The Girls at the Kingfisher Club Read Online Free Page A

them a living allowance.
    When Doris said, “So who do we send?” Lou said, “Not Jo. She’s been in those trenches already, for all the good it did us.”
    (Lou tried to sound clever; sometimes it came out bitter.)
    But Jo had learned a thing or two since the first time. It was Ella who went.
    Jo coached her to stand with her toes pointing inward and knock on the doorjamb with one timid fist.
    It worked; Ella was a natural actress.
    A year later, it was five-year-old twins Hattie and Mattie who climbed his chair and teased until he almost laughed and agreed to give them pocket money for magazines, when they went for walks.
    Jo saved. “You never know what you’ll need,” she said, as if they’d break out and hop a train at any moment.
    But the younger girls bought candy, and most of the older girls bought rouge and lipstick. Doris bought a booklet on the canals of New York, to general bafflement.
    Lou hoarded her money for weeks and then bought a cigarette holder.
    â€œYou never know what you’ll need,” she said to Jo, and smiled, her mouth a little thin.
    (It stung, and it must have showed; when Jo turned back to her book, Lou sat beside her, and rested her head on Jo’s shoulder, and turned the pages.
    How Lou knew Jo had finished reading, Jo never figured. Lou had a knack when it came to Jo.)
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    At last there were twelve, from Jo all the way down to Violet, who was born after Jo had already turned thirteen and who still slept in the nursery.
    As soon as Violet was out of diapers, their father dismissed the remaining nanny.
    â€œThe older girls,” he said, “can watch the others.”
    The decree made its way through the house before it came at last, by accident, to the girls it was about.
    Jo heard it from Nanny Harris herself, who was giving the littlest girls, Rose and Lily and Violet, a last scold as she packed.
    â€œAnd because you’ve been so bad,” Nanny Harris was saying, “I have to go away, and where will I be when you want someone to tuck you in at night?”
    â€œYou’ll be lying to other children, I expect,” said Jo from the landing. “Girls, come down.”
    Harris packed the rest of her things alone, with Doris standing guard in the doorway.
    Back in her room, Jo put on a dress and combed her hair until she looked respectable.
    She had decided to speak to their mother.
    It was terrifying—it had been ten years at least since she’d seen her mother’s room, and almost a year since she’d seen her mother, coming into the nursery to try to smile at the toddling Violet—but these were desperate times.
    This couldn’t be. The older sisters couldn’t replace the nannies as overseers for the younger ones. It wasn’t fair to force them into this captivity forever; surely even their mother, who saw so little, could see that.
    But when Jo had summoned the courage to go down the front stairs to the second floor and knock on their mother’s door, the frothy white bed was made up, and the inlaid oak wardrobes were empty.
    That was how Jo found out their mother had, at last, given up on producing a son for the Hamilton patriarch.
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    Jo let herself cry for two minutes, to mourn a mother she’d hardly known, who could do no good for her daughters ever again.
    Then she set it aside.
    (She set everything aside. There was some hollow place inside her that grew and grew.)
    Jo called Lou and Ella and told them, so they would have the crying over with.
    Ella was tenderhearted enough to weep for their mother and not for herself. Lou dashed tears from her eyes as if ridding herself of a bad habit.
    â€œWe could tell them she ran away,” suggested Ella, after the first flood.
    Jo said, “I don’t want to give them impossible ideas.”
    Lou said, “Then divide them. Let’s get it over with.”
    Jo spoke to Hattie and Mattie,