by Amy Hempel
A song with geese in it, a painting with water in it, a person finding treasures that she hopes the child found. Not this particular song, and not this particular painting not yet painted back then, but a song that took the child to the heart of the world, and a sight that summed up much of what she loved.
*
I said I might have ended things as so many others did. Yet I found my way to a kind of haunted house, an old-fashioned mansion in a corner of rural Maine that could have scared people in a movie about a haunted house, and that did, in fact, haunt the women who for a short time lived there, as I did at eighteen. I had gone to Maine to visit a cousin in August. On a sightseeing trip one day, I drove past the farm that sold organic produce, and then past the truck that sold lobsters out of the back on Main Street, and kept going for hours until I entered a small town that felt familiar, though I couldn’t think why, something generic about it. Something not welcoming, though that was a lot of places I had been. I parked my car on that drowsy summer day, and set out to see as many houses as I could, to see how people lived there. I walked in the direction that the houses became more grand, older, well preserved, forbidding, until I came to the home. It was dark even in daylight, built not to bring in light but to withstand the storms of winter. The yard—one might say grounds—was neatly kept and simply planted. I didn’t know what I was seeing the first time I saw it. Like an exclusive club in the city, there was an address but no name. I felt transfixed by the place, as I had once felt in England seeing a house comparable to this one, but that was on a tour of national historic houses. This one was not a national treasure, nor was it a home. It was a Maternity Home. I did not yet know that I would need the home’s services a few months later.
*
The license plate for Maine, since 1936, says VACATIONLAND. But I never coaxed a kayak down a duck-visited river, or boiled a lobster, never picked blueberries growing wild at the side of a road, or wrote my name on a piece of curled bark. I did collect birch bark when I found it in the orchard behind the home. The orchard was bounded by birch trees and a small pond just beyond. Wind would blow loose bark into the orchard, and if I had been sentimental back then, maybe I would have chosen a name for the girl and written it on a piece of bark, and carried it with me ever after. None of us who gave birth in the home were expected to return, not to check in about a child or to visit for what some people call closure. The closure I could expect involves a sign ahead of a closed lane or exit ramp that says ROAD CLOSURE AHEAD. I’m always glad those roads have closure.
Not expected to return, not encouraged to stay in touch, we launched ourselves from the slate front steps of the home and it was good-bye and not even good luck. Just keep going.
Years later, I became acquainted with the parents of some of the girls where I taught. One couple, a painter and his beautiful wife, had bought an old fishing camp on a lake in the same small inland town where the home had been located. It had since burned down, for which I was grateful. The couple had turned the fishing camp into an endless astonishment of studios and galleries and playrooms, a place no one wanted to leave. Another parent from the school invited me to her grand refuge of a house nearby that was built upon rock ledges that hung above a lake. A deck ran the length of the side facing the lake—you would look down and find yourself hanging above dark water.
The painter’s wife knew how to cut hair, and said she wanted to volunteer to cut homeless people’s hair. She said she thought it would make them feel better. I thought it was a good idea, generous. But the painter cautioned against it, said he didn’t think it was a good idea to use scissors and a razor on the heads of people who were, some of them, mentally ill, and distraught. But maybe you could pick and choose, in the interest of safety and good works. Though I guess many of us have been fooled. I have certainly fooled myself, from time to time to time.
The last time I was in Maine, before I left New York for Florida, I saw tourists taking pictures of mallards along a river. One young girl, maybe twelve years old, took pictures of scat, and giggled when she advanced her camera. I liked her right away, a girl I would not see again.
I met a woman who said she conceived of her daughter before she conceived her. I was one of the ones for whom it went the other way. I could not conceive of that creature, though she was making her way inside me, not even when the doctor handed her off to a nurse and she was carried out of the room. I was weak from labor, and I was weak with relief. The transaction was not free, but I was free to go.
*
Sometimes I can’t bear the responsibility of carrying a purse. I will put a few dollars and a ChapStick in a pocket of my jeans or a pocket of a light canvas jacket, and head out for a walk in the botanical gardens. For an entry fee higher than you might expect, you can walk the paths through native flora, all of it identified by tiny signs. The best thing there is the bamboo garden, the familiar green to ebony and even blue bamboo. There is one kind of plant along the paths that is known as purple heart—it’s in the yard of the rented house, and I think more of it now that I know its name. There are signs that designate sinkholes. No cars or pancaked apartment buildings at the bottom—these sinkholes occurred in an open field where visitors can stand behind a low wooden enclosure and look down to where snakes and skinks have staked a claim.
*
I have not told anyone about the girl, so no one knows what I did when she was born. I almost said “taken,” but she was not taken, she was given. I gave her for adoption. For safekeeping, for peace of mind.
The staff at the home seemed nice enough, by which I mean that one could meet a nurse’s eyes and not feel judged. Those of us who made an arrangement to do so could check in, as to an inn, and stay for as long as we needed before giving birth. We were not pampered, but neither were we deprived of small niceties: lavender-scented soap, fresh—if not ironed—linens, and bedside radios as long as we kept the volume down. There were no locks on the doors of our rooms, but no one seemed bothered by that, at least not when I was there. Unlike some of the others, I did not stay for very long. There was shame attached to being there, coming naturally to some, stirred up in others.
