October Suite

by Maxine Clair

  And then on down the slope. Mrs. Pemberton may not have known every jot and tittle, but she let it be known that she had heard gossip and that October’s name had been at the root of it. Outrageous scandal numbered October’s days at Pemberton House.

  And Irene Wilson’s attitude just might number her teaching days. Irene Wilson, her little crackerjack, turned belligerent. Conniving wouldn’t have been too strong a word. One of the pupils claimed that October had lost her temper as she escorted him down the hall to the office and had struck him in the face. A pure lie. But when the principal asked the class, Irene had sworn that she had seen it happen. Said that she had gotten out of her seat and watched from the doorway. How could Irene know anything about her and James? October couldn’t answer that question, but anyone could recognize revenge. The code against corporal punishment automatically put her in trouble.

  And on down. Mrs. Pemberton served notice: October would have to move out at the end of April, one month before the end of school. No James. The Jacksons said they’d take her in. Her clothes were getting tight. James didn’t call. A wait-and-see paralysis set in.

  October’s room at the Jacksons’ place amounted to what had once been a pantry off the kitchen, with a door, a cot, and a tiny window high up. For the last six weeks of the term, just like mentor-and-cadet, Cora stayed at October’s elbow throughout the school day, brought her chipped ice at recess, sat with her through the final maddening minutes of closing down a year.

  October waited, would wait but dignity was now out of the question. She made no plans beyond the final day of school and then to sleep until James came to end the nightmare. He had to come. It was her only way out.

  Because October couldn’t stand the smell of blood in the meat Mrs. Jackson cooked, couldn’t stomach the consistency of mashed potatoes or any cereal, and because green vegetables left a coating on her tongue, she picked at anything set before her. Cora nagged her about eating. “Call James and tell him,” October said to Cora’s worry.

  October couldn’t stand bindings, either—waistbands, buttoned sleeves, elastic in her panties, hooked bras, scarves that tied up her hair—couldn’t stand the feeling of being smothered. Her bathrobe felt right. “Do you think James knows I’m showing?” she asked Cora.

  One dismal afternoon as a fly buzzed and dived around October’s head on the pillow, she tried to distract herself with a book. Someone rang the doorbell and she held her breath. Women’s voices. No James. Mrs. Jackson was having company—someone, people, were moving through the house. She heard them nearing her door and sat up.

  In less than a shuffle, without warning the door flew open and the shock of her aunt Frances’s large frame in the doorway made her lightheaded. Hand on hip, her aunt declared, “October, girl, now you know better than this.”

  Then she saw her aunt Maude behind Aunt Frances, already wiping tears. Her aunt Maude pushed into the little room.

  “Chile, look at you,” she said. “You know we don’t live like this.”

  And then Vergie, looking grand as Marian Anderson, slipped past her aunts and stood over October. She touched her sister’s shoulder and told her, “We’re taking you home. Thank the Lord your friend Cora called us. You’ve got people, October. Come on, now, get up.”

  In Chillicothe, when Vergie had married Gene and taken over two of the upstairs rooms, the house had shrunk. To spare, now, there was only the made-over side porch that Gene had enclosed with four windows and a carpeted floor. Un-cheery. October’s aunts gave it to her, and she revived the antiquated idea of confinement, stayed out of their way. Better not to have everybody condemning her for what they didn’t understand.

  Not that anybody in the house made a peep about the how and the why of the man who had brought her to this. No one asked or ventured to guess if she had plans or what her dreams might be. Whenever she sat with October or washed and braided her hair, Vergie talked mostly about their small world—Mrs. Hopp next door and the rotten nephew who was stealing all Mrs. Hopp’s money. Or she explained her frustration about Gene having a backbreaking loading-dock job at Meade’s paper mill—“They know he’s too old to be lifting all that stuff”—when Aunt Frances had a place in Mrs. Meade’s will for her six years of private duty. “It just doesn’t make sense,” Vergie said. “They know we’re all related. Seems like they’d let Gene work somewhere else.” Never anything about what might have happened in Kansas. Nothing about what was coming.

  To give herself something to do until James came back to himself and got around to asking Cora about her, October thought that she might sew. She had catalogues of patterns, pictures that Aunt Frances and Vergie were happy to match at the fabric store. It seemed natural to sew what she knew—dresses, suits, skirts for herself.

  “I don’t know who you’re sewing for,” Aunt Frances said one day after work. “It isn’t going to fit anybody around here.”

  October hunched her shoulders. “It keeps me busy,” she said. But it didn’t matter that she couldn’t wear them now; sewing satisfied something. She could finish a piece every three or four days and not remember whole afternoons. And the times when she wasn’t bent over a pattern or guiding a seam under the thundering Singer needle, she wrote letters in her head. To James.

  She broke down and called him long distance one night. Just to hear his voice. And who knows, she thought; depending on how he sounded, she might venture to tell him that she still had all of his money. That she hadn’t seen the “doctor” after all. That she could come back anytime he wanted. She rehearsed her first few lines and dialed.

