Speak Through the Wind

by Allison Pittman

  “Mrs. Hartmann,” she managed to say as the contraction subsided, “I need you to look. To check and see that the baby is—”

  “I’m not your midwife,” Mrs. Hartmann snapped, stopping midpace to face Kassandra with her hands on her hips. “Perhaps if you’d called for the doctor earlier, you wouldn’t be relying on me now.”

  “I just need to know if the baby’s head—”

  “Don’t speak to me of babies’ heads. Leave that for the doctor.”

  Just then there was a clamor downstairs, to which Mrs. Hartmann exclaimed, “He’s here! Thank God!” and left Kassandra alone in the room to run downstairs and usher Dr. Hilton in.

  She had met him just once before, shortly after her arrival, in a very proper interview in the front parlor. The only other doctor she had ever known was the kindly physician who nursed her back to health after being struck by Reverend Joseph’s horse. He had been full of humor and life. Doctor Hilton, however, was nothing like that. Elderly, yes—nearly seventy, he had been present for the birth of Mrs. Hartmann herself—but there was no humor about him. His first visit with Kassandra consisted of little more than a tremulous grip of Kassandra’s hand and an assurance that everything would be fine. Just fine.

  Now here he was, the sky outside not yet bright enough to constitute true morning, and he was as perfectly attired in his suit and hat as he had been on that first conversation in the parlor. He walked in, discarding his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

  “Well, now, miss Kassandra,” he said, adding an r to the end of her name—Kassandrar—“it seems it’s time to have this baby.”

  Mariah followed close behind him with a kettle full of warm water that she poured into the basin on the washstand. Doctor Hilton washed his hands and positioned himself at the foot of Kassandra’s bed, where he drew aside the covers and lifted her gown. Mrs. Hartmann, who stood just in the doorway, gave a little gasp and turned away.

  “I hear you went for a walk this morning?”

  Kassandra nodded and made an affirmative noise, the current contraction making conversation uncomfortable.

  “Best thing to help the labor along as far as I know.” Dr. Hilton continued in his conversational tone, sometimes talking to her, sometimes to Mrs. Hartmann, but always in such a flat, pragmatic tone that no one overhearing the conversation would ever be able to guess at the momentous event taking place.

  When Kassandra told Dr. Hilton she felt it was time to push, he merely said, “Well then, push.” When she felt the need to stop, he said, “Well then, stop.” At times he seemed nearly as puzzled at his presence there as she was.

  After nearly thirty minutes of Kassandra’s attempting to push the baby Dr. Hilton took one peek under the sheet, and his demeanor changed. “Well, now, from the looks of this here, we have a baby.”

  Kassandra’s groans throughout had been matched by those of Mrs. Hartmann, who was eager to be sent on any minor errand. Now, at Dr. Hilton’s announcement, she left to fetch the bag he’d left in the parlor and to alert Mariah to heat more water.

  Kassandra barely heard any of the words spoken by Dr. Hilton, and their atonal quality gave her no indication as to the progress or health of the baby. She was certain only of the commands of her body and the prayer in her heart that had been reduced to only one word. Please.

  She heard the doctor say something about the head, and then the sholdahs.

  Then, the healthy, piercing cry of her child. Her daughter, according to Dr. Hilton.

  The baby’s cry brought Mariah clattering into the room. She elbowed her way past Mrs. Hartmann, who hadn’t taken a single step into the room in all this time.

  “Oh, she’s beautiful.” Mariah held out a clean linen towel into which Dr. Hilton deposited the wet and squirming baby “She’s a keeper, this one is.”

  Kassandra lay back, exhausted on her pillow. “Thank You, God,” she said, over and over, tears flowing freely and puddling in her ears. “Let me see her,” she said, holding out limp and exhausted arms to receive her child.

  “Let me clean her up first,” Mariah said, “so you can meet her proper.”

  “No, please, please—”

  “There’s time enough for that later.” Dr. Hilton redirected Kassandra’s attention to the aftermath of her labor.

