When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777)

by Ruchti, Cynthia

Prove it.

  “We’d fix up that side. Tear out all the carpet. Probably have to replace most of the subfloor, too. Paint would help. And switch plates. We’d pay for fumigation, if we had to. But the other side wouldn’t need much. And there’s our answer.”

  “The other side?”

  “Beck, if we bought the whole building, both units, and let Lauren and Jackson live in half until she could afford for them to be on their own, and we lived in the other half until our financial situation improved, then we’d eventually wind up with two rental units and maybe a way to get back on track with our retirement plans. Providing, of course, I can get hired somewhere.”

  How long had it been since she’d blinked? Or breathed?

  “Selling our current house would be critical. But Ron thinks he might have a lead for us already. And if we could make a strong enough profit from that sale, we’d have the funds for remodeling the disgusting unit.”

  Tears formed. “You . . . you think it’s disgusting?”

  “Are you feeling okay? Wasn’t it obvious? I can’t wait to get home and take a shower. And we were only in there a few minutes.”

  “I . . . I love you.”

  Gil tilted his head and ventured another reach in her direction. This time she allowed his hand on her shoulder, then his arm across both shoulders.

  “Good to know. I love you, too.” His voice had a question in it. He probably wondered if she needed psychiatric help.

  Weren’t they a pair?

  20

  Ivy—1951

  She didn’t expect a homemade cake or a card signed by the staff: Best wishes on your new endeavors. She didn’t expect a baby shower with a pile of infant items from the Montgomery Ward catalog. But Ivy did think someone might say something, some little thing. We’ll miss you. Nice working with you. Good luck with, you know, the . . . um . . . the “in a family way” business.

  Nothing.

  Girls in a family way usually disappeared for a few months to “help a sick aunt” or “recuperate from a curious illness.” Or they got married quickly and had “premature” babies. Ivy could have handled things so many different ways and avoided the discomfort of coworkers who didn’t know what to say or how to help.

  Help? It was as if anyone who befriended Ivy would be in danger of catching what she had.

  Even the lucid patients seemed withdrawn, skittish. Had the staff poisoned them against her, too? All except Anna.

  Anna dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief all day long. Her brave smile fought valiantly but couldn’t dislodge the mask of sadness. Ivy fought back her own tears and clung to a thread of hope that their good-bye was temporary.

  Ivy’s shift ended uneventfully. One final task remained. The last good-bye for room 117.

  “So . . . ,” she said as she stood at the foot of Anna’s bed.

  “So . . . ,” came the echo from its pillow.

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to visit. Not right away, at least.”

  “Oh, fiddle-dee-do on the whole silly world!”

  “Anna!”

  “You forget about the gossips and get on with the business of making a home for you and that baby and the baby’s father.”

  Ivy sniffed back what was quickly turning into a steady stream of tears. “I’ll come see you. Just not right away.”

  “So, we’d better make progress this afternoon then.”

  “I didn’t plan to stay afterward to work on your story today, Anna.”

  “Oh, I see. You were going to rush off to—?”

  An empty apartment. An unproductive session with the help wanted ads. “I guess I could stay for a few minutes.”

  “Good. There’s something I need to get off my chest.”

  Anna—1890s

  I wished I’d been born with more than two arms. I longed to embrace the brokenhearted parents who brought their daughters to me, without loosening my grip on the weak-kneed mothers-to-be.

  I fought the urge to shake a few parents, to rattle the cages of the bitter and uncaring, the unkind and unforgiving. My heart caught in my throat, nearly suffocating the life out of me, the day a steely-eyed, steely-jawed father literally kicked his eldest daughter out of the back of his wagon. We tended to her skinned knees and forearms for weeks. We tended her bruised and tattered spirit every day she was with us.

  Except for grace, I didn’t believe she could ever be right. A person can’t be treated like refuse without showing it somehow. Downcast eyes. A tic or tremor. An edge to the voice. Troubled dreams. I’ve gotten so now I can pick out of a crowd the people who have known no kindness at home. The pain of it shoots through me like a lightning bolt through a water-soaked willow, setting every nerve ending on fire.

  Like a wave that retreats from shore for a moment, shivering as it gathers momentum, forgiveness should flood back in with more love and vigor than ever. I have seen it happen.

  One mother—about to become a grandmother—swallowed her disappointment like a foul-tasting, but necessary pill. Rounder than she was tall, and well padded against life’s jostling, she wore her arms too far forward, as though they were sewn in backward; but she was making do.

  The lines on her face read like a map of her past. The tracks of wagon wheels that carried her family from the east to a not-so-long-ago uncivilized place. The still and forever visible trail of tears etched by grass fires and crop failures and a husband who didn’t understand that she would never be free of the memory of a toddler son buried under a nameless, scrawny shrub on the unforgiving prairie.

  And now this. Her third-born daughter of six—the one who had never given her a lick of trouble—her angel-child with flax-colored, silken hair and a face of tempting innocence was brought to my door with a swollen belly and the too-familiar downcast eyes.

  The baby’s father had been merely passing through town. The girl’s own father didn’t know how to rise above his hurt and embarrassment to continue to love her.

