Bedtime Story
(c) 2006 David Conlin McLeod
On the corner of Spruce and Hillside Street, surrounded by an elaborate, decorative fence of iron bars, there is a three story brownstone building. It stands on the corner of two tree lined streets in the midst of a small city neighborhood of old tenement buildings, corner liquor stores, graffiti covered nail salons, boarded up pawn shops, and seedy looking adult video stores. The brownstone building is unique in the sense that it is clean, and charming. It stands out boldly and begs to be noticed. The windows no longer have bars or fences on them. The grassy lawns are lush and green and free of trash and strewn bits of paper or discarded cans and soft drink cups. The park bench behind the iron fence is freshly painted a nice autumn red color too.
These days the building has been remodeled inside and refurbished. New walls, new carpeting, new light fixtures, and even framed gallery quality art pieces adorn the foyers and hallways. It is a luxury apartment building- or at least it seems to want to be a luxury apartment building. Back in 1898 or around the turn of the century however, this building once served as an orphanage for young displaced or neglected girls. It was a home for those who had no family.
I found this building very intriguing, but also very inviting. As I considered my many options of where to live and where to plant my stakes, I came to consider this building often. Choosing my first apartment all on my own, I was intimidated by the choices and the task itself of finding a place that could meet my meager budget and suit my needs. I was still in college and needed to find a place relatively close to campus. Yet I wanted to find a place that seemed far away from my past.
When I first discovered this brownstone building, I was immediately doubtful. Its manicured lawns, its clean exterior, and attractive location seemed too good to be true. I assumed that renting any one of the apartment suites or studios would be well beyond my means. I assumed only a certain class of person could afford to live in such pleasant surroundings. I would have given up on this building and gone on to the next prospect if not for a strange feeling that overcame me as I examined the building’s main entrance.
I felt a nervous flutter in the depths of my belly and felt a slight chill up my spine as my eyes caught sight of a small bronze plaque and a simple polished wood sign beside the entrance. “Spruce Street Home for Girls- Est. 1898,” the sign read. “Dedicated to Mrs. Alice Pettigrew, a mother to all lost souls,” read the bronze plaque.
Stepping back and away for a moment, my body froze and I took a long pause to collect myself for suddenly a million thoughts danced wildly in my mind. My thoughts seemed to multiply and divide themselves in strange and frightening ways. My thoughts and feelings were both excited and yet frightened and even gloomy and somber. I felt forced to consider not only the building’s past, but my own. I felt hopeful of finding a place to call my own, but was growing overwhelmed with feelings of longing. I felt burdened with old feelings of loneliness.
‘Would I be doomed to repeat history?’ I caught myself wondering. ‘Would I be forced to ride the ripples and waves I’ve already sailed before?’
My story might be simple enough to tell. The year I was born, the war that tore my home and family apart was just beginning to finally end. American troops had just pulled out of Saigon as the Viet Cong stormed their embassy and took control of the city. Everywhere else in Vietnam, other cities and villages were being overrun and assaulted. Homes were broken into or destroyed. Families were pulled apart and dragged away in different directions. Brothers, sons, and fathers were being recruited by the North Vietnamese armies or by local gangs and resistance fighters who hoped to force out the American presence. Women and children were being shuttled away from their homes to be sent elsewhere- to be herded like human cattle for sale or trade to local flesh peddlers or probably to Hanoi or other places in the north where they’d eventually end up tossed to the streets or forced to live in brothels anyway. I was still an infant, so even today I can only honestly guess where the women and children really went once their fathers and brothers and sons were taken away. Yet it seemed reasonable to assume the worst possible case and assume that had I not been eventually rescued from Vietnam, I would have ended up in the streets somewhere likely selling myself for food scraps and nights in some stranger’s bed.
What I do know for certain was that my father was an American soldier killed just before I was born. My mother was Vietnamese. I know these things because of the Red Cross nurse who took me in shortly after my mother left me to flee into the country. My mother went to an army hospital in Saigon and gave birth to me just two weeks before the American embassy fell. I was born with blue-grey American eyes, the nurse told me years later. Yet I had my mother’s complexion, hair, and features.
