods, and it is almost like hearing her voice.
“I love that color, too. Would you like one braid or two?”
Kat slowly holds up two fingers.
“Two it is, then. Can you turn a bit toward your pillow, love?” She obeys and I put the brush to her head and begin to gently loosen the tangles. “My best friend growing up had hair this color. So very pretty.”
To fill the silence as I attend to Kat, I ramble on about how my mother used to braid my own hair too tightly and how my midnight blue hair ribbons had been my favorite.
“There,” I say when the plaits are done. “You look very pretty. And we’re getting some new clothes for you today. Won’t that be a treat? You’re getting so tall. You’ve outgrown all your dresses.”
Kat looks down at her too-small dress and then raises her head to look at me again. The child looks troubled, as if the thought of parting with the constricting dress she’s wearing is too painful a notion to consider. Perhaps Candace bought the dress for Kat before her illness sent her to her bed for good. Surely she had. Of course she had.
“You like this dress, don’t you?” I say in a more empathetic tone. Kat says nothing. “It’s very pretty. I can make some clothes for your dolly with the material from this dress if you like.” I point to the doll Kat clutches. “I can make a frock for her just like this one. My gram taught me how to sew. I can make her some pantalets to go with it. Would you like that?”
Kat gives her assent in one slight nod. I want to pull her into my arms.
Instead I tell her she can help me make breakfast. We make her bed quickly and then head downstairs.
It takes me a bit of time to familiarize myself with such a well-equipped kitchen. The meal last night I did nothing to prepare, and Martin wanted to leave the plates to soak overnight, so everything about its appointments is foreign to me. It takes me several tries to light the stove, and then I’m opening cabinets right and left to find a skillet. Martin had boxes of staples delivered, so there are eggs and sausage, but there is no bread to make toast. And no yeast or lard or vinegar. I shall have to make a list. As I find my way around, I decide we will eat at the butler’s table in the kitchen rather than in the formal dining room, and I give Kat the table settings to place at our seats. I am nearly pinching myself again at my fortune, strange as it is, as the room begins to take on the scents of cured meat and fried eggs. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been in a warm, happy kitchen making a meal that is setting my mouth to water. At the tenement there was only the hunk of bread in the morning, the watery soup at the factory cafeteria at noon, and at night, the cold sausages shared among the other young immigrant women I roomed with. There was no table and no conversations around the meal, except for when there was an occasional pilfered bottle of whisky to pass from one to another to another.
After breakfast, we take Kat to a children’s clothing store in the heart of Union Square, where Kat submits to trying on several ready-to-wear dresses in different colors and styles, some for every day and a few for special occasions, the clerk says, like a party or for churchgoing. I ask Martin if he and Kat attend church.
“No. But if you wish to go and take Kat with you, I’ve no objections. There are plenty of Catholic churches here.”
“I’m from the North, remember? I’m . . . Protestant.” I say this with a light laugh, a bit surprised he’s forgotten that. I mentioned it in my letter to him.
Martins shrugs. “There are plenty of the other kind, too.” He turns to the salesclerk and points to the Sunday-best dress Kat has on. “We’ll take this one as well.”
It’s odd to me that he doesn’t care if I decide to take Kat to an Anglican service, if I can find one, but empowering, too. He trusts me with her.
Next we step inside a dressmaker’s, where I am measured and fitted for three new shirtwaists and undergarments.
We take a streetcar to the Palace Hotel on the corner of Market and Montgomery to have lunch in one of its lovely dining rooms. The multistoried palatial building has an open center entrance that until recently buggies could drive into to unload their passengers. The open court is overlooked by all seven stories and framed with white-columned balconies and decorated with exotic plants, statuary, and fountains. The American Dining Room, with its linen-topped tables and golden high ceilings, has just begun to serve the midday meal when we arrive. We lunch on consommé, duckling croquettes, and endive salad, with glazed peach tarts for dessert. It is the finest meal I’ve ever eaten and it’s a challenge to pretend it is merely an ordinary lunch on a busy day.
After our meal we make our way to the Emporium to outfit Kat’s new room with proper toys and décor for a little girl.
On the ten-minute walk to the Emporium—a multilevel department store that carries everything—I see more of the city’s bustling retail area. I take note of a shoe repair shop, a milliner, a stationer’s, a grocer, a bakery, and a hair salon.
The outside of the immense Emporium is as large as many of the buildings I’d grown used to seeing in New York, taking up nearly a whole city block on Market Street. We take an elevator to the fourth level and walk past displays of sporting goods and bicycles to the children’s toy section. The display cases are laden with dolls and doll carriages, miniature tea sets, train sets, boxes of colored wax crayons, and paints. There are dollhouses and little wooden barns with carved farm animals and books and puzzles and looms and jointed stuffed bears and armies of toy soldiers.
Kat is drinking in the sight of all those shelves, I can see that, but she makes no move to walk toward any of them. Martin just waits for her to do so. I reach for her hand and lead her to a doll carriage upholstered in robin’s-egg blue fabric, with chrome and rubber wheels and a collapsible hood trimmed in wide white lace.
“How about if we try out this carriage with your own dolly,” I say, convincing Kat to lay down the doll with the cracked cheek inside the satin-lined bed of the miniature buggy. A glimmer of a smile tugs at Kat’s lips.