  “Hello, James,” she said when he answered. “It’s October. I just called to say hi and see how you’re doing.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding to her like he had turned a somersault and surprised himself by landing on his feet.

  “How are you?” he asked. Now here was the question. What would she tell him? What did he think, and what did he know for sure? She fished.

  “I’m fine, really. A little tired is all.”

  “Are you working?” he asked. And she said no, but sewing a lot. Would he think, Maternity clothes?

  “Where are you?” he asked, as she hoped he would.

  “I’m in Ohio with my aunts,” she said.

  “You aren’t ... you know ... sick or anything are you?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “You sound fine,” he said. “Like your old self.”

  So he had been counting on her being her old self. “Yes,” she said.

  “Look,” he said “I don’t mind saying hi, I mean, I’m glad to know everything came out all right, but do you think it’s a good idea to call me?”

  Too much. She had called him at his house. Suddenly she was nerves and stammers just remembering that she had flirted with the idea of telling him the truth.

  “I just wanted to say hi,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, “but I can’t be talking ... you know ... to you on the phone. It wouldn’t be right, you know?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You were always decent,” he said. “I never met your aunts, but tell them I said they raised a decent woman.”

  She hung up and went straight to her room. A full moon, heavy and golden, climbed half the sky, getting smaller and smaller as it climbed. When it was a dime-size eye way up, it threw its argentine light over her bed and found her staring back, stunned that there was the chance that James didn’t know what she knew about love.

  As if it had been a bad idea, she stopped sewing and put away the fabrics. She let tears spill out of her now, all the time, with aunties and Vergie and Gene sitting right there at the dinner table or right out there on the front porch. Having a baby was one thing. But there were worse things. It could be that James had talked so guardedly about his wife not because of decency but because his wife wa
s the woman that he loved.

  She wrote two letters, one to the Board of Education, one to Cora. To the Board she explained that she had had a change of address and that she would not be available for the fall term. Family matters, she said. If they saw fit to hire her for January, they could send her contract to her address in Ohio. If not, she would reapply in the winter for the following year, adding that she had loved her job at Stowe, and worrying that either her pregnancy or the children’s lie about the hitting incident would destroy her chances. Yet she hoped that no one had said anything to anyone about anything.

  To Cora, October sent a sad longing for the classroom days that the two of them had once spent, scraping gum off the floor. She had a single question: What were people saying? She had complaints, too, about being nauseated all the time and craving onions in vinegar. Of James, she said only that she hadn’t heard from him.

  The first time the baby kicked, October jerked back from the table and held her stomach still against the live something in there. The months were passing. James had been the immediate future she understood. She could not yet fathom it, but she knew that another future was shaping itself.

  The baby grew, seemed to influence her whole body to go along with the program. Her hair grew longer, fuller, wilder. Her aunts’ eyes were on her as the bittersweet chocolate of her skin turned milkier.

  “You’re looking mighty spiffy these days,” Aunt Frances said. And Aunt Maude backed it up with, “You see, you turned out to be some kind of pretty, didn’t you?”

  “It’s like a religious thing,” Vergie said. “This is what happens to a woman—you shine from the inside.” Vergie was four years older than October, married to Gene for eight years, with no baby in sight.

  When October looked into the mirror, she saw the shine, all right, but it looked more like oil than illumination on her skin. Her nose spread wider above her swollen lips. Once, when Aunt Frances caught her looking at herself in the hallway mirror, she said, “You know you always were so touchy about how you look. Don’t worry, you’ll get your size back.” How could she? She looked like a horse.

  She was the vessel; the baby possessed her. It grew by itself, slept, kicked, flaunted its unlimited rights to her blood and bones and left her tired. It didn’t need her consent; it willed itself into existence within its own world, pound for pound, inches at a time.

  At the end of the summer, Cora finally responded to October’s letter. Sure, people gossip, and then they move on to the next piece of news. It was good that October had left. Word was that a few people had been too curious about October’s health and her sudden desire to spend the summer in Ohio. And Cora swore that she never breathed a hint. And yes, there had been a report about the corporal punishment incident at the end of the year. Cora couldn’t say whether or not it had gone into October’s permanent file.

  There was no stopping the progress of a determined birth.

  Early in November, with winter already turning the sky to ashes, October gave up nighttime altogether and kept the lamps burning in her room all the time. She couldn’t rest; the baby kicked and turned and scraped against her insides. And when she lay down to try to sleep, her breath wouldn’t come or she felt like she was smothering. Vergie moved Gene’s easy chair into October’s room so that she could nap some. But it got so bad that somebody needed to promise they would sit watch to be sure she kept breathing or October would refuse to sit in the chair.

  She was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet to relieve the gas pains when it began. Her water broke. The doctor, young and new at Ross County General, had told them that her labor would be slow. Aunt Frances had said to ignore him—nobody can ever tell about the first one. And so they rushed. In the Negro ward at the hospital, while her aunts and Vergie and Gene were out of her reach, October lay in the labor room counting the tiles of the walls and the minutes between the vises of contractions. A nurse the color of honey with a record for a voice checked periodically for dilation and smiled and patted but went away every time. “You’ll know when it’s time,” she said.