My mother left me with the Red Cross nurse and fled into the countryside never to be seen or heard from again. To this day no-one knows why she fled. Yet while I remained in the hospital, the Red Cross nurse took care of me and managed to smuggle me out of the country as the Americans pulled out of Vietnam. She had taken me with her and placed around my neck the dog tags of a dead American soldier- hoping that the American dog tags would ensure me asylum in the United States. Though I do not know for certain that the dog tags belonged to my American father or not, I do know that my last name is the same as that found on the dog tags- the tags that saved my life. I still wear the dog tags around my neck by the way. As for my real father, I tell myself he must have died; why else would he be unable to claim me? The nurse seemed to think he might have been killed in action too. Maybe it’s convenient to think these things are true despite the absence of fact, but it feels easier on the soul. It’s easier to say a father died than to say he abandoned you out of shame for having a child of mixed race.
I was brought to the states and sent to an orphanage. Why? Because no-one would claim me or take in a Vietnamese girl. The dog tags belonged to a dead man with a family who wanted nothing to do with me. They may have loved their son dearly, but they resented the war that claimed his life. They wanted nothing in their lives to remind them of the war- least of all a Vietnamese girl who bore their son’s blue-grey eyes. Were they cold-hearted? Were they racist? Maybe. Maybe they simply hated Vietnam. Could I blame them for not taking me in? No. In truth, I probably didn’t belong to their son or anyone else’s American son- not really. Maybe by rare chance two very different lives came together. An American soldier finds a pretty Vietnamese girl who is taken aback by his charm and they agree to spend the night with each other. One thing leads to another. For one night they fall in love or in lust. Then the man is reminded of the war he must fight and abruptly leaves the woman behind once he is satisfied… and once again lives drift apart.
I grew up in an orphanage- not unlike the brownstone building I was admiring from a nervous distance. I was put up in a room apart from the other orphans. Each day I was cleaned, fed, and comforted by a small staff of matrons and nurses. When I was five I was taught my numbers and letters and gradually allowed to attend the orphanage school. I was like a little wide-eyed sponge ready and eager to soak up everything of the world around me. I learned to read, write, and tried to excel in every subject I was taught in hopes that I would earn praise and respect. Each year I stayed in the orphanage I learned more about myself and about why I was generally separated from the other orphans. The more I learned, the more I wanted that respect.
Rather than tell you stories of racism, sadness, and sorrow, let me get back to the brownstone building and the weird feelings I experienced as I stood beside the main gate.
I feared I was somehow about to repeat history. I felt as an orphan finding my first apartment in the city, the last place I would want to find myself is back in an orphanage. Yet I was charmed by the brownstone building. Though I longed for a home or a place that could feel like a home more than an institution where children and young women like me were penned up and segregated, I found myself drawn to the brownstone apartment building sensing a certain welcome feeling. The welcome feeling seemed to caress me like a mother’s embrace.
There were no bars or fences on the windows. In fact the windows had curtains and shades. The entrance doors were glass and not wood or metal. The doors were like windows themselves letting you see inside and out. The gate was decorative and easy to open and close- so I stepped past the gate and stepped inside the building.
* * *
I spent the first night in my new apartment feeling a whole range of emotions. I was excited to have a place all my own with a view of tree lined streets and a little playground across the street. I was proud of myself at having my own things in my own space. I had a bed I could call my own and a refrigerator and television I didn’t have to share. My food filled my cupboards and pantry and it was my cooking that filled my apartment with the smells of spices and sauces. More importantly, my clothes filled my closets. For a girl growing up having to share everything or wear hand-me-downs, it’s a big thing to finally have things that are yours and yours alone.
That night I explored my room and settled by the window facing the playground with a cup of hot tea cupped in my hands. I sat there in my little sofa chair and stared out at the evening sky and the late autumn leaves and the playground where I imagined the young orphan girls of long ago might have played. I took long breaths and exhaled all my worries and fears and settled into my sofa feeling all at once relieved.
‘Maybe orphans are meant to stay among orphans.’ I pondered.
