by Jones, Craig
Smiling, she stood up and came toward us. She had cut her hair since we saw her last, and she looked more like Frank than ever. She was still far from beautiful, but quite striking and obviously unselfconscious about her height, because she wore heels and did not slouch in the least. I was carrying Regina and Frank was carrying the two plants some of my students had brought me. As soon as he saw Vivian, he tucked one of the plants under his arm, then gripped my shoulder to steer me to the door. Vivian halted and made no attempt to follow us: that alone made me angry with Frank.
“You can’t do this to her,” I said, pulling away from him.
“She can’t do this to us!” he hissed. “Come on!”
I glanced over my shoulder at her. She stood there tall and proud, yet looked at me helplessly.
“You can at least let her look at the baby.”
“No.”
“You’re acting like a child.”
“You don’t know her. She’s not worming her way in. You made a promise to me, Irene. Now keep it.”
We continued on to the parking lot. I got into the car but Frank didn’t. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and started for the lobby doors. Vivian came through them and met Frank on the steps. Frank spoke, then she spoke, then she reached out to touch his hand and he pulled back from her. He said something else as he backed away from her. She remained on the steps. We drove home without saying a word to each other.
A few days later, a typewritten envelope with no return address came for me. Inside was a note from Vivian explaining the accompanying check: a thousand reoffered as a wedding gift and a thousand to begin a savings account for the baby. I debated with myself over telling Frank and finally decided not to. I stuck the check in my jewelry box and for a week I considered opening a secret savings account. I watched Frank carefully that week, the way he lingered at the crib staring at a miracle, the smile on his face as he sat with his arm around me while I nursed the baby.
I tore up the check and the envelope with it.
During the months that followed, I was quite naturally preoccupied with Regina. And with Frank. His energy astounded me. He hired a plumber from the university and the two of them went to work rebuilding and modernizing the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom. By the end of the summer, he was buying the materials for building a recreation room and laundry room in the basement. Yet when classes began, he assigned himself extra office hours and tutored the poorer students in our living room for midterm and final exams. Still, there was always time for the house and for the baby. He worked incessantly, sleeping only four or five hours a night, but the harsh routine he set for himself seemed to nourish rather than debilitate him. Within a year, the basement was completed, every floor in the house refinished. My initial reservations about having taken on an old house instead of a new one dwindled each time I drove up to it. The neighborhood was settled and comfortable, with fully grown oaks and maples that stood like sentinels on both sides of the street. The houses were all large and quite modest in their trimmings: standard white was the reigning preference for wood and brick alike. Ours was a dark green, but within two years we would paint it white, following suit. And within five years, our adjoining empty lot—the sunniest patch on the block—would contain a vegetable garden. Having that extra property gave us a certain prestige among the neighbors, but the feature I loved most about the house was its location at the end of the block, where the street dead-ended. I liked the feeling of being tucked away even from the minimal traffic on the rest of the street, minimal because most of our neighbors were much older, with their children already grown. However, our empty lot did attract children from neighboring streets, and I was happy that Regina would have playmates close by. Frank, in fact, encouraged kids to play in the lot by hanging old tractor tires from the oak limbs to serve as swings. “When she has friends,” he would say, “I want them to feel comfortable here. I want them to come to her.” I thought at the time she would always be surrounded by friends if they came to her the way her father did. When Frank was finished preparing his lectures and reading his students’ papers, when he put aside the hammer and the sandpaper and the paint, his total recreation was Regina. I was instructed to take a nap or read or go to a movie while he played with her on the living room floor. He bought a couple of dime-store wigs, a rubber nose, wax lips, and kept her entertained for hours with impersonations. He built a little stage with a cloth curtain and put on shows for her with hand puppets. I was not the entertainer Frank was. For Regina, the drawing and coloring and games I taught her were inferior substitutes for her father’s performances. As soon as she heard Frank come up the front porch steps, she would scramble to her feet and toddle to the door with hand puppets dangling from her fists.
As much as I loved my daughter, my heart was not really in most of the activities we did together. While playing with her I found myself daydreaming about teaching and going back to it. The short time I taught before she was born was the happiest period of my life. When I left Peck High to have Regina, the principal, Hugh Lance, told me firmly I had damned well better plan on coming back, that he didn’t want to see my talent wasted. He was not given to compliments, so I was genuinely flattered by what he said. As comfortable as I was at home, nothing in the world rivaled the sensation of being in front of a class giving my performance, which would encourage the kids to give theirs. Naturally, there were disappointments, scores of them, but somehow they were always outweighed by the accomplishments. And while I was at home with Regina, it was those accomplishments I kept thinking about. Although I said nothing, I would catch Frank every now and then giving me a knowing, sympathetic look. Finally, a few months before Regina turned four, he suggested I call Lance and ask if I could come back the following September. I wanted to leap for the phone, but I said no, another year wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. I was apprehensive about turning Regina over to a stranger before she started school. The last thing I wanted her to feel was abandonment.
