If Wishes Were Horses: A Novel

By Merry Whiteford

If Wishes Were Horses is a moving coming-of-age novel that explores the depth of friendship, the hope for redemption, and the heartbreaking choices one must make in a difficult, brutal world.

It's 1974, and 16-year-old Star Hennessey is living with three other foster children in a broken-down central New York town. The daughter of an alcoholic prostitute, Star has so far escaped the gritty, painful circumstances of her life through the poems and stories she writes and recites in her head.

When she discovers she is pregnant, Star's search for the right course of action brings her face-to-face with the cruel exploitation she fears is her legacy--but culminates in her personal and spiritual triumph.

If Wishes Were Horses is a stunning story expertly told by Merry Whiteford, a graceful writer who delves into Star's harsh reality with compassion, hope, and beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466871076

Merry Whiteford

Merry Whiteford is the award-winning author of the novels If Wishes Were Horses, Dog People and Burning Down the House. She lives in Virginia with her husband Neil.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Prologue: Providence

1. If Wishes Were Horses

2. Like Family

3. Girl/Woman

4. Winter Break

5. Mildred’s Fortunes

6. Poetry 101

7. The Little Salon

8. Men and Angels in the Snow

9. Valentine’s Day

10. I’d Ride Away

Epilogue: Providence

Also by Merry Whiteford

Copyright

For Neil, the joy of my heart

Acknowledgments

With thanks to the Vogelstein Foundation for generously supporting me in the writing of this book; to Lori Perkins for finding it a good home; to Sally Kim for her wisdom, sensitivity, and generosity; to my friends and family for their love and encouragement; and especially to my dear friend Ann Holter for keeping me in bath soap and lending me her teeth.

If wishes were horses, beggars might ride.

PROLOGUE

Providence

In the middle of the twentieth century, in Onondaga County in the middle of New York State, if you were a child between one place and another, a child without proper guardians—a child unlucky or unloved—you were in the care of Providence, House of Providence, the orphanage on Salt Springs Road run by Franciscan nuns. Except, maybe because the term made people think of poor, hungry Oliver Twist, rats and dirt, abuse and neglect, they didn’t call it an orphanage; they called it a children’s home.

With a private road cutting through a thick wood leading to the large Tudor mansion, you might have thought this was an elegant place—House of Providence had, in fact, once been a private residence for one very large, very rich family—but it had been renovated, dissected, made ugly and institutional, and now it was shelter for about a hundred hapless kids. Inside, you could see the hard luck we’d all come from. It was present in the humble furniture, the shabby carpet, the dingy walls—as if somehow we couldn’t help dragging it along with us wherever we went, like a cartoon convict drags a ball and chain.

It was here that I spent almost three years of my childhood, in two-to-five-month stretches—like prison terms for petty crimes. Yet there was something about Providence I didn’t really mind. For me, it was comfortable and easy being only with children in my position, not being teased or avoided for being badly dressed, poor, and unfortunate. But my brother hated Providence because we had to sleep in dormitories and eat bland food and follow endless, seemingly arbitrary, often ad hoc rules. He hated it because he hated the nuns and their relentless pickiness and punishments; he hated it because he hated to pray. But mostly, I think, my brother hated Providence because he hated the uncertainty, not knowing where we would go or whose mercy we’d depend upon or what would become of us next.

One of the last times we were at Providence, we were there with a girl named Hannah Leland. She was fourteen years old but looked even younger with a little mask of freckles on her nose and fine pale hair curling down her back. Because she was so small and thin and knobby at the joints, it was a shocking thing to see Hannah Leland with a woman’s belly. But I don’t think Hannah wanted anybody seeing her because she kept to herself most of the time. Even at recess, she’d stand at the far end of the yard, kicking the dirt, staring at her feet, and moving just a little as if blown by a small breeze. On several occasions I tried to speak to her, but Hannah said she didn’t want to make friends. It seemed to me as if she didn’t want anything that might tie her to this place, or weigh her down any more than she already felt.

