I point to one image. “This one, the hatbox. A man brought his child to Dr. Couney once in one of these. The girl was surrounded by feathers to keep her warm.”
Charlie reaches out and grabs the notebook from me with the energy of a little boy. Pulling a pencil from its binding, he adds a note and then passes it back to me. “What else have you seen, Althea? What do you think works?”
He wants to know what I think. I am sitting, but my legs want to leap, carry me up through the ceiling and to the sky. Instead, I curl my toes in excitement as I search through my memory. “Clothing should be wool, certainly. Warm bricks are used sometimes, from the fireplace. But perhaps more important than the incubator is the feeding, Charlie, for the babies too small to suckle. Dr. Couney’s nurses used special spoons, but I don’t suppose those are common. Perhaps babies could be fed through the nostrils with an eye dropper. And for those that cannot do even that, would you be able to acquire rubber catheters small enough to use?”
He again snatches the notebook and scribbles furiously as I talk. “Yes.” He looks up at me, sweat collecting on his smooth brow. “Yes.”
With the incubator sketches before us, I can’t help but think again of telling Charlie the truth. Look at his passion for saving these babies, his conviction that it is right. Surely, he couldn’t blame me for rescuing Stella from death.
“Some parents refuse to let their newborns go to the island,” I begin with forced casualness. “They don’t want the babies to be part of a freak show.”
Charlie looks up, brow scrunched. “That’s not right. Maybe we should think about how we can change the public opinion about Dr. Couney, in addition to the practicalities of providing incubators to families too far away.” He’s flipping pages again as he talks, jotting down his thoughts as he shares them. I’m caught on the first part of the words: That’s not right. If it’s not right for a parent to refuse treatment, surely Charlie thinks it’s right for a nurse to require it. Surely Charlie would agree with me.
I give him one more test. “Or we could focus on changing hospitals’ perceptions. Then, regardless of what the parents think, the doctors will recommend the babies for care.”
“That’s true,” Charlie muses, chewing on his pencil. “Thank you, Althea.”
I close my eyes, draw in a deep breath, and get ready to form the words that may change my life. But when I open my eyes again, Stella’s name on my lips, Charlie has stood. His notebook is tucked under his arm. “I’m afraid I have an appointment in half an hour,” he apologizes. “I just couldn’t help but stop by first.”
“Right.” I swallow. “Good-bye.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Stella Wright, January 1951
The doctors won’t let me in to see Hattie until visiting hours this afternoon. Each second of waiting seems impossible. I can’t just sit here in the lobby, antiseptic smell soaking into my skin.
I use a hospital phone to call Jack.
“Jack.”
“Stella, sweetheart. Are you okay?”
“Jack, I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s the matter? Did something else happen?”
Haltingly, I tell Jack about calling Hattie after we spoke and going to her house this morning. I know he didn’t want me to go, and I fear his disappointment. But I need him, so I tell him all of it. “I found her beaten nearly to death, Jack.” I take a deep breath. “And I’m afraid it’s my fault.”
“No, Stella.” Jack’s voice is confident, reassuring. “You might have scared her husband or angered him, but that’s not an excuse for violence. Listen to me. Michael Perkins did that to his wife, not you.”
“But if I hadn’t called . . . Jack, she must be my mother. The resemblance . . . it’s undeniable. My mother . . . and I may have gotten her killed.” The next words burst out of me, though I try to keep them tucked away. “What if she dies before I can even ask her for answers?”
“Oh, Stella. Do you want me to come to the city tonight?”
I’m so surprised by his offer that I don’t answer right away.
“Where are you, what hospital?”
“Jack—”
“You aren’t supposed to be using that phone.” A nurse appears glaring at my side.
“Please.” I attempt a smile. “I’m almost done.”
“You are done,” she corrects me. “I need to make a hospital call.”
I put my mouth back to the receiver. “Jack, I’m sorry. I have to go.”
The nurse snatches the telephone, and I back away, defeated. I wonder at Jack’s offer and what it means. I’m touched, and of course part of me desperately wants him here—but another part of me fears he’ll convince me to leave my past well enough alone.
* * *
—
They still won’t let me into Hattie’s room. Facing this interminable wait, there’s only one place I want to go.
I run outside, coat flapping, and hail a taxicab. I give the driver the address for Evergreen Cemetery. Like most of the active cemeteries in New York City, it’s outside Manhattan in Queens’s Cemetery Belt. The drive is long, and I bounce my knee the whole way there, my fingers ripping at my nails. When we arrive, I pay the driver and walk through the gates. The frost on the ground crunches under my shoes, and I pull my coat tighter around me. I find my parents’ shared headstone and crouch before it. My mom brought flowers to Dad’s grave once a month, and I’d sometimes come along. But this is the first time I’ve been since Mom’s funeral.
Cold spreads damp circles across my skirt where my knees meet the ground, and I shiver. The names on the tombstone are as clear and precise as the days they were carved, and I almost wish moss and lichen would weave through the etchings. I hate the sharp-edged clarity of my parents’ death dates, the finality of my father’s 1945 and my mother’s 1950.
Chin up, Stella.
“I can’t help it, Mom. I hate that you’re gone.”
