Calling Me Home: A Novel

by Julie Kibler

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get there,” I murmured across the few feet between us.

  “I know, I just—” Another sigh made me nervous. Even when the doctor had made Miss Isabelle quit driving, she’d seemed completely in charge. She’d adjusted. But now her inability to let go of her worry concerned me. My temper tantrum earlier probably hadn’t helped.

  “Miss Isabelle. Trust me?”

  “I do. I’m tired, that’s all.” That was better. A minute later, she even chuckled. “Hmmph. Imagine your Teague if he heard you talking about trust. Hello, pot, I’m the kettle, and just so’s you know? We’re both black.” Then her bed shook as she silently laughed at her own joke backfiring. Full recovery—or maybe slight hysteria.

  I flipped to face the other wall, pulling the extra pillow over my eyes to block the streetlight glaring through the crack between the dusty blackout curtains. Where was a hair clip when you needed one?

  The only person I needed to trust was myself. The other road had too many curves, and I wanted to see straight ahead.

  29

  Isabelle, 1940

  MOTHER CALLED FOR Mrs. Gray, and together they managed to walk me to the claustrophobic room behind the kitchen where we kept an old bedstead. Cora had slept there overnight when it had been too late for her to walk home safely and my father wasn’t available to drive her—though I’m sure nobody ever admitted it.

  Mrs. Gray spread a sheet over the lumpy mattress, and I fell onto my side, drawing my knees high, groaning at the pains, which were coming faster now. I heard Mother dial the telephone in the kitchen and speak. A short while later, another woman entered the room. My pain had begun to peak. If it hadn’t already stolen my breath, the sight of her face would have.

  A Negro.

  A midwife, come to deliver me of my baby. Apparently, colored was good enough now the baby was coming. I might have laughed had my insides not been boiling like molten lava trying to erupt from the volcano of my body.

  I closed my eyes, thankful for someone with a notion of how to get me through this. Later, I realized I never saw my father the whole time I was confined to that tiny room. As a physician, he should have checked how things were progressing—especially given how early the baby was. Perhaps he stayed in the kitchen, advising the midwife, too ashamed to examine his own daughter.

  She prodded me, gently explaining each step. I was too focused on the pain to be self-conscious. She assured me the baby would emerge as it should—even if I felt I was going to split in two—and that it wouldn’t take long.

  Her worried eyes, however, revealed that her expectations were low. Perhaps she sensed if she voiced her worries about the timing of the birth, I might stop working to get the baby out. As it was, I struggled to follow directions, distracted by my fear for the baby and anger with my mother, which recurred every time she entered the room. Mother stood to the side while the midwife briefed her, then left again. Finally, the midwife said she should remain. I would need to push soon, and the pushing would be more productive if she functioned as an anchor.

  My mother took her place at my knee, her face a muddle of anger and concern. I looked away, focusing on the midwife’s features as she alternated instructions to push or wait or push again. My lower body seemed to have a mind of its own by then, disconnected from my mind, and though I tried to do as she commanded at one point—to wait and gather my strength for the next wave—I had a sudden, uncontrollable need to push the baby out.

  The rest passed in a blur, the midwife reporting I’d delivered the head, then the shoulders and body, and this series of events I couldn’t see or comprehend resulted in a tiny bundle wrapped in white toweling and rushed from the room. I strained to hear a cry, a wail—something to tell me my baby was alive. Silence pierced silence.

  The midwife left me alone with my mother, and I shook, suddenly cold, even enveloped as I was by the sweltering heat. My body was foreign and new again. The shock chilled me.

  “The baby?” I asked, and Mother remained silent.

  I asked the question several times, and each time she turned away, until I became frantic, pleading for a simple answer. Finally, she studied me with what seemed the smallest measure of pity. “It was so early,” she said, shrugging. “It was for the best.”

  Another cramp clenched my abdomen, and this time it seemed it came from the pain of learning my baby was gone, as though my body were mourning the loss before I even knew of it. A wail budded low in my chest and emerged from my mouth whole. Though I wanted more than anything to prevent my mother from witnessing my anguish, I couldn’t conquer it.

