The Light of Luna Park

by Addison Armstrong

  “Grace!” Geoff bellows. His wife comes striding in, rushed but unharried.

  “Geoff?”

  “You sent Mrs. Anderson into the lion’s den.” Geoff chuckles. “And the little one, too.”

  “Stella,” I answer reflexively. “Her name is Stella.”

  Grace turns her sparkling smile to me. “I’m so very sorry! I was under the impression that you were joining the men in here for the evening. Our little Joseph will be delighted to have a playmate. Come along!”

  “Oh.” I pause, searching for a polite way to correct her. “You were actually quite right. I will be joining the other doctors this evening.”

  She turns a questioning glance to her husband, who, in turn, looks askance at Charlie. “Charlie, old horse, you finally settling down?”

  I close my eyes briefly and then open them. “I am a nurse, Dr. Burns. Geoff. And I have experience that Charlie”—I stumble over the use of his Christian name, so improper in any other situation—“thought you would all find fascinating. But if you would prefer that more modern medicine stay entirely in the hands of nurses—bedpans and bedsheets do, after all—I completely understand. I can go.”

  Grace Burns’s eyes are narrowed in what is either admiration or fury; perhaps both. Charlie is covering a smile. And Geoff Burns is laughing. “Well, well! We’ve got ourselves a guest to remember.”

  Perhaps it is amusement crackling in his voice rather than respect; certainly, I am a novelty more than I am a peer. But I have made my point and carved out my space, and so I smile and play the part I have created. “Charmed.” I extend my hand. “Truly.”

  * * *

  —

  The medical talk starts up over supper. Stella has been exiled to Grace and Joseph’s nursery—so that she doesn’t get any ideas like her mother, I suppose—and my fingers itch without her. Surely any mother would be nervous to leave her baby with a stranger, but I am terrified. Though I am committed to Stella as if she were mine, I feel always as though the world may come and snatch her from me. “Jig’s up,” they say in my dreams, where kindly nuns are just as likely to spirit my daughter away as are men masked in black. In reality, it would be Hattie or Michael, or perhaps the police. Certainly not Grace Burns, and certainly not her six-month-old son. But still I fret. Still I listen, anxious to hear a cry, a laugh, even a rustle from the nursery above.

  “So, Althea.” Geoff looks over his china plate to where I sit gratefully next to Charlie. “Tell me about your . . . expertise.” He cocks his eyebrows as if awaiting the punch line of a joke.

  “Certainly.” I clear my throat. “It actually concerns Stella, in a way.” I put down the olive I grip gingerly in my fingers.

  “So your experience is from being a mother, rather than a nurse.” The man who utters these words says them kindly, with relief. As if he has been released from the burden of distrusting me; as if I have been freed from the pressure of real knowledge.

  I roll my shoulders back until I feel the stretch in my neck. “My first experience was as a nurse. At Dr. Couney’s incubator park on Coney Island.”

  “The freak show?”

  I take a deep breath. I may be putting myself at risk, but these doctors are part of the AMA. They hold sway in the medical world, and my words to them might be able to save the lives of other premature infants.

  “Yes, the freak show. The one that saved my daughter’s life.”

  The men quiet at that.

  I breathe in. “Couney is able to save the vast majority of the babies brought to him, despite the fact that most of them weigh but two pounds. Bellevue, where I trained, could do none of that.” As I continue, I forget to whom I’m speaking, lost in the wonder of the ways to save a life. “These babies struggle to breathe, to suckle, to regulate their body temperature. And Dr. Couney saves them, using European technology that our hospitals refuse to adopt.”

  “Where did he get his degree?”

  I don’t let the men see me falter. “He studied under the Frenchman who invented baby incubators. Budin.” Dr. Couney spoke little of his past in my time at the island; in fact, he often deflected to discuss that of his nurses. I must confess I’ve wondered since what Dr. Couney was trying to hide. But I don’t think it matters. What matters is that he saved my baby’s life, and many others.

