When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777)

by Ruchti, Cynthia

  Anna directed where her few possessions should rest. A very long life. So few possessions. But it seemed as if Anna had held onto what mattered and had discarded the rest.

  “I don’t know how to talk to him.” Anna refolded a handful of embroidered hankies for Ivy to place in the smallest drawer of the dresser along the north wall of the room.

  “My father?”

  “Yes.”

  Ivy chuckled. “You’d think asking me would get you at least a handful of answers, wouldn’t you? You’ve known him an afternoon. I’ve known him all my life and I’m no farther along—” The choice of words halted her. No farther along. She laid her hand on the shelf of her belly.

  “I don’t want to offend him.”

  “Oh, Anna. If you discover that secret, please tell me.”

  “Has he always been this tightly curled upon himself?”

  Somewhere in an unpacked box was a thick black photo album, with scallop-edged photos tucked into neat black corner triangles that held them in place, that held her childhood in place. Wagon rides. A toddler-sized rabbit fur coat and hat. Ivy on her daddy’s shoulders. Perched on the back of a carnival pony. Standing between her parents. Neither parent wore definable expressions. No one would caption the photos with the word Joy. And three-quarters of the way through the album, the remaining pages held black triangles with emptiness where pictures had been removed, followed by pages with nothing at all.

  “Ivy, forgive my prying. I forget sometimes that others aren’t as eager to share their stories as I am.”

  Ivy closed the dresser drawer and turned toward Anna. “We should decide where you’d like your lamp. How about here?”

  Anna reached for the chain. Ivy scooted the lamp closer.

  “I’ll get an extension for that chain this week. Dad can bring one home from work.”

  “Much appreciated.”

  Too tired to tell stories that night, Anna retired early, which left Ivy to rearrange things in her own bedroom, imagining the crib in the alcove, a rocker near the window, an additional dresser for baby necessities. All those thoughts wove their way through the ever-present thread of concern.

  She’d received one letter from Drew. It arrived the day after she sent the truth winging its way toward South Korea. Nothing since then. Maybe nothing ever again. Her hand moved to the mound of her child. “We’ll be okay, little one. But I wish you could know your daddy.”

  Ivy slept that night with a wet pillow.

  When she checked on Anna in the morning, she found the woman wiping her own tears.

  “Anna? What’s wrong?” Ivy rushed to her side. “Are you in pain?”

  “Far from it. Are those what I think they are?” She squinted and pointed out the window.

  A vine partially obscured her view. Ivy would have to get out there later in the day to cut it back so Anna could see the—. No. A handful of azure and raspberry-pink blossoms nodded at the sun.

  “Morning glories, Anna.” Ivy pulled her chenille robe tighter across her budding body.

  Anna’s smile—all her own teeth—widened. “I’m home, Ivy. We’re home.”

  The cramped bungalow didn’t resemble the house Anna once named the Morning Glory Haven for Unwed Mothers. But the love did.

  “Yes. We’re home.”

  Anna—1890s

  “A mother was born last night, Puff. Not a baby only. A mother, too, was brought to the light of life.”

  “It’s a wondrous thing, Miss Morgan.”

  Puff and I shared tea at the worktable in the kitchen. The sun was an hour from checking in for the day, as was Puff. I had yet to go to bed from the night before.

  “Do you want me to set a fire under the copper boiler for washing up the sheets and such?”

  “Puff, I believe the hot water would be ready before I am.”

  “Wait a bit?”

  “Please. I have them soaking in cold water.”

  “You might want to get some sleep.”

  “Maybe. You know how unpredictable these first hours of life can be.”

  “The new mama’s resting well?”

  “Reba is an amazement to me. For such a young thing, she bore her labor with courage. When the babe was laid in her arms, I saw in her eyes a maturity that must have entered just as the child left her body. Some new mothers act as if they’ve birthed a doll, a plaything. Reba seemed to sense she cradled the essence of life.”

  He studied my face and the way I rubbed my knees. “You hurting?”

  “My legs ache, that’s all. They don’t like working long hours without being pampered. They’re rebelling against what I asked of them last night.”

  “Swolled up?”

  “A little.”

  “Can’t push too hard without paying a price somewhere.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You want I should ride in and ask Miss Lydia to spell you today?”

  Fatigue couldn’t prevent the smile that overtook me. “Her own little one is putting up a fuss in the mornings, Puff.”

  “She in the family way?”

  “Some would call it a miracle.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  I learned to think of sleep as a luxury—like white sugar and silk stockings and oranges at Christmas. A treasure, when I could get it. Savored as if it were chocolate lingering on my tongue.

  Sleep had its seasons. When the house was quiet, the spare bedrooms empty, I slept deeply, the sleep of a carefree child. As the rooms filled, sleep grew thinner, like soup watered down to accommodate extra guests at the table.

  I listened for the tears my girls cried in the night. My senses stood sentry through the darkness, ready to respond to their distress, if necessary. It often was. I followed indigestion down the stairs and fed it bicarbonate of soda and words of comfort. I massaged cramped calves and pressed my fist into knots in young backs. I opened the Word and poured its healing balm over the wounds of raw rejection. Over midnight tea, I listened as the stories spilled out, stories that were too ashamed to show their faces in the daylight.