As I settled in my sofa and began to dose off, I heard what sounded like the pitter-patter of bare feet padding across my kitchen. I glanced over my shoulder and noted that the lights had dimmed or flickered off, leaving me sitting amidst the soft glow of my reading lamp set beside me. I blinked and rubbed my tired eyes and thought nothing of this till I heard the sounds of a chair being pulled across the carpet. I sat up and glanced over at the living room table and noticed something strange. My one chair had been pulled away from the table and set at an odd angle and there on the table was a book that had obviously not been there before.
I shot up from my seat and went to the table and examined the book. It was a children’s storybook. It was thick and heavy and well worn. I rubbed my hands along the hardcover and along its spine and felt a subtle chill run up my arms. This book was very old, yet sturdy. I settled into my chair and found myself examining the pages and title page.
No sooner had I read the title aloud when I felt the presence of someone in my apartment coming up behind me. I heard the soft pitter-patter of feet scampering across my living room and suddenly the window curtains unfurled and the shades had been pulled down. The kitchen clock above the sink clicked eight o’clock and suddenly a pale, willowy little girl in a tattered nightgown appeared behind me with a pillow tucked under her arm- one of my pillows. She stood and looked up at me with pale blue eyes and a soft, pleading lower lip. She had sad eyes and she trembled beside me. She raised her hand and indicated with a slender, shaking finger the book on the table.
Frozen and bewildered, I swept my eyes all over this girl. Where did she come from? How did she get here? Was she a ghost or was she real? What did she want?
The girl pointed once more at the book and leaned her head over my shoulder and snuggled beside me. I felt her warm breath against my cheek and felt her hand rubbing against my back. I thought I heard a slight moan escape her lips. My eyes wandered over the little girl’s face.
She was a young girl- maybe six or seven years old. She was pale like snow. She looked cold. Her pouting lips and sad eyes told me she was an orphan. An orphan knows when she comes across another orphan. You just know. I looked down at her tattered nightgown and glanced back up at her face. She wanted to be read to. She wanted to hear a story.
Ghost or apparition or figment of my imagination, she was still a little girl- an orphan like me. In her world it was her bedtime. In her world, that somehow crossed paths with mine, it was story time and time for bed. Maybe in the past there was a nurse or matron or governess accustomed to tucking this girl in her bed at night. Maybe in her past this nurse or matron sat beside her on her bed and read her a story to coax her to sleep.
Had a become this girl’s new matron or governess? I picked up the book and took myself to the sofa by the reading lamp and settled to read; inviting the girl to follow beside me and settle where she liked.
Who was I to be afraid of a little girl? Who was I to ask this girl to leave? In her time this apartment might have been her bedroom. This was likely her place before it became mine- then again, it was most likely our place together- set aside for us girls set aside from everyone else.
So I settled and began to read from the storybook. In the back of my mind I wondered though about this girl and what her story was. How did she come to be an orphan? How did she come to live here and make herself known to me? Was I chosen? Had she picked me out especially? Or by some magic did I choose this place in hopes of finding someone like myself?
“Once upon a time, long, long ago… there lived a little girl,” I began to read.
The little girl propped my pillow against my leg and settled there beside me on the sofa and laid her head upon it and closed her eyes. In moments she snored and murmured. I read the first story in the book. The story was about a little girl in Copenhagen selling matches for copper coins and bits of food. The story was “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Anderson.
It was a sad story with a seemingly sad ending, but then I thought as the girl continued to sleep upon my lap with the passing of hours, that there must have been relief for the little match girl in the end. Upon passing from the world of cold, sadness, and depression; into the heavens and into the arms of the angels, she must have known comfort and relief then.
In a strange moment of realization, as I looked up from the book and glanced behind me at the slivers of light peeking through my window, I felt the girl fade away into the streaming sunlight. In that moment of realization I felt as perhaps Hans Christian Anderson might have felt as he sat back and re-read his story, that the poor little match girl might very well have found her relief in heaven, just as maybe I felt that this little visitor of mine had perhaps found her relief in a bedtime story read to her by a lonely Vietnamese girl in an apartment on the corner of Spruce and Hillside Street, in a building dedicated to Mrs. Alice Pettigrew, finder of lost souls.