Aside from telling me to get lost, Hannah Leland only spoke to me once. It was at dinner one day in midsummer. I saw her sitting by herself at the far end of the room and I walked over and sat right down next to her. I said hi and other things, things about the rain or the food, and she said she wasn’t raped, if that’s what anybody had told me; she didn’t need pity; she was in love with a twenty-seven-year-old man named Sam who was going to rescue her from this place, her and her baby, and take them to his house where they’d all live, like a family. Any day now he would sneak her out the back door and we’d never see her ever again. So actually, it was she who pitied me and all the other children—and we were all children, she said—at Providence.

But the twenty-seven-year-old man named Sam never came, and though every night, Hannah Leland would wait by the pay phone in the hall, you would never actually see her with the receiver in her hand, talking with someone, talking with Sam. Instead, she’d just sit there staring, waiting, until one of the nuns saw her and shooed her back to the dormitory. When her condition became even more obvious, the nuns sent Hannah Leland away to a girls’ home to have the baby, which the state immediately took from her and never let her see. She never even got to know if it was a boy like Sam had said he’d wanted or if it was healthy or normal or even alive.

After Hannah returned to Providence, the nuns wouldn’t let her be. It was almost as if they weren’t really sure there was a God or an afterlife so they’d get her now, just in case she wasn’t gotten later. Or maybe it was just that they couldn’t forgive her for committing such a big sin when she was still so little. Every morning, they made Hannah get up before everyone else and wash the front hall. They made her wear dark, baggy clothes, like a fat old lady might wear. And one day, they cut Hannah Leland’s long hair short like a soldier’s.

We were all in the dormitory just before bed when Sister Margaret marched in with a pair of scissors. She made Hannah stand in the middle of the room where everyone could see, and then Sister Margaret began to cut. Long, soft, innocent curls of hair fell onto the floor like an offering at Sister Margaret’s feet. Hannah didn’t cry. She hardly even blinked. She just stood there.

For Hannah Leland, more than for any of the rest of us, living at House of Providence was like being a prisoner of war.

When I could, after that, I would sneak a cookie or an apple from the dining room, wrap it in a napkin, and leave it for her on her bed. Hannah Leland was no longer allowed desserts. In an attempt to offer something more substantial, I began writing out bits of lyrics to songs that seemed heartening and kind—Bridge Over Troubled Water and You’ve Got a Friend—and I’d slip them under the covers of her bed. I knew she just threw them out, but they made me feel better. I tried to bring her hopeful things—that was what she was lacking, I figured: hope. I gave her my four-leaf clover, a lucky penny, a puff ball from the yard by the woods. I wanted to console and soothe her; I wanted to show her that she was not alone. But not once, not ever, did Hannah seem changed by this.

And that was it—that was what I wanted: not to secure her friendship, but to change her heart. I didn’t want it to be the case—I almost felt I couldn’t bear it to be the case—that the hard circumstances of life could ruin her forever. Though I never said it out loud or even privately to myself then, I believe that I knew that if life could break Hannah Leland, then just as surely and just as irrevocably, it could break me too.

But before Hannah Leland softened, before she came to peace with her life, before her penance was through and her hair grew out and the seasons changed, there was suddenly nothing left for me to do.

It was an ordinary dusky winter day, and after recess I hurried back to the dormitory under the pretense of retrieving my pencil box. That morning, I’d written out most of the lyrics to Let It Be and now I wanted to leave them on Hannah’s bed.

When I reached the door of the dormitory and burst in, out of breath, almost laughing, I felt I’d run smack into a wall—there she was, in the middle of the room, just beneath the central beam, a young girl, hanging by her neck. The room was dim, and her face was shadowed, and at first I didn’t know who it was. I could tell it was a girl about my age, about my height, about my shape. As I neared, trying to make out the face, that mouth, that nose, those eyes, I thought, for a brief moment, that I was seeing myself. I must have screamed because soon Sister Alice Mary was with me, making sounds like a bird, rushing forward, then stumbling, slipping on the floor, squawking.

The rest of the day, I felt I was moving through water: my arms and legs were heavy and slow, and sounds came to me from far away.

Hannah Leland was dead.

