by Nancy Roman
Martin and I stood in the darkened bedroom for a few moments, watching them sleep and listening to their calm even breaths.
“What do we do now?” I asked finally.
He touched my fingertips. “Nothing. Not for right now. Go to sleep.”
I went back to the sitting room, to my small sofa where I had been sleeping for six weeks. As with Jonathan, I did not bother to change out of my travel clothes, but simply pulled a blanket over me. And tried to sleep. My first night as a married woman.
CHAPTER 19
Life seemed somewhat rosier in the morning.
It has stopped snowing, and the sun was bright and melting the snow on the pavement. The children were excited about getting out to play as quickly as possible, as Amelia had given them little snow shovels, and they wanted to try them out before the snow had completely disappeared. I bundled them up and brought them out to the back of the house, where they could dig in the snow until their noses were red.
It was Sunday and I suppose we should have gone to Mass. Martin had not yet gotten out of bed. When we returned from our outdoor activity, with wet clothes and running noses to be seen to, he was sitting at the kitchen table with coffee and a book of Sherlock Holmes stories, which had a been a gift from my mother. To me, she had given My Antonia, the new novel from Willa Cather, and I hoped I would have a few moments each day to read it. I had my hour during the children’s naps. And evenings, I suppose.
The children ran to their father snowy and squealing, and he scooped them up and deposited one on each knee.
“Now who would like a sip of coffee?” he asked.
“Me! Me!” they cried.
He tipped his cup to their lips and they pretended to have a big sip.
“I dig in the thnow!” said Charlotte.
“Come, we need to get you into dry warm clothes,” I said, and they scooted off Martin’s lap and ran to me.
“You can drink Papa’s coffee too,” said Jonathan. “You need to be strong so you don’t die.”
Martin went pale. We met each other’s eyes and shook our heads. Neither of us had been aware that Jonathan knew his mother was dead. We had kept both children away from the funeral with cousin Bertha. We were also not sure he knew what it meant to be dead.
I took him in my arms and said, “Jonathan, I am big enough without coffee to snatch you up and tickle you like the big brown bear in your alphabet book!” And he giggled and wiggled out of my arms, and ran off to the bedroom to fetch the book. The moment passed.
“We have almost no food in the house,” I said to Martin. “The shops I know are not open on a Sunday. Is there a place where I could buy some bread and potatoes, and perhaps a chicken for dinner?”
“I’ll go,” he said, grabbed his coat and ran from the house. He was gone for three hours.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized when he finally returned, handing me a sack. “I stopped at a church and I found it comforting. I stayed quite a while. It was quiet and peaceful. And then the shop I had intended to go to wasn’t open after all, and I could not even remember where there was another store in all of the city. It was as if the city got turned around on me, and I didn’t recognize the streets. It must be the snow.”
“Do you know, when I was reading Sherlock Holmes a year or two ago, I got so wrapped up in the story, that I walked out for school one morning and was surprised to find my street? My brain somehow expected London.”
“Ha! I have snow and Sir Conan Doyle. What handy excuses. Anyhow,” he continued, “I bought us a nice big chicken and some oranges as well as potatoes, bread, milk, and cheese.”
“And coffee?”
“Oh no! Are we out? I used up the last of it, didn’t I? I’ll go out right this minute.”
“Don’t you dare leave. The children will be up from their naps any moment now. We’ll have tea. There’s plenty.”
“Can we have some right now? With an orange? I’m cold and starving.”
And like any married couple in the whole world, we sat with tea and oranges and talked about Sherlock Holmes and the news of the day, while the children napped.
CHAPTER 20
Martin returned to work the next morning. I was burning with curiosity the entire day, wondering whether he had told the other men in the factory that he had gotten married over the Christmas holiday. How in heaven do you explain such a thing? I suppose it was fortunate that I did not have to - if you can suppose a benefit to being completely friendless.
We weren’t the only people to do it - marry, that is. With the devastation wreaked by the epidemic, many young families were without fathers or mothers, and were quickly - too quickly - filling the loss with substitutes. Children had to be cared for; families had to be provided for. In addition, there was the War. Fathers lost to the War left families without means. Many young widows went back to live in their parents’ home. But many sought to find a spouse posthaste. The Church acted as matchmaker in several cases that I read about - a war widow and a widower from the influenza were paired recently at St. Michael’s parish, resulting in a family with a mother and father not yet twenty-five, with seven children.
I suppose I should have found it a blessing to have just two children at seventeen.
With a man who was good and kind and not a stranger.
If only I had the slightest idea what to do with the children. Or the house. Or the meals. But especially the children. My affection for Jonathan and Charlotte was growing with each day, and it’s not as if it were my first day alone with them. I had been with them for the last six weeks. And I managed to keep them happy and safe, fed and clean.
