The Cape Ann

by Faith Sullivan

  “It was born dead,” she said in a voice far too calm and unhurried. She seemed barely aware of me.

  The stork had dropped the baby just as I had dreamed.

  “I don’t want the baby to be dead,” I said.

  “The baby is with God,” Mama told me.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, remembering Sister Mary Clair. “The baby is in limbo, Mama.”

  She slapped me. “Don’t you ever say that again.”

  “Mama!” I stumbled back against the table.

  “Never again!” She loomed over me. “I never want to hear another word about limbo! The baby’s in heaven.” She grabbed my arm roughly. “Betty doesn’t need any smarty-pants Catholic brat telling her the baby’s in limbo. Do you understand?”

  She let go of me suddenly, turning her back. She looked lonely, standing in the middle of the kitchen, shoulders hunched, nothing and no one to support her.

  I crept toward her. “Mama? Can I see her?” I touched her arm. She was weeping. I threw my arms around her waist. “I won’t ever say anything about limbo, I promise.”

  “Aunt Betty’s asleep. Maria gave her tea, and she went to sleep.”

  “The baby. Can I see the baby?”

  “Will you be quiet and not wake Aunt Betty?”

  I nodded.

  “The baby’s—” She made a pass at her eyes with the hanky. “I almost said ‘sleeping.’ The baby’s in a basket on the bureau. Come right out again as soon as you see her.” Mama sounded like she was talking to a stranger, some little girl who belonged to someone else. It frightened me. I wanted to say, “You don’t have to be ashamed of having me, just because Aunt Betty’s baby died.” I wanted Mama to hold me and say, “I’m sure glad I’ve got you.”

  The shades were drawn in Aunt Betty’s room. It was dark and hot. The medicinal odor of Maria’s tea hung in the closeness. In the big chair, Uncle Stan was asleep, head back, snoring softly.

  A wicker laundry basket sat on the bureau. In it a bed pillow with a clean white pillow slip was arranged for a mattress. The baby lay on the pillow, dressed in a tiny white gown, which was nonetheless too big, embroidered with white rosebuds. On her head she wore a little white organdy bonnet, again far too big, decorated with roses made of satin and tied under the chin with satin ribbons.

  She didn’t look like a baby girl. She looked like a baby bird, fallen from the nest onto the grass. Where had the stork dropped her? I wondered. I wanted to touch her tiny hand, which seemed no larger than a quarter, but I was afraid her eyes would open and look at me accusingly.

  24

  MARIA’S MAGIC WORKED. AUNT Betty’s fever went down. The sickness cast on her by the Witch ebbed from her body. Maria came each day for a week, preparing her tea, making certain that Aunt Betty drank it.

  But while Aunt Betty’s body grew stronger and freer of poison, her mind closed around her loss, and she was remote from everyone. I tried to stay out of her way altogether.

  I watered plants. I picked up stray pieces of paper that blew into the yard. I swept the porch and the walk, and wiped off the dusty windowsills with a damp rag. Indoors I straightened up, polished furniture, and swept the floors. In the living room, I ran the carpet sweeper until Mama told me to stop because it made too much racket. I put it away and began picking lint from the rug on my hands and knees. However hard I worked, it mattered little. The sick, guilty feeling was going to be with me the rest of my life.

  During the week following the baby’s death, Maria took me home with her for several hours each day. Mr. Zelena let me feed the chickens, which were kept in a pen behind the shed, and he also let me water the garden and pull weeds. Maria taught me to embroider.

  After my embroidery lesson and garden chores, I would take a nap on Maria’s couch. I grew accustomed to the strangeness of the Zelena household: the heavy smell of garlic and herbs, the mystery that breathed silently, behind doors and around corners. And yet, perhaps not entirely accustomed, for I never opened a door or took a step without Maria’s urging, for fear I would stumble on secrets not meant for me.

  From a member of her sodality, Maria procured a roll-away bed for Grandma and Grandpa Browning, who had come from Blue Lake. At night the few furnishings in Aunt Betty’s living room were shoved against the walls, and the rollaway was set up.

  Sunday, which was Grandma and Grandpa’s first night with us, as she tucked herself and Grandpa into the rollaway, inches from me, Grandma exclaimed, “We’re like peas in a pod, aren’t we?”