  Kassandra propped herself up on her elbows and struggled to get even a glimpse of the baby girl who continued to fill the room with her welcome wails. She saw nothing but Mariah’s back, bent low over the dressing table now covered with a thick towel. Mrs. Hartmann, though, from her vantage point of the doorway, would have a clear view, and Kassandra looked to her to ask about her daughter. But the expression on Mrs. Hartmann’s face stopped Kassandra from asking anything. Her eyes, so fixated on the child, bore a longing that Kassandra had seen only in the eyes of the starving children in the streets of the city

  “One last push,” Dr. Hilton said, and Kassandra complied.

  “May I see her now?” Kassandra asked.

  Mariah turned around with the blanketed bundle. “Of course you can.”

  “I think you should rest first.” Mrs. Hartmann walked into the room and stood in front of Mariah, blocking Kassandra’s view. “Don’t you think, Dr. Hilton?”

  Dr. Hilton exchanged a pointed look with Mrs. Hartmann before opening the large leather bag on Kassandra’s bureau and rummaging through its contents.

  “No!” Kassandra ignored the pain in her body and worked to sit up in her bed, even attempting to swing her legs over the edge. “I do not need to rest! I need to see my baby!”

  But her weakened body would not obey. She felt paralyzed, and the helplessness took on the tinge of panic as she saw Dr. Hilton dip a bottle of clear liquid over a clean white handkerchief and approach her.

  “Now, Kassandra,” he said in that matter-of-fact manner of his, which sent chills through her body “You’ve been up most of the night. You’ll need your sleep.”

  “What are you doing?” Kassandra said.

  She wasn’t referring to the doctor’s suspicious ministrations, but to the vision of Mariah Brown handing her child over to the waiting arms of Mrs. Hartmann. That was the last sight Kassandra had before the handkerchief was placed over her mouth and nose, and all conscious thought disappeared.

  he second time she woke up, she was on the floor. Mariah knelt beside her, wiping her brow with a cool cloth as she held Kassandra’s head in her lap.

  “There now,” she was saying, “that’s it. Wake up. Help me get you back into bed.”

  Kassandra didn’t want to get back into bed. Even in this groggy state, she wanted to find her daughter. But Mariah was not one to be denied, and the two women struggled together until Kassandra was back in the bed, sitting up on newly propped pillows.

  “Where is she?” Kassandra asked, surprised at the thickness of her voice.

  Mariah busied herself helping Kassandra take a sip of water and smoothing out the covers. “I’ll get Mrs. Hartmann in here,” she said.

  “Not her. My baby.”

  “You just rest,” Mariah said, patting Kassandra’s leg before leaving the room and closing the door behind her.

  “No!” Kassandra’s voice croaked with the effort, but Mariah didn’t return. Kassandra continued to holler—calling for Mariah, calling for Mrs. Hartmann, calling for her baby—until her throat was raw and the door opened again at last.

  This time, it was Mrs. Hartmann who came through, scowling and asking Kassandra if she had gone quite mad.

  “Where is my baby?”

  “Calm down, Kassandra.”

  “I will not calm down. Where is my daughter?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “We do not need to talk. I need to see my daughter.”

  Mrs. Hartmann moved a chair close to the bed and sat on it. She reached for Kassandra’s hand, which was clenched into a fist, and covered it with her own. The gesture was fraught with such unwarranted and unprecedented affection that Kassandra dreaded what she
had to ask next.

  “Is she … is she all right?”

  Mrs. Hartmann looked at her, seeming to deliberate her answer. How many answers could there be? Yes, she’s fine. No, she’s sick. She’s sleeping. She’s—

  “I’ve hired a wet nurse from town,” Mrs. Hartmann said, as calmly as if she were announcing that they were having pork chops for supper. “It’s really the thing to do. All the experts say so The baby is with her.”

  Kassandra tried to wrap her mind around what Mrs. Hartmann just said, but it didn’t make any sense. She had been prepared to hear the worst—had steeled herself against the idea that this child, too, had died before she got a chance to hold her. But that she had simply been taken away? Why would she hire a nurse when Kassandra was perfectly capable of taking care of her child? She stared at Mrs. Hartmann and inwardly, silently, begged for an explanation.