But back at home - my former home, I mean - watching my mother’s smooth and sweet competence with the children left me feeling that everything I had been doing was all wrong. I was awkward and short-tempered. I alternated crazily between neglect and over-protectiveness. Mother said the most reassuring words to me: that I possessed a natural gift and that she could see the children adored me already. And also that Martin, despite his grief, could see this too, and the knowledge that I was there for his children was easing his pain. But all those kind words seemed like shallow platitudes - a way of flattering me into submission, much as Father had flattered me into the job at the lumberyard.
As much as I had managed to keep the children from falling out the windows or down the stairs for more than six weeks, it was different now. I was not their kindly young aunt meeting their needs on an emergency basis. I was their mother.
It terrified me.
How could I be their mother? It was too big a responsibility. Jonathan stuttered sometimes. He laughed easily, but a few minutes later he would be in tears over a missing bunny or his blocks falling over. Charlotte was so serious. What two-year-old took so much to heart? She held a pencil with a strained grip, her little tongue sticking out with intensity. She asked me “Why?” at least twenty times a day, on subjects as diverse as peeling a carrot or having two ears. So smart. And yet she was still in diapers, with no indication that she wouldn’t remain so throughout her existence.
Yet I was supposed to guide them through their young lives. See them through their illnesses both big and small. Walk them to school, and make sure their lessons were completed. Teach them to get along with other children, maybe learn a sport or a musical instrument. Bring them up in their religion. Show them the ways of the world and the choosing of careers and spouses.
The ways of the world? I was still waiting for someone to show them to me.
But I managed.
I managed in small increments. I continued just as I had the weeks before.
On Martin’s first day back to work, I rose at five and made him breakfast. I sent him off with a lunch pail filled with bread and chicken, two pieces of fruit and a half dozen of my mother’s Christmas cookies wrapped in a napkin. He
kissed the children, still sleeping in their cribs. That morning he kissed me too - a small, light, barely-there touch of his lips to my forehead.
I had more than ten hours before he would return. I let the children sleep until seven, which gave me a bit more than an hour that I reserved for myself. I read the newspaper.
The children woke up hungry, but happy. I fed them porridge and milk while they were still dressed in their nightclothes. Then I bathed them together. My mother had warned me that in short order I would need to separate their little bodies, but they seemed oblivious at the moment, and it was much easier to wash them as well as watch them together. How in the world does a mother keep an eye on one child in the bath and another who knows where?
Martin had only a small, primitive icebox, so that meant I needed to shop nearly every day. The first month I had been in New Haven, the weather had still been temperate, which was lucky, since it had allowed me the opportunity to seek out the butcher and the greengrocer, and other shops. Martin’s landlord had written directions to the very best and most frugal of the shops that were an easy walk.
Now that the weather was cold, I was grateful that I was already an expert at this part of daily life. I bundled up the children, and we walked to find tonight’s dinner. Martin was generous with the money he would leave for the shopping, so I was free to buy whatever I fancied. He usually praised my cooking, while eating very little.
The walk home had often proved more difficult, and this day was no exception. With many blocks still to go, Charlotte complained that she was cold and too tired to walk further, and I had a sack of groceries to also contend with.
“Let’s go,” begged Jonathan. “I’m cold too. Make her hurry up.”
But Charlotte sat down on the snowy walk and would not move. I picked her up, and tried to balance the child and the provisions. I waddled a few steps and slipped a bit on the ice. I managed to keep upright and also keep from dropping Charlotte on her head, though she screamed in fright. A tin of baking powder and some precious butter fell from my sack.
Jonathan then started to cry. “My butter is on the road! I won’t have butter for my bread!”
“Let’s all get a breath,” I said, and sat down on the curb. I held both crying children and thought about having a nice tantrum myself.
But I could not. I was the mother. I was the person who solved all problems.
“Here is what we will do, Jonathan,” I said. “Pick up the tin and put it in my pocket.” He smiled and did so. “Now pick up the butter and put it in your pocket. Did you ever have a pocket of butter before?”
He laughed. And I became a little more of a person who solved all problems.
“Now you see, the bag is not so full. But I think it is still very heavy. There is a slice of ham and some potatoes in there. Can you count the potatoes?”
“Six!” he said.
“Well, that is a lot. But you have one more pocket, and I think you might be able to fit a potato in there.”
“It fits!” he shouted, as he stuffed a small potato in his pocket. “You have another pocket too… do you want to put a potato in your pocket?”
“That would be a wonderful idea,” I said. So Jonathan put a potato in my pocket too.
“Now, Charlotte,” I said, seeing that she had stopped crying, and had become very interested. “You have no pockets. But if I carry you, can you carry one big potato?”
She nodded.