There were no group activities foisted upon us, for which I think all of us were grateful. No mandatory chapel attendance, though there was a small chapel attached to the home (it might have once been an extra bedroom, long since fitted out with pews and stained glass). We were not allowed to eat in our rooms, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner were where we got to know who else was there.
I had spent a few years at boarding school, so I took to the dormitory feel of the place. Others did not like sharing a room, and wore a towel into the shower stall, and slept facing the wall. But for me it was nostalgic to be in a large Victorian house with other young women.
Just a week after I had settled into the home, the morning sickness passed. I thought it was a sign that I had done the right thing. But I had not done the right thing. But I didn’t know it yet.
There were times the home seemed empty of people in charge. Where did the nurses go for whole afternoons, and where was the housekeeper who sometimes swept the floors in our rooms? Where was the handyman when a lightbulb burned out at night and a woman still wanted to read? Where were the matron and her husband? None of us knew what the husband was ever up to other than trying to raise money to keep the place going. The matron—old-fashioned name—was not part of the day-to-day; she delegated jobs to the visible staff, and seemed to rely on regular briefings. They seemed like stock characters to me, these stern, shadowy figures in the haunted-feeling house.
We could go where we wanted, not that the small town had much to offer. A buddy system was encouraged but not enforced, in case one were to feel faint from exertion. An unspoken rule was in effect, one that discouraged eliciting personal information. My only complaint was the setting of the thermostat; it was kept to a temperature lower than allowed for coziness at night, or in the day, even given the fact that pregnant women often run hot. On
e had to rely on old crocheted afghans pulled around hunched shoulders. Some were made from continuous stitches, and some assembled from dozens of pot-holder-like squares. The squares didn’t match, and the sight of a pile of these homemade throws could be dizzying.
So little was asked of us. Oh, we were asked for money, but this was not a charity we had come to.
When I said “nurses” before, I didn’t mean that we were treated like patients. Our vital signs were not checked, nor prenatal vitamins offered. Unless delivery was imminent they were more like hall monitors or housemothers. We supposed that they kept the matron informed of the smooth, or less than smooth, running of the operation. And on days when the doctor was called in, they proved themselves indispensable. Housemothers became medical professionals, and we guests became mothers.
*
On Thursday afternoons, I check in on the man in his nineties who always has his TV on. This is not uncommon among the people I look after. This fellow likes the show where Realtors show people three houses for sale and the people choose one of them to buy. On the day I’m remembering, the show films in the Caribbean. A broker shows a couple a magnificent house with incomparable views and two infinity pools. The wife takes it all in and says to her husband, “I could never be happy here.”
This man in his nineties was once CEO of a large northeastern corporation. I think we hit it off because he told me he had often wished, before heading into a board meeting, that he was a desk clerk in a modest chain motel.
*
“I see a child coming forward.” That is what the psychic said to me, the one who said she saw me surrounded by moving boxes (I had just moved to Florida). At the time she said it, I was blank, I saw no one—what child? Then I thought maybe she meant a young girl I was fond of, Lois’s ten-year-old granddaughter, who could already pull a face like the best stand-up comic. She had enviable timing, and didn’t know she had this power. Though I didn’t get to see the girl often, I was moved to want to care for her. The family had its struggles.
It was not until I was driving home that I knew who the psychic saw coming forward. And I had to pull the car over. Well, I almost pulled the car over. It was that kind of realization. And a measure of the distance I had come from the way I had once felt; there was a gap, and it was only a few minutes, but it hadn’t used to be there, not any gap at all.
There was a girl I saw eating a sandwich sitting on the lawn of her house the other day. She wore a turtleneck shirt, and I noticed her because she had put both of her arms through one sleeve of the long-sleeved shirt. She held the sandwich off to the side with both hands while one sleeve flapped in the breeze. I was in a car stopped at a light when I saw her, but even if I had been walking past, I would not have wanted to know why she put both of her arms in one sleeve. She made me smile, a contrast to the boy in a stroller in a crowded market who shoved a handful of fruit into his mouth and then spit out the words “I just can’t wait to eat these delicious berries,” repeating the act until the box of raspberries was gone. His lack of control or the use of the word “delicious”—it was hard to say which was worse. Three guesses as to whether the mother paid for the empty box.
*
I am never glad to hear from a person I knew a long time ago. What do you want from me—that is the dreaded question—and why now. Though when I heard from one of the women who had been at the home when I was, the usual queasy feeling made room for curiosity. The call came just after I arrived in Florida.
The person who tracked me down was possibly the meekest of the residents at that time. She had suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, which did not taper off the further along she got; it kept her vomiting for the duration. There was nothing she could keep down beyond the occasional saltine and a few sips of ginger ale, so it was a surprise to us all when her baby was born undamaged. Not that the baby remained her baby. This was a boy, we were told. And true to the old saying, this boy had not robbed her of her looks. Sick as she had been, she displayed an odd radiance from the time she arrived to the day she left.