  “I didn’t want to say anything until after the baby was born,” Mrs. Hartmann said, “knowing what happened to the first one. I didn’t want to get our hopes up too high, just to be disappointed.”

  She spoke in that fast, almost manic way she sometimes did—as if terrified of the interruption that would send her hopelessly off track. The rapidity of her speech made it difficult for Kassandra’s muddled head to make sense of all of it, but one phrase stood out. Our hopes.

  “Maybe I was afraid you’d run away before I even had a chance to explain things. You have a history of that, you know, my dear. Running away. Of course, I don’t know where you would have run to, exactly …”

  “You aren’t making any sense,” Kassandra said, her tongue thick behind her teeth.

  “Joseph and I, you see, will never have children.”

  “You and Reverend Joseph?” Kassandra tried to attach meaning to the abrupt change in focus. “He loves children.”

  “I know he does, but we’ll never have children of our own.”

  “You have been married only a few years,” Kassandra said. “It takes time … sometimes.”

  “It’s not a matter of time.” She still held Kassandra’s hand, and now she worked her thumb underneath Kassandra’s clenched fingers and gently pried them open, until there was a flat, open palm to cover with her own. “Dr. Hilton has assured me that it would be quite impossible for me ever to carry a child. I haven’t told Joseph. I’d been praying for the right words, the right time … then you showed up. It was like an answer to prayer.”

  Kassandra withdrew her hand and laid it protectively on her empty stomach. “That is why you decided to let me stay. My child—my daughter and I—in the carriage house?”

  “Not exactly,” Mrs. Hartmann said, looking down at her empty hands.

  Kassandra clutched at the bedclothes and closed her eyes, wishing she could make Mrs. Hartmann disappear as quickly as her baby apparently had. “You cannot mean …”

  “We would give her everything, you know.” Mrs. Hartmann was fidgeting now, looking around the room, perhaps remembering how wonderful it was to grow up with everything. “We could provide for her in ways you never could.”

  “I know what Reverend Joseph wants.” Kassandra hoped the slowness of her speech would make her meaning more clear, both to herself and to Mrs. Hartmann. “He wants all of us together—”

  “That will never work.”

  Mrs. Hartmann stood and walked over to the window. It was getting dark again, and Kassandra wondered if more than one day had passed since that first birthing pain. Mrs. Hartmann busied herself lighting the lamp at Kassandra’s bedside as she talked.

  “It’s no way to raise a child. She’ll never really know her place. If we provide for her, is she ours? If she calls you ‘mother,’ is she yours? Children are either raised by their parents, or they are adopted outright. That place in the middle … well, you know better than anyone how unbearable that is, don’t you?”

  How well she did. It was being in that place in the middle that drove her into Ben’s arms. That need to belong somewhere—to have a place—that allowed her to find contentment in the most wretched of circumstances. But now she did belong to somebody. She belonged to her child; they belonged to each other.

  Kassandra scrutinized the profile of Mrs. Hartmann’s fussy face, grotesquely illuminated as she adjusted the lamp’s flame. This was not a woman who appreciated God’s gifts. Why light a lamp when the full gray moon could bathe the room in nearly as much light? No, any minute now she would make some disdainful remark about the maddening monotony of the crashing waves. How could such a woman ever truly love a child? Especially one conceived in such blatant sin.

  “I cannot,” Kassandra said at last. She wasn’t begging; she wouldn’t plead. “Will you bring her back to me now?”

  “I’m not some kind of goblin, you know, stealing babies away.”

  “I know that,” Kassandra said, feeling the tendrils of compassion snake through the dissipating fog in her head. She tried once again to stand, but felt the shadows of a weakness she didn’t want Mrs. Hartmann to witness. Softening her tone, speaking calmly as if to a madwoman, she said, “Please, please bring her to me.”

  “If that’s really what you want, of course.”