  “No,” I cried. And again. “No. I want my baby. My baby.” I turned my face from hers and moaned into the pillow, tears mingling with the sweat of my labor. She left the room.

  The midwife returned and reseated herself at the end of the bed. She pressed on my abdomen, as though she were trying to expel my grief from my body, and with each wave, my sobs diminished, until they finally ran out. She explained that the afterbirth had been delivered. She took it away, and when she returned, I clutched her arm, my eyes asking the question I couldn’t voice again.

  She barely shook her head and looked away, and my eyes flooded again, though this time my cry was silent.

  “Was it a boy or girl?” I asked. I watched her battle with the question, her eyes flicking toward the door, though it was firmly closed.

  “A girl,” the midwife whispered.

  “I want to see her.” I struggled to sit up, but the woman pushed me down again, though gently, her hands and arms strong and versed in the care of new mothers. But without my baby, what was I?

  “Honey, you lie still now. I need to check things and get you cleaned up. And…” She hesitated and looked toward the door again and shook her head. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Mother!” I screamed, and the woman started at the force and volume of my cry.

  Mother opened the door only enough to let herself in.

  “I want to see my baby,” I said, my voice dead calm now.

  “It would be a bad idea, Isabelle.”

  “Maybe just for a minute, ma’am?” the midwife said. “Just to say her good-byes? Sometimes that helps.”

  “It would only make things more difficult. And it isn’t your concern.” Mother’s voice was flat, too, her face harder than I’d ever seen it. It was impossible to believe I’d once been her baby girl.

  When she stepped out of the room again, I grasped at the midwife. “What will they do with her? I need to know where she’ll be.” I knew my mother would never tell me. Someone might see me mourning, and our secret would be no more.

  “She’ll be in a good place, don’t you worry.” She paused to listen to the rain, which still drummed against the roof. “Safe and dry … and in God’s hands. You’ll see her again one day. I know it.”

  Her platitudes didn’t help. I screamed again, over and over, long after Mother had left the room, through the whole process of the midwife bathing me and soothing me with warm cloths as though I were an injured child, through the examining and stitching of the jagged tear that would take weeks to heal properly, that throbbed constantly like a separate heartbeat, reminding me of what I had lost.

  30

  Dorrie, Present Day

  THE MECHANIC RECLAIMED us at the hotel the next morning and sent us on our way. Miss Isabelle had been tight-lipped about the day she went into labor, but once we were settled into our route again, aimed the right direction and an hour and a half or so from Cincinnati, I’d quietly asked her what happened after she fell down the stairs.

  My questions felt cruel, but more and more, it seemed she needed to tell this tale, to purge some of her pain before we arrived. (Forty down, five letters: “to flush out or eliminate.” Purge. Even thinking the word was painful.) As though in the retelling, she would work her way through a kind of healing.

  When she told me about her mother’s refusal to let her see her baby, her monotone exposed her grief. Thi
s time, tears did drip from the sides of my eyes as she fell silent. I blinked as long as I could, then casually reached a finger to rub them away, hoping she’d think my eyes watered because of the late-morning sunlight gleaming through the windshield.

  “What made her that way?” I asked, a lump in my throat choking my voice. “I’m so afraid I’ll let my kids down, Miss Isabelle.”

  I thought of Stevie Junior, home alone with his dumb mistakes, faced with ultimatums from both sides, right or wrong, but equally critical. How was the kid supposed to deal?

  I’d talked to him briefly that morning. He’d been subdued and embarrassed that Miss Isabelle had witnessed his temper tantrum. He apologized for screaming at me, which made me feel hopeful. I told him I felt like I ought to be there—wanted to be there now that we’d both calmed down some—but he said it was okay and promised to sit tight another day or two. Bailey had agreed to wait to tell her parents and to not do anything hasty—at least until I returned home, as it would only be a few more days. He’d given Bebe the money for safekeeping, and though she’d pestered him to tell her where it had come from, all he told her was that he needed her to keep it in a safe place he didn’t know about. I chuckled a little over that. My mom was there, but twelve-year-old Bebe was the one you could trust with the money. We all knew it.