When Hannah Leland’s few things were gathered up and put into a cardboard box, no one came to collect them; they simply got sent away, like Hannah Leland’s body, and then it was as if they’d never been. It was shocking how quickly her life could end and then be closed and the world could go on, seamlessly, without a scar, as if nothing had happened at all.

CHAPTER ONE

If Wishes Were Horses

In 1974, Skeeter, Pig, Lucky, and I lived with Lily and Kap Thompson at 313 South Beech Street, almost on the corner of East Genesee, an address that would have meant something once, Lily said. A hundred years before, this would’ve been a grand house off the grandest street in Athens, two blocks from the Erie Canal at a time when it was filled with expensive ships carrying precious cargo to ladies and gentlemen all over the world. It was the kind of house you saw in movies from the 1930s, with so many windows and a wide front porch, a carriage house and its own name. But now the outbuildings had collapsed and the house itself was in a state of decay: much of its paint hung from it in small strips like old Band-Aids, some of the windows were cracked or had been replaced with cardboard, and inside, the house had been chopped into apartments of strange shapes with double-locked doors. Ours was the largest apartment, and it ran along the first floor of the side that got no sun, I mean no sun, so Lily said the only things she could grow there were her two plastic ferns and the vase of dried roses in the den.

Sometimes Lily would tell me stories about the past, stories from a hundred years ago when ours was that grand house off the grandest street, stories about ladies with parasols—not umbrellas, but dainty things made of ivory and lace—ladies with pure white skin who would stroll along East Genesee while their husbands bought and sold goods at the canal. The husbands would buy porcelain, tea, and silk from China. They would buy wines and fine perfume and pretty underwear from France. And all they had to sell, Lily said, was salt—but believe me her, salt was a great luxury then, a precious spice, and people paid good money for it. According to her, Athens was a different place in those days, everyone was rich and happy, but I don’t know how she’d’ve known all this since she and Kap only moved here from New Hampshire fifteen years before when Kap’s uncle died.

When you walked into 313 South Beech, you entered a small room with a tin cabinet of mailboxes on one wall, on the other, a bank of buzzers that no longer worked with names of people who no longer lived here still taped beneath them. At the end of the little room was a threshold where a door had once hung, but now you could just walk right into what Lily called the foyay, not a room, but a tall silo of a space lit only by a bulb hanging from a wire in the entranceway. As you moved into the foyay, and your outdoor eyes got used to the indoor light, you could make out the staircase that crept up along the far edge of the wall as if it didn’t really want to be here, so exposed, in the foyay, like at its summit was something special that needed to be protected. Wires poked out of a white nipple at the top of the foyay, twisted this way and that, like a sculpture of snakes. Lily said the wires once lit a crystal chandelier, very elegant, all the way from Scotland; crystal light was the best for illuminating the silk once carpeting the treads so the ladies and gentlemen could pass safely down the staircase.

It was the kind of staircase you could imagine supporting the slow steps of fancy girls in hoop skirts and ruffles with those parasols Lily talked about, but now you’d only see Mrs. Town hobbling down them in her scratchy wool coat and red rubbers, a filmy black head scarf tied under her chin, her eyes large and weepy behind the purple-tinted lenses of her glasses. Sometimes, Mrs. Town would be on her way to Euclid Cordials or to Fifield’s Big Market up on Westcott Street and she would drag along a jingling wire luggage cart she kept in the back hall. None of us knew whether she was hard of hearing or just plain mean, but she would only grunt when she saw you and you said, Good morning. And at night, when everyone was settled into their apartments, her voice would tumble down the staircase and spill across the foyay: What’s happening? Who’s there? When she was home, you could always hear the hum and murmur of her TV echoing down through the air vents until late at night when the test pattern signal would blare and then there would be sudden silence. Mrs. Town wasn’t frightening, but she was like a ghost just the same: mostly you knew of her presence by the hollow, faraway sounds she made.

Several times a day, Mrs. Town’s edgy little dog Romeo would fill the foyay with frantic activity and noise. He’d scramble down the staircase and jump and turn in tight, anxious circles, panicked, yipping, little claws clicking on the floor, until he was attached to a leash and escorted outside. For the last few months, this had meant my taking his leash from the back hall and walking him up and down South Beech Street or along East Genesee. In the morning, or after school or anytime on the weekend or vacation, Mrs. Town might telephone Lily, asking whether the girl would walk Romeo. If I was home, Lily would always say of course.

