by T. Greenwood
Now I just felt embarrassed.
“We’ve got a pretty serious situation on our hands then,” I said. “If you can’t go anywhere until after the baby comes, I think we need to figure out exactly what your plans are.”
Maggie didn’t argue. Instead she nodded. Emphatic and certain. “I already thought it out,” she said.
“That’s great.”
Shelly stirred in the other room. I glanced toward the living room nervously.
“I suppose you wanna know what I’m fixin’ to do. With the baby?” she whispered conspiratorially.
“Sure,” I said.
Maggie wrapped the blanket tightly around her, only her face poking out. A slow grin broadened into a smile. “I’m gonna give it to you.”
Valentine
B etsy surprised me for Valentine’s Day by coming out to visit me at school. With the full load of classes I needed to graduate, I hadn’t expected to be able to see her until spring break in March. But as I was trudging through a small storm to the library, wool scarf pulled up to shield my face from a bitter wind, her voice called out, as soft as snow, “Hey! Montgomery!”
The whole campus was blanketed in a fresh coat of white; in the distance she was only a blurry crimson spot, like a fuzzy drop of blood against all of that white. But as she approached, and her face began to come into focus, I felt my heart quicken. It was a Wednesday, the middle of the week, and there she was: smack dab in the middle of the quad wearing a dark red coat, carrying her suitcase.
“Suppose Miss Katy will let me sneak into an empty room?” she asked, hugging me.
“Maybe if we bring her some chocolates.”
“Let’s go get some chocolates then, and some coffee. I didn’t sleep a wink on the bus.”
“What time did you leave Two Rivers?” I asked, pulling my sleeve up to check my watch. It was only eight o’clock.
“ Early . It was still dark out.”
“Who’s watching the shop?”
“I asked Hanna to check in today. I can only stay tonight, and then I’ve got to get back.”
“Where do you want to go for coffee?”
“Anywhere that’s warm.”
I was hungry. On Wednesdays I didn’t have class until the afternoon. I usually skipped breakfast and studied all morning at the library, continuing to study over a tuna sandwich at the dining hall on campus. We settled into a booth at Lockwoods (the students all called it “Lockjaws”), and I ordered steak and eggs, hash browns, toast and juice. Betsy asked for toast and coffee.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“So what do you wanna do tonight? If I’d known you were coming I’d have planned something. All of the nice places to eat are probably booked up already.”
Betsy shook her head again and accepted her plate of toast from the waitress. Betsy looked at the toast and then said, “Oh, please, can I get this dry? I’m so sorry,” and handed the plate back to the waitress. “Actually, if you could just bring me a glass of juice.”
“You okay?” I asked. Betsy was never the kind to send back food at a restaurant. I’d seen her eat a steak that was still bleeding when she’d ordered it well-done, runny eggs when she’d requested them over-hard, salads with bleu cheese dressing when she’d asked for Italian. She was easy like that. “You look like you’ve lost weight,” I said.
She shook her head again, looking a little green. She forced a smile. “Thanks.”
When she set the cup of coffee down and looked out the window, I became suddenly overwhelmed by the possibility of something terrible. What if Betsy was sick? What if she had come to tell me that something was wrong with her? She was pale, thin; she couldn’t eat. But rather than just asking her, I kept trying to get her to eat—as if a fork full of my hash browns dripping in ketchup could solve all her problems.
“I don’t want it, Harper!” she said angrily, as I slipped a piece of steak from my fork onto her plate. Betsy sipped on her coffee, looked out the window.
“Want some muffin?” I tried again.
“No!”
“You look awful,” I said. “You’re too skinny. You’re pale.”
“Jesus Christ,” Betsy sighed, looked me square in the face and threw her hands up. “I meant to tell you later. Make it special. But you had to be such an ass.”
I looked at her, bewildered.
“I’m pregnant, you stupid idiot.”
“What?”
“A baby . We’re going to have a baby.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face.
“Have some water,” she offered, pushing a glass toward me.
I shook my head. “We can’t have a baby,” I said. “We’re not even married.”
“You don’t have to be married to have a baby.”
“I mean…you don’t want this…you always said…” I looked at her, all of that blood that had rushed out of my face now pulsing somewhere around my chest.
Betsy picked up the glass of water and drank deeply from it. She reached across the table and took both of my hands. “I want you ,” she said.
“You have me. You’ll always have me.” None of this made sense. My heart was thumping hard against my ribs.
“Don’t you understand?” she cried, pulling my hands to her face, kissing them, her tears spilling onto my knuckles. “You’re Three-A now. A father. You can’t get drafted.”
