The Midwife of Hope River Page 8

  Afterward I explained everything to Bitsy, just like Mrs. Kelly once taught me. How you have to watch women who’ve had more than five babies for malpresentation and hemorrhage. Their womb is so stretched that a baby can flop around any old which way in there and it doesn’t clamp down well afterward. Bitsy paid attention as if someone’s life might depend upon that knowledge . . . which it someday might.

  Payment, one fine ham and a sunrise.

  Winter

  10

  Solitude

  “I don’t think I should go!” Bitsy worries as I step out of my high boots after feeding Moonlight. She has just taken a bath in the washtub in the middle of the kitchen, and her body, wrapped up in a sheet, steams when the cold air hits the room.

  “Of course you should! The arrangement’s been made, and the MacIntoshes are counting on you. Besides, you’ll have time to spend with your mother. I’m sure she misses you. Katherine and the baby too.” I take my chair and reach for my plate of corn bread and baked beans, salted with the last of the Millers’ ham.

  “But I worry about you all alone way out here, Miss Patience.”

  This really irks me. “Miss Bitsy,” I spit out, “I’ve told you before to drop the ‘Miss Patience.’ You’re not my servant. Anyway, I got along last winter alone and I can do it again for a few weeks this year. You’ll go and have a good time while Mr. MacIntosh pays you.”

  This part I wonder about, since he’s never had the money to pay me.

  “He promised he’d give you five dollars for helping Mary over the holidays,” I continue my argument. “Five bucks would go a long way this winter. Maybe you can even bring home some more coal and tea. Maybe some sugar and flour. That’s cash money, and you know we need it.”

  “But it’s Christmas. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “Really, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in all that.” I know this hurts Bitsy. We’ve talked religion a few times, how I grew up Presbyterian but lost my faith a long time ago. She grew up in the A.M.E. church, African Methodist Episcopalian, and hates to hear me talking like a sinner.

  The discussion is cut short by the sound of an automobile laboring through the mud on Wild Rose Road, and Bitsy runs upstairs to get ready. Mr. MacIntosh is here, right on time, and after he wipes his feet, he takes a seat on the edge of the sofa. He takes a deep breath and looks around curiously.

  “How are Katherine and the baby?” I ask to fill the silence.

  “Good. Great.” He strokes his sandy mustache. Must have been a real looker when he was young, as handsome as Katherine is beautiful, but worry now alters his face. “Her mother and sisters are coming up on the train from Baltimore for the holidays. Bitsy will be a big help.” Despite their new poverty, the MacIntoshes will put on a big show for their relatives. Upstairs Bitsy clumps around, packing her few belongings.

  “Radio out of Wheeling says a massive storm’s coming,” William says, changing the subject. “Big snow from the southwest. They’re always the worst, the ones from the south. You better get some more wood in.” It’s the second time recently that some fellow has felt the need to advise me about basic survival.

  I glance toward the window. The shadows of low gray clouds skim over the mountains. He could be right, but the ground’s still bare and the sun shines intermittently. In five minutes, Bitsy is dressed in a full-length navy coat, a hand-me-down from Katherine MacIntosh, and standing on the porch with tears in her eyes. I hold out her Christmas present, a pair of green mittens that I knit for her, and she hugs me so tight I lose my breath. It’s the first physical sign of affection she has shown, and I find myself grinning. Except by a few of my mothers, I don’t get hugged often.

  “Really, Bitsy, I’ll be okay.”

  Then the sound of the auto fades as it takes the bend on Raccoon Lick and I’m alone. Still no snow, but the air is colder and the pale dove sky has turned slate. “Alone,” I say out loud as I smile, then tidy the kitchen, bring in more wood, and get out my yarn to begin knitting a pair of brown mittens for Thomas.

  While I work, I keep an eye on the clouds.

  December 18, 1929. Rising moon, half full.

  Called to another birth, not four hours after Bitsy left with William MacIntosh.

  Female infant, Dora, 6 pounds, 9 ounces, born to Minnie Boggs, only 14 years old. She surprised me by delivering quickly. Labor eight hours. I only made it for the last hour. Small tear, no repair. Blood loss minimal.