  “All you can do is act the way you’d like them to act,” Miss Isabelle said now. “They’ll watch you, and then they’ll make their own decisions. You cross your fingers over your heart and hope to God they make good ones. But you’re not going to let them down, Dorrie. No more than any imperfect mother who loves her children more than she loves herself.”

  “But how did she cross the line? Why did your mother let you down so hard?”

  “It was a different time, Dorrie. And I had crossed an unforgiveable line, too … for that time. Though it’s hard to accept, any other mother we knew might have reacted the same way. And you’re hearing this story through my eyes—my seventeen-year-old eyes. It’s an irony that young people mostly see things as black and white, Dorrie. All or nothing. Sometimes, in spite of their enthusiasm for embracing change, it takes years of experience before they truly see the whole picture. Still, I don’t believe my mother ever really learned how to love me properly. Her basic needs were scarcely met as a child, and all she could do as an adult was clutch at the status she believed would save her. I really do think it all boiled down to fear. She was so worried about what the people around us would think, she forgot about … me.”

  I hurt for her. As much as my own too-young, too-ignorant single mother had bungled things—and made me nuts with her dependence on me now—I’d never, ever, questioned her love. I always knew that, in her weird, unreliable, impulsive, ridiculous way, she loved me. I’d seen the pride in her eyes when she watched me with my own children, or watched me work my magic on a customer’s hair—even if she didn’t understand my methods or relate to my self-determination. Sure, Momma had let me down, plenty of times, but never in the way Miss Isabelle’s mother failed her.

  Up ahead and over to the east, in the now-visible distance, a series of bridges spanned the Ohio River and skyscrapers rose in a clump on the other side, creating the illusion we were about to cross over onto an island—though, from studying the map along the way, I knew it wasn’t so.

  Miss Isabelle’s eyes filled with something I struggled to identify. Like a ball of rubber bands, all mixed up in their colors and textures, the emotions in her eyes were a jumble.

  Finally, there it was: Cincinnati.

  The City of Seven Hills, Miss Isabelle had said they called it. There were more hills than that, if you were counting.

  31

  Isabelle, 1940

  MY SKIN WAS young and elastic. I hadn’t put on much weight during my pregnancy; first the depression and then the humidity and heat had stolen my appetite. Between that and the baby’s coming early, I’d hardly shown, and my hip bones had scarcely shifted. Unclothed and up close, my faint stretch marks could have been detected by an experienced eye, but nobody was looking. Perhaps my breasts were fuller, but the midwife had instructed me to bind them tightly with rags when my milk began to come in, and with no baby to suckle, they were no beacon of motherhood. My old dresses soon fit again.

  When I emerged from the cocoon of my bedroom, Mother said I could come and go freely—under one condition: I must never admit I’d been in Shalerville during the time she’d claimed I was gone. Otherwise, she showed no interest in my whereabouts or anything I did. I suppose she was relieved to be finished with the distasteful business of ridding us of my baby.

  Granting her wish was easy. I had no desire to explain the last seven or eight months to anyone. Nor did I initially desire to leave. It wasn’t that I was content to stay home, reading, sleeping, or—more often—gazing out the windows. If anything, I was numb. I was unmotivated, uninspired.

  Undone.

  Finally, though, after a month or so of doing mostly nothing, and when the heat let up, I became unsettled.

  I don’t know what flipped the switch. I simply woke to life again—even if it meant feeling the pain intensely while my mind explored ideas and plans. Suddenly, another minute in the house where I’d been tried, convicted, and held prisoner for the crime of following my heart was too long. And after my eighteenth birthday that fall, my mother could do little to keep me under her thumb, even if she’d wanted to.