  The ribbon of stairs gracefully connecting the first floor with the second creaked brazenly with every footstep on its polished treads. On damp days and nights, however, the boards swelled tight and grew silent. One could fairly accurately report the weather conditions according to the squawking the floorboards and stairs produced.

  Would-be intruders would surely abort their mischief after having planted but one villainous foot upon an alarm-sounding step.

  “Better than any barking dog,” Puff said when asked to oil them or tighten them or whatever one does to correct such an annoyance.

  I only asked him once. After that, I resigned myself to appreciating the clear signal that my girls were prowling about. Many a night, a creaking stair roused me to follow a troubled heart to the kitchen for warmed milk with honey.

  Call it a gift or a curse, I was often awake, alert, and half-dressed for battle long before one of the young women informed me that her labor had started. I heard every suckle, every sweet breath, every delicate, life-assuring sound of the newborns.

  I view it as concern, but I suppose God would call it worry, that kept me listening, too, for horses’ hooves and footsteps and pebbles tossed at upstairs windows.

  Morning Glory was not a prison. It was a haven. That was my intention, at least. But some of the girls saw bars on the windows and locks on the doors, though there were none. They considered house rules confining, stifling. They plotted escapes and rendezvous with past or present lovers.

  Most were thwarted by my half-alert sleep state or Puff’s uncanny ability to sense trouble, coupled with his chameleon-like countenance. Sweet spirited and calming by nature, he became vigilante-like when the girls’ honor, safety, or common sense were threatened.

  I repeatedly lectured, “If your young man is motivated by adventure and risk, by deception and mischief, he will arrive in the cloak of night. Love shows its face in the daylight.”

  For y
ears, the majority of the rounds I made at night were not for bed checks but for what I considered the better portion of my responsibility to the women—prayer.

  How many nights did I wander the shadowed halls? How many times did I stand at a closed door, my hand pressed silently against the oak panel, my heart pressed hard against God’s throne in agonizing prayer for the troubled young woman in fitful sleep on the other side?

  It’s a wonder there were not salt stains on the floorboards outside each door, for all the tears spent there.

  Why did I cry? For some, the tears fell because of their naïveté. They had no knowledge of how difficult the road they’d chosen was going to be. While still within the protective walls of Morning Glory, they remained safe. But none of them could stay forever. All eventually left that place, where, like it or not, they were loved.

  “Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus said. “Look and learn.”

  He provided for the birds of the air, even the ones that made unwise choices.

  On a warm summer day, we left the doors at the front and back of the house open, so the wildflower-scented breeze could blow through. A misdirected bird flew into the house, but couldn’t find its way out.

  The girls living with me at the time fell into two categories—those who screamed and locked themselves in their rooms until the “crisis” passed, and those who were determined to help rid the house of the intruder.

  The bird—a common brown sparrow—showed its utter fright in its erratic flight, bumping into furniture and lamps, and eventually flying full bore into the panes of a window.

  “Stupid bird,” one of the residents said as the sparrow lay flopping on the floor beneath the window.

  “That was its problem a few seconds ago,” I told her. “Now, its problem is pain.”

  In that moment, I gained an answer for those who wondered why I would show mercy.

  When young women from the Morning Glory Haven for Unwed Mothers walked out through the front doors, they stepped into a world that felt no obligation to care that they were precious, only that they were fallen.

  The world they faced did not know that the sound of our falling is the call that sends Him to catch us.

  Was it any wonder my heart for those young women would press me—strong in other respects—to tears for them? Some would be rejected by prospective suitors who viewed an unwed mother—no matter how beautiful and desirable—and her fatherless child—no matter how charming and bright—as too great a responsibility. Some would be turned away from many a door, many a job opportunity, and even—sadly—many a church because of the child, the product of passion they once mistook for love.

  Night after night, in that moonlit hall, I wept for my girls and for myself—for the nightly faith-struggle to surrender them completely to the God who followed them when I could not, to the God whose relentless love never stopped pursuing, to the God who was and is a better protector than I could ever hope to be, the God whose love dwarfed my own, the God who—unlike me—was never unaware of where they were or what they needed.

  I cried, too, for the childless mothers. Some came to me with a babe in the womb and left empty-armed and empty-hearted. I cried for babies who died, and for their mothers who died a little, too. For the mothers with love enough to spare but no resources with which to raise a child. For the agonizing moment of deciding to let someone else adopt their own flesh and blood.

  Would I have been brave enough for that? No matter how wise or rational or necessary, could I have kissed the doeskin newborn’s head and chosen to “labor” immediately again, wordlessly bearing the heart’s death-grip contractions as the child with my eyes and chin was delivered into the waiting arms of an adoptive woman with nothing but longing in her womb? Could I have been that selfless?

  Could I have been as selfless as my own mother?

  Ivy—1951

  “Your mother didn’t give you up for adoption, Anna. You worked with her.”

