Laura Krughoff
The first and only letter Mary Agnes received from home read: Child, I have destroyed your letter of last week. You should count it a blessing that your arrival in this world coincided with your mother's leaving of it. A stepmother can better bear the thought of your disgrace than a true mother might. Your vanishing in the winter nearly killed your father. He has grieved you as though dead and it is better to let his heart rest than to vex it again with the knowledge that you are not murdered but simply wanton. Stay in Philadelphia, you have no other home. You may repent at any time to your Heavenly Father. Leave your earthly one alone.
Mary Agnes had called the woman who answered her letter Mother Lucy since she learned that people and things had names as a prattling baby. But in her thoughts she struck a line through Mother every time she did so. In her own secret mind she called her stepmother by her bare first name. She cannot remember a time when she did otherwise.
Mary Agnes had not asked to return to her father's house in Indiana in her own letter. She had not said she was living in two rooms above a cloth shop on Fourth Street with Aurelius, a man her father would know by sight from mass at St. Vincent's, but likely not by name. She had written to say that she was well in Philadelphia, that she'd found employment in a thread factory, that she regretted whatever suffering her departure had caused, but that she had known it was time to strike out on her own and so she had when an opportunity presented itself. All of which was true. She'd wished her parents well. She had apologized for nothing. When she received her stepmother's reply on a Wednesday in September, she read it once, folded the slip of paper back into its envelope, and burned it in the stove.
On the 20th of December, Mary Agnes decided to tell Aurelius she'd fallen pregnant. She had learned from other women at the factory about a Quaker lady who was willing to help girls obtain what they might need to prevent themselves from becoming so, and when she could manage without Aurelius being aware of it, she had used the diaphragm she'd gotten from the Quaker. She'd been raised on a farm and had understood the mechanics of getting an animal pregnant from an early age. She knew that men and women were animals, among other things. She'd known as a young child that she was to her father what a calf was to a bull, that her mother had died in her delivery the way she'd seen a heifer die, its calf twisted and stuck inside. She enjoyed intercourse with Aurelius, perhaps even more than she enjoyed other forms of his company, and so she initiated often and enjoyed herself fully, knowing the diaphragm was tucked safely against her cervix. She had learned the word cervix from the Quaker. Before her, Mary Agnes would have thought of the diaphragm as covering the mouth of her womb. Sometimes Aurelius surprised her, however. Sometimes, she surprised herself, waking in the night with a need for him inside her that was as urgent as any other hunger, so that she roused him from sleep, already straddling his thick, plump penis.
And so, she was pregnant. Night was already falling like a damp cloak as she rode the trolley home. When she had tried to speak to Aurelius about birth control, he'd assured her they could trust in divine providence, that God would not send them a child until his first wife, who had left him in Indiana, taking his young son and returning to her people in Kentucky, had died of the cancer she'd written him about. From the earliest days of their affair, Aurelius had spoken with hope about the death of his wife, the return of his son, and their eventual marriage. He still attended mass, took holy communion, lit candles to a future untroubled by the sin they were currently forced to live in. He said God wouldn't send them more suffering than they'd fled in Indiana.
Mary Agnes knew that God, if he existed, regularly followed suffering with suffering. She watched her neighbors on Fourth Street huddled together around newspapers she could not read. She needed no Yiddish or Russian or German to understand what they feared the photographs of Hitler to portend. Her neighbors were the children of people who'd fled pogroms. And just yesterday, a tenement in the 7th Ward had collapsed, killing, among others, a girl she'd been friendly with at the thread factory. The girl and her family had left a dirt-floor shack in South Carolina for the freedom of Philadelphia just to be crushed in the rubble of a building their landlord didn't care couldn't hold its own weight. Either God in heaven doled out suffering for his own pleasure or he did not exist. Mary Agnes no longer felt the need to decide which. Aurelius could go to mass seven days in a week. She never intended to go again. She would tell him she did not want a baby and she did not want to marry him. She wanted an abortion and she intended to find out how to get one.
Though she had turned sixteen on Christmas, the conductor at the Broad Street Station suggested Aurelius pin her ticket to her coat as if she were a child. It was the first day of 1937 and Aurelius was sending her home. He'd telegrammed her father. He'd paid to say that he'd found her living amongst Jews and working with colored people, having abandoned her faith in Philadelphia. He held her by the arm as they waited for her train. Everything steamed in the cold. Mary Agnes watched her own breath until the vapor vanished, and then she breathed again. She was white with rage, and she would not turn her blue eyes on Aurelius.
She would take the train to Cincinnati and there she would transfer to the interurban that would take her home. Her father would collect her at the station in town. It had all been decided. So. She would find out after all if she were a fatal daughter. She'd been turned into a child again, that much she could understand. It just took a train ticket and a telegram between men. But she'd left her father's farm once and she knew she could do it again, even if she didn't know precisely how as she stood on the platform at Broad Street Station, her fingers and toes going numb in the cold.