Read Atlantis: Three Tales for Free Online Page B

longer than the middle, which was, in turn, longer than the ring finger, which was longer than the little—all of them, indeed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The nails were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart in bluish gum—some of the lower ones, Sam realized, missing. “What’s your name?” he asked again, of this unappealing child.
    The woman behind him said, “She’s showing you her wrist beads.” Then—small, brownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (the child’s hair stuck out in tufts, from under a gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, the cloth ends frazzled like something someone had sucked on)—the woman took the girl’s wrist and held it up. Black-gloved fingers moved a band of white beads from under the threadbare cuff. “Baby beads—just like when you’re born. In the hospital.” (Sam had been born at home, and had had the details of Doctor Haley’s three-in-the-morning visit, when they’d thought there might be complications—but there weren’t—recounted to him many times.) Each bead had a black letter on it.
    â€œSee,” the woman said. “E- L-L-A A- B-L-I-R  . . . this is Ella Ablir.” Each lettered bead had two holes in it. Running through were, Sam saw, not threads but wires, twisted together below the pudgy wrist. The woman smiled. “She’s looking at you because you’re white.”
    â€œNo.” Sam smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not. I’m colored, too, just like everybody else here.”
    â€œOh, I’m
sorry
 . . . !” The woman was suddenly and greatly distressed—while again Sam glanced at the white clerk behind the bars and at thewoman at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-heeled shoes buttoning inches up stockings white as some nurse’s: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies, but wasn’t sure how many she wanted; now she asked for two more, no three more—well, maybe another two; and one more please? Thank you. Now, if I could just have two more of this kind—please?
    â€œSometimes,” Sam said, “when people first meet me, they think I am. But I’m not.”
    â€œYes. Of course,” the woman said. “If I had just been paying attention, I would’ve seen it.”
    Sam looked down at the girl, who still stared up: “Hello, Ella,” he said, becoming aware that, behind the woman, five or six other children shuffled—girls, most of them. No, all of them. Ragged, unkempt, each had something distinctly wrong with her.
    â€œWhere’re y’all from?” Sam asked.
    â€œWe’re from the Manhattan Hospital,” the woman said, indicating a rectangle of cardboard pinned to her lapel, with something printed on it, “for the Insane.” The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So did the girls behind. The eyes of a tall and stoop-shouldered girl did not look in the same direction. “Over on the island. But they ain’t really insane at all.” She smiled. “Not even a little bit of it. They’re just some very nice little girls—who all been very, specially good. And I been out with them since eight o’clock this morning, taking them around on a Christmas pass.”
    Their young women goe not shadowed (clothed) amongst their own companie, until they be nigh eleven or twelve returns of the leafe old, nor are they much ashamed thereof, and therefore would the before remembered . . . sometymes resorting to our fort . . . but being over twelve years, they put on a kind of semecinctum lethern apron before their bellies, and are very shamefaced to be seen bare.
    â€”wantons before marriage and household drudges after, it is extremely questionable whether they had any conception of it.
    The woman in red