In place of a mother’s love, I felt an embodied responsibility to reflect their exquisite worth back to them from the inside out. A girl known as Ruby wrote with her left hand, since her right hand was missing two fingers. An eight-year-old called Cammy, long employed picking cranberries in a New England bog, had fingers curled like those of an old woman with arthritis. The boys who had been cutters in canning companies had the faces of shrunken old men and hands that had been hacked to pieces. A boy named Hiram, who’d been paid five cents a box to pack sardine cans, though he could manage only four boxes a day, could no longer extend his fingers from their bent positions without pain. Before being sent to the cannery, he’d worked full nights at a spinning factory; he was so young and small that he had to clamber up the sides of the spinning frames to work the threads and bobbins, and he’d lost most of one foot in the process. A girl of nine named Mary had a scar running all the way down her cheek, ending at her collarbone. When a man tried to rape her, she’d used the considerable blade of a sardine knife to stab him at the jugular. Before he died, he got off one slice that disfigured her face forever. One seven-year-old boy’s wrong move at a glassworks left him with no hands at all.
What I gave them was witness: You exist. You are not nothing. Take your life back.
—
One day, in the midst of a history lesson — and when I say “history,” I mean showing the children of Room 8 the paths of global commerce and migration and immigration overlaid on the paths and lives of the original inhabitants, the national and local trade routes, the pirating routes, not to mention the laws surrounding individuals and their bodies and movements, the arc of geologic time, and the myths and stories people have created to track and remember themselves — the girl named Ruby, an eight-year-old former oyster shucker, was asking me, Please wait, I can’t keep up, when a noise cracked through the air, so loud that it shook all the desks and even my own vertebrae. A great flash of light, then another, larger explosion. The window glass quivering, the floor briefly buckling, my jaw clacking so hard that I drew coppery blood from my own tongue. The children held on to the sides of their desks. More than one crawled underneath.
When the shock passed, we all ran to the windows and looked out toward the water. With our faces pressed against the glass, we must have looked like immigrants lining the hull of a ship.
Just three buildings away from us blazed a furious fire.
Twenty women, mostly girls under the age of fifteen, perished that day when they could not get out. The doors and windows had been locked.
I took in the deepest breath of my life, held it, thought about shirts and collars and corsets; odd, the images that come into the mind during a crisis.
Aurora and the Want of a Child
To anyone who inquires earnestly, I explain that my business involves bodies.
Beyond the separate undertaking that fills Room 8, I rent rooms. The rooms I let are not residential. I have… rearranged the aims of the building my beloved cousin purchased for me. My clientele are men and women of means, and I curate my rooms based on their wants. In return, along with the customary consideration, they never cease to provide me with good stories — as if they were all characters, I sometimes muse, in a novel or stage play.
Sometimes their occupancy makes the walls vibrate.
For example, some years back, a man walked into my building, introducing himself as the owner of a very successful preserve manufactory, a company that produced canned tomatoes, jellies, fruits, vegetables, meats, and soups. At the time, I gave little thought to his tiny empire; it was enough for me that he seemed able to pay his bills with us. He was a frequent visitor, which meant he did not lack an imagination, and in time, I came to admire him.
During the war that took my leg, many of us had been saved from starving by eating food from cans, and during the intervening years, I had amassed a small collection of these “survival soups,” as I liked to call them. More than once in my life I had to rely on the survival soups, to help others or even myself survive. But I always restocked them when times improved. I became fond of their presence. They were an antidote against fear, and a reminder that scarcity and wealth are no distance from each other. Once the preserve canner became a client, I hired a local finish carpenter to design a special blue cabinet, with sixty little square caves only slightly bigger than the cans, and displayed it in a place of honor in my business quarters. The cabinet of gleaming and colorful cans was a frequent topic of curiosity and conversation with other clients.
This factory owner was kind, at least in my company. He only ever wanted to be ever so gently spanked, and the only remarkable aspect of that desire was his stamina; he could take that light touch for several hours — far longer than any other client. He liked to sustain the quality of a treasured thing over long periods of time. Like a tomato or peach hidden inside a tin can, its surprising hue and ripe bulge glistening from within the moment you sawed through the edges of the silvery-blue metal. And he liked to keep one hand clenched around my artificial leg, as if his life depended on it. That leg holds a thousand of his tender kisses.
Once, as he was dressing after his session, I walked over to the cabinet, pulled a tin of pears from its blue cave, and opened it with a can opener. Lifting the lid, I held the can out toward his mouth. He dipped his fingers into the thick sugary pear muck, pulled out a pear, and ate it, his eyes never leaving mine, except when he closed them to experience his brief autoerotic pleasure more fully.
You may know that the French inventors of the tin can failed to invent an opener for their container, and for years, the cans could only be opened in a brutal manner — with a hammer and chisel, a rock, or a bayonet. Equally interesting to me is the fact that the first canned food was invented for seamen who were inefficiently fed disgusting meals, by all reports, of meat and fish stored in barrels of brine. Everything tasted of salt. (Too much salt on the ocean? Well, that’s the thinking of men for you.)
My favorite can story involves the lost expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin. In 1845, Franklin, an officer of the British Royal Navy, departed on two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus on an expedition to cross the last unnavigated territory of the Northwest Passage. When the two ships became icebound near the Victoria Strait, however, the mission collapsed and all 129 men were lost.
Three years later, Franklin’s wife helped launch a search, which became the first of many. In 1850, relics from the expedition were found near the coast of Beechey Island, in the northern Canadian archipelago. Further relics and stories of the Franklin party were collected from local Inuit communities.
It’s here that the story fades — except for what I gathered from another girl who approached me one day, a strange girl who claimed to be from the future. In the year 1981, she said, a team of scientists from Canada studied the bodies, graves, and relics collected from the ships and concluded that the crew likely died from tuberculosis, pneumonia, starvation, and lead poisoning caused by badly soldered cans on board.
You heard right. A visitor from the future.
She went on and on when I first met her, this girl, like she couldn’t stop: the history of the tin can, its invention and manufacture, its evolution. She told me all about the original inventors of canned food. Some Parisian fellow, named Halpern or Appern or Appert, who worked out a way to seal prepared food in glass bottles with cork stoppers, then boiled the bottles in water. An Englishman who developed tinplate cans with soldered lids instead of glass containers — good for sailors, she said, since salted meats hastened the onset of scurvy. In her time, this girl claimed — a time unimaginably far away — canned food had once again become as sought-after as it had been useful at sea with Napoleon or on land in the Civil War. With visceral joy, she told me about a can of tomatoes she’d eaten, in her world, that very morning.