  The clench-and-loosen rhythm went on for another short while. Then a wave crashed pain across her back, and October knew it was time. The nurse had just measured and patted and left and she thought she might have to call out. The next wave crashing made her forget decorum, and she hollered, “Somebody!”

  The nurse came running. Without a trace of condescension, she told her, “I’m here, Miss Brown. It’s time for you to sit up. Now put your feet on the floor and stand up.”

  Trying to hold her back in one piece, October did as she was told.

  “Now turn around and sit on the gurney—I’m going to wheel you in.”

  She shook out a sheet to cover October, but then said, “Oh, oh,” and “Keep breathing real deep, honey.”

  The head and shoulders split her in two, and then the hard body slid out. As the nurse worked at wiping and swabbing and smacking, October heard the wail. In a minute the young doctor pushed the gurney with her and the baby to the delivery room. Too late. By then a baby boy had already torn his way into her life.

  And what did I do? I stood by and held for her and her new baby son.

  Delicacy dictated that she carefully consider declaring the name of the father. Unknown was the choice she most favored, and since it was strictly up to her, she scribbled Unknown on the form. She knew that the actual naming of the Baby would be more than she could manage—a complicated matter—and she had no interest in figuring it all out. She thought maybe if she had had the normal options—a father for him, a grandfather’s blessing to pass on, a favorite uncle or movie star, or staunch faith in one of the biblical heroes—a name might come to mind. She decided to wait until she took him home. Maybe then.

  She never really got a good look at him, either, until they were at home, and at eight days old he didn’t look to her like anyone in particular. Just a baby, brown with a smooth cap of hair, in a bassinet that Vergie had draped with white scalloped eyelet. The first few nights, October slept with the bassinet right up against her bed. But then she began to listen to his breathing and her vigilance kept her awake. She moved him a few feet away from her bed.

  When he cried, she had trouble holding his head and body so that they didn’t wobble. He was too small to fit comfortably in the crook of her arm. No worry. If he so much as sneezed or whimpered, Auntie or Vergie would rush in—“Is he all right?”—and pick him up.

  And then her milk came down and engorged the glands so that they felt like stones lodged in her breasts and under her arms. They would harden until the Baby was ready to be suckled and she could trade one kind of pain for another. All the lanolin in the world could not toughen her tender nipples for the strong jaws of the Baby.

  October was nursing one morning sitting in Gene’s easy chair in the living room, when Vergie came in with two cups of tea. She sat one on the table beside Gene’s chair and sat cradling the other in her lap.

  “When Auntie gets off today,” Vergie said, “I thought we could go out to Sears and look at some baby clothes. He needs a couple more things, don’t you think?”

  October looked down at the Baby at her breast. His eyes were closed and he was making the slurping noises he always made when he nursed. What was it about a baby that made everybody go soft? And why didn’t she go soft holding him? She tried hugging him closer, wanting to feel like his mother but feeling only the clumsy cramp of forcing her arms to work on their own.

  He was tensed and his fists were clenched, all of his focus on her nipple. She had dressed him in an undershirt and diaper and wrapped him in a small blanket. At night she or someone else always put him in a nightgown and pulled the drawstring to protect his feet. Those things were simple and conveniently changed whenever he wet his diaper. It had never occurred to her to buy all those other things made for a boy.

  But the snow outside was gray
, and October couldn’t think of being seen at Sears in any of the oversize clothes she had to wear still. She told Vergie, “I’ll order him some things from the catalogue. You all can pick them up.”

  “Good,” Vergie said, reaching down under the coffee table for the Sears catalogue. She turned to the baby section and scooted her chair up to October’s side.

  “Look at these,” she said.

  October glanced at the pages of baby clothes all looking alike. If the Baby needed coveralls now, and jumpers, she guessed that she should be the one to buy them.

  “Sure,” she told Vergie. “Let’s order him some today on the phone. Why don’t we get three or four of each?”

  “I think you could start out with just two,” Vergie said. “They cost, you know.”

  October wanted to say that she had enough money, but in fact after paying her own hospital bill she had very little at the bank. “Okay,” she said to Vergie, “two.”

  “Have you been thinking about what to name him?” Vergie asked all of a sudden.

  October looked down at the Baby and shook her head. Days before she had been reading Ebony and saw the name Nathaniel and thought she would just give him that name, or the next name that she came upon. And then the moment passed.

  “Me and Aunt Maude were wondering what you thought of David.”

  “I guess it’s all right,” October said. The Baby had relaxed his suck and was dozing now. She slipped her nipple back into her nursing bra, slung a diaper over her shoulder, and began burping him. This wasn’t the time to worry about a name again, or clothes for that matter. He was only six weeks old.

  The Baby let out a big burp, and as October tucked him away in his bassinet, he began to fret. “Let me hold him,” Vergie said. “David means ‘beloved,’ you know.” Vergie began rocking him.