  “Until the fall of 1885, when I was sent away.” She angled her head to the window, sadness etching deeper lines into her face.

  “But, you would have been twenty years old by then.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If it weren’t for love, I wouldn’t either.”

  Ivy’s heart rhythm lurched forward. “Please. Tell me.”

  “We worked hard, my mother and I. Long hours. Difficult conditions. Too few doctors. Too many babies. We lived as sparsely as we could and served as often as we could.”

  “I can’t imagine how rewarding that must have been for you.”

  Anna drew the blanket around her arms as if the room weren’t already toasty. “It became all the more so in my memories when she died.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I should have known what she intended. I should have known. I should have stopped her.”

  Ivy slid her chair closer. “Stopped her from what?”

  “She sent me away for a holiday. A month at Aunt Phoebe’s. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t come with me. We were never apart. She loved her aunt.”

  “Her aunt?”

  “Phoebe was my great-aunt. My mother’s aunt. Hadn’t I said that before?”

  “I don’t think so. Why did your mother stay behind?”

  “To save me.”

  The color faded from Anna’s complexion, what little color remained after a lifetime of labor.

  “We can talk later, if you’d like, Anna. Is this too much for you?”

  She patted her hand on her chest. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. “It’s lived in here too long.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “No one alive remembers what she gave. Except me.”

  Ivy laid the notebook aside and watched for evidence that Anna’s breathing was suffering from squeezing out a long-tamped memory.

  “While I frolicked at Aunt Phoebe’s, taking tea every afternoon in the parlor that would one day become my office, while I slept until the sun was high and stayed out late with young people who Phoebe had enlisted to see that I was sufficiently entertained—me, who had skipped most of my childhood—”

  The words stopped.

  “What happened while you were gone?”

  “My mother gave up her life.”

  “What? Why? Oh, Anna!”

  “A mother with four young ones and another on the way. Three of them with the sickness—smallpox. No one would go near the home when her time came. My mother knew no one would help. And she knew if I were at her side, as I always was, I’d either stop her or enter the house and the danger with her. So she sent me away, ‘gave’ me to someone who would love me when she couldn’t.”

  “And you never went home again.”

  “Once.” Anna’s chin quivered. “For her funeral.”

  Anna—1890s

  You can see how the path of my life helped paint with delicate strokes the exquisite gift of adoption, the true meaning of a mother’s sacrifice.

  You can see why I mourned over those who spat on the sacrifices made for them.

  Like a deep, untouchable bruise, my heart ached for women who, despite our best efforts, left Morning Glory pregnant with unresolved doubts.

  Mamas and papas sent me their shame-shrouded daughters. Unable to shrug off their own embarrassment, parents sent their unwed children to me.

  I cried for the stony-hearted, who refused to cry for themselves. I cried for the young mothers with no mother-heart, who coldly announced their distaste for the child they carried, their indifference about its future, and their eagerness to rid themselves of their “problem.” As I consider what I have just spoken, it sounds as if I had a joyless life, that the task assigned to me was one of crushing heaviness and unbearable concern. Forgive me for sketching the picture with excessive shadows. Light beat back the shadows. Joy was a daily companion.

  Ivy—1951

  “Joy?”

  “You didn’t miss that part, did you?” Anna twisted her hands over each other. “Oh, that would be
my fault. I’ve been so intent on explaining the heart-wrenching and the miraculous that I may have given too little attention to the joys.”

  “I’ve been guilty of the same, I suppose.” Ivy laid a hand over her child and waited for it to acknowledge its presence. A child, curled on itself now, cushioned in a sea of warmth that pulsed with its mother’s pulse. A child that already kept her awake at night as it rolled in the sea and stretched its limbs, practicing for life outside the womb. A baby. A joy-maker.

  “You know the details about that first dinner party. We made fund-raising an event for the social calendar. Picnics and potlucks, holiday gatherings. Christmas at Morning Glory became a tradition for local society. Not right away, mind you.” Anna waved her hand as if dismissing a misconception. “Over the years, the ice melted and charity won another heart or two, then three. Buggies and wagons filled the yard. Then a mix of cabriolets and automobiles.”

  “Cabriolay?”

  “Fancy word for buggy.”

  “Christmas at Morning Glory. I wish I could have seen that.”

  “What a sight! A fire in every fireplace. Tables of food—our own Morning Glory handiwork plus donated goodies. Pine boughs cut from the trees that lined the property. Josiah’s contacts in the cities meant we always had musical entertainment—a harpist, a string quartet, a vocalist who eventually went on to make a name for herself in radio.”

  “And people were more charitable at Christmas?”

  Anna’s eyes danced with the light and warmth of a long-ago hearth. “Something about the babe in the manger—a child born to an unwed mother, but a child who changed the world—made people pull their hands out of their pockets and give.”

  “I can’t imagine how hard you worked. But how much fun it must have been.”

  “Oh, my legs ached at the end of those nights. Throbbed clear through the next day sometimes. But I soaked them then sat with them propped on pillows with a muscle-cramping smile on my face.”