Aside from Mrs. Town and Romeo, you might hear Ted Rudway on the staircase, in mid afternoon or late at night, after he’d run out of dope to sell or Bojangles had closed. Ted Rudway was thirty or forty and he had about twelve degrees from the University and called himself a jack-of-all-trades and a master of fun. He was attractive and had probably been very handsome years before. But now, close-up, you could see his skin had a grainy, gray, unhealthy tone, his blond hair was thinning, and beneath his cool blue eyes, dark little hammocks of skin were outlined in wrinkles. Still, he was the handsomest boy I knew, and whenever he saw me, he smiled and said hello. Ted Rudway sold nickel bags for thirty-five dollars, but only in bars around the University, never from his apartment on the third floor, and he wouldn’t give any to us because he said he wouldn’t be another Socrates corrupting the youth of Athens, and not even Skeeter knew what he meant. Still, sometimes he’d let us come up to his apartment, the only one on the third floor, and we’d eat cheese twirls and check out the weird Day-Glo posters and the woolen tapestries on his walls, while he’d light incense and play boring music from the sixties when everyone strummed acoustic guitars and sang in harmony.

Lily would only let us go upstairs if she had something for Mrs. Town—like if she’d accidentally gotten a piece of Mrs. Town’s mail—and since the other two second-floor apartments were empty (one was condemned and the other was a plain vacancy) and since we’d sneak up the fire escape to Ted Rudway’s, we almost never climbed that staircase, seeing how the door to our apartment was here, to the right in the foyay, at its foot.

About the staircase, I made up this poem:

Say you were a genie,

And your own master,

Would you toss Mrs. Town

Over your banister?

Would you flatten yourself out,

And snake off to Westminster?

Or stretch up through the clouds,

Look down at your sister

Climbing you now—

Old and strong, wood and plaster—

Climbing you once to never come down—

If she were me?

On the other side of the foyer was apartment number one, home of the only other person who lived here, the owner of the building, a quiet old foreign man named Mr. Wunsche. Mr. Wunsche was tall and thin, with a bland face and eyes that were kind and gentle—you could tell even from this side of his glasses. Like a character from an old movie, he wore dark suits with vests and a hat from the 1940s which he grabbed at the top and raised a little when he saw you, which was rare because mostly he stayed at home or otherwise kept to himself. When Mr. Wunsche spoke, it was in a German accent—everyone recognized it from Hogan’s Heroes—and sometimes you’d have to ask him to repeat himself. Often, you could hear music from his apartment, lonesome, soulful music with tinny guitars, low harmonicas, and raspy, scratchy voices. For a while, I thought he was a musician or a composer, but then Lily told me he had been a professor at the University. She said all those years of hard thinking had worn Mr. Wunsche right out and now all he did was sleep all day, trying to catch up on his energy so he could lead a normal life and return to what it was he really loved. When I asked her was that music, she said, oh no, not music.

Everyone’s got a secret passion. Folker Wunsche’s is photography.

He told you that?

You can see the photos on his walls when he opens his door.

"He took those photographs?"

"They’re on his walls. Do you think he’d hang some stranger’s photographs in frames on his walls?"

I would hear Mrs. Town tell Lily that while no one put strangers’ photos on their walls, no one put photos of strangers on their walls either. That was the important point, she said—what the photos were of. In this case, Mrs. Town was sure the photographs were of absent friends and lost loves.

For my part, I figured Mr. Wunsche’s photographs were of his missing daughter.

Aside from telling me landlord things about closing the front door and wiping my feet, the only time Mr. Wunsche spoke to me personally he said, I knew a girl with hair like yours. Since he’d said "a girl," I figured he must’ve been speaking of his daughter—not his wife or mother; but because he’d said it sadly and in the past tense, and because he hadn’t mentioned where she was now, I imagined that his daughter was missing or dead. And then I figured that’s what Mr. Wunsche was doing now—not catching up on energy so he could lead a regular life, but mourning.

