by Nora Carroll
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she finally said, like a kid in the middle of a scolding who can’t think of any other way to get away.
“Of course, most other gemstones have problematic political issues attached, and I suppose you could make a moral argument that if the diamond was mined in the Rhodesian era . . . ”
Russ just kept talking as Jess turned and walked back toward the yellow light on the cottage porch; he was, in fact, a little like a radio, left on so that a soothing, unintelligible rhythm could be heard from another room.
The next morning, Toni Barnes phoned and said that Phelps had been called back to Saint Louis on urgent business, so the closing would be delayed for another twenty-four hours. Jess and Russ would have to postpone their departure for one more day. Russ would be coming back in August for the actual shoot. Jess did not plan to accompany him. Phelps and Martha had so wanted the cottage as it was, with the Indian collection, that they had matched the appraiser’s generous lump-sum estimate. Jess could scarcely believe the numbers involved—enough to put a generous down payment on a house in New Jersey, where she could have a little yard of her own.
She had chosen a tiny number of things to take with her: the file with Margaret’s birth certificate, the packet of Chapin Flagg’s letters, and the ghostly picture of her aunt who had drowned. The few papers looked small and insubstantial laid out on the pink-and-white bedspread.
As she removed the picture of Lila from its tarnished silver-plate frame, a small newspaper clipping, dark orange with age, slipped out from between the picture and the velveteen backing and fluttered to the floor. Jess picked up the clipping, dated at the top June 5, 1922. The headline read: “Drowning at Wequetona Club.”
Last Thursday, May 30, Lila Tretheway Flagg, wife of Chapin Flagg of Wequetona Club and Winnetka, Illinois, daughter of the late Harris Tretheway of Brenton, Texas, drowned in Pine Lake. Despite efforts by Capt. Thomas Cleves, a visitor to Wequetona, and club member Dr. George Lewis, Mrs. Flagg could not be revived. The memorial service will be held tomorrow at the Ironton Congregational Church. She is survived by her mother Mrs. Ada Louise Tretheway and her sister Margaret Adele Tretheway, both of Wequetona Club.
Jess stared at the clipping, unsure what to do with it. It seemed hard to throw these documents away, and yet the cottage was going to another family. After all, what difference did it make? After a moment’s hesitation, she let it drop into the wastepaper bin, watching it fluttering until it came to rest on top of used Kleenexes and tangles of hair.
As for the photo albums, she left them where they were, on the shelf, next to the moldering books on botany and trout fishing and golf. She figured that in a generation or two, the Whitmires would forget that these were not their own ancestors, Phelps and Martha’s grandchildren looking with wonder at the strange wide-eyed faces in the sepia prints that looked mutely out at them, unable to tell their stories.
Time to get on with it. Jess looked once more at the little pile of things that were left, gazing for a moment at the picture of Lila, puzzling momentarily over the packet of letters from Chapin, with one that looked more recent than the rest. Then, the urge to pack took over. Moving briskly, she bound the documents carefully in brown kraft paper, sealing the edges at perfect right angles with clear packing tape. She labeled the package with black marker in neat block script with her name and address in New York. As an afterthought, she added: Documents: Journey’s End. She liked the tidy, finished way that the package looked. It could fit neatly in a suitcase.
That task finished, Jess now felt that time hung heavy upon her. She was ready to leave, all packed up. The extra twenty-four hours seemed needlessly painful, a kind of purgatory. She had been skirting Russ all morning, unable to look at him except crosswise. She had feigned sleep when he woke up, drunk her coffee in the kitchen while he waited on the porch. She wasn’t sure that he noticed she was avoiding him.