  Kassandra heard her quick little footsteps disappearing down the hall. She reached for the glass of water on the table beside her bed, took one cautionary sip before quenching her dry sore throat with its coolness. She ran her fingers through her matted hair, drawing it behind her head and plaiting it loosely, leaving it unfastened at her back. Soon she heard the little footsteps again, this time much slower and measured, and when Mrs. Hartmann bent low to deposit the bundle into Kassandra’s waiting arms, there was the briefest moment when she wasn’t sure if the other woman would let go.

  The tiny girl was wrapped in a soft yellow blanket, swaddled tightly with just one tiny fist escaping from the confines of the fabric. Kassandra caught that fist between her finger and thumb and brought it up to her lips, delivering a series of kisses on the baby’s red, wrinkled knuckles. The child was fast asleep, pale eyelashes flush against soft, blotchy cheeks, but Kassandra didn’t need to see her eyes to know who had fathered this little girl. On the top of her head, hair the color of glazed carrots lay in soft, wispy strands. She let go of the little fist and ran her fingers across the scalp, remembering the tuft of her son’s hair tucked into her Bible and lost to the fire. This hair she would live to see grow. She lifted the baby to plant a soft kiss on top of its head.

  “Isn’t she a precious lamb?” Mrs. Hartmann said, speaking just over Kassandra’s shoulder.

  “She is,” Kassandra said, pulling the blanket away to lay her palm against the infant’s strong, beating heart.

  “However will you be able to care for her alone? Especially back in that horrible neighborhood. By the Bowery, wasn’t it?”

  Kassandra felt her blood turn cold. “I … I do not want to go back there.”

  “Well, darling,” Mrs. Hartmann said, moving from behind Kassandra to sit in the chair at the bedside. “We don’t always get what we want in life, now do we?”

  “I thought I might stay with you—”

  “I already told you that would be impossible.”

  “Not forever. Just until I have a chance to get back on my feet.”

  “Now, now, darling. When have you ever been on your feet?”

  Kassandra felt as if she’d been thumped between the eyes. “I just meant until I can find a job.”

  “And who would be so quick to hire a young woman who came along with her illegitimate child?”

  “You cannot make me go back there.”

  “No, I can’t,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “I can only try to speak to you as one woman to another. Can’t you see how hard it would be to have you there—living with us—a constant reminder of what I am unable to give my husband?”

  “Does Reverend Joseph know about all of this?”

  “He is completely blind when it comes to you.” Her words revealed a vulnerability that reached far beyond her inability to h
ave a child. “He’s never forgiven himself for letting you get away the first time. Given the choice,” she laughed nervously, “I believe he’d have me out on the street and you and the baby cozied up by the fire.”

  “Surely not.”

  “I abhor gambling, Kassandra. I won’t take that risk.”

  Just then there was a soft knock on the door before it opened to allow Mariah, carrying a tray, to enter the room.

  “Doctor says you shouldn’t eat just yet,” she said, setting the tray on the bureau top. “Said that medicine he give you to help you sleep might make you sick if you eat too soon. But I brought some tea—oh, there’s the precious one.”

  “Not now, Mariah,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “Kassandra and I are speaking.”

  “Is that so?” Mariah stood just behind Mrs. Hartmann’s shoulder, hands on her hips, staring right into Kassandra’s eyes. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “Could you open the curtains? And the window? I would like to look outside,” Kassandra said.

  “All right.” When Mariah was finished, she turned and said, “If there’s anything else, I’ll be just downstairs.”

  The two women sat in silence for several minutes after Mariah left.

  With just a bit of a stretch, Kassandra could see the now full moon over the ocean. The sand was iridescent in its glow, and she thought back to those early hours of her labor, staring at the same beach, under the same moon, so full of hope and life. She wished she could take the baby now, straight down to the beach, and walk along the shore, holding the child in her arms as carefully as she’d held it in her womb.

  “Couldn’t we just stay here?” Kassandra asked, the idea forming even as she said the words.

  “What do you mean? Here?”

  “Here. At this house. Leyna and I—”

  “Leyna?”

  “I thought if I had a girl, I would name her Leyna,” Kassandra said, almost shyly. “I used to think it was my mother’s name.”

  “My mother’s name was Charlotte,” Mrs. Hartmann said, her tone distracted.