  In Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s room, there was no sound. They lay awake, not whispering. Since the baby’s death, Aunt Betty spoke to no one. When Grandma had tried to talk with her, Aunt Betty had told her, “I don’t want to talk, Mama. Just leave me alone.”

  Rising at four A.M. Monday and closing the door between kitchen and dining room, Mama began heating water to fill the big galvanized laundry tubs. All day she was bent over the washboard.

  Before Maria came to brew Aunt Betty’s tea and take me to her house for the afternoon, I helped Mama. She fed the clothes into the wringer, while I turned the crank. When the basket was full, I grabbed one of the handles and helped carry the wash to the clotheslines. I handed Mama shirts and dresses and towels, and she pinned them to the line. Together we shook the wrinkles from the sheets and straightened their edges.

  How strange it seemed, when we carried the first load to the yard, that the basket that had cradled the dead baby now held a heap of wet laundry.

  Late Saturday the undertaker from Kinder Mortuary had driven out from Mankato and taken the baby away. We would not see her again until the funeral at St. Ambrose Catholic Church on Tuesday.

  I didn’t mention to Mama that it was my fault the baby had fallen, nor did I ask where the stork had dropped her. Guilt and shame constrained me from talking about the baby. Also, I was afraid the punishment would start. That would probably come after the funeral. Right now, people were too shocked to think about punishment.

  Between the baby’s death on Saturday and the funeral Tuesday morning, Uncle Stan paced like a dog who has to go out. But he stayed home except for a little while Saturday afternoon, after the undertaker had gone, when he drove to the Zelenas’ to call his family in Red Wing.

  He would sit with Aunt Betty for a few minutes, trying now and then to talk with her.

  “Don’t you want to talk about it, honey? You know, I feel bad, too.”

  But Aunt Betty was wandering in dark fields of distraction. Uncle Stan would pace then, up and down the bedroom. I sat on the front porch, and I could hear him talking and pacing. Out the screen door he would explode, and plunging his hands deep into his pockets, he would march around the house, head down, trying to understand how everything had gone so wrong.

  When he’d nearly worn a path in the grass, he hurled himself back into the house and threw himself violently down on a kitchen chair. “Is there coffee, Arlene?”

  Mama poured him coffee, but withheld sympathy.

  “You think it’s my fault,” he said, stirring sugar into his cup.

  Maria, whose magic tea was warming on the stove, poured it through a strainer into a cup and, casting a disparaging glance at Uncle Stan, left the room, bearing the healing tea to her patient.

  Mama emptied the drain pan under the icebox. “You didn’t want anybody to know you weren’t making any money,” she accused.

  “You think I’d let her starve, is that what you think?” he asked, offended.

  “I think you managed not to notice.”

  “You’re hard,” he said, as if sorry to have to point it out.

  “She’s my sister.”

  “She’s my wife.”

  “If I’d had to hit her over the head and deliver her to Mama in a gunnysack, I’d have done it, if she were my wife.”

  “You’re hard,” he repeated, as if this accusation were a shield against her contempt. Contempt was unwomanly. Arlene was unwomanly. “You don’t understand men,” he said, dismi
ssing her blame.

  “I understand some men too well,” Mama told him.

  He huffed out the back door, leaving the coffee on the table. In the garage, he slammed things around as if he were looking for something or were going to undertake a project, but he had nothing on his mind except confusion and anger.

  After a while I followed to see what he was doing. A big cardboard box, broken flat, was spread on the floor. It was what Uncle Stan stretched out on when changing the oil in his car. Now he lay on it, legs pulled up fetally, arms wrapped around himself, sleeping. I tiptoed in and stood watching. Tears, not yet dry, clung to his long lashes like beads of dew. He looked like a hobo sleeping down in the hobo jungle. Seeing him like that made me fear for all of us.

  25

  THE BABY’S NAME, I learned at the funeral, was Marjorie Ann. If she’d grown up, she’d have been Margie Weller. Sitting in the front pew of St. Ambrose Catholic Church, I tried to imagine what someone named Margie Weller would look like when she was almost seven. Would I like her and want to play with her?