Jess reached down and plucked the yellowed obituary from its resting place among the crumpled tissues in the wastepaper basket. She smoothed the wrinkled paper with the side of her hand against the cool glass tabletop of her grandmother’s desk, and reread the few words written there.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MAMIE
It was raining so hard the night we left, a deluge, a downpour as cold and dense as a rain could possibly be. It seemed to me that the world had turned upside down, that the lake was up and the sky was down and the cold contents of the lake were dropping on us, drowning us in their fury. Thomas and I stumbled down the back road, unable to see more than a few paces in front of us. He carried the two little bags and I had my bundle gripped tightly in my arms, so tightly that I thought for sure that I was harming it, but I was afraid to grip any looser. It was only Thomas’s firm hold on my arm that kept me going. The pressure of his broad hand on my upper arm was like eyes to see with, like one warm spot in a body that felt so cold that I would have sworn there was no more blood coursing through my veins. Thomas Cleves had big feet—I remember the sight of his size-twelve boots stomping through puddles and I kept looking at those puddles feeling afraid, afraid that beneath a puddle there was an infinite depth of water and that he would sink down and disappear in front of me, and leave me alone on that back road, blinded by rain and too cold for my heart to keep on beating in my rib cage.
But stomp, stomp, his boots stayed the course, good and solid, and I followed him, away from the cottages, past the stone gates, and up the hill to the road, just a wet, dark ribbon in the night. And there we stood, waiting for headlights, believing that by the grace of God we would see headlights. I held my little damp bundle to my cold bosom and hoped that there was somehow enough warmth in me to maintain a tiny spark of life.
If I have ever put myself in the hands of the good Lord, it was that night. And if I have ever felt a cold, hollow, empty place inside that worried that the good Lord wasn’t listening, it was that night too. I felt the muddy hem of my dress knocking against my legs, and I felt my curls pulling loose from their pins and clinging to my forehead as I looked up that wet, empty road, hugging my bundle with fear and calling to the Lord in the loudest unspoken voice that I had, willing that curtain of water obscuring the road to part.
I often wonder, looking back, how long we would have stood there. I remember, and Lord forgive me this, that the longer we stood there shivering, the more the bundle in my arms felt heavy, the more I wondered if I had enough strength to carry out my plan, and I started eyeing the clumps of bushes on the side of the road. But the waters did part that night, the rain sliced apart by headlights, a tinny Model T truck rattling through, and we climbed in and got carried down that wet road to our destiny, and the bulrushes I had been contemplating, there by the side of the road, were left behind us, spooling away farther and farther as that good farmer took us south in his truck toward Indiana, not saying a word about our sorry bedraggledness, nor even taking notice of the damp bundle of rags on my lap that from time to time took to mewling like a pitiful half-drowned cat.
Nowadays, everybody drives up in Michigan, but in those days the roads were so poor that even to make it down to Alpena was a full night’s journey. The good farmer took us all the way down there without asking any questions, and I didn’t know which way to look, nor what to do, when the little bundle set up a steady and persistent howl, but after a while it gave up and then silence again, and I do believe I must have even fallen asleep. I just remember my head banging against the stays of the cover that the driver had put up because of the rain. At the train station, we got out and thanked him, then I sat on a park bench by the lake while Thomas went and rounded up some evaporated milk and a clean, dry length of flannel. We looked at that little baby with the smoke-blue eyes with a kind of nervous wonder. Sure enough if it wasn’t still bawling and breathing. If ever there was a miracle, it seemed to be that.
The home for foundlings and orphans in LaSalle, Indiana. That was our destination. That was t
he place Thomas had told me about, the name floating up to me through the fog of my intense confusion. The little church in Ironton, our summer church, sent a collection box there every year. I didn’t have any idea where LaSalle was, but I knew that Indiana couldn’t be that far away.
It is a testament to our love that I went to Thomas first. Without thought or plan, I cut right through those woods to the Cleves cottage, holding that strange bundle wrapped in my own damp sweater. I presented myself before my beloved with my awkward burden, rapping on the window under cover of darkness, heedless that almost any member of his family could have heard my solicitation. He came out into that night with me, cloud cover already thick, though the rain had not yet started to fall, and walked into the dark forest with me.
“Thomas,” I said, looking up at that face, trying to see into his brown eyes in the shadows. “Lila left the baby . . . in the woods . . . I found it . . . Thomas . . . can you . . . ?”