“That’s marvelous. So Jonathan, now that the sack is ever so much lighter, I am trusting you to carry it all the way home. Can you do that?”
“I could carry it even when it was heavy!” he said.
And we made it home.
I gave the children a lunch of steamed carrots and bits of the chicken from the previous night. The heavens smiled down upon me - it was time for their naps.
I washed some clothes in the sink and strung them out on the porch landing. I swept the floor and made biscuits, which I did not burn too badly and which were still warm when the babies awakened, so they had a nice treat. I set both children on the floor with the new Christmas train, while I prepared the rest of dinner.
Martin came in just before six. He hugged the children, exclaiming, “Oh my darling babies, I have missed you so much!”
“I had a pocketful of butter!” said Jonathan.
“You did?” asked Martin, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Long story,” I said. “But the result is this: We need a pram.”
And Martin said the most remarkable thing.
“We have one.”
Of course. Why would they not? That evening, after the children were asleep Martin brought me down to the cellar, where he had a roped-off square of space. And in addition to the sled we had taken out weeks ago were a pram, and a wagon, and even a small hobby horse and ice skates.
“I suppose I should have shown you where everything was back in November,” Martin said.
“It’s fine,” I said, “I feel like it might be Christmas again.”
CHAPTER 21
We had a few very ordinary days. Martin went off to work. I made meals and played with the children. Cleaning the tiny apartment was simple; laundry was much more difficult because the weather had turned frigid. Hanging the wet garments on the porch clothesline was a miserable task, and the clothes froze like empty scarecrows. I took to hanging a few things in the cellar on the ropes that marked Martin’s storage space.
The cold weather was rough on the children too. I bundled them up for the shopping, but their little noses were red and their feet ached through their boots. I sought help from the landlord’s pleasant wife, and left the children in her care while I ran to the market as quickly as I could. I began to wear an old coat of Catherine’s under my own coat. It would have been a better fit to wear the coat over my own, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being seen in her clothes. Each time I wore her coat I hid it quickly in the back of the wardrobe before I went downstairs to Mrs. Battle to fetch the children.
While the chill made me lethargic, the same could not be said of Charlotte and Jonathan. They had all the energy of toddlers and seemed to borrow more from someplace that they perhaps inherited from Malcolm.
I dragged the hobby horse from the cellar up to the third floor, and they loved rocking as if they were galloping through Texas. After just twenty minutes, though, we were paid a visit from Mrs. Giametti from directly downstairs. Her husband was home from the War, where he had been gassed. He suffered from severe incapacitating headaches, and the hobby horse banging on his ceiling was beyond his tolerance. I apologized immediately, realizing why the toy had been in the cellar in the first place, and lugged it back.
When I was replacing the hobby horse, I noticed a large box thrown into a corner that did not appear to be in anyone’s marked space. Perhaps discarded from some large delivery. I checked the box and it was clean and in good condition. It wasn’t heavy, but it was wider than the stairway. I pushed and prodded and finally deposited it in the middle of the kitchen.
I turned the opened end to the floor, and with a small knife cut a door and window into the side. Jonathan immediately recognized the potential, and it was all I could do to stop him from jumping up and down and causing further injury to poor Mr. Giametti.
“This is your house,” I said. “I believe it may need some pets and furniture and dishes.”
Jonathan ran to the bedroom for his bunny and Charlotte’s teddy. Then he dragged in a pillow and the toy tea set.
“Come on in,” he invited Charlotte.
She gave one of her rare smiles and crawled into the box.
The children were still in their playhouse when Martin came home. He nearly fell over the box opening the door, as I had moved it far away from the stove as I cooked.
“What do we have here?”
he asked.
“A houth!” Charlotte answered.
“Well, then.” And he knocked, making a clacking sound with his tongue.
“You can’t come in,” said Jonathan. “You are too big for our house!”
“Then I will huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” He shook the sides of the cardboard lightly and the children screamed in fake terror.
Maybe I wasn’t so bad at this after all.
CHAPTER 22
Several days later I received a package from my mother.
Along with some good heavy stockings for me and the children were two large squares wrapped in scraps of old bed sheets. My portraits of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. A note attached to Miss Tarbell’s photo read:
“You are still you.”
I hugged the photo to my breast. I still wanted to be me. But if I became Catherine instead, perhaps I would have a better life.
“Why are you crying?” asked Jonathan, who had climbed out of his crib to stand behind me. “Who is that lady? Is it your Mama?”
“No, darling,” I said. “Grandmother is my Mama.” He looked doubtful as to this confusing relationship. I sat him on my lap. “This lady is Miss Ida Tarbell. She writes books and articles for newspapers.”
“Does she write stories like my bear story?”
“She writes stories that make people’s lives better.”
“Like my angels book,” he said.