  Minnie wanted to get up and bathe right away, but I said no. Not for one week. Her granny and mother agreed with me, but I doubt she will do what I say. Her husband, Calvin Boggs, ten years her senior at 24, has no control over her either. I found myself missing Bitsy. She would have been a comfort going out after dark, but she’s at the MacIntoshes’ helping Big Mary with Christmas.

  Mercy

  I pull up a chair, balance my cup of peppermint tea on the windowpane, and stare out at the gray day. Spending a few hours with fourteen-year-old Minnie reminds me of my year at the House of Mercy in Chicago. Gray. That was the color of everything, or that’s how I remember it. Gray walls. Gray uniforms. Gray gruel for breakfast. Gray sheets.

  The girls in my dormitory were a mixed lot and, despite their poverty, were nearly as spunky as Minnie. Most were children of immigrants, Polish, Italian, Russian, Irish, new to the country and struggling with English. When their parents died of consumption, cholera, or an industrial accident and they had no family in this new land, there was nowhere else for them to go. Some were thieves, pickpockets, or child streetwalkers. Some were disabled, defective, and unwanted. A few still had one parent who visited.

  Those were the saddest. Their widowed mother or father, working twelve hours a day in a sweatshop or tannery, still couldn’t afford to keep them at home, like the redheaded sisters from Ireland, nine and seven, who cried when their mother came on Sunday and then cried again when she left.

  I’d been doted on, growing up in Deerfield, so I nearly drowned at first in that sea of despair, but I quickly learned to swim and those two years in the House of Mercy changed my life. Living with the poor, the lonely, and the discarded embroidered them into my heart.

  To survive I made myself useful and ingratiated myself with the nuns by singing the youngest girls to sleep and reading to the older ones. I sang hymns: “Rock of Ages,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” “Come to the Savior Now.” I sang popular tunes: “After the Ball Was Over,” “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” . . . anything I could think of.

  None of the girls had been to school. The sisters gave me a worn copy of The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and I read to them at bedtime and on rainy days: “Thumbelina,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Even the girls who didn’t understand English were soothed by my voice. “The Princess and the Pea” was their favorite.

  By day I was a laundress, like my mother had been, in the institution’s basement. We used newspapers to bundle the sheets, and one morning, at the bottom of page 10 in the Chicago Tribune, just under an advertisement for SEARS MODERN HOMES, ARRIVES BY TRAIN, WITH INSTRUCTIONS AND ALL MATERIALS, was an announcement of tryouts for the chorus line at the Majestic Theatre.

  I was well spoken, could sing, and wasn’t unpleasant to look at, so, determined to audition, I waited until dark, then slipped out the side door with my few belongings and the sisters’ worn copy of Hans Christian Andersen. It was the first thing I ever pinched but sadly not the last. Under the cover of darkness, I arrived at Mrs. Ayers’s boardinghouse, the last place I’d lived after my mother’s demise.

  “Child!” she exclaimed. “What’s happened?” She was wearing a rose silk dressing gown with her hair loose, flowing down her back like black rain. I’d never seen her that way before. Having a man had changed her.

  “I know I’m not your responsibility,” I began, “but I beg of you this one kind favor.” I’d read a line like that in the sisters’ storybook. “Lend me your best dress for three hours tomorrow
.” She took me in with open arms, making sure I understood that it was only for the night, and put me to bed in my old room.

  In the morning, Mrs. Ayers, now Mrs. Swartz, pulled a cream ruffled tea dress with lace panels on the sleeves out of a round-topped wooden trunk. It was the dress she had married Mr. Swartz in. We took in the waist with basting thread and her new husband, a kind soul, hired a horse-drawn cab to take me to the Majestic at three.

  When the driver left me off on Monroe, I pinched my cheeks to give them more color, stared up at the ornate Art Deco–inspired hotel, the tallest building in Chicago, and tried to pretend I was used to such places. I told the man with the tooth missing who stood out in front that I was there for the audition, then found myself a seat in the third row.