“Mamie,” he said, and I couldn’t see his face because the night was too dark.
“I need . . . I need to take it away,” I whispered.
“Mamie,” Thomas said, his voice gentle. “If you run away, you will be disgraced.”
The bundle I held in my arms, wriggling, wrapped in my sweater, seemed unreal and insignificant; the bulk of Thomas’s warm presence seemed real and great. I looked at his silhouette against the bits of indigo sky and the black trunks of trees. I searched his face for answers, but it was too dark out for me to see. My nostrils were full of him though, of the smell of his body.
“If I stay, then the disgrace is upon my sister, a disgrace she will never be able to rectify from the grave.” That was the first time that I had linked those two ideas, my sister and the grave. I could feel my body shivering, colder than ice. I did not cry, as I truly believe that my tears were too frozen to flow.
“Mamie,” Thomas said, peering dubiously in the shadow toward the shapeless white bundle in my arms, “are you sure the baby is still alive?”
At that very moment, the little bundle started howling, first feeble, then more convinced. I could feel the stirring in my arms like the very force of life. And like I was born knowing how, I nestled that bundle against my bosom and set up a rocking motion with my hips that came from somewhere inside I didn’t know about.
If I were a woman with a better imagination, would things have come out differently? Standing there in that dark wood, holding that poor, accursed orphan babe, I couldn’t think of any path that led back through the woods to Journey’s End. I did not see how to walk up to my mother in her wild-eyed craziness and hand her that tiny kernel of life that had turned up on my path in the woods. I could only see going forward.
“Couldn’t you come with me?” I said, speaking up a little louder since the baby was wailing. “We could run away.”
Thomas did not answer.
“There’s a home in Indiana. We send a church box there. We could take the baby there, and leave it.”
For a long moment, Thomas was silent, though I could feel him looking at me, and smell him, and feel the heat coming off his body. Then, his big strong hand circled the base of my head like a cradle, and he pulled my face closer to his, pressing the warm sweet heat of his lips against mine, drawing my small self close to his big body so that the bundle I was holding was caught in the warmth in between.
“Baby must need milk or something, right?” he said finally. “I don’t know what else to do but leave you here in the woods. I’m going to gather a few things and meet you back here. You won’t be afraid now, will you?” When I did not answer, he loped back out of the woods toward the house.
I stayed there for what seemed like an eternity, rocking that baby whose cries were so loud they set my teeth on edge, lusty and sharp edged with what must have been a fierce hunger. Finally, he came back with a jar of warm milk that I dropped into the baby’s mouth with a teaspoon while Thomas held up a lit candle to see by. It was just after that that it started to rain.
LaSalle, Indiana, was a gray town. On the river, it was lined with textile mills, a small downtown with three churches and a courthouse. Beyond that central square, the houses were jerry-built, their paint peeling. The rain had finally stopped, but it was a wan sun that shone down, and the skies were less blue than a smoky yellow. Thomas and I had spent the night in a little hotel off the Main Street, and we had spent it as man and wife. I guess there is not much convincing to do if a couple shows up with a baby in tow, and they gave us a narrow room upstairs. I believed that the Lord saw us as wedded right from that first night in the woods, and I did not think He would insist that there be a signed piece of paper from the courthouse as long as He knew it would be along in a day or two.
Even to this day, I can tell you that I loved Thomas Cleves with all my heart and I believe that he loved me too. Two days I spent with my beloved, and I drank at the font of his soul and discovered all that can be beautiful between a man and a woman. Is two days enough to last a whole lifetime? I can only say that I believe you can only ask so much of a man, even a good man. I had myself a good man, but I made my choice.
