Laura Schlitz: A Drowned Maiden's Hair

“Little girl!” chimed a voice from the other side of the outhouse door. “Little girl, why are you singing in there?”

Maud froze. The voice was unfamiliar. The idea that a stranger was listening was somehow frightening. She stared at the crack of light that framed the door. She did not breathe.

“Little girl,” coaxed the voice, “don’t stop! Go on with your song!”

Maud considered the voice. It was high without being shrill, with a queer lilt of music in it. Maud, who had heard very few beautiful voices in her life, had no hesitation in judging it beautiful. After a moment, she ventured, “Who are you?”

“I’m Hyacinth,” answered the voice, clear as a bell. “Who are you?”

Hyacinth. Maud had an idea that a hyacinth was a flower — not a common flower like a daisy or a rose, for which anyone might be named, but something more exotic. She analyzed the voice again and decided it sounded young, but grown-up. Inside her mind a picture of a young lady took shape, her hair just up: rosy cheeks and a white lacy dress and a pink parasol with fringe around the edges.

“Who are you?” repeated the voice. “Why were you singing?”

“I’m locked in,” said Maud.

“But why are you locked in?”

Maud ran through a number of possible answers and discarded them all. “It’s cold,” she stated, “and singing warms me up. That’s why I was singing.”

She listened for an answer and heard, instead, the sound of the key in the lock. The crack of light widened, the door opened, and Maud tumbled out, blinking like an owl in the spring sunshine.

She saw, with disappointment, that the stranger was not young at all. In fact, she was old: her hair was white, and her skin was lined. At second glance, Maud’s disappointment was less acute. The stranger was erect and dainty, like an elderly fairy. She wore a plum-colored suit made of some lustrous fabric that had a pinkish bloom to it; her waist was snow white and frothy with lace. At the collar, there was a gold brooch studded with amethysts and moonstones. Maud had an instinct for finery: the lace, the jewels, and the purplish cloth were all things to be coveted. She felt a surge of fury. She had no such things, and no chance of getting them.

“Who locked you in?” asked the stranger. “Was it some hateful big girl?”

Maud grimaced. She could tell from the phrase “big girl” that the stranger had made a common error. “I’m a big girl myself,” she informed the stranger. “I’m eleven.”

“Eleven!” The lady named Hyacinth clasped her hands. “You aren’t, really!”

Maud clenched her teeth. “I am,” she asserted, rather coldly. “I’m small for my age, that’s all.”

The lady had stopped listening. She was staring at Maud almost fiercely, as if something had just occurred to her. “Eleven,” she repeated.

“I am,” argued Maud. “Ask Miss Kitteridge.”

The lady drummed one set of gloved forefingers against the back of her other hand. “And what is your name?”

“Maud Mary Flynn,” said Maud, baffled by the way the lady flew from subject to subject.

“And you’re eleven years old?”

“I told you I was,” flashed back Maud.

The lady startled her by laughing. Her laughter had the same musical quality as her voice. Halfway through the laugh, one gloved hand pinched Maud’s chin, tilting her face upward. Maud flinched, though the touch was soft. She caught a whiff of violets.

“You sing very prettily, Maud Mary Flynn.”

“Thank you,” said Maud, with dignity. She had always suspected that her voice was good, though no one had told her so. She glanced over her shoulder at the schoolroom window. If Miss Clarke looked out and saw her, she would be in trouble.

“Poor child!” The strange lady had changed again; now her voice was tender, with only a faint hint of mockery. “Locked up in that nasty cold place without any coat! You ought to tell the teacher that the others locked you in.”

“She already knows,” said Maud. Once the words were out, she wished she could take them back.

“She knows and she didn’t stop them?”

Maud fished for a lie but was unable, on such short notice, to find one. “She was the one who locked me in.”

“Do you mean” — Hyacinth sounded indignant — “do you mean she locked you in there, with no coat, on purpose?”

Maud nodded.

“For what reason?”

Maud stole a glance at the lady’s face. “I was swinging my legs during class. My boots made a noise against the floor.”

“Is that all?” Hyacinth asked in disbelief. “How unjust! You poor little thing!”

Maud felt her eyes fill with tears. She knew that her bad behavior had not been limited to swinging her feet. She knew that she had all but forced Miss Clarke to punish her. And yet — under Hyacinth’s pitying eyes — she did feel like a poor little thing. It was an intensely pleasurable feeling — close to embarrassment, and yet agreeable. Speechless with surprise, she raised her face to the Hyacinth-lady, who reached out and stroked the salt water from her eyes. The gray gloves were soft as the skin of a peach.

“Maud Flynn!” Hyacinth bent down as if she were about to tell a secret. Her voice lowered to a thrilling whisper. “Maud Flynn, what if I were to take you away from this horrid place? What if you were to come home with me and my sister Judith and be our little girl?”

Maud’s eyes widened. “You’re Miss Hawthorne,” she exclaimed in a whisper. “You’re the ones —” She remembered in the nick of time that the Misses Hawthorne wanted a child of eight or nine years of age, and shut her mouth.

“Yes, I am Hyacinth Hawthorne,” agreed the stranger. “Would you like to come home with me? I promise Judith and I won’t shut you in the necessary-house. We haven’t one. Our house has all the modern improvements.”

Maud could not speak. She clutched the hand that was offered her and followed Hyacinth Hawthorne away from the outhouse.

The office of Miss Kitteridge, Superintendent of the Asylum, was a cramped room at the front of the brick building. Maud had been sent there whenever her behavior went beyond what Miss Clarke could tolerate, and she hated every inch of the room. She also hated Miss Kitteridge, who sat beneath an engraving of Jesus blessing the children of Judea. Under the picture was a woolen sampler, with the words “Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me” cross-stitched in red and black. When Maud was a little younger, she had thought that the caption referred to Miss Kitteridge: any child who came unto Miss Kitteridge, Maud figured, was bound to suffer.

Miss Kitteridge was a tall woman with a yellow pompadour and a deceptive air of fragility. Maud’s eyes darted over her and settled on the other woman in the room. The other Miss Hawthorne — her sister Judith, Maud supposed — appeared twenty years older than her sister. Her face was stern and her costume sober: a rich, red-brown silk — a good dress, Maud judged, but plain.

Miss Kitteridge sighed. Her sentences often began and ended with a sigh; she always spoke as if she were not quite strong enough to finish a whole thought. Maud was not misled by this. She knew Miss Kitteridge was not too weak to be cruel.

“A most respectable family,” said Miss Kitteridge, as if it were a complaint. She was speaking, then, of Polly Andrews. “I think you will find —”

“Judith,” interrupted Hyacinth, “I’ve found our little girl.”

She spoke serenely, as if she had no idea that she was breaking into the conversation. Maud felt the same peculiar weakness in her stomach that she felt when Hyacinth called her a poor little thing. She fitted one knee behind the other and curtsied to Judith Hawthorne. She knew her dress was wrinkled and her stockings were sagging. She wished she had thought to pull them up.