(c) 2006 David Conlin McLeod
On the corner of Spruce and Hillside Street, surrounded by an elaborate, decorative fence of iron bars, there is a three story brownstone building. It stands on the corner of two tree lined streets in the midst of a small city neighborhood of old tenement buildings, corner liquor stores, graffiti covered nail salons, boarded up pawn shops, and seedy looking adult video stores. The brownstone building is unique in the sense that it is clean, and charming. It stands out boldly and begs to be noticed. The windows no longer have bars or fences on them. The grassy lawns are lush and green and free of trash and strewn bits of paper or discarded cans and soft drink cups. The park bench behind the iron fence is freshly painted a nice autumn red color too.
These days the building has been remodeled inside and refurbished. New walls, new carpeting, new light fixtures, and even framed gallery quality art pieces adorn the foyers and hallways. It is a luxury apartment building- or at least it seems to want to be a luxury apartment building. Back in 1898 or around the turn of the century however, this building once served as an orphanage for young displaced or neglected girls. It was a home for those who had no family.
I found this building very intriguing, but also very inviting. As I considered my many options of where to live and where to plant my stakes, I came to consider this building often. Choosing my first apartment all on my own, I was intimidated by the choices and the task itself of finding a place that could meet my meager budget and suit my needs. I was still in college and needed to find a place relatively close to campus. Yet I wanted to find a place that seemed far away from my past.
When I first discovered this brownstone building, I was immediately doubtful. Its manicured lawns, its clean exterior, and attractive location seemed too good to be true. I assumed that renting any one of the apartment suites or studios would be well beyond my means. I assumed only a certain class of person could afford to live in such pleasant surroundings. I would have given up on this building and gone on to the next prospect if not for a strange feeling that overcame me as I examined the building’s main entrance.
I felt a nervous flutter in the depths of my belly and felt a slight chill up my spine as my eyes caught sight of a small bronze plaque and a simple polished wood sign beside the entrance. “Spruce Street Home for Girls- Est. 1898,” the sign read. “Dedicated to Mrs. Alice Pettigrew, a mother to all lost souls,” read the bronze plaque.
Stepping back and away for a moment, my body froze and I took a long pause to collect myself for suddenly a million thoughts danced wildly in my mind. My thoughts seemed to multiply and divide themselves in strange and frightening ways. My thoughts and feelings were both excited and yet frightened and even gloomy and somber. I felt forced to consider not only the building’s past, but my own. I felt hopeful of finding a place to call my own, but was growing overwhelmed with feelings of longing. I felt burdened with old feelings of loneliness.
‘Would I be doomed to repeat history?’ I caught myself wondering. ‘Would I be forced to ride the ripples and waves I’ve already sailed before?’
My story might be simple enough to tell. The year I was born, the war that tore my home and family apart was just beginning to finally end. American troops had just pulled out of Saigon as the Viet Cong stormed their embassy and took control of the city. Everywhere else in Vietnam, other cities and villages were being overrun and assaulted. Homes were broken into or destroyed. Families were pulled apart and dragged away in different directions. Brothers, sons, and fathers were being recruited by the North Vietnamese armies or by local gangs and resistance fighters who hoped to force out the American presence. Women and children were being shuttled away from their homes to be sent elsewhere- to be herded like human cattle for sale or trade to local flesh peddlers or probably to Hanoi or other places in the north where they’d eventually end up tossed to the streets or forced to live in brothels anyway. I was still an infant, so even today I can only honestly guess where the women and children really went once their fathers and brothers and sons were taken away. Yet it seemed reasonable to assume the worst possible case and assume that had I not been eventually rescued from Vietnam, I would have ended up in the streets somewhere likely selling myself for food scraps and nights in some stranger’s bed.
What I do know for certain was that my father was an American soldier killed just before I was born. My mother was Vietnamese. I know these things because of the Red Cross nurse who took me in shortly after my mother left me to flee into the country. My mother went to an army hospital in Saigon and gave birth to me just two weeks before the American embassy fell. I was born with blue-grey American eyes, the nurse told me years later. Yet I had my mother’s complexion, hair, and features.