  “Incubators . . .” The man across from me at the table furrows his brow. “So they work the same way a farmer’s do? For eggs?”

  “Similarly.” I smile patiently. “But more sophisticated by far.”

  “Heating, then.” One of the men inserts himself as if afraid that I will otherwise assume he does not understand the concept of temperature. How insecure man can be when threatened by an intelligent woman.

  “Certainly. The incubators are thermostat-regulated so that they replicate the temperature the babies were accustomed to before birth, and the air pumped into them is heated through hot-water coils. It’s filtered as well, passed through absorbent wool over antiseptic solution and then filtered again to remove large particles—dust and the like.”

  “So that’s it?” Dr. Burns asks. “All the little guys need is heat and air? I’ve seen babies put in hatboxes and sandwiched between hot water bottles, and that works just fine. What makes Coney Island so different?”

  “That does work for some.” I don’t want to alienate my host. “But many babies who are as small as my Stella was, two and a half pounds, they cannot even eat yet. They cannot suckle. And Couney’s nurses are uniquely able to feed them regardless.”

  “What, with magic?” This from the man to whom Charlie and I first talked as we entered the room. The man who likened my having any expertise whatsoever to a baby having the same.

  I stretch my face into a smile. “With a gavage to the stomach through the throat, or with a specially manufactured spoon that allows the nurses to drip the milk into the nose.”

  “Their mother’s milk, I hope.”

  Not for the first time, I think about my inability to feed Stella the way a real mother could. The nurses at the island tut-tutted over the babies who had to turn to the wet nurses for milk. I myself wondered if they were less devoted—what else would keep them from their children? But now my stomach churns, for I did the same thing. I kept Stella from her mother and her milk. I close my eyes briefly and then return to the conversation. Focus, Althea. “It depends,” I tell the man. “Some mothers do bring their milk; mostly, it comes from wet nurses.”

  “Kids that can’t even eat.” The man who is either Dr. Reynolds or Dr. Mason—whichever one it was whom I found less hateful—shakes his head sadly.

  “Makes you wonder,” says his counterpart, “whether God even wants them to survive.”

  Makes you wonder whether God even wants them to survive.

  Makes you wonder.

  “We will follow,” Michael Perkins vowed, “God’s plan.”

  “Excuse me.” I scoot back in my chair and place my napkin on the table. All my energy goes into setting it down gently rather than breaking down. And then I flee, the sound of each man’s chair grating along the glossy floor as he stands. Funny, that they’re willing to adhere to such archaic forms of respect yet unwilling to treat me with the decency afforded any other human being.

  Charlie catches up to me just as I am emerging with Stella from little Joseph Burns’s nursery. “Althea.” Charlie reaches out to touch me and then thinks better of it. “I am so, so sorry. I gave him a good talking-to, Althea, I did. I had no idea they would say such horrible things.”

  I keep walking. I have perfected the demure silence; I will use it tonight to my advantage. Stalking into the dining room, I approach the man who has so gravely insulted my daughter. “Hold her,” I command him. “Hold her and then look me in the eyes and tell me God didn’t want her to live.”

  He chuckles uneasily, but the other men don’t join in. “Go o
n,” Geoff Burns urges him. “Put this to rest.”

  The man takes Stella uneasily. “Sorry to offend you, ma’am. Of course your little girl is God’s own gift.”

  I hug Stella close as he hands her back to me. “Indeed. And you would do well to remember it.”

  I turn and glide from the room, using the silent walk I have adopted in the years of caring for sleeping patients.

  “Women,” the man hisses to his friends as I go. “Damned hysterics.”

  I pause. I want to leave, escape this dark enclave of thick curtains and covered windows. I know Charlie would be willing to take me home; likely, he would be eager to. Even as I stop moving, my knees point forward over my toes toward the door. But those men in there are going to tear me apart if I go, and Charlie, too. And I am tired of being underestimated. I am tired of keeping quiet and meeting the low expectations of men who consider themselves superior.