  Amelia and her mother alone had the courage to face the crisis. Marielle, Amelia’s mother, would not . . . could not . . . leave another child unattended. Against her husband’s wishes, and no doubt at great emotional cost, she visited often during the months Amelia resided with me. She never came empty-handed—another similarity between the woman and her God. She brought soft flannel nightshirts and diapers for the baby, jellies or homemade breads and pies for our household, and carefully squirreled coins to tuck into her daughter’s palm.

  She spoke little, like Amelia.

  “Marielle, would you care for some tea?”

  “Yes, thank you. I’ll get it.”

  “I’m happy to serve you.”

  “Please allow me, Miss Morgan.”

  When she returned with the tea, many minutes later, I knew she’d been at work in the kitchen while waiting for the water to heat. The skin on her fingers was pruned. I suspected the roasting pan I’d left to soak now looked like new.

  Amelia and Marielle walked together on the property, their lips rarely moving but their hearts connected.

  Who but God could have timed one of this mother’s visits to coincide with the birth of her angel-faced granddaughter? I would have written the script that way, if the pen had been mine. With gratitude for the unexpected mercy, Dr. Noel and I stepped back from the bed and let this love-conquers-all woman with a deeply lined face and unspeakably kind eyes coax her granddaughter out of the womb. Love was the first thing that child knew of this world. Love’s hands were the first to touch her.

  I knew that Amelia and rosebud-lipped Aubrey Lillian would not flounder when the new grandmother asked Puff to retrieve from her wagon a beautiful hickory cradle that Amelia’s thawing father made for the child . . . his pain-birthed grandchild. What it must have cost him to saw and plane and sand and carve and fit together the pieces of this forgiveness cradle! I prayed that his voice and arms would grow as skilled at expressing his love.

  In the spring following the birth of her bright-eyed granddaught
er, Amelia’s mother, Marielle, brought the dignity of a name to our home. She returned with a limp, scraggly-looking vine, and scratched a spot for it in the dirt along the foundation on the east side of the house.

  “Morning glory,” she said, as I watched over her shoulder.

  The patch of ground she’d chosen did not look particularly fertile. And the scrawny vine held no visible promise. Marielle warned that morning glories resist being transplanted. But she worked with the confidence of one whose next task might be calling Lazarus from his grave.

  I confess I had little hope that the vine would survive the afternoon, much less the season. As if amused rather than frustrated by my doubts, Puff smiled the smile of the knowing. He and Marielle listened to some voice of reason to which I was deaf.

  Urged on by love alone, the nearly naked morning glory vine grew accustomed to its new home and to my sporadic watering.

  I add this next detail so you can wonder with me at the odds against this tenacious plant. It was an exceptionally dry spring, as I recall. Other established plantings near Marielle’s succumbed, their bowed, exhausted, parched heads tripping over their roots. But, with every element working against it, the vine—like the house and its purpose—survived.

  Marielle returned one more time, in the early fall, with an armload of infant clothes her granddaughter had outgrown. Gifts for other too-young mothers.

  We rarely had visitors so early in the morning. I guessed her secondary mission before she voiced it, following her out the back door, down the steps, and around to the east side of the house.

  The morning glory vine had chosen to dress for company, for which I was as thankful as a proud mother on Easter Sunday. The profusion of blue, ruffled, translucent blossoms was a downright spectacle! A tight bud the night before, each flower had twisted itself open at the sunlight’s invitation, even as the hearts of many of my girls twisted and wriggled their way open under the penetrating rays of God’s Son.

  Marielle didn’t smile in response, as I assumed she would. Fresh tears pooled in her eyes as she quoted the Scripture that was her sustenance . . . and mine. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

  Fingering the velvet of a sunlit blossom, she added her own commentary to the end of the verse: “And doesn’t God get the glory in that!”

  My home was first called Morning Glory Haven for Unwed Mothers that day.

  Until now, I’ve not shared with you the battles I fought over the young men who left their seed in these girls and then walked away, with no more sense of responsibility than a male lion seeking not a family but an outlet for his urges—

  Ivy—1951

  Ivy’s pencil stilled.

  Anna coughed. “Dear, will you kindly erase that previous sentence? I need to edit out the bitterness. I’m still working on erasing from my life the remnants of bitterness that hover like a chronic case of indigestion.”

  Anna—1890s

  I’m not unaware of or ungrateful for the young men who have humbly adjusted their lives to accommodate a change in their own timetable for fatherhood. My heart readily embraces the repentant, the contrite.

  I’m painfully aware that God has set a standard of patience to which I have not attained. But I do understand—though I will never fully grasp—His promise from Isaiah 57:15: “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.”

  How easy it is to love the contrite, those who understand the weight of their choices and their consequences. How freely the sympathy flows toward those who face their responsibility and let it propel them toward the sorrow that leads to repentance. And how much I am learning from observing that phenomenon.

  To witness the birth of a child is to witness a miracle, even under ordinary circumstances. But within the walls of Morning Glory, the moment of birth was as holy a thing as earth can know.