She told me that her brother—conveniently a private investigator—had helped her locate me. She said she wanted to know if I had seen the book. What book? The book about the home, she said.
She said she figured I had not heard about it, that it was published by a small press, and might not have been widely reviewed. She did not want to say more. Or she said more, but she was cryptic. Before she hung up, she told me that if I could not secure a copy on my own she would send her copy to me.
She called on a day that reminded me I needed boots—three inches of rain fell in less than half a day. I found a store that was having a sale. The boots did not have to be stylish, just waterproof.
I tried on a left boot from the display and asked the salesgirl if she could find its mate. She came back with another left boot. She said, “I found it,” and handed it to me to try on. When I pointed out that she had brought me a second left boot, she said no, it was for the right foot. I showed her that the toes of both boots turned toward the right. She would not be persuaded. I put on the boot, and it was obvious to me and to a second salesperson I hadn’t known was there that I was wearing two left boots. “Let me get you the right one,” he said. The salesgirl was not affected by this in any way I could see.
*
It was the policy of the home not to let us see them. It was supposed to be easier this way, but whoever it was easier for, it was not easy for us. Some of the women tried to get around this. Others, myself included, were too tired to make a fuss. We were told that the adoptive parents would pick up the babies in the office, which was on a different floor of the home. It was said to happen almost immediately after a birth; it was that well coordinated, we were told.
Waiting for the book to arrive, I went with some friends to a movie about a long-married couple. The friends had been married as long as the couple in the film. The make-believe husband let a secret erupt, and the whole quiet film showed the effects on the wife of this act. The wife was played by an actress you would want to watch do anything on-screen.
At dinner after the movie, we found we had opposite reactions. My friends thought the woman in the film was awful and unfair; they thought her husband was “lost,” and rooted for him. But I thought the husband was selfish, and at fault, and behaved gratuitously badly. He had failed his wife in public at their anniversary party. His comments were inadequate, with all of their friends there to hear them. I sided with the wife in the film, whose long marriage was suddenly in question. My friends defended the keeping of secrets, but I think of secrets as lies.
Is it possible to keep a secret from a psychic? The one who told me she saw a child coming forward, she was one of dozens of psychics in a town famous for them. A couple of hours’ drive from here is the tiny old town that was once a spiritualist camp and a paranormal vortex. There is a haunted hotel if you want to stay overnight, and first-rate occult bookstores and crystal shops. I bought a pair of earrings made of green aventurine. I’d hoped a “d” had been left out by accident, but no. Though it’s “adventurine” when anyone asks me.
The official T-shirt of Cassadaga shows the name of the town, and underneath it the slogan: Where Mayberry Meets the Twilight Zone.
That’s where I live!
The bar in the haunted hotel is where one can wait for a session. I plan to go there again and again, trying different psychics until I find one who won’t tell me the truth.
*
I had the great luck to be introduced to a woman of immeasurable kindness and talent who had a remarkable ability to create beauty around her. She is herself a world-class beauty. She is a painter and I love her paintings. She is a most generous friend who gave me the two I loved best. In one, there are three little girls in white dresses. There are no features on their faces. They stand on the shore of an island, waving to whoever is on the boat that is either approaching the island where they stand or leaving it behind. I asked her who the little girls in whit
e dresses were. In her ninetieth year, she told me: “Me, myself, and I.” And are the people in the boat they wave to—are these people arriving or leaving? I asked. “Leaving,” she said. “The girls are waving good-bye.”
In another painting she gave me there are four faceless girls in white dresses. There is a sense of urgency as they flee the storm that is gathering above them; they are trying to get to safety, to leave “Cloudland.”
*
What if one could find solace in cleaning? What if I could learn to put a bag inside a vacuum and push it about a room and have the dirt transported just like that. Oh, I know how to vacuum—just what if I could find the Zen component, if there is one to be found, in washing dirty dishes, in bleaching the bowl of a toilet, having first procured a plumber to fix that toilet. What if I changed the sheets that have gone unchanged, and swept a porch of pine needles and leaves, used a broom to rid the front door of cobwebs and adhesive beetles, and raked up the pinecones blown down by high winds onto the patchy lawn. Anyone else would have done these things by now. What must it be like to live an ordered life?
A friend from the New York days, the stylish Christopher, lived a life of ease and said to me one day, “When life is easy, it’s an easy thing to take a life.” He was being provocative, I think that was what he was being. No way to find out now; years ago the ease went out of his life and he died of AIDS. But isn’t it also true that when life is hard, it’s easy to take a life? Sometimes the answer is yes when a person asks if it would kill you to get the mail.
*
“Estrogenous.” Not even a real word, yet any woman can hear the insult in it. Misogynists use this word, and a doctor used it in the home. It is a way to dismiss a woman and what she says, what she thinks, because she is believed to be overrun with hormones. And although the doctor in the home did not use the word to describe me, I thought less of him for using it at all.