My mother left me with the Red Cross nurse and fled into the countryside never to be seen or heard from again. To this day no-one knows why she fled. Yet while I remained in the hospital, the Red Cross nurse took care of me and managed to smuggle me out of the country as the Americans pulled out of Vietnam. She had taken me with her and placed around my neck the dog tags of a dead American soldier- hoping that the American dog tags would ensure me asylum in the United States. Though I do not know for certain that the dog tags belonged to my American father or not, I do know that my last name is the same as that found on the dog tags- the tags that saved my life. I still wear the dog tags around my neck by the way. As for my real father, I tell myself he must have died; why else would he be unable to claim me? The nurse seemed to think he might have been killed in action too. Maybe it’s convenient to think these things are true despite the absence of fact, but it feels easier on the soul. It’s easier to say a father died than to say he abandoned you out of shame for having a child of mixed race.
I was brought to the states and sent to an orphanage. Why? Because no-one would claim me or take in a Vietnamese girl. The dog tags belonged to a dead man with a family who wanted nothing to do with me. They may have loved their son dearly, but they resented the war that claimed his life. They wanted nothing in their lives to remind them of the war- least of all a Vietnamese girl who bore their son’s blue-grey eyes. Were they cold-hearted? Were they racist? Maybe. Maybe they simply hated Vietnam. Could I blame them for not taking me in? No. In truth, I probably didn’t belong to their son or anyone else’s American son- not really. Maybe by rare chance two very different lives came together. An American soldier finds a pretty Vietnamese girl who is taken aback by his charm and they agree to spend the night with each other. One thing leads to another. For one night they fall in love or in lust. Then the man is reminded of the war he must fight and abruptly leaves the woman behind once he is satisfied… and once again lives drift apart.
I grew up in an orphanage- not unlike the brownstone building I was admiring from a nervous distance. I was put up in a room apart from the other orphans. Each day I was cleaned, fed, and comforted by a small staff of matrons and nurses. When I was five I was taught my numbers and letters and gradually allowed to attend the orphanage school. I was like a little wide-eyed sponge ready and eager to soak up everything of the world around me. I learned to read, write, and tried to excel in every subject I was taught in hopes that I would earn praise and respect. Each year I stayed in the orphanage I learned more about myself and about why I was generally separated from the other orphans. The more I learned, the more I wanted that respect.
Rather than tell you stories of racism, sadness, and sorrow, let me get back to the brownstone building and the weird feelings I experienced as I stood beside the main gate.
I feared I was somehow about to repeat history. I felt as an orphan finding my first apartment in the city, the last place I would want to find myself is back in an orphanage. Yet I was charmed by the brownstone building. Though I longed for a home or a place that could feel like a home more than an institution where children and young women like me were penned up and segregated, I found myself drawn to the brownstone apartment building sensing a certain welcome feeling. The welcome feeling seemed to caress me like a mother’s embrace.
There were no bars or fences on the windows. In fact the windows had curtains and shades. The entrance doors were glass and not wood or metal. The doors were like windows themselves letting you see inside and out. The gate was decorative and easy to open and close- so I stepped past the gate and stepped inside the building.
* * *
I spent the first night in my new apartment feeling a whole range of emotions. I was excited to have a place all my own with a view of tree lined streets and a little playground across the street. I was proud of myself at having my own things in my own space. I had a bed I could call my own and a refrigerator and television I didn’t have to share. My food filled my cupboards and pantry and it was my cooking that filled my apartment with the smells of spices and sauces. More importantly, my clothes filled my closets. For a girl growing up having to share everything or wear hand-me-downs, it’s a big thing to finally have things that are yours and yours alone.
That night I explored my room and settled by the window facing the playground with a cup of hot tea cupped in my hands. I sat there in my little sofa chair and stared out at the evening sky and the late autumn leaves and the playground where I imagined the young orphan girls of long ago might have played. I took long breaths and exhaled all my worries and fears and settled into my sofa feeling all at once relieved.
‘Maybe orphans are meant to stay among orphans.’ I pondered.