  I look down at Stella. She is unaware of the cruelty around her as she tugs happily on my brooch. She was lying so sweetly next to Joseph when I ran to find her, both babies grinning slightly as Grace sang over them.

  Gritting my teeth and clenching my toes, I turn toward the staircase. I carry Stella carefully up them and return her to Grace’s care. “Thank you,” I murmur, not trusting myself to say more. And then I return to the table downstairs, taking my seat and folding my napkin primly on my lap. “So”—I smile brightly—“where were we? Had I told you yet about the woolen clothes?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stella Wright, January 1951

  I wake up with Hattie’s name on my lips. Now that I’ve talked to the incubator nurses, I can’t leave without reaching her. I need to know for certain that she is my mother, need to answer the questions that still remain. Why did she give me up? Did she think me dead? How did my mother—Althea—end up raising me as her own? Why?

  And who does it make me?

  I examine my face in the mirror as I make it up. Full lips. Long lashes. Blond curls. So different from my mother, Althea, differences I had always dismissed.

  I wonder what Hattie will look like.

  Taking a deep breath, I knot a scarf around the base of my neck—no perky victory rolls today—and put on yesterday’s dress. I didn’t pack for a third day in the city.

  I hail yet another Checker cab and sit in silence until I thank the man when he pulls up in front of the Perkinses’ modest row house.

  I take a deep breath. What will I say to Hattie when she opens the door? I had all night to solidify a plan of action, but I came up blank. There’s no script for such a unique situation. I will see what Hattie says to me, and go from there.

  I knock on the door.

  A light is on in the house, but nobody comes to the door. “Come on,” I mutter. I’m resisting the urge to turn and run almost as strongly as I’m resisting the urge to grab the door and enter uninvited; I am equal parts terrified and excited.

  But still no one answers. I bang loudly on the door. “Hello?” I call, craning my neck in an attempt to see through the windows. The lowered blinds cast impossible shadows, but I do finally hear a noise inside. Nervous, I straighten my dress and wait for the door to swing open.

  But it doesn’t. “Hello?” I call again. For the second time comes that rustling sound and the faint accompaniment of a voice. I wrestle only a moment with indecision. I have not come here to leave with nothing.

  I try the door handle, but it catches. Locked. I press my ear to the wood.

  “Please . . .” A voice, faint and frightened.

  “Hello?” I position my mouth so that it lines up with the crack between the door and the wall. “Is there someone there?”

  “Please,” she repeats. “The back . . . the birdhouse.”

  * * *

  —

  My legs shake so intensely that I can barely walk. Once, I fall, stumbling over a rock in the backyard. But I find the birdhouse. With streaked red paint and rough wood, it is a homemade thing, but it serves its purpose. The key is hidden deep inside, and I pull it out and take it around to the front door.

  “Hattie?” I call once I’ve opened the door. I am prepared to explain who I am, but I find her in the living room and stop abruptly. This woman does not need to know my name; what she needs is my help. “Hattie,” I whisper. I have never seen the woman before, but I know this must be her. Even purpled and leaking blood, her lips are plush and soft. They’re Cupid’s-bow lips, a perfect indent between them, and they match mine with uncanny precision.

  My mom’s lips were thin, like the rest of her. Nothing like my curves. Nothing like Hattie’s.

  But there’s no time to dwell on any of that now. Now, I must do something for this woman, whose face is little more than a footnote to the rest of her body’s destruction.

  “How long have you been here?” I whisper.

  Her lips—those punctured, puffy lips—mouth a response I cannot make out. “Don’t talk,” I amend. “Just . . . lie still.”

  I squeeze between Hattie’s limp form and the side table upon which the phone she’d answered sits. I call the operator. “I need an ambulance.”

  “One moment.” Her voice is infuriatingly calm.

  I bounce on my toes as I wait for the line to connect. “Station Thirteen.” A man’s voice. I tell the man about Hattie’s injuries, our location. “Please,” I add uselessly, “please hurry.”