  The sun through the vivid stained windows turned the folds of white satin in Margie’s little coffin to pink and blue and green. With her beaky nose and pallid, waxy skin, Margie looked like an ugly porcelain doll. Her hands, unnaturally fine and slender for a baby, lay on a child’s white prayer book, whose pages were edged with gilt. Wrapped around one tiny wrist and spilling carefully onto the prayer book was a child’s rosary, bitty little seed pearls strung along a fine gold chain, ending in a gold cross so delicate it resembled Maria’s lace crochet work. Even a book and rosary this small were too large. And they were too beautiful. Their size and beauty made the baby look smaller and uglier. The white gown and bonnet that would have been her christening clothes were the same ones she had worn on Saturday. And they were too large and too fancy. I couldn’t help thinking that Marjorie looked like Mrs. Astor’s horse.

  All of this touched a place in my conscience, which was lashed raw with guilt. I wept obscenely. Mama nudged me and gave me her handkerchief. I couldn’t stop. Wherever I turned my mind, the ugly-faced baby, prayer book on her stomach, pricked me.

  On Mama’s other side was Aunt Betty, cold and gray, barely breathing, and beyond her, Uncle Stan, still looking confused and cross. Nothing would ever be the same between them and me.

  Papa, who sat on my other side, poked me in the ribs, shaking his head and frowning. “Be quiet,” he whispered. That made me cry more. Early that morning, Papa had driven from Harvester in the Oldsmobile. He was returning early tomorrow, before the morning trains.

  Behind us sat Grandma and Grandpa Browning, and Uncle Stan’s parents, Alf and Delia. Across the aisle from them were Grandma and Grandpa Erhardt, who lived only thirty miles from Morgan Lake and had come for Mama’s sake. They had met Uncle Stan and Aunt Betty but once, at Mama and Papa’s wedding. Early this morning, they’d arrived on the milk train with boxes of food. Papa was taking them home later.

  In the pew behind Grandma and Grandpa Erhardt were Maria Zelena, her papa, and Mr. McPhee. No one else had come for the funeral except half a dozen anonymous old women in twenty-year-old print dresses and shapeless black hats, which were stitched to their heads with hat pins.

  Papa pinched my leg and hissed, “You’re putting on quite a show.” I buried my face in Mama’s skirt, creating big stains of tears and spittle.

  “You’d better get her out of here,” he told Mama, and slipped out of the pew to let us pass. Pulling me by the hand, Mama hurried me up the side aisle and out into the vestibule.

  “What on earth is wrong with you?” Mama whispered sharply. As I could only stare at her and blubber, she took my hand again and hauled me out the door, which clanged behind us disclaimingly, like the righteous gates of heaven. I sat down on the top step, all the way to the side, in the shade cast by the banister wall.

  Mama stood two steps below me, pocketbook gripped beneath her arm. “Now, young lady, you tell me what’s wrong. Don’t you think Aunt Betty feels bad enough, without you making a scene?” I was bent over with my face planted on my drawn-up knees. “Honey, you didn’t know the baby, how can you be so sad?”

  “I can’t explain,” I told her, my words muffled by my dress.

  “Remember, the baby’s in heaven, and it’s never going to be hungry or tired or sad. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

  The baby was in limbo, and it was never going to see God.

  “Lark, I can’t stand here all day. Don’t you see how selfish you’re being? Aunt Betty needs me in there.”

  Mama wasn’t yelling. She didn’t sound angry. She was trying to make me see reason, and her very patience made matters worse. If she’d dragged me home, given me a spanking, and left me there alone, I’d have felt a little better.

  “Lark, are you going to answer me?”

  The cat had my tongue.

  “All right, Lark, if that’s the way you want it, you can sit here till after the service. But if you wander off, I’ll take the brush to you.”

  I sat hunched against the banister wall, crying, until at last the tears ran dry, and there were only spasms of sighs left in me.

  Mama and Uncle Stan were the first to emerge from the church, one on either side of Aunt Betty, supporting her. Aunt Betty was steady enough on her feet, but she looked like a sleepwalker about to step off a cliff.

  Papa, Grandpa Browning, Alf Weller, and Ladislau Zelena carried the tiny coffin, which probably could have been transported by any two of them. Slowly, watching their feet, down the steps they came. Inside the church, the organist continued to wrench straining, wheezing chords from the pump organ.