That afternoon we persuaded Katy to let Betsy bunk in with a freshman girl whose roommate had failed out after first semester. I wanted to go somewhere, be with her, let all of this settle in. But despite Betsy’s news, I still had a midterm in the morning, so Freddy offered to take her to a matinee while I studied. I spent the next three hours hunched over my books at my desk thinking about the baby growing inside Betsy’s belly. “It’s already this big,” she had said, picking up a handful of snow and rolling it into a tiny snowball that I carried in my bare hands all the way back to the dorm, until my fingers were numb and the snow had melted. As I tried to study for my Macroeconomics exam, I thought instead about that little life growing inside Betsy and about the enormity of its impact.
After the matinee, Freddy helped sneak Betsy into our room. I think he must have bribed the house director because there was actually very little secrecy or sneaking involved. Freddy just showed up with her on his arm and presented her to me like a gift. In that red coat, she looked exactly like a girl-sized Valentine.
We lay side by side on my twin bed in absolute darkness. (Despite Freddy’s assurances that there was nothing to fear, I still insisted we pull the shades and turn out the lights.) It was so dark I couldn’t even see her face.
“Betsy, are you sure this is what you want?” I asked softly.
But she didn’t answer; her shallow breaths had slowed and deepened. And I thought about that time we tried to run away to Maine, about her incredible resolve. Her fearlessness. As she slept I let my fingers explore the place where our baby was growing. I must have drifted off like this, fingers pressed against her stomach, because when I woke up, her hand was coveri
ng my hand. And instead of allowing panic about my impending fatherhood or guilt about Betsy’s tremendous sacrifice seep into this moment, I just let an irresistible and overwhelming sense of relief wash over me like rain.
We agreed to keep the baby a secret. And I carried that little snowball with me through the winter: on my way to and from class, in the shower, in the dining hall, in the library. No one at school, except for Freddy, knew that by October I would be a father.
I don’t know how I made it through that final semester. I was swamped with schoolwork, but I took the bus back to Two Rivers every weekend, terrified of missing something. I read on the bus, in a free barber chair as Betsy worked, and on the Parkers’ couch for hours after both Betsy and her father had fallen asleep. By the time I got back to campus on Sunday night, I was so exhausted I collapsed into bed before the sun had even set. But my exhaustion couldn’t begin to compare with what Betsy was going through.
Keeping the secret was relatively easy for me; I just kept my mouth shut. But for Betsy, who was vomiting almost hourly and so sleepy she once fell asleep midsentence on the phone with a Lucky Tiger salesman, explaining her behavior took a great deal more creativity. She told her father that she was just tired from working so much. She told her patrons she was tired from taking care of her father. At home, she was able to keep the visits to the toilet a secret by using the upstairs bathroom. But at the barbershop she started sneaking out to the alley when one of her regulars raised an eyebrow when she excused herself for the third time while giving him a simple shave. (The smell of Barbasol, unfortunately, was one of the great offenders.) And the alley certainly couldn’t have helped matters: the barbershop was right next door to Athena’s Diner. The combination of smells (of shaving cream and fried eggs) must have made the alley something akin to hell for Betsy.
She didn’t go to a doctor—couldn’t go to the doctor. Her family physician would never have been able to keep it to himself, and Dr. Owens, the only baby doctor in town, got his hair cut at her daddy’s shop. Word would get back to Mr. Parker. She figured it would be best to wait until after I was done with school and had procured at least some form of employment before she sprung the news on her father. So, in the meantime, Betsy relied on Rosemary’s wisdom. Rosemary told her to drink peppermint tea and ginger ale. To eat water crackers. And to nap whenever she got the chance. She gave her pamphlets she had received from Dr. Owens, which Betsy studied with the same intensity as I studied my Monetary Theory and Policy texts. Each weekend she offered me another fruit analogy: plum, peach, orange, grapefruit . By the time spring arrived, she was hiding a small honeydew.
“So, Montgomery, do you plan to marry that girl?” Freddy asked one day in late March.
It was the first day the sun had shone in months. It was still only forty or so degrees, but everyone had come outside to welcome the sunshine, removing their coats to reveal a sea of white arms. Freddy and I were sitting on the steps to the library, drinking coffee, trying to study. Freddy had given up, closed his books and leaned back with his hands behind his head, basking in the small warmth offered by the sun.
I couldn’t tell him that while Betsy Parker was willing to have my child, I was highly doubtful that she was ready to become my wife. It was something I knew would sound ridiculous if I tried to explain it, and so I said, “Just waiting for the right moment, I guess.”
“Cadit quaestio.” Freddy smirked.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
But he only shrugged his shoulders. Over the last year, Freddy had become more and more cryptic. Since my decision not to emigrate to Nova Scotia, I’d felt like a failed protégé.
“I’ll ask her,” I said, aware that I was being scolded. “When the time is right.”
Freddy leaned back against the steps and closed his eyes.
“I will .”