I pull my fingers from my glove and trace the A of her name. Who were you, Mom? Who is my father? And who am I?
Losing my mother opened a crevasse in me that will never be refilled. Already there was a missing piece of me, a phantom limb that reached to call her when she could no longer be reached. But to think I may lose her all over again—to think she may not have ever been mine—how will I survive it?
I let out a sound that is primal and raw. The wind whips my voice toward the river.
Althea Anderson. My mother. But who was she, really? Why did she raise me if I wasn’t truly hers?
I cradle my head in my hands, one gloved and one bare. I know my mother—or the woman I thought was my mother. She didn’t do anything recklessly. She didn’t do anything selfishly. If she stole away with me, she had a reason.
I trace the letters of her name and then my father’s.
I rest my forehead on my parents’ grave marker and sob. Frost seeps into my skirt and my bare palm grows red from cold.
No one is here to see me.
I am utterly alone.
* * *
—
My skirts are wet and my eyes are puffy when I return to Bellevue in the afternoon. But Hattie looks far worse than I. She looks as if she is suffering even in her unconsciousness.
Out by Coney Island, the thought that Hattie might be my mother made me nauseous. I’d hoped this morning I would present her with my evidence and she would provide me with an alternative. If she had told me I was hers, I’d have fought. Argued. But after seeing her lying on the ground, blood-spattered and bruised . . . my fight is gone. This woman with her round face and Cupid’s-bow lips resembles me as only a mother could.
“Mrs. Perkins.” I kneel beside her bed. “Hattie. Can you hear me?” Her eyes are open, and they slide toward me. The bruising on her face has worsened, but at least the blood has been cleaned. Her arm has been set and is in a cast.
“Margaret?”
I gasp, and Hattie’s brow convulses. Afraid she won’t stay awake long, I skip the small talk. “Yes, Margaret. Tell me about Margaret.”
She knows immediately what I mean. “We didn’t take her to the island.” Tears well in Hattie’s eyes, though she hadn’t cried when I found her body ravaged on the floor or when the ambulance men lifted her roughly onto a stretcher.
“To Coney?”
“Michael said no.”
“And you?”
Her nostrils flare as her head tremors slightly. For a moment, I fear she is having a fit—and then I realize she is shaking her head. I didn’t say anything, she is telling me. And she is ashamed.
I hear my mother’s words in my head. You have to speak out.
I always thought she was talking about bullies at school or boys who doubted my brains. Later, I associated the advice with the war, and what the Nazis did to the Jews and the homosexuals and the disabled. And recently, I thought about it in terms of protecting my students.
But maybe my mother’s advice came from somewhere else entirely.
I don’t press Hattie on what she did or did not say to her husband. “What happened?”
“She died.” Hattie hiccups. “We let her die. There was no doctor here for the early babies, not like now—”
“Did you see her die? Did you see her body?” My voice is too demanding. I am asking too much of this woman, who lost her child twenty-four years ago and now lies broken in a hospital ward with a stranger.
Hattie shakes her head, and I pull out the thumbprint card. “What if she didn’t die, Hattie? What if someone took her to Coney?” I press the thumbprint note into her hand. “Look.”
“Margaret,” Hattie whispers. “Margaret. But where . . . ?”
“Right here.” I shudder even as I volunteer myself as this woman’s daughter. “I . . . I think I am Margaret. And you . . .” I reach up and trace the outline of my pert nose and bow-shaped lips. “That would make you my mother.”
That nausea again. I refuse to let it rise and overcome me, breathing slowly through my mouth. I start to become aware of another feeling as the nausea subsides. A strange sort of tenderness. Not love for this woman, but something approaching it.
Hattie stiffens, and a spasm of pain twists her lips. “It can’t be. You can’t be.”
Oh, how much I want to believe her. For just a moment, I decide not to argue. “Really?” I cannot disguise the hope in my voice.
“Go.” Hattie’s voice quakes even as her jaw hardens. I watch the purple bruise shift and stretch as she clenches her teeth. “My daughter is dead.”
“But . . . but what if it isn’t true?” I can’t help but press.
She asks me a question rather than answering mine. “Who raised you?”
“Althea Anderson and—”
She looks up sharply when I say my mother’s name. “You know her!” I exclaim.
Again, Hattie doesn’t answer. “Did she ever hurt you?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you love her?”
“Yes.” My answer comes without a moment’s thought, and it’s true. Whatever my mother’s lies mean, I decide it doesn’t change the fact that she was the best mother I could have hoped for, my best friend. The woman who made me me.
Hattie lets out a wrenching sob and reaches for me. I hesitate and take a step toward her. But I’m not ready to embrace her. I can’t put my pale skin against her pale skin, let my blond curls brush hers.
I’m still frozen when footsteps enter the room. I turn, hoping it’s a nurse so I can ask about Hattie’s condition. But the footsteps belong to a tall man about Hattie’s age. His eyes are hazel, and his hair is darker than Hattie’s or mine.
“My husband,” Hattie murmurs. Her eyes are wide, as if she did not expect to find her own husband at her bedside. And no wonder. He’s the one who hurt her, isn’t he? The roar I heard on the phone?