  Aunt Betty, along with Uncle Stan, was eased into the backseat of a black Chrysler chauffeured by the older of the two undertakers. Quietly and with ritual slowness, it glided away from the curb, following the hearse.

  Behind the Chrysler, Papa drove the Oldsmobile, Mama in the front seat, Grandma and Grandpa Erhardt in the back, with me between them.

  I touched Mama’s shoulder. “Isn’t the hearse beautiful, Mama? Almost as beautiful as the coffin.”

  “Oh, Lark,” Mama sighed.

  The sun flashed like little strokes of lightning from hood ornaments and grills and chromium appointments. All the cars were freshly washed, waxed, and buffed for the occasion. We were the most brilliant thing to pass down Main Street since the last funeral. I was disappointed that so few people saw us.

  Mr. Esterly was sweeping the walk in front of the store. He paused, paying heed to our sorrow. On the brick platform, the depot agent, sorting through freight packages, looked up and stilled his hands until we had passed.

  Arching the open gates of the cemetery, wrought iron letters, amid lilies and flourishes, spelled, “St. Ambrose.” The hearse turned in and wound along the path laid between weeping willow, cedar, and aspen, halting at length near the center of the graveyard.

  Wordlessly, we piled out of cars and hiked across the grass to the open grave waiting for Baby Marjorie. Mindful of the dream in which I’d tumbled into such a pit as this, I backed away, a stone bench beckoning.

  From where I sat, I could see Aunt Betty, between Uncle Stan and Mama. She looked as if she might never again speak or move except at someone else’s bidding. Unseeing, she glanced my way. I dropped my eyes. Even the empty gaze with which she had swept the hillside was an accusation.

  26

  WHEN WE RETURNED TO Aunt Betty’s, food was brought out and laid on the lace-covered dining room table. Everyone who had been at the funeral, including Father Dressler from St. Ambrose and the old women who sat in the back pew, came to the house to eat.

  I stole into the little bedroom off the kitchen where Mama slept and closed the door. The room was clean and cool, and smelled of Mama’s cologne and makeup. Voices murmured beneath the crab apple tree in the backyard, where the men had retreated to smoke. I listened without attention and fell asleep.

  Waking, I saw that the afternoon had spent itself. The cot lay i
n a pool of downy shadow. In the kitchen, the food had been put away. I retrieved a slice of ham from the icebox and a dinner roll from the bread box. I heard the women in the living room talking quietly. Beyond them, out in front of the house, the men lounged on the grass and against the sides of their cars. Alf Weller sat on the running board of his Model A, which was nearly indistinguishable from his son, Stan’s.

  The Zelenas and McPhee had departed, as had the old ladies, who, Mama said, ate more than men and then proceeded to relate nightmare stories of dying babies and dying mothers, of women who went mad or blind giving birth and women whose babies were born horribly “marked.”

  Padding barefoot out the back door, I climbed the crab apple tree and sat among its branches, eating the sandwich. From there I discovered that I could see over the Witch’s raspberry bushes and into her backyard.

  She was kneeling on a cardboard mat, pulling weeds from around tomato plants. Now and then she cocked her head, listening to her own thoughts. After a while she stood. Throwing her work gloves on the back steps, she began to march up and down, up and down. Then she stopped and, with both hands, grabbed hold of the hair which she wore rolled tightly back from her face. She pulled at it frenziedly, as if to yank it out by the roots, and when it was torn from the hairpins that held it and flying wildly around her head, she threw her hands in the air and looked up at the sky. At length she ran into the house, forgetting the gloves lying on the step.

  I finished my sandwich, climbed down from the tree, and wandered around the house to the front yard, where my two grandpas and Alf Weller still chewed the rag over President Roosevelt and Hitler. They’d been going on about Roosevelt and Hitler and Chamberlain most of the afternoon, I thought.

  “Where’s Papa?” I asked Grandpa Erhardt.

  “Took Stan for a ride in the Oldsmobile. Said they wouldn’t be gone long.”

  “When did they go?”

  Grandpa took out his pocket watch and opened it. “What time did the boys go?” he asked Alf Weller. “About four, was it?”