I called Lance and the arrangements were made. I would start back to work when Regina started kindergarten. Frank’s plan was to get Regina into the morning session and to schedule his own classes for the morning as well. That way, she would come home to him, not to a baby-sitter.
That last year alone with Regina, I managed to keep my disposition in top form: knowing I was going back to work made my patience invincible. When Regina whined and crabbed, I was stolidly serene. I didn’t even mind playing chauffeur and chaperon when she and her friends wanted to go to the zoo or to the south-side swimming pool every day it didn’t rain. Before that, during the winter months, I took them sledding three days a week.
Then in August came the end to my serenity. Regina began to complain of feeling cold, of aching in her ankles, arches and knees. The doctor said it was probably a summer cold or a strain of flu. I was content with that for three or four days, until she turned pale and developed dark circles under her eyes that looked as if they had been there forever.
It turned out to be rheumatic fever. Along with the prescription for the medication, the doctor handed us the news that there would be no school for Regina until January, and possibly not even then. She was to have constant rest and no excitement. That, of course, meant she had to be watched. So for me it would be good-bye to teaching for another year.
“You’re going back,” said Frank.
“But we’ll have to hire a baby-sitter.”
“No, we won’t. I’ll stay with her.”
“But how?”
“I’ll get evening classes. I’ll take care of it.”
And he did. He managed to get his chairman to go along with it, although he had to schedule his office hours for Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Mrs. Lorimer, a widow who lived down the street, came in for three hours on those mornings. She was a compulsive worker and very fond of Regina, two factors which made me feel lucky to have h
er. However, I would catch her giving me looks of disapproval as I gulped down my morning coffee and reviewed my lesson plans for the day. None too subtly, she liked to remind me that she had raised five daughters, all of whom had turned out exactly the way she wanted them to because she had stayed at home to keep her eye on them. I could have pointed out that my staying home would have put her out twenty dollars a week, but I said nothing. Yet her disapproval of me was mild compared to her disapproval of Frank. She avoided him entirely, except with her eyes: they crawled over him like hands that can’t quite figure out the texture of the object they’re touching. I imagined what was going through her mind: How could a man let his wife work when there was a sick child in the house? Why would a man who is a man shape his life around his wife’s job when his own job was more important? Naturally, the answers to these questions were two of the answers to why I loved Frank. But I felt no need to explain that to Mrs. Lorimer.
That school year, 1967-1968, and the following summer proved to be a pivotal period in our lives. Trying to assess all the events and their separate impacts puts me in the position of an editor trying to decide on the right headline. First of all, I returned to Peck High in a state of ebullience that was soon diminished by an amorphous tension among the students. The summer riots in Detroit had been given tremendous publicity, and every now and then I heard “Those niggers” being mumbled in the corridors. The black population at Peck was less than ten percent, but there was already talk of redistricting to bring that figure to twenty-five percent. The majority of black students slunk around the building as if they expected the walls to open up and discharge troops against them. But there was a small group of black boys to match the group of whites who were longing for confrontation. The confrontation came in February, two days after a white woman was raped and murdered by a black man in a downtown transient hotel. It broke out in a gym class, and because the seven students involved were black and white, it was the first incident in the school’s history to earn the term “racial.” Hugh Lance expelled all seven and the next day called a special assembly at which he warned every student that fighting of any kind would result in automatic expulsion—girls included. The school was quiet the rest of the semester, but the fights were continued off school property, where Lance could do nothing about them.
At home I didn’t think about school problems. I was too involved with Frank and Regina. Regina was crushed when she couldn’t start kindergarten with her friends and crushed again when the doctor refused to let her go in January. This second blow turned her disappointment into resentment, and we had an even harder time keeping her off her feet. Television, books, games bored her. For the first two months or so, her friends were faithful in their visits—one at a time, as the doctor ordered—but as the novelty became a chore for them, they came by only when they had nothing better to do. Perhaps to punish them, Regina was petulant in their presence. She fought with each one of them so often that by the middle of the year, they stopped coming altogether.
After work and on the weekends, I took charge of her. In the rocking chair, I marked papers and wrote lesson plans to the din of the television and was interrupted constantly by her requests for juice and crackers and toys and dolls. One night while Frank was teaching, she turned to me and said:
“I have to go to the bathroom.” The tone of her voice hit something in me. It was the same tone a number of my students were beginning to use, a tone that had more than an edge of command in it.
“Then go,” I said.
“Carry me.”
“What?”
“Carry me.”
“Regina, you don’t need to be carried. You can get up to do that.”