My nostrils flare. The mom who raised me was obedient and quiet. The mother who birthed me is scared and submissive. But I’m none of those things, and I want to send Hattie’s husband reeling.
Stupidly, I only now realize what Hattie’s husband would be to me. My father.
But he doesn’t transform before my eyes to some sort of sympathetic figure; he stands before me at once a stranger, a monster, and the man who made me.
The fight seeps out of me. I don’t want to hit him. Look at Hattie—that’s what he would do, and I don’t want to make myself anything like him.
I step forward and then back again, not sure whether to introduce myself to the man, condemn him, or run from him.
Hattie speaks, making my decision for me. I turn to her with desperate hope. For what, I can’t say. “This nice lady”—she gestures to me—“is . . . an intern at the hospital. She was checking to see if I needed anything before going home. Isn’t that sweet?”
I suspect I look anything but sweet. My face is contorted in fury as I gaze upon the man who’s landed his wife in the emergency ward. My legs shake, and I fear I’ll fall if I try to take a wobbly step in my heels.
“Very.” Michael is dismissive, striding to his wife’s side. Surely he notices her cringe as he approaches. Does it bother him, or does he relish it? Perhaps it reminds him of his power. “Did you—” he hisses as he reaches his wife, lowering his voice so I cannot hear the rest of his question.
Whatever it is, Hattie assures him that she did not. Then she looks up at me. “Good-bye, nurse,” she calls. “Thank you for the care.” She is crying unabashedly now.
“I can stay,” I offer helplessly. “Do you want me to stay?”
“No!” I hear the urgency in her voice.
“You want me to stay,” I repeat.
“My wife said no.” Michael turns, and in his eyes flashes confirmation that he is the reason Hattie is here in the hospital at all.
“Indeed. The hospital is really not a safe place for someone healthy like you.” Hattie looks at me imploringly.
“Make sure you get out too, then.” I hope she understands my meaning. “You need to stay safe, too.”
And then I turn and flee.
* * *
—
I do not want to return to my mother’s, Althea’s. I’m afraid of what else I may find when I am confronted by her ghost in the apartment. I’m afraid of what anger toward her I may unleash within me alongside the grief. She never told me the truth, and now I’m left with so many questions and no way to find answers. I feel unmoored. So I gather myself and focus on what I can do.
I find a nurse and ask for the baby doctor. “The incubator man,” I clarify. It’s a tenuous connection, but Hattie mentioned that the hospital has a ward now. If the doctor is an expert on premature babies, perhaps he can explain to me the chances I had of surviving, give me reason to believe that my mom did the right thing when she stole me away from my birth mother.
And from my birth father. Certainly, he was another part of the reason my mother kept me for her own?
The nurse gives me directions, and I am knocking just moments later on an office door. “Doctor?”
He appears quickly, disheveled but handsome in middle age. He’s younger than I expected. Close to my mother’s age. But his polite smile drops when he sees me. I can’t decipher the expression that replaces it. “Are you . . . ?”
“Stella Wright.” I stick out my hand.
“Stella . . . you’re Althea’s daughter. Oh, my God.”
I freeze. How does this man, whom I’ve never even laid eyes on, know who I am?
Yet another surprise, another revelation that raises more questions than answers. My skin is hot and flushed, and tears press behind my eyelids.
My overwhelm threatens to send me into hysterics, and I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. �
��I shouldn’t have—I have to go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Althea Anderson, January–April 1927
By January of the new year, Stella is beginning to roll over, reach for me as I work, and even babble. Charlie visits most Sundays after church, taking almost as much joy in her progress as I do. Our eyes often catch over Stella’s head or our fingers brush as I pass her to him to hold, but we are rarely truly alone with one another. We talk medicine, debating recent progress such as the development of an intradermal tuberculosis vaccine and setbacks like the court’s decision that Carrie Buck could be sterilized against her will, both of us hopeful that the Supreme Court would overturn the decree. We spend hours together with Stella, and by the time the girl is eight months old, or six from her due date, she is covering her eyes with fists for peek-a-boo whenever she sees Charlie. He plays with her in a way that I can’t, throwing her into the air and tossing her with an abandon a mother lacks. With the arrival of spring in April, the three of us take regular trips together to picnic in the park, after which Stella and I take home an assortment of flowers for Mrs. Wallace to press into an old leather album. Daffodils are her favorite. “They make me feel like a girl again,” she declares, pulling one from the pile to stash behind her ear. “Oh, how I could dance! That was the only way I knew to help Mr. Lincoln and the war, to dance with the soldiers home on leave and transport them into a world of gay ladies and fine dresses.” She chuckles lightly. “Transport ourselves there, too. It wasn’t so pretty even up here in the Union states, you know. But I can’t complain.” Her smile now is soft. “Met my husband in Lincoln’s militia.”
“There was fighting in New York?” I am surprised; never had I heard of a battle nearby when in school.
“No,” Mrs. Wallace laughs, “except to protest the price of bread under inflation. My husband was sent in to keep the peace during the Draft Riots of sixty-three.” Her voice softens. “We were married fifty-two years.”
The Light of Luna Park Page 21