  The Reds were nearing their first World Series victory in twenty-one years, and everyone was obsessed with baseball. No one paid attention to me as I began making daylong journeys to the city. I purchased coffee or tea in exchange for café seats, where I combed through secondhand newspapers, flipping past the ragged sports pages to the nearly as ragged classifieds. Debates over the fine points of the most recent loss or victory were my background noise as I scanned for jobs available to a bright young female with no real training or specific skills—but none that would transform me into one of the eerie young/old women I witnessed streaming from factories or plants when end-of-day whistles sounded. My soul felt ancient, but I would need a strong, healthy body if I must support myself indefinitely. If I couldn’t have Robert, I wanted no other man, and I would no longer depend on my family. I would take care of myself.

  But I kept one eye on the newsprint and the other on the teeming sidewalks, praying one day I’d glimpse him.

  After a time, I felt bold enough to stroll past the rooming house where we’d spent our wedding night. I did so several times, on different days, desperate to spy him climbing the steps to the porch at the end of a workday. But I didn’t see him. Finally, I dared climb the steps myself. The landlady stepped back, seemingly startled, perhaps even frightened to discover me on her doorstep. She peered past me—to see if I was alone, I suppose, or whether the angry men who’d barged into her home and business accompanied me.

  “What do you want?” she said. I asked whether Robert still lived there. She shook her head, avoiding my eyes. “He never came back since that day,” she said. “Took everything and never came back at all. Told him I couldn’t refund the rent he’d paid ahead, but he didn’t mind.” She cocked her head. “Not here for that, are you? Can’t do anything for you if so.”

  I assured her I wasn’t looking for money, though I asked about the thimble. She denied having seen it on the nightstand or under the bed when she cleaned. I hoped that meant Robert had gathered it up with whatever he took when he left. The woman closed the door on me as soon as I gave her the opportunity.

  Sarah Day invited me into her kitchen, clucked her tongue, and gathered me close. I didn’t mention the baby, but something told me she knew, the way she released me carefully from her embrace and studied my hips and bosom when she thought I wouldn’t notice. But her story was no different. Neither she nor Reverend Day had seen or spoken to Robert since the day after our wedding, when she headed him off while my father and brothers took me home.

  I tried to summon the nerve to go by the house i
n the small community where Robert and Nell had lived with their parents, the courage to walk to the church, to the arbor where I used to meet him and where we’d shared our first kisses, but fear paralyzed me. I didn’t know how Cora or Nell would react to seeing me. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to withstand their fury at me for costing them their jobs. I wasn’t even sure Robert would want to see me. I wondered if he’d been angry that I hadn’t tried to contact him. I wondered if he knew my mother had kept me prisoner. I wondered if he had any idea I’d carried his child … and lost her.

  Though I contemplated the best course of action, though I hoped for a twist of events—coincidental or celestial—to bring us together again, I resigned myself to creating a life alone. I’d caused enough trouble already.

  One day, an ad ran for a job, not giving many details other than it was a new business that needed one additional steady employee, no experience necessary. Everywhere else, I’d been summarily dismissed upon walking through the door to ask about a position. My slight stature must have put potential employers off—not to mention my lack of experience when the unemployment rolls still hadn’t recovered completely from the Great Depression. There was no telling how many people competed for a single position. I assumed this business owner would react the same way.

  But not this time. He looked me over, asked to see my hands, studied how I held a few small tools, then told me about his new endeavor.

  A popular camera company had introduced a new film that produced beautiful color slides, and the price of the film included processing and returning the slides to the customer already mounted and ready to project. People enjoyed showing off photos of vacations or family events, but mounting their own old-fashioned slides was tedious. This was the latest, greatest thing, a major time-saver, albeit a luxury. And the price reflected this luxury. This Cincy entrepreneur saw his opportunity. He’d perfected his own system of mounting the old-style glass slides. He produced large quantities of pressboard frames similar to the other company’s. People could bring batches of glass slides, and he would mount them at a fair price. And if they dropped them off one day, he guaranteed they could pick them up the next, instead of waiting on the postal system as the other film’s users had to do. To his great delight, business was booming. He couldn’t keep up. That was where I’d come in.