“Daddy carries me. He always carries me.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t always do it.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Well, you can walk to the bathroom and back. That little bit won’t hurt you. In fact, it’ll be good for you—just that little bit.”
“Daddy wants me to get well.”
“I want you to get well too, but you can walk to the bathroom and back. I’ll come with you.”
“No, I’ll go alone.”
I watched her from the corner of my eye. She did a dramatic wavering out of the room, and there was a long, almost ominous silence. When I heard the crash, it suddenly seemed as if I had been waiting for it.
The bottles of bath oil and cologne we kept on top of the toilet tank were scattered on the floor. Regina stood there watching one of them roll in a circle and come to a stop.
“I bumped into it,” she said, without looking at me.
“It had to be bumped pretty hard.”
“I fell.”
The doctor’s primary warning had been: “She must not become excited.” “All right,” I said. “From now on I’ll come with you so you won’t bump into things.” She looked uncertain for a moment, then stooped down to pick up the bottles. “I’ll pick them up,” I said. “You just go to the toilet.”
“I don’t feel like going now.”
Frank came home that night the way he always did, exhausted and pretending not to be. I couldn’t hold back from approaching him with this bathroom business, so I decided to do it lightly. He said he had been carrying her to the bathroom, but he would explain to her why I couldn’t.
“I don’t think you should be doing it, either,” I said. “The doctor says she can get up to do that.”
“She can do it when I’m not here. If she likes to be carried once in a while, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“She knocked over those bottles on purpose.”
“Irene, she’s a sick and very lonely little girl. Don’t be so hard on her.”
I was stung by the accusation. I looked at the philodendron on our window sill and remembered that night back in college when I had been hard and unreasonable. “You’re right,” I said. “Come to bed.” I knew he was tired but I had to have him make love to me. I had to show him the tenderness that would prove the accusation wrong.
It may have been a few days or a few weeks later when we had our first serious argument over Regina. We were figuring the monthly bills at the kitchen table while Regina was supposed to be taking her nap. When I walked into the living room, she was off the sofa and standing at the window that faced our empty lot. Her fists were clenched against the glass, her face stony with rage. Outside, four of her friends were swinging on the tractor tires. Before I could speak, she turned to me and said: “Get them out of our yard.”
“You know you’re not supposed to be up.”
“Tell them to get out of our yard.”
“They’re just playing. Now get back on the sofa.”
“I don’t want them there!”
“You won’t know they’re out there if you stay on the sofa.”
“I know they’re there.”
Frank came in and asked what was wrong.
“She wants the kids out of the yard,” I said, trying to slough it off.
“Daddy, make them get out. I don’t want them there!”
“We’ll just close the drape,” I said, “and you won’t even see them.”
“Daddy, make them go,” she said, ignoring me. “It’s our yard.”
“Okay, pumpkin, but you’ve got to get back on that sofa.”
“Frank—”
He flashed me a look of angry warning, then turned and walked out the front door. I took hold of Regina’s shoulder and told her to get onto the sofa. She pulled away and said she wanted to see Daddy tell them. I watched with her as Frank ambled up to the kids with a smile. For a minute they looked at him blankly, but one boy caught on more quickly than the others; he looked immediately toward the window where we were standing. His eyes slid from me to Regina, and his expression became fiercely identical to hers. As he walked a
way with the others, he glanced back over his shoulder. I understood his sneer.
“How could you do that?” I asked after I motioned Frank up to the bedroom and closed the door.
“None of them come to see her anymore. It’s natural for her to be angry.”
“They’re only kids, Frank. They don’t understand.”
“What about her? She doesn’t understand, either.”
“But she has to understand that her getting sick was . . . accidental. She can’t punish everyone else for it.”
“She has to understand, but they don’t?”
“It’s happened to her, not to them. I realize it’s hard for her, very hard, but—”
“I would think your first loyalty would be to your daughter.”
“It has nothing to do with loyalty.”
“Were you ever confined to a bed?”
“That has nothing to do with what I’m saying.”
“It has everything to do with what you’re saying. I’d think you’d be a little more tolerant. She’s sick, she deserves to be indulged a little. If it makes her upset to see those kids out there, then I don’t see anything wrong with making them stay away.”
“She has to learn she can’t have everything her own way.”
“You mean the way you have?”
That remark sliced deep. “If that’s what you think, then you don’t know me very well.” I left him there and went down to start supper.
I breaded the pork chops, peeled the potatoes, and didn’t start to cry until I got to the salad. Then I felt his arms slide around me and his lips graze my ear.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t. Just leave me alone.”
He held me tighter. “No, I won’t leave you alone. You’re going to let me say I’m sorry, because I mean it.” I turned and he held me against his chest. “I do love you,” he said. Then, kissing me: “I’ll set the table. We’ll use candles tonight.”