As I settled in my sofa and began to dose off, I heard what sounded like the pitter-patter of bare feet padding across my kitchen. I glanced over my shoulder and noted that the lights had dimmed or flickered off, leaving me sitting amidst the soft glow of my reading lamp set beside me. I blinked and rubbed my tired eyes and thought nothing of this till I heard the sounds of a chair being pulled across the carpet. I sat up and glanced over at the living room table and noticed something strange. My one chair had been pulled away from the table and set at an odd angle and there on the table was a book that had obviously not been there before.
I shot up from my seat and went to the table and examined the book. It was a children’s storybook. It was thick and heavy and well worn. I rubbed my hands along the hardcover and along its spine and felt a subtle chill run up my arms. This book was very old, yet sturdy. I settled into my chair and found myself examining the pages and title page.
No sooner had I read the title aloud when I felt the presence of someone in my apartment coming up behind me. I heard the soft pitter-patter of feet scampering across my living room and suddenly the window curtains unfurled and the shades had been pulled down. The kitchen clock above the sink clicked eight o’clock and suddenly a pale, willowy little girl in a tattered nightgown appeared behind me with a pillow tucked under her arm- one of my pillows. She stood and looked up at me with pale blue eyes and a soft, pleading lower lip. She had sad eyes and she trembled beside me. She raised her hand and indicated with a slender, shaking finger the book on the table.
Frozen and bewildered, I swept my eyes all over this girl. Where did she come from? How did she get here? Was she a ghost or was she real? What did she want?
The girl pointed once more at the book and leaned her head over my shoulder and snuggled beside me. I felt her warm breath against my cheek and felt her hand rubbing against my back. I thought I heard a slight moan escape her lips. My eyes wandered over the little girl’s face.
She was a young girl- maybe six or seven years old. She was pale like snow. She looked cold. Her pouting lips and sad eyes told me she was an orphan. An orphan knows when she comes across another orphan. You just know. I looked down at her tattered nightgown and glanced back up at her face. She wanted to be read to. She wanted to hear a story.
Ghost or apparition or figment of my imagination, she was still a little girl- an orphan like me. In her world it was her bedtime. In her world, that somehow crossed paths with mine, it was story time and time for bed. Maybe in the past there was a nurse or matron or governess accustomed to tucking this girl in her bed at night. Maybe in her past this nurse or matron sat beside her on her bed and read her a story to coax her to sleep.
Had a become this girl’s new matron or governess? I picked up the book and took myself to the sofa by the reading lamp and settled to read; inviting the girl to follow beside me and settle where she liked.
Who was I to be afraid of a little girl? Who was I to ask this girl to leave? In her time this apartment might have been her bedroom. This was likely her place before it became mine- then again, it was most likely our place together- set aside for us girls set aside from everyone else.
So I settled and began to read from the storybook. In the back of my mind I wondered though about this girl and what her story was. How did she come to be an orphan? How did she come to live here and make herself known to me? Was I chosen? Had she picked me out especially? Or by some magic did I choose this place in hopes of finding someone like myself?
“Once upon a time, long, long ago… there lived a little girl,” I began to read.
The little girl propped my pillow against my leg and settled there beside me on the sofa and laid her head upon it and closed her eyes. In moments she snored and murmured. I read the first story in the book. The story was about a little girl in Copenhagen selling matches for copper coins and bits of food. The story was “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Anderson.
It was a sad story with a seemingly sad ending, but then I thought as the girl continued to sleep upon my lap with the passing of hours, that there must have been relief for the little match girl in the end. Upon passing from the world of cold, sadness, and depression; into the heavens and into the arms of the angels, she must have known comfort and relief then.
In a strange moment of realization, as I looked up from the book and glanced behind me at the slivers of light peeking through my window, I felt the girl fade away into the streaming sunlight. In that moment of realization I felt as perhaps Hans Christian Anderson might have felt as he sat back and re-read his story, that the poor little match girl might very well have found her relief in heaven, just as maybe I felt that this little visitor of mine had perhaps found her relief in a bedtime story read to her by a lonely Vietnamese girl in an apartment on the corner of Spruce and Hillside Street, in a building dedicated to Mrs. Alice Pettigrew, finder of lost souls.
posted by The Vampire, David at 9:28 PM
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