  “They will. Stay on the line. Is the patient conscious?”

  “Yes.” I ought to stay calm, but I cannot. Not when confronted by the destruction of a body so similar to mine. A body that throws my entire life into question. “Yes, she’s conscious. But how can I help her?”

  “Assess her injuries. Is there anything hurt other than her face?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Remove her clothing. Gently.”

  I unbutton the top of Hattie’s dress gently and pull it to the side. A yellow stain blooms across her chest—an old bruise—and in the center is a large purple blotch like eggplant. Nausea rises in me again. I wish my mother were here. She was never fazed, would have stayed calm even in the face of this desecration.

  I pull the two sides of the dress farther apart, finding a stained-glass mosaic of red, purple, and blue. The marks track up Hattie’s neck and become hard, round circles like thumbprints. I think of Margaret’s small ink thumb on the note in my clutch. Did that thumb come from the man who left these prints? Did mine?

  Don’t think. I realize only now that I’d failed to notice the unnatural angle at which Hattie’s arm is twisted above her head. It lies askew, her light hair underneath it like the lining of a coffin. I am awed that she had the strength to pull herself toward the door so I could hear her from outside. The strength, or the desperation.

  “Her chest is bruised, and I think her arm is broken,” I tell the emergency operator.

  “Don’t touch her arm,” he instructs. “Is there blood?”

  “On her chest.”

  “See what you can do to clean it up without moving her. You need to see where it’s coming from, and whether the wound is still bleeding.”

  I swallow as I set the phone aside. “I’m going to go get a cloth,” I tell Hattie, “but I’ll be back.” I return with a wet washcloth pulled from the small bathroom off the kitchen. “Here.” I dab gently at Hattie’s lips first to remove the blood that has dried. You’re just cleaning, I assure myself. Just like wiping Mary Ellen’s legs or washing my own body in the shower. Just cleaning.

  The blood from her lips has stopped flowing, and the cut on her chest is scabbed over. I alternate between the window and Hattie until the ambulance arrives fifteen minutes later. “Thank God.” I run outside. “She’s in here. Please, hurry.”

  Two young men, dark-haired and silent, traipse inside with a stretcher. “Are you the doctor?” I turn to the older man.

/>   “Yes, ma’am. Who are you to the patient?”

  “Her daughter,” I blurt, determined to stay with Hattie.

  Her daughter. I fall to the ground as the doctor follows his assistants inside. Her daughter, her daughter, her daughter.

  Is it true? Am I that woman’s daughter? Did I come from her curved body, battered and bruised? I run my hands down my own skin.

  If Hattie is my mother, am I going to lose her, too?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Althea Anderson, November 1926

  “How did you remain so calm?” Charlie asks me on the way back to Mrs. Wallace’s. Already we’ve ridden the train and IRT subway in silence, the eerie half-light in the car discouraging any attempt at conversation.

  I shrug. Certainly I felt anything but calm. “Practice.”

  “I would have lost my senses.”

  I look at him and smile. “I somehow doubt that.” But perhaps he is right. There is a certain quiet intensity burning beneath his surface. He is not one to stand for injustice or to stay silent on it.

  “Althea . . .” He hesitates. “I’m sorry. Mrs. Anderson.”

  “No.” I shock myself. Stella is asleep in my arms, and I am very nearly able to convince myself that I am still the young girl I was three months ago. I am tired of being a Mrs. “Althea is all right.”

  “Althea. Then, of course I am Charlie.” He hesitates. “I never anticipated that they would react the way they did.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to make it up to you.”

  I should laugh, thank him, offer up a flirtatious suggestion. Wasn’t I raised to be a cheerful conversation partner? But I do not laugh. Instead I sigh, and tell the man the truth. “Oh, Charlie. If only it were that easy.”

  “You’re mad, then.”

  “No. Well,” I amend with a wry smile, “not at you. It’s just . . .” How to explain? It’s just that a lifetime of disrespect cannot be corrected by one man’s kindness.