On the day that I go to my grave, I will be able to describe every detail of the corner of Main and Bunting in LaSalle, Indiana. My beloved took me for breakfast in a coffee shop that morning. We ate thick slices of bacon and drank steaming coffee from white-porcelain mugs. Thomas had gone to the dry-goods store and found some little pink clothing for the baby. She may have been a foundling, but I wanted her to look pretty so that she would be loved. She wasn’t a pretty baby. She looked yellow and shriveled and scrunched up, but that morning she looked more like a human being than she ever had before. Does that make any sense? Up until then, it was only her eyes that convinced me that she was human at all; I thought of her more as moss from the woods, or a mushroom, or a rotting wooden stump. Until that morning, when my eyes took her in for what she really was: a jaundiced starveling baby who was mewling in the world, smart enough to know she was hungry but not smart enough to know that her mother was dead.
Thomas and I ate that breakfast with appetite; it tasted like the best food in the world, and we were catching the corners of each other’s eyes, having that private knowledge of heat and soreness that we shared, far outside the sunny world of that breakfast shop.
We had talked a little about our story and decided what we would tell people when we got back home: in the confusion of grief after Lila’s death, we had eloped. Thomas and I made a plan to stop at the little courthouse in LaSalle and make it official. It was not the wedding or the circumstances we had dreamed of, but, in spite of the terrible events that had brought us to this point, it is true: we had carved out a measure of true and delirious joy. We would leave the poor baby at the home, and we would pray for her, that she would go on to have a life better than the one promised by the way it had started.
Thomas had his arm linked through mine as we walked down Main Street past the plate-glass windows and the imposing granite edifice of the bank. He held me firmly as we stood at the corner of Main and Bunting, looking across the street at the white-frame building, whitewashed and jerry-built, with a painted sign that read: LASAlle HOME FOR FOUNDLINGS AND ORPHANED CHILDREN. At that moment, the baby who was to be Margaret set off with a screaming racket. Without thinking, I shifted her just so, and I felt her little body go soft, grateful because I was learning her ways.
It was at that moment, about half past nine in the morning on a half-warm early-summer day, that my body just stopped doing my bidding. Thomas held me and was guiding me to cross the street, but my foot just wouldn’t step off that curb. It was like I was frozen there, and I believe that God stepped down and put a hand on my shoulder, because I could not move, not a step. Thomas tightened his grip on my arm, not noticing when he felt my resistance. He stopped and looked at me.
“What is it, Mamie?” he said, turning to me. Even then, at that fateful moment, his voice w
as thrilling to me.
I looked down at that little baby I was holding in my arms, and like a movie theater picture in front of my eyes, I saw that awful blue of the lake, Lila’s face staring at me like a block of ice. And in this vision I couldn’t hear her speaking, but I could see her mouthing words. And what she was saying was “Mamie, don’t.”
I thought about that moment a lot, later on, later when Margaret was living with me on Sycamore Street, an ill-tempered, ungrateful, dark-skinned child. And I thought about it when she up and left me, off to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, and never came back again, just blew in for a few days at holidays. I thought about it when her name used to show up in unexpected places: on a newspaper wrapped around shoes that I picked up from the shoe repair, or left behind on a park bench, or half wrinkled and shoved in a wastepaper bin. I thought about it, and I wondered if I couldn’t have given that little pink-dressed baby to someone else to raise, someone who didn’t see a ghost every time she looked at her, someone for whom the joy of having her wasn’t always shadowed by the pain of loss.
What I know is that I couldn’t do it that day; there was something in me that held on to that baby in spite of every single thing that says I should have given her up. I don’t know if it took me a long time to answer, but I know that I looked up at my beloved’s face and tried to memorize that gaze of kindness, took it in and studied every angle of it. Before I opened up my mouth and said, “Thomas, I can’t.”
He did try to talk me out of it; we spent half a day upstairs in that little hotel room, crying and then kissing, then crying again. Only stopping now and again to get some milk ready for Margaret to drink.
He was such a big man that when he sat on the edge of that hotel bed, he made the springs sag halfway down to the floor. There was only one window in that room, set up high. From where we sat on the edge of the bed, we stared at the rusting washbasin, and at the faded gray posies on the wallpaper, which was brown-singed and peeling up near the ceiling.