Though I’d hear that music from his apartment in the foyer, that sad, low music, I only caught a glimpse of him now and then, closing his door behind him as he disappeared inside his apartment or as he left it for places I couldn’t have guessed.

*   *   *

Though the largest room of our apartment, what Lily called the den, was supposed to be Skeeter, Pig, and Lucky’s room—Lily had convinced Social Services it could comfortably accommodate three boys since it was large and had a walk-in closet and a bureau, a pull-out double bed, and a chair that unfolded into a twin—Lily said it was too nice for a bunch of flap-eared Goops like them. So Skeeter, Pig, and Lucky shared the front room of the apartment which Lily called the parlor, but they made a mess of it, trashed it, really. It had had a painted canvass ceiling which they stabbed at and eventually tore down with their pocketknives, leaving an ugly gray water-stained ceiling in its place. The walls had been not quite white but smooth and clean-looking when we first came, but now they were chipped in places and marked with thumbprints of masking tape that couldn’t hold the posters of rock stars and cars the boys had hung. Sometimes Skeeter and Pig would swipe the fashion magazines Lily passed on to me and now and then bra and panty advertisements were stuck up on the walls. The boys all slept on the floor, on pilly old blankets and stained, fraying sheets that Lily made them roll up and stuff in the front closet every day for visitors who would have to cross their room to enter the apartment. Really, though, she was thinking of the woman from Social Services who had come by once without phoning first and put Lily and Kap on report for slovenliness and various other infractions like having no toilet paper in the bathroom or milk in the fridge.

When I first arrived and since I was the only girl these days, I had my own room, at the very back of the apartment, with my own bed. Twice, we’d had girls come and I’d had to share, which I hated, having someone’s strange breath in my air, my room, bumping into a leg, a body, in the middle of the night in my own bed, having to fight for covers which should have been mine, had been all mine before. Having another person in my room made it a different place, not only because they brought their own things and their own smells, or because their bodies seemed to occupy so much of the space, almost like they had thick shields around them that changed the space and made me feel cramped and suffocating when they entered the room, but because now there was someone watching me, someone making me see myself and my things differently, someone who knew where I hid my poems and that I still sucked my thumb and when I cried in my sleep.

Once, during the first girl’s stay, I woke in the night to find our hands clasped, raised up above the covers, up toward the ceiling, our arms straight. When I woke and saw this, our arms straight above us, our fingers intertwined, I grabbed my hand back and rolled away from her and never said anything about it. But after that, I was even meaner to her than I had been and I wouldn’t let her read my magazines. The first girl finally left—she ran away—and the second only stayed two days before she tried to O.D. on aspirin and was taken off in an ambulance and we never heard about her again. Skeeter said she was probably given shock treatment and sent to juvey.

A single bulb hung from the middle of the ceiling of my room so I could see too much—every crack in the plaster, the yellow of the window shades, the water stains on the walls. Plus the glare of the bulb made it impossible for me to read and write in bed. So I saved my allowance for two months solid and bought a bright red Japanese shade; on one side was an image of Mount Fuji, on the other, a scene of a pagoda and a tiny bridge with a woman standing on it, gazing down a river that probably went all the way out to sea. The shade made the room rosy and warm and I could pretend I lived in another place, an easier, softer place, and I could read and write into the night. Lily didn’t like the shade, she said the red light would make people think ours was a whorehouse, but since my room was in the back and couldn’t be seen from the street, she’d let me keep it.

My room had two windows with metal locks like half moons in the middle. The one beside my bed looked down onto the parking lot out back and its small cache of deserted vehicles. The other was above my desk, no more than ten feet from the yellowed brick wall of the apartment building next door. It didn’t matter that the actual views from the windows of my room were plain and dull; it was almost better that way because then I was free to see anything. Starting with almost nothing leaves almost everything open.

A bureau with no fronts on any of the drawers leaned against the southern wall of my room, and squatting adjacent to it was a small brown desk with people’s names and initials and a poem dug into the top. At the far right corner of the desk, I kept my books in a stack, with their spines facing out, facing me: The Runaway Bunny, Ethan Fromme, Webster’s Dictionary, The