  A heavily made-up redhead in a low-cut green satin gown was on stage belting out “Sweet Adeline,” and I was glad to have a chance to look around. The colors of the theater were rich and dramatic, with dark gleaming wood, red plush velvet, and silver accents. Box seats rose to the ceiling. I was so enchanted that I didn’t hear the gentleman with the clipboard call my name.

  “Elizabeth? Elizabeth Snyder!” That was before I took on my alias.

  “Oh, me, sir!” (No one I knew ever called me Elizabeth. I’d always been “Lizbeth” to my family. That’s my heart’s name.)

  “Sheet music?”

  I felt silly. “I don’t have any. I’m doing my mother’s favorite song, ‘Oh Promise Me.’ The man with the missing tooth rolled his eyes but perked up when I sang without accompaniment, in my clear alto, “Oh, promise me that someday you and I will take our love together to some sky.”

  I never went back to the House of Mercy, not even to visit, and I felt bad about that, about not saying good-bye to the girls, especially the little ones, but I’d left without permission, stolen their storybook, and lied about my age to get the job at the Majestic. If I returned, they might try to keep me.

  11

  The Majestic

  It was at the Majestic in ’09 that I met my first love, Lawrence Clayton, an artist, scene designer, and student at the Art Institute of Chicago. During rehearsals, I’d stare at his hands as he painted the canvas sets, watch his delicate strokes. Eventually he asked to walk me home. We took the long way.

  Soon it was a regular arrangement. We’d stroll along the boardwalk and throw bread to the pigeons in Washington Park. It didn’t matter what we did, we were so happy just being together.

  I guess I was reckless, but that’s the way of young lovers, isn’t it? I missed one period and then another few. Since I’d never been regular, I wasn’t concerned; in fact, I didn’t know I was pregnant until Cassandra, my roommate, another chorus girl, asked me when I’d last had my monthly.

  It seems strange now that I couldn’t tell I was carrying, never even thought of it, but my mother had died before my first flow and no one had ever discussed the birds and the bees with me.

  When I finally told Lawrence about my pregnancy, he was thrilled but apprehensive. His mother, an Episcopal minister’s daughter, and his father, a professor of history at the University of Iowa, were sure to disapprove. The money for his education came from a small stipend his grandmother had left him, and he depended on his parents for his room and board, but he had little cash. That’s why he worked part-time as a scene designer.

  Finally we could wait no longer. We wanted to marry, and he had to inform his family. (It was easier for me. I had no one to explain things to, no one to judge me.) My beloved was on his way home to ask for their blessing when he was killed in that train wreck at Western Springs. I read about it in the Tribune over soft-boiled eggs and rye toast. The front-page article listed the sixteen dead, Lawrence Frederick Clayton near the top. I traced his name with one finger and then collapsed like a tree cut off at the base. Lawrence was gone, his mouth that had kissed me, his hands that had touched me, his mind that had loved me.

  It was shock that brought on my labor, I’m sure of it, and then the bleeding and the terrible pain. The baby was too early; not that it would have mattered, even a full-term infant couldn’t have survived that kind of blood loss.

  The professor and his grief-stricken wife never learned about me or their son’s child. If the baby had lived, maybe I would have searched for them, but when the blood poured out of my womb, erupted like a flash flood on the Des Plaines River, I knew all was lost.

  Milkmaid

  “I can’t bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.”

  I wake in the little house on Wild Rose Road with tears wetting my pillow. That’s what the matron at Chicago Lying-in Dispensary told me. That’s what she said. “I can’t bring your baby to you, because your baby is dead.” The chatter of the other women in the small hospital ward turned off like a spigot.

  “Dead?” I feel myself shoot down a long dark cold tunnel. This was the baby I’d made with Lawrence, my lover who had died not one week before.

  “Smelling salts!” the nurse yells.

  When I come out of my faint, a cool cloth mats down my long hair and the nurse leans over me. Is she telling the truth? All I can remember is blood running out of me and the night ride in the horse-drawn ambulance down the brick streets.