  “This! This is what God can do!” I said aloud whenever a young woman’s heart was open to it. “Out of disappointment and shame, the Lord births life! In the womb of Grace, He nurtures an embryo of Hope. And when the time is right, Hope pushes its way out into the light. We catch it with grateful hands and gaze upon His handiwork with awe and gratitude.”

  I remember the words because I repeated them so often . . . to myself and to my girls.

  Hope’s labor pains. That’s how I came to refer to the rejection and setbacks. They grabbed me around the belly and threatened to suffocate me. But I grew to look upon them with a measure of excitement, as a long-overdue mother greets with joy her first doubling-over pain. The baby—Hope—is about to be born!

  It would do me no more good to scream in response to the distresses I faced than it would for my girls to react to their labor with thrashing and howls. What an unnecessary and counterproductive waste of energy!

  When warning a laboring mother that her moaning and screeching would needlessly exhaust her and frighten the other residents, I knew I was speaking to myself. My own hysteria, if I’d allowed it, could have kept others from trusting that the Lord was more than equal to their need.

  Morning glory sickness. In many ways, it looked and felt as morning sickness must everywhere else on the planet. Calling it morning glory sickness was perhaps a weak attempt at injecting humor into a humorless malady.

  “Sharla has the morning glories,” one of the residents might have reported about another. “She won’t even touch the raspberry ginger tea I took her.”

  Some suffered more than others. Some not at all, which hardly seemed fair to the rest. We did what we could to ease morning glory’s discomfort. Raspberry ginger tea. Dry toast at the bedside. Cold compresses. Patience. Prayer. But, like a pioneer confronted with the continent-splitting Mississippi, we, too, knew that the only way to the other side was straight through.

  I have no proof, but I strongly believe that misery is intensified when the heart is not buoyed by joy. The girls did not need to hide their sick moments, as they often did before they came to live at Morning Glory, when their stories and babies were hidden. But they did need to learn to cope.

  Empathy flowed through the halls of this home in abundance. Did it help? Doesn’t it always?

  We implemented nearly every home remedy whose reputation found its way to our ears. Not just for waves of nausea stirred by a babe within, but for whatever infirmity wandered through our doors.

  Mild kitchen burns were tended with scrapings of raw potato. A tea of honey and vinegar calmed nagging coughs. Crushed onions for headaches. Onions roasted in ashes for colds. Onion juice and honey for croup. The garden was heavily devoted to onions.

  But there is no antidote to bitterness, and no substitute for compassion.

  I heard my mother’s voice in my ears . . . and in my comfort. The silky voice she used as a birthing tool for all the women who called on her for help. How many births had she attended? And for how many did she insist I accompany her—so often against my wishes? It was books I wanted. An education. After too many truancies when called from the classroom to assist my mother, my education was up to me. Borrowed books and a listening ear. Stories from those who had been places and done things beyond the boundaries of my simple life. I thought my mother stifled my education. In so many ways, she formed it.

  In the early days, I assumed she made me go with her because we were alone, the two of us. She couldn’t very well leave her little girl home alone in the middle of the night when a furtive knock at our door sounded the alarm that she was needed . . . that we were needed. I was her “assistant.” The mothers-to-be accepted me as part of the package. Mother and I were a team.

  If I’d had a father, as a child I could have stayed snuggled under the covers until morning. He would have taken care of me, listened for me, and tended to my needs until Mother returned. If morning had dawned and she still had been holding a laboring hand, I could have made breakfast for Daddy. He would have been so proud of my talents in the kitchen, for such a young thing. I could have learned to
make his tea and surprised him with its morning-defining aroma.

  “Pumpkin!” he’d have called me. Or “Princess! How kind of you! What a sweet girl you are! Come give your papa a hug.” And that’s how we would have started our day.

  But if I’d had a father, how would I have learned all I needed to know to fulfill what was asked of me? How would I have learned the stages of labor and their transitions, having no children of my own, if I had not attended nearly every birth my mother attended?

  How would I have gained the stamina to endure if I’d not practiced at my mother’s knee? From what source could I have gathered the insight to know when the path of labor was leading to a life-threatening precipice, when a doctor’s expertise was required, when and how to prepare a woman’s heart to bear the unconscionable agony of miscarriage, the twisting pain of stillbirth?

  God knew what comforts I needed to go without.

  Ivy—1951

  Ivy’s pencil disengaged with the page once more. Anna’s voice always took on a poetic quality when she spoke of the past. When not reminiscing, even at eighty-six she talked like any young woman of the 1950s. A “cool cat,” some might say. But when her memories took over, the storytelling that flowed from her wrinkled lips and love-smoothed heart held an almost Victorian elegance.

  Although mesmerized by the rhythm of the words, Ivy remained glued to the stories themselves, often rereading them at night in her room, catching bits of wisdom she’d missed when focused on committing it all to paper.

  What would happen to Anna’s words once the story was complete?

  Ivy couldn’t imagine God meant them only for her.

  And she couldn’t believe she’d just considered that God had given her even a moment’s intentional thought. What was happening?

  “Ivy?”

  “I . . . I need to sharpen my pencil.” She pulled the small sharpener from her purse, bent over the wastebasket, and twirled the pencil to a fine, fresh point, leaving curls of yellow-edged wood shavings in the basket.