What he didn’t know was that I had scoured the pawnshops for a ring that might somehow represent my tremendous gratitude. (I knew I could never find or afford a ring that would adequately signify my love.) I had rehearsed the speech I would deliver to her father. I had even practiced how I might broach the subject with Betsy, though this part of my ruminations always left me in a cold sweat. I knew that I had to ask her; hell, I’d imagined asking her this single question almost my whole life. And so I bought a bus ticket to Two Rivers for the first weekend in April, and spent all of my savings on a ring that I hoped might ask the question for me.
On Monday I felt optimistic, excited even, on Tuesday my optimism and excitement had devolved into a sort of blind determination, and by Wednesday I was ready to call the whole thing off. I was spinning the ring across my International Trade textbook at my desk when Freddy came into the room. He was in his ROTC uniform, sweaty and breathless. “They shot King,” he said.
“What?”
“Martin Luther King. Some sniper got him coming out of his hotel room.”
The ring spun across the page and dropped to the floor. It rolled under the bed, a jingle-jangle and then silence.
There was no answer at my parents’ house all afternoon. I parked myself in the hallway next to the pay phone, redialing every fifteen minutes. The anxiety I’d been feeling about the impending proposal was edged out by the much larger worry about my mother. When night fell and there was still no answer, I reluctantly returned to my room. I turned on the radio and listened to the reports regarding the chaos that was erupting in the streets all over the country. Outside my window, all was quiet; the sun was gone, the promise of spring broken, as snow started to fall, softly at first and then with a sort of frenetic quality. I’m not sure how I managed to sleep, but I did, for a couple of hours, leaping to my feet when the phone rang out like a shot.
My mother had printed up a special edition of the Freedom Press almost immediately after the bullets riddled King’s body. The headline read DREAM TURNS NIGHTMARE . Below this was a candid photo of Martin Luther King Jr. holding his infant son, both of them smiling.
She was out on her usual delivery route, the back of her station wagon filled with bundled copies of the paper. She made this trek monthly, leaving the Freedom Press in coffee shops and beauty parlors and schools all over the city. There wasn’t a single neighborhood she neglected: from Cambridge to Little Italy. Brookline to Dorchester. But on April 4, when she drove down Blue Hill Avenue, the street was on fire, and the last thing the residents of Roxbury wanted to see was a crazy-haired white lady driving a Buick through a riot. When they swarmed her car, rocking it like a cradle in their arms, she didn’t scream in protest or try to explain. She simply waited. When a dark-faced man ordered her to roll down the window, screamed obscenities at her, and spit in her face, she only smiled and closed her eyes. And when they smashed the windows and glass fell all around her, she quietly accepted the punishment she must have felt we all deserved. This is what I imagined anyway, as my father tried to explain. The beating she suffered this time might have been endurable had she been younger, stronger, a man . But she wasn’t, and after only an hour in the Harvard Medical Center emergency room, she went into a coma and then quickly died. My father arrived after she was already gone.
After I hung up the phone, Freddy found me sitting on the floor speechless and trembling. He offered me his hand, pulled me up, and then guided me back down the dark corridor to our room. He made a pot of coffee on a contraband hotplate and made me sit down on the edge of my bed and tell him what happened. And as I spoke, as I tried to articulate the smell after the fire, the smell that still
permeated my dreams, as well as the sound of my father’s voice like shattered glass on the other end of that line—as I tried to explain the recollection of my mother’s hands stroking my hair after a childhood nightmare, the memory of her wading into a pond to capture pollywogs in a jar for me, the image of her trying to teach my father how to do a cartwheel in the backyard, I knew that the sadness I felt was already yielding to something more powerful than grief. A child was growing inside Betsy’s womb, but something terrible was growing inside me. I had never felt anger like this before; it was an anger as cold and as deep as a bottomless lake.
1968: Fall
B rooder drives until the logging road abruptly ends. The smell of pine is so strong, so antiseptic, it reminds Harper of the science lab on campus. Of formaldehyde. When he squeezes his eyes shut, he imagines steel trays. The rigid bodies of frogs and pigs and cats. He had no stomach for that. He has no stomach for this.
Brooder stops the truck and cuts the lights. Ray follows behind him and does the same. Inside the car, the air is quiet and cold. The dash lights dim as Ray cuts the engine. Ray’s hands are shaking now. Harper watches him try to light a cigarette, each match going out in his unsteady hands.
“Shit,” he mutters, trying again.
When he succeeds, and the paper crackles orange and hot, Harper is grateful for the smell of smoke. He reaches for Ray’s cigarette and takes a long, hard drag. He lets the smoke fill his lungs and tries to imagine his chest expanding. His body growing. He is so constricted now, compressed, he fears he might snap. Or crack. Like ice. Or glass.