  But why would she lie? If she wants a baby, infants born out of wedlock are a dime a dozen. I should know. I had lived in the House of Mercy, just one of the scores of foundling and orphan asylums in Chicago.

  The nurse scrapes a chair across the wooden floor and sits down beside me, but she isn’t interested in easing my grief. She’s a hawk eyeing her prey. I am just sixteen.

  “Elizabeth, if you’ll join the staff as a wet nurse,” she puts on the pressure, “you won’t have to go to an orphanage or back on the streets. You’ll be given a bed in the room with the other wet nurses, and you’ll have plenty of food. We only take healthy and well-spoken young women. It’s a respectable profession . . . and,” she threatens, “if you don’t get the milk out, your breasts will crack and fester.”

  My eyes fill. I had planned to breastfeed, as my poor deceased mother did and all sensible women do, but I have no baby to suckle, and let’s face it, no home or livelihood either. My friends from the Majestic don’t know where I am or what’s happened to me. After Lawrence died, I never went back to the theater . . . just couldn’t walk in there all pregnant and weeping.

  Now here I am alone with milk dripping down my front and an offer of good food and shelter. It seems the easiest way. I put my hands on my breasts, already as hard as doorknobs. I thought there were no tears left, but the well of sorrow never runs dry.

  There were three of us then, Wilma, Nola, and I. Wilma was twenty and had been a wet nurse the longest. When her milk dried up, to get more, she went out and got pregnant again, on purpose. After the birth, Dr. Shane took her unwanted baby home to his wife, who couldn’t have one.

  The other wet nurse—she came after me—was Nola. The nurses found her on the steps of the hospital, shivering in the cold, breast milk frozen on her thin cloak, and the matron took her in eagerly. She’d delivered at home with a midwife, but her pa had taken her baby because Nola was only thirteen. Then he’d sold it.

  When we weren’t needed for suckling, the three of us were assigned to housekeeping; none of the dirty jobs like emptying bedpans, just dusting and mopping, and we weren’t allowed in the rooms when patients had fevers either. That’s why we called each other milkmaids, because of our cleaning duties.

  I wasn’t bitter. We laughed when we said it: Milkmaid . . . “Milkmaid” sounded nicer than “wet nurse.”

  12

  Advent

  Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . with Bitsy gone, my only company is my dogs, Emma and Sasha; my calico cat, Buster; and Mrs. Kelly’s ornate black-and-gold mantel clock. Still no change in the weather, but on a trip to the barn the air smells like snow, a clean winter smell.

  When Mrs. Kelly and I first moved here, I felt I’d been dropped into a foreign land, Greenland or maybe Madagascar
; everything was so strange. I’d been cut adrift. And I was scared too. For the past twenty years I’d lived in the city. I was scared of snakes and bears and skunks. Scared of hoot owls and night noises. Scared of the dark and the huge sky, so lonely without humans around. It wasn’t so strange for Sophie; she’d grown up in Torrington, just forty miles away, had gone to nursing school there before moving to Pittsburgh, and had spent summers on the farm with her grandparents.

  It was hard at first to get used to no indoor plumbing, electricity, or access to a telephone, but over the last few years I’ve adapted. The lack of machine noises soothes me. The yellow kerosene lamplight is restful. Even the outhouse isn’t so bad. It gets you outside, and there’s always something to see. Today four mallards came in from the north and landed in the yard. I ran inside to get cornmeal, but when I came back they were gone, heading south.

  Around ten, just before bed when I go outside to be sure the barn is secure, I notice that a wind has come up, but still no snow. I lift my head, scanning the sky, as my father, the sailor, would do. Clouds scuttle past the moon, moving fast, blotting out stars. Later, when I get up to use the porcelain potty that I keep, on cold nights, behind the bedroom door, I stop at the window. A few lazy flakes float down like torn paper. “There’s the big storm MacIntosh warned me about!” I think.

  The next time I stir, it’s morning and my bedroom is filled with a strange white light. Outside, every bush and tree, every limb and twig is laced with snow, a fairy wonderland. I throw on my robe and run downstairs to build up the fire. There’s eight inches of powder on the fence rail, and the flakes are still falling.